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

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Captain's Log
My Collection

Took my parents to see Gaslight at 10 in the gosh darn morning which threw off my entire schedule for the rest of the day.
I'll be back tomorrow with a Barbara Steele film I've never seen before.

They sure are:

Which version?

Ingrid Bergman.
We've seen it many times, but this was our first time at the theatre.

Oh shit! Snow vampires!!!

There's another version?

Bergman's version is the 1944 version. There's also a 1940 version which is pretty good, though it doesn't have the same A-list line up (and no sexy, saucy Angela Landsbury).

Yeah the earlier version is a bit too obscure for this theater's purposes.


And yes, Bergman got the Oscar but Lansbury was the MVP

No, I've seen CoB.
I had to blind buy this one. Looks promising, looking forward to it

Well, this was the hot recommendation a few years ago and I tried to watch it twice and somehow found myself too bored to continue both times. Which is crazy because Eyes Of Fire is anything but boring.
In a town on the Western frontier of mid 18th-century America (when the Western frontier was still basically the Mississippi River), a woman and the preacher she is having an affair with are about to be hanged for adultery and whatever other misbehaviors puritanical f*ckwads can come up with (boy if I didn't loathe religious zealotry when I started this movie...). They are about to kick the box from under the preacher in front of the ramshackle family he's collected when the preacher's noose (magically?) snaps. You see, he took in the daughter of a woman who was burned as a witch and while she is believed to be mad, she may actually be something quite a bit more.
They are saved when some reasonable townspeople burst in and liberate them and their group sets off together to find greener and less repugnant pastures.
After encountering some territorial Natives and being joined by the woman's husband (indeed), a sharp-minded trapper, they find an abandoned settlement and decide to dig in. But the Native superstitions surrounding the area may not be so silly as the group's clairvoyant and perhaps magic young wild-woman soon discovers.


Soon, the odd dynamics within the group and the constant assault by potentially supernatural events begin to send things into a spiral as a strange child arrives, one of the group is taken by something and falls into a coma, and naked people that don't look like the Natives start to menace their little settlement. Before long, the group is terrorized to the breaking point by woodland spirits.


But the trapper and Celtic fairy-woman will have something to say about it before it's all over.
This is a surprisingly creative little pagan-horror film. There’s witchcraft and Celtic magic and religion-gone-wrong and all kinds of good stuff, particularly in the creative way the Witch is visualized (in the budget) and the ways they find to make magic on a budget (or maybe it’s just the vision). The narrative is plenty competent and, while the filmmaking (particularly the cinematography or vision for the cinematography) doesn't always impress, the film really works all the way through. I read one positive reviewer who called the film "flawed" and it actually made me think how reviewers cop out using terms like that to hedge their reviews. If there is a flaw with this film I didn't see it. Which is not to say it's a masterpiece, it's not, but it is a movie that succeeds about as much as it can on its budget and the limited talent of its director, and really lacks any mis-steps.
In the category of Punching Above Its Weight, Eyes Of Fire delivers.

This was my exact predicament. Dozed off the first two tries, months apart. Third time was the charm and now I own the mofo on BluRay.

An interesting thing I learned in the bonus interview is that the director's main gig was photography, so some of the camera tricks in the film were techniques he'd learned doing still work.

Funny that you had that same experience. I wonder why the third time is the charm. I mean, I feel like the movie gets going, I wonder what bored me the first two times.
And that makes sense, some of the "FX" were really just negatives and colored negatives and such.

Clearly light on fog.
Still, you had me at topless face-whipping.

Barbara Steele topless face-whipping.
Oh my!