i watched the black cat with boris karloff and béla lugosi last night and WHAT is up with karloff's whole aesthetic in this movie.
ah, the old hollywood approximation of the aleister crowley vibe. the eyeliner. the wacky eyebrows. the widow's peaks so high you could climb mountains in them as you ascended to the heights of his not-1950s cheapo alien uppercut. the occultist chic/proto-manos robes and jewelry. lugosi being all "the years have been kind to you" like this man doesn't look haggard as fuck and wildly out of place in his funky art deco mansion in the middle of a ww1 cemetary. he looks like he should be battling superman for world domination and i for one aspire to be this level of pretentiously mysterious. 11/10. RIP that his clothes are so easy to rip, though.
mwahahaha it's that time of year again. going to simplify it this time around, though, because i am horrendously and embarassingly behind with sooooo much right now but still really want to post and yap about what i've watched. so i'm going to strip the posting down to the bare minimum 1 thing i liked and disliked about each movie. also, posters and ranking lists because, i mean, why on earth wouldn't i include those, those are the best part.
Day 1: The Wedding Banquet (1993)
Day 2: Big Eden (2000)
Day 3: Scorpio Rising (1963)
Day 4: Castaways (2023)
Day 5: The Vampire Lovers (1970) - inspired by Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu
Day 6: Daughters of Darkness (1971)
Day 1: The Wedding Banquet (1993)
liked: i really loved wai tung's boyfriend simon in this. he is just. so delightful. from his incredible aids protest shirts to the really sweet (albeit raising some concerning implications) scene he has with wai tung's father to him being wholly supportive of wai tung staying closeted instead of guilt-tripping or shaming him for it like you see in a lot of movies like this. he's just such a delightful human being.
disliked: so... wei wei totally raped wai tung, right? but the film doesn't realize it? she had already established a pattern of ignoring his boundaries and wanting to "fix" him even before they had sex, and what we saw of the scene had him repeatedly saying no while she ignored him. "things got out of control" my foot. that man was raped, and it makes it really difficult to sympathize with wei wei and feel good about the ending where she gets to continue to stay in wai tung's life. which is a bummer, because i overall liked wei wei as a character! but that part really left a bad taste in my mouth and did not make the ending feel like a good one, even though the film clearly wants us to think that it is.
Day 2: Big Eden (2000)
liked: kind of a bittersweet thing, but as someone who grew up in a small rural town like the one in this film, and would still live in that kind of environment if it were safe to do so, the portrayal of big eden in this both hurts and feels so good. big eden is so much like where i grew up, all the trucks and cowboys and country music and neighborly community. all that's missing are the guns and the houses owned by people too poor to paint and too proud to whitewash, because those would shatter the utopia. it's beautiful and it hurts. this film makes me homesick for a world i know never existed, but feel deep within me all the same.
disliked: the mary margaret character is... honestly she gets worse every time i see this movie. not only is she just kind of annoying and not funny, but she is the one character who comes across as fake, which is wild. i love that this is a movie where the early 2000s city slicker straight woman who talks to her gay bestie like they're teenage girls comes across as less realistic than a group of rural white cowboys who become super invested and uber-supportive of a bludgeoning gay interracial romance, but goddamn. having watched the film with the director's commentary a couple years ago, apparently she's a favorite of his, so thank GOD she's not in the movie very much.
Day 3: Scorpio Rising (1963)
liked: oh my god this soundtrack is so good. how dare i have to get back to work, i need to go listen to this immediately. 0/10 for not including b. bubba's "i'd rather fight than swish," though. i don't care that that song didn't come out until 1964, it should have gone through a time vortex and been included.
disliked: maybe i need to watch it again and pay more attention, but for a film that is credited as being a precursor to music videos, i was overall pretty unimpressed with the interaction between the music choices and the editing. sometimes it worked really well, like the ending with surfaris' "wipe out" and the use of love songs by women in homoerotic scenes, but mostly it felt like things were just shuffling along and while the songs were intentional, they were not cut together in an intentional way. but i could be missing something, i will admit to watching this while eating lunch and thus not giving it 100% attention.
