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

A Sort of Evil Out There: The Horror of ‘Twin Peaks’

Beware of spoilers.

No one knows what to expect when Twin Peaks picks up next year after its last episode aired 25 years ago. We know that many of the old-cast members will be returning, and some key ones—such as Michael Ontkean, Michael Anderson, and Lara Flynn Boyle—won’t. We can assume that the black coffee will flow, the red curtains will billow, and the traffic lights will sway, because those are all key atmospheric components in a fictional world richer in atmosphere than most others. A good deal of that atmosphere derives from “a sort of evil out there… something very, very strange in these old woods,” as Ontkean’s Sheriff Truman once told us (and obviously won’t again). 

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 305

The Date: July 31

The Movie: Kill, Baby, Kill (1965)

What Is It?: In an 18th century Carpathian village, a doctor investigates the death of a woman who leaped from a ledge onto a spiked fence. Suicide? Not exactly. The mystery deepens as a giggling, sallow-eyed girl appears whenever a villager is compelled to take his or her own life. The horror heightens as director Mario Bava piles on the startling images: creepy dolls, a swing-set mounted camera swooping over a graveyard, an op-art staircase,and a bounty of cobwebs, crypts, and corpses. There’s also a good witch and a living, breathing dead ringer for the grimacing corpse from Black Sabbath.

Why Today?: On this day in 1914, Mario Bava is born.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 197

The Date: April 14

The Movie: Black Sunday (1960)

What Is It?: Mario Bava guts Nikolai Gogol’s story “Viy” and fills the cavity with nightmares, torture, spiked masks, spurting blood, spiders, crypts, and two Barbara Steeles: one sweet and pure and the other a resurrected vampire/witch who wants to exsanguinate the good one. Double Steeles means double fun.

Why Today?: On this day in 1935, the Black Sunday dust storm swept the American Midwest.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 64

The Date: December 3

The Movie: Black Sabbath (1963)

What Is It?: Mario Bava saturates his horror portmanteau with comic book color and Boris Karloff’s looming presence. However, it is the Karloff-free “The Drop of Water” that truly terrorizes.

Why Today?: On this day in 1948, Ozzy Osbourne is bourne.

We Need Another Barbara Steele!

Perhaps no other genre generated more iconic actors than horror, and it wasted no time dumping them in cinemas. Even before the advent of sound, there was Lon Chaney and Conrad Viedt. As soon as we could hear our monsters groan and growl, we had Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Dwight Frye, Claude Rains, and Peter Lorre. Then came Chaney, Jr., John Carradine, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Vincent Price, etc.

The key word here, of course, is actors. Actresses were not absent from horror movies. Those monsters needed someone screaming and helpless to carry off, after all, so we had Mae Clark, Helen Chandler, Fay Wray, Valerie Hobson, Evelyn Ankers, and Hazel Court to perform such tasks. Their thankless roles as distressed damsels are summed up in the term “scream queen” coined decades after the first queen was heard to scream on screen. But what about the women who made us scream? They were few in the early days of horror cinema, and though the Bride of Frankenstein would become an iconic figure only rivaled by the big three guys—Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the Frankenstein Monster—the character only had four minutes of screen time and Elsa Lanchester would not follow up on her horror stardom as Bela, Lon, and Boris did. Universal followed its first great sound scare-fest with Dracula’s Daughter, though the film is not one of the best-remembered horrors of its day, and the vampiric Gloria Holden would not capitalize on it any more than Lanchester did on Bride.

Review: 'Black Sunday (Devil’s Advocates)'

There may not be a ton of revelations in the Black Sunday installment of the Devil’s Advocates series, but author Martyn Conterio gets it right by making the most of the horror cinema study series’ limited page count and by not taking it all too seriously. He understands that Mario Bava’s gruesome Gothic horror is a bit of stylish, semi-incomprehensible fun above all else. Conterio handles Bava’s dark materials with a light touch, so his study never flops into turgid academia.

