Review: 'I, Monster' DVD

In 1971, Hammer was having another go at Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde a decade after its failed first attempt, Terence Fisher's generally misguided The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll. Perhaps to avoid confusion with Roy Ward Baker's Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, Milton Subotsky opted to call his own adaptation of the same year I, Monster and changed the names of the title character(s) to Dr. Marlowe and Mr. Blake. 

"You're Like Me": The Strange Links Between 'Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde' and 'Blue Velvet'

David Lynch has created some of the scariest moments on film. The infamous scene behind Winkie’s Diner has been rated cinema’s scariest scene more than once. Twin Peaks has been named television’s scariest show. Eraserhead, Lost Highway, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, INLAND EMPIRE, and, of all things, The Elephant Man have been categorized as horror movies through the years. However, Lynch has never really been a horror film director. Rather he works horror into his work in the same way that he works in comedy and melodrama, and because he does not really make films we expect to hit the beats of specific genres, those moments of humor, naked emotion, and terror always hit harder than they would in genre pictures because they are so unexpected.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 277

The Date: July 3

The Movie: Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937)

What Is It?: Disney’s historic debut animated feature boasts the studio’s trademark painterly artwork, enchanting music, and darkness. The Wicked Queen and her ghostly mirror adviser are terrifying. Snow White’s escape into a dark wood is the stuff of nightmares, and the Queen’s transformation into an apple-wielding witch (in a sequence inspired by Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) would give a nightmare nightmares. If you can stomach the endless capering of those Seven Dwarves, you’ll find some rewarding stuff in this not-quite perfect Disney classic.

Why Today?: Today is Compliment Your Mirror Day.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 8

The Date: October 8

The Movie: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931)

What Is It?: MGM’s bid to cash in on the success of Dracula and Frankenstein bested both films and still stands as one of the most upsetting and brilliantly conceived monster movies. Rouben Mamoulian constantly whips out new tricks to dazzle the audience while Frederic March and Miriam Hopkins give realistic performances atypical of the time that suck you deep into a very dark story better than R.L. Stevenson's book. It gets my vote for best pure horror film ever made.

Why Today?: On this day in 1897, Rouben Mamoulian was born.

Review: 'Essential Horror Movies: Matinee Monsters to Cult Classics'

Narrowing a century of horror cinema down to 72 essential films is a goal doomed to fail. Genre fans tend to be bloody-minded in more ways than one. We are a tough breed to please, and Michael Mallory really stuck his hand into the monster’s mouth with his new book Essential Horror Movies: Matinee Monsters to Cult Classics. I can’t say that his selections totally defeated my own bloody mindedness, but I can say that most of them fit the bill. While I’d never argue that movies such as The Last House on the Left, Friday the 13^th, or Saw are good, I will admit that they are essential by representing major facets and turning points in horror history. Some of his choices are more confounding. Since this book covers so few films, I can’t understand how some of these made the cut (Polanksi’s beautifully shot but dull and embarrassingly unfunny horror comedy The Fearless Vampire Killers; a film called Waxworks that I have not seen but does not really seem to qualify as horror based on Mallory’s write-up; The Beast with Five Fingers) while others— such as The Black Cat, The Innocents, and Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (a shockingly ahead-of-its-time film that Mallory criticizes for being more dated and less grim than the silent version starring John Barrymore!) weren’t even in the running. Mallory’s extended “Fifty Additional Horror Films Worth Seeing” list doesn’t even sweep up the debris and contains a number of notorious stinkers (Roger Corman’s The Terror, Son of Dracula, Count Yorga).

Of course, this is the kind of reaction we serious horror freaks are supposed to have, and I’m sure there were more than a few outraged reactions to my own 150 Essential Horror Movies series from a few years back. I tried to make my list worth reading by writing what I hoped were insightful readings of the films and their places in horror history. This is also what Mallory did to make his cases, and although photos receive pride of place in his coffee table book (and those images do make this a very appealingly grotesque volume), his text is the real essential elements because of its insights and its trivia, although I’d keep a wide birth when reading his spoiler-sprinkled summaries of films you’ve never seen. I was actually surprised that I’d never seen a handful of these (Waxworks, Mill of the Stone Woman, Mark of the Wolfman), so his book even fulfilled the purpose that all books and lists of this sort should: convincing recommendations.

Review: 'The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters'

You know you’re not reading a typical encyclopedia when it starts with a quote from Bugs Bunny. Nevertheless, The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters earns its name, covering an array of fantastic creatures in a single, monstrous 625-page volume. Editor Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock whittled his initial list of 1,000 monsters down to about 200, but because some of those entries are very wide-ranging (Animals, Monstrous; Bible, Monsters in The; Women, Monstrous) Weinstock’s contributors check a lot more than 200 off the list. With that multitude of contributors comes a multitude of approaches, some more successful than others, to studying creatures from Angel to Zombie. Some of the most pervasive monsters— Demon, Extraterrestrial, Ghost, Witch/Wizard—comprise a sizeable chunk of the book with multiple contributors exhaustively detailing how they have been portrayed in books, films, TV shows, comics,  and games throughout world history. Some get more attention than they deserve (Brownie is a slightly longer entry than Devil, The, Dracula, or Frankenstein’s Monster). At least one of the most essential and influential monsters—Hyde, Edward—is absurdly short-changed, the most essential and influential of his films—Rouben Mamoulian’s 1931 adaptation— not receiving any mention at all. Some entries are little more than lists of books and films with microscopic synopses and little in the way of historical background or analysis (Death, Personified, for example).

Most entries, however, strike a strong balance between the histories, insightful analyses, and lists of examples we expect of an authoritative encyclopedia. There are no significant absences and plenty to discover in the way of relatively unfamiliar creatures, such as Devil-Bug, the monster doorman from George Lippard’s The Monks of Monk Hall, the soothsaying Donestre of the Middle Ages, the child-killing Empousa of ancient Greek folklore, the world-creating ocean goddess Tiamat, a big Kosher bird called Ziz, and Kappa, a goofy-looking Japanese swamp monster that pulls kids’ internal organs out through their butts.

A Strange Case for ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’

Early in his amusing study Danse Macabre, Stephen King lays out the three essential monster archetypes: “the Vampire, the Werewolf, and the Thing Without a Name.” Each of these creatures serves as the central villain of three “twentieth-century gothics which have become known as ‘the modern horror story’.” King’s categorizing of Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a vampire novel and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a “thing without a name” novel need no explanation. His werewolf tale is slightly dodgier. But the gnomish ghoul in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has always sat outside the pack despite his broad influence and importance. Mr. Hyde is not a werewolf in any official sense, but it isn’t too tough to suss where King is coming from. Hyde is a monster brought on by transformation, a not-so-subtle representation of uncontrollable, destructive id. He parallels alcoholics and drug addicts neater than the Wolf Man does, but the similarities are still significant. So is King’s categorization of Hyde as a werewolf. There was never a major werewolf novel in the vein of Dracula or Frankenstein, yet that beast naturally completes the holy trinity of major monsters. The werewolf took its fated position alongside Dracula and the Frankenstein Monster in 1941 when Universal Studios released The Wolf Man, its final great, serious monster movie during its great golden age of monster movies, and one of its few without literary precedent.