Welcome To Our Nightmare II: The Return of Terror and Wooley

Oh, that. Yeah that's going to be an issue. But I suspect the ads vs no ads won't be the issue. It'll just be the issue of being able to see the movie at all, I think will be the issue (I do foresee the financial incentives to be to increase the non-ad versions), and there's the whole issue that if you buy a movie via streaming you have no guarantee you'll be able to stream it in the future.


It's one reason why I've been increasing my purchasing of physical media again in the past couple of years (and keeping an eye out for streaming services such as Kino's that allow you to download copies DRM free so, well, you do own a copy of it).
(Also throw in, I've seen physical media go out of print over the years...)


AppleTV+ is their subscription service. It does have some movies that you have to subscribe to see*. People seem to be using it more for watching Ted Lasso. I don't know if it has much in the way of movies that aren't exclusive to it. When I search for movies on my ipad, it also tells me if the movie is available on other services, which makes me think if I try to search for them with my AppleTV, I'd basically get directed to apps to subscribe to (back in the day, if someone signed up for a streaming service through an apple device app, Apple would get a slice of that pie. I can't keep track of how the financials work now).


*: The Tragedy of MacBeth and Wolf Walkers are the primary ones I can think of.

ETA: In a related bit of news to be concerned about, apparently Disney was denying requests by theaters to show classic 20th Century Fox movies at midnight showings after the purchase, because they were (are?) using Disney Vault rationale to "make movies being available to seem special." (I'm unclear how/if the industry shift to streaming during the pandemic affected this.)

Granted, the amount of people that watch movies on Tubi (and that's commercials-only isn't it?) might mean I'm underestimating how likely services will go the ads-only route.

I know I owe someone here, quite possibly you on a previous write up, for checking this film out and it was amazing. It's such a perfect black comedy and I'm not sure it could have been made at any other time. If it was made earlier I feel like it would have been to slapstick and the really dark parts wouldn't have made it in and any later I think it would have been bloodier and more lurid but might have lost the weird innocence and slight goofiness that makes the family almost easy to root for even as they go around killing everyone.

I guess on that thought, if someone announced a plan to remake this do you think any current director could pull it off?

So, no midnight Rocky Horror?

I'm glad you enjoyed it and I hope it was me that influenced you because I love to spread joy.
As for a contemporary remake, man, I dunno, I might talk to Rob Zombie about it with the understanding that he would not have script-control.

First Hammer of the season! And none too soon.

I am going to assume that everyone here knows the story of Frankenstein, more or less, and just get down to the business of what makes this film so enjoyable.
Terence Fisher. There is a lot of talk about the "Bava look" which became the "Argento look" and so forth, but Fisher's use of bold striking color and colored lighting predates either. Bava didn't direct his first film until a year after this movie came out and he was still directing in Black and White when Horror Of Dracula dropped. The New Gothic is rightly (in my study and opinion) attributed to Hammer and Fisher was the man who built that house, yet Bava and Argento are considered "auteurs" and somehow Fisher's name rarely comes up in that discussion. Fisher actually hated the term and didn't like to be called that, but let's face it, he's pretty much the man who created color Gothic Horror.
And he put the blood in movies.
I said to myself during the film, "Man, this movie is actually really f*cking gruesome." It’s kinda surprising, even though I’ve seen it a couple times before. But some of those organs in jars are real organs. Those are actual sheep’s eyeballs in the jar masquerading as human eyeballs in the eyeball scene. In 1957? Did Fisher invent gore? There are certainly a lot of people, according to my reading, who think he did. Just look at how much more visceral his Frankenstein is than the previous incarnations.


That brings us to Christopher Lee. As I'll discuss later in another film, Lee took his acting very seriously, regardless of what part he was playing. It was always craft to him and he was a consummate professional. His casting here makes for a very different movie than if you just got a big stuntman. Wes Craven talked about how important it was to get the right actor for Freddy Krueger when prevailing wisdom at the time was that you got a stunt-man to play that kind of role. And, let’s be honest, that whole series persists because of Englund’s performance. This is quite true of Lee here nearly 30 years earlier and it's part of the reason that, while I like most of the Hammer Frankenstein franchise, this is the one.
Lee actually does a really good job of conveying, wordlessly, that he is suffering because of Victor creating him. And that he’s suffering just by being alive.


Lee can be so great, I really kinda wish he’d gotten more to do in his career. I know he did a lot of films but most of the ones that are memorable are him playing some monster or uncomplicated villain. Even Saruman is kinda just a mustache-twirler, even though Lee makes him rather memorable. A lot of people have played The Monster but I would submit that only Karloff and Lee played him memorably.
And now we get to Peter Cushing as The Real Monster.
The film does a nice job of setting up how this young genius goes wrong or perhaps how he never really had a moral compass but was never in a position to do anything really horrible… until he was. But it is Cushing who brings it to life. The scene where he just cuts off the corpse’s head and drops it in the acid while his partner looks on with just a trace of both revulsion and realization that Victor lacks any real humanity, well that’s just the right notes there and Cushing hits them unflinchingly. There is a real menace in how sociopathic Cushing portrays Victor, so differently than Colin Clive/James Whale's take on the character.
The way he’s been lying to the housemaid that he’s going to marry her to have this ongoing affair with her and then laughs in her face when she finally calls him on it. And then of course, he just locks her in with The Monster. There’s the whole “who’s the real monster” thing people talk about with this story and so many others like it, this movie and Cushing make no bones about it. They’re very clear that Victor is a high-functioning psychopath and that, by late in the second act, there is nothing he won’t do and Cushing fully embraces and sells it.


