What was the last movie you saw?

[BAYLOR]

I watched a 1974 documentary the Horror Hall of Fame which was hosted by Vincent Price. It had such bad jokes even he made a comment about how bad they were.


INSEMINOID 1981 -- Been curious about it since the mid 80s.
I didn't miss much.
A cheap ALIEN rip off with electronic keyboard music though Judy Geeson can really scream.

It didn't stay in the theaters very long.

 

[Jeffbert]

I learned yesterday that the word Magum refers to the bullet size, not the gun. A magnum is a bullet with a wider bore than usual. I don't know if they had .357 and .44 magnum bullets back then...

I never said they did, reread my post.

 

[Jeffbert]

SPIDER BABY (1967 Opens with Wolf Man reciting a poem about it. O.k., I tried to watch this a few years ago, but just could not. This time, I succeeded. A family of inbred cannibals is left under the chauffeur's care. Crighton Chaney (aka Lon Jr.) near the end of his career portrays Bruno, who, among other things cares for two young girls who are both insane, homicidal maniacal cannibals. Bad timing for the normal folks, relatives, who come to adopt or whatever, the two girls. Not as bad as I thought it might be!

 

[Jeffbert]

NOIR ALLEY had a double feature consisting of two Val Lewton films. 1st time I ever watched them on the day they were on.

CAT PEOPLE & LEOPARD MAN. I have seen both several times, but Muller's opening comments gave me enough reason to see them again.


CAT PEOPLE (1942) revived the foundering RKO, which had suffered after two A-grade pictures had failed. If you can get TCM's streaming content, watch this! Stuff I never imagined.

So, Irena believes that she literally transforms into a black panther when she is sexually aroused. Shrink Tom Conway attempts to talk sense into her, but fails. Does she really become a cat? Lewton is genius,

LEOPARD MAN (1943) In a New Mexico town, a leopard escapes, and kills a young woman. Apparently, it kills two more. But it could have been murder. Did not enjoy this one as much as the former, but still good.

 

[KGeo777]

SPIDER BABY (1967 Opens with Wolf Man reciting a poem about it. O.k., I tried to watch this a few years ago, but just could not. This time, I succeeded. A family of inbred cannibals is left under the chauffeur's care. Crighton Chaney (aka Lon Jr.) near the end of his career portrays Bruno, who, among other things cares for two young girls who are both insane, homicidal maniacal cannibals. Bad timing for the normal folks, relatives, who come to adopt or whatever, the two girls. Not as bad as I thought it might be!

Ralph! Ralph! Ralph! Ralph!
Ralph.


Chaney's acting is pretty good-especially in one scene where he speaks and then starts shedding tears without a scene cut.

 

[Randy M.]

NOIR ALLEY had a double feature consisting of two Val Lewton films. 1st time I ever watched them on the day they were on.

CAT PEOPLE & LEOPARD MAN. I have seen both several times, but Muller's opening comments gave me enough reason to see them again.


CAT PEOPLE (1942) revived the foundering RKO, which had suffered after two A-grade pictures had failed. If you can get TCM's streaming content, watch this! Stuff I never imagined.

So, Irena believes that she literally transforms into a black panther when she is sexually aroused. Shrink Tom Conway attempts to talk sense into her, but fails. Does she really become a cat? Lewton is genius,

LEOPARD MAN (1943) In a New Mexico town, a leopard escapes, and kills a young woman. Apparently, it kills two more. But it could have been murder. Did not enjoy this one as much as the former, but still good.

I like both of these, especially the former, but the latter has one of the tensest scenes I've seen in horror movies when a young girl goes to the store to get something for her father's dinner. Sounds mundane, but it's anything but. Taken directly from the novel Black Alibi by Cornell Woolrich, as Muller pointed out.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

The House on Skull Mountain (1974)

Very old-fashioned and very mild horror movie. An elderly woman writes letters to four great-grandchildren just before she dies, summoning them to the title mansion. (This is shown as a cartoonish matte painting, with the house way up on a big mountain that has apparently had a huge skull sculpture carved into it. It doesn't look like a natural formation, anyway.) It's the old, old plot of gathering the relatives together to read the will. We already know the dead woman's butler is performing Hollywood-style voodoo, so no suspense about who's bumping them off one by one. Random spooky stuff happens. A faceless hooded figure shows up, snakes appear from nowhere, etc. There's a long, long scene of a whole bunch of people performing a voodoo ritual (drums and modern dance) in the caverns under the house, with the pretty great-granddaughter "chosen" by the butler while he's killing the others.

