Review: 'Gothic: An Illustrated History'

Gothic is a bit like that old pornography rubric: I know it when I see it. Dracula? Gothic. King Kong? Not Gothic. The Cure? Gothic. Metallica? Not Gothic. Gothic isn't just the monstrous, or the dark, or the nihilistic. It is ruined structures. It is shadows. It is urbane yet corrupt. It is beautiful and ugly in such close proximity that it is impossible to decipher which specific features are beautiful and which are ugly. Robert Smith tripping on acid with his jet-black bird's nest, smeared lipstick, and vulnerable pout is Gothic. James Hetfield guzzling Bud in denim is not.

Roger Luckhurst keeps his definitions much more specific and academic in his new book Gothic: An Illustrated History. Yes, he agrees that Gothic involves ruined structures, monsters, and blurred borderlines, but he has no problem defining King Kong or Godzilla as Gothic characters because they're monsters and monsters are Gothic. I don't know where he comes down on the big "Is Metallica Gothic?" question because he completely ignores Gothic music. He does address architecture, art, literature, design, and film, so Gothic: An Illustrated History, so it would be unfair to call the book limited, and the writer does cover these topics with authoritative command and novel organization: the chapters are largely organized according to locations, which allows a great deal of discussion of ethnicity and cultures, revealing the racism at the heart of a good deal of what might be considered Gothic. However, by ignoring Gothic music and fashion, Luckhurst leaves a major gaping hole in his book and fails to complete the definition he valiantly works to construct.

The illustrated format of Gothic would have also lended itself very well to discussions of Gothic music and style, since both of those strands are so closely entwined--after all, Robert Smith and Siouxsie Sioux are probably the Goths most Goths strive to emulate. There are no images of those two Gothic icons, but there are plenty of images of architecture, furniture design, fine art, and horror movie stills that make each turn of the page a thrill. 

Review: 'The Science of Women in Horror: The Special Effects, Stunts, and True Stories Behind Your Favorite Fright Films'

Horror lurks on a hostile terrain, and that landscape is unquestionably most hostile toward women. Throughout most of the genre’s history, women have usually been present to shriek, get slaughtered, show their bodies, and huddle in a corner while some dude tussles with the monster. This is a particularly sorry situation since it was a woman—Mary Shelley—who invented the horror genre as we now know it two centuries ago.

Meg Hafdahl and Kelly Florence are two horror fans well aware of this problem. Their new book The Science of Women in Horror: The Special Effects, Stunts, and True Stories Behind Your Favorite Fright Films mainly functions as an entertaining movie and TV guide for feminist horror fans frustrated by the lack of non-insulting viewing options. The writers basically whittle their list of feminist-friendly horrors down to a skimpy 29 films, which probably would not fill the first ten pages of the usual horror guide. So, as their book’s unwieldy title suggests, they pack their pages with much more than the standard starred recommendations. The Science of Women in Horror offers some interesting tangents related to the real life science, history, and psychology behind the films; analyses (a reading of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night as a sort of horror/western is particularly compelling); making-of details; and interviews with actresses, filmmakers, and fellow horror fans.

Diary of the Dead 2018: Week 4

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week this October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 19

Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter (1974- dir. Brian Clemens) ****

At a time when Hammer was doubling down on its exploitative rep, the studio produced this comparatively light-hearted romp in which a swashbuckler trots across the countryside looking for vampires to stab. Captain Kronos—Vampire Hunter may be Hammer’s freshest film of the seventies. James Needs’s editing is very stylish (a pub swordfight is pricelessly executed), and Horst Janson is reasonably appealing as the vamp slayer (though his penchant for violent sex is a gratuitous capitulation to the era’s nastier ethos). Caroline Munro and John Cater as Kronos’s more personable sidekicks are better. It’s too bad this did not lead to the series it was intended to because it would have been great fun to watch this dynamic trio swashbuckle their way through other adventures.

