Shivering Vampires

Leave a comment

When casting about on free movie streaming services, you occasionally stumble across something odd.  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that I’ve been favoriting vampire movies the last few months.  I’d not really heard about The Shiver of the Vampires, perhaps because it was a French movie, or perhaps because there are just so many vampire films out there.  Well, it had the desired monster in the title, and it was free (costing only a few commercials).  As might be expected for a European movie, there’s a bit of nudity involved.  A fair amount of that is appropriate for vampire films, it seems.  This one involves a newly married couple going to visit her cousins who live in a castle in the country.  These cousins are groovy vampire hunters, but unbeknownst to her, have become vampires themselves.

The young couple arrives to be told that the cousins have died, but they are welcome to stay.  Soon, the vampire that turned them shows up and begins visiting the bride.  The groom is slow to catch on that there are vampires involved, although he fairly quickly finds out that something’s the matter with his wife.  Then the cousins show up alive.  Well, technically, undead.  They don’t reveal themselves as vampires, but their cousin, the bride, is being turned as well.  The poor groom sees odd rituals being enacted, and a couple of familiars decide to help him destroy the vampires in the hopes of rescuing his wife.  Stakes, crucifixes, and sunlight are all effective against these vampires, but they don’t seem especially evil.  In fact, there’s a kind of self-loathing among them.  The ending isn’t exactly cheering.  

A little shy on depth of story, the film does feature an impressive castle and some strong seventies vibes.  Interestingly, the Wikipedia article on the movie refers to the familiars as “renfields.”  This term, derived from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, was one I’d never come across before.  Renfield’s Syndrome now seems to be preferred to Clinical Vampirism, although neither has much scientific standing.  “Familiar” is, of course, a term adapted from the witch craze of Early Modern Europe.  Vampires need a living helper since they are vulnerable in the daytime.  The director of Shiver, Jean Rollin, was known mostly for his vampire movies.  They’re not easily found, at least at this point, on streaming services.  Shiver has an arthouse film feel to it and it makes me curious about how vampires cross cultures, even if the results are a little odd.  

Fine Young

Leave a comment

Horror is getting harder and harder to define.  Maybe it’s because movies are venturing further and further into mixed genres.  The best genre I’ve seen suggested for Bones and All is “romance horror.”  It is a most unusual love story with a tinge of the supernatural to it.  Maren has an unusual problem.  She eats people.  This started when she was three and her father, when she turns 18, sets her out on her own.  Another “eater,” Sully, finds her by smell, teaching her that eaters can identify each other that way.  Sully begins to creep her out, so Maren heads west to try to discover her mother.  She sniffs out another eater, Lee.  Not sure he wants to get mixed up with another person with his issues, he nevertheless allows her to come along.  They travel from Kentucky, through Missouri and Iowa, to Minnesota.  Along the way other eaters find them, by smell.

In Minnesota, Maren finds her mother in an institution and learns that her mother was also an eater.  Eventually Lee confesses that his father was an eater.  Sully, who’s mentally unstable (for an eater) has been following Maren and decides he has to kill her for what she knows.  Lee rescues her, but is critically injured in the process and insists that Maren eat him.  Now, from that description you might think this is either a comedy or a film with horror score and stingers, but it’s neither.  It’s a straightforward romance, following two lovers with a unique problem.  Only it’s not as unique as all that since there seem to be quite a few cannibals around.  The theme, and the feeding scenes, are definitely horror.  But is this a horror movie?

Although Maren and Lee are moral people, and likable, they are the monsters in this film.  While they try not to kill, they are driven to eat other people and they do resort to violence to do so.  The signature accoutrement for horror are absent as the focus remains steadily on the building romantic relationship.  You want Maren and Lee to succeed because they’re nice people.  But they are monsters according to definition.  Often in horror serial killers and other humans may serve the monster role in the absence of supernatural, or preternatural creatures.  There’s an almost vampire-film feeling to this story (the heightened senses, and all that blood) but eaters aren’t constrained by daylight or crucifixes.  It’s the kind of movie that keeps asking the question “What am I?” and leaves the viewer to try to digest a definition. 

