Welcome To Our Nightmare: A Terror and Wooley Horror Show

Tools    





Victim of The Night

Time for another old black and white Horror movie, preferably something classic and also unintentionally silly. So we arrive at The House Of Frankenstein!

In this film, Boris Karloff plays Dr. Niemann, a sort of self-proclaimed disciple of Frankenstein who was imprisoned for grave-robbing and for trying to put the brain of a man into a dog. He escapes with his hunchback assistant, Friend Daniel, and goes about treachery immediately and with purpose. Along the way he acquires a traveling show that boasts having the actual skeleton of Dracula. Which turns out to be real. Unleashing the softest Dracula anybody's ever seen.


He intends to use it and ultimately the secrets of Frankenstein and any monsters he encounters along the way to exact his revenge and further his glorious purpose.
This is a strange movie. It's kinda just throwing everything at the screen and having Karloff and Atwill and a few others exposit whatever dialogue is necessary to advance whatever isn't already painfully obvious.
“Our village has been quiet and peaceful since the dam broke and swept The Wolfman and The Frankenstein Monster to their destruction several years ago.”
I guess, by the time you get to the SIXTH film in a franchise, you’re always kinda stretching pretty thin.
This movie really tries to do everything. You have the Mad Scientist, his hunchback assistant, Dracula, Frankenstein’s Monster, The Wolfman, gypsies, then they introduce a Hunchback Of Notre Dame thing with the hunchback assistant, Friend Daniel, falling in love with the gypsy dancer - hell, they even threw Lionel Atwill in here for his FOURTH Frankenstein movie in a row - in four different roles! What a trooper!
Also Lon Chaney Jr. was just an appallingly bad actor.
But it's fun to see Karloff as the mad doctor with the dumb mute monster making faces at him for a change.


Karloff overdelivers as usual, giving a performance that keeps all these shenanigans afloat. Guy was an absurdly underrated actor.
This is a fun-enough little hour-and-ten-minute movie with everything I listed above crammed in. That ought to be enough to get a couple of you to get off your asses and watch it, even if it is probably past the point they should have stopped.





HAUSU (1977)

So here's one that I've wanted to see for many years but just never got around to it until now.
The latter-day marketing for this one seems to focus on the cheesy effects and promises the film equivalent of one of those "WTF Japan?" memes.

It can certainly be enjoyed on that level but I wasn't prepared for some of the underlying stuff that comes with it, like The Bomb or the relationships between teens and step-parents. So it's wacky if that's what you came for, but if you're inclined to dig deeper there's some stuff to chew on.

But what impressed me most was the utterly alien approach to editing/continuity. I haven't seen anything else by Obayashi, so I don't know if this is his usual MO. It's jarring at first but I'll always admire when someone manages to produce something that is so unique. Liked this one even more than I was expecting to. This is a future BluRay purchase for sure.
Hausu is great. Glad you liked it!
__________________
IMDb
Letterboxd



Victim of The Night
Wooley is nigh giddy tonight.
The Wonderful Amazon Person brought me this today:


It has been so long. I needed to have it.



HAUSU (1977)

So here's one that I've wanted to see for many years but just never got around to it until now.
The latter-day marketing for this one seems to focus on the cheesy effects and promises the film equivalent of one of those "WTF Japan?" memes.

It can certainly be enjoyed on that level but I wasn't prepared for some of the underlying stuff that comes with it, like The Bomb or the relationships between teens and step-parents. So it's wacky if that's what you came for, but if you're inclined to dig deeper there's some stuff to chew on.

But what impressed me most was the utterly alien approach to editing/continuity. I haven't seen anything else by Obayashi, so I don't know if this is his usual MO. It's jarring at first but I'll always admire when someone manages to produce something that is so unique. Liked this one even more than I was expecting to. This is a future BluRay purchase for sure.
[/center]
Hausu is a favorite of mine and I love showing it to other people who have no idea what they are about to witness.



Hausu is a favorite of mine and I love showing it to other people who have no idea what they are about to witness.
Ha, I can't imagine going into it blind. I was disoriented even though I knew what I was in for.
__________________
Captain's Log
My Collection



Victim of The Night
Ha, I can't imagine going into it blind. I was disoriented even though I knew what I was in for.
I went in blind. Had no idea and just trusted a rec from RT.



Victim of The Night
Ok!!!
TWELVE DAYS of houseguests is over!!!
I can get back to HALLOWEEN!!!





Victim of The Night

“Dan, I’m dead. Please bury me.”

Well. This ****ed-up little movie. I really like it.
It has been over a decade since I savored the modest delights of this gruesome Twilight Zone/Tales From The Crypt movie. And on the one hand I'm sorry I waited and on the other, the hand that got surprised all over again, I'm not.
I want to give as little away about this film as I can since I feel like this is definitely one of those the-less-you-know movies. Like, I actually think it's better, even though a significant portion of the ghost is intentionally given up in the first 5 minutes, if you know absolutely nothing about this movie other than that it's a Horror movie and it's pretty good.
That said, I will say that the sheriff of a small New England town is having issues dealing with the sudden rash of violent deaths in his quaint little burg and his wife's seemingly enigmatic behavior. What sinister scenario is playing itself out in the peaceful town of Potter's Bluff?!


This is famously tagged as "the writer of Alien"'s first movie after Alien and, honestly, it's surprising to see sometimes, in retrospect, what did and didn't succeed. There are a lot of things to like about this movie and precious few to take umbrage with. I can think of almost none, really (save one). Yet this movie apparently bombed in its day. I've seen the trailers and they're no worse than anything else at the time. And this is a lot more coherent and professional than a lot of genre flicks one might have seen at the time on the budget.
Dan O’Bannon's script in particular works very well for the material. I could see this very same story being simply awful in the hands of a different writer. The line I opened with (bolded, above) was both chilling and almost a little heartbreaking. And, honestly, the director, who went on to do my beloved Vice Squad (no wonder that movie plays like a Horror movie at times) does a nice job here as the film starts out almost tranquil but with a note of foreboding in the melancholy soundtrack, only to turn violent and jarring within minutes. And a scene of a family seeking help in an abandoned house is very effective. There is fairly intense violence and some gore, but it's really not gratuitous, it's appropriately shocking. The only nudity in the film, something I wouldn't normally comment on, is contextual and even partially obscured as it's seen through a camera-lens, but actually has the desired effect. There's also a moment that amused me where the melancholy piano score suddenly gets a saxophone injection when our (temporary) protagonist spies a femme fatale. The rest of the score sounds a lot like Carpenter, which is almost never a bad thing.
Throw in Robert Englund (his second appearance in a pre-Nightmare film this very thread!) and mostly great work by the legendary Stan Winston (seen here working on one of the better of many good effects in the film):


(... the only quibble in the film, by the way, is one kill that, despite Winston, doesn't look so hot and is below the standard of the rest of the film)
... and you get a pretty effective little Horror film. That is, frankly, kinda ****ed up. As old-fashioned as this little town is, the movie kinda ain't right.
Honestly, I’d love to remake this movie. My way of course, frightening but not too stylized, with a director who could lay back and let the movie do the work. I think it's hard to bring old movies to new audiences sometimes but I feel like a beat for beat update of this would be a nice movie to watch.



Victim of The Night
Also, I am pleased to report that, in addition to reading 'Salem's Lot and Cycle Of The Werewolf this month, I am filling in some of my spare moments poring over this delight:



Your envy is showing.