Blair Witch (2016- dir. Adam Wingard) **

Diary of the Dead 2018: Week 2

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week this October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 5

Mill of the Stone Women (1960- dir. Giorgio Ferroni) ***½

A young doofus goes to work for an artist famous for creating a gruesome carousel of infamous women condemned to death. The doofus has a fling with the artist’s daughter despite the warning that she’ll drop dead if she becomes slightly upset. Needless to say, this relationship does not end well. Despite a plot so similar to a couple of other movies that if I gave you their titles you’d have this one’s plot figured out lickety-split and heaps of exposition subtle as Nikolai Volkoff’s scrotum in your soup, Mill of the Stone Women is pretty exceptional. The creepy-sculpture-crammed windmill is an ace horror movie setting, and though the characters all start off pretty blah, they all go absolutely bonkers by the fiery, freaky climax. Poe would have been envious.

The Boogeyman (1980- dir. Ulli Lommel) **½

Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Monsters!

Welcome, foolish mortals, to Psychobabble’s House of 100 Monsters. Creak up the steps and over the threshold. Within this vile abode you will encounter not 98, not 99, but one hundred of the most terrifying, horrifying, unpleasantifying creatures who have ever haunted the page, the screen, and the breakfast table. They are my personal favorite freaks, ranked from terriblest to really terriblest. No Halloween is complete without a visit to a spook house, and my house of horrors is as spooky as it gets. So I formally invite you to freak out to Psychobabble’s 100 Favorite Monsters. Step right this way…

100. Tar Man

First, allow me to guide you down into the basement where a certain deceased individual has recently been resurrected by a certain military-grade toxic gas. Don’t ask me who he was in life, but in death this standout star of Return of the Living Dead is like an E.C. Comics zombie in the oozing flesh and he wants one thing only... brains!

99. Black Frost

Sidestep the Tar Man and take a break by our deep freeze. Oops. Bad idea, because inside is a terrifying thingy that blasts incapacitating frosty air from its jockstrap. This is how Black Frost brought down The Mighty Boosh, and it traumatized many viewers of their surreal British comedy by baring its unsettlingly white teeth before breaking into a hideous dance of death. He’s one icy bastard.

98. Clayface

Wait a minute… that chap wasn’t Black Frost at all! His face has morphed back into its natural state—that of one Matt Hagen, better known as Batman’s hulking, shape-shifting nemesis Clayface, one of the nastiest and most genuinely monstrous monsters to ever menace Gotham City!

97. Wampa

Back in the deep freeze is another terrible creature, a towering snow beast with white, shaggy fur and clawed paws the size of trashcan lids. Is it the Yeti? Nah. They wouldn’t know what the hell a Yeti is up on the distant planet of Hoth. That’s where the Wampa whomps Luke Skywalker’s face off in the shocking attack that kicks The Empire Strikes Back into gear.

96. Pumpkinhead

Review: 'The Lost World (1925)' Blu-ray

No movie has been more influential on the still-popular giant monster genre than King Kong, and no movie was more influential on King Kong than Harry O. Hoyt’s 1925 adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. A band of adventurers journey to a mysterious jungle where they encounter a menagerie of stop-motion dinosaurs that menace and fascinate the folks. They manage to bring one of the giant creatures (an Apatosaurus, not a giant gorilla) back to the big city (London, not NYC) where it runs amok on a major monument (London Bridge, not the Empire State Building). There’s even an amorous primate who only has eyes for the leading lady.

One of the big differences between The Lost World and King Kong is that the characters are motivated by love rather than the thirst for fame and glory. Lloyd Hughes’s Ed Malone joins the expedition because his completely caring and not at all sociopathic fiancé will only marry him if he has had strange adventures that involve risking his life. Bessie Love’s Paula White gets on board because she wants to save her father who had been marooned in the lost world during a previous expedition. This makes the characters more likable than King Kong’s cast of misogynistic butt heads. Jules Cowes’s servant in black face is painful to watch—you can’t expect to watch a silent-era jungle picture without at least one extremely offensive characterization—but the film is sweet as a whole despite the dangers posed by a leering ape man (his toothy makeup suggesting that The Lost World was influential on another key horror classic: Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), a fire-spewing volcano, and those prehistoric beasties.

And let’s not get too hung up on our human cast, because it’s clear who the real stars of The Lost World are. Allosaurus, apatosaurus, edmontosaurus, triceratops…oh my! While primitive compared to the more polished stop motion in Kong, the special effects of The Lost World— which include work by Kong’s main animator, Willis O’Brien— remain a joy to behold.