Littlefoot

Leave a comment

A film is an object.  Just like a book, a film exists and waits for someone to discover and promote it.  The vast majority of both don’t make the cut and exist in obscurity.  The Legend of Bigfoot by Ivan Marx is one of those obscure films.  I only knew of it because it was included in the DVD pack called “Beast Collection,” which I’ve already mentioned a time or two.  This set of movies is united by a few different themes which have little to do with one another.  The “Bigfoot Terror” disc includes Marx’s Legend although there’s no terror here and it presents itself as a documentary.    Interestingly, this movie actually had a theatrical release.  Of course, the mid-seventies were a high-water mark for Bigfoot interest in general, prior to the current phase.  Marx followed up his movie with a couple sequels and to his dying day claimed that his Bigfoot footage was authentic.

As far as the movie goes, it is just plain bad.  The wildlife footage, shot by Marx, is actually impressive a time or two.  Most critics dismiss his Bigfoot footage as a hoax, a view supported by the fact that the bona fide Bigfoot researchers he worked with eventually distanced themselves from him.  The movie is rambling and dull but intriguing at the same time.  It’s amazing, for example, that he was able to get this into theaters at all.  But what drove the producers of “Beast Collection” to include it, beyond it perhaps having been cheap and bit of filler on a disc claiming “approx. 5 hours of yeti scares”?  Well, it’s an object.  And it fits the theme of “yeti” but not really that of “Terror.”

There’s not a ton of information on Ivan Marx online.  IMDb has a mini-bio of him, noting the others who worked with him.  Even his wife, Peggy, who appears in the film, gets a little IMDb notice.  Such movies as this are hopeful artifacts.  Those of us who struggle against obscurity can take heart that, although probably a hoax, a movie that would otherwise likely have been forgotten made its way into a schlocky collection of horror movies to be purchased by the gullible and the hardcore.  As I mentioned in my post on Search for the Beast, I bought the collection to see Zontar: Thing from Venus, which, at the time, was available nowhere else.  I got what I wanted, and oh so much less.

and Seek

Leave a comment

I’m afraid there may be spoilers—but not for the ending—below.  Discussing this story will be difficult without giving some things away.  Kiersten White’s Hide has given us an imaginative world with masterful misdirection.  Fourteen people a bit down on their luck, and strangers to each other, are offered an opportunity to win $50,000.  They have to hide in an abandoned amusement park for a week where two of them will be caught each day and the last person remaining wins.  The novel mostly follows Mack, a woman whose father killed her family while she survived by hiding.  Not only does she have survivor’s guilt, but she’s been homeless and the shelter director thinks she’ll have a chance at winning the prize.  There is a lot of social commentary here, as well as a monster.  Okay, spoilers below.

The minotaur is a most useful monster.  The backstory here isn’t in Greece (well, the deep backstory is, but that is only played out partially here) but in Asterion.  No state is given for the town, and the contestants can’t be given that information.  They’re locked in the park, with supplies, but very little information.  Then the contest starts.  After a couple of days Mack and a couple others begin to suspect that something’s wrong.  Those who get caught while they’re hiding leave personal effects behind, and since they all need the money that seems unlikely.  Then their host stops coming, leaving the bewildered contestants on their own.  Mack and those she’s befriended come to understand that being “out” is really being eaten by the minotaur.  Well, they don’t realize it’s the minotaur.  The one who does gets eaten before he can tell.

