Here is the first film in this series that does not reside in my movie library. Sunday night as dinner was becoming close to ready my sweetie-wife suggested that she wanted to watch a horror with me that evening and in the end suggested we watch Thirst. Well, it was available to us via Shudder and it’s Amazon add-on (Part of a 7 day free trial – you gotta love those) and so soon I had it queued up on the Xbox 360.

Thirst comes to us by way of Australia’s exploitative movie cycle of the 1970’s and 1980s. The same period that gave us Mad Max and Razorback. An unusual entry into the vampire mythos Thirst reminded me  in one part of The Hunger and in another way of the Australian film Daybreakers.

Thirst about a secret society of vampires living and thriving in our global community. What sets this masquerade story apart from many others is that these vampires are wholly without a supernatural aspect. They are people who discovered centuries ago that health and life can be obtained by drinking healthy blood. The secret society has established farm where blood-cows (that’s you, me, and the rest of humanity) are raised and cared for to provide a clean product. The plot of the film is the discovery of the descendent from one of the founding noble families. For reasons never truly explained the society is hell-bent on bring this lost lamb back into their fold. What follows is a story of psychological torture and a contest of wills.

Thirst was interesting but on a sort of watch it one time sort of manner. My sweetie-wife had seen the film many years ago and this time around found it dull and boring. As with all things artistic your mileage may vary. I do not regret the 90 minutes watching this unusual film.

Okay, I’ll fess up that this one is a bit of a cheat, but only a bit. Last night I started watching a different film but working OT at the day-job apparently had hit me fairly solidly and before 10pm, and that’s early for me, I found myself unable to keep my eyes focused. So today I will write about a film I watched for the first time earlier this month.
In an earlier post I referred to Hammer Studios approach to horror films as being Bloodshed and Bosoms. This really kicked in with their production of The Curse of Frankenstein starring Peter Cushing as the immoral Frankenstein and Christopher Lee as the creature. Where Universal Studios avoided explicit images of body part and organs Hammer presented them full frame, widescreen, and in color. Ladies wore low cut dresses and the combination of the grotesque and the titillating proved to be box office gold.

Fast-forward to 1970 and the Hammer adaptation of the vampire story Carmilla. Like a drug addiction what shocked and titled last year produces a lesser effect this time around, so when we get over a decade into the cycle something more is needed to shock the box office.

The Vampire Lovers stars the incomparable Ingrid Pitt as Carmilla a vampire who plays the part of a young girl, she is supposed to be 16 or at least look like that but Pitt did not look like a teenager, whose plays upon the sympathies of others for shelter and protection, allowing her to hunt their young daughters as her victims. Being that this is 1970 and even on the other side of the Atlantic standards in film were rapidly changing. Hammer no longer happy with simply low cut gowns dives into nudity for titillation and a strong lesbian subtext for their shock value. Though honestly it’s not that deeply buried and it may be more accurate to call it text and not sub-text.

The film works overall and Pitt, thought hardly looking 16, delivers a nice performance as a vampire that more than a little conflicted. There are some variations on the vampire lore with new limitation and less super human abilities that make this film something more than simply a retelling of Dracula with the cast gender flipped.

This is a movie that my darling sweetie-wife had wanted to see for sometime, but it has rarely been available in the United States. Luckily there is a blu-ray release of the UK cut and it was less than $10, so I happily bought a copy so we could watch it together. The film is decent enough that I have no plans to see the disc used, but rather it will take its place in my library.

I remember seeing this film during its theatrical release. It was 1980 and I was in the USN stationed at Pensacola studying electronic warfare. (That didn’t really work out but that another and much longer story.) A female friend and I went to see the film at a theater near the base. When the film finished and the credit began to run, in addition to the black screen and white lettering, fog rolled on the screen. The then fog rolled off the screen, down to the floor and up the aisles. The theater had run fog lines behind the screen giving everyone an extra half -second of heart-stopping fear. I loved it.

The Fog is the horror film John Carpenter made to follow-up his success with the low budget and trend-setting movie Halloween. The story is set in the fictional California town of Antonio Bay just as the residents are about to celebrate the town centennial. On the eve of celebrations a ghost brig appears shrouded in a fog bank and ghastly figure slaughter fishermen aboard the small boat. Soon the town itself is threatened as the dark terrible secret of their founding is covered and the sins of the past propel a murderous present.

Unlike Halloween The Fog isn’t primarily about the kills, for an 80’s horror film the body count is actually rather low, but the movie works on a sense of dread and what can’t be seen. Personally I find that the sound effects and works in the film carry a great deal of the terror. The are moments of gruesome violence made terrible personal because you can’t see them but instead you hear the sounds and that is much more effective.

