HalloWatch: Elvira: Mistress of the Dark (1988)

Watched:  10/26/2023

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  ha ha ha ha ha

Director:  James Signorelli

Look, I've talked about Elvira, the character, plenty over the years, and I've watched this movie every Halloween for a while.  I even have a tag for Elvira related material.  

Suffice to say, I am a fan of the character, the film, and Ms. Peterson herself.  

I've nothing new to say on this particular viewing, but you should watch the movie before we hit the big, spooky day!

HalloWatch: Psycho (1960)

it never occurred to me before how bonkers this poster really is

Watched:  10/26/2023

Format:  Peacock

Viewing:  3rd or 4th

Director:  Alfred Hitchcock

So, it's not really worth talking too deeply about Psycho (1960) here at Ye Olde Film Watch Journal.  The movie is one of the most written about, discussed and analyzed flicks that one is likely to see.  So I won't get into plot, analysis, etc...  Y'all can chase that around on your own.  

I hadn't personally seen it in probably two decades, so I decided to give it a whirl as part of our Halloween spooktacular cinema series.  

Probably my foremost comment is that the movie actually lives up to the hype.  Some movies do.  Lawrence of Arabia.  2001.  The Godfather Part II.  I can go on listing great movies, but just assume I agree with you as you fill in your own blank here.

Maybe those movies show signs of age or that they were made in another time, but there's nothing about them that doesn't pull you in and hold you.  And Psycho - minus the weirdo psychoanalysis at the conclusion - is kind of a perfect film.  Every line has weight or double meaning, every shot provides you with information about the story and characters, and the sound and atmosphere are on point.

PodCast 257: "The Invisible Man" (1933) - A Halloween 2023 PodCast w/ Jamie and Ryan

Watched:  10/21/2023

Format:  BluRay

Viewing: Unknown/ First

Decade:  1930's

Director:  James Whale

For more ways to listen

Jamie and Ryan are transparent in their madness about this 1930's cinema classic! It's a ghostly good time as they get wrapped up in a conversation that makes it clear, you can see right through them when it comes to their enjoyment of this film.

SoundCloud 

The Signal Watch PodCast · 257: "The Invisible Man" (1933) - A Halloween 2023 PodCast w/ Jamie and Ryan

YouTube

Music:

Invisible Man Theme - Heinz Roemheld 

The Invisible Man - Queen, The Miracle 

Halloween 2023

The Signal Watch PodCast · Halloween 2023

All Halloween and Horror Playlist

The Signal Watch PodCast · Halloween and Horror

HalloWatch: Frankenstein (1931)

Watched:  10/24/2023

Format:  Peacock

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  James Whale

Every year during the spooky season I try to give Frankenstein (1931) a watch.  The past several years, I've double-billed Frankenstein with Bride of Frankenstein, usually the night before - or night of - Halloween.  

But this year I wanted to give the movie a bit more time to percolate and watch it as its own thing.  

It's a movie I've seen *a lot* and so I can spot the places where the dolly shot bounces on the tracks, and I can see the literal creasing in the backdrops used in the forest scenes.  I laugh with anticipation at the jokes and know which bits work best as scares.

I make a lot of notes about how Dracula movies don't match the novel, because there's usually some adherence to the book and seeing where and why they diverged is a curiosity.  But by the time you get from the publication of Mary Shelley's novel in 1818 to the play and the movie, this story was well over 100 years old, and folks were going to do their own thing.*  There's barely any of the novel left in this film.  Themes.  Some names.  Some settings.  A wedding.

So I tend to separate them and consider them their own thing, and it's usually in subsequent adaptations that I look for whether they're borrowing from this film or from the novel or doing something entirely new.  

Even if the film is nearing the century mark, it still plays.  The creatures' pathos is as real as the novel, if reduced to a child-like state of confusion rather than a sort of existential crisis of existence.  The performances are of their time but would absolutely put fire in a modern adaptation.  You simply won't beat Colin Clive going mad in the moments of success after the monster is lowered from the tower.  

The look is borrowed from German Expressionism, and between the Gothic horror of Dracula's settings and this film, we get a language for how the best sets and scenes should look in horror that will be endlessly copied, parodied, stolen from and refracted for the next 90 years.  That's not to say this was the final word, but the starting line and the thing to which everything else can draw comparison.

Further, the themes of "who is the real monster?" would echo throughout horror and science fiction, and are often the best part to chew on in a film (and something zombie movies picked up and ran with).  But I think this movie does the best job of bringing a Dr. Frankenstein to life who really thinks he shut the door behind himself and his experiments, only to have it come roaring back.

I'm now curious to read the play upon which the movie is based.  Curiously, next year sees the publication of the script for what I believe to be the first time.  

Some time I will write a much longer bit on this movie, it's sequel and the novel and why I keep coming back to them, but not today, kids!

But for the best Halloween spookiness for the whole family, I humbly submit this classic.

