Night of the Demon (1957)

1957
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Starring Dana Andrews, Peggy Cummins and Niall MacGinnis

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, a movie in the 2017 Black (and White) Christmas Spectacular that I can't quite recommend.  Night of the Demon isn't a bad flick by any stretch of the imagination, but I did find it to be a pretty damn tepid one.  A lot of the movies that I've watched this silly season have been great because they're all forward momentum with absolutely no time for bullshit.  The running time on this one pushes past 90 minutes, and it shows big time with how much shots there are of dudes sitting around in libraries talking about stuff.  Not terribly exciting.  Pretty much every critic alive disagrees with me.  I just thought I would throw that little factoid out there.

Without a doubt, director Jacques Tourneur had some grand plans for this movie.  It's shot with the kind of care and attention to detail that only directors pre-CGI could have.  There are also exactly three - count 'em, three - scenes that I absolutely LOVED, which we'll be getting to in due time.  So Tourneur knew what the hell he was doing; in my mind, it was just that the story wasn't big enough.  The plot comes from a 1911 M.R. James short story called "Casting the Runes," and with this, I now get another of the references in the "Science Fiction, Double Feature" Rocky Horror song.  With absolutely no knowledge of how long that story is, I can only surmise that the effort to stretch it to feature length was the undoing here.  With all of that said, let's go about unpacking said small plot in a big movie.

Within five minutes of the movie starting we get one of those aforementioned scenes that I loved.  Welcome to the house of Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis), a man suspected of dabbling in Satanism.  Although, is Satanism really something that can be dabbled in?  It kind of seems like an all-or-nothing proposition.  That theory gets tested when rival Professor Harrington (Maurice Denham) threatens to expose him and getes reminded of the threat that hangs over his head.  Upon driving home, a bunch of creepy sound effects start playing on the soundtrack...and then a freakin' animated demon emerges from the forest and kills the ever-loving f**k out of him.  This whole bit is really chilling and effective, and I'll admit to being amped for everything to come.  But then we meet Dr. Holden.

Yes, folks, Dr. Holden.  John Holden, to be precise, played by Dana Andrews and unfortunately a very mopey, somewhat dislikable character who dominates the plot from here on out.  Weirdly enough, I don't even think it's the way that the character was constructed - Holden is there to be the skeptic of the movie, the guy who believes that nothing that happened or is happening is because of any kind of supernatural slant.  But...I don't know.  A lot of the other reviews I've read of this movie just heap praise on Andrews in this role, and I'm sure he was a fine actor in his time, but here he just kind of comes off as a sanctimonious prick.  Is this truth, or is this just another instance of that incredibly rare (to the point of affecting one person on Earth) glandular condition?  Only time will tell.

The plot device is this: Holden is an American professor who is now in England to attend the conference where Harrington intended on exposing Karswell's Satanic cult.  There's also a quasi-love interest in the form of Harrington's niece Joanna (Peggy Cummins) who promptly contributes nothing else to the movie other than some red-hot black-and-white sexual tension.  We get some delightful bickering as Holden and Karswell mock each other's beliefs (or lack thereof) before we get the real crux of the story: Karswell casually informing Holden that he has three days left to live.  Gulp.

I should also point out that there is this whole side plot involving a character named Rand Hobart (Brian Wilde), another link between cult activity and Karswell.  Hobart has been cataonic since the death of his brother, and figuring out why takes up the bulk of the running time.  See, Karswell is able to cause anyone to be cursed by passing an unholy parchment onto their person - something that he did with both Hobart (who in turn passed the document back to his own brother) and now with Holden.  From here, the movie takes on the "race against time" format as Hobart figures out the mystery, eventually leading us to a final ten minutes that actually manages to redeem the movie somewhat in my own mind.  At least as much as a fantastic game of "pass the parchment" can be.  You'd be surprised how covert you have to be to get somebody to carry a paper around if they know it's coming back.

First, some good stuff.  The atmosphere of the film is fantastic, especially some of the stuff at Karswell's mansion.  In particular, there is one shot of Holden looing down what appears to be an endless hallway that glued me to the television screen.  On the acting end, MacGinnis turns in the best performance of the movie by far.  The character of Karswell really isn't some vile, nasty cult leader - at least in my own mind.  He's a guy trying to save his own skin, and the way that he does this is no doubt immoral, but weirdly enough the dude actually comes across as somewhat likable.  The music is also extremely well-done, granting all the shots of the English countryside and the jagged edges of the Karswell home its appropriate dreariness.