In any case, this is a tense horror story based on a classic tale.  There is, of course, a rationale for the murderous behavior in a modern setting.  White keeps you waiting quite a while to learn what it is, and there are plenty of places where I thought I’d figured out how it’d end only to be proven wrong.  And she gives believable character sketches and explores the kinds of motivations that drive different people who find themselves needing an income.  (One of the characters was raised in a religious cult—bonus!)  Those who are poor aren’t always at fault, but those who are wealthy will do anything to preserve their excess.  We see that playing out in daily life, even as it’s being explored in fiction.  The minotaur isn’t always what we think it is.  And the more you think about its insidious origin story provided here, the scarier it becomes.

Non-Demon

Leave a comment

The psychological horror film The Neon Demon isn’t about a literal demon.  It’s a movie about rivalry between runway models in Los Angeles, but there isn’t a great deal of story.  And what story is told doesn’t really make sense.  Sixteen-year-old Jesse, who should probably technically be an orphan, has made her way to LA because all she has is her prettiness.  Some photos get to an agency that agrees to hire her.  The other young women become jealous of the attention Jesse receives.  Only one, Ruby, a make-up artist, befriends her.  The jealous models confront her, and the creepy hotel manager where she stays seems to prey on the women who are trying to break into the dream of the city of angels.  Jesse escapes to Ruby but Ruby’s interested in a sexual relationship that Jesse doesn’t want.  Ruby and two rival models kill Jesse and eat her.  This leads to the death of Ruby and one of the models.

Some of what I describe here is speculative since there are abstract, dream sequences thrown in and it’s not always clear what is going on.  I kept finding myself wondering if this was horror, as presented in the list where I found it.  The unrelenting male gaze could be considered horror for women, but the movie doesn’t take up that narrative.  There are a few male characters, and one of them actually seems to be a good guy, but the threat comes from the other women.  Reviews for the movie were deeply polarized.  Some declared it one of the best movies of the year (2016) while others gave it abysmal ratings.  At the box office it earned about half its budget back, and that budget was a respectful seven figures.

Horror is a difficult genre to define.  I keep coming back to the fact that it’s artificial.  The history of the term began with monster movies but eventually other films with dark themes were included.  Some have no monsters unless a human acting aberrantly counts (and some do count such as monsters).  Slashers have their serial killers and gothic tales have their haunted houses.  Well over seventy sub-genres of horror have been defined.  Casting about for freebies on the weekend leads to some that you just can’t pin down.  Neon Demon does, ultimately seem to fit the label, but many viewers will probably wonder exactly how.  Being out on your own can be frightening, and cannibalism is creepy, so I’ll go with that.

Institutionalized

Leave a comment

When movies set out to present a different period, a bit of historical research can go a long way.  Someone like Robert Eggers offers such verisimilitude that you feel like you were at the intended time.  Others are less successful.  The Institute claims to be based on true events, and, apparently human trafficking did take place at the Rosewood Institute for a number of years.  The movie, however, gets many period details wrong and suffers from a labyrinthian story.  Also, it is shot so dark that even with brightness at full it’s difficult to tell what’s happening much of the time.  So what are these allegedly true events?  Wealthy women are admitted to the fashionable institute to recover from mental stresses.  At least that’s why Isabella Porter is there.  Drugged by the fictional Aconite Society, she is trained to be impervious to pain, erase her identity, and believe she is fictional characters to act in plays.  A strange premise.

Her brother suspects something is wrong, but under the influence of wolf’s bane, Isabella kills him.  The women are repeatedly tortured and dehumanized, ultimately to be sold to the wealthiest elites of Baltimore as slaves.  The true part of the true events is quite slim, and it’s never explained why Isabella is trained to believe that she’s Young Goodman Brown, and paired off with another woman as his wife Faith.  Also, there are Satanists involved.  With all the stops pulled out, the whole begins to sound rather silly.  It’s unfortunate since there does seem to be the core of a good idea here.  It needs a little less rather than more.

