A scary thing happened on the way to the Movie Forums - Horrorcrammers

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Yeah, my #1 interest is the eye candy. That early color process gave everything a weird greenish tint that suits the material well. I'd like to see what Whale's Frankenstein would've looked like, or Werewolf of London, etc.
Crazy how they cast only redheads and made them wear all green.



27th Hall of Fame

Cure (1997) -


I was meaning to watch this film a couple years ago, but I never got around to it and eventually forgot about it for whatever reason. I'm glad I was finally able to watch it though as, even though it didn't blow me away or anything, I'm cool with rewatching it down the road.

This is the kind of film I think I'd appreciate more with another viewing. While I enjoyed the first half or so well enough, I wasn't entirely on board with the film until the second half when Mamiya began talking to Takabe. The various conversations between the two of them and the effect they had on Takabe's mental health were all top notch and make for some of the scariest moments in the film. The first half, by comparison, didn't interest me quite as much.

That portion of the film isn't without its strengths though. For one, this film hit one of my sweet spots for crime films as, though it appears to solve the central mystery fairly early (there isn't a big reveal as you gradually figure out who's causing the killings as you watch the film), other vital questions are left open which require further probing. Even if you're able to figure out who the killer is, you aren't told why the killings are happening. For example, where does Mamiya's hypnotist powers come from? Is he reenacting the murders of a hypnotist in the 1800s? Also, is Mamiya's supposed ignorance of what he's doing genuine? Or is his memory loss just an act, meaning he's fully aware of what he's doing? These questions linger throughout the film (the ending complicates these questions even more) and provide an unrelenting feeling of unease to it. While its ambiguity may frustrate some viewers, I found that the questions which were left open resonated with me quite a bit.

I also loved the look of the film. That the film maintains such a dull and cold color pallet throughout (greys, browns, and greens, mainly) gives it a unique look, as if all life has been sucked out of the film, resulting in a thoroughly bleak environment. The few scenes where some vibrant colors, like red, appear onscreen seem to indicate danger. I also enjoyed some of the settings (mental hospitals and abandoned buildings) as they added to the film's slow, uneasy atmosphere and served as great horror set pieces.

The film is a lot slower and meandering than I expected it would be and that might have played a part in why I didn't like the film as much as I could've, but I feel that it would fare better with another viewing now that I know what to expect from it. Overall, I thought the film was quite interesting and I'm glad I finally got around to it.



Has anyone here seen Doctor X (1932)? The whodunit plot is kinda whatever, but it has some great two-strip Technicolor cinematography, and a climax that delivers the goods. Worth catching on the Criterion Channel before it leaves at the end of the month.
One of my favorites. I prefer it to Wax Museum as well. I remember the plot being entertaining in a silly tongue in cheek way. I've had Return of Doctor X on my watchlist for ages, but I expect it'll be a lot more code-influenced and not nearly as unique.
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Victim of The Night
Has anyone here seen Doctor X (1932)? The whodunit plot is kinda whatever, but it has some great two-strip Technicolor cinematography, and a climax that delivers the goods. Worth catching on the Criterion Channel before it leaves at the end of the month.














Several times and I recommend it every chance I get.




Victim of The Night
Doctor X has a lot of cool bits (especially some of the makeup) and the technicolor looks awesome, but the tonal shifts between the horror material and the wacky intrepid reporter don't work too well. Definitely worth a watch though, especially at a brisk 75 or so minutes.
I agree but I feel like they are overwhelmed by just how crazy and awesome it is.





The Devil Inside Her (Colt, 1977)




This review contains mild spoilers.

After being unmoved by Zebedy Colt's The Farmer's Daughters, I was surprised by how much more I enjoyed The Devil Inside Her. It's probably not much more forcefully directed on the whole, and contains some of the same unpleasant content as the other movie, but couches it in subject matter much more conducive to this style. The movie takes place in New England, 1826. Terri Hall, a farmer's daughter, longs for a handsome farmhand, played by Dean Tait. Their strict father, played by Colt himself, doesn't take too kindly to this relationship, and tries to put an end to it by flogging her. His other daughter, Jody Maxwell, in a fit of jealousy, prays to the devil, played by Rod Dumont (first seen in KISS makeup and working his genitals like he's making hand pulled noodles), who then descends upon the family and tries to bring them under his influence. Because this is a '70s porno, this happens through a number of sex scenes with varying degrees of consent, with the devil having his way with different members of the family while disguised as their loved ones, usually with cat eye makeup to clue the audience in.

