Hallo-Watch: The Ghoul (1933)

Watched:  10/10/2024

Format:   Amazon Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  T. Hayes Hunter

Well, they can't all be winners.

The movie is probably more interesting for it's goofy history than the movie itself, which is disappointing on almost every level if you're looking for good old-fashioned Halloween fun, but I suppose it's a great movie if you think cousins should hook up by a film's ending.

The story is unnecessarily convoluted, but the spaghetti mess doesn't reveal itself until the very end, and up til that point, it's mostly skulking.  So much skulking.  Sometimes someone skulking after someone who is, in turn, skulking after someone else.  It's crazy.  And a waste.  We have Karloff, who only did the movie because he and Universal were in a spat, and all they gave him to do was wander around dressed like a grandpa after church and wear some iffy make-up. 

The plot is:   there's a supposedly mystic artifact that will allow the Egyptian god Set to take you to Egyptian Heaven?  And Karloff spent his fortune on it just before passing.  Now, everyone wants the amulet, and so a manservant has it for a minute, he gives it to Karloff's estranged niece, who runs into her estranged other cousin, Rafe.  There's Egyptians looking for the thing.  A comedy lady.  A pastor.  And skulking.

And I shouldn't have to say, look, your cousin has great hair, and that's how a wave was supposed to look in 1933, but you still should stop touching her.

The big let down is that it's a movie that has been about mysticism and dark magic, and then at the end, they explain everything away as a series of coincidences, misdiagnosed maladies, scam artists, etc... that all *happened* to line up to make it seem like Karloff came back from the dead and was lumbering around.  Which, I do not need to tell you, absolutely sucks.  Don't do this.

What is good:  

Well, the set and lighting and visuals are all amazing.  No notes.  Loved that.  I liked the funny lady swooning over the Egyptian who is, in turn, absolutely bullshitting her.  And..  yeah.  That's about it.  I liked that it had Ernest Thesiger, because he's one of my favorite parts in one of my favorite films in The Bride of Frankenstein, and I'd never seen him in anything else.  And I don't feel guilty pointing out star Dorothy Hyson is cute since Rodgers and Hart wrote The Most Beautiful Girl in the World about her.  

I don't really know why I've seen this movie cited as "see The Ghoul sometime" but now I wonder if they meant the much later movie called The Ghoul, and I just clicked on the wrong one.

Just watch The Old Dark House.  It's a better movie.

 

Hallo-Watch: Nosferatu - a Symphony of Horror (1922)

Watched:  10/10/2024

Format:  Amazon Prime

Viewing:  first straight thru

Director:  FW Murnau

I've seen this film in bits and pieces, but never in one shot.  So, technically, this is either my first view or not, and I'm calling it my first as I spend this Halloween watching films I should have already seen and have not.  

Yes, I've seen Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) - or most of it - before, here and there.  

Structurally, Nosferatu is more or less a very watered down Dracula - infamously so as the movie was immediately sued into oblivion by Bram Stoker's widow (yes, Dracula came out so recently that Stoker's widow was around in 1922).  

Briefly - A Transylvanian fellow entertains a young solicitor come to sell him property in his hometown.  He sees Count Orlock doing weird things, lusting for blood, etc...  And the Count runs off to his hometown with crates of soil, murdering a transport ship along the way.  But in London Wilborg, instead it focuses on a plague of rats, and our Mina stand in doesn't fall ill, she realizes she must sacrifice herself as a sinless woman to the Count so he'll have overplayed his hand.

Unshockingly, this movie is mostly here for the spooky vibes and to tell everyone else how to do this for the next 100 years.  It's not the first horror movie by a long shot, but it is a highly influential one.  And - in my opinion - is maybe more in the spirit of the novel than all the romantic versions made since Lugosi made women swoon in 1930.  Orlok is a straight up weirdo, and our leads know it.  He's bringing illness and plague with him, he's a soulless killing machine.  

But what folks remember, rightfully, are the visuals of the film.  Flexing some Expressionistic bona fides, Murnau leans into strange and eerie sequences of shadow moving, some in-camera tricks of the day, and long, oddball takes to build tension in a single shot.  Our vampire is a homely bastard - not as described in the novel, but his own, unique look that echoes some of what's there - the grasping, claw-like hands.  But you know all this.  It's a gorgeous film, and worth a look for spooky season, even if you just put it on during your Halloween party.  That's the power of the Nosferatu vibes.

