Ten Days of Terror!: Horror Shorts

Film: The Call of Cthulhu; Whistle and I’ll Come to You (1968); Outer Space
Format: Internet video on laptop.

People who read horror either love H.P. Lovecraft’s work or they hate it. I don’t know that there’s a lot of middle ground. One of the problems with Lovecraft’s writing is that, like Ray Bradbury’s writing, it doesn’t always translate well to film. In Bradbury’s case, it’s dialogue—no one actually speaks like Bradbury characters do. With Lovecraft, it’s the fact that his creepy crawlies and monsters defy description. This hasn’t prevented people from trying to film Lovecraft stories, but most of them don’t live up to the promise. The creature at the end of the original Hellboy is probably the closest we’ve seen to a true Lovecraftian horror on film. His story “The Call of Cthulhu” was thought to be unfilmable, but about 20 years ago, a group of independent filmmakers created The Call of Cthulhu as a traditional silent film…and it works.

Like a lot of Lovecraft (and Poe before him), the story is told in flashback, by a narrator who is relating his story to someone, trying to explain exactly what happened. In this case, a man (Matt Foyer) inherits the work of his great-uncle, who was obsessed with a religious cult called the Cthulhu Cult. The nephew pours through the work and becomes similarly obsessed himself. The fact that everyone who encounters or deals with the cult in some way seems to end up dead does not dissuade him. Encounters with the cult itself eventually leads the man to searching for the source of the cult, which leads him to the fabled city of R’lyeh, where great Cthulhu lies sleeping.

Ten Days of Terror!: Final Destination 5

Film: Final Destination 5
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

There is rumored to be a Final Destination 6 in the works, but until that happens, Final Destination 5 is the end of the series, and it means that I can put this series behind me, at least for now. Final Destination 5 seems like the end of the series that we deserve, though, or at least one that ties things up, regardless of whether or not it starts up again. On my end, I’m happy just to be done with it, even if that’s temporary.

By this time you know the setup. There’s going to be an inciting accident of which someone will have a terrible premonition. They will freak out, a group of people will follow them off whatever they are on or out of whatever they are in, and the accident will happen as foreseen. Death, having had his victims taken away, will then stalk the survivors and kill them via Rube Goldberg contraption in the order they were supposed to die. Eventually, our main character, the person who had the original premonition will figure out what is happening and will do some research on how they might survive what is happening, but Death will always win out in the end. The real question is always simply how the next person is going to die, since a) we know they will, and b) we know the order it’s going to happen.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Final Destination

Film: The Final Destination (Final Destination 4)
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

You do this long enough, you learn a few lessons. I watched We Need to Talk About Kevin some time ago and never want to see it again, but I didn’t bother to write it up. Now it’s on the They Shoot Zombies list, so I’m going to have to watch it again. What does that have to do with The Final Destination, a.k.a. Final Destination 4? It’s the only film in the Final Destination series that isn’t on the list. I’m reviewing it in self-defense. I don’t think it’s ever going to show up, but I sure as hell don’t want to sit through it again. This is entirely proactive.

The Final Destination is the low point in the series. There’s a reason it hasn’t shown up on the They Shoot Zombies list. While most of them have a sub-3.0 rating on Letterboxd, this one is the lowest by nearly a full point. There are reasons for this. In addition to me not wanting to have to watch this again, I’m hoping to prevent you from wasting the 82 minutes it takes to get through this one.

Ten Days of Terror!: Final Destination 3

Film: Final Destination 3
Format: DVD from Freeport Public Library through interlibrary loan on rockin’ flatscreen.

I like the conceit of the Final Destination movies. The idea that a couple of people have cheated death then become targets of Death in the literal sense and wind up dying in a series of Rube Goldberg-style accidents is a fantastic hook for a film. The problem with the series is that it reached its highpoint in the open scenes of Final Destination 2. Not a single person I know who has seen that movie will willingly drive behind a log truck. What that means for the rest of the films in the series is that the car crash sequence is always hanging over the films. Final Destination 3 tries desperately to match this and can’t.

The way the films work is that the opening sequence sets up the idea that someone has a terrible premonition of an accident, freaks out, and leaves the situation along with a few other people. Then the accident happens exactly like the premonition suggested it would. The people who managed to avoid their terrible fate in the freak accident are then picked off one by one, essentially in the order they would have died in the premonition. Where the first film used a plane crash and the second used a massive highway accident, Final Destination 3 opts for a freak accident on a rollercoaster.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Town that Dreaded Sundown

Film: The Town that Dreaded Sundown (1976)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

I knew going into the original version of The Town that Dreaded Sundown that I had seen it before. There’s a moment or two that are nearly impossible to forget, not in a good way but in a weird horror/comedy way. What I forgot about this movie was how much of it is ridiculous and odd. I didn’t like the movie the first time I saw it and I didn’t like it this time, either, but this time, I can articulate the reasons I find the film lacking far better. I suppose this is the benefit of having done this for more than a dozen years.

One of those things is being a little more aware of who is making the movies in question. In this case, our auteur is Charles B. Pierce. Mystery Science Theater 3000 fans may remember Pierce as the director and star of Boggy Creek II: And the Legend Continues. There are a lot of similarities between this film and that one, and since Pierce’s 1985 sasquatch-adjacent film is one that appeared on a show specifically made to mock bad movies, this isn’t a good thing.

Ten Days of Terror!: Homicidal

Film: Homicidal
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Were I another person, I would say that the films of William Castle are a guilty pleasure for me. The truth, though, is that I don’t subscribe to the idea of guilty pleasures; I like the movies I do for reasons that I am happy to articulate, and that includes movies that are generally disliked or, in the case of Castle’s films, are pure gimmick. I love how audacious Castle could be. His films were goofy and silly, and he gained audience with tricks like in-seat vibrators, glasses that revealed “ghosts” on the screen, and having people sign a waiver that they couldn’t sue if they died of fright. The gimmick for Homicidal was a timer that appeared at the film’s climax—patron’s too scared to continue could get a full refund, but were forced in a humiliating walk of shame. The truth is that Castle’s films were never really scary enough to force anyone to do this, but the idea is a dandy one.

However, the plot that drives Homicidal forward is one that needs to be fully discussed. There is a solid shock moment at the end that the film builds up to, but to really understand what is happening, that needs to be talked about. That being the case, the rest of this review should be considered to be under a spoiler warning. If you don’t want a movie that’s close to retirement age spoiled for you, you may not want to click the link to continue.