Did I mention that all these folks are African-American? The single, weird exception is the one great-grandson who is a white guy, and our movie's hero! Besides being racially insensitive, the movie is pretty dull. It looks like a made-for-TV movie (or an extended episode of Night Gallery) for the most part. The climax, when the butler summons the dead woman back from the grave as a zombie, isn't as bad as the rest of it.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Trouble Man (1972)

Our ultra-cool hero is known only as Mister T. He has a big fancy car, a big fancy apartment, a whole bunch of expensive tailored suits, and so on. He apparently makes his fortune not only as a licensed private eye, but as a pool hustler and general problem solver. A couple of guys running a crap game hire him to stop the armed robbery of their games. He doesn't know they're just setting him up to take the blame when one of the robbers, whom they forced to participate in the phony robbery, is shot dead. The complex scheme is intended to provide a meeting with a rival crime boss (known by the traditional name of Mister Big) so they can send guys disguised as cops to kill him. The unflappable Mister T has to take on the real cops and the hoods on all sides, which he does with style. There's more plot than half a dozen other blaxploitation action flicks, so pay attention.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

I liked the Green Knight too.
Went to see Dune last night. Fantastic. Visually stunning, sonically stunning, well paced all the way through. Amazing experience. My one quibble: bagpipes. But my other half tells me that is a reference to Macbeth and Scotland.

 

[AE35Unit]

I never said they did, reread my post.

No need, I wasn't suggesting you had said such. I apologise if I offended.

 

[Jeffbert]

No need, I wasn't suggesting you had said such. I apologise if I offended.

Misunderstandings occur from time to time. No offense taken.


As many times as I have seen the original LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, just last night during the final day of TCM streaming it, I watched the color 'remake.' Different in several ways, & very enjoyable! But Audrey had not only a masculine voice, but that of Levi Stubbs! Very deep.

 

[Guttersnipe]

I was forced to watch Hubie Halloween on Netflix. It was another awful attempt at comedy by Adam Sandler. Scary in that it can seem to go on forever.

 

[KGeo777]

I, MONSTER 1971 - Some say it was released 50 years ago today. I think it is an ok if sleepy version of the Jekyll Hyde story. Christopher Lee does a good job with a somewhat different interpretation--in this case Hyde is the one who undergoes all the stress of the changes. Instead of Jekyll being the one dealing with the consequences---it is mostly his alter ego that is shown having to deal with the negatives of the transformation. I assume it was a coincidence that as he keeps changing, he looks more and more like Brudah from the Count Yorga films.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Not a bad version, which is actually a little bit more faithful to Stevenson's novella, although they change the character's names. My review, from three years ago:

I, Monster (1971)

Christopher Lee has the title role(s) in this adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's famous novella Strange Case of Dr. Marlowe and Mr Blake.

What's that? You haven't heard of that one? Perhaps you know the characters under other names.

In any case, the setting is shifted forward in time a bit to 1906, so that Freud can be mentioned. It seems that Doctor Marlowe has come up with a drug which either destroys the Id (reducing an angry, tough businessman into a fearful, obedient child -- psychologically, not physically, you understand) or destroys the Superego (causing a proper young lady to remove her clothing in front of the good doctor. This mandatory sexing up of the story reveals nothing to the audience, and the movie in general is quite reserved.) Naturally, Marlowe uses the drug on himself and is transformed into the grinning, violent Blake. Blake's crimes produce a physical change in his appearance, although it's a moderate one, with handsome Lee slowly changing into ugly (but hardly monstrous) Lee. Like all film versions of the novella, the audience is in on the big secret from the start, although otherwise this one is closer to the original than most. We hear about (but don't see) the story's opening shocker of Blake stomping a child to death; the plot begins with Marlowe's lawyer (Peter Cushing) trying to figure out why he's giving money to Blake and made him his heir, figuring that the doctor is being blackmailed by the scoundrel.

 

[KGeo777]

It was originally supposed to be in 3D which is why they have some shots of him doing stuff into the camera.
I didn't know there was a 3d revival in 1971 though-I thought the 80s was the return of 3d.
I guess it has fallen out of fashion again?
Until Avatar 2 when they supposedly will unveil a system that doesn't need glasses at all.