If all the storylines came together into a coherent whole, there might’ve been some takeaway.  As it is, layers of a secret society cover other layers and when you get to the center there’s nothing there.  Movies about mental institutions are difficult to pull off well, particularly when they’re based on true stories.  While a wolf-bane drinking society of the uber-wealthy does sound plausible, it leaves unanswered why they want their female patients to act out stories when they could easily afford to attend plays with professional actors.  ’Tis difficult to fathom.  The satanic aspect is never really explained but again, I wouldn’t put it past the rich.  The acting is good, from what I could see of it, except for the institute’s doctors, all of whom were woodenly portrayed.  Perhaps this was intended to be a parable, or maybe a retelling of “Young Goodman Brown.”  There was a bit of Poe thrown in as well, so all was not completely wasted.

To Dracula, a Daughter

Leave a comment

Nosferatu, by F. W. Murnau, was deemed in copyright violation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and ordered destroyed.  Rights to the novel were properly purchased by Universal and the horror film proper was born.  Other studios wanted to get in on the action, so the rights to the story of the Count’s daughter were bought by MGM.  They then sold the rights to Universal so that the latter could produce a sequel to their earlier hit.  Dracula’s Daughter didn’t do as well as the original, but it kept the vampires coming.  Some years later, Son of Dracula came out, keeping it in the family.  Having watched Abigail, I had to go back to Dracula’s Daughter to remind myself of how the story went.  I recalled, from my previous watching, that it wasn’t exactly action-packed, but beyond that thoughts were hazy.

Picking up where Dracula left off, von Helsing (that’s not a typo) is arrested for staking a man.  Then a mysterious woman arrives and steals the body to destroy it in an attempt to rid herself of vampirism.  We see that just five years after Dracula the reluctant vampire was born.  Creating a scandal at the time, Dracula’s daughter also seemed to prefer females.  Apparently the script was rewritten several times to meet the approval of censors during the Code era.  The modern assessment is that this is based more on Sheridan Le Fanu’s Camilla rather than an excised chapter of Bram Stoker’s novel.  Since the world wasn’t ready for lesbian vampires in the thirties, she falls for Dr. Garth, a psychologist that she wants to live with her forever.  Kidnapping his secretary to Transylvania, she draws him to Castle Dracula.  Her jealous servant Sandor, however, shoots her with an arrow.  Von Helsing explains that any wooden shaft through the heart will do.

Already as early as Stoker, at least, Dracula had brides who were vampires.  It makes sense that there might be daughters and sons.  And studios, learning that people would pay to watch vampires on the silver screen, were glad to keep the family dynamics rolling.  Vampires proved extremely popular with viewers—a fascination that has hardly slowed down since the horror genre first began.  Some of the more recent productions explore themes and approaches that simply wouldn’t have been possible in the early days of cinema.  We don’t see Dracula’s daughter actually biting victims—one of the many things the Production Code wouldn’t allow—and there’s no blood.  Nevertheless, the story itself went on to have children and they are still among us.

Imagine Monsters

Leave a comment

Adulthood is where you begin to recognize the folly of growing up.  Like most people, when I “matured” I was ashamed of things I made as a child and, regretfully, threw them away.  This came back to me recently as I was thinking of a sketchbook—actually a scrapbook that I repurposed in my tween years.  I love to draw.  I don’t do it as much now as I’d like (thanks, work!), but I was encouraged in it by art teachers throughout school who thought I had a little talent.  The sketchbook, however, was only ever shown to my brothers, but mostly only looked at by me.  This particular project was where I was making up monsters.  As with my writing, I’d never taken any drawing classes, but I had an active (some say overactive) imagination.  (That’s still true.)  

In any case, a discussion with my daughter brought back memories of this book I’d discarded by the time I went to college.  I still remember some members of the menagerie I’d concocted.  Even now that I’ve seen hundreds of monster movies, most of those I’d fabricated as a child have no peers that I’ve seen.  These weren’t monsters to be incorporated into stories—they were purely visual.  Although, I can say that my first attempted novel (probably around the age of 15) was about a monster.  I got away with being interested in monsters in high school, but college was a wholesale attempt to eradicate them.  Even so my best friend from my freshman year (who left after only a semester) and I made up a monster that lived in the library.

