Encounter With The Unknown(1973)
Three short films connected through the subject of the supernatural and narrated by Rod Serling (Twilight Zone and The Night Gallery).
An hour and a half of mediocrity later leaves me convinced that these shorts were rejects from his TV series bolted together to provide a feature film on the cheap.
With this, I finish the quartet of cheap black-and-white shockers produced by Del Tenney, after having watched The Horror of Party Beach** (1964) and its co-feature The Curse of the Living Corpse*** (1964) as well as I Eat Your Skin**** (filmed 1963?1964?, released 1971.)
We start with a guy getting shot in the face with a shotgun. Later we'll find out it was our main character's father, and he blames himself for the killing. He's a wealthy, reclusive young painter. Right away we get the tiny bit of nudity that must have limited the uncut version of this thing to "adults only" theaters, as we meet him and the model posing for him. Pretty soon his elegant lawyer and the lawyer's mute, hulking chauffeur show up. Let the red herrings begin!
The model has a sort-of boyfriend, but wants to be with the painter. Cue big fight between the two guys. Next, she reveals she's pregnant, but the timing makes it clear it wasn't the painter's fault. In our first big shock scene, filmed in a manner that will remind you strongly of Psycho (hence the alternate title), a giallo style killer in black gloves and trench coat stabs the model to death. Given the circumstances, the painter is the primary suspect.
Meanwhile, the painter's sister shows up after being away for six years, ready to attend the local women's college. Cue lots of young women in their underwear and another tiny bit of nudity. Painter gets a girlfriend, one of the students throws herself at the model's sort-of boyfriend. She gets killed for her trouble. More red herrings show up, such as a peeping tom. There is, of course, a Shocking Twist Ending.
The killer is the sister, who shot their father and stabbed the women in order to have her brother to herself.
It's a decent little thriller, even if the plot meanders around quite a bit.
*Not to be confused with Psychomania (1973), which involves a frog deity and a zombie motorcycle gang.
**Hilariously terrible, and a cult classic mocked by MST3K.
***Not too bad, and somewhat similar to the film under discussion.
****Actually a lousy little voodoo movie supposed to be called Zombie or some other similar title, and not released until they needed a companion feature for the R-rated film I Drink Your Blood, in an infamous double bill. I wonder what movie patrons of the time thought about seeing a gore-drenched new color movie followed by a bloodless, ultra-cheap, black-and-white film half a dozen years old on the same bill. In any case, nothing even remotely similar to the eating of skin takes place.
I watch a lot of repeats for Hoctoberween but I watched a new one MARTA 1971 which is a murder mystery set in a castle with Stephen Boyd as an impotent nut who finds a stranger on his property (Marissa Mell) and lots of weird things happen. He does a good job looking truly nuts in this movie. Mell does a good job looking good. I think her real voice is heard in this one.
A real castle can improve the overall quality of a film. It's kind of incoherent story-wise but what a castle.
Just finished watching a Russian movie called Coma which I thought was excellent.
Coma patients all sharing an experience as a scientist is using them to create a utopian city. It had pretty good effect and the soundtrack was good. Sort of the same realm as The Matrix or Inception. A good science fiction movie in my opinion.
Said to be the first zombie movie in color. It's also an extremely cheap and amateurish effort. Starts with the zombie (a guy with long hair wearing a tuxedo, with pale yellow makeup on his skin) rising from his sarcophagus as a woman performs a voodoo ritual and screams "Kill!" several times at the top of her lungs. We'll see this exact same scene again after about forty minutes of filler.
In brief, newlyweds visit no less that three nightclubs in New Orleans (cool jazz, G-rated striptease, and hot jazz/rock 'n' roll) then go to the groom's ancestral plantation, the inheritance of which he's going to share with his cousin. By george, the cousin is the woman we saw/will see performing the voodoo ritual to raise her dead brother, so he can kill the others and she can get the property for herself. Oh, I forgot to mention that the newlyweds pick up the stripper they saw at the club when her car breaks down and have her stay at the plantation, adding another potential victim.
The original version was supposedly an hour and a half long, and what survives today is about an hour. What we have is agonizingly slow and padded, so what it used to be must have been truly glacial. Everything is brightly lit, creating the worst possible mood. Acting ranges from mediocre to abysmal. Some of the female performers appeared in nudie cuties, which gives you an idea of the quality of this film.
