Review: 'Corman/Poe: Interviews and Essays Exploring the Making of Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe Films, 1960-1964'

In the late fifties, Hammer Film Productions struck a blow for Gothic horror just when it seemed as though bulb-headed martians and giant bugs had banished vampires, Frankensteins, and spooky cobwebs for good. That was great for UK, birthplace of Gothic horror, but what of the U.S.? Without having even seen Hammer's Curse of Frankenstein or Dracula, all-American Roger Corman came to the stateside rescue with a series of horrors based on stories by America's premiere Gothicist, Edgar Allan Poe. With more than a little help from screenwriters like Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont (both veterans of the Twilight Zone writers' room, not incidentally), producer/director Corman managed to inflate Poe's exceedingly short, not-exactly-action-packed tales of mystery and imagination into crowd-pleasing features. The guy who gave the world highly enjoyable but undeniably schlocky fare like A Bucket of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors suddenly displayed a true artist's eye, with his rainbow palette, brilliant use of foreground set dressing, and zeal for psychedelic dream sequences. With a stock team of iconic actors such as Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Jack Nicholson, Boris Karloff, Ray Milland, and Hazel Court, Roger Corman had found the formula for iconic, unforgettable, enduring films. 

Review" 'The Bat' Special Edition Blu-ray

The Film Detective issued a blu-ray of The Bat in 2015, and though Crane Wilbur's comedic 1959 old dark house flick, based on a play by Mary Roberts Rinehart, remained a complete delight, the disc was not without issues. While I did note in my review that it was a vast improvement over the myriad DVD editions of this public domain picture, I also noted the myriad "specs and thin scratches" that invade the image regularly and the disc's crackly audio. It was also a pretty bare bones package.

Diary of the Dead 2018: Week 5

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 26

Hellraiser (1987- dir. Clive Barker) **

The premise of Clive Barker's adaptation of his own novella, The Hellbound Heart, is appropriately skeletal. Some dickhead stumbles into hell, and manages to escape and return to corporeal form by slaughtering the assholes his sister-in-law/sex monkey lures to him using her feminine wiles. Unfortunately, a band of mutant hell monsters miss torturing him so much that they go searching for him in the earthly realm. With its bad acting, leaden dialogue, and over-the-top gore, Hellraiser plays like a pre-teen goth's attempt to freak out his parents. Ooooh! Extreme!

Phenomena (1985- dir. Dario Argento) ***

Review: 'Dragonwyck' Blu-ray

Although he’d starred in such second-tier Universal horrors as The Invisible Man Returns and Tower of London, Vincent Price didn’t really become established as the horror star of his generation until House of Wax in 1953. Yet it was 1946’s Dragonwyck that saw the Vincent Prince archetype coalesce. His ruthless landowner Nicholas van Ryn is posh, snooty, seemingly soulless yet tortured to his soul, and more than a little campy (one might imagine 20-year-old Roger Corman sitting in the cinema, taking notes). Despite some arguments to the contrary, and a couple of spooky scenes that actually imply mental illness more than supernatural doings, Dragonwyck is not a horror movie at all but a Gothic romance in the recently-established Rebecca tradition. Like Hitchcock’s commercial breakthrough, Dragonwyck is based on a piece of neo-Gothic pulp literature and focuses on a naïve young woman (Gene Tierney) who takes up residence in the gloomy mansion of a troubled older man with some nasty secrets (Price). The payoff of Dragonwyck is not as satisfying as its more prestigious predecessor’s, the pace can be sluggish at times, and the whole affair feels a bit slight despite the grandeur of the performances, music, and sets, but it certainly is more fun to watch Vincent Price in this kind of picture than Lawrence Olivier. Gene Tierney’s Miranda Wells is also a stronger heroine than Joan Fontaine’s nameless bride, though Miranda’s pluck wilts by the end of the picture. Price makes up for that by layering on the juiciest slices of ham he can cook up at this early stage of his career.