As an academic, until very recent years, monsters were off limits.  If you wanted to be sidelined (and in my case it turns out that it wouldn’t have mattered) you could explore such outré subjects.  Now it turns out that you can get mainstream media attention if you do (as a professor, but not, it seems, as an editor).  I’m sitting here looking back over half-a-century of inventing monsters, with a sizable gap in the middle.  The interest was always there, even as I strove to be a good undergrad, seminarian, and graduate student.  Now I can say openly that monsters make me happy.  I can also say, wistfully, that I’d been mature enough to keep that sketchbook that preserved a part of my young imagination.  It was tossed away along with the superhero cartoons I used to draw.  And the illustrations of favorite songs, before music videos were a thing.  Growing up is overrated. 

A surviving drawing, unfinished

Stop for a Bite

Leave a comment

Universal does monsters right.  I’m no movie maven but I don’t know why the whole Dark Universe thing didn’t work out.  These movies are good!  Abigail recently came to one of the streaming services I use and I watched it right away.  (There’s sometimes a delay between when I write about a movie and when it appears on this blog.)  There will necessarily be spoilers here.  I write this as someone who doesn’t watch trailers if I can help it, and who tries not to read about movies before watching them.  So be forewarned, if you are, by any chance, like me.  In case you’re bowing out now, this is a very good flick.

So, this is one of those spates of recent vampire movies where you go for quite a while before realizing it is a vampire film.  Set as a taut thriller, a group of six criminals who don’t know each other kidnap a twelve-year old ballerina.  She’s being held for ransom and the kidnappers have to keep her in the mansion for 24 hours, after which they each will receive their share of $50 million.  What they don’t know is that Abigail is a centuries-old vampire who likes to play with her food.  Suspecting they’ve been set up, the criminals speculate that the girl’s father has set his most vicious killer on them.  Modern, educated people, they don’t believe in vampires (there’s quite a bit of shading from Dusk Till Dawn in here) but they have to figure out how to defeat one.  Like Dusk Till Dawn, they ask themselves what they know about vampires, trying to come up with a plan to survive the night.  As you might expect, a bloodbath ensues.

If you’re the kind of person who reads about movies first, you’ll know, as I didn’t, that this was planned as a remake of Dracula’s Daughter.  It’s been so many years since I saw “the original” that I scarcely remember it.  (So you know what’s coming, eventually.)  I’ve watched many monster movies—like the books I’ve read, it’s so many that I lost count long ago.  Many of these films are pretty good.  And, of course, there are many I haven’t seen—that depends on money, time, and circumstance.  I do have to note, however, that coming up on the centenary of Universal monster movies, they haven’t lost their touch.  I have no idea what happened to their Dark Universe, but I do get the feeling they maybe gave up on the idea a little too soon.

Undead Again

Leave a comment

I had intended to see it in the theater, but holidays are family time.  And not everyone is a fan of horror.  Last night I finally did get to see Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu.  Eggers is a director I’ve been following from the beginning.  Here’s a guy who pays very close attention to historical detail.  No slips in letting modern language expressions creep in.  Costume and setting designs immaculate—nothing incongruous here.  I was surprised that he was taking an established tale that’s based on a technically illegal film from Bram Stoker’s Dracula as his starting point.  Still, I’m looking forward to Werwulf, probably about two years from now.  (And speaking personally, I’d love to see his take on Rasputin.)  In any case, Nosferatu.  I avoided trailers and online discussions because I wanted to come to it fresh.  He’s managed to make a disturbing story even more disturbing.