Ten Days of Terror!: Eden Lake

Film: Eden Lake
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

A bunch of the stuff that I had reserved to watch on Tubi left the service all at once, which put me in a bit of a bind—I had to watch a bunch of stuff as quickly as I could before it disappeared. That meant watching movies I knew I’d get to eventually much sooner than I planned. One of those movies was Eden Lake, a film with shades of torture porn and living as a close cousin to the home invasion genre, two areas of horror I’m not a huge fan of.

What’s more significant, though, is that from the opening moments I had the feeling that I’d seen this before. In fact, I felt it so strongly that I had to check through my records (yes, I keep records of the lists I’m pursuing) to see if I hadn’t already watched this and just forgotten to cross it off. It turns out I was both right and wrong--Eden Lake is very much a remake of the French Extremity film Ils.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Hole

Film: The Hole
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

There are a lot of classic tropes in movies in general, and there are genre expectations in terms of plot. There are also set-ups that we see over and over again because they work. For the horror genre, one of the most classic of tropes is the idea of a group of teens or 20-somethings heading out to the middle of nowhere and then something terrible happens. The “people in the middle of nowhere” trope goes back to the silent era, or at least the earliest talkies. In later years and with the rise of more gonzo horror, it happened more and more. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Friday the 13th, and Evil Dead wouldn’t exist without this trope. The Hole takes this basic idea and attempts to do something a little different with it.

We start with the rescue of boarding school student Liz (Thora Birch), who is the only survivor of a group of four who have been missing for nearly three weeks. Through a series of interviews with a psychologist (Embeth Davidtz). The story we get from Liz is that her friend Martin (Daniel Brockelbank) has discovered a fallout shelter in the middle of the forest nearby and has a key for it. Liz wants quality time with the school stud, Mike (Desmond Harrington), and arranges for her friend Frankie (Keira Knightley) and her mancrush Geoff (Laurence Fox) to go with them during a school field trip. Their parents think they are on the trip; the school thinks they are with their parents.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Ritual

Film: The Ritual
Format: Streaming video from Pluto TV on various players.

The Ritual is one of those movies that feels like you’ve seen in pieces before. There are moments that are directly reminiscent of other films, places where other films have borrowed from it, and allusions to films that don’t on the surface have a lot to do with this one. Among the films that I could see shining through in The Ritual are The Blair Witch Project, King Kong, The Grey and The Descent. I also recognized films like Annihilation, Antlers and Midsommar, but these were released after The Ritual, making this a potential influence more than anything else.

We start out with a group of five guys in a pub deciding what they want to do as a group vacation. Every suggestion eventually gets shot down. The last one under discussion is a hiking trip through Sweden suggested by Rob (Paul Reid). Shortly thereafter, as Rob and Luke (Rafe Spall) go into a liquor store to buy wine, Rob is killed in a robbery gone wrong.

Ten Days of Terror!: Sheitan

Film: Sheitan
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on various players.

I sometimes have a movie on while I’m working. I find more and more, though, that this only really works for me if it’s a movie that I’ve seen a lot. It’s there mostly for background noise more than anything else. There are a few things I can do while watching a movie, though, depending on the movie. Foreign films and anything else that requires that I read subtitles is always going to be a harder sell in that respect. What this means is that I actually watched a large chunk of Sheitan (Satan for the more English-minded) at the gym, on my phone, while on the treadmill. And I learned a lesson; R-rated movies probably aren’t the best choice for public areas.

Bluntly, there’s some nudity and sex in this. Normally, I don’t care that much, but watching the beginnings of a threesome in public isn’t necessarily something that I was comfortable with doing, so it’s something I won’t be repeating in the future. It’s also why the next time I watched a movie in part on the treadmill, it was a silent film, which felt a lot safer in that respect.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Brotherhood of Satan

Film: The Brotherhood of Satan
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Sometimes I wonder if the Satanic Panic of the 1980s was fueled in part by the Satan-infused movies of the previous decade. The ‘70s appeared to be rife with cinematic stories of people turning their life over to Satan. Sometimes you get The Touch of Satan, which ended up as one of the better late-MST3K episodes. Sometimes you get The Devil’s Rain, which featured a surprisingly robust cast for a B-movie fueled by the devil. And sometimes you get The Brotherhood of Satan, a movie that is absolutely bonkers for part of it, but still manages to bring in some real evil and a few decent surprises.

This is also a film that features the talents of L.Q. Jones, a character actor whose career spanned 40+ years, and who named himself after the character he played in his first movie. Jones is virtually unrecognizable in this without his full, giant mustache. Jones is also an uncredited co-author of the screenplay. He plays the sheriff in this, and one of the reasons he’s hard to spot is that he genuinely looks about 10 years younger than his actual age—quite a feat for the early 1970s. He also wrote the follow-up book adaptation.

Ten Days of Terror!: L'Inferno

Film: L’Inferno (Dante’s Inferno)
Format: Internet video on Fire!

If you’ve never read The Divine Comedy, I recommend it. It’s pretty accessible for 14th Century literature, and a good translation makes for a really fun read. Well, at least for two-thirds of it. In the Ancient Greek tradition, a “comedy” is a story that starts with the characters at a low point and ends with them at a high point. Since this story begins in Hell and ends in Heaven, it is the ultimate comedy in that Greek sense. In Inferno, Dante witnesses the tortures of the damned. In the second book, Purgatorio, he sees the punishments inflicted on those who might still someday be purified to reach Heaven. In the final book, Paradisio, Dante sees Heaven. Bluntly, in Dante’s vision, Heaven is boring. That’s why the 1911 film adaptation focuses much more on Limbo, Hell, and Purgatory. The version I watched featured a prog-rock soundtrack that would have felt very much at home with Peter Gabriel in the cast and Tony Banks on the keyboards.

The film follows the trials of Dante’s Inferno pretty well, although it does leave out some specific areas of the various levels of Hell. The poet (Salvatore Papa) is denied entry to Paradise by being blocked by a trio of demons—Greed, Pride, and Lust. His idealized woman, Beatrice (Emilise Beretta, I think—the film isn’t clear), descends from Heaven and invokes the poet Virgil (Arturo Pirovano) to guide the poet through Hell.

Ten Day of Terror!: Saw IV

Film: Saw IV
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.

