Week Three - October Horror Movie Challenge

Day 15 - PUPPET MASTER II: HIS UNHOLY CREATIONS (1991). Oh Day 15, how I hardly remember you. Puppet Master II, what a shit show. Or maybe it's all the booze talking. In recent months, I've been revisiting some of these Full Moon Productions I loved so much in early nineties and realizing I was a very different person in the early nineties. (But I still dress relatively the same - boots, leggings, plaids.) There's an Egyptian brain serum and some side love plot involving reincarnation of a lost love (isn't there always?) but not enough here to keep me awake for very long.



Day 16 - HISSS (2010) directed by Jennifer Lynch. Think Bollywood without the singing and dancing crossed with what? A snake goddess hellbent on revenge towards a wealthy old white dude with brain cancer that stole her snake lover while they were doing sex so she would pursue him and offer him an immortality stone in exchange for her lover. Yep. That's what this is crossed with. And it might sound like a good time (the snake goddess in human form is impossibly hot, as well) it's pretty craptacular. Cheap, cheap, cheap, but there are some good gore gags and the snake transformations are actually pretty nice. Not what you would expect from David Lynch's offspring, given her other work, but whatever.



Day 17 - John Carpenter's THE THING (1982). Duh.



Day 18 - THANKSKILLING (2009). Recommended to me by my bar partner, who inexplicably smells EVERYTHING and has a serious fascination with boobs. (He drew a crude set on my birthday card last year.) This god-awful, but self-aware, horror movie making at its best (worst?) makes Troma look like they have a high class sense of humor. If you ever wanted to hear a turkey hand puppet say 'nice tits, bitch' then look no further. Misogynistic, poorly acted, over-the-top on purpose, and offensive as the day, this one clocks in at just 66 minutes, which seriously feels like an eternity, but not in a bad way. How many Jon Benet Ramsey jokes can you take in an hour? Watch this and find out.



Day 19 - CARNY (2009). Starring Lou Diamond Phillips as a small town sheriff with an escaped cryptozoological beast on his hands. Maybe or may not be the Jersey devil, because it escaped from a truck at a carnival with Jersey plates. Nice try, crappy script. Sideshow stuff is cool, but I do find it hard to believe such an outfit would hit upon small, religious town Reliant aka Bumfuck Nowhere, USA. All characters are either assholes or you don't care about them, so when they become monster food, you continue with your game of Angry Birds and try to give even less of a shit.



Day 20 - THE BLACK CAT (1934). Bela Lugosi birthday = Bela Lugosi movie. Horror stalwarts Karloff and Lugosi out evil each other over the affections of a young newlywed. Awesome set design, awesome performances, some very Caligari-like imagery, a cat, and a Karloff flaying. Good, good, good stuff.



Day 21- GUTTERBALLS (2008). I wish I could tell you how much I loved this because the MANIAC inspired cover makes me giddy with glee, but it was Friday night, I worked until 3 a.m. and had to be up at 9 a.m. so I probably watched all of ten minutes. I awoke to the DVD menu starting over and no recollection of what had just transpired. It still counts, because this is my blog. I still have the DVD, so a repeat watching will take place.

There's the third week. Started slacking there towards the end, what with two late night bar shifts and the anticipation of birthday celebrations (read: drunkenness) getting in the way. But I'm still in. Don't tag me out yet.

James River Film Festival Highlights

Richmond holds an annual film festival each April. The festival doesn't tend to focus on any theme or genre - they'll have a night of short films from local universities, or some independent work, maybe a reading or two thrown in. Once every couple of years, however, they'll screen a thing or two that peaks my interest and this year I was delighted to find out they were screening the Spanish language version of DRACULA with a live soundtrack AND a rare 35mm print of THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER. On the same night! Yay!

Movie the first - DRACULA. The introduction wasn't anything I didn't already know - the film was shot at night on the same stage as Tod Browning's film, the long shots of Dracula aren't Carlos Villar, but Bela Lugosi, a money-saving maneuver - but the highlights included seeing this old film on a big screen in a theatre with an audience AND musical accompaniment by guitar whiz Gary Lucas.

On the musical aspect. Lucas, looking cool in a purple fedora and loose fitting grey suit, took the stage after being briefly introduced as a performer with Captain Beefheart. He said a couple of words and the film started rolling. He played along with the DRACULA theme song at a little too high a volume, so I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to concentrate on subtitles. It really was that loud. But after the credits, he toned it down and I was immediately sucked in to watching the movie, almost tuning out Lucas as he played along. He's that good. You don't even realize you're hearing something performed live.

The only time I was sentient I was watching a live performance along with the film is that some of the music is slightly anachronistic. There's a Spanish feel to some it, a rock n roll feel to other parts, with softer notes played with women are conversing on screen. He also switches between acoustic and electric depending on the action, which is pretty cool. It updates the film in some ways, but you are still aware you're watching a movie from the Thirties. It's a weird feeling, but not a bad one.



On seeing DRACULA with an audience. I've seen this version of the film many times and often pair it as a double feature with Bela Lugosi's version. But this was my first time with a theatre full of other film fans and it was a little annoying, even though it is interesting to see how different people react to certain films I myself am very familiar with. Yes, the movie is stagey and akin to a stage performance, because it originated as such. Yes, it's eight decades removed from our current movie watching brains. And yes, sometimes it's hokey. But it ain't all that fucking funny. You would think people were watching stand up or something the way they were guffawing at Dracula's facial expressions. I think a lot of times people don't know what to do with themselves when they watch something old or removed from what they are used to. Laughter is their way of dealing with it. I've seen it happen with all sorts of films, usually films that are a lot more 'shocking' than this one. Overall, it was cool to see this on a big screen, stupid laughter from stupid people aside.