The film itself is also more of a joy to behold than it has been in eons since much footage seemingly stranded in the cinematic lost world has been recovered. Once only available in a meager and allegedly less-than-coherent hour-long cut, the film is now basically back to its original length (apparently, only a cannibal sequence remains missing). The restoration looks great on Flicker Alley’s new blu-ray release of The Lost World. Some sequences are pretty scratched up, but most are relatively clean and some are downright pristine, which is good news for a near 100-year-old movie, half of which has spent most of that time in limbo.

Flicker Alley gives this landmark release its due respect with a bestiary of bonus features. There are nine minutes of “deleted scenes,” though these are more like animation tests that find the various dinosaurs simply going about their business rather than anything that expands the narrative or action of the film. The most fascinating bits of this bonus involve brief stills of the animators in shot setting up the dino models. There are also two complete short films with animation by Willis O’Brien. The cooler of the two is the completely animated, nine-minute R.F.D., 10,000 B.C., a sort of Flintstones precursor in which prehistoric people tool around in dinosaur-drawn carts. There’s also the thirteen-minute Ghost of Slumber Mountain, in which a guy encounters a ghost, a giant bird, and more dinosaurs during a camping trip. Most historically significant is five minutes of O’Brien’s legendarily incomplete film Creation. This is the footage that got him the King Kong gig. Audio commentary by film historian Nicholas Ciccone, an image gallery, and booklet essay round out a lovingly assembled package.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 57

The Date: November 26

The Movie: King Kong (1933)

What Is It?: More ape business: a bunch of jerky explorers strut onto a secluded island, kidnap a giant gorilla, drag him to NYC, secure him with rubber bands while exploiting him in front of a bunch of slack-jawed richies, whine when he breaks free, and murder him. Willis O’Brien’s magical stop-motion effects will make you want to punch a computer in the face.

Why Today?: Because of this.

Review: 'Jobriath A.D.: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Fairy Tale'

In 1972, David Bowie made history when he declared “I’m gay” to Michael Watts of Melody Maker. During the earliest days of the gay pride movement, it was a big deal to have a major pop star come out of the closet in a major music paper. Just six years later, Bowie was once again chatting with Watts in the pages of MM, only this time he heavily implied that his “homosexuality” was all part of building the Ziggy Stardust character.

The year after Bowie made the declaration that would continue to be a topic of discussion even after he admitted he’d always been heterosexual, an artist regularly diminished as “The American David Bowie” made a similar announcement. The big difference was that Jobriath actually was gay, and instead of being an offhand provocation in the press, his homosexuality was an outright publicity campaign. There was barely a scrap of press written about the singer-songwriter that didn’t dwell on his orientation. This was not Jobriath’s idea. The mastermind behind selling the singer’s sexuality was his manager, Jerry Brandt. Sadly, Brandt completely misjudged the tenor of a time that was pretty staunchly homophobic despite those initial uprisings in the gay movement. Jobriath’s pop career never got off the ground. Neither of his albums charted. Brandt dumped him. Jobriath ended up on the cabaret circuit and barely left a footnote in Rock & Roll history as “The American Bowie” whom Bowie, himself, wrote off as a piffling fraud. Jobriath died of AIDS in 1983.

This is part of the story told in Kieran Turner’s new documentary Jobriath A.D.: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Fairy Tale, but it is hardly the story in full. We are not introduced to Jobriath as a failed pop star or a confused kid struggling with his sexuality or any persona that might make way for clichés. Our first Jobriath is a great success, starring in the L.A. production of the smash musical Hair alongside R&B legend Gloria Jones. A few years later he is signed to Elektra Records and cutting his debut album with famed producer Eddie Kramer (and Richard Gere on backing vocals!). His face and body are plastered on billboards and bus ads. He is not a joke. He is not a mere David Bowie clone. He is an original voice melding prog rock, glam, cabaret, and Beethoven. We spend the first thirty minutes of Jobriath A.D. with a star.

Then we backtrack to his troubled home life, the introspective man he really was, how an incident going AWOL from the military resulted in young Bruce Campbell morphing into Jobriath. Turner’s structure is brilliant, forcing us to rethink the scraps of information we thought we knew about the obscure pop singer. The filmmaker fills out the tale with illuminating interviews (Brandt emerges as a deeply flawed and fascinating character in his own right) and imaginative animated sequences that illustrate some of the stranger episodes of Jobriath’s story, such as his aborted Paris Opera House spectacular that would have found him playing King Kong scaling a model Empire State Building that would transform into a giant penis before the star transformed into Marlene Dietrich.