*worth noting, this film will be 100 in just 8 years

HalloWatch: The Vampire Lovers (1970)

quite the photoshop collage here

Watched:  10/23/2023

Format:  FreeVee on Amazon

Viewing:  3rd or 4th

Director:  Roy Ward Baker

In the wake of the opulence and spectacle of watching the 1992 Dracula adaptation, I threw on the 1970 Hammer horror film, The Vampire Lovers, a movie I'm pretty sure I'm on the record as a fan.  That impression held up on a re-viewing of the movie.  

During this period, Hammer was sorting out what to do as Lee was increasingly (and famously) less interested in playing Dracula, and so they sought to expand their vampire offerings beyond the Count and his shenanigans.  Thus, they went to the novel that preceded Dracula, and from which Stoker (ahem) borrowed from.  

If you're looking for the book that mixes up vampirism, sex and romance, this is the one, and it often feels like the romantic angles ascribed to Dracula was an interpretation of how this book, and therefore movie, take on a vampire's relationship with their prey.  In this case, rather than an exotic Count from a mysterious kingdom, it's a fellow young woman who is deposited at the doorstep of a family with a young woman of similar age.  Who precedes to die.

Shortly after, the same young woman, calling herself Carmilla, appears at another house (left by a woman of breeding and elegance) with a similarly aged young woman, and we see how the relationship between the two blossom, even as villagers start getting picked off.

If Brides of Dracula is any indication, Hammer had long ago figured out the formula for inserting a clutch of attractive women in their films and teaming them with baffled middle-aged men and Peter Cushing.  

This was one of a handful of starring movie roles for Ingrid Pitt, who is 30+ here if she's a day, playing 19.  Full disclosure, we're Ingrid Pitt stans here at The Signal Watch, and we think she's just super.  Madeline Smith, just at the start of her career, is terrific, and we'd be happy to see more films with Kate O'Mara.  As always, Cushing is a force of nature in the film.

Anyway, with all the "romance" of vampires stuff, Vampire Lovers manages to find the balance between eroticism and the actual devilish nature of the characters.  Part of Carmilla's curse is that she does seem to form a bond with her victims - if not love, then dependence, and she's damned to take their lives, one after another.  

The only other film I can think of that seems to touch on this concept in its way is The Hunger, which blows that concept out, making it a genuine romance.  Until it isn't.  And walks through what the relationship actually is via Sarandon and Deneuve.  

There's still straight up vampire stuff in this film, from Carmilla wandering the woods like an apparition, to garlic being generally unwelcome, to beheadings.  All solid stuff.  

HalloWatch: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Watched:  10/21/2023

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Second, I think

Director:  Francis Ford Coppola

Firstly, this isn't Bram Stoker's actual Dracula.  This is Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992).

I very much remember Coppola, with whose work I'd just become acquainted at age 15 or so, announcing he was going to remake the Universal Monster stuff using the source material.  And as a teen, I was jazzed.  Let's kick the dust off, ditch the stuffy 1930's stylings (I'd never seen the movies at this point) and lets make a Dracula for the 90's!  

All I can really remember from that first movie is that it was... a lot.  The reviews were mixed, but everyone was going to see it, and I was in a packed theatre when I watched it myself.  

Honestly, I remember thinking "well... that was a lot.  And I get why the reviews were mixed."  Halloween night of '93, I went to see the original, and was like "oh, wow.  This is rad.  I get why people love this." and, in fact, my interest in horror movie monsters I'd had as a kid was reignited (along with a VHS copy of Phantom of the Opera) to the point where I'm annoying about it to this day!

Over the years, I've not returned to the Coppola movie because (a) I didn't like it all that much to begin with, and (b) there's so many Draculas.  And one gotta catch 'em all.  

Hallo-Watch: Ghost Ship (2002)

Watched:  10/20/2023

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Second

Director:  Steve Beck

So, I remembered this movie being better than I expected when I watched it back in the mid-00's.  Watching it in 2023, it is as bad as I first suspected when the trailers hit.

It has a few highlights - the opening is a banger if you can tolerate some gorey gore.  There's some interesting set design, and the overall concept of a haunted ship (on sea or in space) is a good one.  I like haunted house movies, and what is a cruise liner if not a floating resort?

But the movie is essentially a cliche-fest, borrowing from better films and engaging in the goofiest of 1990's ragtag, blue-collar, post-Abyss team dynamics that just absolutely throttled movies by the 00's from Deep Blue Sea to Name-Your-Film.  We get bits of The Shining, we get bits of just general ghosty-stuff you're like to see in any spook movie new or old, but now with CG!  Which was all producers thought we cared about in 2002 (spoiler: it absolutely was not).  

What's weird about this movie is that it's never scary.  Beyond that, I'm not sure there's really ever any tension.  It's so by-the-numbers that you'd literally have to be a kid who hasn't seen anything to get anything novel out of it.  So then you're left with execution.  And - it's...  again, by-the-numbers in a way that at the time we were told was being done for sale to foreign markets.  Which.... (a) cool for them, but I am also your audience, and (b) I don't know if you've ever seen an Asian film or a European film, but "complicated" is not something they have any trouble wrangling, so why these movies get reduced to people shouting last names at each other and commenting on "tiddies" is beyond me.

