Buzzing Thru the Pylon: Halloween Free-For-All, Pt. 7: Return of the Best Buy Exclusives!

Once more, a trip to Best Buy caused me to happen upon new discs which I had not seen discussed elsewhere. Warner has released a pair of discs exclusively to Best Buy stores, and one of them (featured below) was a no-brainer purchase for me. Some would contend, such as my girlfriend, that I would have to possess little in the way of gray matter to purchase such a thing in the first place, and this would not be a statement based solely on its content… the deeper truth is that we have little or no more room for such items in our relatively cramped abode, and my predilection for purchasing books, music and movies constantly has her making the odd comment here and there about the situation.

But she should put down the knife -- at least, she can after Halloween -- since I actually did show a small measure of restraint, as I did not purchase the twin disc to this set, a double feature of the Lovecraft feature The Shuttered Room and a Roddy McDowall golem flick called, simply, It! Since I have never seen the former before and it is actually being shown on TCM on Halloween, I decided to delay its possible addition to the collection for the time being. (Shuttered’s potential is the only thing in discussion over such a buy, since It! is really not very good at all.) But if I miss out on buying it, I miss it. That’s the choice I made, and Jen should be momentarily proud over it. Here are the discs:

Warner Horror Double Feature // Best Buy Exclusive
featuring:
Chamber of Horrors
Director: Hy Averback
Warner Bros., 1:39, color
Cinema 4 Rating: waiting to watch this over again, some 25-30 years later

The Brides of Fu Manchu
Director: Don Sharp
Hallam/Anglo-Amalgamated/Seven Arts, 1:34, color
Cinema 4 Rating: waiting to watch this over again, some 20 years later

Two more British horror flicks from the ‘60s that somehow my mind – and I am sure that I am not the only one out there – automatically triggers on as belonging to the long and bloody line of Hammer horror films, even though they, in actuality, are not. I know that somewhere far back in my past I saw Chamber of Horrors, a gimmick-laden (and how!) revenge festival with Patrick O’Neal as a one-armed madman with a variety of stump accessories, a couple of times. But, it was so long ago, I scarcely remember it past O’Neal’s image, being one of the few times I actually watched him act. The second of Harry Allan Towers’ Fu Manchu series I recall a tad bit better, having seen it slightly more recently, though still long enough ago where reading the film’s synopsis on IMDB has me now confusing with the later films in the series that I have caught in the past couple years.

Am I suggesting that all Fu Manchu flicks look alike? Hardly, that would be mildly racist, even when I am merely attempting to be ironic. But when all five films star the great Christopher Lee in the lead role, and all five basically have the same plot – the abduction of hot girls; forcing scientists to bend to his evil whims; trying to take over the world (the same thing he tries to do every night, Pinky…) – then you can understand the confusion. Fu’s megalomania is quizzical, since he can barely control a dozen people in one room – how is he going to control everyone in the world? He’d get no rest at all, and one would certainly beg for some extra leisure time with all the hot girls around. Maybe he should shoot for a smaller goal. Like taking over a movie studio and forcing them to make a halfway decent film. While Lee’s presence, and the attendant gore and torture that follows in his notorious character’s wake, could serve as the sole reasons why the connection to the Hammer series looms so large in my mind, perhaps it is also because these were shown side by side with the Hammer Frankenstein and Dracula films in my teen years, and so that made the true connection for me. Regardless, Hammer or not, The Brides of Fu Manchu will now rest side by side on my DVD shelf with those same films, if only for Mr. Lee.