Jobriath A.D. is one of the most moving, most insightful, most revelatory Rock documentaries I’ve ever seen. Factory 25 presents it on home video with a deservedly lavish presentation. Extras include a director’s commentary and extended interviews with the likes of Gloria Jones, Marc Almond (valuable since he receives very little time in the proper film), actor Dennis Christopher, Jayne County, and Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott among others. Giving fuller air to music is 16 minutes of crackly footage of Jobriath recording his debut album and a video for Almond’s cover of “Be Still”.

The DVD is packaged alongside a clear-vinyl LP featuring Jobriath running through a scrapped musical concept alternately known as “Popstar” and “The Beauty Saloon”. After composing a made-to-order score for producer Joe Papp’s adaptation of Moliere’s The Misanthrope, Jobriath went to work on an original piece marrying details from his own pop star years with gangster movie tropes. Between songs he provides narration and stage direction. Though the music is a product of Jobriath’s cabaret years (when he went by several names, including the not-too-subtle “Cole Berlin”), there’s some real Rock & Roll energy in the work, particularly on the pumping “Time Sat on My Face”. The recording is crude, but its intimacy is touching, another welcome revelation among many in the wonderful Jobriath A.D. project. I hope David Bowie is listening and rethinking.

Review: 'Tome of Terror: Horror Films of the 1930s'

Horror movie guides pop up like grass on a grave, yet they never tend to get it right. Too often they are glib, and they never encompass everything world cinema has contributed to the genre since its inception. There have been good ones. Jonathan Rigby’s American Gothic and the collaborative, two-volume American Silent Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy Films, 1913-1929, come to mind, but as their titles suggest, their scopes are still limited. A series is necessary to serve a genre with as much breadth and longevity as horror, which Christopher Workman and Troy Howarth realize.

Based on the first volume of their series, a chunky collection of reviews devoted exclusively to the thirties, these guys aren’t cutting any corners (the second volume will actually backtrack to the silent era and pick up with the forties in volume three). Tome of Terror: Horror Films of the 1930s swells with shorts and features from all recesses of the world, which is significant considering that studies of the genre’s key decade are often limited to its most prolific location of production, Hollywood, and often even more limited to a specific studio, Universal.

Each entry features a few technical specs, cast list, synopsis, history, critique, and even some details about the major players’ personal lives and careers beyond the given films. Pieces on lost films may only be a few paragraphs, but major movies may receive an entire page or more. Workman’s entry on King Kong is truly superb, going deep enough to assess the biological accuracy of its dinosaurs! (On the flip side, his more critical assessment of the comparatively fantastical creatures in Son of Kong goes a little too far considering that it is, after all, a movie about a giant gorilla.)

The writers’ tone keeps the discussions enjoyable rather than dry, though I believe they are too hard on certain aspects of the classics, like the oft-denounced “staginess” of Dracula and the performances of Valerie Hobson and Una O’Connor in Bride of Frankenstein, which I believe are integral to the movie’s delicious deliriousness. Of course, no opinionated reader is ever going to completely agree with all the opinions of a movie guide writer, so I’m impressed by how often I agreed with Workman and Howarth. I would have preferred the book to be arranged strictly chronologically instead of alphabetical by year, since how one film develops on the innovations of others is particularly significant in horror. That’s a nitpick since guides of this sort are meant to be dipped into rather than read from cover-to-cover, even though this is one of the few that welcomes that kind of reading. Some might also complain that a lot of the murder mysteries and Sherlock Holmes and Charlie Chan movies in here only loosely qualify as horror, but I think their presence is further evidence of the writers’ determination to be all-inclusive. You certainly can’t complain that any significant film is missing, which would be the far greater crime. Tome of Terror also scores points for the terrific photos that appear on nearly every one of its pages, but its greatest achievement is fattening up my list of movies to see, which is the ultimate job of any movie guide worth reading. I can’t wait to build that list even bigger when they publish volume two.

Greg Nicotero's 'The United Monster Talent Agency'

Greg Nicotero had a twenty-five year career as one of Hollywood's leading makeup whiz's in his back pocket by the time he finally directed his own film in 2010. That's when the dude who brought creeps to life in Evil Dead II and Bride of Re-Animator, and worked additional magic on David Lynch's Mulholland Dr. and a plethora of Quentin Tarantino movies, created the utterly delightful "The United Monster Talent Agency". The eight-minute short jets back to a Hollywood when classic monsters were in such high demand that they required their very own talent agency to keep them in rotation.