If you’re reading this you probably know the basic story.  F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu was in violation of copyright of Dracula, and so the basic story is similar.  Eggers manages to bring to the fore the vampire as sexual predator angle.  He prefers to bite chests and take long, slurping drinks.  I said it was disturbing.  And Orlok really looks the translation of the title, “undead.”   Even at over two hours Eggers has difficulty fitting in all the elements of the story.  And there are some unexpected aspects thrown in as well.  In my mind, I couldn’t help compare it to Werner Herzog’s remake.  Both are art-house treatments of Murnau’s work, which was itself German expressionism.  All three are memorable in their own way.

The one character I didn’t fully buy was Willem Dafoe’s von Franz (the van Helsing character).  This often seems a difficult one to cast.  In Bram Stoker’s Dracula Anthony Hopkins just doesn’t do it for me either.  It must be difficult to pull off eccentric but deadly serious.  The unsmiling obsessive.  That, to me, would be even more disturbing.  Ellen Hutter’s fits are amazingly done and there’s a menace to her melancholy that really works.  I’ve never seen Lily-Rose Depp in a film before, but she seems poised to become a believable scream queen.  I was exhausted after watching the movie after a long day at work (there’s a reason to see things in a theater over the holidays, I guess), but after a night of strange dreams, I awoke to find myself wanting to watch it again.  That’s the way Eggers has with films.  They reward multiple viewings.  And although this story’s familiar from the many versions of Dracula out there, it emphasizes some elements that have, up until now, often only lurked in the shadows.

Sounds Funny

Leave a comment

It may be the strangest vampire film ever.  Lifeforce not only postulates the origins of vampires as beings from space who come to suck humans dry of their souls, it also plays off of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, any number of zombie films, and Alien, all with a score by Henry Mancini.  Patrick Stewart is in it, but the plot makes very little sense.  Although it didn’t perform at the box office, it has become a cult film, and some parts of it are actually pretty good.  Directed by Tobe Hooper and partially written by Dan O’Bannon, there was some real talent involved.  Too bad it just can’t seem to hang together.  The main reason seems to be the story-line.  It’s based on a novel, but not all novels translate to film so well.

What’s interesting is that it attempts to provide an origin story for vampires.  When the crew of the Churchill initially discovers the alien ship, the creatures are bat-like.  This intends to explain why vampires are associated with bats.  Since these beings had come to earth long ago, their association with sucking people dry, and bats, led to the belief in vampires.  Of course, following the logic of the story, vampires should’ve nearly taken over the earth before since victims revive after two hours and victimize those nearest them.  Only one scientist in this future London can uncover a specific combination of metals that have to be used to stab a vampire in precisely the right location in order to kill it.  Meanwhile the souls of thousands of residents of London are being sucked up to the alien ship.

The score for the movie also rings a bit oddly.  Henry Mancini isn’t the first name to come to mind as a composer associated with horror movies.  Or science fiction.  Even G-rated 2001: A Space Odyssey knew that.  Perhaps we’re lulled into thinking nothing of it by big studio productions that make the soundtrack sound natural to the movie.  Like all of the elements of a film, however, they really have to work with all the other elements to make something spectacular.  Lifeforce had a large budget and nevertheless struggles.  Tobe Hooper had just come off of directing Poltergeist, which, although never one of my favorites, was a stronger and more lasting entry into the horror canon.  Maybe it’s that vampires and space just don’t mix.  Vampires are gothic monsters and that’s difficult to transfer to outer space with all its gadgetry.  That, and a score that’s difficult to take seriously.

The Power of

Leave a comment

One rare treat is rediscovering something that intrigued you as a young person, but which you’d completely forgot.  Living in a small town and seldom going to movie theaters, I had to have learned about Magic from television commercials.  I remember parts of the trailer, even down to particular phrases, but it was a movie I’d never seen.  I forgot about it.  That’s not to say that in the intervening decades I might not’ve relived that trailer in my head—I’m sure I did—but since I began binging on horror films a few years ago, it never occurred to me.  I remember it scared me as a kid because the trailer consisted of a monologue by the ventriloquist’s dummy.  Herein hangs the tale.  The movie did reasonably well at the box office but nobody seems to discuss it much.  When it showed up on a streaming service, the thumbnail of Fats’ face transported me back to the seventies and I knew I had to see it.

