Crampton Hallo-Watch: Castle Freak (1995)

One poster shows the villain, which is a spoiler, and one is a teenager in a bra, so you get Crampton

Watched:  10/24/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Stuart Gordon

I am not always in-line with all of the thinking that goes into being a hard-core horror film fan, but I love how much they celebrate the work of their favorite actors - and keep them employed for decades.  One such fave I've been aware of for some time has been Barbara Crampton, and I'm on board.  Sign me up for the Crampton fan club.  

So, we'll be digging a bit more into the Crampton-filmography over time.

When I saw that Castle Freak (1995) re-teamed director Stuart Gordon with actor Jeffrey Combs and Crampton, and I saw some notes about "this is a horror movie with a kind of grown-up storyline" I was curious.  I like a good "whoops, the robots have flipped out at the shopping mall" movie as much as the next guy, but I wanted to know what this team looked like doing a bit more drama and little less in the way of re-animated corpses running about.  

Combs and Crampton play a couple on the rocks following the blinding of their daughter (Jessica Dollarhide) and death of their young son after Combs drove them off the road, drunk.  Clearly Crampton can't forgive and forget, and Combs is maybe too much of an egoist to really accept what he did.  But a mysterious relative has just passed, and when that occurs, Combs learns that he's inherited a castle in Italy.  Apparently he was Italian nobility.

Well, wouldn't you know it - there's a freak living chained up in the basement of the castle.  And by freak, we mean a hideously deformed, savage human, that for some reason, someone decided it was best they keep in a cage in the basement.  

The arrival of the fractured family leads to the "freak" flipping out and escaping, where he hides in the many hidey-holes of the castle and occasionally popping out to harass and then murder.  There is a housekeeper, who is aware of the freak (who is named Giorgio, so I can stop calling a fictional disabled person a "freak") but has been complicit in Giorgio's horrible life.

The family fractures all the more, and Combs goes out where he picks up a bottle again and accidentally picks up a hooker.  Things go sideways as the hooker leaves - and it brings things to a head, as police want to look into the castle.

As a stand-alone story about a family trying to move past trauma, you do get the idea that Combs and Crampton would have been interesting in a straight drama about loss.  The Crossing Guard, which is @#$%ing great but depressing, comes to mind.  We're nowhere near that - after all, we have a dude running around murdering people with his bare hands to contend with - but we do get to use that as a sort of investigation of the secrets families keep, our own weaknesses and what we can do to make amends.  

There's a 2020 version of this film for reasons I cannot fathom, which sounds like it's much more Lovecraftian in nature and changes all the major details that make this one different and/ or interesting.  What it does do is say "maybe we shouldn't make a wretched human an actual monster" which plays very oddly now, as I know it probably did in 1995 - but which arrived in a period full of serial killer movies, so who knows?

I find it interesting that this was poster-girl Jessica Dollarhide's last movie.  Maybe she went to college and was done.  I can't say.  She's certainly not bad in the movie.

Anyway, I don't want to oversell it, but it *is* different.  The same sort of lived-in, real-world problems, like, say, in The Shining, are an interesting refraction against the part that makes the film "horror".  

1930's HalloWatch: Vampyr (1932)

Watched:  10/23/2024

Format:  Max

Viewing:  First

Director:  Carl Theodor Dreyer

Apparently when this movie came out, people were just *mad* at it.  Like when you read that people freaked out about Stravinsky's Rite of Spring and rioted*, when Vampyr (1932) was shown, it seems the good people of Vienna wanted their money back and subsequently rioted. Berlin just boo'd the picture.  And it kind of went from city to city, earning a terrible reputation.

But imagine just dumping David Lynch or Tarkovsky on people who think they came to see Universal's very palatable Dracula.  

That said, this movie is *great*.  And that's with the viewing I did which was of a stitched together restoration of a film no one really wanted to see again after 1932 and was more or less lost.  

