Dead of Night (1945)

1945
Directed by Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Robert Hamer and Basil Dearden
Starring Michael Redgrave, Mervyn Jones, Frederick Valk and Roland Culver

Now this one was a real unexpected bonus.  When I picked out the movies to be featured in the Black (And White) Christmas Spectacular, I knew that this one didn't have color, and it was pretty damn respected critically.  Lo and behold it's also an anthology film!  I friggin' love anthology horror films, to the point where I think one of these should be pretty much mandatory every October.  Couple that with the fact that we're dealing with a 1945 release date and almost every character in it compulsively lighting up cigarettes and I knew that this one was right up my alley.

Anthology flicks are really cool to me because you get forced - sometimes jarring - changes of pace at various intervals throughout your running time.  In GOOD movies of this nature, the stories are wildly different and give you a chance to get all of the gooey goodness that the horror genre has to offer.  I don't think this was ever done better than it was in the Stephen King-George Romero classic Creepshow, but I've seen enough of these things to know what I'm talking about.  Maybe.  You know, if they made some kind of Horror Movie University, odds are that I probably wouldn't even rank in the upper 50th percentile, so take that for what it's worth.  Nobody ever said I was good at selling my credibility when it comes to reading a blog.  But based on my somewhat limited knowledge, I can report that Dead of Night is definitely worth your while.  Let's get to the specifics.

Most movies of this nature have some kind of framing device, and this time we've got a doozy.  Meet Walter Craig (Mervyn Jones), incredulous guy who has been having a recurring dream about...well, pretty much what he's experiencing right now.  Namely, being called away to a countryside home to meet a group of strangers, all of whom he has also seen many times before.  Introductions are made, accents are established (this movie is very British, to the point that I actually had to turn on subtitles), and characterizations pop.  The most interesting characters are Eliot Foley (Roland Culver), the owner and host of the festivities, and Dr. van Straaten (Frederick Valk), psychologist in the vein of Sigmund Freud who goes about debunking all of the stories that are about to go down.  Stories, you say?

Well, it seems as if Walter's ravings about seeing all of this before inspires all of the house guests to share their own instances of paranormal phenomena from their past.  First up is racecar driver Hugh Grainger's (Anthony Baird) dalliance with premonition.  This is the shortest and weakest out of the five, so the less said about it the better.  Next up is teenager Sally O'Hara (Sally Ann Howes), who tells of her encounter with a ghost at a Christmas party.  Howes is a really good actress, and it's fun to watch her go between playful and frightened at the drop of a hat.

With that, the movie starts going a bit more in depth.  The third segment features the gorgeous Joan Cortland (played by the awesomely named Googie Withers) gracing us with the events that took place during her engagement and early-married days.  She once bought an antique mirror for her husband, one that only shows one background in its reflection.  Once the background of the mirror becomes known, the payoff is pretty predictable, but this is still a pretty effective little segment with some appropriately freaky-deaky music.  And Withers is a powerhouse.  Next up is a bit of levity courtesy of Eliot Foley himself involving an obsessed golfer who finds himself haunted by the ghost of a fellow golfer.  These guys are played by Basil Redford and Naunton Wayne, who portrayed similar characters in the Hitchcock film The Lady Vanishes.  The act was so popular that they got to do it again in a few more films, this one included.  The segment is played for laughs, and it actually works on a few occasions.  Love that "I am about to vanish" series of gestures.

Last on the agenda is your classic "Ventriloquist's Dummy" story, and considering the time period that this flick came out, this one ranks up there.  Since this is Dr. van Straaten relaying the tale, we know that we're about to see a man go slowly insane, and that's just what we get in the form of ventriloquist Maxwell Frere (Michael Redgrave).  I can't help but think that the later British thriller Devil Doll was heavily inspired by this one - hell, it even features a dummy named Hugo.  Maxwell believes his dummy is alive, and while we've seen this plot roughly 17,471 times in films since then, the setup, build and payoff is done really well here.  Hugo's voice is also a thing of beauty.  This leads us up to the finale at the country house and a twist ending that manages to come off as both genuinely surprising and strange.  I don't know if "strange" is a good descriptor for something that I enjoyed, but fuck me if I didn't just type it.