Cushing's Victor does not give a f*ck and, actually, he can't even understand why anyone would. And that is the definition of a psychopath.

I think it is lost on most people, as we see Hammer Horror as rather quaint these days, that in its day it was absolutely trying to shock audiences. Bright red blood. Actual sheep’s eyeballs (standing in for actual human eyeballs). Severed hands. In 1957. They were absolutely going for shock. I’d kind of like to see a timeline of gore in Horror movies and see where Hammer falls. This film is just 3 years after Creature From The Black Lagoon where most of the deaths are off-screen and all are bloodless, and here we have eyeballs and brains and shit.
This is, therefore, a landmark film, a sentinel event in genre history, and deserves to be recognized as such.


Post Script -
Just a reminder to everyone that “Over At The Frankenstein Place” from The Rocky Horror Picture Show exists because it was filmed in the same castle as this film... as, frankly Rocky Horror is nearly just a glam-rock remake of this one with some other 50s/60s Sci-Fi thrown in (and nods to the Universal ones as well).


They even used an almost identical tank to the one in this film, just painted garishly red. Even the bandages Rocky is wrapped in are essentially exactly the way Victor's monster is shown and portrayed here, with Peter Hinwood's (Rocky) first staggering steps with just his head unwrapped, arms out, a literal mimicry of Lee's emergence scene. And the whole bit about how it took “an accident” to spark life which is exactly what happens here, the lightning storm tripping the mechanism when he’s out of the room. And on and on. So, don't forget, when you watch Rocky Horror this October, that this is really the film that spawned it.

Or The Fly, The Omen, or Alien.

Found the article, from 2019.
https://www.vulture.com/2019/10/disn...its-vault.html

Lame.
Rocky Horror is still showing at the theater by me Halloween Weekend, I wonder if that will be the last time.

So keep in mind, that article is from 2019 and the idea of the Disney Vault is to put movies in there so they're unobtainable for a while, and then get re-released. It's a strategy that made sense with the Disney animated classics. At least at one point. Covid and the streaming wars radically changed the notion of normal strategy, and that article is pre-covid. Granted, how that strategy might have changed (and might be the general trend), is to restrict the movies to only their subscription services. That's the direction I'm most fearful of (in that scenario, you might not even be able to buy the physical media of your favorite movie).


But that's just possible scenario. These things seem to changing radically as they're trying to figure out how to maximize their profits.


I guess we shouldn't be too surprised that the streaming services have basically started to replicate the financial strategy of TV (which also used to not have commercials back in the beginning).

ETA: actually, now I'm trying to remember if it was all completely free, but there were commercials.
Unfortunately I was not alive during that era (or maybe fortunately, because that means I'd be really old now). Something people complained about the change.

Hope you don’t mind a guest contribution.

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Not at all, especially one with Elizabeth Montgomery!

Speaking of witches...

Guess I should squeeze in The Fly on HBOMax this weekend before it disappears.

Thanks to a combination of being busy at work and being incapable of staying awake long enough to watch a full movie, I've been slacking here lately. Here's a giant bat-guy.

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Captain's Log
My Collection

During the week that I was housebound with covid I did a Terence Fisher DEEP dive. Deep as in 35 films, none of which were part of the Frankenstein, Dracula or Mummy series.
I was impressed that some of his early B&W stuff showed a lot of style. These were just noir-ish crime films but most of them had that little bit of visual "oomph" that elevated them above your standard B-level gangster films. And he didn't have the benefit of Lee, Cushing, or monster-makeups at this point, so I agree he should get more credit for what he was bringing to the table.

(I'd like to recommend some specific films from his early period but I'm afraid they're all blended in my memory now. Sorry. Blame covid)

Earlier this week I watched Twins of Evil and in a film where two attractive twins struggle to keep their clothes on, Cushing was by far the most watchable presence. He is a Witchfinder and he is the most dedicated and intense witchfinder you'll ever see. It's an interesting contrast to Vincent Price in Witchfinder General. Matthew Hopkins (Price) is talking the talk, but he is corrupt to the bone. A woman accused of witchcraft can easily escape punishment by spending the night with him. Cushing's witchfinder, on the other hand, would never! He is a Puritan to the core and is willing to burn his own nieces for their sins. Then towards the end, when he realizes he's almost burned an innocent person, the look on his face conveys that he is now questioning everything he knows, even though I don't think there's a line of dialogue saying so. This is 15 years or so into his horror career, a vehicle strictly designed to get the centerfold twins in a movie. He could've easily phoned it in but instead gives the film's best performance.

I actually like that one, and not just for the... titular(?)... twins.
It's no Brides Of Dracula but I enjoyed it as a vampire movie and particularly a corruption-of-innocence vampire movie.

I did too. I'll try to slap together some thoughts tonight.