Twilight Time’s 1080p presentation of Dragonwyck might not knock you out—there’s a little dirt here and there and detail is sometimes weak—but there is no significant damage or debris, grain is organic, and the sound is excellent, really showcasing Alfred Newman’s lush, sometimes baroque, sometimes almost poppy score, as does Twilight Time’s obligatory isolated music track. This disc also ports over some nice bonuses from the 2008 DVD: a featurette called A House of Secrets: Exploring Dragonwyck, which includes some talking heads making that unconvincing “Dragonwyck is a horror movie” argument, a commentary by historian Steve “Dragonwyck is a horror movie” Haberman and filmmaker Constantine Nasr, and a radio drama of the story performed by Price and Tierney in the year of the film’s release. Twilight Time adds an additional radio adaptation from 1947, this one starring Price and Teresa Wright, and best of all, a pair of full-length A&E biographies—one utterly sad, one utterly charming—spotlighting the film’s two stars.

Review: 'The Mad Magician' Blu-ray

Poor Vincent Price. All he wants to do is chop off Mary Murphy’s head with a buzz saw in front of an audience of slack jaws, but the prop company for which he designed the trick just won’t let him use it! No wonder he goes from being just another amateur magician to a mad magician.

1954’s The Mad Magician is another in Vincent Price’s homicidally tortured artist pictures that kicked off with House of Wax the previous year. A bit slight in comparison to other such movies like Wax or Theatre of Blood, The Mad Magician is almost singlehandedly distinguished by Price, though Lenita Lane certainly deserves credit for adding quite a bit of supporting color as the amateur sleuth who suspects there’s something fishy about our magician (she’d be even more wonderful playing alongside Price in 1959’s The Bat).

Despite his own rep for making moody murder mysteries such as The Lodger and Hangover Square, director John Brahm basically stays out of Price’s way to allow the star to chew the scenery in his delightfully inimitable way. Price also gets to play it more subtly with some impressive vocal disguises (George Bau and Gustaf Norin’s makeup disguises are equally impressive). Presumably, even the film’s 3D is unostentatious. There’s certainly no excess of magic wands or fingers poking at the camera.

Nevertheless, Twilight Time still presents its new Blu-ray edition of The Mad Magician in 3D. Since I’m not equipped for that, I could only watch it in two measly dimensions. Fortunately, I never missed the poking fingers since it is still a handsome, widescreen presentation with organic texture and no trace of scratches, squiggles, or blemishes (which might have been pretty psychedelic in 3D!).

A 20-minute, making-of doc leads a neat selection of extras. Two 3-D Three Stooges shorts maintain the multi-dimensional theme and deliver on the poking things missing from the main feature. There’s also an audio commentary between film historian Steve Peros and Price historian/master raconteur David Del Valle that is almost as amusing as the feature.

20 Things You May Not Have Known About Vincent Price!

No Halloween season is a true Halloween season without a healthy dose of Vincent Price movies. But wait! Don’t sit down to shudder along with House of Wax or The Abominable Dr. Phibes just yet! To truly appreciate the man and his work, you’ll first want to bolster your Priceducation with these 20 Things You May Not Have Known About Vincent Price!

1. That Vincent Price was a gourmet chef and cookbook author is well known among fans, but they might not be aware that culinary interests ran deep in his bloodline. His grandfather, Vincent C. Price, invented baking powder and pioneered cornstarch as a baking ingredient, and his father, Vincent Leonard Price, was the president of the National Candy Company.

2. Vincent Price’s first wife, Edith Barrett, didn’t become as synonymous with horror as her husband did, but she did star in the creepy classic I Walked with a Zombie.

3. Price’s daughter Victoria is a serious writer who wrote scripts about Richard Widmark and her dad’s old friend Roddy McDowall for A&E’s Biography series and an extensive and refreshingly objective biography about her dad. She also had a brief role as a reporter in Price’s final film, Edward Scissorhands.

4. As a young man from an unquestioningly conservative St. Louis family, Price expressed sympathy with this burgeoning Nazi party. However, he underwent a major liberal awakening upon moving to Hollywood where he became active in such causes as the Jewish Anti-Defamation League. Ironically, Joseph McCarthy targeted Price as a possible communist in the fifties, citing Price’s anti-Nazi inclinations as proof that he was some sort of dangerous radical. McCarthy was one loony piece of work.