I find myself exhausted by the Saw franchise. Don’t get me wrong; the first movie is genuinely good and unique in a lot of ways. It looks like it’s going to be a torture porn movie, but it is actually a disturbing psychological horror. From that first movie, though, the franchise has devolved into little more than excuses to put people in terrible situations and murder them for the thrill of the audience. That’s great if that’s all you want, but I get tired of it pretty quickly. So when Saw IV showed up on the They Shoot Zombies list, I knew eventually I’d have to dip my toes back into this particular sewage plant, and here we are.

If you’re unfamiliar with the basics of the franchise, the story is that a cancer patient named John Kramer (Tobin Bell), nicknamed Jigsaw, who finds people who he thinks no longer appreciate the gift of life that they have been given. He traps them and puts them into deathtraps where they have to fight to stay alive, typically having to go through something terribly painful (and often nasty) to survive. Those who live now have (he says) an appreciation for the life they have. Those who fail have a puzzle piece-shaped bit of skin removed from their body, representing that “missing piece” of the person—a survival instinct.

Ten Days of Terror!: Return of the Living Dead III

Film: Return of the Living Dead III
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

The original The Return of the Living Dead did the seemingly impossible. It was a spoof of a horror classic (the George Romero Living Dead classics) and actually made not only a watchable film, but added to the lore in a significant way. The trope that zombies like to eat brains comes from this series, not Romero’s. The second movie in the RotLD series was a huge step down in quality, mainly because the comedy didn’t work. The third film, Return of the Living Dead III (or Return of the Living Dead Part III if you prefer) is kind of a return to form. There are a lot of changes, though, the biggest being that this third and final film in the series doesn’t really attempt the comedy.

We do have to stick with the series, though, so we’re going to pick up five years after the previous film. Young Curt Reynolds (J. Trevor Edmond) and his girlfriend Julie (Melinda “Mindy” Clarke) steal his father’s access key card to the military base he works on, and the two go exploring. While there, they discover that Curt’s father (Kent McCord) is in charge of experiments that involve re-animating the dead. However, the experiment goes wrong, and because of this, Curt’s father is reassigned.

Ten Days of Terror!: Ju-On: The Grude 2

Film: Ju-on: The Grudge 2 (Ju-on 2)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Horror movies always reflect the fears of the time and of the culture. It’s not shocking that post-9/11 a lot of American horror films were like Hostel and Turistas: extremely xenophobic. A great deal of Japanese horror was of the atomic variety (Gojira and the like) for obvious reasons, but a lot of Japanese horror is ghost-based as well. Japanese horror stories have involved ghosts for centuries; often the ghosts are there to impart morality lessons to the living. Modern Japanese ghosts, though, are often about bringing up the sins of the past—the people of the present are still paying for the crimes that happened years ago. That’s certain the them of the Ju-on films, and it’s the major throughline of Ju-on: The Grudge 2 (or just Ju-on 2 if you prefer).

While this does tell a particular story, it does so in a non-linear structure that isn’t easy to follow. It jumps around a lot and we see the same thing from several different perspectives at different times. The conceit of the original movie is continued here. That original conceit is that when someone dies in extreme sorrow or extreme rage, those emotions linger, generating a curse. Anyone who encounters that curse dies from it and lingers themselves, continuing and expanding the curse in an ever-widening circle. That’s where we started in the first movie, where we ended when the first movie ended, and where we will pick up here.

Ten Days of Terror!: Paranormal Activity 3

Film: Paranormal Activity 3
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on basement television.

Years ago, when I reviewed Paranormal Activity 2, I commented that I was one day going to have to watch the third installment because it had been added to the They Shoot Zombies list. I don’t like this series at all, so I was dreading this and putting it off. But, eventually, you have to take the plunge, and so here we are with Paranormal Activity 3.

The first movie in the series was a fantastic example of a very smart filmmaker filming very stupid characters. The second movie at least gave us characters whose motivations could be understood. They did the wrong thing over and over, of course, but at least it was understandable. It was also a prequel to the first movie. This, the third installment in the series, is a pre-prequel, dipping further back into the history of the characters from the first movie, going all the way back to the 1980s.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Devil Bat

Film: The Devil Bat
Format: Streaming video from Pluto TV on Fire!

I don’t go out of my way to reference Mystery Science Theater 3000, but there are times when I find it necessary. The Devil Bat is one of those cases. This movie didn’t actually appear on MST3K, but it definitely feels like it could have. Movies very much like it did appear on the show. I am put in mind of a Bela Lugosi clunker called The Corpse Vanishes that has a fairly similar plot in a lot of respects. The Devil Bat is no worse than that one, and certainly not a whole lot better.

This is yet another in a series of films that gives us Bela Lugosi as a respected scientist of some sort who is secretly completely insane. Lugosi in this case is Dr. Paul Carruthers, a chemist who lives in a small town called Heathville and who works for a cosmetics company. What we will learn eventually is that the company has made a fortune off of the formulas of Carruthers for which he took a $10,000 payoff (it’s worth noting that in today’s dollars, that’s close to a quarter million). Anyway, now that the company has made bank from his ideas, Carruthers decides he is being disrespected and wants revenge.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Devil-Doll

Film: The Devil-Doll
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!

In The Bride of Frankenstein, there’s a section where we learn that the doctor that Frankenstein has thrown in with is obsessed with making tiny people. Tod Browning might have taken a page out of the screenplay for The Devil-Doll, a film that is virtually entirely based on the idea of miniature people doing bad things. There are a surprising number of films that feature this idea to the point that there’s a Wikipedia page devoted to films that feature miniature people.

The Devil-Doll starts with a prison break. Marcel (Henry B. Walthall), a mad scientist and Paul Lavond (Lionel Barrymore) escape from Devil’s Island. Marcel wishes to get back to his wife and experimentation while Lavond is looking for revenge. A former banker, he was convicted of robbing his own bank and killing a night watchman, and has served 17 years of a life sentence. However, Lavond is innocent; his partners Coulvet (Robert Greig), Matin (Pedro de Cordoba), and Radin (Arthur Hohl) framed him after stealing the money themselves.

Ten Days of Terror!: Corridors of Blood

Film: Corridors of Blood
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

I do love horror movies, and while there are plenty of modern horror movies that I enjoy a great deal, there’s a part of me that is drawn to the classics, the pre-gore films that have that Gothic flair to them. Despite the name, Corridors of Blood is exactly this sort of film. It’s arguably terribly misnamed, because there’s not a great deal of blood here, and perhaps not even that many corridors. The truth is, though, that if it were actually named for what the film is about, a film called The History of Anesthesia isn’t going to put a lot of butts in the seats.