As detailed in Donna Davies's groovy documentary Nightmare Factory (now streaming on Netflix), Nicotero and his crew did it all the old-fashioned way: lap-dissolving the Wolf Man's (comedian Dana Gould...one of several familiar faces you'll find in the film) transformation, stop-motion animating King Kong, and building all of the miraculously authentic costumes from scratch. They literally don't make 'em like this anymore, folks. Check out "The United Monster Talent Agency" here and see how many monsters you can spot!

Being Smart on Halloween: A Monster Movie Guide

If you’re too old for trick-or-treating or too clever to actually throw your Halloween party on Halloween (so rarely it falls on a weekend night, and who wants to get blitzed on Tuesday and have to drag themselves to work Wednesday morning?) you might spend October 31^st doing what I do: cramming as many horror movies into 24 hours as you can. But what to choose? What to choose? One wrong selection and— Ka-POW!—the entire atmosphere of this most atmospheric of holidays shoots right down the crapper, leaving you holding your head in anguish and weeping, “Why, oh why did I ever put Leprechaun: Back 2 tha Hood into the DVD player?” That would be pretty stupid. So here’s some Halloween-movie-selecting advice that will make you smart.

Obviously, a film set on or around Halloween is the perfect choice, though these are shockingly rare. Halloween and its sundry sequels and remakes are at the front of the pack. Jacques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon, with its children’s Halloween party gone awry, is a wonderful seasonal mood piece, as is the “Sleepy Hollow” episode of Disney’s marvelous Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad. More recent examples are Rob Zombie’s House of 1,000 Corpses, a rummage through dusty Halloween decorations stored in an attic reeking with dankness, and Michael Dougherty’s Trick ‘r Treat, a picture I didn’t care for but one that has some truly rabid proponents who adore its nostalgic ambience. Something Wicked This Way Comes begins just a week before Halloween in a golden October in which “1,000 pumpkins lie waiting to be cut,” and movies don’t come richer in autumnal atmosphere than Jack Clayton’s. The neo-cult classic May finds the title character collecting some bloody booty during a psychotic trick-or-treat excursion. As the kids of The Blair Witch Project prepare for their own excursion into the woods, we see Halloween decorations in shop windows, so that one passes muster too.

There are exceptions to this seemingly obvious rule. Movies with Halloween scenes aren’t always ideal holiday fare. Classics they may be, but I wouldn’t want to spend the night of spooks watching, To Kill a Mockingbird, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, or Meet Me in St. Louis, though a chorus of “Clang, clang, clang went the trolley” has been known to terrify.

Certain movies are pretty safe to categorize as honorary Halloweeners. We know that a man may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright, but for all we know The Wolf Man takes place in late September, November, or shudder to think, early December. Nevertheless, it’s a good choice, so try not to get too hung up on when exactly Larry Talbot’s life goes to pot.

Films that immediately break the seasonal spell are those that glaringly take place in the wrong season or environment: desert horrors such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Near Dark, seaside ones such as The Birds, or snowy ones such as The Thing. And perish the thought of watching one that takes place on a completely different holiday! That means no Gremlins (Christmas), Jaws (4^th of July), or April Fool’s Day (April Fool’s Day). If you lived in the New York area during the late seventies/early eighties, you may also find that King Kong has too many Thanksgiving associations to enjoy it on October 31^st. With its island and metropolitan settings, it’s not very Halloweeny anyway.

You get an F for effort, King Kong.

Creature from the Black Lagoon is a bit of a grey area. On the one hand, no environment recalls Halloween less than the Amazon (except maybe space, which means no Alien!). On the other hand, as the studio’s ad campaign once insisted, “Universal IS Halloween.” Considering the place its iconic monsters hold in Halloween costumes, decorations, and holiday movie marathons, exceptions can be made for Black Lagoon and the snowy Invisible Man. Go ahead and enjoy them with a clear conscience on October 31^st. That being said, more ideal selections would be Dracula, The Mummy, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, or The Wolf Man. But you already knew about that last one.