According to the ever-accurate Wikipedia, this was one of the very rare horror films released in Britain during the 1940s.  They were actually banned while World War II was going on!  Historical doodads like this always fascinate me.  Coming out of that, I can't imagine a better way for audiences at the time to get their feet wet than this film.  It was light, it was fun, you didn't have to think too deeply about it, and best of all, these were British people who didn't need subtitles to understand some of the dialogue.  By 1945 standards, no doubt this movie was fantastic.

I'll also be the first person to admit that there are some things that don't quite hold up.  There's a couple car crashes in the opening "Hearse Driver" segment that made me laugh out loud due to their extensive fakiness, but those things are always forgivable.  The other main complaint is that the movie is very "ghost story" heavy.  There is good variety WITHIN the ghost genre, but it would have been nice to see some other types of supernatural horror sprinkled in there.  Maybe something in there about psychic power, hellhounds, reincarnation...at least these are the subjects that come to mind for this reporter when thinking about things known to British film-makers in the 1940s.  In the end, it doesn't really matter.  The acting is fantastic all the way through, and the flick is overall just a damn fun time.

*** 1/2 out of ****.  In the realm of anthology films, there are definitely better ones, but it's hard to go wrong with a group of well-acted, atmospheric stories.  Give this one a watch.

Freaks (1932)

1932
Directed by Tod Browning
Starring Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova and Roscoe Ates

Here we go, my first ever viewing of Freaks.  I've been aware of this movie for what seems like forever.  Since seventh grade, in fact, when we used to get this amazing catalogue in the mail called the Johnson-Smith Catalogue of Things You Never Knew Existed.  Most of these things had the same items in just about every issue, but every once in a while they would get their hands on some rare item.  I remember getting an (at that time) ultra-scarce box of Star Trek: TNG trading cards.  And on their single page where they listed VHS tapes, they once had a copy of this film, describing it as a movie that managed to achieve unparalleled controversy in its day.  These days, it's pretty tame, but in 1932...I can see why.

Last Halloween, I remember taking note of the director of the original Universal Dracula movie and putting the 2 and 2 together when it came to Freaks.  According to the ever-accurate Wikipedia, MGM Studios gave him tons of leeway when it came about crafting the story of this film, and what he chose to draw on was his experience in a traveling circus as a teen.  What Browning came up with was a movie that shocked audiences to the point that almost a third of the original cut was erased, and that footage has never been recovered.  When it comes to the world of traveling carnivals, I'm just a step below Austin Powers.  Back in my high school days, we used to have one every summer in the parking lot of the mall that housed the McDonald's I worked at, meaning that for the better part of a week all of these guys would come in for breakfast, lunch and dinner every day.  It was an experience, I tell ya.  They smell like cabbage.  Freaky stuff.  With that, let's see how much we can get out of this amazingly lean 64 minutes.

The setup: We open up with a sideshow barker showing a group of tourists the person that he dubs the most grotesque thing that has ever graced the Earth.  And it doesn't disappoint, as said tourists immediately gasp in horror when he does the big unveiling.  The script immediately launches to a traveling circus where we meet Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova), the trapeze artist who is eventually revealed to be an extremely dislikable character.  Actually, EVENTUALLY might be a bit of a misnomer, as the first ten minutes establishes the fact that she steals circus strongman Hercules (Henry Victor) away from his girlfriend, a sweet woman named Venus (Leila Hyams).  But Cleopatra also has another suitor, the pint-sized dwarf named Hans (played by the amazing Harry Earles).

At first, Cleopatra is merely humored by all of the attention and gifts that she gets from Hans and jokes about it behind the scenes with Hercules.  Both actors are great in their respective roles as a couple of knuckleheads who get their rocks off laughing at the circus freaks behind their backs, and boy, what a cast this movie has aside from Hans and his fiance Frieda (Daisy Earles, Harry's real-life wife).  There's Half-Boy, the Armless Girl, conjoined twins...and the microcephalics.  A big word that I had to look up just for this review because I'm one dedicated mofo.  If you've seen this movie, you'll know what I'm talking about.  The sideshow people aren't played for scares this early in the movie, but knowing what is to come, a lot of them are indeed unnerving.  But not in the way that they're ever portrayed as the villains.  Stick with me.