31 TV Shows for 31 Days of Halloween Season: Day 10

Series: The Muppet Show

Episode: “Vincent Price”, in which Vincent Price finally finds some costars who can keep up with his uniquely subtle acting style. This entire installment of The Muppet Show reeks of the strange, the weird, the scary. A trio of ghosts croon “I’m Looking Through You”. Muppet cannibalism is a running theme. Furniture turns murderous. Kermit transforms into an amphibious vampire and takes a chunk out of the guest host’s jugular. Most horrifying, most vile, most abominable of all, Vincent Price sings a James Taylor song. James Taylor… shudder.

Review: 'Theatre of Blood' Blu-ray

Vincent Price was adored by fans but ridiculed by critics for his out-sized, hambone theatrics in nasty horror flicks. So it’s little surprise that Price’s personal favorite of his own ghoulish filmography was supposedly Theatre of Blood. Price plays Edward Lionheart, a Shakespearean actor thought to have committed suicide who returns from the dead to bump off the critics who ridiculed him for his out-sized, hambone performances. As Lionheart employs a gaggle of homeless people and a hippie henchman who could pass for Ian Hunter to help cross the snooty, upper-crust critics off his list, there’s a whiff of social revolution about the movie. The fact that he is also criticized for only acting in ancient plays and loses an award to a young actor named William Woodstock (ba-dum!) will also help the film appeal to preservation societies.   

With its gimmick murders (they’re based on the killings in Shakespeare’s plays) and copious campy humor, Theatre of Blood has much in common with another key Price film, but Robert Fuest shot The Abominable Dr. Phibes as a vibrant psychedelic hallucination. Director Douglas Hickox realized Theatre of Blood with grittier, dirtier, greyer realism, though cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky’s use of distorted, fish-eyed lenses really heightens the film’s nightmarish, stomach-churning grotesqueries. 

The grungy palette of Theatre of Blood looked wretched on home video, and as much as I love Price and the film’s satirical premise, I always found Theatre to be off-putting and inaccessible because of its ugly presentation on VHS and DVD. As I was hoping it would, Twilight Time’s new blu-ray has really turned around my feelings about the film. Although white specks are constant (as they tend to be on a lot of Twilight Time releases), the picture is clear, bright, organic, and sometimes even colorful, allowing the wicked brilliance of Hickox and Suschitzky compositions to shine through. Sound is very tinny, sometimes distorted, but the picture looks so good that I was only mildly bothered by the audio issues. More importantly, I’m grateful that I can now truly enjoy one of Vincent Price’s best roles. A lively and interesting commentary by Twilight Time’s Nick Redman and journalist David Del Valle, who performed an extensive video interview with Price in 1988, completes this blu-ray, which is available from Twilight Time's official site here.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 240

The Date: May 27

The Movie: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

What Is It?: Vincent Price finds himself in a horror movie so bizarre, so insane, so giddy that he can get away with a pretty restrained performance. As the title character, he bumps off the medical professionals he blames for his wife’s death, basing each murder on a Biblical plague. Great gimmick; great flick.

Why Today?: On this day in 1911, Vincent Price is born.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 207

The Date: April 24

The Movie: House on Haunted Hill (1959)

What Is It?: William Castle’s best movie is great fun on its own thanks to the filmmaker’s humor and budget-trumping artistry, Vincent Price’s Vincent Price-ness, and at least one true-blue scare, but this is still a movie best seen in a theater full of delinquents chucking popcorn boxes at the inflatable skeleton Emergoing overhead. Duck!

Why Today?: On this day in 1914, William Castle is born.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 111

The Date: January 19

The Movie: Masque of the Red Death (1964)

What Is It?: Roger Corman hits his horror peak with this lavish adaptation of two Poe tales (“Hop Frog” is the other). Corman receives A-list support from screenwriter Charles Beaumont, cinematographer Nic Roeg, and stars Jane Asher, Hazel Court, Patrick Magee, Skip Martin, and Mr. Vincent Price.