Conterio covers a lot of graveyard ground in 89 pages, digging into a bit of creation story, a bit of analysis, a bit of legacy, and a bit of biography—Bava and iconic star Barbara Steele rightfully receiving most of this attention. He theorizes about the design of the mask nailed to her face in the ghastly opening sequence and the misogynistic implications of this scene as viewers are invited to revel in Steele’s beauty and the eradication of that beauty. He discusses the plot’s nominal origins in Nikolai Gogol’s story “Viy”, and other possible inspirations, such as Stoker’s “Dracula’s Guest” and Tolstoy’s “The Family of the Vourdalak”. He pores over the BBFC’s efforts to censor the film, and most important of all, tackles the most obvious question Black Sunday poses: what the hell is Princess Asa Vajda—a vampire or a witch? Most radically, Conterio suggests a preference for the Americanized AIP cut of an Italian film originally released as La maschera del demonio (The Mask of Satan)…well, at least he prefers the title.

The only glaring issue is Conterio’s failure to draw Ershov and Kropachyov’s more faithful adaptation of “Viy” into the discussion in any significant way (their excellent 1967 film Viy barely gets a passing mention toward the end of the book). Some may also believe that Conterio’s explanation of the film’s “massive” legacy overreaches a bit, particularly when the writer implies a scene in the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” TV series intends to pay homage to the film, and more absurdly, when he suggests that some of the most awful aspects of Francis Ford Coppola’s awful Dracula are intentionally awful attempts to pay homage to Black Sunday. Yeah, right. But we can allow the writer his smattering of indulgences since he has otherwise written such an enjoyable study of such an enjoyable flick. Thanks, Martyn!

Review: 'So Deadly, So Perverse: 50 Years of Italian Giallo Films Volume One'

Giallo is a contentious genre. Part lurid crime thriller, part gory horror, part sleazo-sex flick, the distinctly Italian film field can be tough to pin down, and each of its hardcore fans probably has his or her own idea what qualifies. Author Troy Howarth (with ample help from guest essayists Ernesto Gastaldi and Roberto Curti) does what he can too pin down what, exactly, a giallo picture is and isn’t over the first 40 pages of his movie guide So Deadly, So Perverse: 50 Years of Italian Giallo Films Volume One. Then we’re in the deep end with a glut of reviews that waste no time courting controversy. Two films in and its The Three Faces of Fear (aka: Black Sabbath), included because the least-celebrated tale of Mario Bava’s horror portmanteau, “The Telephone”, passes the litmus test.

I’m certain Howarth will afford the rest of that film all-due attention when he and co-conspirator Christopher Workman get to the sixties-centric volume of their Tome of Terror horror movie guide series. So Deadly, So Perverse kind of functions as a companion to that series. Its extra space devoted to extended essays aside, it follows the same format as Tome of Terror with its tech specs, astute and lively reviews, detailed histories, above-and-beyond historical and biographical tidbits, and abundant illustrations. It differs from the first volume of Tome of Terror in its across-the-board depth. There are no two or three paragraph write-ups. Howarth examines every inclusion thoroughly, probably because there are fewer instances of lost films when dealing with giallo than 80-year-old horror movies. I personally don’t have as much interest in giallo as I do in 80-year-old horror movies, but I still found it hard not to get caught up in Howarth’s enthusiasm and came away from So Deadly, So Perverse with another dirty-laundry list of nasty movies to see. 

Diary of the Dead 2012: Week 4

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews every Monday in October (as was the case last year, I’ll only be discussing movies I haven’t reviewed elsewhere on this site). I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

           

October 22

Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (2011- dir. Troy Nixey) ***½

For the most part I was pleasantly surprised by this remake of a 1973 TV movie, perhaps because I never saw the original. Little Sally and her folks move into a rundown mansion infested with tiny demonic tooth fairies. Sally’s explorations through the house reminded me a little of Coraline, and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark shares that film’s willingness to show kids in real danger. Unlike Coraline, this movie is probably too scary and violent to actually show to most kids. My biggest problem is that we see way too much of the CG monsters. And why would they cast a girl who looks exactly like Katie Holmes to play Holmes’s stepdaughter? The filmmakers really missed an opportunity to make Holmes Sally’s biological mother, but then they couldn’t have taken advantage of all those “kid adjusting to new mommy” clichés.

           

October 23

Lisa and the Devil (1974- dir. Mario Bava) ****

Mario Bava’s Lisa and the Devil finds tourist Elke Sommer taking her room and board at Alida Valli’s haunted mansion. Telly Savalas is a satanic butler and there’s a weeping phantom with a taste for chocolate sprinkles. Lisa and the Devil is a sometimes bloody, sometimes romantic, sometimes darkly comic, always incomprehensible Old Dark House yarn. Everyone is totally nuts, but Savalas takes the cake. In other words: it’s fab.