See, s**t gets real when Cleopatra finds out that Hans is due to inherit a whole lot of money.  Since we're already at about the halfway point of the movie, it doesn't take long for the nuptials to take place.  We get the classic wedding feast scene where the sideshow performers accept Cleopatra into their ranks with that creepy chant later made famous in the Ramones' "Pinhead" song.  We get a somewhat convoluted series of events where Cleopatra and Hercules try to poison Hans that goes wrong.  And then the finale as the circus travels to another location.  Yikes.

If it sounds like I'm simplifying this movie, I'm really not.  It's so short that it flies by, although it DOES make time for a couple of side plots.  For such a mean story, we get some much-needed levity in the form of Venus finding romance with Phrosio (Wallace Ford), the friendly circus clown.  There's also the owner of the circus proposing to one of the twins and one of the sideshow performers giving birth.  Yeah, all of these are character traits that are established in a scene or two, but they're much-needed little nuggets of humanity that, fortunately, are just enough to hold your attention until the credits roll.

Fun fact from the life of the Lick Ness Monster: this was one of the movies that I looked up on Amazon and found that the DVD was something like thirty bucks.  No thanks.  Amazon Video?  Something like a quarter of that.  Understand something, folks - if you choose to take the bold leap of buying this flick digitally, you're not going to be getting some big epic thing that is going to rock your world.  A lot of the movies featured in the Black (and White) Christmas Spectacular really do require some context of where the movie world was at the time they were released, and this is no different.  By modern standards, this movie is pretty dull.  If you're willing to look past that, though, there's definitely some enjoyment to be had.

How so?  Well, the characters.  There's a lot of characters in Freaks, and there's a lot of characters that you'll never forget.  Hans in particular is simply unforgettable.  Earles manages to pull some real emotion out of this material, and coupled with his stature and his unmistakable voice this guy is an instant classic.  Venus and Phrosio are both really likable, as well, and serve as a nice balance to show that not all of the big people in the world of this flick are bad.  Because of this, the movie actually manages to be touching despite its subject matter.  In addition to the people populating the landscape, there's also the landscape itself.  Browning managed to really amp up the atmosphere here just like he did with Dracula, which isn't surprising since this movie was budgeted at $316,000 - a fortune for the time period.

Rating time.  Freaks gets *** out of ****.  Don't go into it with sky-high expectations and you'll enjoy yourself, although maybe not in the way that you'd ever want to watch the movie again.

Nosferatu (1922)

1922
Directed by F.W. Murnau
Starring Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schroder, Aleander Granach, Ruth Landshoff and Wolfgang Heinz

Ladies and gentlemen, it's time for some Boring Life and Times of Jon Lickness.  Everybody is on the edge of their seats, I'm sure.  I found myself in the unenviable position of having to buy few movies for the upcoming weeks but figured it would be easy enough, just like it's always been.  I go through the usual routine that I've been on for, oh, 15 years or so of going on to Amazon and looking for the mountain of cheap DVDs from wholesalers.  And it was in this buying quest where I found out that DVDs...aren't so cheap anymore.  Seriously, the lowest price I saw for any of the films I was looking for was $25.  Yup, digital video has made the production of these things pretty much unnecessary, meaning less stuff in the market, meaning price up, boyo.  Lo and behold, I joined the dark side of Amazon Video for a lot of the films to be reviewed in the coming weeks.  My opening night Amazon Video splurge consisted of four old horror flicks and the Elvis Presley opus King Creole.  Yeah.  I'm cool.  Fortunately, the movie in question today is so crusty that it's in the public domain and it's part of my oft-mentioned and never-watched "50 Horror Classics" set.  Foreshadowing alert.

