I've been watching a few horror movies for Halloween lately. Of course I had to watch the original
Halloween (1978), but this time on Blu-Ray and it was fantastic. Haven't got through all the extras yet.
I've watched a couple of films I haven't seen. The first is
Return of the Vampire (1944), starring Bela Lugosi as a (drum roll) vampire, although not his famous Count Dracula. This time, instead, he is Armand Tesla, who is killed when a British professor drives a stake through his heart. The stake is left in, and Tesla's body is still intact. However, the London Blitz unearths his coffin and a couple of inept graveyard workers pull out the stake, reviving the count. What follows is a not-bad atmospheric Universal-type horror movie (albeit made by MGM) that is okay as long as you don't take it too seriously. Tesla's aide in evil doings is a werewolf named Andreas, who is a good actor named Matt Willis, who unfortunately looks like a scruffy puppy when he's a werewolf. More like something out of a Three Stooges short. Anyway, not bad if you've got nothing else to do. Here's the "werewolf" if you want a snicker:
The second one was much better. It was
Torture Garden (1967), starring Burgess Meredith, Peter Cushing, and Jack Palance, among others. It's one of the Amicus Films anthology releases that were popular in the late 60's and early to mid 70's.
Tales From the Crypt (1972) is my favorite of the bunch but this one was very good. Meredith is the showman of a sideshow exhibit where he coaxes a handful of people into "looking into the shears of the Fate named Atropos," a seemingly wax woman who holds said shears and the people each see what may come to be in their future...so very much like the
Tales From the Crypt movie. Each tale is fun and the actors are game no matter how far-fetched the tales are. And that's the fun of it: that they're far-fetched and you can just sit back and enjoy them one-by-one.