The problem that I had with Night of the Demon is that it's just a really boring film with a lot of padding.  How much padding?  There is a seance scene where various characters talk to Harrington, complete with a comedic gold traditional British song being sung beforehand.  It might not sound funny, but trust me...it is.  There's also a scene where Hobart is hypnotized into telling the audience the key piece of information about sacred parchments being responsible for all of the death.  Both of these take up something like five minutes of running time, and...slog.  For American release, it was trimmed down by roughly 13 minutes and re-titled as Curse of the Demon, and I can see why the change was made.  But I wanted to be legit - I watched this movie in its full, intended form, so that's what I'm reviewing.  Thus, the giant demon attack at the end of the movie can't quite pull it up to positive territory.  Oh yeah, spoiler alert.

The time for judgment is upon us.  ** out of ****.  The flick is definitely worth checking out for historical purposes, but it's not one that you'll ever want to revisit.  At least I won't.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

1956

Directed by Don Siegel
Starring Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates, King Donovan and Carolyn Jones

We've got another first here on the ol' blog, ladies and gentlemen.  This is the first version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers  I've ever seen, and that is some accomplishment considering just how many times this flick has been remade/readapted.  There's the late '70s version with Donald Sutherland's fantastic curly hair, there's the 1994 one with Meg Tilly and her retained ridiculous level of hotness after her even more ridiculous '80s prime, and then there's the Nicole Kidman version.  The less said about that one the better, because it looked boring as all get out.  They also seemed to take some words away from the title with each successive reboot.  George Orwell was right about language.  Now I've seen the O.G. version and have nothing else to compare it to, and I can report that this story is definitely worth the hype and the spot that it has in the NATIONAL FILM REGISTRY.  Suck it, anti-horror snobs.

Much like last week's film, Them!, this one was granted a big budget, a respected director and an accomplished cast by its studio and expected to be a big deal.  While a lot of people point to this period of history as a time when the studios relegated horror and thriller films to the summer teenage dead-time, I think they actually gave these flicks MORE respect then.  Universal had a whole wing of its library dedicated to heavily made-up monsters, after all.  Much like all of those Universal monsters, Warner Bros. had themselves a really strong piece of source material in the 1954 Jack Finney novel Body Snatchers, and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring snatched (/tomatoes) every last bit of tension that he could get from Finney's no-doubt tobacco-stained fingers.  How so?  Well, read up and find out.

The movie opens with Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) screaming his ears out at a team of psychologists demanding to know why he is acting like an insane person.  We flash from here to the fictional town of Santa Mira, California.  More specifically, Santa Mira, California, a scant few days earlier, as Miles is called back to town due to a rash of people reporting mysterious ailments that seem to clear up as quick as they arrive.  McCarthy quietly turns in a performance for the ages, doing the Jimmy Stewart "everyman against impossible odds" role to perfection.  He's got a love interest in the form of ex-girlfriend Becky Driscoll (the lovely Dana Wynter - so lovely that her arrival in the movie is accompanied by tender, tinkly music) back in town after going through a divorce, and this plot manages to hold your attention without once getting annoying.  So then...the matter of those patients?

It starts off innocently enough, with Becky's cousin believing that her uncle isn't quite who he seems to be.  He looks the same, but something is off.  The glassy state and complete emotionlessness should be enough of a giveaway, but we have another hour left to kill.  The plot then moves to the strange case of Bennell's friend Jack Belicec (King Donovan) who has found a near carbon copy of himself in the closet.  Not soon thereafter, Bennell finds a similar copy of Becky in her father's basement.  Then, we get the dinner party, the trip to the greenhouse, and the discovery of the pods.

