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Showing posts with label Horror. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Horror. Show all posts
Face of the Screaming Werewolf (1964)
Atom Age Vampire (1960)
How many times have excellent European films from the 1960's even up until the present been ruined by American distributors? Whether it's dubbing or the editing room, the European film industry has always been royally screwed by us. I think that this film and MANY MANY others have been horribly misrepresented and misunderstood. Unlike others, this film still looks good with horrible dubbing and when it's a badly edited mess. I absolutely love Susan Loret as the scarred beauty, she is the shining star of the production. The plot is very common in European films and is usually pulled off better, but the film does have potential, it just doesn't meet it. Anchor Bay, if you're reading, please consider obtaining a European UNCUT print of this, preferably subtitled so the dialogue can make a bit more sense. The cheap label ACME Video company offers the movie and the running time is marked as 105 minutes. This is doubtful, but the tape is usually only $10 anyway, so you might want to check it out.
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']]}The Thing from Another World (1951)
When most think of The Thing, they think of the 1982 masterpiece by John Carpenter. However, the original The Thing From Another World, though very different, is still a skilled exercise in suspense. A group of researchers near the North Pole uncover a crashed spacecraft, and take the body of the pilot back to their station in a block of ice. Unfortunately for them, the body is still very much alive, and breaks free of the ice, rampaging throughout the base with the desperate crew trying to stop it before it spreads to the outside world.
Unlike the Carpenter version and the story on which it was based, this alien is not the shapeshifting imitator that the story has become known for, instead portrayed as a more Frankenstein-like monster. While this is a major detriment to the film, it does manage to rise above this limitation and deliver a very tense and claustrophobic thriller. The monster is traced around the station using a geiger counter, a motif that eventually inspired the motion tracker in Aliens. The most frightening scene is when the characters all huddle up in a room, watching the needle go higher and higher until the monster eventually kicks down the door. This is one of the few cases where the original film is inferior, but this chilly chiller from 1951 still wins where it counts, and will keep you watching the skies.
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']]}Them! (1954)
Them! is one of the precursors to Godzilla, detailing one of cinema's first and best radioactive monsters. A mysterious rash of killings in Arizona has police baffled. After calling in some scientists, they uncover a massive colony of giant ants, mutated by years of exposure to radiation from bomb tests. As the beasts attack the town, two queens hatch in the nest and take to the skies. Now the heroes must find the queens before they form new colonies, and spread the new, deadly species of insect all over the world.
Them! may well be one of the most influential movies on this list, jumpstarting the radioactive monster rope, delivering the first ever 'big bug' movie in a genre that is still popular, and featured one of the first ever strong female leads in horror cinema. Its influences can be felt in many popular films, scenes of characters wandering through the massive ant colony looking suspiciously like the hive in Aliens. Them! may have an incredibly silly premise, but it delivers everything straight faced and with a prevailing sense of dread. The audience is given little relief in the way of budding romances common in 50s horror films. The characters know they haven't the time for love. With none of the niceties to distract us, we are along for the ride with the characters as they travel all over the country to find those two queens before all is lost.
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']]}What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
The intensely bitter Hollywood rivalry between the film's two stars, Davis and Crawford, was heavily important to the film's initial success.This in part led to the revitalization of the then-waning careers of the two stars. In the years after release, critics continued to acclaim the film for its psychologically driven black comedy, camp, and creation of the psycho-biddy subgenre.The film's then unheard of and controversial plot meant that it originally received an X rating in the UK.
Because of the appeal of the film's stars, Dave Itzkoff in The New York Times has identified it as being a "cult classic".In 2003 the character of Baby Jane Hudson was ranked No. 44 on the American Film Institute's list of the 50 Best Villains of American Cinema.
In 1917, "Baby Jane" Hudson is an adored yet ill-tempered vaudevillian child star while her older sister Blanche lives in her shadow. By 1935, their fortunes have reversed: Blanche is a successful film actress and Jane lives in obscurity, her films having failed. One night, Jane mocks Blanche at a party, prompting Blanche to run away in tears. That same night, Blanche is paralyzed from the waist down in a mysterious car accident that is unofficially blamed on Jane, who is found three days later in a drunken stupor.
In 1962 a wheelchair-bound Blanche (Joan Crawford) and Jane (Bette Davis) are living together in Blanche's mansion, purchased with Blanche's movie earnings. By now, Jane has descended into alcoholism and mental illness and treats Blanche with cruelty to punish her for stealing her spotlight. Later, when Blanche informs Jane she may be selling the house, Jane's mental health begins to deteriorate further. During an argument, she removes the telephone from Blanche's bedroom, cutting Blanche off from the outside world. Later, Jane begins denying Blanche food, until she serves Blanche her dead parakeet on a platter—and, at a later meal, a rat that she killed in the cellar.
Jane becomes obsessed with recapturing her childhood stardom and puts an advertisement in the paper for a pianist to accompany her singing, When Jane leaves the house, Blanche tries to get the attention of her neighbor, Mrs. Bates (Anna Lee), by writing a note pleading for help and throwing it out her bedroom window. Jane returns in time to notice the note and prevents Mrs. Bates from seeing it. When Jane reads the note, the two sisters quarrel again.