Now, if this sounds just a little bit like a certain witchy movie from a few years ago, I will suggest that this would make a pretty good double feature with Robert Eggers' The Witch, as both families depict a puritanical family under attack by hostile supernatural forces they're completely unequipped to deal with. (While the onscreen content in this film is obviously more unsavoury, the conclusion it reaches might be a bit gentler. "Love of God cannot be so oppressive that one forgets pure love and honest desire.") While this movie is not up the technical standards of that other movie, its low budget does give it certain advantages, with its forest environment providing a certain immediacy and sense of isolation a more polished production might not be able to conjure. (This also makes it easier to excuse that the movie isn't a terribly convincing depiction of the period, with characters wearing bellbottom jeans or dressed like the raided L.L. Bean. Inconsistent costuming is beside the point when you feel like you're really alone in the forest.) The filmmaking, while not particularly sophisticated, does apply its lo-fi stylization where it counts, peaking with a climactic satanic orgy that hits us with a barrage of red filters, canted angles, gimp masks, an upside down lady, glam rock makeup, capes, afro wigs, slow motion, and Annie Sprinkle throwing herself into the action with abandon.

This is not a lot more polished than The Farmer's Daughters, but with its slightly longer runtime, you can see it build some kind of arc, both narratively and stylistically, instead of the two act structure and handful of editing tricks during the climax of the other movie. Colt also seems to have a better handle on the light but ominous folk horror atmosphere here than on the roughie sleaze of the earlier movie. (As for the farm theme, I understand Colt owned a farmhouse and shot his movies nearby, which likely explains things. Of course, he plays off this theme with a scene of Maxwell spending quality time with an unshucked cob of corn. All I could think of during this scene was Gerald Ford's lesson from the campaign trail in the year prior to when this movie was made: "Always shuck your tamales.") And I think the casting goes a long way in making this work, with the more clean cut looking Maxwell playing the "bad" sister and the more unusual looking Hall playing the "good" sister. Hall, with her narrow face, raccoon eyes and wispy presence, looks like she'd be entirely at home in a giallo or ghost story and as such is a pretty effective lead for this movie's folk horror stylings. Is there a movie where she walks down corridors in flowy white robes while curtains flutter in the wind? This merits further investigation.







A Night to Dismember (Wishman, 1983)



Watching Doris Wishman's A Night to Dismember, I couldn't help but be reminded of The Hollywood Strangler Meets the Skid Row Slasher and Las Vegas Serial Killer, two late works by Ray Dennis Steckler. Both directors started their careers in the '60s and now found themselves trying to keep up with current trends, but finding themselves unable to adjust due to their outmoded filmmaking methods, they settled back into reflex. A Night to Dismember especially feels like a transmission from another timeline, where filmmaking had become less technically sophisticated over those couple of decades, and instead dissolved into a kind of primordial soup. The production and release circumstances add to this "moment out of time" quality, with Wishman having to salvage the film with reshoots and brazen editing after losing most of the footage after it was sent for processing, and the finished film not getting released until several years later. (Wishman's original cut apparently surfaced on YouTube a few years ago,, but I did not watch it yet.)

The natural state of this movie is VHS tape as it's wearing out, or a film reel as it's disintegrating. Shots connect with each other at jagged angles, jammed together like puzzle pieces that obviously shouldn't connect, yet Wishman takes her scissors to the edges and puts them together anyway, with ungainly dissolves and superimpositions further melting them together, while the dubbed audio creates a further sense of detachment. I don't think this quite holds together with any kind of dream logic, and I didn't find this as fun as some other nightmare-tinged horrors, perhaps because none of the individual images really grabbed me. That being said, I probably am a bit kinder to it than most would be, as having watched a number of Wishman's films over the past few weeks, I do find it recognizably her work. There's a certain dissonance that can be detected in some of her other films that I've seen, with the rampant objectification of the heroine and interrogation of said objectification in Indecent Desires, the visual poetry contrasting with the ugly subject matter in Bad Girls Go to Hell, and the alternately sympathetic and sensationalized portrayal of trans people in Let Me Die a Woman. While this movie doesn't present such clean contrasts, I did find its jumbling of slasher tropes and the way the violence (at times laughably crude, at other times startlingly gnarly) collapses upon itself to be engaging in a strange way. And there are moments when the soundtrack proves effective, usually when it settles on synth fuzz, which resembles a coating of grime over the proceedings. However, the soundtrack is usually hilariously ill-fitting, populated mostly by some kind of stock chase music from '70s thrillers.