In theory, based on the work of Sheridan le Fanu, it's really it's own thing, nodding to bits of his collection of works entitled In a Glass Darkly, which contains the novella Carmilla - upon which my fave rave, The Vampire Lovers, takes inspiration.

The film is creepy enough, just based on the concepts.  A young man comes to a small French town and is visited by an older gentleman in the middle of the night (in the film's first real tell about how weird it will be), who leaves him with a package marked "open in the case of my death".  Soon, he's seeing disembodied shadows running around, a mysterious doctor, a mysterious older woman... and then witnesses the murder of the older gentleman through his window.  And then it gets weird.

Hallo-Re-Re-Re-Re-Watch: Ghostbusters (1984)

Watched:  10/21/2024

Format:  Alamo

Viewing: hahahahahaha

Director:  Ivan Reitman

Si invited me out to a Ghostbusters Party at The Alamo.  It was a good time!  They gave us a marshmallow, a tub of slime, a glow-in-the-dark thing to wave around for proton beams...  

I also realized I've seen Ghostbusters (1984) more than the average bear when I p-shaw-ed the guy who went up to the front as a "super fan" saying he'd seen the movie twenty times.  I also told the host I'd seen the movie opening day at age 9, and that apparently earned me some street cred.

It was a bit of a quote-along, jam-out to the songs thing, and super fun.  

A few years back, Si, Jamie and I did this as a podcast, so rather than me rehashing the movie in text, you can listen to that.

I guess my only real note is that Sigourney Weaver is a stone cold fox in this movie, and I'm not sure we're supposed to talk about that.

Weaver judges me for bringing it up

Hallo-Universal-Watch: The Invisible Man (1933)

Watched:  10/18/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  James Whale

We watched this one with some folks.  

I always enjoy that this movie is essentially about a guy who injects himself with a serum that, yes, makes him invisible - but it also makes him an incredible a-hole.  It's a real take.

But Jamie and I discussed this in what turned out to be the penultimate episode of The Signal Watch PodCast.

Anyway, you can listen to our thoughts on it!

How can you not like a movie where the main character declares the moon is afraid of him (and means it!)

HalloDocWatch: Haxan (1922)

surely someone remade this as an album cover in the 80's

Watched:  10/19/2024

Format:  Criterion

Viewing:  First

Director:  Benjamin Christensen

What an incredible film.  

I mean, obviously.  This is a silent film that has thrived well into the modern era, so I'm no genius for noticing that it's pretty good.

Essentially a documentary/ presentation about the history of what we consider witches and witchcraft, the film feels a wee bit like an early Powerpoint at first, but it has a lot of territory to cover - like explaining how people a few hundred years ago thought the universe was constructed and the way in which that informed their entire worldview. If you literally believe Earth is the center of all things, flat, and God is sitting beyond line of sight directing celestial bodies for fun and profit, and Satan literally sits in a spot in a hole in a firey hole in the Earth, then you're going to be willing to believe he's also in your neighbor's house making it with the old lady who lives there.

The film doesn't just have fascinatingly well-constructed arguments, it's a prime example of the imagination, visual artistry and astounding craft of film by 1922.  If you ever think silent film was primitive - my dudes...  The movie creates scene after scene with unbelievable art and set design, costuming, lighting, optical and practical FX... many positively surreal.  They show the cosmos at work from a Christian cosmology perspective, what people imagined was happening at Black Sabbaths, complete with the devil in many forms and troupes of demons alongside him, recreate scenarios for how a witch hunt could begin...  And they also show very practical demonstrations of torture devices, etc...  

It's hard to explain how incredible these visuals are, so...

The movie is scary, but not in the "ooOOOooo...  witches!" way.  Instead, it's a reminder that humans are terrible, the world is drowning in abuse of power and misogyny, and religion is used as an excuse to do all sorts of things your deity of choice would really frown at, especially done in His/ Her/ Their name.  Basically, the film is about how we decide to abuse power, mostly for no reason, other than that we have a hard time seeing certain kids of people *as* people, and we fucking love to punch down.  