Halloween is a distinctly western holiday, so at the risk of coming off xenophobic (I swear I’m not! Some of my best friends are xenos!), Asian horror films may not exactly hit that sweet spot. Still, North American Halloween influences have become pretty internationally pervasive over the years, so if you still feel compelled to spend your holiday with Godzilla or that cute little girl from Ringu, that is your prerogative. I also encourage you to indulge in movies centered on such seasonal tropes as haunted houses (recommended: Robert Wise’s The Haunting), black cats (recommended: Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat), witches (recommended: John Llewellyn Moxey’s The City of the Dead), pumpkins (recommended: Stan Winston’s Pumpkinhead), and candy corn (recommended: TK).

Oh yeah. That's the stuff.

Just remember that as kooky and crazy as Halloween is, there are rules to enjoying it. Stay safe. Always wear reflective clothing. Check your candy for razor blades and light artillery. And no matter what you do, follow every guideline I’ve delineated above. Doing so just may save your life.

Monsterology: Animals

In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, we’ve been looking at the history of Horror’s archetypal monsters.

Diary of the Dead 2013: Week 3

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week in October. I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

October 11

Seed of Chucky (2004- dir. Don Mancini) ***

…after taking two steps forward with Bride of Chucky we take two steps back on the third and final day of our Chucky-a-thon. In Seed of Chucky, Jennifer Tilly plays herself as the star of a new movie based on the real-life exploits of Chucky and Tiffany. Billy Boyd joins the family as the voice of Glen/Glenda, the dolls’ Pinocchio-esque (and rather incontinent) child. The problem is the movie is too mean to Tilly, who goes along with all the gags at her expense gamely enough that maybe we shouldn’t feel too sorry for her, but it still isn’t much fun to watch. There’s also a little too much truth in advertising. This isn’t just called Seed of Chucky because of Glen/Glenda; there is a lot of doll sperm in this movie from the bad CGI opening credits sequence to Chucky whacking off to an issue of Fangoria to a truly unpleasant scene in which Tiffany artificially inseminates Tilly. This must be the lazy influence of the gross-out comedies that There’s Something About Mary spawned, or perhaps it’s writer/director Don Mancini’s attempt to make a John Waters movie, since Waters is on board as a relentless paparazzo. I have no beef with a sperm joke as long as it’s funny, but Tilly getting sexually assaulted most definitely is not. I preferred Glen/Glenda, who brings a little heart to the series. He’s a good character that saves Seed of Chucky from being as blah as Child’s Play 2, and Mancini pulls a funny running gag from the dolls’ “Made in Japan” stamps and there’s a good Shining joke toward the end, so Seed of Chucky isn’t a total wash.

—And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973- dir. Roy Ward Baker) ***

The big gimmick of the delightfully titled —And Now the Screaming Starts! is that there’s no gimmick at all. Amicus, the studio best known for its portmanteaus, delivers a straightforward feature. Stephanie Beacham moves into her new husband’s old manor. The ghosts there would prefer she left. This starts as an old-fashioned old dark house movie with an eyeless ghost that emerges from paintings of Herbert Lom and a severed hand that keeps crawling around and grabbing people. Then it takes an unexpected turn from the cheesily generic to the rapey and serious. It’s OK stuff that gets a boost from Roy Ward Baker’s ever-fine direction and a geek-pleasing cast that includes Beacham, Lom, Peter Cushing, and Patrick Magee, although all but Beacham are underused.

October 13

Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter (2012- dir. Timur Bekmambetov) *½

Is it possible for a movie to not only be about vampires but actually be a vampire? I vote “yes,” because while watching Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, I felt like my brain was being sucked out of my head with the passing of every frame. I guess that would make it more of a zombie than a vampire, but let’s not get too nitpicky about a movie with such a complete disdain for history. A campy premise can be played without camp, as Don Coscarelli did so brilliantly with Bubba Ho-Tep, but it shouldn’t be played with a complete absence of self-awareness and humor… at least not with so much bad CGI. Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter is played so straight it ends up falling on its own stake. Indeed, the dumbest part of this symphony of dumb action and dumber editing is that it thinks it has something profound to say about human rights. You mean slavery is bad and slavers are like vampires? Keep filling my brain with knowledge! The best thing about watching Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter is that my wife will now stop pressuring me to watch Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter.

