Ten Days of Terror!: Fiend Without a Face

Film: Fiend Without a Face
Format: Internet video on the new internet machine.

The Criterion Collection is odd sometimes. There are plenty of movies that are a part of the collection because they are weird, obscure art films that tend to be fawned over by the beret and clove cigarette crowd. And then you get Fiend Without a Face, a strange little science fiction movie that could have easily been an MST3K film in different directorial hands. This film is loaded with dumb science and magic technology words about radiation, and also features free-range brains with attached spinal cords and eyestalks, so there’s that, too. I mean, I get why this is generally looked at positively, but it’s still weird as all hell.

We’re spending our time in this film in Manitoba around an American air force base put in place more or less to protect Canada and the U.S. from Russian attacks from over the pole. Quite suddenly, there is a rash of deaths in the surrounding countryside. The people in the area naturally blame the radiation coming from the nuclear power plant at the military base. Autopsies on the victims, though, indicate something very different is afoot. The victims all have a pair of holes at the base of their necks. More disturbing, their brains are missing, as are their spinal cords.

Ten Days of Terror!: Night of the Lepus

Film: Night of the Lepus
Format: Streaming video from Hulu Plus on the new internet machine.

There is a particular odd little subgenre of horror movies that involves taking small critters and making them giant and dangerous. This isn’t The Meg or Jaws, mind you. Sharks are plenty scary already, and making them bigger just makes them more of a threat. No, I’m talking about movies like Tarantula, Them! or The Deadly Mantis, where something small(ish) is suddenly made gigantic, and thus a threat. Within this subgenre, there exists a further collection of films where the critters in question are ones that aren’t even slightly threatening. Frogs or Black Sheep are good examples of this, but The Killer Shrews is maybe the most classic, that is, until you remember the existence of Night of the Lepus.

Our monsters in this case are giant rabbits, lagomorphs in the 100-150 pound range, human-sized, blood-thirsty bunnies that rampage across the Arizona desert. But clearly, I’m getting ahead of myself here. The source of the massive stampede of rabbits (technically, lepus is the Latin name for “hare”) is important here.

Ten Days of Terror!: Thirst (Bakjwi)

Film: Thirst (Bakjwi)
Format: DVD from personal collection on basement television.

There are some myths that I think are endlessly mutable into something new while retaining a sense of the old. The Frankenstein story, for instance, has been reformulated and recrafted hundreds of times into movies as diverse as Re-Animator, Splice, and Ex Machina. Vampire myths are pervasive as well in the sense that I think just about every culture has some type of vampire story, and these are in many ways just as varied. Because of that, it’s always fun to see a new take on the story. Thirst (or Bakjwi if you prefer the Korean) is rooted in the classic vampire story, but just as much a new take on that story.

The truth is that I like just about everything about Thirst. I love the fact that the vampirism is never really explained—it’s just something that happens. I like that it rather aggressively addresses the hypocrisy of religion (specifically Catholicism) at its core and in the practice of it. This is a smart movie hiding in the guise of a supernatural thriller with erotic overtones. It’s a reminder of just how good Park Chan-wook is with great material, and this is great material.

Ten Days of Terror!: The Creature Walks Among Us

Film: The Creature Walks Among Us
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on The New Portable.

Evidently, there is something irresistible about creating a trilogy, so despite the lackluster second Creature from the Black Lagoon film, we’re going to be treated to a third, called The Creature Walks Among Us. Like the sequel, the only real connection here is going to be the Creature himself—we’ve got a whole new group of scientists and adventurers who want to capture the Creature, who managed to survive the ending of the previous movie and go hiding in the Everglades. Honestly, though, “The Creature from the Everglades” doesn’t have that same ring to it.

This time, our team of scientists is led by Dr. William Barton (Jeff Morrow), who we soon learn is mentally unstable. A part of his instability comes from the person of his wife, Marcia (Leigh Snowden). It’s clearly not a very happy marriage, in part because of his possessiveness and the fact that Marcia is very quickly the target of advances from the group’s guide, Jed Grant (Gregg Palmer).

Ten Days of Terror!: Revenge of the Creature

Films: Revenge of the Creature
Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on The New Portable.

There’s plenty of old-school horror in the original Universal monsters, but not a great deal that’s genuinely scary. What’s interesting is just how many of the monsters are, once you dig past the horror trappings, really tragic. The Gill Man, better known as the Creature from the Black Lagoon, is one such tragic monster. While much of his tragedy is the story, perhaps the bigger tragedy is that he never got a really good sequel. Revenge of the Creature is about as good as we’re going to get for him, the poor fishy bastard.

So what’s wrong with the sequel? Well, for starters, it stars John Agar, the square-jawed, mostly talentless version of an A-list actor in B-list movies. A lot of Agar films, including this one, wound up on Mystery Science Theater 3000. I have, in fact, seen the MST3K version of this film so many times that I remember particular quips from it. Still, it’s only fair to give this its honest due for this website.

Ten Days of Terror!: Phantom of the Paradise

Films: Phantom of the Paradise
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on various players.

There are times when you realize just how failed we are as a species. In the 1970s, we had a choice of rock operas with which we could have become collectively obsessed as a culture. Tommy might have been the choice of pinball had become a thing, even if Quadrophenia is clearly the better Who-based choice. Had we been an even more religious society, Jesus Christ Superstar might have been the one. But for off-the-wall entertainment value, the world collectively decided to fawn over The Rocky Horror Picture Show when we could have instead been going to midnight shows of Phantom of the Paradise.

At first blush, you figure you know what is going on here. It’s clearly going to be an updated version of The Phantom of the Opera, but with different songs and a different kind of theater. Truthfully, it kind of is that, but it’s so much more. It’s as much a version of Faust as it is anything else, and there are elements of The Picture of Dorian Gray here as well. Three classic horror tales for the price of one.

Ten Days of Terror!: Blacula

Film: Blacula
Format: IMDb TV on basement television.

There’s something special about exploitation movies of the 1970s regardless of exploitative genre. Blaxploitation films were such a natural outgrowth of the film industry and the rising realization that there was an African-American (Afro-American at the time) audience for films that showed them as the stars. Genre films beyond the crime film, action movie, and police film were natural extensions of this. Since there is a particularly odd strain of conservativism in horror films, co-opting the genre to show Black heroes was a natural choice. Of these films, Blacula is the granddaddy for a lot of reasons.

We start with Prince Mamuwalde (William Marshall), sent by the Abani nation to seek help from Count Dracula (Charles Macauley) in suppressing the slave trade. Mamuwalde and his wife Luva (Vonetta McGee) are instead attacked by Dracula, who both thinks that the slave trade has some benefit and, of course, is a vampire. Dracula turns Mamuwalde into a vampire for his impertinence and then locks him in a coffin, sealing both him and Luva in a room—Luva to die and Mamuwalde to suffer. Dracula also dubs Mamuwalde “Blacula,” giving us our title.