Our hero has to hide the fact that he's a hotroddin', rock 'n' rollin' swinger from his dotty maiden aunts. Meanwhile, he has to raise rent money for the clubhouse/garage where he and his buddies do their thing. That doesn't include the $4100.00 they need to build a super-duper hot rod designed by the gang's resident mechanical genius. Fortunately, new girl in town is a friend of real-life rock 'n' roll pioneer Gene Vincent, playing himself, who sings a couple of songs at a benefit for the gang. Not only that, but our hero puts on a fake beard and becomes a rock 'n' roll star as a jive-talking beatnik, using a fake name. Then there's our movie's bad guy, a rival hotrodder who gets the hero framed for stealing hubcaps.
Forget the plot, mostly played for comedy, which is really just an excuse for a bunch of songs, some dancing, some fighting, some romantic rivalry, and surprisingly little hotrodding. The whole thing is the usual low-budget exploitation quickie of the time, slickly made, painless, and easily forgettable.
Very late-in-the-day threequel (in name only) to Creepshow (1982) and Creepshow 2 (1987). Unlike those two, this one has nothing to do with Stephen King and George Romero. Five stories that intersect with each other in odd ways.
"Alice" -- A remote control (apparently created by the Mad Scientist who features in a later story) transforms a bratty teenage girl's family from white to African-American, then to Latinx folks. Then it turns her into a grotesque monster. Then the Mad Scientist turns her into a white rabbit. Our first clue that this film is going to be full of stories that don't make a lot of sense.
"The Radio" -- Guy gets a radio that starts talking to him in a woman's voice, giving him advice. It lures him into murder. Things don't work out well. Maybe the best of these not-very-good stories. It's pretty much a gritty crime story with a fantasy element.
"Call Girl" -- Escort likes to murder her clients. She shows up at the home of a young, seemingly innocent man. The story spoils its own ending, by showing us three dead bodies hanging on the wall, which the escort doesn't notice. She "kills" the client, he turns out to be a vampire of sorts (gigantic mouth full of gigantic teeth.)
"The Professor's Wife" -- The Mad Scientist (remember him?) is about to marry a much younger, giggly woman. A couple of students deduce that she's actually a robot, so they kill her and rip her body apart in an attempt to prove this. Played for extremely black comedy, with tons of gore.
"Haunted Dog" -- The world's most obnoxious physician walks away from a homeless man choking to death on a hot dog. The dead man's ghost haunts the doctor to his doom. That's all the plot there is, so lots of time is killed with the physician's nasty behavior at the free clinic where he is being forced, for some reason, to work. More time is wasted with characters from the other stories showing up. (The Mad Scientist buys an "advanced voodoo kit" from the street vendor who sold the talking radio; the physician goes to a party hosted by the vampire.)
A brief epilogue shows the Mad Scientist's wedding to his newly revived bride, who is now completely covered with bandages, although her eye leaks blood and her hand falls off. (I assume the "advanced voodoo kit" brought her back to life, but this dark joke would make more sense if he just used Mad Science to Frankenstein her back together.) The white rabbit is in the back of their limousine, and the family of the formerly human bratty teenager is worried because they think her mother only imagines that she ever existed.
THE DARK 1979 -- Haven't seen this in ages. It looks great in HD and the awfulness is all the more vibrant. The feeling one gets is that they were channeling 1940s or 50s horror tropes (the psychic who sees the murders, and a shambling ghoul killer and the woman reporter who wants to break the big story) but mixed with some eccentricities like William Devane as the ex-con author who seemed to be competing with Cathy Lee Crosby in a hairstyle competition.
One gets the impression that someone was deliberately putting in background jokes like the couple kissing in the middle of a street and the unusually energetic protestors doing jumping exercises as they chant.
There are some good humor moments like the dwarf selling newspapers and the cop dropping the jelly donut on the newspaper.
Halloween Kills (2021): Just terrible. It got so boring for me that I used it as white noise while I did other stuff. I doubt I'll finish this trilogy, considering Halloween Ends got even worse reviews and isn't about Michael Meyers at all.
Welcome to Leith (2015): A documentary focusing on white supremacist Craig Cobb and how he bought land in a very small North Dakota town, and how he turned it into a neo-Nazi home. I really hate these people and was hoping that they'd get punched at the very least. It was, however, more interesting than the above.