They also discuss how the very world that people lived in, and the rules they believed they lived by - ie: Satan could just pop up, sex you, and now you're evil (I don't know, man) likely had profound psychological impact on people and led to all sorts of weirdness in the Middle Ages (for an example, we can look at Ken Russel's film The Devils, based on a true story).  And led to nonsense like Salem.

Not so curiously, by the film's end, they leap to the modern era (of 1922) and rather than say "but we're so advanced now", they say "look, this is how we do the same shit now, only we dressed it up for polite society" by showing similar treatment of women in the modern era.  Remember - 1922 is also when we'd, like, lock up our wife in an asylum for getting sick of our shit and talking back.  And while there are plenty of 2024 examples, these are the good old days a whole lot of people think they want back because their context of the past are glimpses of old TV shows.*

Anyway, reality is a hellscape of terrors inflicted on each other for reasons that don't seem to make much more sense than believing our  omnipotent friends would have us do that, and/ or we're really sickos who found ourselves in a position where we could abuse the shit out of people and make money doing it.

Never trust anyone who desires power.

Happy Halloween!

*the past mostly sucked, and the desire to go back to any period before a Star Trek future makes absolutely no sense to me.  Unless you get to have a candlelit dinner with Myrna Loy.  Then it makes sense.

HalloWatch: The Vampire Happening (1971)

Watched:  10/16/2024

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Freddie Francis

Imagine a movie written entirely with the same vibe as one panel comics from mid-Century Playboy.  That's the entire vibe of this "movie".  

During the darkest days of COVID lockdown, I would scroll Amazon Prime for movies to Watch Party, and at some point, The Vampire Happening (1971) came up, and I laughed at the title and checked it out, deemed it far too boob-tacular to make it into the queue, and moved on.  But Amazon Prime was not done with me.  And so - for whatever reason only the algorithm knows, this movie always found it's way into my line-up of offerings.

It's a goofy comedy that works by 1970's European erotic movie rules, so you kind of have to just roll with it.  But the basic story is that a Hollywood actress inherits a castle in Transylvania.  She looks just like an ancestor who was some sort of vampire.  Her arrival means her relative rises from the grave again, and while Betty romances a strapping young man, her double is out there making new vampires.

Eventually there's a vampire party, or, as us hep cats said in the late 1960's - a vampire happening - complete with the arrival of Dracula.  

Italian produced, written by Germans and shot in Germany by an English director, and starring a ragtag pile of Euro-talent and staying just on this side of softcore, it's truly an artifact of its time.

Basically, the movie was a weird excuse for the Italian producer to put his wife on film, and have a big party in a castle.  I can only imagine what was going on behind the scenes.  But in watching this movie, there's a distinct feeling you're watching the product of someone's scheme to have a very adult good time on someone else's dollar.  As such, it's not... good.  It's not funny or particularly sexy and feels interminable for the first 2/3rds.  It had one line I found laugh out loud funny right at the end of the movie, and I did like the winky end to the film.  And Dracula is kind of funny.

The star, Pia Dagermark - wife of the producer - had won awards at Cannes in 1967, and I think this movie was what more or less ended the movie business for her.  It happens.  

Just go watch a Hammer vampire movie instead.

HalloWatch: Puppet Master (1989)

Watched:  10/15/2024

Format:  Peacock

Viewing:  First

Director:  David Schmoeller

It's important to note the budget for some of these movies.  

Puppet Master (1989) has a reported budget of $400,000.  That's about $1.12 million in 2024 dollars for a whole movie - or, roughly, the cost of bagels on an Avengers movie.  And, people still watch this thing.  So hopefully residuals are still making their way to folks who worked for cheap.

This movie is like someone took a bunch of ideas, threw them in a hat and then pulled them out whilst blind-folded.  And that isn't necessarily a complaint.  It's weird to see so many ideas in one movie, but they do work together.

The rough idea - for some reason a Puppet Master (William Hickey!) is tracked down at a hotel in the 1930's by Nazis?  He kills himself rather than give them the secret of how to imbue puppets with life.  