It really is what the film is about, though. Dr. Thomas Bolton (Boris Karloff) works in a hospital in the 1840s in London. Dr. Bolton is frustrated, not because he lacks skill. In fact, he is noted as being a very good and successful surgeon because of his speed. No, what frustrates him is that the common expression of the time suggests that the surgeon’s knife and pain in the patient are inseparable. His goal is to find a way to prevent pain in the patient during surgery—too many of his patients lose their minds or die from shock thanks to the pain. He begins experimenting with ways to handle thing, mildly assisted by his son Jonathan (Francis Matthews) and his niece Susan (Betta St. John).

Ten Days of Terror!: The Mad Magician

Film: The Mad Magician
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

There’s a part of me that realizes Vincent Price had a career before he started doing horror movies in the mid-‘50s. If memory serves, House of Wax was his first true horror movie, which makes The Mad Magician from 1954 his second. It’s interesting to see him this early in his career, still clearly the great Vincent Price, but also still feeling his way in the genre. To be fair, The Mad Magician is barely a horror movie. Additionally, while it conjures up thoughts of magician suffering from insanity, in truth he’s really just angry.

Price plays Don Gallico, who makes a living creating illusions for other magicians. He’s gotten an itch to perform on the stage, though, and calling himself Gallico the Great, he decides to put on a show featuring a new trick. This trick is a version of sawing a lady in half, but features a huge buzzsaw set up to behead the assistant.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Cursed

Film: The Cursed
Format: Streaming video from Hulu on Fire!

There’s a certain art to naming a movie or a book, or really any project. The right name piques interest while the wrong name puts people off or doesn’t get anyone thinking about anything. Case in point is The Cursed. I struggle to think of a more generic title for a horror movie; there certainly can be one, but I don’t know off-hand what it would or could be. This is especially true when you discover that the original name of this project was Eight for Silver, which is at least evocative of something, or has the potential to get the audience thinking.

The curse in this case is going to come from a group of Romani people (called “Gypsies” throughout the film as a slur, because it is one), and the cursed of the title are going to be the men who slaughter them and their families. We’re going to start in the future, though, at the battlefield of the Somme in World War I, where a man is treated for bullet wounds—and an additional bullet of non-German design is found in his body.

Ten Days of Terror!: Medusa (2021)

Film: Medusa
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!

I grew up in the church. It was a liberal church, to be sure, but still in the church. I have long since given up religion as well as religious belief. It’s my position that religion, as a rule, makes things worse, a notion probably put into my head by the title of a Christopher Hitchens book, but one that I stand by. I’m in mind of Hitchens as I look at Medusa, a recent film out of Brazil. This is a film that is clearly referencing Jair Bolsonaro in a lot of respects, at least in terms of its approach to the effects of extreme belief.

Hitchens tells an anecdote of an interview with right-wing whackaloon Dennis Prager where Prager asks him if he were in a foreign city and was approached by a group of young men, would he be more or less nervous if he knew they had just come from a prayer meeting. Hitchens responds by saying that, staying only with the letter B, he’s had that experience in Baghdad, Belgrade, Bosnia, Bombay, and Belfast, and if you were ever in any of those cities and you saw men leaving a prayer meeting, you knew exactly how fast you had to run in the other direction. Thanks to Medusa, we can add Brazil to the list.

Ten Days of Terror!: Let the Wrong One In

Film: Let the Wrong One In
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

It’s not easy to do horror-comedy. Most fall into the trap of being comedy-forward instead of dealing with anything that genuinely approaches horror. There are some solid exceptions, of course. Shaun of the Dead is the template for solid horror-comedy as it should be done. It’s actually funny and there are some genuine horror elements in it. Let the Wrong One In, clearly meant to reference Let the Right One In, attempts to do for vampires when Shaun did for zombies.

Average Dubliner Matt (Karl Rice) deals with his mother (Hilda Fay) and his drunken, junkie brother Deco (Eoin Duffy) as best he can. What he doesn’t know is that Deco was recently attacked by a vampire named Sheila (Mary Murray), who was turned at her bachelorette party near Transylvania. Deco is persona non grata at home, but, guilted into helping him, Matt invites him into the house to keep him safe from the sunlight. Wanting to help, he calls for a doctor, but instead gets Henry (Anthony Head), Sheila’s fiancé, who has sworn vengeance against all of the vampires in Ireland, all of which are being created by Sheila and her bridal party.

Ten Days of Terror!: A Haunting in Venice

Film: A Haunting in Venice
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on Fire!

Sometimes, an actor falls in love with a character and they can’t walk away from that character. Kenneth Branagh appears to have become entranced with the character of Hercule Poirot. A Haunting in Venice is the third Branagh Poirot movie; he got through the two classics in A Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile. In that respect, A Haunting in Venice is treading a little bit of new ground. It’s nice to see some new Poirot stories on the big screen rather than the same two over and over. That said, it’s probably inevitable that Branagh will eventually adapt Evil Under the Sun.

Right now, there are two mystery franchises that have large budgets and attract a good number of stars. Branagh’s Poirot films are one of them; the second is the Knives Out series with Daniel Craig. Branagh’s films are period pieces and are adapted from Agatha Christie stories. If you’re going to adapt a mystery, you could do a lot worse than the grande dame of whodunnits. Rian Johnson’s Knives Out films are modern and original. Both include a star actor who clearly loves the role. And if you ask me to put my money on one, I’m going with Knives Out.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977)

Film: The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

When I was a kid, I was given a collection of H.G. Wells stories. It’s hard to call them actual novels because of the length; they are more or less novellas. These are classic stories, though, and they have been made into excellent movies more than once. Included in the collection are The Time Machine, The Food of the Gods, The First Men in the Moon, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Island of Dr. Moreau. All six of these stories run less than 700 pages combined. What this means is that they are easy to adapt accurately. This doesn’t, however, mean that they are easy to adapt well. The 1977 version of The Island of Dr. Moreau is evidence enough of that.

My guess is that you know at least the basics of the story—a man named Braddock (Michael York) is shipwrecked on a faraway island where he meets the mysterious Doctor Moreau (Burt Lancaster) and his assistant Montgomery (Nigel Davenport). Also on the island are a number of bestial men who seem sub- or half-human. There is also a woman named Maria (Barbara Carrera), who claims to have been brought to the island by Moreau.

