Split Personality

Film: The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

The Doctor Jekyll story is one that everyone knows but that almost no one has actually read. It’s sort of like Robin Hood in that respect. We all know the basics—the scientist who discovers a formula that causes a bestial, criminal side to come out. The doctor struggles against his alter ego, torn between his morals and his desires, and is ultimately destroyed by this internal conflict. The Two Faces of Doctor Jekyll decides to have a little fun with the basic story, giving us an alter ego that is not what we’re used to.

In 1874, Dr. Henry Jekyll (Paul Massie) works with deaf children, but is detached in his personal life from his wife. Kitty Jekyll (Dawn Addams) feels abandoned by her husband. They fight about Henry’s friend Paul Allen (Christopher Lee), who is buried in gambling debts. Kitty argues that Henry is supporting his spendthrift friend. In reality, Kitty has run to Paul for affection, becoming his mistress and hiding that fact by pretending to hate him. Meanwhile, Henry has become detached from his wife (and everyone else) because he is attempting to create a chemical potion which he hopes will help him learn the truth of the inner workings of the human mind.

Knock Knock

Film: Them (Ils)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

French Extremity films are generally a tough sell for me. While I tend find them meaningful and worth watching, they are also really difficult to watch a lot of the time. For anyone interested in the harder edge of horror without wanting to risk too much in the way of gore, Them (Ils in French) is a great place to start. This is a film that is very interested in scaring the audience as much as possible without dipping into the gore that tends to mark the style.

Our opening scene gives us an idea of what is ahead of us. A mother and daughter have an accident on a desolate road at night. As they attempt to repair their car, the mother vanishes. The daughter, attempting to keep herself safe soon discovers that who or whatever took her mother has the keys and is attempting to unlock the car doors. After a few more moments, the daughter is strangled from behind.

J.G. Ballard's Stalker

Film: Annihilation
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

These days, if I watch a newer horror movie, I tend to post a review of it. This is more or less self-defense; you never know when one of those movies might appear on a list that I am pursuing. I didn’t do that the first time I watched Annihilation, which is why I watched it again today. In this case, I’m not really upset by this. Annihilation is a movie that really needs to be watched at least twice to fully grok, and even with that I’m not sure I’m all the way there.

I think that this is intentional. This is not a movie that makes a lot of sense from front to back, but that’s because it is much more a movie about feel than it is about an actual plot and story. It feels alien and unknowable because it doesn’t want to be explained. It wants to be experienced and felt deep in the bones with half-sensed truths and glimpses of things out of the corner of the eye.

Under Wraps

Film: The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Mummy movies, starting from the 1932 film featuring Boris Karloff through to all of the current films have essentially one basic story. The mummy gets discovered by intrepid explorers who scoff at the curse of the tomb inscribed on the tomb. Eventually, either through the reading of an inscription or the desecration of the tomb or for some other reason, the mummy comes back to life and starts killing off the people who stand in his way. The Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb from 1964 is no different in this respect.

That basic plot seems to come in large part from the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922 followed by the mysterious deaths of several of the participants in the discovery. The idea of a curse that destroys the living who disturbed the dead is a powerful one, and even manages to be interpreted in various modern way—at some level, Poltergeist follows this same formula. The formula just adds in the fun aspect of not merely an undead curse, but an undead avatar inflicting the curse.

Dream House Not Included

Film: Barbie
Format: Phoenix Theaters, Dubuque, Iowa

I finally got a chance to go to the theater and see Barbie, the first half of the Barbenheimer double feature that was popular a number of weeks ago. Of course, I went into this knowing some things about the film, but I was surprisingly cold on the actual plot and many of the people involved. I was surprised, for instance, at the presence of Will Ferrell in the film, as I didn’t know he was attached to the project. Barbie became a cultural phenomenon, one that also got a lot of blowback from the political right because, as a film written by and directed by a clearly pro-feminist filmmaker, it’s going to ruffle a lot of conservative feathers.

We start with a 2001: A Space Odyssey parody that was the first point of anger I heard from the right—the little girls playing the parts of the pre-humans destroy their dolls much like the pre-humans smash bones in Kubrick’s film. From here we jump to Barbieland where, with a few exceptions, everyone is named either Barbie or Ken. That makes identifying some people here difficult, as different characters named Barbie are played by dozens of actors, and ditto for Ken.

Bales of Cocaine

Film: Cocaine Bear
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

Sometimes, you know exactly what you’re going to get from a film simply because of the name. Cocaine Bear is that sort of movie. This is very loosely based on a story of a cocaine smuggler dropping a few bales of cocaine out of his plane and then jumping…and dying from a faulty chute. The cocaine was, the story goes, eaten by a bear, that quickly expired from eating enough cocaine to fuel an army and all of its logistics officers. Naturally, we’re going to take that real world “bear ate cocaine” idea and do a lot more interesting things with the bear.

Essentially, the start of the film is exactly that. Andrew Thornton (Matthew Rhys) tosses some bags of coke out of a low-flying plane and, as he is preparing to jump out of the plane after the coke, slips, bangs his head on the door, and slips out of the plane, unconscious and falling to his doom. The cocaine ends up spread across the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest while Thornton’s body splats onto someone’s driveway in Knoxville. Since Thornton was a known smuggler, he is quickly identified by local detective Bob (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), who determines that the cocaine found around the body belongs to St. Louis drug dealer Syd White (Ray Liotta, in his final film).

What I've Caught Up With, August 2023

It would be nice for my life to calm down for a week, and I'm hoping (as usual) this will happen in a couple of weeks when I get a break from work. Family issues--my father's slow descent into dementia and my wife's long COVID have not eased up, and naturally I've been given extra duties at work in the form of an extra class, meaning extra grading and extra lectures. Not a lot of movie watching this month, but things are actually looking up. Things change dramatically for me at the end of the year when I give up a significant time sink. At least fall is on its way.

Day of the Tentacle(s)

Film: It Came from Beneath the Sea
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

If you watch a science fiction movie from the 1950s, horror or not, you’re going find something very interesting about the way that the plot works. Regardless of what the threat is to mankind and society in general, there’s going to be a love story attached to it, and possibly a love triangle. This is the case for movies as diverse as The Deadly Mantis and Revenge of the Creature, and it’s true of It Came from Beneath the Sea. In fact, in this movie, the love story is so forward that we deal with almost none of the fun stop-motion giant octopus until the second half of the film.

True to its era, It Came from Beneath the Sea is going to also be forward about the advances of Science! when it comes to telling this story. In this case, we’ll be learning all about the new American atomic submarine that is purported to be the new ultimate weapon in keeping the U.S. safe from the dirty, dirty commies. As the film starts, it’s going through its shakedown cruise. During its travels, the ship encounters something unknown and is briefly captured. When it returns to Pearl Harbor, something biological is discovered wedged in the sub’s dive planes.