In the late 1980's, four psychics are summoned to the fancy hotel by a former colleague, Gallagher.  To be honest, I do not know why he summoned them as he then kills himself before they arrive.  One is sort of an everyman psychic, one is a fortune teller who gets glimpses of the future, and two seem to channel sex into their research, which is at least kind of novel.  Meanwhile, Gallagher's widow is hanging about.

There are spirit visions and glimpses of people's deaths yet to come.  A lot of rolling around on a bed.  And nobody seems to have liked Gallagher.  

Soon, the puppets who once were Hickey's pals are running around picking off the psychics.  And each puppet kind of has their thing.

It's probably telling that the stars of this movie mostly don't have many credits.  Hickey is a cameo and our star is really Paul Le Mat, who you'll keep squinting at, trying to remember what you know him from.  I put the movie on because it said it had Barbara Crampton, but she's in it for 30 seconds as a favor to someone, and it managed to sucker me into watching it, so... well done, film producers from 1988 or so.

The puppets are kind of neat.  It's all just... puppetry, but to its credit, it works.  The Pinhead fellow with human hands, Leach Girl, Blade...  just good ideas.  

But there's oddly almost no... feel to the movie.  They have this stunning location of the hotel, but seems like they had a few rooms somewhere, and decided to just light everything like a late 1980's TV show - ie: there are no shadows.  It's sort of weird, visually, in 2024 to see something speaking in TV-language of the era.  

The movie is just weird enough, by virtue of throwing ideas at you left and right, that it's not boring or repetitive.  But it can feel like someone was just writing things down with no clear goal where it was going.  And that's okay.  I just don't think there's anything remotely scary about this movie.  It's more... kind of interesting.  Some really oddball stuff out there winds up drumming up multiple sequels and a fanbase.

I do wonder if this was made because someone say 1987's Dolls, a movie by Stuart Gordon of Re-Animator fame.  Dolls worked for me when I saw it on HBO or something in probably 1989.*  But Dolls was pretty creepy, if memory serves.  

Anyway - it was fine.  One more to check off the list.

*I wound up watching this with a good friend's mom.  I was at his house spending the night, and she'd wandered into the room as the movie started, and my pal fell asleep, and so I wound up watching this goofy movie in a super awkward context, as she was clearly watching it and I didn't know if I could just go to sleep or turn off the TV or what.  She also would go to movies with us and sit by herself so she could see, like, Dirty Harry: The Dead Pool.

HalloWatch: Night of the Demons (1988)

Watched:  10/15/2024

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Kevin Tenney

This is usually the kind of movie I take in after Jamie's gone to bed, but she was, like "whatever you want to watch, man", and... ha ha.  

An intentionally trashy horror flick, I think they spent more time worrying about the opening animation than they did the content of the actual movie.  It's... fine?  It's just very in love with not being good, but isn't quite trashy enough to be as entertaining in that regard as it imagines.  It also becomes critic proof if you keep saying "it's supposed to be bad!  It's supposed to be trashy!"  

And yet.  

No, really, the movie is in on it's own joke of just being what it is.  I'm not sure if that's enough for me in 2024 at age 49, but I also know that was not the intention in 1988 when they were essentially making a party movie for teens and 20-somethings.  I just don't think there's enough here and don't quite get why the movie seems to be a thing (which is why I watched it).  

It had about four good things in a 90 minute movie, and that's not nothing!  But I also couldn't tell if some of the acting was just bad or a brilliant portrayal of bad acting.  That only Linnea Quigley really kept working after this for any length of time may be the tell.  That said - I liked Amelia Kinkade in a horro-movie Patricia Morrison kind of way.*  

It's just a very thin movie, and that's okay, but won't go down as the great discovery of 2024 for me.  This is several years after Evil Dead 1 and 2 at this point, and I think this movie could have been a lot more fun.  And given literally anyone a motivation.