Ten Days of Terror!: White Dog

Film: White Dog
Format: DVD from personal collection on basement television.

I admit that I am someone who puts a lot of stock into verisimilitude in movies. I need to be able to see that something could happen in the world that is shown to us for me to be involved in the story. I can accept magic, and spaceships, and laser guns. I can even accept all of those in the same movie if I’m given a consistent world. When a film breaks with that, when it breaks the rules of the world that it presents, it tends to lose me a little bit. Samuel Fuller’s White Dog, a film so notorious that it was not officially fully released for more than two-and-a-half decades, is a rare exception to this. In this case, the message is more important than the fact that the people involved act in ways that don’t specifically make sense.

The notorious nature of White Dog is enough that it makes sense for me to offer a trigger warning on it: this is a movie that is directly about racism. This is not sanitized “racism is bad” like Driving Miss Daisy or even the “racism infects everything” of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. This is vicious and brutal, and while the film isn’t remotely pro-racism, it is shocking and unflinching and brutal. So, this being the case, you’ve been warned. Click on the link to continue reading if you’re up for it. If you’re not, no shame.

Ten Days of Terror!: Eaten Alive

Film: Eaten Alive
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

Certain directors do certain things really well. Hitchcock did suspense like no one else, and early Spielberg is rife with absent fathers. In the horror world, backwoods psychopaths come in a lot of flavors, and you have to give some credit to directors like Wes Craven for films like The Hills Have Eyes. But no one really does true hillbilly psychopathy like Tobe Hooper did. Don’t get me wrong; Craven wrote and directed a good psycho, but there’s a real touch of nastiness to Hooper’s work. You can see it in a film like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where it genuinely feels like he found a family of inbred mutants. Eaten Alive has the same feeling. There’s something about this film that feels legitimately dangerous, like we’re seeing people who aren’t acting.

Eaten Alive is not long on plot, but it doesn’t really need to be. It’s not the sort of movie that trades on its plot in general. It trades specifically on the idea of the audience wanting to see people get eaten by a crocodile. We’re going to ignore the fact that this takes place in Texas so it should be an alligator. To the person being dined upon, that difference is going to be pretty low on the list of concerns.

Ten Days of Terror!: Frogs

Film: Frogs
Format: Streaming video from Pluto TV on various players.

It’s a legitimate question to ask who had the bigger fall from grace, Ray Milland or Joan Crawford. Before sliding into a number of television appearances, Milland appeared in both Frogs and The Thing with Two Heads in 1972. Joan Crawford’s storied film career ended with her starring role in Trog, playing an anthropologist who tries to connect with a cave-dwelling troglodyte. I think this is a competition that could go either way. I bring it up only because I watched Frogs today, and it’s something truly unlike anything I expected. The be fair, I had no idea what to expect.

Amazingly movie-named Pickett Smith (an un-mustachioed Sam Elliott) is a wildlife photographer taking pictures around an unnamed island in an unnamed (but clearly Southern) part of the country. He discovers a significant amount of evidence indicating pollution probably stemming from their use on the island plantation owned by the Crockett family. His canoe is swamped by Clint Crockett (Adam Roarke) and his sister Karen (Joan Van Ark). As a sort of reparation, they bring him to the family home where a celebration is soon to be taking place.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Diabolical Dr. Z

Film: The Diabolical Dr. Z (Miss Muerte)
Format: Streaming video from Plex on Fire!

I don’t typically watch a movie twice before writing a review, but I found that it was necessary for The Diabolical Dr. Z (or Miss Muerte if you prefer). There is a plot to this movie, but it goes in a lot of directions, and a lot of what is happening feels like it’s here specifically to get the running time to feature length. Co-screenwriter and director Jesús Franco has a story that he wants to tell here, but seems to have needed an editor to trim out some of the fat.

The truth is that The Diabolical Dr. Z should be called Dr. Z’s Diabolical Daughter. Our titular character, Doctor Zimmer (Antonio Jiménez Escribano) doesn’t make it all the way through the first act. We see him doing some experiments on an escaped felon. Eventually we come to learn that Zimmer’s experiments are in mind control, a process that appears to involve pushing large nails into people’s temples and spines. From here, Zimmer and his daughter Irma (Mabel Karr) arrive at a conference on neurology. Zimmer makes the claim that he can find the genetic roots of good and evil and that he should be permitted to experiment on human subjects (although he’s already been doing so). Rebuffed by a trio of doctors, Zimmer suffers an attack and dies.

Ten Days of Terror!: Body Melt

Film: Body Melt
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

There’s something about the gross out movie that is both repellent and fascinating. That’s exactly what Body Melt is, and there’s no other way to categorize it. This is an Australian movie very much in the same vein as Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste, but there are going to be a lot of other influences from the 1980s tossed in here as well. There are going to be elements that feel like Videodrome, The Stuff, Society and even a direct reference to The Thing at one point.

Body Melt, in addition to making reference to all of those other films, is another in the long list of movies about an evil corporation. In this case, the company makes a dietary supplement called Vimuville. They’ve been putting these supplements in the mailboxes of a neighborhood called Pebbles Court in Melbourne as a sort of test run of what the supplements can do. These are designed to produce people who are perfectly healthy, but of course there are terrible side effects. These start with hallucinations and end with, well…body melt.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Hands of Orlac

Film: The Hands of Orlac
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

There are times when the order in you see something affects the way that you understand them. The 1930s film Mad Love is a remake of the silent film The Hands of Orlac, trimmed down, sexed up, and starring Peter Lorre. I saw that remake before seeing the original, which means that while watching The Hands of Orlac (Orlacs Hände if you prefer the original German), I had to remind myself that what I remember from Mad Love was done her first. The things that felt derivative were, in fact, not so at all.

The basic idea of The Hands of Orlac involves a sort of super-science that smacks of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein novel. Concert pianist Paul Orlac (Conrad Veidt, a silent horror staple) is in a terrible train accident and his hands are crushed. Knowing that his hands are his entire life, the doctor transplants new hands onto Orlac. Naturally, those hands didn’t just come from anywhere or anyone. They are the hands of Vasseur, a recently executed murderer.