Hellraiser 2022 - It's a pretty good Hellraiser movie - maybe better than the original in some respects but I came away from it feeling a little dirty. My tolerance for gore is not what it was and I could have probably done without it, tbh.
THE TWO MRS CARROLLS (1947) Geoffrey Carroll (Humphrey Bogart)'s wife is strangely ill, and soon dies He is a painter, and had made a rather unflattering portrait of her that was not revealed until after her death. So, he marries Sally Morton (Barbara Stanwyck), and eventually, after several years, she too, becomes ill. Yes, he poisoned both, but will he be able to dispatch her as he did with #1?
Nigel Bruce is the family physician, Dr. Tuttle, a rather humorous portrayal.
Bogart's portrayal of Mr. Carroll is very different from any other I can recall, except 1
Political drama written by Rod Serling from the novel of the same name by Irving Wallace. The President of the United States and the Speaker of the House are killed in a freak accident when a building collapses in Germany. The Vice-President has suffered a stroke, is confined to a wheelchair, and expects to die soon, so he refuses the office. According to the Constitution, the president pro tempore of the Senate (a largely honorary/ceremonial office, generally given to the senior Senator of the majority party) is next in line. The president pro tempore is a scholarly widower with an adult daughter. He also happens to be African-American.
James Earl Jones stars as The Man, who faces a situation for which no one could be prepared. His daughter is an activist who thinks he's too moderate. The Secretary of State (William Windom) has Presidential ambitions of his own. Windom's racist wife is even more pushy about it, leading to an extremely awkward dinner party where Jones, his daughter, Windom, and his wife are all present. A Senator (Burgess Meredith), formerly openly segregationist, tries to limit Jones' power by proposing a law that would require congressional approval before Jones could fire a member of the Cabinet.
In addition to all this, there's an American radical accused of assassinating a South African official. He's got an alibi, so Jones gives him sanctuary from the South Africans who want to extradite him. Then Meredith obtains proof that the young African-American man is guilty. Can Jones deal with the demands of the South African government that wants him extradited, as well as the African-American protestors who want him to remain in the USA? Will his wise and sympathetic aide (Martin Balsam) help him through this crisis, and win him the nomination for the next election?
Intended for television but released to theaters instead, it looks like a made-for-TV movie. It mostly consists of people talking in offices. It could almost be a stage play. However, I liked it. There's fine acting from familiar faces all around. The dialogue is very Serlingesque; nobody can offer so many sharp, pithy, metaphor-heavy pronouncements in real life. Accept that, and enjoy Jones speaking those lines like nobody else can.
Excellent adaptation of the classic Heinlein story "'--All You Zombies--'". The less said about the plot the better, but those familiar with the story will be pleased by the way the film makers honor it. (I don't even mind the fact that they had to add violent action movie stuff, because it's well integrated into the story.) Intelligently scripted, beautifully filmed, sensitively acted. I love the way they create the various time periods. I particularly adore the look of the SpaceCorps sequences, although those sections aren't really a vital part of the plot. Highly recommended.
X (2022): In this slasher film, a bunch of young adults go to a secluded house to shoot a pornographic film. The old couple finds out what they're there for and all hell breaks loose. Effectively creepy.
Surprisingly effective. I haven't seen anything directed by Ti West before, so didn't realize how steeped he was in 1970s, early '80s horror movies. Not only does this take place in that time period, with call backs to various horror movies, notably The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it is effectively shot as a low-budget movie at that time would be -- a scene of a woman on a dock by a lake has a very Friday the 13th vibe. Taking advantage of that secluded lake, a long stretch of untenanted land except for the somewhat Wyeth-like farm house they are staying at, West creates a homage to those older movies about sophisticatedly clueless city folk wandering naively into situations they don't recognize and can't adjust to, while managing to turn it into a meditation on aging and love.
My wife likes horror but not gore, and I was concerned this might be gory. I expected us to turn it off at some point, but we didn't. There are some gory scenes, and maybe more than a lot of viewers would be comfortable with, but because this is obviously about something more and the performances by Brittany Snow (Southern brassy, funny porno-Marilyn Monroe wannabe) and, especially, Mia Goth (determined to be someone), are so strong, we ended up watching the entire movie. Snow is pretty well-established as a female second- or third-lead (Pitch Perfect), but I haven't seen Goth before and from this I expect to see her a lot more.
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