There's little question in my mind that Orlok and Dracula both represent some fear that folks living in times of less exposure to other people held when it came to foreigners or even their own neighbors who were different from them.  Ie: The Other.  Whether that's intentional or the casual racism of Grandpa thinking "that's how things are", I suspect the latter case.

What's odd is the lore around this movie - from the notes in Wikipedia about it being made by German occultists who wanted to, like, employ the dark arts.  To the lawsuits and upsetting Mrs. Dracula, to the film almost being lost, to the 2000 movie Shadow of the Vampire.

But, look... here's what Bacall has to say.

So, be like Lauren Bacall, people.  Refrain from shoe-based violence and check out the OG vamp feature.

I should mention, the Werner Herzog version is really good, and we're looking at a remake coming this Christmas from Robert Eggers, who I think is maybe the right dude to do this justice with modern cameras, etc...  

Hallo-Watch: Christine (1983)

Watched:  10/09/2024

Format:  Peacock

Viewing:  Third?  Fourth?

Director:  John Carpenter

This spooky season, I'm mostly trying to check off movies I should have already watched - also movies I haven't seen since I was a kid, so I don't remember the films well at all.  This isn't that - but Jamie had not seen Christine (1983), and I kind of consider it worth a viewing.  So it's her version of that, I suppose.

I read the Stephen King novel when I was in 6th grade.  But I didn't see the movie until some time later - maybe when I was fifteen.  I've seen it a couple of times since, including in a hotel room during a  conference over a decade ago.  It's a bizarre movie - how compelling should a movie about a haunted car be?  And yet.

Christine is a John Carpenter movie, and - I think - should be included in consideration of his run of solid work there in the 1980's.  I know Carpenter seems grumpy about all of the movies he did as a work-for-hire director, but the pairing of his sensibilities with King really does work.  I'd love to see someone re-do Christine without having to strip it down for a movie audience and make it as weird as the book, but as a movie - separate from the book but using the core of it - I think this movie works as a kind of horror, just not the horror of "oh no!  A car will get me!" that you might guess on first blush.

To me, the horror of the movie is not so much about a killer, possessed car - which, fair enough (that is a problem!).  Instead, it's about helplessly watching a friend go down due to a change in their life, be it addiction, a toxic partner, or some other obsession.  This is two lifelong pals who went two different directions, and one of them goes off the deep end, and the other has to deal with the fallout as that person hurts other people.  

Hallo-Watch: Phantasm (1979)

Watched:  10/08/2024

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Don Coscarelli

I didn't know anything about Phantasm (1979) coming in, despite the fact it's a horror staple and much beloved.  And that's a bit odd.  Generally you get the idea.  There's a chainsaw massacre in Texas.  A Freddy.  A Jason.  All I knew about this one was "there's a gangly older gentleman and a flying sphere with knives on it".  How those two things were employed, I could not guess.

Perhaps taking a page from the semi-psychedelic horror of the preceding decade and the impact of European horror making its way to the US - think Suspiria - it opened the doors for horror to show that part of horror could be the confusion of the audience - that the audience is also in a place of confusion, just as much as the protagonist, as the movie runs its course.

The approach gives the movie an odd, dreamy feeling - where the edges never quite match-up and attempts to force the narrative into a sensible pattern are a bit useless.  It's sort of about a teen/ tweenage boy who has lost his parents and whose older brother is now saddled with his care, just as the brother is set to go out into the world.  While the brother and his friends seek female companionship and go about the business of young adults, the younger brother, terrified of being alone, follows at a distance.  

It seems the mortuary in town (Dunsmuir House, famous from this, A View to a Kill, Burnt Offerings and other films...) is where a tall man and a bunch of cloaked dwarves live, and are maybe murdering people?  Or weirder?

They involve their friend, Reggie - an ice cream man with a terrible look - and try to unravel the mystery, especially as their parents were sent to the same mortuary, and as they discover what the mortuary is doing with the dead bodies... * they decide to take it all down, as one does.  Because this is a horror movie where the heroes are well armed, including the under-16 kid.

I was surprised how much of the dialog and reactions of the characters in the movie felt... natural.  Like, this isn't canned dialog or reactions to just push the movie along.  People do things that make sense in a movie that is defying sense and logic, and it really helps.  Like - if you're going to break into a place with potentially murderous beings - do bring a gun if you can get it.  Don't just go creeping around hoping for the best.  And, the kid is oddly sensible - they don't make him an idiot just because he's under 20 years old.