Paul Naschy Double Feature // Best Buy Exclusive
featuring:
Curse of the Devil [El Retorno de Walpurgis] (1973)
Director: Carlos Aured
Spanish, 1:24, color
Cinema 4 Rating: haven’t seen yet in a real version

Werewolf Shadow [La Noche de Walpurgis] (1971)
Director: León Klimovsky
Spanish, 1:35, color
Cinema 4 Rating: haven’t seen yet at all

Trick or treat? I really won’t know which until I – and I will consider the opportunity a treat until I learn otherwise – dig into one or both of these Spanish horror films this Halloween weekend and discover the truth for myself. Most people outside of horror circles are probably not all that aware of Paul Naschy, who has as large a legacy in horror films in many countries in the world as Karloff, Lee, Cushing and Lee have in the English-speaking world. If they are aware, they may not know him by name, but possibly have crossed paths with him on Spanish-language channels here and there, generally in very censored and misshapen prints of his films, or even occasionally in badly dubbed versions of a couple of his films, such as Fury of the Wolfman, on UHF and cable access channels. In addition to his appearances in scads of films over his nearly fifty-year career, Naschy has knocked out a dozen films featuring his Hombre Lobo character, a wolfman named Waldemar Daninsky, even appearing as Daninsky as recently as four years ago. I only own copies of two of his films on videotape, both dubbed and truly atrocious in recording quality to view. I was aware that several of his films, including the two released on this combo disc (which I have read elsewhere can only be found at Best Buy), had been released to DVD. I figured now was as good a time as any, with my interest in world cinema, to become truly acquainted with Mr. Naschy (nee Jacinto Molina), and to let my own opinion take over in my mind all of the comments I have read – from disparate sources, mostly negative but coddling, as though they were films proposed by filmmakers with the talents of mere preschoolers, making films for the even more infantile. I doubt this is the truth, and there has to be some level of professionalism involved for such a series to have lasted so long and so popularly.

But then I think about Police Academy, and I worry…

Buzzing Thru the Pylon: Halloween Free-For-All, Pt. 6: Hammer Down!

With the near completion of my Universal horror collection over the past few years (there are only a handful of the obscurer titles still outstanding, with all of what would be considered the true "classics" covered), comes the time to pay attention to my Hammer collection.

Almost more influential to me in my youth than the Universal versions of the famous monsters were the Hammer versions of the same. Once I discovered that these films even existed as a near-teen, Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee (and to a lesser extent, Oliver Reed for his role in Curse of the Werewolf) became my gods for a number of years. I have recounted my devotion to a late night ABC affiliate program called The World's Most Terrible Movies a couple of times before; Lee and Cushing were the chief reasons that I tuned in week after week. With scant few references at hand in my local small town library and an absolute lack of internet in those days, I had little knowledge of Hammer Films except for the fact that I saw their names on many of my then favorite films, most of them starring those twin gods of mine.

And then, over the years, as I discovered more of their films, the immediate assumption was that all of these films were also Hammer Films, an assumption, if one were to judge from board comments on various websites, that many other horror film fans make to this day. When I made some recent purchases in addition to my obtaining the latest Icons of Horror DVD set, this time focusing on a quartet of unreleased as of yet Hammer Films, I grabbed the extra pair of discs continuing that assumption: that the related films featuring either or both of the Lee/Cushing team just had to be Hammer Films, even though I had read before that they weren't. So strong is the connection between that studio, those stars and their eager public, that it matters little when the film does not actually belong to the studio.

The Flesh and the Fiends (1960)

Director: John Gilling

Triad/Regal, 1:37, b/w

TC4P Rating: 6/9

The Skull (1965)

Director: Freddie Francis 

Amicus/Paramount, 1:30, color 

TC4P Rating: 6/9

First, the imposters: one I have never seen, The Flesh and the Fiends, a black and white version of the Burke and Hare story starring Mr. Cushing, and The Skull, an Amicus adaptation of a Robert Bloch short story featuring both members of the famous team. The Skull certainly fits the assumption well, as I have always lumped it into the Hammer camp. Having seen the film numerous times over the years, I suppose that I have seen the Amicus name in the credits over and over again, and it was still not enough to wipe the association with Hammer out of my mind. Never having actually owned a copy of this movie, though, I will be glad to finally get a chance to see it in its true aspect ratio (if indeed it proves to be), rather than the chopped and leaping prints with which I have had to make do over the years.