Why Today?: On this day in 1809, Edgar Allan Poe is born.

Review: 'The Bat' Blu-ray

Vincent Price is a shady doctor who ices shady banker Harvey Stephens to get to the money Stephens stole from his own bank and hid in the house he’s leasing to mystery writer Agnes Moorehead. Meanwhile, Moorehead’s neighborhood is being terrorized by a masked, clawed serial killer who takes the novel approach of releasing rabid bats on his victims—hence his nickname and the title of The Bat. Based on Mary Roberts Rinehart’s play of the same name (based on her own novel The Circular Staircase), Crane Wilbur’s The Bat is not exactly unpredictable as a mystery, but it is simply oodles of fun as an old dark house picture with shadowy, stormy atmosphere. The script is sometimes corny, sometimes genuinely witty, and always breezy fun. Most significantly, this picture is a fab vehicle for Moorehead and Lenita Lane, who plays her companion. It is particularly refreshing as it doesn’t limit Moorehead and Lane to the usual “helpless female” roles. They take an active role in solving the mystery, always support and love each other, and are often more on the ball than the ineffectual cops in charge of protecting them. Moorehead even refers to the dynamic duo as “two strong women” at one point. Price does his patented menacing routine, which means he’s a blast to watch too (also, be sure to look out for little rascal Darla Hood in her final role).

The Film Detective’s new blu-ray of The Bat is a very appealing antidote to all the crummy versions of this public domain movie floating around. There are a lot of white specs, and thin scratches appear with some regularity, but the picture beneath the flaws is handsome, indeed, with natural grain, nice detail, and bold contrast. Audio suffers from occasional crackling, but it’s also strong overall, showing off Louis Forbes’s smashing score well—I love his use of slide guitar to signal the killer!

Review: 'Scream and Scream Again' Blu-ray

It’s probably normal to spend the majority of Scream and Scream Again wondering if Gordon Hessler and his crew committed a botch-job of massive proportions or made a conscious stab at abstract art. Hessler’s track record doesn’t make figuring this out any easier since he directed his share of good pictures (The Golden Voyage of Sinbad) and exploitative trash heaps (Cry of the Banshee). Scream and Scream Again falls somewhere in between those poles, and in this case, it’s probably wisest just to go with the flow and take in its sundry oddities without thinking about any of it too deeply. Half the picture is a political thriller in which a member of some sort of Nazi-esque military organization keeps pinching people to death. The other half finds a bloodsucking serial murderer/rapist terrorizing a London nightspot called The Busted Pot. Why any swinging hippie would attend a joint with a name like that is anyone’s guess. It’s like naming a brothel “The Crab Trap.” Oops! Sorry. I promise not to think so much anymore.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 7

The Date: October 7

The Movie: House of Usher (1960)

What Is It?: Roger Corman’s first Poe adaptation has all the classic elements in place: Vincent Price, Gothic overload, gorgeous color, lavish sets, and a Richard Matheson script. It's a bit meandering, but the apocalyptic climax is a big pay off.

Why Today?: On this day in 1849, Edgar Allan Poe dies.

Diary of the Dead 2014

Every year I log my Monster Movie Month © viewing with ultra-mini reviews at the end of every week in October in a fiendish feature I call Diary of the Dead. This year I altered the scheme slightly for a single, season-ending post.

I wrote it. You read it. No one needs to get hurt.

Oct. 1

Rodan (1956- dir. Ishirō Honda) **

One of the most iconic giant Japanese monsters first appeared in a pretty boring movie. Miners discover a baby pterodactyl that looks and moves like a kite. It terrorizes Japan without a smidgen of the moodiness of its forefather, Gojira. Amazing that Ishirō Honda followed that masterpiece with such a lazy picture. Rodan would only become fun when paired with Gojira, as we shall soon see.