October 14

King Kong (1976- dir. John Guilermin) ****

It’s been a good three decades since I’ve seen Dino De Laurentiis’s infamous production of King Kong. As a kid, I didn’t think it was that bad. As an adult, this opinion holds true. I liked the updates, which both make it less demanding of comparison to the (obviously) superior original and made it very relevant to a 1970s audience with its recasting of Carl Denham as a greedy oil man (is there any other kind?), Jack Driscoll as an environmentally-conscious paleontologist, and Ann Darrow as a spaced-out Hollywood starlet whose life is saved by Deep Throat only so she can be abducted by a giant gorilla. While Rick Baker in a gorilla suit is no substitute for Willis O’Brien’s marvelous special effects, the animatronic mask is much more articulate than the usual ludicrous gorilla costume. Plus it’s satisfyingly self-conscious of its shortcomings (Jack: “Who the hell do you think went through there? Some guy in an ape suit?”). Thank Lorenzo Semple, Jr., for the persistent wit; he was also the screenwriter behind many episodes of “Batman,” the wittiest TV show of the sixties.  The cast is very good too with Jeff Bridges, Chuck Grodin, and Jessica Lange keeping you from shrieking “Bring on the goddamned monkey, already!” for the first 50 minutes of the movie. I really liked it. Sue me.

Diary of a Madman (1963- dir. Reginald Le Borg) ***

Vincent Price holds down the fort in this adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s story “Le Horla.” A condemned man is under the influence of a murderous entity called the Horla. When he suddenly dies in the presence of Price, our star becomes the new host. Because it’s a period spook story from a literary source starring Vincent Price, it’s hard not to compare it to Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe pictures of the same period. The relatively style-less, chintzy, and talky Diary of a Madman suffers in that comparison, but Price puts his customary all into the role of the tortured magistrate and Nancy Kovack is very watchable as a gold-digging yet conflicted model. There’s also a pretty neat animated effect in which Price’s sculpture transforms from a smiley Nancy to a frowny Nancy. That statue is also involved in the movie’s one truly effective scare.

October 15

Paranormal Activity 4 (2012- dir. Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman) **

Poor Katie Featherston. She’s a good actress. Must she be forever doomed to skulk around in sequel after sequel after sequel of the Paranormal Activity series? As was the case in part 3, Katie is actually a minor player. The main characters are a bunch of kids, and since this latest installment is set in the present instead of the halcyon days of 2006, there’s no need to explain why everything is being filmed even before the weird stuff starts happening, because kids (and most adults) today just live their lives through their cell phone viewfinders. Progress! The Paranormal Activity movies, however, have not progressed. Shadows dash in the background. Doors move. Stairs thump. Chandeliers sway. People sleep. The most significant addition is the reliance on fake-out scares, which occur at a truly absurd rate. What started as a really, really scary little movie has become just another formulaic horror franchise. And there’s no end in sight! Paranormal Activity 5 is in the works for 2014! At least we all get a break this year.

October 16

The Hands of Orlac (1924- dir. Robert Wiene) ***

Five years after making The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the first feature horror film and the paragon of German Expressionism, Robert Wiene adapted Maurice Renard’s perennial terror tale about Paul Orlac, a pianist who loses his hands in a train crash and receives a transplant from a deceased murderer whose extremities have not lost their yen for killing. While the subject matter is wackier than that of Caligari, the visual style is much less phantasmagoric. Wiene only really lets his imagination loose during Orlac’s dream of his hands’ former owner, and even that sequence does not approach the nightmarish distortions of Caligari. Comparison to Karl Freund’s frothing 1935 remake Mad Love also makes Orlac seem tame. On its own merits, The Hands of Orlac is a good shadow-submerged creeper and Conrad Veidt does his usual wonderfully weird work as Orlac. However, the nearly two-hour version of this originally ninety-minute film is unnecessarily drawn out and the ending is disappointing.

Zombie High (1987- dir. Ron Link) **½

An awesome cast (Virginia Madsen! Sherilyn Fenn! Paul Feig!) attends a high school academy where everyone listens to the worst generic pop songs in the world and their classmates get transformed into brain-dead conformists in the bio lab. What starts as tongue-in-cheek, retro-eighties fun turns turgid once that cast starts going under the knife and Madsen turns into Nancy Drew. Ultimately, Zombie High makes the mistake of taking itself too seriously, and what could have been a cool paranoid horror satire ends up being a bland paranoid horror movie. The true story of Aziz Ghazal—a guy who killed himself, his wife, and his daughter—is much more horrifying than anything in Zombie High, the movie he wrote and produced.