I always seem to think that I have seen The Flesh and the Fiends, but my memories of Karloff's The Body Snatcher (a favorite, for which I have always supported Danny Peary's notion that perhaps the man could have won an Oscar for his performance if the Academy were smarter) are very strong as regards black-and-white grave-robbing flicks, and I am also probably mixing it up with The Doctor and the Devils, a 1985 Timothy Dalton starrer directed by Freddie Francis (who, coincidentally, also directed The Skull). Judging from what I have read about this one, I am in for a gruesome treat. But only watching it will tell... [Note: And once I did, I liked it well enough, but not as half as much as The Body Snatcher.]

Icons of Horror Collection: Hammer Films
4 Creepy Classics from the Hammer Film Archives featuring:

The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll (1960)
Director: Terence Fisher
Hammer/Columbia
TC4P Rating: 6/9

The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964) 

Director: Michael Carreras 

Hammer/Columbia

TC4P Rating: 6/9

The Gorgon (1964) 

Director: Terence Fisher 

Hammer/Columbia
TC4P Rating: 7/9

Scream of Fear (1961)

Director: Seth Holt

Hammer/Columbia

TC4P Rating: 7/9

And now for the real deal: the Hammer flicks, two of which I have never had opportunity to see. The Gorgon is a personal favorite, as it was one of the few Hammer films of which I actually own a real copy of on VHS, and yet again, I will be glad to be given a chance to see it in widescreen for the first time. I have never thought much of Hammer's Mummy series beyond the swell first flick, but I am willing to give them all another chance with fresh viewings, so The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb will likely be part of my Halloween program this weekend (though, unlike the other three films on this set, there is no Lee or Cushing).

I did get to watch half an hour of Scream of Fear a few months ago, before my pothead neighbors somehow convinced the cable guy to switch our connection off so they could get the Super Bowl (we have no proof of this, but the circumstantial evidence against them, especially as collected by Jen and I, is astounding). So, this will be another first, as will my viewing, long awaited, of the Hammer version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which I think might be the only version which I have not seen. (Believe me, I have seen a lot of them...) All told, it pulls in another chunk of Hammer all at once into my collection, cheaply and effortlessly.

And the other films? Like many a horror fan, I bid them all an eager welcome, whether we can remember if Hammer produced them or not. 

After all, in the end, it's really Pete and Chris that matter...

RTJ

Psychotronic Ketchup: Nothing But the Night (1973)

Director: Peter Sasdy
Charlemagne/Rank, 1:30, color
Cinema 4 Rating: 4

What spells terror to you? How about a fat whore wearing a Ronald McDonald style wig-do and a bright red leather jacket crawling across the Scottish countryside? Yep, that’s what I thought. It’s horrible to even consider it…

She would be far scarier if they didn’t show her panting desperately for air every few steps, and if they also didn’t show her stopping for a sandwich break halfway through her supposedly epic crawl across the breadth of a remote island as she angrily tries to reach her young daughter, supposedly to do her great bodily harm. I know the English must have their tea time, but this is ridiculous. And this is in the midst of incredible, frenetic violence going on all around her – helicopters circle overhead, police teams leading dogs comb the hillsides looking for both her and a little boy who has disappeared, and a boat gets blown to smithereens, killing five more trustees of a place called Inver House, where the fat whore’s daughter and a group of other children are being sheltered for some possibly nefarious reason one might discover later in the film. The only terror generated by this supposed threat to the welfare of English children everywhere is the one posed by her grotesque looks, with makeup lacquered on so thickly about her facial features that you will instantly realize I am not mistaken for the Ronald McDonald reference at the beginning of this piece.