October 25

Bay of Blood (1971- dir. Mario Bava) *½

I kept waiting for this proto-slasher tedium to become a Mario Bava movie, but it never did. The master just wasn’t trying when he dashed off this crap about a killer stalking the woods around a bay. If this is the movie that inspired the pathetic Friday the 13^th, then it’s utterly unforgiveable. Half-a-star for an effectively gross shot of a live octopus crawling on a corpse’s face.

The Raven (1935- dir. Louis Friedlander) ****

Early in The Raven, we learn that sadist Bela Lugosi is so obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe that he actually built an actual pit and an actual pendulum in his basement. No doubt, Chekhov’s pendulum is going to be put to use by the end of this film, but first Dr. Bela has to become obsessed with a pretty patient and give Boris Karloff a bad facelift. We also get to hear Lugosi recite the title poem, which has to be some sort of cultural landmark. He clearly had a great time playing this role. Plus there’s the rare opportunity to hear Karloff do his famed Frankenstein growl without the flattop make up. Louis Friedlander is not in the same league as Universal’s best directors—Whale, Browning, Ulmer, Freund—but he tosses together a nice potboiler of macabre and jolly schlock.

October 26

The Premature Burial (1962- dir. Roger Corman) ***½

The Premature Burial is similar to so many of Roger Corman's Poe pictures in that it takes a story that was already sketchy on the page and stretches it as thin as is imaginable. But, goddamn, does it ever look fantastic! Corman was a master of aesthetic and atmosphere, and The Premature Burial provides the opportunity to spend 80 minutes in cobwebby crypts and foggy graveyards. Where else would you rather be?

October 27

Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (1971- dir. Seth Holt/Michael Carreras) **

Sorry, but Valerie Leon in a super sexy Egyptian princess get up is not enough to raise this Stoker adaptation from the dead. Leon suffers on-and-off possession from long-entombed Princess Tera and people start dropping dead. There's some languid investigating and some exploitative gore and lots and lots of talk all adding up to very little. Seth Holt died of a heart attack while directing this movie and Hammer head Michael Carreras took over. 

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932- dir. Robert Florey) ****

Another Halloween season approaches its finale and Diary of the Dead shudders to a close with a screening at the lovely Landmark Loews in Jersey City. Poe mostly gets tossed out the window for Universal's bizarre adaptation of Murders in the Rue Morgue. Instead, Bela Lugosi is a particularly mad scientist who somehow seeks to prove the theory of evolution by injecting women with gorilla blood. It sounds silly, but plays out sadistically and Karl Freund's background in German Expressionism oozes through his disturbed cinematography. The intentional humor is strong too, particularly in a gag in which three men give their interpretations of monkey language. 

Hope your Halloween is terrifying... and not hurricane terrifying.

Diary of the Dead 2011: Week 3

I’m logging my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews every Friday in October (this year I’ll only be discussing movies I haven’t reviewed elsewhere on this site). I write it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.



October 14th

Frankenstein Unbound (1990- dir. Roger Corman) **

Roger Corman hadn’t directed a movie in nineteen years when he made Frankenstein Unbound. Why he decided to make his comeback with this insane hooey is anyone’s guess. John Hurt is a scientist in the year 2031. He creates a WMD that somehow produces a Hun on horseback who zaps him and his Knight Rider car back to 1817. There he meets the similarly disaster-prone scientist Dr. Frankenstein (Raul Julia). For some reason, Percy (Michael Hutchence!) and Mary Shelley (Bridget Fonda) coexist with her literary creations. Corman holds up Frankenstein and his monster as forerunners of all the bad, bad science that would wreak destruction in the future. An interesting idea, and Hurt and Julia are great actors, but the package is just so damn silly. Corman plays it totally straight, so Frankenstein Unbound never achieves the campiness that is its true calling.

October 15th

The Evil Dead (1983- dir. Sam Raimi) ***

Once you’ve seen its brilliant sequel/remake, The Evil Dead is tough to view as anything but a rough demo. Sam Raimi intended his first feature to be serious horror, but the cheesy script and acting prod it toward camp. By fully embracing that inclination, he made Evil Dead 2 one of the funniest and most energetic horror/comedies. Its predecessor