The term "Pod People" is definitely one that is familiar to horror fans.  Even I was more than aware of what they were many years ago, mainly due to the awesome level in the SNES masterpiece "Zombies Ate My Neighbors" and the host segments from the MST3K episode Giant Spider Invasion that pay homage to this film.  To a lot of people, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the "Pod People" movie, and that's where the plot leads us from this point on.  The exposition is spelled out to us in the form of a couple of helpful pod people, and it goes as follows: these alien seeds have been travelling through space for eons, finally finding Earth in the farmlands of Santa Mira.  They hatch, take on the form of a host, and fully inhabit said host's mind and memories when the host falls asleep.  And now that Bennell and Becky know about the plan, they're target #1 for assimilation.

In the final trimester, almost the entire town has been copied and taken over by the pods.  There are some admittedly tense sequences as the hero and the heroine try to escape the town with the denizens after them, trying to also run away from sleep all the while.  I know it might not sound like much, but it is.  The finale, with Bennell and Becky hiding away in an abandoned mine and spotting that gigantic farm full of farmers ready to deliver the pods all over the country is actually pretty dreadful.  And I mean that in the best way.

Throughout my Magellan-like travels watching a lot of these older horror films, I've noticed a recurring trend that the material is taken deadly serious.  There was no 1980s nostalgia to pull from in the 1950s, so that self-referential tone just isn't there, and thank the lord for the nighttime on that one.  More than anything else, though, this movie is carried by Kevin McCarthy.  While there's a large group of characters that we actually get to care about in this flick, this is his movie all the way and he delivers big time.  But it's not just him.  Wynter is also compelling in her own way, as is King Donovan as Jack and Carolyn Jones as his wife Teddy.  I recognized Jones right away, as she was Elvis Presley's costar in King Creole, easily the best movie that the King ever did throughout his long and nonillustrious film career.  But I digress.

I'm wracking my brain trying to think of a weakness this movie has, and the only area that I can think of where Invasion of the Body Snatchers even comes close to being weak is that some of the middle section drags.  The stretch that lasts from Jack finding his body double leading up to the big reveal of the discovery of the first pod doesn't move along quite as brisk as the rest of the film, but it seems like I say this sort of thing every week.  Everything else fires on all cylinders, from the music to the camera work to the script to the performances.  It even has an ending that wraps up nice and neatly in about 30 seconds flat, and I cannot tell you how grateful I was that this movie was made in 1956, because I was immediately struck by that sinking feeling that a modern movie would probably carry on for another 40 minutes of terminal boredom involving the military going back to Santa Mira to fight off the Podded-up locals.  Three cheers for simplicity and 80-minute running times!

*** 1/2 out of ****.  It's definitely worth a buy and a watch for all horror fans, whether or not you're all about the history of the genre or not.

Them! (1954)

1954

Directed by Gordon Douglas
Starring James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon and James Arness

Longtime readers of the blog know one unequivocal fact: I am f**king terrified of insects.  Seriously, the damn things are the stuff of nightmares for me.  I've had some incidents with them over the years going all the way back to my childhood fear of grasshoppers (yes, seriously), including being frozen in fear for something like five minutes one time when a winged grasshopper flew into my car.  I'm well aware of the irony.  Nerdy blog horror guy can watch people get sliced up and go right to sleep immediately afterward, but bugs?  Yeah, keep them away.

As such, I knew that Them! was going to be a damn scary movie for yours truly before I even hit the "play" button.  I heard of this flick many years ago, back when I used to read every book about classic horror that my middle school library had.  The page-long spread in one of them about...um...Them! stood out immediately.  Out of all insects, ants are truly some of the most amazing, aren't they?  They can lift 20 times their body weight, they have a complex social structure, and they just seem to possess this weird intelligence that makes them slightly unnerving.  Throw these critters into an O.G. 1950s-style creature feature complete with the always great "nuclear testing makes something grow to Brobdingnagian proportions" plot, and you've got a winner.  Watching the story unfold, I also noticed several things that were later ripped off in James Cameron's Aliens, which we'll get to...RIGHT NOW!