 

[Rodders]

I saw something called Transcendence. It has quite a well known cast, but the film itself was actually a bit boring.

 

[KGeo777]

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH 1964 - Not my favorite of the Corman Poe Price films--it is one I admire more than like. Trying for an Ingmar Bergman feeling but I just don't find enough coherence in it . It's too metaphysical mumbo jumbo for me--and something about the depiction of the Red Death and the fellow spirits as personable mortality agents--I find it a little too--pretentious? Just does not work for me beyond sketchy moments.

 

[Jeffbert]

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH 1964 - Not my favorite of the Corman Poe Price films--it is one I admire more than like. Trying for an Ingmar Bergman feeling but I just don't find enough coherence in it . It's too metaphysical mumbo jumbo for me--and something about the depiction of the Red Death and the fellow spirits as personable mortality agents--I find it a little too--pretentious? Just does not work for me beyond sketchy moments.

This was covered by Eli Roth's History of Horror just a few weeks ago. Spent nearly the entire segment on it. Interesting perspective!


Not one of my favorites, either, as I much prefer silly/campy ones.



Three with William Powell:

Fashions of 1934 (1934) has Powell & friends attending fashion shows, secretly photographing & stealing expensive designs for ladies' dresses and manufacturing knock-offs. One caught by the New York dress makers, who had paid through the nose for the designs, they are secretly employed by them and send to France, to get the designs for cheap.



DOUBLE WEDDING (1937) Powell & Loy. She is Margit Agnew a domineering elder sister who runs her younger sister Irene (Florence Rice)'s life to the extreme of having chosen a mousy wimp named Waldo Beaver (John Beal) as her husband to be. But the guy is too polite when the aggressive Charlie Lodge (William Powell) comes along. But Lodge is only interested in the elder sister. Despite his best attempts to teach Beaver aggressiveness, etc., so he can claim the younger as his bride, it seems Lodge will end up marrying the younger sister.

Supporting cast includes Edgar Kennedy, who usually torments L&H.



RENDEZVOUS (1935) As American troops are leaving for France during WWI, Bill Gordon (William Powell) is among them, but wanting a goodbye kiss from Joel Carter (Rosalind Russell) a woman he had by chance met at the train station, he exposes the fact that under a pen name, he had written a book on cryptography. The next thing he knows he is behind a desk working on decoding enemy messages. But he had thought the manly thing was to go to war as a soldier, etc. She was the daughter of the sec. of war, & had ratted on him. Nothing he does can get out of the office. Drama with a few dashes of comedy, this is very entertaining.

Among the supporting cast is Cesar Romero (AKA the Joker).

 

[KGeo777]

PRINCESS OF THE NILE 1954 - I had seen this before and it is short (over an hour). It's a clunky Arabian intrigue story on the studio back lot with Jeffrey Hunter and Debra Paget. Watchable but not memorable.

THE KING'S THIEF 1955 -- This is more like it. Edmund Purdom, Ann Blyth, David Niven, George Sanders, and Roger Moore (I didn't know he made movies so early). Three Musketeers-style adventure featuring a quartet of thieves. Nothing grand but more to appreciate with less of the hokey Hollywood humor elements that often creep into these kinds of films in the 1950s.

 

[Toby Frost]

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1989)

The Turkish army besieges a European city in the Age of Reason. Adventurer and liar Baron Munchausen (John Neville) gathers his remarkable colleagues and routs the enemy in a set of outlandish adventures.

Wow, this was quite unusual, even by Terry Gilliam standards. For one thing, the plot is a mess, and could have been cleared up with a bit of simple explanation. For another, it's basically a set of short stories in which the Baron gathers his comrades, which makes it quite jumpy. It doesn't help that two of the adventures, where Munchausen meets magical royals and, by charming the queen, enrages the king, are very similar.

Visually, it's incredible, especially given the lack of CGI. The scenes in which the Baron dances with Aphrodite (Uma Thurman) and flies off in a balloon made of knickers, and the moment where Munchausen is about to be beheaded (where the camera zooms back over the entire Turkish army - easy with CGI!) are remarkable. However, it's episodic and takes a long while to get going, and the ending makes no sense even by the logic of the rest of the film.

The actors are enthusiastic, and the whole thing is pretty likeable. However, I think a lot of children would just find it baffling. It's a very large curate's egg.