As if Ripped from Today's Headlines

Film: Khartoum
Format: ThisTV Chicago on rockin’ flatscreen.

I wasn’t specifically in the mood for a massive military epic today, but I’m constantly fighting a battle against the amount of movies saved on the DVR. Khartoum is a long one, particularly with the addition of commercial breaks. It doesn’t help that I keep recording films that aren’t otherwise available on NetFlix. It’s not unlike struggling with one’s waistline.

It’s interesting to me that the heart of the plot seems like it could be taken from pretty much any month’s newspapers in the last decade. We are dealing here with a military uprising of Muslims under the leadership of a charismatic and religiously-fueled leader claiming to speak for the prophet. Despite the 50 years separating this film and the present day, much of it seems incredibly relevant.

Ten Days of Terror!: Dead of Night

Film: Dead of Night
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

As a horror fan, I’d heard of Dead of Night before today, but had never had an opportunity to see it. Looking at films of this vintage, it’s easy to talk about influence, and Dead of Night certainly has had a great deal of influence on horror movies in general and on horror anthologies in particular that have followed it. For all of its cinematic heft, Dead of Night is probably the only horror movie to ever advance science, however temporarily. The story goes that Fred Hoyle, Thomas Gold, and Hermann Bondi developed the Steady State idea of the universe as an alternative to the Big Bang model after seeing this film, and specifically due to the ultimate nature of the framing story presented here.

Like any anthology, we start with a framing story that pops in regularly between the stories of the film. There are five internal stories put together smartly—rising tension through the first three, a comedic spin on the fourth and then the hammer drop of scares in the fifth, only to wrap up the frame. Anthology films don’t always work because they don’t give their shorter tales enough room to breathe. Dead of Night solves this by putting most of its effort into both the frame and the fifth and scariest story. The first three tales are appetizers; the fourth is a palate cleanser, while the fifth and the frame are the main course.