I have a soft spot for seventies horror.  I was surprised to learn that Anthony Hopkins and Burgess Meredith were in it.  And Ann-Margaret.  A movie about a stage magician going mad, I found that it kept me tense.  I didn’t know how the story went.  In case you’re curious, it goes like this: Corky, a stage magician with a ventriloquist act, is about to hit the big times.  He then flees to his childhood Catskills and finds his high school crush managing a remote, rundown resort.  She’s in a loveless marriage and Corky has trouble with women.  Two things become clear: his dummy says what he (Corky) really feels and Corky is seriously disturbed.  Fear of being found out leads him to murder and although Peg, his crush, really liked and likes him, he can’t separate himself from the dummy.

There’s an ambiguity here.  There are a couple scenes when Fats moves on his own.  Otherwise there’s nothing supernatural going on here.  That raises the question of whether the camera is lying or whether spooky action at a distance is taking place.  Overall I thought the movie was well done.  I wouldn’t have tolerated the language Fats uses when I was younger, but I did think Hopkins’ acting was quite good.  Playing a person struggling with a mental disorder requires some convincing acting to be bought.  And there was a feel to many seventies horror movies.  This one brought me back with the power of suggestion, and perhaps a little magic.

Peak del Toro

Leave a comment

Crimson Peak is perhaps my favorite Guillermo del Toro movie.  Gothic to the hilt, the story—a bit overwrought—features plenty of ghosts and a house appropriate to them.  The many reflexes of horror on display here make it a compelling movie, despite its box office disappointment (although, honestly, how can $19 million really be a disappointment?).  There’s a gothic mansion, a murderous plot, blood-red clay, incestuous siblings, ghosts—what more’s necessary?  Thomas Sharpe is a minor aristocrat down on his luck.  All he and his sister have is the crumbling Allerdale Hall, perched atop Crimson Peak with its clay mines beneath.  In need of investors, they travel to Buffalo, New York, where Edith Cushing (surely no coincidence of names) meets and falls in love with Thomas.  Her wealthy father dies in mysterious circumstances, but she marries Thomas and they head for England along with her inheritance.

It’s clear something’s not right, so Edith, who is an aspiring writer, explores the old house and makes some unwelcome discoveries.  And she sees ghosts.  They help her unravel what’s going on but her health is declining as winter sets in.  Of course, the fact that she’s being poisoned doesn’t hurt.  Thomas and Lucille, the lover siblings, have done this before.  More than once.  There’s a kind of Bluebeard theme running through Crimson Peak.  Each time they inherit the wealth of the deceased brides but they can’t get the mines up and running to save their estate.  The twist is that this time Thomas has actually fallen in love, making it difficult for him to kill Edith.  Their house, except for that gaping hole in the roof, is one of my favorites from any movie.

The more I think about it, the haunted house in gothic films may be the decisive element for me.  I’ve always loved Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and perhaps growing up in humble domiciles attuned me to what could be.  I loved reading about Collinwood.  Maybe I even knew that such houses come with a very steep price that consequently casts them as haunted.  Indeed, in the movie itself Edith says the ghosts in her story are metaphors for the past.  Of course, she encounters literal ghosts at Crimson Peak.  This is a movie about moods and gothic settings.  The horror pretty much matches what del Toro offers up in other films like The Devil’s Backbone.  The only monsters here are the ghosts and they aren’t the bad guys.  