When Blanche's caretaker Elvira Stitt (Maidie Norman) comes to clean the house, Jane pays her and gives her the day off, but when Elvira returns later on, Jane abruptly fires her and sends her away. After Jane goes to the bank to get some cash, Elvira comes back and finds that Jane has locked Blanche in her room. When Jane returns, a neighbor tells her she saw Elvira go into the house. Jane confronts Elvira. Meanwhile, eccentric and cash-strapped Edwin Flagg (Victor Buono) sees Jane's newspaper advertisement and arrives at the mansion, where Jane hires him as her accompanist. Desperate for cash, Edwin insincerely flatters Jane and encourages her to revive her act. While Jane drives Edwin home, Blanche searches the house for food and discovers Jane has been forging her signature on checks. Desperate for help, Blanche crawls down the stairs and calls their doctor, telling him of Jane's erratic behavior and begging him to come to the house. Jane returns in time to find Blanche on the phone and beats her unconscious before imitating her voice over the phone and telling the doctor not to come. She then binds and gags Blanche and locks her back in her upstairs bedroom. Elvira, still suspicious of Jane, returns the next day and discovers Blanche in a weakened and starved state. Before she can rescue her, however, Jane beats Elvira to death with a hammer and disposes of her body.
Days later, the police call upon the Hudson house and tell Jane that her maid's cousin has reported her missing. The panicked Jane prepares to leave, taking Blanche with her. Before they can leave, Edwin shows up uninvited and drunk, and discovers Blanche in her bed, bound and emaciated. Edwin flees to a drugstore where he notifies the authorities.
Jane drives Blanche to the beach and reverts to her childhood self. Near death, Blanche confesses that her paralysis is her own fault: on the night of the accident, she had tried to run Jane over because she was angry at her sister for mocking her, and ever since she has let Jane believe she was to blame for her spine being severed when the car struck the iron gate of their house. Pathetically, Jane asks, "You mean all this time we could have been friends?" With childlike joy, Jane goes to a beachside snack bar to get ice-cream cones for herself and Blanche, then succumbs completely to her insanity and dances before a crowd of puzzled onlookers, believing she is once again "Baby Jane", performing for her adoring fans. Two police officers, who have come to arrest Jane for Elvira's murder, see Blanche lying motionless in the sand and rush to her.
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']]}Witchcraft (1964)
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']]}The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953)
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']]}Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959)
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']]}Awakening of the Beast (1970)
In the film's first portion, filmed in B&W, Dr. Sergio, a psychiatrist, appears on a television program on a panel with three other contemporary psychiatrists after he claims to have conducted experiments on four volunteer drug addicts with LSD in order to investigate his claim that sexual perversion is caused by use of illegal drugs. As evidence, he presents a series of documented accounts of drug use which led to lewd and bizarre sexual acts. Marins appears (as himself) on the panel with the psychiatrists as some type of expert on the subject of depravity. During the program, Dr. Sergio recounts the experiment to his colleagues on the panel, who reject his claims.
Dr. Sergio gathers the four volunteers, and after receiving an injection, the volunteers (four drug users seen in the previous segments) are instructed to stare at a movie poster of Marins' The Strange World of Coffin Joe. The film changes to color and each patient's experience is vividly portrayed in a series of surreal scenes.
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']]}Cat Girl (1957)
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']]}The Alligator People (1959)
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']]}The Four Skulls of Jonathan Drake (1959)
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']]}I Bury the Living (1958)
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']]}Voodoo Island (1957)
Carnivorous plants and zombies supply the chief menace for the principals in Voodoo Island... There's no attempt at explaining how various mysterious things happen in the script, but the thriller gimmicks come off with Reginald LeBorg's direction. Aubrey Schenck-Howard W. Koch production was lensed on Kauai Island, Hawaii, so backgrounds have a helpful freshness as the characters are put through plot perils. Karloff doesn't have to exert himself much to handle his standard character...Elisha Cook and Beverly Tyler hold up the supporting roles. None of the performances is more than stock.
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']]}Color Me Blood Red (1965)
You gets what you pays for with Herschell Gordon Lewis movies. If you are looking for a great, original plot with interesting characters, well acted and impressively directed, then don't look here. But if you want to see a silly Roger Corman rip-off with lots of unintentional cheap laughs, and plenty of HGL's trademark, then you're in the right place. 'Color Me Blood Red' is the last in Lewis' Blood Trilogy, and is the second best of the three in my opinion. ('Two Thousand Maniacs!' just beats it for sheer entertainment value). Don Joseph plays a tormented artist who discovers a way out of his artistic rut - blood, lots of it. Joseph's acting is variable at best, but possibly the best seen in a HGL movie, and he comes across as a corny, poor man's Timothy Carey. Which may not be much, but it's enough, and his performance stands out from the rest of the inept cast, especially the bizarrely unbeatnik beatnik teens (WHAT was that all about?!), and William Harris' stupid art critic character. 'Color Me Blood Red' is dumb, no doubt about that, but it's dumb FUN, and should be seen by every horror movie buff for its historical interest if nothing else.
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']]}Castle of Blood (1964)
Well executed old and very dark house horror. Good set-up which includes the character of Poe, himself, alluding to the story in a London pub. Although from here it is pretty much the one guy who has taken the dare to visit the house on a particular night running from room to room either looking for or avoiding people, it is still most enjoyable. Plus we have the delightful and enigmatic Barbara Steele. There is some wooden dialogue and some unexplained bits and bobs but it is the super creepy atmosphere that is maintained throughout, that and the super musical score that keep this one moving nicely along. DVD originates from US and has a few extras
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']]}Confessions of a Psycho Cat (1968)
Or, if you like King Kong, holy mackerel, whadda show! This movie is out of control, a great original idea, sick beyond belief and genuinely creepy (yet arousing) at times; the craziness of the whole shebang is heightened by the fact that some of the characters - not least Eileen Lord as Virginia - seem to be genuinely insane. Garrett is perhaps the craziest of the lot, just being himself, dancing around with his broomstick, doffing his top hat to all and sundry and generally munching away on anything that passes by in his time-honoured fashion.
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