We Are What We Are (2013- dir. Jim Mickie) ***

I haven’t seen the Mexican film upon which this cannibal family flick was based, so I can’t make any unfavorable comparisons. Taken on its own merits, the American We Are What We Are is refreshingly atmospheric. It’s also deliberately paced, which I usually like, but this one’s a little too deliberate, bordering on tedious. It’s also a bit empty aside from its fairly subtle critique of the patriarchy. On the plus side, it has Michael Parks, which is worth at least half a star.

Oct. 3

Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964- Ishirō Honda) ***½

This is more like it. Since Honda didn’t seem interested in/capable of recapturing the grimness of Gojira he took his kaiju franchise to its logical camp conclusion. Rodan is back and less turgid in mood if not motion. So is Gojira and giant bug Mothra. The old rampaging monsters experience a change of heart when faced with three-headed dragon Ghidorah. They actually have a conversation about whether or not they should assist humanity by offing the new menace! Plus there are those wacky fairy twins, who appear on a crazy TV talk show. Perhaps not great fun, but certainly good fun.

Oct. 4

Ten Mysterious and Imaginative Edgar Allan Poe Adaptations

According to imdb, Edgar Allan Poe’s works have been adapted 287 times as of this writing. With eight of those not even seeing release yet, the penner of weird and gloomy tales hasn’t fallen off the radar of film and TV creators one iota. That’s a lot of stuff to sift through, and I won’t pretend I’ve seen all of those adaptations. I have seen enough to put together a short list of unmissable realizations of Poe stories, the faithful and the far out, the straight and the surreal, the subtle, the hilarious, the animated, and the bloody. Here are ten great Edgar Allan Poe adaptations you might want to cram in today in honor of his 205^th birthday.

1. The Fall of the House of Usher (1928- dir. Jean Epstein)

Edgar Allan Poe is unquestionably among the most popular writers in history, which accounts for why he’s been adapted so many times. However, his work usually doesn’t lend itself to faithful adaptation. He’s often a lot more interested in piling on the words to fashion a mood than he is in telling a story. Perhaps this too is a reason for his popularity among filmmakers. An oft-adapted story such as “The Fall of the House of Usher” is so lacking in plot that it allows an interpreter to take it in any number of interesting directions. French filmmaker Jean Epstein did that in his silent adaptation from 1928, using spare surreal imagery to convey the dread Poe labors to conjure in his story. With assistance from co-writer Luis Buñuel, then making Un Chien Andalou with Salvador Dali, Epstein welds together an assortment of fantastical, unforgettable images. The odd ones—disorienting POV shots, nightmarish sets, screwing frogs—pack as much power as the ones that are now regarded as spooky movie clichés—mysteriously extinguishing candles, billowing curtains, reanimated corpses. Even as the story takes its liberties with the source material, the presentation conveys the atmosphere of a Poe story uncannily, which is really the most important thing.

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

After reworking Dracula and Frankenstein into films that don’t rely too heavily on Stoker or Shelley in 1931, Universal treated Poe with a similar lack of respect with its adaptation of “Murders in the Rue Morgue” the following year. The film works mainly as a vehicle for Karl Freund’s expressionistic cinematography, Bela Lugosi’s sinister mugging and line readings, and Robert Florey’s totally wacko plot developments, such as Lugosi’s plot to prove the theory of evolution by shooting up women with gorilla blood. That twist surely would have tickled Poe, whose macabre sense of humor is lost on all those readers who just think of him as a purveyor of opium-spiked horror. Despite the fact that it didn’t quake box offices, Murders in the Rue Morgue set off a mini cycle of Poe movies for Universal. Ironically, this unfaithful adaptation was the closest thing to a faithful adaptation the studio produced…

3. The Black Cat (1934- dir. Edgar G. Ulmer)

…and for proof of that, check out The Black Cat. The story is actually one of Poe’s clearest, and more faithful adaptations would come in later years (and later on this list too), but Universal was always pretty revision happy, and writer Peter Ruric and director Edgar G. Ulmer get downright slap-happy with “The Black Cat”. So long to the simple plot of marital mania and revenge. Hello to a psycho chess match between Satanic war criminal Boris Karloff and sadistic “hero” Bela Lugosi. Karloff’s ailurophobia allows the film to very, very, very tangentially relate to Poe, but his story has no bearing on Ulmer’s masterpiece otherwise. Karloff and Lugosi have never been better matched, both relishing every line of peculiar dialogue, and with its art deco style and insane brew of Satanism, torture, and head games, The Black Cat may be the best film on this list even if its pretty spurious as an adaptation.

