Ten Days of Terror!: Haunted

Film: Haunted
Format: Streaming video from Tubi on Fire!

I sometimes wonder why there aren’t more period horror movies. There are certainly some, of course, but the idea of the Gothic horror sadly went away decades ago. I think in general modern horror fans are much more about seeing what they can see—the gore and the brutality. Modern horror is about transgression in a lot of cases, but people not aware of the history of the genre don’t realize that a lot of those Gothic stories were just as transgressive. This feels like the reason that a film like Haunted slid under the radar of horror fans.

Haunted has a solid cast and is beautifully filmed and has fewer than 2,500 ratings on Letterboxd. To put that into perspective, the passable Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight from the same year has almost 8,500 4-star ratings on Letterboxd. Admittedly, it’s not a terrible movie, but it doesn’t have to scope, cinematography, or cast that Haunted does.

My Fair Pygmalion

Film: Educating Rita
Format: DVD from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

In the original story of Pygmalion, a sculptor who turns the heads of all the ladies makes a statue that is so perfect that he falls in love with it. When George Bernard Shaw wrote the play of the same name, he had a character “make” a woman from the streets into a lady of society, with love blooming along the way. Toss in music and you’ve got My Fair Lady. Hell, turn the man into a millionaire and the woman into a hooker and you’ve got Pretty Woman. In the case of Educating Rita, we keep the professor, but the woman who is to be turned into something more is a much more willing recipient of her education. In fact, it’s she who starts process.

Susan White (Julie Walters in her big screen debut) is a hairdresser who, based on her accent, is from Liverpool. She’s definitely blue collar and she and those around her have very low expectations of her, life, and the rest of the world. She wants more, though. She dubs herself “Rita” and decides to enroll in courses at Open University in the UK. Open University was doing distance learning before it was cool. The idea is the students would meet with a tutor once a week, do assignments on their own, and eventually test through their courses. Rita’s assigned tutor is Frank Bryant (Michael Caine).

Mid-Life Crisis

Film: Shirley Valentine
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on The Nook.

There are a number of movies on NetFlix that are available streaming but not as discs. That means that getting this movies watched is at a premium for me; there have been a few that have moved from “available on streaming” to “shit, now where do I find it?” status for me. Shirley Valentine is one of those films. So, just to make sure that it doesn’t happen here, I watched Shirley Valentine today, not expecting much but a check in another box and one more movie off the list.

Imagine my surprise when Shirley Valentine turned out to be one of my favorite new-to-me movies of this month. This is a movie about a middle-aged Liverpudlian woman having a spiritual rebirth and discovering who she really is. It sounds incredibly dreary and dreadful, but it’s actually quite good. Not the least of the reasons for this are the engaging screenplay (based of a one-woman play by Willy Russell) and the truly masterful performance by Pauline Collins.

What's It All About?

Film: Alfie
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla Digital on The Nook.

Michael Caine makes some bad choices with the movies he picks. How else do you explain his missing picking up his first Oscar because he was on the set of Jaws: The Revenge? It seems like there’s never been a script that Caine has turned down. Fortunately for his career and for those of us who watch films, Caine also makes a lot of really good choices. Alfie is one of his really good choices.

Alfie has a plot, but it is more a character study than anything else. Our time is spent with the eponymous Alfie Elkins (Caine), who is such a ladies man that James Bond takes lessons from him. As the film starts, Alfie has just finished having sex with a married woman in his car. He confides to the audience that he’s going to stop seeing this particular woman because she’s getting too dependent on him, predicting (rightly) that she’ll want him to meet her husband next. We’re then given a quick tour of all of Alfie’s current partners—neither the film nor Alfie himself would dare call them love interests.