It's time for another marathon run.  Welcome...wait for it...to...the 2017 Black (and White) Christmas Spectacular!  A few people have complained recently that I don't review enough "old" movies, and when I looked back at all of my reviews from the last year, they've got a fair point.  You also can't get much "older" than glorious black and white.  We're going to be going through seven B & W classics in chroological order, and since it was already mentioned that this one is in the public domain and that it's the oldest, it should come as no surprise to those in the horror know that this week we're doing the O.G. 1922 Nosferatu. 

This movie is as no frills as it gets.  Hell, it doesn't even have sound!  Yes, kids, in the very early days of cinema, all movies used to be this way.  A musical soundtrack, brief bits showing the story, and title cards giving us essential dialogue.  I think I can count the number of silent movies I've seen on two hands (and one of 'em is the Mel Brooks spoof Silent Movie), but this flick is definitely one of the best known.  It's an unauthorized adaptation of the novel Dracula that hits a lot of the same beats with different character names, and it's wacky enough to be watchable for anyone.  If you've seen nothing else from this flick, you're definitely more than familiar with that famous shot of Count Orlok (this movie's version of Drac himself) and his shadow walking up the stairs.  Google it.

The opening bits of the story are actually pretty close to Bram Stoker's novel.  It goes from the present day of 1897 Victorian England to 1838 Germany, where we meet Thomas Hutter, this movie's version of Thomas Hutter.  He's on his way to Transylvania to meet Count Orlok with the familiar story device of assisting the Count buy up a new house in a new city.  Only in this film, said house is located directly across the street from Thomas Hutter himself.  Seems legit.  One thing about this movie that I would actually like to see brought back is the LOOK of Count Orlok himself.  With Twilight and everything that came in its wake, we've OD'd on vampires who look like Abercrombie and Fitch models.  We could definitely stand to see a nasty, ugly-looking S.O.B. again, and Max Schreck was definitely up for the role.  Well, action-wise, anyway, because it's not like we get to hear him talk.  When he dives for the blood after Thomas Hutter accidentally cuts himself...you buy that shit.

What's left of the plot is essentially Dracula, albeit with some minor differences.  Hutter has a wife named Ellen with whom Orlok becomes smitten (the title card reading "She has a lovely throat" is a favorite).  Van Helsing has been changed to Professor Bulwer, Renfield has been change to Knock (and what a name that is - he also gets a bonus sequence where he kills the warden of his psych hospital), and Lucy Westenra is now Annie, the sister of one of Harker's - I mean, Hutter's - good friends.  Unfortunately, a lot of the really interesting side characters are taken out.  No Dr. Seward, no Quincey Morris, no Arthur Holmwood, etc.  In a way, this is understandable.  I mean, we're dealing with a silent movie here.  Making an epic at this time must have been something of an epic in and of itself, so it's a flaw that I'll forgive.  And that might be the single best instance of film criticism of 2017.

However, there is one thing that I really have to give this movie props (do kids still say that?) for  - the finale.  It's definitely unique.  See, the novel has this big epic climax where all of the characters hunting Dracula down chase him down and he's eventually stabbed in the heart by Quincey Morris.  This one has this bittersweet climax involving Ellen (the aforementioned Mina equivalent) sacrificing herself so that...well, see for yourself.  As far as endings that stray from the Bram Stoker source material, this one is a close second only to the "Peter Cushing lays the epic smackdown on Christopher Lee" stuff from Horror of Dracula.

First things first.  Silent movies are a hard sell for modern audiences, but take my word for it, some of them are actually worth seeking out.  Buster Keaton's The General in particular is loads of fun.  If you can get past that barrier, there's some enjoyment to be had with Nosferatu, mainly due to the ungodly atmosphere that director Murnau manages to mine throughout the whole thing.  It goes without saying that black and white, in general, is more dreamlike and mysterious, and that's a big plus when you look at some of the sets on display here.  Even more impressive since it all probably cost something like 17 bucks in 1922 money. 