And this is surprising, because the fat whore is played by none other than Diana Dors, often known as the British Marilyn Monroe, normally blonde, normally gorgeous. I certainly did a double take when I read the credits, but there she was, trolling it up in the opposite direction that she used to, looking a fright instead of a delight. And please don’t consider my statement regarding her status as a “whore” to be misogynistic; I am merely stating her profession within the film… that of a prostitute – a bloody, frightening one by looks at that – and one who did time for murder as well, at which point her daughter was wrested from her possession and became a ward of Inver House. For reasons that I am wholly bored by, she wishes to get her daughter back… or seems to... and her daughter is consumed by memories that may or may not be her own, of terrible fires and the deaths of numerous people. She might be the reincarnation of someone else, or is there something far more sinister at play? You know, the sort of wickedness that would cause us to have to watch her wretched mother bumble her way over hill and dale, panting and heaving awfully the entire, all while trying not very hard to make it seem like she is exactly the sort who could elude detectives, policemen and the army over hundreds of miles -- and possibly plot and commit the murders of all who stand in her noxious way – for an hour and a half.

The movie begins with a trio of what seem to be the horrible murders of the first three trustees of Inver House, and then we meet this awful, screaming wretch of a child. The actress playing her is graced with the traits of the worst child actors, and plays every emotion within the same range, from whispering to screeching, sometimes within the same sentence. She’s the type of child actress that makes one appreciate the Dakota Fannings and Haley Joel Osments of the world. (The reason decent child actors seem so alien sometimes, especially in Osment’s case, is that we have become so accustomed to kids automatically sucking onscreen, we are stunned when we actually see quality and depth instead. This includes Mr. Culkin who, despite his massive success as a kid, actually was a pretty stiff actor. The right cuteness at the right time was the key to his early success.) There comes the point, for reasons that have nothing to do with the plot, that one stops wishing they would catch the fat whore, and would instead just let her through to the orphanage so she can throttle her annoying daughter for good. One tries to take into account that different times call for different levels of child acting, and to just accept the story for what it is… but then some miniature, shrieking harpy opens her trap and takes one completely out of the film again.

Oh yes, you are supposed to be watching this film because it has yet another team-up of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, but when one spends half a film following a porcine, red-headed, slutty clown around instead, one needs to be forgiven the original reason for tuning in. Lee (whose production company made this underwhelming claptrap) and Cushing are both portrayed as being the heroes here, but for the life of me, I couldn’t really figure out a decent reason for their being in the film at its closing point. Lee plays an army colonel who acts with appropriate gusto and determinedness throughout the film, but he really doesn’t seem to hold much influence over anything at all. Cushing plays a pathologist – and a knighted one at that, as we are reminded about a quartet of times in the flick that he is called “Sir Mark Ashley” – and he has one of those professions where you wonder why he is actually involved with this case at all. He seems to be one of those guys just hanging around on the off-chance that somebody will die so he can offer his expertise on how they might have died, and then take the credit for solving the mystery at the film’s end. Not that he really does – he only figures out part of it, and not that any of it makes a lick of sense anyway. And Lee even ends up playing second banana in his own film, letting other younger actors carry much of the dramatic load, relegating Cushing and himself to musing about possible murder angles every few minutes.

And so you are left with two heroes for whom you can’t really understand their compulsion, and a supposed villainess for whom you cannot illicit even the slightest belief that she couldn’t even make it up half a hill without stumbling, falling down, rolling two miles back down the hill to the center of town, and then devour half the contents of a fish n’ chips shop as he crashes through its front door. Without a reservation, mind you. I reserved time to watch Nothing But the Night, and all I received was a blinding headache from the shrill cries of an immensely annoying and precocious child actress, and a lacerating head wound from when I fell down laughing at the thought that anyone in this film would believe that the clownish mother would be any sort of threat to anyone…

Except perhaps by way of STD...

Buzzing Thru the Pylon: Halloween Free-For-All, Pt. 2

Phase IV (1974)
Director: Saul Bass
Cinema 4 Rating: 7

The Man Who Could Cheat Death (1959)
Director: Terence Fisher
Cinema 4 Rating: 6

I remember exactly where I was when I first saw Saul Bass' insect politics thriller, Phase IV. I just don't remember the "who" of the story.

