Dead & Buried

I remember, or maybe just imagine I remember, the novelization of Dead & Buried showing up the Scholastic Book Club in elementary school (there's a chance- I recently found a Scholastic edition of The Amityville Horror), somehow though, I never managed to actually see the movie.
So I was pleasantly surprised to see it on Shudder.

The one thing that stands out the most is Melody Anderson, best know as Dale Arden in the De Laurentis Flash Gordon.

She plays the wife of the sheriff, who's investigating deaths of strangers in the small Maine town of Potter's Bluff.  As viewers, we're treated to the deaths, so the circumstances are no mystery: crowds of locals, armed with rocks and pipes, are beating these people to death and taking pictures- lots of Kodak Instamatic flash bulbs.

The mastermind behind this- no spoilers, don't worry- will be apparent to anyone who's seen an episode of  The Avengers or Murder, She Wrote.

It's an effective and atmospheric small town chiller, with a couple of rather gruesome episodes- an eye impalement and death by acid- that somehow managed to get it on the infamous British "Video Nasties" list of banned movies.  Aside from the Kodaks and rotary phones, it holds up very well.

(I almost forgot- it was promoted as being by the creators of Alien, but Dan O'Bannon, the man who wrote the screenplay for Alien, didn't actually have anything to do with it and disavowed the movie.)

The Beast Must Die

The Beast Must Die.  I’ve been looking for this Werewolf Whodunnit for a while, and after watching Ten Little Indians, I felt inspired to go look once more- and I didn’t have to look far since it’s on Shudder.

Simple, classic premise: a group of people is gathered at a country house for the weekend, and their host announces that one among them is a killer- only this time, a killer werewolf.

It’s from Amicus, which is like Hammer-lite, in 1974.

Calvin Lockhart plays the host, a self made millionaire hunter who’s going for the most dangerous game of all.  His guests include Peter Cushing, Charles Gray, and Michael Gambon, all mainstays from Hammer.

The Beast Must Die works best as a crazy whodunnit, because as a horror film, it has issues, mostly with effects: lots of blue filter day for night filming and the werewolf… well, it’s a gussied up German Shepherd.  

There’s also a swingin’ hip score that’s THERE during the first sequence of the movie, but thankfully fades less intrusively into the background.

As I’m writing this, another aspect of the movie occurs to me- there’s no sex, no profanity.  The Beast Must Die is a terrific, watch-it-with-the-kids starter film for genre loving parents who want to start the kids on the scary but don’t want to go too terrifying to begin with.

It’s a fun film, and were there not so many other films out there to watch, I’d consider giving The Beast Must Die another go, if only to see how it holds up as a mystery.

Ten Little Indians

When I was a kid, on the afternoon movie- there's a phrase I'll probably
use a lot on this blog- I saw a movie that scared the beejeebus out of me.

I've finally gotten around to seeing it again- the 1965 version of Ten Little Indians.  It wasn't a horror film, but with a small, isolated cast being killed in a variety of ways, it served as a template for any number of horror thrillers.

But oddly enough, it was the second death, a mountain cable car plunging to it's doom after the cable is cut... that was the thing that scared me.

Upon re-watching... not so scary.  Compared to... well, all manner of genre pieces, it's prettty tame.

I'm a big fan of Agatha Christie, and this was probably where I got my start, though it always seemed to linger as some sort of boogeyman in my mind. I'm glad I finally managed to see it again.  It's kind of dated- Fabian plays a swinging singer and the love interest is played Shirley Eaton- the other Bond girl from Goldfinger.  Christopher Lee even has a small role as the voice of their host, Mr U.N. Owen.

The producer maintained his rights and did a version in the seventies, starring Elke Sommer, and the eighties, with um... Frank Stallone.  Yeah.

When I told Igor about my history with this movie he told me I should keep it... nope, I'll put it in the sell pile.

I'm content to watch, and rewatch, and rewatch again  Десять негритят,  the 1987 Soviet adaptation- of the book rather than Christie's stage play, because it's true to the source material and the costumes and sets are amazing. Yes, it's in Russian, but it's so good that hardly matters.

I think I'll try and watch some movies inspired, directly or indirectly from this source over the next few days.

The Essential Dracula

Today's score was this hardcover edition of The Essential Dracula, edited by Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu.

Now, of course I've got a copy of Dracula.  A couple actually.  Some nondescript mass market copy.  The Norton Critical edition edited by David Skal and Nina Auerbach. Leonard Wolf's The Essential Dracula from Byron Preiss's iBooks, which was a repackaging of The Annotated Dracula.

So, I guess there's always room for another one, right?

And what an edition this is!