Day 4: Castaways (2023)
liked: it very randomly integrated itself into the movie and for the most part felt pretty tacked on, but i did quite like the concept of the world this film had, of an earth ravaged by a pandemic to the point of complete societal breakdown. i honestly wished the film had focused more on that and leaned more into a dystopian vibe and made it a dystopian thriller about two lesbians joining forces to survive in this new world and falling in love along the way. but i guess they didn't have the budget for that because the end product is more tropical-flavored cottagecore wish fulfillment with a vague but concerningly radfem-vibed undercurrent about men invading women's spaces [stares blankly in transgender existence]
disliked: there were zero consequences to anything in this movie. at all. i was going to say that it was just that the script was bad and the low budget didn't help, but no, you can see it in other areas beside the script. for one, these women are on an island without any access to makeup, laundry facilities, or medical care, yet somehow go through the entire movie looking fucking gorgeous and with a white (WHITE!!!!!!!!!!!!) shirt not even getting stained. they get injured and are shown cut up and bruised, and by the next scene they're fine, even if it's literally the same day. literally at the end of the movie one of the women still has her nail polish on, and if anything it looks like there's MORE than there was at the beginning of the movie. this is probably because that scene was shot first, and you know what, fair, but as a viwer i should not be able to tell that!! and surely that is somethin that would be very easy and cheap to fix by telling the actress to remove her nail polish before filming? unless she had some contract with another project saying she wasn't allowed to, but then why does it look more chipped at other places, and can't she just reapply it???? argh. anyway. these are not script issues, these are problems with the continuity, costuming, and makeup. don't get me wrong though: the script does not help matters. it is almost comical how easy these women have it stranded on their island in the middle of nowhere. there is zero learning curve or struggle to survive, they have everything they could possibly need and everything is hunky dory. interpersonal conflict is resolved in the same scene or at the latest in the following scene, and impacts nothing for the rest of the film. a woman reacts to the uncertainty that her mother might be dead by not reacting at all. nothing is difficult, nothing is challenging, which for a movie that is clearly trying to tell a feminist narrative about women overcoming odds in a patriarchal society is... pretty annoying. maybe, if you want to show your women actually overcome things, you should.................................... show them actually overcome things? maybe?
Day 5: The Vampire Lovers (1970)
liked: this movie did my least (but secretly most) favorite thing in a period film and put 0% and 100% effort into the costuming simultaneously. you've got all these beautiful period dresses and costumes, all ornate and detailed and lovely, and then you've got dinky little translucent nightgowns with sewn-in underwire push-up bras for maximum bust appeal. zero effort was made to make the hairstyles period accurate. you've got half the male cast phasing into the 1970s and the other half refusing to let beatlemania die, and most of the female cast look like they should be cheekily selling me soap in a 1970s magazine. there's a beehive hairdo at one point. you can so obviously tell this movie came out in 1970 and it's terrible. i love hate it.
disliked: it's been a while since i read carmilla so maybe it was like this there too and i've just forgotten, but i was not the biggest fan of this movie's structure. it's fine i guess, but jumping after thirty minutes (it actually might have been less) from the laura plotline to the emma plotline was pretty jarring and took me out of things. i think it's because it meant there was no clear protagonist, or protagonist handoff. to compare, in psycho, we start by following marion crane but after she's killed we switch to norman bates and there's a scene where he discovers and deals with her dead body to establish the transitory switch-off between the two. there wasn't any transition scene like that in the vampire lovers, so it was just jarring. if we had been following carmilla as the protagonist the whole time, maybe that would have worked, she certainly was an interesting enough character. but of course, if the film had done that then she would lose her mysteriousness. idk. the plot worked well enough for me overall but that aspect of it did jar me a bit while watching it.
Day 6: Daughters of Darkness (1971)
liked: THE. COLORS. so much unintentional bi pride lighting, which is very fitting for a movie where basically every single character is multi-gender attracted. this is the kind of movie where every single frame is saturated with color and everything just looks utterly gorgeous and beautiful and oh my god i love it. there's clearly some symbolism thing going on with the colors blue and red specifically, though i'm not exactly sure what yet. both colors seem to be tied to desire, but there seemed to be a difference in the usage of the two i can't put my finger one. in my post-screening reading about the film, i saw that the director said he had elizabeth wear only red, white, and black in reference to nazism because of her role as a controlling and manipulative threat, so perhaps the red vs. blue is coercive vs. noncoercive or dangerous vs. nondangerous desire? i'll have to watch it again, which i very much want to do because this movie was great.
disliked: honestly i adored this movie so there wasn't anything i actively disliked while watching. after the fact, i suppose i do wish we could have learned a little more about valerie as a character. not a lot, i think the beauty of this film comes from its mysterious simplicity, but a teensy bit more might have added to things. she's worried about stefan's mother not accepting her, which i'm assuming is from the apparent class difference, but we learn so little about valerie in general that i'm not sure. fleshing her out might strengthen the understanding of why she seems to be attracted to horrible people as well. ultimately, though, i do accept things enough, and this is nitpicking.