It was a Friday night, and there was someone at our house. Was it an uncle, and not one with quotations around it? Was it just a friend of ours from the neighborhood, or my cousin Brad, and was my father actually even around for this? Was it him? I don't fully recall the name of the person who filled in that particular role in this story, but I am fairly certain it was one of her abhorrent dates following my parents' then soul-wrenching but actually perfectly timely divorce.

I only recall that this person who probably ended up banging my mom bet me a dime for every thirty minutes I could shut completely up for the evening. I was still young enough where a thin dime still meant a good deal to me -- 10 cents would still buy me a pack of baseball cards at that time -- but I was already engaged enough verbally where I could drag any sane adult to the dark side in no time flat. Much like today, it seems. And thus, the deal was born. I sat down, shut up, and decided to watch whatever movie was coming on that evening. In the '70s, ABC had an amazing penchant for showing horror and science-fiction movies in prime time on Friday nights, most of them made-for-TV (and that is no knock on their quality, for there were some excellent ones) and some of them theatrical releases. (Click here for the opening to their show.)

This evening, they were showing what appeared to be a really spooky looking film called Phase IV. Anything with bug attacks at that age, I was there. It's what tricked me into actually seeing The Swarm in a theatre. And so, having dragged a sleeping bag into the living room, I crawled inside and shut my trap, counting out how many cards I could buy if I did not squeak a single word for the next three hours. (That would be, for the curious, sixty cards.) And then, over the next two hours, I found myself losing the ability to speak anyway. Thanks to Phase IV, which had me so scared I couldn't even get out of the sleeping bag to go down the hall to the bathroom on commercials, I was cheating whoever it was out of their money.

At first, I remember being bored, but then, as the implications of what was happening in this oddly located film were growing, and as the tension built up, I found myself unable to turn away. I didn't really understand what was happening, but that didn't matter. It was about the moment, and that moment found me not just easily earning the first two hours of that cash, but in the end found an entire dollar being slapped into my hand. Never has silence been so golden. I maintain that if the entire world would just pay me hush money in this same manner, I would leave everyone alone. I wouldn't yell about organized religion and idiot Republicans (and, occasionally, idiot Democrats) and crazy Hollywood cults and everything else that pisses me off.

If only I could get people to listen to me in the first place, this would be a great way of life for me.

I also remember where I was when I first saw The Man Who Could Cheat Death. OK, not the full movie, but I did see it in sixth grade at our graduation prize summer camp. The people running the camp had a series of 8mm ten-minute versions of various monster films -- the kind that I would ogle in the back pages of Famous Monsters magazine but never have the guts (or the cash -- I apparently wasn't being paid to shut up enough) to order them -- and as a gift for winning Capture the Flag earlier that morning on our second day there, our class was treated to a night at the movies, camp 8mm style. Popcorn, hot dogs and condensed versions of Christopher Lee Dracula and Peter Cushing Frankenstein films.

In this mix was the miniaturized version of The Man Who Could Cheat Death, with Anton Diffring as a sculptor who appears to be 40ish, but is in reality an increasingly mad Dorian Gray type who has lived for 104 years by replacing certain glands in his body with those of gullible, much younger victims. Chiefly, I remember the final sequence, which I will not relate here in the interests of those who have yet to see what is actually a middling though handsome Hammer production. Of course, being a Hammer film, most likely all will not work out for the villain in the end, so if I were to say that the sculptor is not just flaming in spirit, you can work it out for yourself. The scene, though, did make quite an impression on me, as did the appearance of Christopher Lee, with whom I was beginning a definite fascination. Within the next year, I would start watching the full versions of these same Hammer horror films.

But I got my Hammer start by watching the 8mm renditions, all truncated and jumpy on an old projector -- also, completely silent, so we had to provide our own soundtrack -- inside a cabin that split the difference between a cafeteria and a congregation room for this camp usually attended by the biblically minded. That I would totally discard any attempt at connecting with established religion within the next couple of years, and then possibly replaced such worship with a devotion to the very films that I saw that night in the camp is perhaps an irony worth far more delving on my part. But, I will save that for another time. For now, and for once, I will just shut up.

After all, it's your dime. And soon it will be mine...