The Fog is at its heart a ghost story and I have already spoken about how much of a personal affinity of have for spook stories. This is a story that doesn’t have a lot of logic to it, but I think the illogic in some way works to the benefit. There are no Deus ex Machinas to create a crappy ending but rather a sense that the universe doesn’t have clearly defined rules and that is truly terrifying.

In 2005 Hollywood released a remake with none of the story telling or style of the original. Skip that one, but this one is a good movie to watch alone in the night when the chilly air turns misty.

I hope I can watch another film tonight, but the day job has pulled into overtime mode and sleep may win out.

Time was short last night and I needed to select a film quickly and with a brief running time so I went for Universal’s sequel to their hit film Dracula, Dracula’s Daughter.

Dracula’s Daughter opens where Dracula ended, Van Helsing in the ruins of Carfax Abbey having just finished driving a stake through the vampire’s heart when the scene is discovered by a pair of patrolling bobbies. Reinfield is dead on the floor with a broken neck – undoubtedly played by a fake Shemp – and Van Helsing confesses to the destroying Dracula. London is not so forward thinking as to accept the ‘he was a vampire’ defense and the good doctor is arrested for murder.

Van Helsin calls on an old student, Dr Garth to help him prove the truth. However before things can get really rolling Dracula’s corpse is stolen from police custody by a mysterious woman who cremates the remains while her man servant watches with a cynical expression.

The woman is the titular character, and like her father she is a vampire but she is an unwilling one and hopes to find a way out of her life of darkness, blood, and death. Soon there is another spate of blood draining deaths and the police are forced to accept that Van Helsing may not be as insane as his defense.

As a sequel this is a very odd duck. There is no trace of the original characters save for the already mentioned Van Helsing. Dracula makes no appearance and the story while continuing on from the previous events is truly its own beast. Dracula’s daughter is presented in an interesting and conflicting manner. She is like an addict, trapped by a need she cannot deny but one that also repulses here. She has her mostly faithful manservant Sandor but his loyalty comes from the promise of an eternal life and when Dr. Garth becomes the center of her attention Sandor’s loylaty is tested.

This is a short film, just over seventy minutes in running time, and very light on the mayhem. The production code had come into effect by 1936 and between the code and Universal’s owner still hesitant nature toward the gruesome this movie is very sparse of the horrific elements. For example we still are not shown a vampire climbing out of their casket, such an image was deemed too macabre by Carl Laemmle. Surprisingly though some subversive elements survive in the subtext including a fairly strong hint that Dracula’s daughter either likes the ladies or enjoys both sides of the street.

This is not a film you have to see, but I don;t regret seeing it twice in ten years or having it included in my DVD set.

Well, this did not go according to plan. The week before last I had seen an advert for a double feature of The Omen and its sequel Omen II. Now I own a Blu-ray of The Omen (not the sequel which is a seriously flawed film) but I have never seen it on the big screen. Last night I couldn’t find the showing I had read about. Bummed at my boned headed mistake – whatever it was – I informed my sweetie-wife that I would be home on Wednesday night and watched The Omen on Blu-ray.

This morning Facebook reminded me of the showing but since I don’t feel like watching it twice the same week so I’ll watch something on Wednesday.

The Omen is part of a cycle of Devil/Satanic films from the 70s. This particular subgenre of horror had quite a surge in popularity after the smashing success of The Exorcist and pretty much the subgenre didn’t run out of steam until the flood of slasher films in the late 70’s and early 80s.

Sturgeon’s law applies equally well to the devil movies with most being forgettable fair that merely grabbed tropes and clichés in an attempt to leap on the bandwagon, but the two that do stand out are worthy films, The Exorcist and The Omen.

The Exorcist stands on firmer theological grounds but The Omen, directed by Richard Donner who also gave us Superman: The Motion Picture, Ladyhawke, and Lethal Weapon, took what might have been a tired and overly violent movie and made a tight, taunt film that moves on character and the corrupting power of secrets.

The film is about the Thorne family, Robert Thorne a successful politician and close personal friend to the president, Katherine (Kathy) Thrones his supportive and loving wife, and their ‘son’ Damien.

The quotes are there for a reason, Kathy Thorne, while Robert was ambassador to Italy, gave birth to their first son but Robert is informed that the child died immediately. The priest at the hospital offered Robert a chance to turn the tragedy into something better. There was another baby whose mother died in childbirth, perhaps the Ambassador can take this child as his own? His wife need not know. Thorne unable to give his wife the devastating news chooses the lie and they present the baby to Kathy as her own. Everything that follows in the story is a direct consequence of Thorne’s action and his lies to support it.