Somehow Inevitable

Leave a comment

You had to expect me to write about Zontar: Thing from Venus.  I bought the “Beast Collection” set to see it many years ago.  In those days I tried to watch the movies through, in order but I didn’t make it through the first disc, even.  Well, now my perspective has changed—I figured I bought this to see Zontar, and Zontar I must see.  You do know that he controls people, right?  Zontar is a notoriously bad movie.  I saw it on television as a kid, and it may have even been close to the first run since it was made for television.  It’s actually a remake of a cheap Roger Corman movie, so it is a cheap remake of a cheap original.  Nostalgia, however, does funny things to a guy.  Although I saw it half a century ago, I remembered some lines precisely.  Television does funny things to young minds after all, I guess.

In case none of the injectapods has found you yet, it goes like this: Zontar, from, well, Venus, is a bat-like monster with three eyes.  He befriends an earthling outsider scientist, through laser communication, and commandeering a satellite, which becomes a passable flying saucer, lands in  a cave from which he takes over the small town of Jackson, which has a military base and plans to take over by having a general assassinate the president.  Meanwhile, his scientist friend directs Zontar to the four people that he needs to take over the world: said general, the sheriff, the mayor, and his best friend scientist, Curt Taylor.  Things don’t quite go Zontar’s way, despite most of the movie’s running time showing him totally in control.  It feels like it’s a lot longer than its 80-minute running time.

Still, I have to agree with the TV Guide review that says it isn’t as bad as everyone says.  Yes, it is a bad movie but it does have a few redeeming features.  Some of the scenery is nice, and you even begin to care for some of the characters.  The rogue scientist’s wife—despite her constant nagging—is the first person who tries to kill Zontar, and she does this for love.  When Zontar gets her you feel a little sad.  At least I did.  You see, the injectapods haven’t reached me yet and I still have human emotions.  Ironically, it is just such things that drive me to rewatch movies like Zontar all these years later.  And the movie ends with a voice-over moral of the story.  Those 80 minutes weren’t completely wasted.

The Search Continues

Leave a comment

This movie’s so bad there’s a backstory.  Years ago I was really wanting to see Zontar: Thing from Venus.  This was before streaming, and I found it as part of the “Beast Collection,” a set of 11 movies for less than the price of one regular first-run DVD.  I watched a few other movies in the collection, but before long it got shoved to the back of a shelf and forgotten.  I remembered it recently because another collection I have was missing a movie, Snow Beast.  I wondered if it might be part of this otherwise forgotten set.  It was (this really encouraged me because maybe my memory is still much better than I sometimes suppose).  In any case, one of the other movies—one I’d never seen—was Search for the Beast.  I figured, why not?  This is a film that fails on every level.  And I mean every single one.  It really should merit a Wikipedia page, just for being so bad.

So, a professor in Alabama goes in search of the beast in the Okaloosa mountains.  The budget for the movie must’ve been a matter of pocket change.  Anyway, the beast has been “killing” anyone who ventures into the mountains and the professor wants to prove it exists.  He’s backed by a guy with money, who isn’t explained at all, and his university office is less well equipped than an average undergrad’s dorm room.  He takes a female grad student with him but his financier, unbeknownst to the benighted professor, hires a bunch of beefy guys with assault rifles to go along, although they’re only going to take pictures.  Of course the professor sleeps with the grad student but then the head of the tough guys kidnaps her as the beast kills off the tough guys’ heavily armed posse.  Turns out the local hillbillies are, apparently, trying to mate the beast with the women who come into the woods.  It’s worse than I’m describing it.

There is some chatter on the internet about this groaner, so I’m sure that I’m not the only one who’s seen it.  Someone recently asked me how such movies even get made.  Well, anyone with a camera can shoot a movie.  Of course, getting paid screen time (or video distribution) is another story.  I doubt the makers of this film made much money off of it, but since other suckers like myself have discussed it online, the producer, director, writer, and actor Richard Arledge, has the last laugh.  His work is being talked about, no matter if nobody has a good thing to say about it.  Of course, I wouldn’t have ever seen it at all, if I hadn’t had a hankering for Zontar: Thing from Venus all those years ago.