What was the last movie you saw?

Land of the Minotaur (1976)

Moderate-size review with SPOILERS

Pretty dull Evil Cultists flick filmed on location in Greece. Donald Pleasance is the hero priest, Peter Cushing is the leader of the cult. There are a couple of nearly indistinguishable shapely platinum blonde young British women in tiny shorts and one young American man among the victims and intended victims, pretty much everybody else in the movie is Greek. Even the guy playing an American private eye is Greek. Young folks find a secret entrance to a cave where there's a statue of a minotaur with flame shooting out of its nostrils. The statue keeps saying something like "all who enter my realm must die." The cultists wear really shiny Ku Klux Klan style robes with some kind of color code. The leader wears the only red one, with gold trim around the wrists -- fancy! The ordinary workers wear black, some folks (there are a lot of these cultists) wear blue (the sub-leaders?) and there are a few kids in their early teens who wear white. Folks get sacrificed to the minotaur statue right at the start of the movie. After that, not much happens. The priest hires the private detective to track down the missing whippersnappers. The private eye isn't much help at all. The movie goes a little nuts at the end. It turns out that bullets don't stop the cultists, but the priest says a Latin prayer (of exorcism, I assume) and they literally explode. They let the kids in white go free (even though we saw one of them, a creepy girl who stares silently a lot, stab a couple of folks to death at the start of the film) because their souls are still pure or something. Besides the wacky climax, it's a snoozer.
 
In Bone Tomahawk, a band of cannibal cavemen abduct three people from a small Western town, and four cowboys ride out to get them back. The journey is talky and frequently quite funny, but the confrontation with the cannibals is tense and gruesome. The film owes as much of a debt to mutant-redneck films like The Hills Have Eyes as it does to The Searchers.

Slow-starting at first, this film turns extremely grisly and frightening in its last third, despite the rather unsurprising baddies. The director knows that you can’t make a good horror film if the audience doesn’t care about the characters. The acting is solid and the dialogue is very good once you get used to the deliberately antiquated style (“German” seems to be their word for “telescope”). Much better than the overrated Oscar-fodder The Revenant.
 
My wife and I just saw Deadpool (2016) on our 10th wedding anniversary. It was the funniest movie we had seen for a long while (although just the too of us haven't been out to see a movie in the cinema in what feels like ages). Before that we took the little man to see the Goosebumps film, just before his 7th birthday, its been a busy month.
 
Saw The Good Dinosaur with the kids.

I found it really really boring and there was nothing that hasn't been done ten times better before.
 
Assignment Terror (1970)

Spanish scream king Paul Naschy (Jacinto Molina Alvarez) appears in his most famous, frequently recurring role as werewolf Waldemar Daninsky in this monster rally. He also wrote the screenplay, which offers hints of Plan 9 from Outer Space and the Star Trek episode "By Any Other Name," as well as a huge amount of influence from the Universal team-up films Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, House of Frankenstein, and House of Dracula.

Aliens (led by Michael Rennie in his last role) take over the bodies of dead humans and begin a plan to revive various monsters as part of a plan to take over the world. They find the skeleton of vampire Count Janos de Mialhoff on display at a carnival. Pulling the stake out of his heart brings him back. (This theme is taken directly from House of Frankenstein.) They raid the werewolf's tomb and surgically remove a silver bullet from his heart, bringing him back to life. They find the mummy Tao-Tet somewhere in Egypt and revive it. Somehow they find a monster created by a certain "professor Ulrich D. Faranchsalon." (There are many different spellings of this pseudo-Frankenstein name floating around on the Internet, but you can actually see the name on a book written by this fellow. Here's an image of "Anthology of the Monsters" with the author's name on it. I'm guessing at some of the letters -- I'm not at all sure of the middle initial -- but "Faranchsalon" is what I think it says.)

assignmentte7.JPG


Besides the name, this is clearly supposed to be a Frankenstein-style monster.

Anyway, let's skip all the stuff between the gathering of the monsters and the exciting climax.

SPOILERS AHEAD

The aliens start to show signs of human emotions and weaknesses. (There's the Star Trek influence.) The vampire, who doesn't do much in this film, gets dispatched pretty easily by the movie's nominal hero. The werewolf and the mummy have a pretty cool fight, with the mummy getting destroyed in a unique way. The triumphant werewolf next takes on the Faranchsalon monster. At the end the ruined old monastery where the aliens have their headquarters blows up in quite an impressive way.

A silly movie, but of interest to fans of old-fashioned monster battles.
 
The Horror of Faranchaslon 1957. You missed this one, somehow...? Ha. Ha.
Tried to watch Dr. X but fell asleep and don't rememb er a thing...
 
Dungeon of Harrow (1962)

This ultra-low-budget shocker is amateurish in almost every way, with poor special effects, wooden acting, and awkward dialogue. It's slow and talky. Yet is also creates, almost despite itself, an eerie, claustrophobic mood.

In 1870 the narrator (and there is a lot of narration) washes up on an island after a shipwreck, along with the captain of the vessel. After some surprisingly formal and polite conversation between the two, they hear a woman's scream. They find the body of a woman who also apparently survived the wreck, only to be killed by hunting dogs. Yes, yet another version of "The Most Dangerous Game," although this turns out to be a very minor part of the plot.

The island is inhabited by the completely insane Count de Sade. (Not the famous one, I suppose.) In a bizarre scene, he has a vision of his own evil, in the form of a guy in a cape, first seen as a negative image, who produces various scary hallucinations. None of this has anything to do with the story, and the guy in the vision never shows up again.