Ten Days of Terror!: Hands of the Ripper

Film: Hands of the Ripper
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

I went into Hands of the Ripper completely blind. Based on the title, I expected this to be a giallo along the lines of The New York Ripper. It’s not, though. While the title is lurid enough, this is a Hammer film, and one of the last of Hammer’s Gothic horror movies, and close to the end of Hammer’s productions until they were brought back in the mid-2000s. Knowing that this is a film that takes place in that time period, and given that this is a British production, your first thought is almost certainly that this is referencing Jack the Ripper. Your first thought is going to be right.

To get things going, we’re going to see Jack the Ripper pursued by a mob (an uncredited Danny Lyons). He arrives home to a wife who realizes who he is and murders her in front of their young daughter. We jump a good 15 years into the future and that young girl is now Anna (Angharad Rees), living with Mrs. Golding (Dora Bryan), who does séances in her home. Anna, more or less, plays the spirits. At one such séance, we are introduced to Dr. Pritchard (Eric Porter) and his son Michael (Keith Bell). We also meet Dysart (Derek Godfrey), a member of Parliament.

Ten Days of Terror!: Subspecies

Film: Subspecies
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

The vampire movie has changed a lot since the originals. Many modern vampire movies play with the standard vampire myth in a lot of ways. Some can’t transform into bats or other creatures, or are vulnerable only to some things. There’s always been a sense of romance around the vampire, though. While there are exceptions (say, 30 Days of Night), typically vampires are as tragic as they are terrifying, at least in theory. Subspecies is a vampire film that dives back into the roots of the subgenre. We’re not hanging out in Alaska or Louisiana. No, we’re going to be spending our time in the OG vampire capital: Transylvania.

We need to start, as we often do, with setting up the bad guy. In Transylvania, around the town of Prejmer, the vampire king (Angus Scrimm) lives in peace and solitude. He possesses an artifact called the Bloodstone, which constantly drips the blood of the saints, meaning he doesn’t need to hunt and kill to survive. King Vladislav has two sons, Radu (Anders Hove) and Stefan (Michael Watson). Radu looks undead—long, skeletal fingers, fangs, unnaturally pale skin. Stefan looks human and poses as a researcher studying nocturnal animals. Desiring the Bloodstone, Radu murders his father, and in the process creates a quartet of little demon-like creatures to do his bidding.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Last Man on Earth

Film: The Last Man on Earth
Format: Streaming video from FreeVee on Fire!

Richard Matheson’s “I am Legend” has been adapted to film three times. The latest time was called I am Legend and was a massive blockbuster featuring Will Smith. Before that was The Omega Man with Charlton Heston. The first version was The Last Man on Earth from 1964, featuring Vincent Price. In my opinion, the adaptations have gotten steadily worse; The Last Man on Earth is not only the best of the three adaptations, it’s in many ways the one most loyal to the novel, in no small part because the screenplay was co-written by Matheson himself, even if he was disappointed enough in the result to asked to be listed under a different name.

In 1968, Robert Morgan (Vincent Price) lives by himself in the ruins of a city devastated by a terrible plague. We learn through a series of extended flashbacks that Morgan was a scientist working on finding a cure for a bacterial plague that has wiped out the planet’s population. However, he is not entirely alone, as it were. Those who have died of the plague have returned, and while physically and mentally weak, the bear all of the other classic hallmarks of vampires. They avoid their own reflection in mirrors, are repelled by garlic, and heal from wounds quickly, forcing Morgan to kill them by staking them. Because there are things that need to be discussed in detail, consider the rest of this under a spoiler warning—this movie is 60 years old, but that doesn’t change the fact that you may not want it spoiled.

Ten Days of Terror!: Billy the Kid vs. Dracula

Film: Billy the Kid vs. Dracula
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

When I started this blog at the end of 2009 (Jeez…2009!), I knew I would be going to some places that were going to move me out of my comfort zone. I would watch directors I’d never heard of, movies that took me places I hadn’t conceived of, and would see sights that would stick with me for good or ill. But of all of the places I have gone with this project, I could not have foreseen something as singularly bizarre as Billy the Kid vs. Dracula.

The title of this one doesn’t contain any secrets. We’re literally going to see William H. Bonney, aka Billy the Kid (Chuck Courtney) facing off against Count Dracula (John Carradine) in the Wild West. Dracula is going cross-country for some reason, and it’s not explained. Honestly, that’s probably for the best. It doesn’t matter how Dracula crossed the Atlantic or why he, a creature who depends on a population to feed on and protection from daylight, is crossing a huge wilderness thinly inhabited by settlers and otherwise populated by an almost certainly hostile native population. It also doesn’t really explain how he manages to travel by night when the average stagecoach traveled through the day. These are things better left unexplored, honestly.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Brainiac

Film: The Brainiac (El Baron del Terror)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

One of the great horror movies of the 1960s is Mario Bava’s Black Sunday. In the opening sequence, a woman is accused of worshipping Satan, which she freely admits to doing. She suffers a terrible punishment (including having a spiked masked hammered onto her face), but before she dies, she swears she will return and revenge herself on the descendants of those who are sentencing her to death. I bring this up because this is pretty much the same plot as The Brainiac (or El Baron del Terror if you want the original Spanish).

In the opening sequence of The Brainiac, Baron Vitelius d’Estera (Abel Salazar) is accused of a host of crimes by the Mexican branch of the Inquisition. As he is about to be burned at the stake, he vows to return when the (extremely fake-looking) comet that is overhead returns, in 300 years. Since all of this takes place in 1661, you can guess that the Baron is coming back in 1961, essentially the film’s present day. And, because this is aping Black Sunday, the Baron has vowed to wipe out the lineages of all of his accusers.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Virgin Spring

Film: The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan)
Format: DVD from DeKalb Public Library on Kid #1’s TV.

For those who are movie snobs, certain genres lie at the shallow end of the swimming pool. Comedies, especially rom-coms, are a good example of this. Another is horror. Horror movies don’t get a lot of respect from the clove cigarette crowd, with a few exceptions. Show them a classic American low-budget grindhouse film like The Last House on the Left and they are likely to turn up their nose. However, if you present essentially the same story in black-and-white and have it directed by Ingmar Bergman, and we’re talking about a Criterion Collection mainstay, The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan).

This is not a film that goes long on plot, but it doesn’t have to. It’s about the drama and terrible nature of the events that happen in its 90-minute running time. Young Karin (Birgitta Pettersson) is sent by her parents Märeta (Birgitta Valberg) and Töre (Max von Sydow) to take candles to the local church. Karin is pampered, in contrast to her half-sister Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom).