Since a silent movie is, well, silent, a HUGE part of the experience was the score.  Fortunately, that's also a part of this flick that works really well.  The full, original title of the film was Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, and I think Murnau can rest in his grave knowing that he created just that.  The music is enjoyable, memorable, and at times perfectly creepy.  It can also get a little overbearing at times, sounding like a funeral dirge on crack.  But only briefly, I promise.  I'm not gonna lie, it's hard for me to get into the characters of a silent film (which is why The General is such a rarity), so details like this are important.  Fortunately, this is a movie that nails most of its little details.

*** out of ****.  I can't say that this flick is any kind of favorite, but everybody should check this movie out at least once for curiosity and historical value.  Recommended.

It (2017)

2017
Directed by Andy Muschietti
Starring Jaeden Lieberher, Bill Skarsgard, Wyatt Oleff, Jeremy Ray Taylor, Sophia Lillis, Finn Wolfhard, Jack Dylan Grazer and Chosen Jacobs

Now that the Halloween projects are over, I can finally get to this little movie called It.  You may have heard of it.  It's grossed something like the GDP of a small country much to the surprise of a lot of industry professionals, but I've got to say that I wasn't surprised in the least bit by the success of this film.  Why?  I was one of the kids, baby.  If you were seven years old in 1990 like I was when the original miniseries adaptation of Stephen King's undisputed masterpiece, if you remember just HOW big of a deal those two nights on television were.  Two nights of kids, clowns, and crazy Tim Curry acting as nutty as Christopher Lloyd going full Doc Brown.  I also don't know if it was the first major thing in pop culture to portray a scary clown, but it's largely thanks to that film that we now have a whole army of weirdos dressed up as clowns wandering around the streets of America trying to creep people out. 

The miniseries was also my introduction to Stephen King.  It would be a few years before I took the plunge and read one of his books (the first was The Shining).  That miniseries never escaped me, and I looked at the book multiple times at the library, but it took a while to pull the trigger.  Why?  It's over a THOUSAND FREAKIN' PAGES LONG.  And that was my 1998 Fall and Winter reading project.  The book is substantially meaner than the miniseries and even the movie in question today, because it really, really delves into the whole bullying aspect of the story.  It's also far from Stephen King's scariest book.  But it's SO emotional.  We get the story of a group of bullied kids coming together to face off against their bullies, and then face off with the ULTIMATE bully - a nameles, faceless, ancient entity that does its best to scare all of the kids to death.  That is powerful, timeless stuff.  As a result, a whole lot of people from those in my age bracket all the way up to those young whipper-snappers today were excited for this movie.  $650 million later, here we are.  Get ready.

The novel, the 1990 miniseries, and this flick all have the same opening sequence, and it's a doozy.  We meet the main character Bill Denbrough (Jaeden Lieberher), a sensitive kid with a stuttering problem, as he builds a paper boat for his little brother Georgie.  Said little brother then takes the boat outside in the rain...and meets the creepy clown.  I was pleased as punch when I found out that this movie had the R rating, and it doesn't puss out here as we get Georgie biting it in very graphic detail.  We then warp forward to the beginning of the following summer, and since this movie takes place in 1989, it means that we also get some good nostalgic clothing choices and lines of dialogue.  Of course, Bill is still grieving for Georgie, and it's from this point that we meet the crop of characters.

Bill's group of friends include wisecracking Richie Tozier (Finn Wolfhard), straight-laced Rabbi's son Stan Uris (Wyatt Olef) and hypochondriac Eddie Kaspbrak (Jack Dylan Grazer).  At 135 minutes, we get plenty of time to know each of them - always a plus!  The four of them are at odds with bully Henry Bowers, and man, what a dick this guy is.  Rounding out the main group is um...overweight guy Ben Hanscom (Jeremy Ray Taylor) and Beverly Marsh (Sophia Lillis), the latter of whom an outcast due to rumors going around that she's the school bicycle.  The movie has an excellent group of child actors and everyone puts forth a worthwhile effort, but I think Lillis shines the brightest out of everybody.  She has a home life that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, and as the lone female in Losers' Club (the name that they eventually come up with for themselves) she's the strong central point that holds the movie together.  For added drama, there's also the little love triangle plot between Beverly, Bill and Ben that gets repeated from both earlier iterations of this story, as well as the late addition of slaughterman's son Mike Hanlon (Chosen Jacobs) to round out the group.