*Kinkade went on to be a sort of animal psychic, and I salute anyone who makes a living chilling with animals, from zooloogist to psychic

Superman 2025: Krypto, The Superdog

You can follow our posts on Superman at this link, and our posts on the new movie, Superman (2025) at this link.

Today, James Gunn announced that, yes - after a year of playing hide-the-ball with the issue - Superman's canine companion, Krypto, will appear in 2025's Superman.  

Full disclosure - a full subset of my Super comics and paraphernalia collection is Krypto-related.  My house is littered with white dogs in capes.  There's like 7 of them in the room I'm in right now.  I am also a grown man who spends 45% of his waking time talking to a 128 pound dog with zero manners.

If you think a Super Dog is a dumb thing and superheroes can't have pets... I would like to introduce you to DC Comics' longstanding tradition of Super-Pets and related animals.  Krypto was a mid-1950's addition to the Superman canon, showing up less than twenty years after Superman first showed up in 1938.  But after the insertion of Rex the Wonder-Dog into DC's world of action-adventure, sometimes in military comics.  Batman has Ace the Bathound.  Wonder Woman has had a variety of pals, but Jumpa, her kangaroo, is probably most famous for nerds.  Robin has a Batcow.  Here's an encyclopedia of them.

It's important to remember that one of the biggest stars in movies through the late 1920's was Rin-Tin-Tin, a German Shepard. Rin-Tin-Tin and Lassie enjoyed stardom in movies and television through the 1990's.  Dogs as characters just wasn't a weird idea to people in media.  And especially when you're trying to rope in a younger audience, as comics were intended through the 1980's.

Late-80's Hallo-Watch: Pumpkinhead (1988)

Watched:  10/13/2024

Format:  Amazon 

Viewing:  First

Director:  Stan Winston

I wasn't expecting Pumpkinhead (1988) to be good.  

Yet, I'd always meant to watch this movie.  I remember being 13 and the ad came on for "Pumpkinhead" and my brother and I looked at each other and laughed and laughed and laughed.  To this day, it sounds like naming a horror movie "Taters n' Gravy" to me.*

Pumpkinhead  looks good, but for Stan Winston's directorial debut, it's an awkward, tedious slog through flat characters and half-cooked ideas.  It's an 84 minute movie that has you looking at your watch and wondering when all of these people will be dispatched by the creature so you can finish the film.

The basic plot:  Lance Henriksen plays a guy in what I guess is maybe Appalachia? but is clearly the ranches outside of LA.  Some 20-somethings planning a weekend of riding dirtbikes(?) stop off at a fruit stand(?) and then go riding.  There's an accident and Henriksen's kid is killed by one of the bikers who jumps right into him.  

The guy who does the killing makes his group of 6 take-off where they have a sort of confrontation, and Jeff East - the guy who played young Clark Kent in Superman: The Movie! - and he squabble because the guy seems like he's going to kill everyone here to cover up the fact he killed the kid...  So the group more or less splinters.

Henriksen makes contact with a witch-type lady who has him bring forth Pumpkinhead, so he can get revenge.  And revenge it gets, generically picking people off, while the real idea is to slowly reveal more and more of the suit Stan Winston's team made, that is, in fact, pretty good.  By the last 1/5th of the film, we're seeing the suit in full glory, and it looks neat!

By this point, Jeff East and his girlfriend are obviously going to make it, and we've come to understand the cost of raising a Pumpkinhead is that you and it will be sort of symbiotic when it's convenient to the scene.

I don't know.  It's a slog and I didn't care for it.  But it's also not a movie people love - and yet, several sequels happened.  Stan Winston kept making cool effects but went on to direct A Gnome Named Gnorm, making children everywhere understand that sometimes God abandons you, and the evidence is everything about Gnorm the Gnome.  

*But the lasting legacy of the movie's title in my head is that...  my poor dad was in the room for the commercial at some point, and being shitty kids, we said "hey, that's your new name, Dad!  Pumpkinhead!"  And, lo, that lasted about a year before I became aware that deploying the name "Pumpkinhead" one more time guaranteed a foot connecting with my ass.