Ten Days of Terror!: Mill of the Stone Women

Film: Mill of the Stone Women (Il mulino delle donne di pietra)
Format: Streaming video from Plex on Fire!

I tend not to love Italian horror, since a great deal of it is frequently incomprehensible to me, at least in terms of plot. That’s different for the older Italian horror, though, and a movie like Mill of the Stone Women (Il mulino delle donne di pietra) is a case of an Italian filmmaker doing something in the more Gothic style. Gothic horror is always a lot of fun. It’s overblown and weird and dramatic to a fault. It also has great costuming and sets and is gorgeous to look at. That’s certainly the case here.

I thought, for a very long time, that the name of this movie was Mill of the Stone Woman, meaning a singular gorgon-like creature. It’s not, though. The reference is to a collection of moving statues held in an old windmill. Hans van Arnhim (Pierre Brice), heads to a remote Dutch island to do research on a story about the mill in question. Once an actual grain mill, it has been turned into an art installation by a sculptor named Gregorious Wahl (Herbert A.E. Bohme). The machinery of the mill now acts as a carousel, displaying the sculptures.

Ten Days of Terror!: Anatomy

Film: Anatomy(Anatomie)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi on Fire!

There’s something inherently disturbing to me about secret societies. Anything that is shrouded in that kind of deliberate mystery is something that gets my hackles up. Add in the idea of medical malfeasance and the exploration into the world of forbidden research, and you’ve got something that is almost certainly going to be something I find disturbing. That’s where we’re going with Anatomy (Anatomie in the original German). I often find medical things difficult to watch. Once I started this up, I knew it was going to be something of a rough ride for me.

Paula Henning (Franka Potente) is a medical student with a long pedigree—her father is a doctor and her grandfather had a long tenure as a medical professor. She is accepted to a prestigious summer course at the University of Heidelberg where her grandfather taught. On the train there, she saves the life of a young man named David (Arndt Schwering-Sohnrey), who claims to have a serious heart condition. A few days later, David shows up on one of the slabs in Paula’s class.

Ten Days of Terror!: The House by the Cemetery

Film: The House by the Cemetery( Quella Villa Accanto al Cimitero)
Format: Streaming video from AMC on Fire!

I’ve made no secret of how I approach Italian horror films on this blog. While there are some true standouts like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, I remain convinced that the majority of Italian horror films come about because the director envisions a particular scene or a couple of scenes and then plans the movie around getting those scenes on camera. Because of this, there are often bizarre plot holes or things that happens specifically because of the need to get to those key scenes. Suspiria is a great example of this. There’s some of that in The House by the Cemetery (or Quella Villa Accanto al Cimitero if you prefer the Italian), but for once, it feels like this might have actually started with at least an elevator pitch of a plot.

We open with the sort of classic slasher movie opening. We have a young woman (Daniela Doria) looking for her boyfriend in a house. She finds him dead and then is quickly dispatched herself. This is the house by the cemetery that is going to be the focus of much of the rest of the film. We switch to New York where we meet the main human characters of the film. These are Norman and Lucy Boyle (Paolo Malco and Catriona MacColl) and their son Bob (Giovanni Frezza), who makes a strong case for the most annoying child in any movie. It’s not so much the kid as the dubbed voice, which can cut glass.

Ten Days of Terror!: Coming to a Theater Near You!

Typically, I have about 40 reviews ready to go for the days up to and including Halloween. This puts me in the position of having to cobble together “groups” of movies for themed days. This year, I had more than 40, so I had a little more leeway in creating those groups.

As with past Octobers, I will be posting 40 reviews over the next ten days, starting tomorrow morning at 1:00 AM. Reviews will post automatically at 1:00 and 7:00, both AM and PM through Halloween. Here's what’s coming over the next week and a half.

Watching While the Planet Burns

Film: The Last Winter
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

For the last few years, I’ve been on my local environmental commission, doing what little I can to at least try to make my farm town more environmentally aware (I had to leave in February for personal reasons). It’s always an uphill battle, especially when monetary issues are placed above environmental ones—and with a few massive corporations adding warehouses and facilities in the area, this has happened a lot lately. Personal issues are forcing me to step back for a time, but the concern is still there. We’re going to start seeing this more and more in our media—the environmental concern I mean. The future of horror is climate horror, and films like The Last Winter are the start of this. The fact that this is almost 20 years old and things have only gotten worse is concerning.

There are a lot of places where a horror movie focused on climate catastrophe could take place. Putting this in an oil drilling camp in Alaska is one of those obvious places. Our oil drilling team from a fictional company called North is looking to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and needs to build ice roads to bring in the equipment. The problem is that the permafrost is melting and they don’t have enough of a sustained freeze to get the roads built. The camp is facing a great deal of stress because of this. The leader of the expedition, Ed Pollack (Ron Perlman) is obviously pro-drilling, and butts heads with the required environmentalist, James Hoffman (James LeGros). Further complicating things are that Ed’s previous sexual partner Abby Sellers (Connie Britton) has taken up with James during Ed’s absence from the camp.

More Style, Less Substance

Film: Beyond the Black Rainbow
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

I am not by nature a contrarian. I do sometime take a contrary position on movies, though. Sometimes, that’s liking a movie that most people don’t like--Soldier, Pootie Tang, and Kung Pow are good examples of this. And, of course, there are films that are highly acclaimed that I don’t like. Under the Skin and The Killing of a Sacred Deer are examples that come to mind. To that list we’re going to add Beyond the Black Rainbow, a film that most people seem to like, and I can’t figure out why.

I’d love to do my normal here and give you a blow-by-blow discussion of what happens in the film, but not a great deal happens in this film. Ultimately, my problem with Beyond the Black Rainbow is that virtually nothing happens in it. This is a movie that has a massive synopsis on Wikipedia but could genuinely be summed up in a couple of sentences. A researcher driven insane by an experiment imprisons a young psychic who he becomes obsessed with while she does her best to escape her imprisonment. There, I did it in one.

Where Exactly is "Beyond Space"?

Film: It! The Terror from Beyond Space
Format: Streaming video from Pluto TV on Fire!

