Horror Watch: I Walked With a Zombie (1943)

Watched:  04/21/2025

Format:  TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Jacques Tourneur

I Walked With a Zombie (1943) is @#$%ing *great*.  Holy cats.  I'm mad at myself I took so long to see it.

Fun fact:  apparently I finished watching this movie on the 82nd anniversary of the film's release.  How about that?

More than a decade after White Zombie - an okay movie that I think drags - RKO put this one out.  It's considered part of a retrospective high point for RKO as Val Lewton was producing cheap and effective thrillers.  

Apparently the title is lifted from an article by journalist Inez Wallace who spent time in Haiti and met people who were basically without will thanks to drugs.  It also borrows a bit from Jane Eyre, one of my favorite reads from college days.

The movie is a Gothic mystery set on the fictional Caribbean island of Saint Sebastian.  The beautiful wife of a sugar plantation owner has fallen into an odd stupor, able to be given commands, but she's otherwise lifeless, emotionless... mostly still unless directed to move around.  Frances Dee plays a nurse brought from Canada to care for her - and expects she's being asked to live in paradise, but like a character from Bronte, Byron or Poe - the husband of the "zombie" sees only death on the island. 

There's a riddle for what really happened.  Two brothers at war.  A mother who is remote from them.  

The location of the plantation leans into the history of the cruelty of slavery and the family's part in what happened, keeping the haunting figurehead from one of their slaveships on the premises, a tortured man impaled with arrows - a reminder of what they did.  Pretty wild as elected leaders are, in 2025, trying to erase slavery of all things from our history books.  The family has tried to make amends now in the mid-20th Century, seeing themselves as stewards of the history and the people here, not interfering, but making sure people are healthy and the plantation provides an economy.

Chabert Watch! Christian Mingle The Movie (2014)

Watched:  04/19/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First (and Last)

Director:  Corbin Bernsen

Job:  Ad company exec

new skill:  being brainwashed

Man: Jonathan Patrick Moore

Job of Man:  I don't know if I ever figured that out

Goes to/ Returns to:  Eventually goes to the Yucatan

Event:  several

Food:  Sushi

This is a movie about a mentally ill person who falls prey to a cult through a recruitment scheme posing as a dating site for Christians.  

Designed to be mistaken for a Hallmark movie, this infomercial for ChristianMingle.com (a very real dating site), our film - Christian Mingle The Movie (2014) - follows Lacey Chabert as a VP of Brand Management for a small advertising company.  She's unlucky in love, and is absolutely freaking out that, at age 30, she's still unmarried.  

The movie is written and directed by Corbin Bernsen, and so I have to lay a lot of blame at his feet, but also know he was having to make a movie for people who are maybe not really aware of how some of the things they wanted in their movie would play.  The film does have appearances by the eternally lovely Morgan Fairchild, Brian Keith, Stephen Tobolowsky, Bernsen, John O'Hurley and one actress I remember who was really pushed on us in sitcoms like 15 years ago.

On the surface level, it's a romantic comedy/ drama about a woman finding God while also finding a Good Man.  

On a meta level, this movie is essentially a warning shot to accomplished women who are being told they're a failure without a man.  Beware: you will have your entire life destroyed by people pretending good will but who will throw you away without batting an eye.

Noir Watch: The Steel Trap (1952)

Watched:  04/19/2025

Format:  Noir Alley on TCM

Viewing:  First

Director:  Andrew L. Stone

This one is a wild ride.

Look, I just like Joseph Cotten.  The man is a movie star, but also can be an everyman like no one's business.  And he was absolutely the right choice to be our lead.

He plays a sort of middle-management salary man at a bank, knows all the in's and out's, and is married to Teresa Wright (who played his niece in Shadow of a Doubt).  They have an adorable moppet of a daughter.  All is post-war happiness.  Or is it?

Cotten begins realizing how easy it would be for him to rob his own bank.  There's no femme fatale pushing him to do it - he just realizes he's clever enough to pull it off, and people trust him enough that he won't be found out til he's already out of the country.  It's basically asking the question of "why am I playing by the rules if the rules aren't doing me much good to really get ahead?"

And, so he waits til no one is looking at the end of a Friday and clears out the vault.

What follows shows up in movies like Quick Change where the heist just will not play by your carefully sorted rules.  So for about an hour we're watching every conceivable foul-up get in his way as he has to gaslight his wife (who he is taking with him, telling her he's on a business trip) to get them both on a plane.  In a way, it's almost painful as the issues mount up.