Also in residence are the Count's giant African slave; a mute servant girl; a brooding ex-nurse to the Countess, who acts as the Count's companion; and the Countess herself, insane and locked up in the dungeon. Strange dialogue, torture, madness, murder, and a twist ending ensue. The whole thing seems like a Roger Corman Poe movie with a drastically lower budget. The appearance of the Countess and the ending are pretty effective. In many ways, a very bad movie, yet I found it rather haunting.
 
Up my alley, that looks to be. DLin' that dungeon, I am. Hmm, I see Ninja of the Magnificence on the same page... and,
These are the Damned - supposedly loosely based on The Midwich Cuckoos. Geee... The Snorkel 1958... the Garment Jungle... Lost, Lonely and Viscious... * Fun is looming over MY evening, thass fer sure..*
 
Be aware that These are the Damned (also known as The Damned), despite the fact that the title is very similar to Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned, the first based on The Midwich Cuckoos and the second a sequel/quasi-remake to the first, and is also a British SF film from the same period dealing with strange children, is not based on The Midwich Cuckoos at all. It's a fine film anyway.
 
The Horrible Dr. Hichcock (1962)

I'm using the most familiar title of this famous Italian Gothic shocker, but the copy I watched begins with a notice from the British Board of Film Classification (rating it as "suitable only for persons of 18 years and over") which calls it The Terror of Dr. Hitchcock. (Note the variation in spelling. I believe that "Hichcock" is correct, and that, at most, only a very vague allusion to the Master of Suspense is intended. This isn't a Hitchcockian film at all, really.) The opening titles, however, inform me that I am watching Raptus: The Secret of Dr. Hichcock.)

"Raptus" is an unusual word, related to "rape" and "raptor" and "rapture," which can refer to a seizure or a state of ecstasy. All of these connotations seem appropriate to the unusual theme of this film.

I'm going to skip the opening scenes for the moment. The rest of the movie concerns a doctor whose first wife died twelve years ago. He returns to their home with his new bride. (Barbara Steele, whose eyes seem more enormous than ever in this role.) She a rather nervous type, who faints at least twice during the film. She begins to believe that the ghost of the first wife is haunting her. Hallucinations, the supernatural, or an attempt at gaslighting? There's a sinister housekeeper, a room which is always kept locked, and even a black cat.

So far this all seems very familiar. Things take on a different meaning, however, when you consider the start of the movie. We see a man hidden by a cape approach a cemetery at night. Someone is digging a grave. (At night? Just accept it. This film is more nightmare than logic.) The caped fellow knocks out the gravedigger and opens the coffin nearby. Within is the dead body of a beautiful young woman. The man caresses her lovingly, then covers her body with his own . . .

Thankfully we cut away. We soon learn that Dr. Hichcock has a secret room in his house made up like a funeral parlor. He likes to give his wife a drug which places her in a death-like state and then lovingly caress her and . . .

Yes, Dr. Hichcock is a true necrophiliac. This daring theme haunts the entire film. The movie is also very nicely filmed, with fine sets and costumes, a few really impressive scenes, those bright red and blue lights, seemingly without any rational source, which you find in Italian Gothics, and one heck of a climax. Recommended.
 
The Ghost (1963)

Supposedly a sequel to The Horrible Dr. Hichcock but that's nonsense. Yes, we have a character named Doctor Hichcock, but he's got a different first name. Yes, Barbara Steele plays Mrs. Hichcock, but she's got a different first name. Yes, the same actress who played the spooky servant is back, and she's still a spooky servant, but she's got a different name. Besides, the first one took place in England in 1885, and this one takes place in Scotland in 1910.

Anyway, this Doc Hichcock is suffering from paralysis and is confined to a wheelchair. A younger doctor attempts to treat him with small doses of a drug which requires immediate treatment with an antidote to avoid suffocation. We very quickly find out that Mrs. Hichcock and the handsome young doctor are lovers. Oh, by the way, Doc Hichcock has a strong interest in spiritualism, and we witness a seance at the very beginning of the film.

Well, you can probably see where this is going, since you're watching a movie called The Ghost. Since this film depends on an carefully crafted plot (unlike the dreamlike The Horrible Doctor Hichcock, which often threw logic out the window), I won't say any more about it. Suffice to note that it lacks the daring and original theme of the previous movie, but it's an effective Italian Gothic chiller in its own right.
 
Hang 'em high (1968). One word review: Lacking
An enjoyable enough watch, but IMO suffers from gaps in the narrative, sketchy/lazily drawn characters with motives and actions that seem at odds. Like a stew that's had too much water added too it - you can eat it, but you know it could have been more enjoyable.
 
Oddly, I just posted a still from Hang Em High ... and, looked at The Ghost. But I watched Dr. X, reviewed recently by Victoria, and it was just like she said. The Count is a really annoying guy, a nut who owns his own leper island, I mean what do you want?
Watched The Snorkel, which is a murder mystery. It's pretty obvious what the snorkel itself is for, an evil use for a snorkel... well it was okay.
 
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Just seen a film called Imaginarium - very odd film. Possibly the saddest human drama I've seen in years, shot like a whimsical fantasy film and with a heavy metal score. I loved it, but at the same time it's hard to recommend.
 
Fun at St Fanny's (1955) - strange little low-budget British school comedy film lovingly restored and re-released on DVD by The British Film Institute. Bewilderingly bad, the film lurches from scene to scene or crude slapstick with the barest thread of a plot holding them together. A not very good school farce punctuated by moments of really really weird acting the odd utterly surreal moment and bizarre little musical numbers (including a very odd version of Mambo Italiano). Some very odd stuff in here but why the BFI thought it worth the effort to revive is as baffling as anything on screen.
 
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