I genuinely love 1950s science fiction in general, and space-based science fiction far more. It believed in us, and had hopes and dreams for humanity. In It! The Terror from Beyond Space, we have successfully landed a team on Mars in 1973. In reality, of course, we haven’t been back to the moon in about half a century and Mars is still a pipe dream. Movies like this, though, just knew that we’d be living in a scientific society and that we would be exploring the cosmos and encountering the weird, strange, and deadly.

When the movie begins, a nuclear-powered spaceship lifts off from Mars, headed back toward Earth. On board is the crew, naturally, as well as Edward Carruthers (Marshall Thompson), the lone survivor of the first manned trip to Mars. Carruthers is suspected of murdering the other nine members of his crew. After all, he had no way of knowing that a rescue was coming. With 10 people, there was only one year’s worth of food. With just one, he’d be able to survive a decade.

Airbnb Has Gone Downhill

Film: The Haunting (1999)
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

From a creative perspective, I fully understand the desire for someone to want to remake a story that they like and know well. Over and over, though, great films are frequently remade badly. Consider, for instance how few American remakes of Japanese horror movies are actually worth watching. The Ring, surely, possibly The Grudge, and maybe a few others, but most of them are trash. There’s a reason that every now and then, a meme will surface about remaking terrible movies with good plots to give them another chance. Sadly, with the 1999 remake of The Haunting, we’re instead getting a shabby retelling of a classic story.

Unfortunately for this film, it’s competing against two masterpieces. The original filmed version of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House is an amazing horror film, terrifying in places and surprising because it is rated G. Today, this is also competing with the made-for-NetFlix miniseries that is arguably the best horror-themed short-form series ever made, and at least in the conversation. I’m not going to bury the lede—in comparison, this is a cheap knock-off.

Change, Changing Places

Film: You Are Not My Mother
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla on Fire!

There is a long tradition of the changeling child in folklore. A young child suddenly “changes,” and it’s attributed to the actual child being spirited away by the fae or by some other supernatural creature and replaced with something that looks like the child but is clearly different. It’s actually pretty good evidence that there were autistic people a thousand years ago. It’s also a particular trope in folklore that has been sadly underused in movies. The closest we have is something like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which is the alien invasion version of a changeling story. You Are Not My Mother is a film that dives head-first into the idea of a changeling child, and does so with good effect.

The film opens with us watching Rita Delaney (Ingrid Craigie) taking her infant granddaughter to the forest and placing the baby on the ground. She lights a ring of fire around the baby, and the film cuts just as we start to hear the baby crying. I promise, despite what it looks like, the baby is not lit on fire.

In Russia, Victim Murders You

Film: Botched
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

A lot of horror movies have given us protagonists who are criminals, either intentionally or forced to be so as the premise. Crime movies are a pretty easy sell in general, as are horror movies, so it makes sense to combine them. The entire premise of a crime/horror movie is that the criminals end up trying to commit a crime in a place that is cursed or haunted or against someone who is worse than they are. From The People Under the Stairs to this year’s Abigail, a criminal plot is an easy transition to horror. And so we have Botched.

Richie (Stephen Dorff) is a thief working for Mr. Groznyi (Sean Pertwee), a Russian mob boss. Richie works for him because Groznyi smuggled Richie into the U.S. years before, which means that Richie is in his debt. The film opens with a diamond heist that goes well until a freak car accident followed by another one causes Richie to lose the diamonds. Now, with nothing to show for his work, Richie needs to pull off a new heist to repay his boss.

What I've Caught Up With, September 2024 Part 2

On the television front, I finished White Collar near the end of September, and thoroughly enjoyed it. I'm hopeful that the rumors of a White Collar reboot are true, and that as many of the original cast will return. I also finished Arrested Development, and let me tell you, the last season or two is a slog to get through. I also watched His Dark Materials, which I liked pretty well. Finishing White Collar opened up a spot for new workout show, which I filled temporarily with the Korean zombie series All of Us are Dead, but I finished that on Friday, so once again, I need a new workout show.

What I've Caught Up With, September 2024 Part 1

I spent more than a week sitting on my daughter's couch, grading papers and watching her dog while she and her fiancé were at a destination wedding. That being the case, despite it being finals week for me, I actually watched a few more movies than normal for that part of the month. There was a lot of good in September, and while there were a couple that I ended up not being too fond of, there were several that I enjoyed quite a bit, and may well end up in the regular rotation. More tomorrow.

Want to Know How I Got These Scars?

Film: The Man Who Laughs
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

There are a few truly iconic comic book characters. One of those is Bat-Man. Of the Caped Crusader’s vast and colorful rogue’s gallery, his most infamous and deadly opponent is the Joker. Anyone with even a little knowledge of comic book history can tell you that the Joker was based, at least visually, on Gwynplaine, the hero of The Man Who Laughs, a novel by Victor Hugo and one of the most influential silent films ever made.

In the late 18th century, near the end of the reign of King James II (Sam DeGrasse), the king is informed by his evil jester Barkliphedro (Brandon Hurst) about the capture of Lord Clancharlie (Conrad Veidt), who refused to kiss his ring. Clancharlie has returned for his son, and is informed that his son has been given to Hardquanonne (George Siegmann), who has carved a permanent smile on the boy’s face. Clancharlie is executed, and to get rid of the boy, the king orders all of the “Comprachios,” people of folklore who cripple children as a way to create circus performers, ordered out of England. They leave, but the boy, Gwynplaine (Julius Molnar as a child, then Conrad Veidt as an adult), is left behind.

The Title is the Best Part

Film: The Blood-Spattered Bride (La novia ensangrentada)
Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!

One of these days, I need to finish the Karnstein Trilogy from Hammer Studios. I’ve seen the first two movies, The Vampire Lovers and Lust for a Vampire, but I’ve yet to finish the story. I was reminded of this when I watched The Blood-Spattered Bride (or La novia ensangrentada) today. It didn’t specifically feel like the same story until, in an old family estate, our characters find a portrait of a woman named Mircalla Karnestein.

The reason for this is that both the Karnstein Trilogy and The Blood-Spattered Bride are based on the novella Carmilla, written by Irish author Sheridan le Fanu about 25 years before Bram Stoker wrote Dracula. These are not unique in finding Carmilla to be influential in their story telling—aside from Dracula itself, it is by far the most referenced vampire work around, having some impact on films like Dreyer’s Vampyr, on Dracula’s Daughter, Blood and Roses, Crypt of the Vampire, Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust and others, and that’s just looking at film.