Years later death stalks the Thornes, mysterious suicides, fantastically bizarre accidents, and the strange ravings of a dying priest propel the Ambassador on a quest to unravel the truth of what he agreed to that fateful morning of June 6 at 6 am.

This film was remade in 2006 but it performed poorly and when I tried to watch it on Blu-ray I stopped the movie before it finished. The truth of the matter is while the script is decent what elevated the original is the director and a superb cast. Gregory Peck as Ambassador Thorne brings considerable gravitas to the production creating an atmosphere making it is easier to believe the fantastic elements. Lee Remick takes a role that really has very little on the page and imbues it with an inner life that enhances the audience identification her tragic character. Rounding out the cast are fantastic character actors such as David Warner, Leo McKern, Billie Whitelaw, and Patrick Troughton.

This is a movie well worth seeing.

Last night I turned to psychological horror with 1941s The Body Snatcher, the first film directed by Robert Wise. This is not to confused the 1956 SF/Horror film Invasion of the Body Snatchers, a classic that has been remade too many time. This movie is based on a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson and it features Boris Karloff giving in my opinion his best screen performance.

Set in Edinburgh 1831, just before the Anatomy Acts stopped the scourge of grave-robbing to feed the needs of medical school, the story is about an idealistic you g medical student, Donald Fettes as he learns about the dark secrets of his mentor Doctor MacFarland and the mysterious, dangerous cab-man John Gray that supplies the school with corpses for its anatomy courses. The horror here lies in the evil that people do for their petty and selfish motives. Gray is propelled by more than mere money but rather a sense of humiliation and a thirst for dominance drives his evil and cruel actions. MacFarland is trapped by his own cowardice and in the end becomes as evil as Gray in his own futile search for freedom from a stained and scandalous history with the cab-man. There is a charming and optimistic sub-plot involving a young girl who was confined by a carriage accident to a wheel chair illuminating that not everything associated with brutal medical schools of the time is doomed to failure.

Clocking in at just an hour and eighteen minutes The Body Snatcher illustrates that a film can be packed with character, story, and theme without suffering from a bloated running time. Karloff as Gray gives a charming and evil performance as a man who can smile sweetly just as he murders you. He gives the character a real sense of life and depth. Gray is monstrous but he is not a monster; he is far too human for such simplistic explanations.

I bought this film about twenty years ago at a shop where I paid something like $8 for a used laserdisc. Having never seen the movie it was a gamble but one that paid off by giving me one of favorite films. It is available on DVD as a double feature with I Walked with a Zombie, another Val Lewton production, these films are part of RKO’s attempt at horror which produced the original Cat People, but I cannot recommend I walked with a Zombie thought it is a small price to pay to own such an film as The Body Snatcher.

Last night I turned the Young People in Peril (YPIP) subgenre for my horror selection. Now this subgenre has been with us for quite a while, really taking off in 1979 with Halloween, launching this and the slasher subgenres as the dominate horror form for decades. Only the Zombie and ‘Found Footage’ subgenres have really challenged the primacy if this format.

2012 saw the release of The Cabin in the Woods, a film that both respected and subverted the YPIP format. Co-written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard, minds that collective have brought to the big and small screens such properties as Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Cloverfield, The Martian, and Daredevil The Cabin in the Woods reflects their sense of humor and horror.

On one level the film displays all the classic tropes of the subgenre. Five college students leave for an weekend at a distant and isolated cabin deep within the forest. They comprise the classic character types found in the films, the athlete, the scholar, the whore, the jester, and the good girl. After ignoring warning signs that things are not what they appear they accidentally awaken an evil force that methodically and remorselessly hunts them down for savage brutal murder.

As you can see this is a  well worn story line and just from that bit it would be difficult to say exactly which film I watched. It might have been Cabin Fever, or the original Evil Dead or any number of YPIP franchises. Two things make this movie stand out from the others.

First; the young people are real characters with real personalities they defy the broad strokes of their position in the plot. The Athlete is smart and well read, the relationships between the characters display true friendship and depth of emotion, making the later brutal scenes that much more horrifying.

The second element I can not truly discuss without delving into serious spoiler territory. These elements are presented from the very first scene of the movie and when the threads combine it can be read in several different ways. Drew Goddard has said that his father worked in nuclear weapons manufacturing and that part of what he wanted to explore as a theme was the stress and lives of people who are tasked with a job that truly horrific and utterly necessary.