The cast on this movie was kind of no-joke at the time.  Gabriel Byrne, an up-and-coming Julianna Marguiles (her magnificent hair reduced here for blue-collar action heroism).  We have a rising Isaiah Washington, Karl Urban and Ron Eldard.  Less well known, Alex Dimitriades, Desmond Harrington and our token ghost-girl, Katie, played by Emily Browning.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention torch singer Francesca Rettondini, who plays a ghostly chanteuse.  While noteworthy for general foxiness, Rettondini would, in 2012, go on to become a television host, and in that capacity would be aboard the Costa Concordia when it ran into rocks, capsizing to become one of the larger scale boat disasters in Europe on this century.  No, Rettondini does not find the irony amusing.  

A few items of note:  Apparently these people all believed they were in a very different movie about people trapped on a ship who slowly go mad thanks to ghosts, but when they showed up, they found out that the script had been re-written to make it what we see on screen.  Which absolutely feels like a second draft generated by a Script-o-Tron 2000 running on Windows 98.  

Also - the movie was directed by a gentleman who had directed just one prior film, and this would be his final bow as a director of features before heading into commercials, which has apparently treated him well.  But it does make you wonder how much the very big name producers (Joel Silver, Zemeckis, etc...) decided to just push this guy around as a young gun-for-hire, which was a standard power move in the 90's.  

Anyway, the movie decides that in the third act it needs to have a plot, and that plot is clunky, dumb and even a little confusing.  We are forced to learn that there was some heist of gold?  A second boat?  Armed bandits?  a quadruple cross?  I don't know and I don't care.  It's dumb and unnecessary.  Ghost stories don't need concrete origin stories.  Especially when they get tossed out in favor of "actually, demon magic" immediately after.  

Horror is hard, y'all.  It really is.  And I know people love this movie, and I gave it a pass for something like 17 years since I last saw it, but.  Nope.  It's just a product of the time in so many ways, and really has nothing new to offer that doesn't happen in the first five minutes.

PodCast 256: "The Blob" (1988) - Halloween 2023 w/ SimonUK and Ryan

Watched:  10/06/2023

Format:  Max

Viewing:  Third or Fourth

Decade:  1980's

Director:  Charles Russell

For more ways to listen

SimonUK and Ryan stop thinking in rigid terms and consume a movie, absorbing it before oozing their way to the next. It's a conversation on a remake of a classic - that may be a classic in its own right! Join us for an all-consuming chat on this 80's film that's out of this world.

SoundCloud 

The Signal Watch PodCast · 256: "The Blob" (1988) - Halloween 2023 w/ SimonUK and Ryan

YouTube

Music:

The Blob (1988) - Michael Hoenig 

The Blob (1958) - The Five Blobs (Bacharach wrote this!)

Halloween 2023

The Signal Watch PodCast · Halloween 2023

Hallo-Watch: The Invisible Man Returns (1940)

Watched:  10/17/2023

Format:  Peacock

Viewing:  First

Director:  Joe May

Well, I've seen The Invisible Man a few times and am a fan.  What I had not done is watch any of the sequels.  I thought now was maybe the time to watch another one in the series - especially as it stars a very early career Vincent Price, before he was even associated with horror.

So... this is not considered a great movie by film history.  It's... fine.  Vincent Price is clearly having a good time and is carrying most of the movie here.  

It's an excuse to try out out new Invisible Man techniques, which are mostly pretty effective, some of which is pretty great as they make good on the "what if he's seen in a fog or in the rain?" questions from the first film.  I wasn't sure how well that would work in 1940, and the answer is: surprisingly well.  Bonus:  you also get a silhouette of Vincent Price in what was likely a unitard.  

The plot is about a guy framing Price for murder, and he uses the chemicals from the first movie to get invisible, knowing madness is coming so he has to solve the crime, and he's tasked Jack Griffin's younger brother with finding an antidote while he does so.  

If the first one had any scares as well as camp, this one knows how to keep it interesting, but the fear of what a madman would do is kept to a minimum.  The film takes off - and predicts Price at his best in the coming decades - when he's given room to rant and rave as the drugs kick in, so to speak.  He's just making a meal out of his scenes and everyone else is keeping up.  

Anyway, as a Universal Horror fan, it's probably territory to check out, but won't deliver as well as other sequels.  For Vincent Price fans, it's a good look at early Price as he's also being cast as an erudite cad over in noir films.  

Hallo-Watch: Village of the Damned (1995)

Watched:  10/13/2023

Format:  Criterion, I think

Viewing:  Second

Director:  John Carpenter

So, Friday night I was wrestling with the two vaccines I'd had injected earlier in the day and wanted to watch something I'd already seen so it wouldn't really matter.  Plus, I wanted something Halloween-ish.  A quick scroll landed me on the John Carpenter directed 1995 remake of Village of the Damned.  

Now, here in 2023, I still have not seen the original.  But in the mid-90's, I kind of saw everything, and this starred Christopher Reeve and was directed by Carpenter, so I was curious.

What I remembered from the movie:  

• Kirstie Alley looking smashing and chain smoking to great effect
• Christopher Reeve giving it his all despite the fact this is nonsense
• Mark Hamill as a pastor?
• Creepy kids who just won't listen

And these things were all accurate.