Whoa, this is a horror movie, right?  Most definitely.  Ladies and gentlemen, the premise of It: the town of Derry, Maine where this all takes place is home to an evil entity that no one can quantify.  It is always there, but every 27 years it re-emerges to feed - mostly on children.  In particular, the children who already have fear in their lives like the tormented youths of the Losers' Club.  It takes the form of whatever you're afraid of, scares the crap out of you, and eats, but since a lot of kids are frightened of clowns we get Pennywise the Dancing Clown as its Default Mode.  Bill Skarsgard takes the role here, and I'm not gonna lie, I thought he did his best but Tim Curry was much more memorable.  Not to mention funny.  Here, Pennywise himself is just kind of a Heath Ledger Joker-lite.  Also, for some reason the director decided to shaki-cam Pennywise up during some of the scenes where he attacks the kids.  Early on, he gets one of Henry Bowers' bully friends to establish that he's a menace, along with the movie's one disturbing bit involving the eerie woman in the painting that Stan is afraid of.  As was aforementioned, once I aged a little I didn't find It to be a particularly scary story but this movie didn't frighten me in the least bit.

A horror movie that doesn't scare the audience might sound like a pretty big complaint, and in most cases it is, but fortunately this movie has a lot more going for it.  Just like the book, we get to go on a ride with these characters we care about as they piece together what the ghost-like being stalking them at their most vulnerable moments is (or isn't, to be more accurate), find out where it lives, and then band together to beat it.  Pretty much every plot cog meets in the big epic finale located under the creepy old house on Neiboldt Street where It seems to reside.  All seven kids?  There.  Pennywise?  There.  Henry Bowers?  There.  Eddie telling off his mother and Beverly killing the d**k out of her abusive dad?  There.  Along with a trademark Richie Tozier one-liner or two.

The movie's biggest strength is its VERY welcome sense of humor.  I've gotta tell you, while I was excited that we were getting another film version of It, I was more than a little nervous about how it would portray its kids.  Call it the "emo-ization" of kids/teen-agers in media, but if I would have had to watch a group of mopey sourpusses for 135 minutes...I might have had to write a strongly-worded letter.  Fortunately, that's not the case.  You might not be scared by this movie, but the dialogue between the kids is legitimately funny stuff that gives the movie a surprising weight.  I know that a lot of people disagree, but this is why the Bond series is now dead to me - they've given the whole series a fatal humor-ectomy, and as a result he's not cool anymore, he's just an empty suit.  Not so here.  You'll remember these people by name when the movie is finished, although admittedly I didn't need any help in that regard.  I read all 1100 pages of this thing back in the day, dammit! 

That emotional investment made up for what I thought was the relative weakness of Pennywise here, and a big reason for that is that this flick exclusively chose to stick with the story involving the characters as children.   As a nerdy middle-school kid reading that book, I related to this story very strongly as a metaphor for facing life and fear head-on.  Spoiler alert for those who are extremely, extremely not in the know: the original novel and the miniseries tells its story over two timelines, one with the Losers' Club as kids and later on as they go back to Derry 27 years later to take It down once and for all.  Another spoiler alert: It ain't dead.  Which means that we're getting a sequel soon with Bill, Beverly, Ben etc. as adults.  I wish I could fake excitement, but I'm not, because I never found these characters anywhere near as interesting as boring grown-ups.  But maybe the upcoming film will surprise me.  For starters, I think they should stick with relatively unknown actors for the main roles, because the last thing I want to see is f**king Anne Hathaway as grown-up Beverly.  As the Internet Wrestling Community likes to say, let's just wait and see.

As for this movie, 2017 It gets a *** 1/2 out of ****.  You won't have any struggle getting to sleep after this one, but it's a damn entertaining flick with almost as much power as the legendary book it's based on.  Minus the child gang-bang scene.  Google it.