4. The Tell-Tale Heart (1953- dir. Ted Parmelee)

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.

Diary of the Dead 2011: Week 2

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 7st

Alice (1988- dir. Jan Švankmajer) ****

Alice begins with the title tot intoning, “Now you will watch a film made for children… perhaps.” Yeah, perhaps you want to stay up all night consoling your hysterical child who’d just been traumatized by Jan Švankmajer’s stop-motion animal skeletons and taxidermied carcasses. Perhaps not. No filmmaker has ever really been able to capture the quizzical humor of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Švankmajer doesn’t really try. His Alice is more of a minimalistic nightmare. The repetitious scraps of dialogue mock Carroll’s copious wordplay. The googly-eyed, chisel-toothed White Rabbit splits open and bleeds torrents of sawdust blood. The sets are dank and derelict. The film reeks of mildew and formaldehyde. This is not horror in the sense that anyone gets hunted by a monster or hacked up by a mad man, but Alice may do nastier things to your psyche than any of those kinds of movies. Patience is required, though.

October 10th

Curse of the Crimson Altar (1968- dir. Vernon Sewell) ***½

This nonsense loosely based on Lovecraft’s “Dreams in the Witch House” is an excuse for naïve images of sex, drugs, and ritual sacrifice. Boris Karloff was winding down and wheelchair bound when he made Curse of the Crimson Altar (aka: The Crimson Cult), but he remained consummately committed. Throwaway lines like “All the best things in life are short lived” take on unintentional

See 'House on Haunted Hill' with Emergo at Jersey City's Landmark Loews!

Earlier this month I reported that William Castle's House on Haunted Hill will be screening at The Landmark Loews in Jersey City, NJ, on Friday, October 28th (8:00PM). In my post I wrote that it would be great if the theater showed the film with Castle's grand gimmick Emergo, not expecting that would be the case. Much to my shock, the theater's official site has announced that the film will, indeed, be shown with Emergo! Not sure how often this happens, but it certainly doesn't happen too often in my own neighborhood! William Castle's grandson will also be in attendance to host a Q&A and raffle off a copy of the new House On Haunted Hill: A William Castle Annotated Screamplay. See you there!

A Vincent-a-Day: ‘From a Whisper to a Scream’

Leading up to the 100th anniversary of Vincent Price’s birth today, I’ve been checking out one of the maestro’s lesser known films all week.

From a Whisper to a Scream (1987- dir. Jeff Burr)

A Vincent a Day week reaches its dastardly conclusion with one of the man’s final films. Price supposedly regretted taking this role, and it’s not too hard to suss why. From a Whisper to a Scream is the kind of cheapo scuzz yesterday’s Madhouse prognosticated. This portmanteau offers torture, incest, necrophilia, human vivisecting, child murder, a cheesy monster baby, a game of pin-the-tail-on-the-torso, and gobs of fairly convincing gore. The dialogue is witless (“She’s got legs all the way up to where the hair grows!”) and the acting is idiotic. These are also the qualities that make this junk fairly entertaining junk. Price appears in the wraparound in which he explains the sordid history of Oldfield, Tennessee, to an uncharacteristically restrained Susan Tyrrell. The great Lawrence Tierney is wasted in a part that barely even qualifies as a cameo, but each of the movie’s episodes isn’t much worse than your average Tale from the Crypt. And though the production values are cheaper than those in Creepshow, the stories are better. From a Whisper to a Scream is the worst thing I’ve watched this week, but I’m pleased that even this crap is pretty good. That’s quite a track record, Vincent! Happy 100th.