This is a film that got plenty of critical praise at the time it was released, and it's easy to see why since the script here wastes precious little time building this palpable sense of dread.  A helicopter pilot is out cruising a lonely beat in the Mexico desert when they spot a lone little girl wandering around.  Sergeant Ben Peterson (James Whitmore, who is aces as the "everyman forced to be a hero" character) and his partner Ed Blackburn (Chris Drake) are on the scene to pick her up, and what they find is a child unable to speak, terrified into silence at whatever she has witnessed.  The girl is played by Sandy Descher, and while her role in this movie is brief, she makes an indelible impression - so much that it's easy to see why Cameron chose to ape this plot device with Newt in the aforementioned Aliens.  This sequence eventually leads to the discovery of two busted-up buildings, the latter of the two the site of a shootout between Ed and an unseen assailant that gives us our first offscreen screaming death.

Flash forward right along in our Screenwriting 101 lesson, as the film then introduces us to the rest of our main characters.  There's FBI agent Robert Graham (James Arness of Gunsmoke and my dad's favorite actor of all time fame) who fills in the "somewhat officious nice guy" role.  But then there's the real stars of this shindig, the antologists - Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn) and his daughter Pat (Joan Weldon).  They give us some more dread as they share what their specialty is, and they are present when Ben and Robert go scouting the desert for whatever it is that's killing a whole bunch of seemingly random people for no reason.  Yeah, there's hints of romantic tension between Robert and Pat that pretty much goes nowhere, but just ignore that plot thread.  Eventually, Pat walks up that hill as she hears the curious sound that has been playing at various intervals throughout the film thus far and sees...it.  A giant freaking ant.

Amazingly enough, the creature effects still look pretty good more than sixty years later.  I'm a broken record when it comes to this subject, but here we go again: hand-made effects are 17 times as effective as CGI, because when it's done right it looks like it actually MIGHT be real, as compared to Michael Bay's goddamn crayola drawings, which just look like goddamn crayola drawings.  For its time period, Them! had a big budget to work with, and it's a good thing because the ants are onscreen quite a bit from this point in the movie forward.  Medford gives us the requisite science lessons that accompany the events and attack scenes, explaining that this desert was the site of the very first nuclear test a decade earlier.  Yup, we tampered in God's domain, or something.

The pace in this movie is brisk, and all of the big set pieces fire along in a slam-bang way.  We go from the ants' nesting site in the desert (and man, that sequence was nothing short of gut-wrenchingly tense for this guy) to an offshore ocean liner to the canals underneath Los Angeles.  There's a lot of yelling, a lot of politicians wondering how the hell they're going to keep 30-foot ants under wraps, and a lot of machine gun fire.  There's really a lot of that.  The finale takes place with the ants threatening to colonize L.A., and as I type this I'm actually feeling trepidation imagining such a thing happening under my small Minnesota town.  Ick.  And yes, folks, I was into the climactic scenes of this movie.

The writers here did a great job with both main things they set out to do.  First, they wanted to create a likable group of main characters, and this is a really memorable bunch.  Peterson has the emotional stakes of trying to avenge the death of his state trooper understudy, while both Medford and his daughter serve as the representatives of science doing their best to use their intellect to save mankind.  Because if these bugs manage to make a decent amount of colonies, it's the end of civilization.  Yet more nightmare fuel.  These likable characters lead us into goal #2, as we get more than a few truly cringe-worthy moments with these characters in peril.  The first reveal of the scout ant in the desert with Pat coming face-to-face with those mandibles...don't even get me started.  But then again, I don't know many other people besides myself who avoid knocking over anthills at all costs because they're worried that they'll sneak into your bedroom and kill you at night, so your mileage might vary.  And folks, I wish I was making that up.

While I greatly enjoyed pretty much everything this film had to offer, I will admit that it does lose some of its steam in the second half.  I think the movie would have been damn near perfect had they just confined the entire story to the remote New Mexico population and the vast desert, ending with the long, slow descent into the colony and coming face-to-face with the queen (a scene that we do get, and yet another thing that Cameron would later xerox).  Once the bugs start hitting different locations, the tension kind of dissipates, in no small part due to the fact that we are then introduced to a bunch of government officials that I couldn't have possibly cared less about.  I also think they should have kept the terrified mute girl around longer in the story than they did.  Hey, I never said that Cameron didn't do a GOOD job ripping this movie off!

Those flaws, though, are very minor.  If you like good 1950s-era acting and special effects and you're scared of bugs like I am, odds are you'll really enjoy this movie.  *** 1/2 out of ****.  And you can bet your ass I ain't watching this one again.

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.