The script has the trademarked Joss Whedon sense of humor and with his deft skill he plays that humor in the front part of the story, because once the horror starts there is little room for jokes and japes. This is what many people who try to combine comedy and horror fail to understand. You can have both, but having them in the same scenes rarely works.

The Cabin in the Woods is a brutal, bloody, and horrifying story expertly crafted and executed. I had the good fortune of seeing it in the theaters and it is one of my favorites.

So I have watched a ghost story, a monster movie, and for this third in the series of indeterminate length I selected a giant monster flick. Of course the giant monster films divide into two broad categories: giant beasts & insects and Kaiju, started by the classic film Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Tarantula is part of that American tradition started by the movie Them! of giant animals, usually insects, terrorizing the north American southwest.

Generally I do not consider the giant bug movies to be actual horror films. Horror is a deeply personal emotion and to convey it in a story you generally need deeply drawn and identifiable characters, while  giant bug movies are more about spectacle and disaster. However I recognize that I am in a lone minority with this opinion and so monster films or all types will be open to the film series.

Tarantula, perhaps best immortalized by Richard O’Brien with the lyric “… Leo G. Carroll was over a barrel when Tarantula took to the hills...,”is not really the best of the big bug movies, though it is far from being the worst. The story is very simply, a pair of scientists working to prevent world-hunger by developing an artificial nutrient, accidentally create a giant tarantula that takes to the deserts of Arizona. In truth there isn’t a lot of giant spider in this movie. Most of the film concerns the local doctor, played by John Agar, trying to sniff out what the scientists are hiding when one turns up mysteriously dead and deformed. The super-sized spider only appears in the last act and when the authorities call in the military it is dispatched rather quickly. (Though you have to wonder what that town smells like after they burn the thing to death with Napalm. Suitable for all your pest control needs.)

The film is competently directed by Jack Arnold, who brought us the first two Creature from the Black Lagoon movies and a little know feature that has always had a fond spot in my heart simply due to it most unusual giant monster – The Monolith Monsters. Arnold brings in a few actors from his previous films, the afore mentioned John Agar, along with his second screen appearance in a genre film, albeit with his face covered by a fighter pilot’s oxygen mask, Clint Eastwood. The effects are credible and hold up decently considering budget and time. The biggest strike against this movie is the script. The protagonist does very little protagging and because of that the narrative has terribly weak momentum. Overall I can’t really recommend this movie except to complete your knowledge of classic films of this type from the 50s.

From Japan on one side of the globe to the United Kingdom on the other the second film in the Halloween festival comes to us from Hammer Studios, the people who made stars of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee while pioneering the bloodshed and bosoms style of horror films.

Short on both bloodshed and bosoms and written by Nigel Kneale, the man who also created the Quatermass stories, The Abominable Snowman follows an expedition to the Himalayan peaks as a small band of men search for proof of the Yeti’s existence. What might have been just another ‘chased by the monster’ story is instead in Kneale’s capable hands turned into a thoughtful character piece that explores some mighty big themes, including man’s place in the world. There are plenty of wonderful character moments in this film. The lhama’s careful verbal bombs as he sabotages the expedition without revealing the true depth of his own knowledge, the open conflict between Rollason a scientist and ‘Friend’ (we never learn if that was his true name) a con man looking reclaim his tarnished image, and other members of the expedition slowly snapping under the stress all come together very nicely.

The cast performs quite well, particularly Peter Cushing as the scientist John Rollason who is driven by the quest for knowledge and Forrest Tucker, best known to baby boomers as a comedic actor from television shows such as F Troop, turns in a very credible performance as Tom Friend, a man with too many secrets. The Abominable Snowman starts with the premise that the Yeti is a dying species, an evolutionary dead end but by the end  the story has turned that cliché on its head.

The film does suffer from the period in which it was produced. The staged mountain tops are clearly dressed sound stages and match up poorly with the location shooting from high in the European Alps. Being the 1950s the film also suffers from ‘yellow-face’ casting where European actors play Asian roles leaving only bit parts to be played by actors that match the ethnicity of their characters.

A lesser-known production of mighty Hammer Studios, my sweetie-wife obtained a copy of the film for me a few Christmases ago from an on-demand service. (Or it may have been for our anniversary which occurs the same week. And if you think a movie is a poor anniversary gift you don’t know me. Movies are ALWAYS a good gift.)

If older films with a more sedate pacing are you speed, this one is certainly worth a look.