As it would be with something like this, it's not the Bram Stoker novel that's the draw, it's the annotations and pictures.  There are pictures from most of the film portrayals up until Frank Langella- who gets the cover- and maps and hundreds of annotations from the scholars who were responsible for the book In Search of Dracula.

Even though it's a seventies edition of a Victorian novel, it's rather immune to being dated, in fact, the only thing that really dates it at all is the Langella photo and dedication.

Mostly because MY seventies Dracula was Michael Nouri.

Howling IV: The Original Nightmare

Another fun choice- Howling IV: The Original Nightmare.  I've seen the original Howling a couple of times and I've seen Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf at least a half a dozen times- it's really really awesomely bad, with Christopher Lee, Sybill Danning and TV's Captain America Reb Brown.
Knowing that movies get worse the further away from the first in the series, and taking degree of aweful that is H2 into consideration, I figured anything subsequent would be cataclysmically bad.  ... and well, may be it is, or maybe not.

IV is essentially a remake of the first movie, going back to Gary Brandner's original novel as a source.  Filmed in South Africa, pretending to be Callifornia, with a small town sheriff with a Southern twang and a town doctor with an odd combination of Down East and British so it's kind of low budget wacky.

A writer takes time away from Los Angeles, because she's having a nervous breakdown.  She gets away from the city to a small town called Drago, where she hears howling but no one else seems to.   It's not actually a nervous breakdown, it was visions.  ... and the howling?  Werewolves.

The actual Werewolves don't get much screen time, and it's more "suspense" than horror, but as a "paranoid city dweller in a scary rural environment story" it works pretty well.

(Additional points for having a theme song sung by Justin Hayward of the Moody Blues.)

"There's always the 'gators... dirty, nasty, slimy 'gators..." The Alligator Prople

Mmmmm.  Today's movie was fun- The Alligator People.
Beverly Garland plays a newly wed who's abandoned by her husband.  She goes seeking him at what seems to be his childhood home, a Tennessee Williams-esque household in the Louisiana bayou called The Cypresses.  There she encounters the alligator hating Lon Chaney, with a hook for a hand, the matriarch of the manor, and a mysterious doctor- not to mention a figure in the shadows, playing the piano.

Clocking in at just under seventy-five minutes, for the most part The Alligator People is mostly a Southern Gothic piece that veers into science-fiction toward the end.

I know it's blasphemy, but I just don't get Lon Chaney.  He was terrific as Larry Talbot in the Wolfman, and of course Lennie in Of Mice and Men,  Even in the Inner Sanctum movies of the forties, he was starting to show some wear, and by time he was doing parts like the hook handed Cajun, it was like he was phoning it in.

Choosing today's movie was a random decision, it was shorter than I'm used to, and it isn't a Universal Movie... but it really was a pleasant surprise.  I'm going to try and find more like it.

Nadja

Rewatching Nadja tonight, cheating a little and reusing my reaction to it from another blog I used to write:

I'm not sure how I missed this, but Nadja is amazing.
For all intents and purposes, it's a remake of the 1936 movie Dracula's Daughter.
Filmed in black and white, it's a slow dreamy thing, like a vampire film by David Lynch, which isn't surprising as Lynch is a producer and has a cameo as a morgue attendant.

Nadja, Dracula's daughter, lives in New York and is lonely. She's having to deal with the death of her father at the hands of Van Helsing.

Elina Lowensohn is haunting as Nadja, while Peter Fonda is delightfully manic as Van Helsing.

Aside from the black and white, it's got footage filmed with the Fisher Price pixel-cam, adding another layer of dreamy-ness to it, capped off with the use of My Bloody Valentine on the soundtrack.

A nice touch for Universal fans is the use of Bela Lugosi from White Zombie in a cameo as Dracula.

I think I'm going to try and pick this up for my permanent collection- it's the perfect movie to watch while sipping bitter, licorice flavored, green liqueurs.
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Post script:  Well, now I'm going to have to rewatch Dracula's Daughter tomorrow night.

Post-Post script: Well, I thought I'd hit "publish" last night- oops.  So, here's the trailer to make up for that:

The Giant Gila Monster!

I've probably seen The Giant Gila Monster half a dozen times and it's just as entertaining now as it was when I saw it the first time when I was a kid.

It's one of those things that you'll either love or hate- hot rodding teenagers in rural Texas in 1959 versus... you guessed it a giant gila monster!

The kids are like the Archie gang, hanging out at the malt shop and working on their roadsters.  Chase, the Archie of the story, has a Polio stricken little sister and a French exchange student girlfriend.  Chase also sings and plays the ukulele.

The acting is... sort of there.  But with a movie like this, you're not looking  for  graduates of the Strasberg School, it's the monster.  He's an actual lizard on a small scale set, stoically plodding across fake scrub and desert, bringing a subtle dignity to a production where most of the performances are sustained with mostly youthful enthusiasm.