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Day 21: The Curse of King Tut's Tomb (1980) - based on the book Behind the Mask of Tutankhamen by Barry Wynne; heavy embellishment of the 1922 discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen
Day 22: The Creature with the Atom Brain (1955)
Day 23: Son of Dracula (1943) - sequel to Dracula (1931) and Dracula's Daughter (1936)
Day 24: Willy's Wonderland (2021) - remake of the director's 2016 short film Wally's Wonderland
Day 25: The Mummy (1959) - loose remake of the Universal Mummy movies, which I will not fully list because there's a whopping six of them
Day 26: I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) - very loosely based on the 1973 novel of the same name by Lois Duncan
good week! i got most of the "decades" movies i wanted to hit this week: 1940s, 1980s, 2020s. all that's left is 1910s at this point, and i've got a couple films in mind... one of them is a french movie almost three hours long (j'accuse !), so if i don't feel up to that this weekend then it will be another german movie sometime during the week.
i also managed to squeeze in a movie with christopher lee and peter cushing, so i think i'm satisfied with films targetting specific actors... there are more horror icons i didn't get to (lon chaney sr. springs to mind, along with more modern actors), but nobody's really singing out that i NEED to squeeze them in before the end of the month.
rambling thoughts:
The Skeleton Key (2005) - this film is agonizing because the script it SOOOO GOOD and the final plot twist so perfectly built up, but the more and more you think about said twist the more and more racist it gets. aghg. but props for including a blind willie johnson song and having it tie into said twist! and speaking of the music, i also have clearly listened to too much 1920s black gospel music because i didn't even realize the scene where kate hudson listens to the conjure of sacrifice record was supposed to be scary until i saw her roommate's face; i was too busy going "wow :) just like on my playlists :) gee whiz they did a really good job capturing the vibes of recordings from people like the reverend j.m. gates :) :)"
The Curse of King Tut's Tomb (1980) - nooooo not tom baker and raymond burr in brownface. but unfortunately that is... what i may not WANT but certainly what i expect from a cheap british tv mummy movie. and as cheap british tv mummy movies go... it has all the flaws and colonialist leanings of the genre but that aside i thought it was funly spooky. because it was a cheap tv movie, they had to depend more on atmosphere and mood, which worked well. there was apparently a cut scene where tom baker's character gets stabbed in the eye during his death scene where his plane explodes, and honestly thank GOD it was cut. that would have been way too over the top and luridly silly and the film works much better as an atmospheric period piece than an 80s gore film. i'll definitely need to revisit this one whenever i get around to writing my gothic mummy thriller, there's a lot of good and bad stuff in this to deconstruct/draw from.
The Creature with the Atom Brain (1955): this has got to be one of the most 1950s films to ever 1950s. you've got nuclear-powered zombies created by evil foreigners (one of who is an ex-nazi mad scientist named wilhelm, because of course his name is wilhelm) causing mayhem in white suburban bliss for our cop protagonist (played by richard denning, because of COURSE he's played by richard denning) and his happy homemaker wife and their Just So Darling daughter. all that's missing are teenage delinquents going on an anti-square crusade using the power of whitewashed rock 'n roll (probably because they were the ones in the audience when this came out). unfortunately unlike some dated products of the era this movie was just? boring? not awful, but not as engaging as the premise would suggest. this was the b-film for it came from beneath the sea and it definitely shows that this is a film they expected you to pay less attention to. the premise is pretty delightfully batshit, though.
Son of Dracula (1943) - southern gothic twist on the universal version of dracula, VERY cool, very atmospheric. also some great vampire transformation effects in this. just don't think too hard about the timeline of the series or who the primary immigrants from europe would have been at this time that this film is making a very questionable metaphor about--you WILL get a headache.