That said - I did spend the first hour of the film waiting for the plot to kick in before realizing what kind of movie I was watching,  when my brain said "oh... this is one of those movies".  And while I enjoyed it up to that point, once I realized "yeah, this thing is just not caring if there's any internal logic" it was even better.

I'm too old for this to be my favorite thing, but if I'd seen it as a kid or teen, I think I would have really dug it for going all-out to be a weird movie and not bother with any answers.  Scenes that don't go anywhere, characters who make no sense... it's all good in dream-land.  I don't know if I ever felt anything was scary beyond being frightened I had no idea what was happening, but it still had a nice creep-factor from the very start.

I was a bit surprised they wholesale stole the gom jabbar, and that the end of Nightmare on Elm Street is essentially the same as this movie.  But, whatevs.  

*turning them into slave dwarves?

Hallo-Watch: Re-Animator (1985)

Watched:  10/07/2024

Format:  Midnight Pulp on Amazon

Viewing:  First?

Director:  Stuart Gordon

In my post on From Beyond, I said I'd previously seen Re-Animator (1985), but in watching this - I had not actually seen this movie.  I'm wondering if I inadvertently watched the sequel.  Or not enough of the movie to actually remember it.  We'll find out when I take in the sequel.

This movie is chaotic, gory, fun, and speaks volumes about someone's ability to convince actors to walk around naked.  It's funny, bizarre, and I dug it.

A brilliant young scientist loses his mentor in Switzerland, coming to ye olde Miskatonic Medical School where he moves in with nice-guy med student, Dan, who is sleeping with the dean's daughter (Barbara Crampton, natch).  Herbert, the brilliant fellow, has invented a formula for bringing dead bodies back to life - demonstrating with Dan's pet cat (who, Herbert likely killed himself).  Meanwhile, Dr. Hill (Bob Gale) has made his career by stealing Herbert's mentor's work, and Herbert publicly calls him on it.  

Soon, chaos ensues as they try out Herbert's formula down in the morgue, and then on someone they didn't intend to be a useful body.  

I dunno.  It's like trying to describe a riot in detail.  There's a lot going on.

Everyone gets their assignments.  Jeffrey Combs is great as Herbert, Bob Gale unhinged as Dr. Hill, Robert Sampson all in as Dean Halsey.  Crampton is lively as Megan Halsey.  

This movie is just crazy nonsense for 90 minutes, and I dug it.  I think as a kid this would have spooked the crap out of me.  As a jaded adult, I'm just sorta chuckling to myself about "wow, they're doing this" as Dr. Hill's decapitated body lugs around his head.  

I'm not sure there's a deeper meaning in the film than "whoops... do not reanimate the dead!" which - lesson learned, amigos!  But it doesn't mean I didn't enjoy the general tone and can-do-horror spirit of the thing.

The FX aren't as cool as From Beyond, but for something done on a budget, they really knock it out of the park.  Maybe minus the cat puppet, which is just good stuff.

Hallowatch: Ghostwatch (1992)

Watched:  10/04/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing;  Second

Director:  Lesley Manning

I'd already seen this movie back in April of this year, and you can read my thoughts from 5.5 months ago here.

I basically wanted to make Jamie, Dug and K watch it, and I have no idea what anyone thought at the end.  It's also not the "The Dog Who Saved Halloween" suckage we usually put on if we're going to do a watch party.  

Personally, knowing what's coming, I enjoyed seeing all the pieces come together.  If you're going to do this kind of thing - where you try to make something look "real" - filmmakers really need to review Ghostwatch (1992).  Which really does benefit from not trying to be a period piece, but reflect the idea that "it's happening now".

On a second viewing, I liked seeing how they set some things up, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that does work - but on a first viewing seems like random stuff you're hearing as you go along - which totally makes sense.  Visually - it absolutely works.  It's all practical, so there's no reason to ever get taken out of what you're watching (see: Late Night With The Devil for a counter example) and maybe that's a lesson to horror movie makers?  I know one of the scariest, to me, movies is The Haunting, and there's approximately zero FX of any kind in it.

Anyhoo... a fun Halloween viewing.  Now on Amazon for, like, $2.00.