Ten Days of Terror!: The Ghost Breakers

Films: The Ghost Breakers
Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

Bob Hope had a persona when it came to his film career. Typically, Hope played cowards who got thrown into dangerous situations and got out of them becomes of someone else’s work or dumb luck. In The Ghost Breakers, Hope plays someone who spends a lot of the movie scared, but manages to act bravely despite this. It’s a bit of a change. Unfortunately, not much else changes from Hope’s basic persona of cracking one-liners that frequently fall flat.

The Ghost Breakers is only marginally a horror movie, and the part that would be considered horror fare for its time doesn’t happen until the third act of the film. Up to that point, it’s a bit of a screwball comedy with some mob stuff thrown in. We start with two different stories. The first involves Mary Carter (Paulette Goddard), who has just inherited an allegedly haunted castle on a small island just off the coast of Cuba. Several people, including Parada (Paul Lukas) and Francisco Mederos (Anthony Quinn) attempt to warn her away from the castle, and Parada even offers to buy it for $50,000 (close to $900,000) while she’s still in New York.

Ten Days of Terror!: Images

Films: Images
Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

I often have issue with the films of Robert Altman. My biggest issue with him is that his movies are so sprawling that they involve massive casts of characters. It’s hard to keep track of everyone when Altman’s typical film looks like it should be a miniseries. At his best, you get a film like M*A*S*H. At his worst (and yes, this is just my opinion), you get long, drawn-out boring films like Gosford Park that I literally never remember is actually a murder mystery until I see the poster. Images is very much a different thing, since the cast has literally only seven people in it; one of those seven is a voice on the phone and another is barely in the film. That, more than anything, got my interested in seeing the film.

Images is, for lack of a better way to explain it, an experience in schizophrenia through the eyes of the character having that psychotic break with reality. While there are a lot of films and stories to which this can be connected, the most obvious connection is Repulsion, to which this bears a great deal of similarity. It’s also worth noting that there is an odd correlation between the names of the actors and the characters in the film. Each of the five main people in the film has a character name that is the actual name of another member of the cast. That had to be planned, didn’t it?

Ten Days of Terror!: Devil

Films: Devil
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on laptop.

Long, deep, lingering sigh. I’d love to go off on a long rant about the films of M. Night Shyamalan here, and there’s certainly plenty of material. I can’t forgive the guy for absolutely ruining The Last Airbender, producing one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen from some of the best source material ever created. No, no, the temptation is strong here, but I will resist. Instead, I went into Devil with as much of an open mind as I could, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t end up once again dubbing its director “M. Night Shame-about-your-last-film” (and thank you Mark Kermode for that name). To be fair, though, he didn’t actually direct this or even write the screenplay. He did, however, write the story on which the movie is based.

Devil is a high concept film. Five people are trapped in an elevator, and we soon figure out that all five of them are actually terrible people who clearly deserve some form of divine punishment. Fortunately for us, one of those five people in the elevator also happens to be the literal devil incarnate (hence the title of the film), who stops the elevator, causes all sorts of technical problems, and starts killing off the elevator occupants one by one.

Ten Days of Terror!: The War of the Words (1953)

Films: The War of the Worlds (1953)
Format: DVD from Northern Illinois University Founders Memorial Library on laptop.

There’s a few things you need to know going into the 1953 The War of the Worlds and my relationship with it. The first is that I know and love the Wells story it’s based on, and I think the Orson Welles radio version is one of the greatest pranks of the last 100 years. Second, it’s important to note that one of the main characters is named Dr. Clayton Forrester. If you understand why that is important, you understand why it’s kind of hard to watch this without a smile every time he says something all science-y.

If you don’t already know, the basic story here is that Earth gets invaded by creatures from Mars that show up initially in ships disguised as meteors. After the ships cool down, three smaller ships emerge from each one and start laying waste to everything with heat rays that can only be described as being the height of 1950s special effects. The intrepid humans do their best to fight back as best they can, learning that the alien machines are impervious to everything, and leaving the humans with no recourse but to find another way to battle the menace.

Ten Days of Terror: The Cell

Films: The Cell
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on laptop.

To accept The Cell, you need to make a few giant leaps to have it make even a little sense. First, you have to go with the idea that inside everyone’s head is a literal surreal landscape where there are versions of us that walk around through rooms. Actually, that’s not a huge leap, since it’s an idea that has been presented in movies dealing with the subconscious before this one. A bigger leap is accepting Jennifer Lopez as an experienced child psychologist working on a high-tech experimental program. The biggest leap is accepting Vince Vaughn as a serious actor.

What we have is an experimental facility being funded by a very wealthy couple for the benefit of their son, who is comatose with a rare virus. Essentially, a psychologist named Catherine Deane (our very own Jenny from the block) puts on a weird contraption, and the kid is put into the same thing, and she enters into the kid’s subconscious mind. His mind is a weird Arabian dreamscape thing, and the kid sometimes turns into a monster.

Ten Days of Terror!: Spider Baby

Films: Spider Baby (The Maddest Story Ever Told)
Format: Internet video on laptop.

Spider Baby, also known as both The Maddest Story Ever Told or Spider Baby or, the Maddest Story Ever Told is a movie that is just a couple of months younger than I am in terms of its release date. In truth, that’s just the tip of the iceberg in terms of names for this thing. It was also billed as The Liver Eaters, Attack of the Liver Eaters, and Cannibal Orgy. Based on those names, you can pretty much gauge where we’re going here, right?

What’s most interesting to me about Spider Baby isn’t what happens on the screen, the presence of Lon Chaney Jr. in one of his last appearances, or the presence of a very young (and beardless) Sid Haig, but the obvious influence this weird little film had on horror that followed. You can draw a straight line between this and the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre within the first couple of minutes of the start. You can also connect it to The Hills Have Eyes, and not just because the young Sid Haig looks a little bit like Michael Berryman.

Ten Days of Terror!: House on Haunted Hill (1999)

Film: House on Haunted Hill (1999)
Format: DVD from Manteno Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop.

I tend to be leery of remakes. There are plenty of remakes that are good, of course. The John Carpenter version of The Thing, for instance, or The Fly. Even The Maltese Falcon is the third version of that story brought to the screen. However, more often than not, remakes are worse than the original version. I was doubly nervous when it came to the remake of House on Haunted Hill. That trepidation can be summed up in two words: Chris Kattan. I stand by my opinion that no movie featuring Chris Kattan or Rob Schneider can be any good. That this is actually Kattan’s best performance doesn’t say much, but actually does work slightly in the film’s favor.

The basic set up here is kind of the same. We have a rich couple, in this case Steven (Geoffrey Rush) and Evelyn Price (Famke Janssen). As in the original film, these two are married, but just barely in the sense that they actively hate each other, but for some reason are not divorced. It’s a running gag between them that they’d like to kill each other. As an added bonus this time, Steven Price, rather than being randomly rich, runs a group of fear-based amusement parks.