But don't take my word for it- The Giant Gila Monster is a public domain movie so you can watch it here:

Crestwood House Monsters

Well, I mentioned the Crestwood House books a couple of posts ago... well it was these beauties that gave me my love of the movies- prior to actually seeing any of these films.

The first wave of these titles, as seen on the back of one of the books, was King Kong, The Wolf Man, Frankenstein, Dracula, Godzilla, and Mad Scientists.

Heavily illustrated with black and white photographs, these books tell the stories of the movies and then supplement them with information about the sequels and behind the scenes production stories.

Later sets included The Mummy, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein Meets The Wolfman, and- as seen in the second picture- The Murders in the Rue Morgue, an adaptation of the 1932  Bela Lugosi Universal movie, which is... an odd choice for a children's book.

The covers were distictively orange (someone's even made t-shirts of them).  They fade into yellow but some schools had them rebound into sturdier, but less attractive volumes- see the brown Draculas in the pictures, as well as The Wolf Man and Frankenstein Meets Wolfman.

This is my collection so far- I've picked them up at library fairs and thrift stores and trained Igor to keep an eye out for them in our travels.

For years, I thought I was the only person who remembered these outside of a small circle I'd been lucky to meet- and then came the internet.
Cinemassacre has a great video about them here.
Branded in the 80s deconstructs the Frankenstein volume here, and Titans, Terrors and Toys does a nice quick overview here.

Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy

Watched Abbott & Costello Meet the Mummy for the first time in years and... hmmm.  It was enjoyable enough.

I didn't enjoy it as much as I did when I watched it last- five or six years ago- mostly because I've rewatched The Mummy's Hand several times in the interim and the idea of two Americans in Egypt (A&C here and Steve Banning (Dick Foran) and Babe Jensen (Wallace Ford) in TMH), down on their luck, enmeshed in an adventure that takes them to a lost tomb where they have to contend with a Mummy and the head of an ancient cult... well it kind of wore out with me.

Fortunately, it had A&C hijinks and the comedy made up for what I'd seen before, including some sufficiently silly parts I had to rewind to watch again- including a bit where the femme fatale is trying to seduce Lou by giving him all her contact information.

Also, the wonderfully disconcerting presence of  Richard Deacon as Semu, the high priest of the Mummy cult.  He's best known as Mel Cooley from the Dick Van Dyke Show.  Yes, him, playing an Egyptian priest.

All in all, it's a good rainy day movie, not necessarily part of a Mummy marathon, but definitely part of an A&C double or triple bill.

Thank You Universal! Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters Collection.

As October approaches, I make a point to check the video sections of Target, Walmart and other such places, because that's when Horror Movies season is at its peak in the bargain video sections.

Today I was in our local Walmart with Igor and saw last year's Legacy collection releases for the Mummy and Dracula.  Having both, from a previous legacy release, I decided to check them anyway for the extras... and there they were: Abbot and Costello Meet The Mummy and Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein, I had a moment of nerdrage- I DON'T WANT TO BUY THESE AGAIN! - when I noticed Abbott and Costello Meet the Monsters Collection, featuring the two mentioned above and ...Meet Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and ...Meet the Invisible Man.

...Meet Frankenstein is special because it's the last movie in the original arc of Universal Horror films as well as the return of Bela Lugosi in the role that made him famous.

Plus there's commentary and a documentary.
The documentary is David Skal's Abbot & Costello Meet the Monsters from 2000, with commentary from Costello's daughter, Lugosi's son and other genre scholars.
Tom Weaver, one of the authors of Universal Horrors is one of the commentators on Abbott & Costello Meet The Mummy.

It's been a crazy kind of week, so it was nice to find this collection- it'll be hours of fun.

Getting Started On Horror Part One

In my last post, I mention something that frightened me as a kid- so where did the fascination with horror movies come from?

Books, actually.  First, The Dynamite Monster Hall of Fame.  This was from Scholastic and I probably got it through my English teacher.  It concentrated mostly on Universal Monsters, but looked at King Kong and Godzilla, as well as the monsters of the fifties.  It was pretty simple, not surprising for a kid's book,  but it was a good introduction.

I've since lost my original copy, but they're available on Amazon.

Great Monsters of the Movies was the other gateway into horror, more of a "grown-up" book- geared more for a sixth or seventh grader!

There's even a still picture from London After Midnight.

I found my copy recently and it's got my name scrawled in it in my elementary school handwriting.

After these two books, I got hooked on the Crestwood House
books, which I'll touch on in my next post.

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I told Igor I was starting a new blog and that I'd be referring to him as Igor.  I think he thought I was joking.