To the extent that there's a recognizable human element in the movie, it's represented by Golden Age porn star Samantha Fox. Fox has turned in some pretty moving performances in her porn work (one can look to Her Name Was Lisa and Dracula Exotica as evidence of her genuine acting talents). This is not a good showcase for her as an actress (which makes the claim that she paid Wishman to star in this pretty baffling), but I did enjoy her exaggerated facial expressions during the dinner scene or the deranged grooving she does when she sees a character spying on her through a window. I found myself to her character in any case, as she represented an element of the familiar in the alien dimension portrayed by this movie, like a party where you know almost nobody and spend the entire time attached to the one friend you stumble across.

Did I enjoy this? I suppose I did, even if I felt my brain leaking out of my ears in the process.





Mother Riley Meets the Vampire
aka
My Son the Vampire
aka
Vampire Over London
(1952)


I knew I was in trouble at the 7-minute mark when Mother Riley began to sing a song. Have I finally reached the nadir of the Lugosi filmography? Time will tell.


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I gotta say- as excruciating as the film was, Bela still "brought it", delivering lines like "VERE IZ MY ROBOT???" with way more gusto than they deserved.

I know very little about the Old Mother Riley character. It appears that there were at least 15 films in the series and this seems to have been the final entry. So maybe this is Mother Riley's nadir as well. Perhaps the earlier films are laugh riots. The actor doesn't appear to have any other significant credits to his name, so I guess Mother Riley was his only thing. (Unless he was on TV or something). The Pythons often dressed as old ladies in their skits so I wouldn't argue if someone considered this to be some sort of inspiration.

If there are any Brits reading this, I'm interested in your thoughts on the Old Mother Riley Cinematic Universe.



Watched the 1967 russian Horror fantasy Viy the other night, starts off a little slow but when it gets going it's a wonderful fever dream, ramping up the weirdness over the coarse of three nights in the movie.




Do you wanna party? Its party time!
Watched the 1967 russian Horror fantasy Viy the other night, starts off a little slow but when it gets going it's a wonderful fever dream, ramping up the weirdness over the coarse of three nights in the movie.

That one is pretty solid and has some good, creepy moments.
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Down A Dark Alley

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Victim of The Night
Watched the 1967 russian Horror fantasy Viy the other night, starts off a little slow but when it gets going it's a wonderful fever dream, ramping up the weirdness over the coarse of three nights in the movie.

Yeah, special movie, Sam Raimi obviously saw it.



Victim of The Night

Can anyone explain to me why I like (and keep re-watching) this objectively terrible film?
I mean, other than a woman turning into a giant spider?

The best I can come up with is that I put it on on a lark, couldn't believe how bad it was, but then became genuinely surprised at how weird it was, and then started kinda rooting for it.
Now, I enjoy it despite it being terrible and not necessarily in the good way we all generally enjoy. It's really strange. Anyone else have this experience or am I just insane?




Can anyone explain to me why I like (and keep re-watching) this objectively terrible film?
I mean, other than a woman turning into a giant spider?

The best I can come up with is that I put it on on a lark, couldn't believe how bad it was, but then became genuinely surprised at how weird it was, and then started kinda rooting for it.
Now, I enjoy it despite it being terrible and not necessarily in the good way we all generally enjoy. It's really strange. Anyone else have this experience or am I just insane?

It's only a bad movie if we expect it to be more than it is. It has way more imagination and ideas in it than most films that have a supposed point. It doesn't let the restraints of restraint restrain it. I imagine way too many people write it off because it's obviously stupid and dumb. But so what? Being not-stupid seems like a terrible thing for everything to be.