Willy's Wonderland (2021) - had this recommended to me by somebody at work. nicholas cage battles demonic man-eating serial killer animatronics, ft. annoying young people being insufferable. the movie's great but i wish it had just been about nicholas cage and MAYBE the liv character as his eventual surrogate daughter taking down the animatronics in increasingly absurd ways, but i also recognize the need of the young people to be cannon fodder. but also the animatronics were RIDICULOUSLY easy to take down. how were these things ever a threat. absurd.
The Mummy (1959) - insert repeat of the noooo not X in browface joke wherein X is christopher lee. i was going to make a joke about how this isn't a remake at all and because of how loosely the old universal monster movies took continuity it is in fact just a sequel and this is the same mummy that went up against abbott and costello in 1955. but unfortunately that mummy was named klaris and this one goes by the name kharis, the name used by the mummy in universal's second through fifth movies. so RIP that joke. ANYWAY. good movie. a bit tedious when the mummy's backstory is being outlined, but otherwise fine. i haven't seen all the universal mummy movies yet but just compared to the 1932 movie this one gives way more payoff on seeing an actual mummy walk around versus starting off with that and then skipping to boris karloff spending the rest of the movie with glue on his face looking like he very badly needs some moisturizer. but i do have a soft spot for the 1932 film because i got to see it in theaters in a double feature with bride of frankenstein two years ago, and for as much of a dracula rehash the plot is the german expressionist influence really was so gorgeous on the big screen. but i did really like the colors in this 1959 movie, especially the inexplicable funky green jell-o light in the mummy's tomb. very neato. also i watched this movie primarily for christopher lee and peter cushing and because i saw a video once that described the hammer mummy movies as cinematic capsules of post-ww2 british colonial nostalgia, and... mmhm. there's a scene where cushing's character has verbal spars with Mr. Evil Egyptian Stereotype™ about the proper way to respect ancient egyptian relics and burial sites, and respecting non-christian religions, and it is WILD how un-self aware the british filmmakers are in how both characters are presented. mr. stereotype makes some VERY valid points but the movie presents him as a completely irrational and backwards knave and cushing's character as a perfect and totally 100% correct saint who is smarter because he's Civilized™. it's like the 1932 movie that way, the film is so bafflingly close to criticizing its own colonialist leanings and sometimes literally seems to do so, but then the plot happens and it's just like. oh. that wasn't intentional. you're just oblivious.
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997): this movie had me until the end. the characters were standard enough for a slasher movie, but likeable, with engaging moral dilemmas that made me want to see what was going to happen to them. then the plot twist for who the killer was happened and the movie lost me. maybe it's because i was repairing one of my shoes while watching and not paying super close attention but did we even meet the guy beforehand??? i don't think so, and when it comes to twists and mysteries, i like it when stories lay out clues where if you put in the effort you might be able to figure it out ahead of time. there was SOME setup in that regard, but not really enough for some random guy to be the surprise killer. it was a good twist in theory, but not in practice, and unfortunately did make me walk away feeling dissatisfied. i did really like the movie's soundtrack though. most of it was 90s rock and metal, but it was good 90s rock and metal, and there was some other stuff in there too, and any movie that has type o neative, leadbelly, AND bing crosby on its soundtrack is a winner.
last week of the month coming up! no plans beyond one of those 1910s silent movies. five more days--onward!
rankings, ratings, and lists thus far:
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) (duh)
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962)
Planet Terror (2007)
The VelociPastor (2018)
The House on Haunted Hill (1959)
The House on Haunted Hill (1999)
The Black Cat (1934)
The Skeleton Key (2005)
Son of Dracula (1943)
The Curse of King Tut's Tomb (1980)
Witchcraft (1964)
Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam (1920)
The Comedy of Terrors (1963)
Lyle (2015)
Willy's Wonderland (2021)
Return to House on Haunted Hill (2007)
I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997)
White Settlers (2014)
The Mummy (1959)
Bijo to Ekitai-ningen (1958)
Prometheus (2012)
The Creature with the Atom Brain (1955)
XX (2017)
Mary Reilly (1996)
Death Proof (2007)
Encounter with the Unknown (1972)
moved Death Proof further down. time has not been kind to it in my brain. congrats to mary reilly for at least being competently made.