October 17

Attack of the Puppet People (1958- dir. Bert I. Gordon) ****

The cigar-sucking execs at AIP suss that if the kids will turn out for an Incredible Shrinking Man they will surely quadruple their numbers for a whole crowd of Incredible Shrinking Men and Women. John Hoyt commits himself delightfully to the role of Mr. Franz, a lonely doll maker who miniaturizes folks to add to his collection. Few villains are so endearing. Bert I. Gordon’s Attack of the Puppet People most certainly is not the profound classic that Jack Arnold’s film is, and the “dolls” in suspended animation are clearly two-dimensional photographs, so it doesn’t always wow on the special-effects front. Big deal! Attack of the Puppet People remains one of AIP’s most charming and poignant B-horrors. You’d have to be a super-sized ass wipe to not want to get shrunk down so you could dance to Rock & Roll on Mr. Franz’s desktop. What fun! Director Gordon was really into this kind of stuff. His other films included such size-shifting epics as The Amazing Colossal Man (which June Kenney and John Agar watch at a drive-in in Puppet People!), War of the Colossal Beast, Village of the Giants, and The Food of the Gods. His nickname “Mister B.I.G.” was not unearned.

Review: 'Vuckovic’s Horror Miscellany'

So, you’re on a first date, and things are going pretty well. You’re having the old getting-to-know-you chat, and the discussion lands on “what’s your favorite book?” You say, “The Haunting of Hill House, of course!” Your date just gives you a blank stare. OK, so let’s move on to your favorite film. “Obviously, it’s Peeping Tom, the movie that practically destroyed Michael Powell’s career!” Peeping Tom? Michael Powell? Never heard of them. “Fine, fine. Fair enough.” Well then, what about your favorite periodical? “Four words: Famous Monsters of Filmland.” At that point, your date stands up and heads for the door, probably not understanding that Filmland is one word.

Just last week, there’d be no way to salvage what had been, up to this point, a lovely evening. But now, there’s hope. Don’t let your date leave. Throw yourself in front of the door, and plead, “If you’ll go out with me again, I’ll give you a present!” Then immediately sprint to your local bookstore and grab a copy of Vuckovic’s Horror Miscellany.

In fewer than 100 easily digestible pages, horror filmmaker, historian, and all-around superfan Jovanka Vuckovic will fill in that massive blank spot in your potential wife/husband/sex monkey’s horror education. Vuckovic’s Horror Miscellany offers a far-reaching historical, biographical, and trivial smorgasbord of all things monstrous from movies to literature to art to television to poetry to mythology to comics to fanzines to radio dramas to pulp magazines to video games to stage plays to music to real-life killers to breakfast cereal.

Because this is Vuckovic’s Horror Miscellany and not Vuckovic’s Horror In Complete, there are some blind spots here too. There is barely any mention of werewolves, and such essential horrorphernalia as Val Lewton, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “The X-Files,” horror-comedies, and Halloween (the holiday, not the movie) are ignored. However, Vuckovic makes up for such rare oversights by expanding her horror overview to drop such oddities as Kafka’s The Trial, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Mondo Cane, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and The Bible (which she correctly categorizes as a “novel,” much to my delight) into the cannon. She also places the most essential items—Frankenstein, Halloween (the movie), King Kong, Black Sabbath, and E.C. Comics—on a level playing field with such relative obscurities as Japanese writer Edogawa Rampo, Brazilian boogeyman Coffin Joe, and Witch Hunt treatise Malleus Maleficarium. So while your future date may not learn anything about, say, An American Werewolf in London, she/he will know that Carol Clover is the film theorist who coined the term “The Final Girl.” That should be enough to get you through that crucial second date.

Review: 'Abominable Science!: Origins of Yeti, Nessie, and Other Famous Cryptids'

Multiple choice question: 80 years ago this month, a fellow named George Spicer published a letter in the Inverness Courier in which he described a bizarre and terrifying encounter. He and his wife had been motoring around Loch Ness when he suddenly encountered a:

A)   chicken

B)   man-eating robot

C)   dinosaur

D)   man-eating chicken