By nature, I'm a planner.  Jamie is well aware, my least favorite thing is a surprise, maybe even a good one, if it's going to throw off my schedule.  I am *much* better about this now than I was ten years ago, where I'd just lose my shit if things got off schedule.  So in a way, this movie seems designed to make me crazy.

We were warned by Eddie Muller in the intro that the writer/ directors of this movie are famous for having some bizarre and far-fetched set-ups, and this is certainly one of them.  There's no ticking clock at the outset of the movie - our hero just decides he needs to rob this bank NOW instead of just planning it out and re-working the plan until he's got a clean getaway planned.  

Ie: for a movie all about planning the perfect heist, what actually occurs is nothing of the sort.  And we get to watch Cotten spiral into being a real jerk as the walls he created close in.

Anyway, it wasn't my favorite movie.  But it did have a unique ending - that ends just before I'm pretty sure the whole thing would have blown up in his face, anyway, so - as they say - you get a happy ending depending on when you leave the story.

Chabert Horror Watch! Scarecrow (2013)

Chabert completes negotiations for her Hallmark contract

Watched:  04/19/2025

Format:  Tubi

Viewing:  First

Director:  Sheldon Wilson

A movie with a pretty good idea behind it, this movie has an okay first half hour or so and then throws away all of that goodwill in the bin by becoming a movie where things keep happening, but nothing really resolves itself.  And I can't tell if that's intentional - like a joke on the part of the writers - or laziness or sheer incompetence.

It's not even clear, based on what we saw before, that ten seconds after the credits role, that our Final Girl isn't going to get killed.

What's most weird is that the description of the film on IMDB - from the producers, I'd guess - is not what actually happens in the movie.  There's elements of that, but that's not really what happens.  I almost feel like this was a description of the script at some point but then they made a different movie through rewrites.  

A group of high schoolers is going to spend their day of Saturday Detention (ala The Breakfast Club) on a farm "disassembling" the famed scarecrow from the old Miller farm that's part of the town's annual Scarecrow Festival.  But the movie opens on two horny teens sneaking onto the farm first, planning to spook their pals when they arrive, and getting killed by our monster.  

The town has an annual Scarecrow Festival during which they have some game where they ritualistically "bury" the Scarecrow.  But it's essentially a small-town fall fest, I guess.  We never see it.

Superman 2025: Superman Day 2025

Today is "Superman Day".  

The day commemorates the arrival of Action Comics #1 as it hit newsstands on April 18th, 1938.  

In years gone by, I might have written multiple paragraphs about what Superman means to me, but I'll hold onto that thought.  Nor will I provide a history lesson.  

What you should know is that Superman and Lois Lane arrived in one shot, echoing sci-fi and pulp-crime characters of the time, and somehow becoming more than the sum of their parts.  There's been plenty of iterations, and there will be more, across comics, movies, television, radio, video games and peanut butter bottles.  But today we're here to get jazzed about Superman as a concept so we all plan on going to see Superman.  

The reality of the matter is that this day is really Warner Bros. working hard to turn the wheel of the Superman ship after letting it steer a bit rudderless in the public's eye for decades.  It's work to rehab the idea of Superman for the average human with $20 to spend at the movies, and get people excited for this summer's new Superman movie when the last outings were not widely loved.

And that's okay!  Getting people excited for a movie, especially when you're giving them a version of that thing they've never seen before, is a challenge.   If they didn't try, I'd be more concerned.

This Saturday Night: "The Set-Up" on TCM's Noir Alley

Hey!

This Saturday (and with a replay Sunday morning), TCM is playing The Set-Up from 1949 on their signature film showcase Noir Alley.  

Why watch?

• People tend to think of film noir as detectives and trenchcoats and dames in slinky dresses.  This movie is the opposite of all that, and is still decidedly noir.  A working class story about a washed-up boxer and the woman who loves him.  
• An older boxer is losing fights, and on the night of what could be his final bout, his own manager has taken a pay-off to throw the fight, but hasn't told our man.
• Robert Ryan, a noir staple and dynamite as an actor, stars as the boxer who can't close the door on his career.  
• Audrey Totter is at her best in this movie.  Usually cast as the bad girl - and terrific in that position - this time she plays the tormented wife.  She's absolutely heart-breaking.
• The movie is directed by Robert Wise, who did every genre in Hollywood and always brought in a great picture.  

I don't usually make recommendations, but this one is a favorite.  If you have a chance to see it via Noir Alley on TCM or otherwise, now's the time to give it a watch.

New Fantastic Four Trailer Drops

I really wish Jack and Stan were here to see this.

Chabert 90's Watch! Lost in Space (1998)

Watched:  04/16/2025
Format:  Prime

Viewing:  Third

Director:  Stephen Hopkins

As Lost In Space (1998) concludes and 1990's-style "electronica" kicks in, complete with dialog samples from the film, you can find yourself missing your glow sticks and rave-ready mini-back-pack.  And you will also hear Lacey Chabert declare "this mission sucks".  

It does, Lacey.  It really, really does. 

It's maybe not a great sign for a movie that when the heroes are all killed in a fiery explosion in what becomes a divergent timeline, we cheered.

Back in March of 1998, I was at FAO Schwarz in Manhattan, and there was a huge, pre-release push for Lost in Space (1998) which was coming in just two or three weeks.   They had a life-size robot and toys with the display type I thought Star Wars would get (I underestimated).  I found this guy's web-page about the 1998 display that he wrote in 2006.  That robot kinda convinced me:  this movie will rule!

Anyway, the trailers were fine.  And after seeing the toys and the robot, I bought into the look, the chance to refresh an older property - that I had never actually seen.  The casting, which included William Hurt, Gary Oldman, Mimi Rogers, and Heather Graham, was insane. Matt LeBlanc of Friends fame also starred, and that was fine.  The movie also, of course, starred a teenage Lacey Chabert, which hit me in no particular way in '98 as I'd never seen Party of Five.   

It's been 27 years since I've seen the 1998 movie of Lost In Space - which I last saw on April 11th, 1998*.  But I have now completed the trilogy of Chabert vehicles that had the word "Lost" in the title (see also The Lost and The Lost Tree).  And, curiously, each film represents a different sort of bad.  A Lower-budget, silly and derivative studio pic with The Lost, a microbudget flick trying and failing to do supernatural thrills with with The Lost Tree, and - as Stuart put it - bloated 1990's studio excess, with Lost in Space.  

Classic Watch: The Godfather Part II (1974)

Watched:  04/13/2025

Format:  4K disc that failed, and then streaming

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  Francis Ford Coppola

Well.  What do you even really say about The Godfather Part II (1974)?  I mean, really.  If you're looking for insight into this movie, is The Signal Watch really going to crack the case on this one?

As we'd done with Godfather, we broke Part II into two nights of viewing.  Jamie hadn't actually seen this one (I have no idea how that happened, and neither did she), and it was a delight seeing her wrapped up in the movie.  She can weigh in down in the comments with her reaction, but it was very positive.  

We had plenty to say about the impact The Godfather had on us back when we were a youth watching movies aimed at adults circa 1990.  In an era when the common wisdom was that the sequel was always worse and a money grab, watching the then-16 year old The Godfather Part II was a revelation of what was possible when you have the ground work of a classic.  Honestly, one of my reactions watching the movie is anger that it doesn't seem like many filmmakers have even tried to take apart these two movies and see what makes them work and try to one up them.

Chabert Watch! The Lost Tree (2016)

Watched:  04/13/2025

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Brian A. Metcalf

Woof.

The Lost Tree (2016)?  More like "lost me 30 seconds in".  Amirite?  Where are my Lost Tree bros?

To me, the thing that is most interesting about this very not-good movie is less the movie than digging in a bit to how Hollywood works/ worked.  It's famously a town of hustlers, and for a brief while in the late 90's and through the 00's, thanks to the power of indie film, some of that got celebrated as we had breakout films like Swingers.  But since Ed Wood got his hands on a fog machine, genre has also been a part of indie film made for no money, but hoping an idea and a performance will carry the day.

That does not happen here.

This movie is a mess from the start.  The camera-work is maybe not the best, and shot on consumer video as near as I can tell.  The audio in mostly fine, I guess, but the soundtrack/ score is doing some Olympic-class lifting, desperately trying to convince the viewer something is happening, and we're not just watching a dude wander around by himself in an empty cabin or an open field for insanely long stretches.

I will be honest and say:  I watched this movie and I can describe what happens in it, but if there's a story here with a point or an ironic twist, I am at a loss.