And, I never realized how much I love Renfield. It really is his movie in a lot of ways, at least this version. I love watching him go nuts. It's easily one of the best performances throughout the movie. And he gets so much more screen time than Dracula. It would seem he upstages the cloaked one in many ways.



Movie the second - NIGHT OF THE HUNTER. Charles Laughton's first and only feature, the wonderful melodrama starring Robert Mitchum, is easily one of my favorite noir pictures. I was delighted to be able to see this on a big screen in 35mm! This feature kicked off with a reading from the novel by Minnesotan author and film fan, Peter Schilling, Jr., appearing with fake LOVE/HATE knuckle tattoos. It was a cute gesture, but kinda weak. This is a dude wearing a navy blue blazer and those little wire-rimmed glasses. Oh well. I'm like, shut up, get to the movie.

On seeing this with an audience. The audience here was more reserved. Everyone was respectful of the film and there was the occasional giggle, but overall, this was a more somber affair than most. Preacher Harry Powell is just so damn evil! You can't take your eyes off him. And Pearl is just so darn cute. I don't like kids, but I would cuddle Pearl in a second.



On the movie itself. It's been years since I've seen this and only ever on VHS. I feel like I paid a lot of attention this time (I was also stone cold sober, hehe). You know how it is. You can see something over and over and then like the tenth time you see it, you pick up on stuff you might have missed. This time I was hyper-aware of the kids and their mistrust of the adults. I'm not saying I missed this entirely before, since it is overt, but I really felt for those kids this time around. They loose their dad, which they get to watch, they loose their mom, the other adults are drunk or unbelieving - there's no one they can trust. And while Mitchum's Preacher is what the film is most memorable for, the kids are really what carry the movie and who you feel for. It's just such a painful movie, in that you feel the same pain and really, really want to see Preacher get what's coming to him. I need to read the novel. I could only love it.

It was so fantastic to be able to see these two old films in a festival environment. To go to two different amazing venues in my city on the same night and watch two of my favorite films is what I want every day to be like. Richmond isn't the roaring metropolis it should be and these things just don't happen on the regular around here. I'm glad I got to be a part of it this year. Here's to more genre offerings in years to come! Yay!

The Bride of Frankenstein

I had some time to kill before I went to the hell that is my restaurant job and figured I should spend some time with Universal's only iconic female monster since I hadn't in awhile. Also, what better time than the Halloween season to refer back to those old horror classics? She's beautiful, she might have just been deadly had she been allowed to live, and she graces my flesh for all eternity, she's the BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN!

I fell in love the Bride when my grandma let me watch some Universal movies on TV when I was about nine or ten and I've loved her ever since, but I hadn't REALLY come back to this film for quite some time. I don't know why - I watch that creature do his thing in that black lagoon place several times a year, same for that whiny werewolf guy (ooh, sorry, don't mean to offend - that SENSITIVE werewolf guy), but I don't relish the same attention on the Bride for whatever reason. And I absolutely LOVE her! Yesterday, I was, as they say, in the mood.

This isn't just a good horror film; this is a great film as far as films go. I spend 99.99 percent of my time on horror movies, hands down. Once in awhile I'll watch an indie flick or some other stupid thing or whatever, but I didn't minor in film studies for nothing (well, I guess I really did since I bring people food instead of expounding on film for money, but you get it) and I know a good movie when I see one. For one of those silly 'horror' themed movies, this is the pinnacle of excellence. From the score to the sets, to the costuming to the storyline, to the superb acting by a talented cast (which is worth repeating ;)), it don't get much better than this, people.

I'm assuming most of us here know the tale, but a quick (?) recap for those who need BRIDE 101. BofF (1935) is director James Whale's sequel to his 1931 masterpiece, FRANKENSTEIN, the film that made Boris Karloff a household name back then, as well as horror icon today, an indisputable fact if there was one.

BofF is, in many ways, a superior film to its original, something that is somewhat of an anomaly, especially in horror, as any horror fan worth his or her salt knows all too well. Shit, even my mom probably knows this about horror movies and sequels (in general as well). Four years before BofF, FRANKENSTEIN had rocketed the careers of both Karloff and Whale and when approached by Hollywood to make another monster, Whale was hesitant at first. He had a love-hate relationship with his monster movies (he also directed THE INVISIBLE MAN and I think Claude Rains was supposed to appear as Karl - Dwight Frye's character in the Bride but it didn't happen and I can't remember why), and wanted to be taken more seriously (but let's face it, money was probably a factor, too), having been a theatrical stage persona in Britain before arriving in Hollywood.

The result for BofF was Whale having complete control and a great deal more money to work with in this particular outing for Universal. He could lavish attention on the sets, he could hire an all-British cast of his choosing (and what a cast it was! - we'll get to that in a second), and he could play with the story elements, because Whale was, as you see when you know what he insisted on including, a man with a great deal of imagination.

The film begins with a prologue, again at Whale's insistence, with a young and beautiful and well-endowed, IYKWIM, Mary Shelley (played by a young and beautiful Elsa Lancaster), Percy Shelly, and Lord Byron expounding one dark and stormy night how a delicate creature such as Mary could have conceived of the horror of Frankenstein. Mary quips at them a bit and then they urge her to continue her tale because the first had ended so abruptly. Mary smiles sweetly and obliges and thus begins the BofF.

The prologue is excellent and sets the tone for the film, a film told by a woman. Mary is presented as sweet and beautiful, but with a dark side, kinda like me ;P She's afraid of storms and lighting, but has no problem telling the men stories about cadavers and crypts and Monsters. She says, "...such an audience needs something stronger than a pretty little love story, so why shouldn't I write of monsters?"

The actual film picks up right after the first film ends. The monster has been brought to 'justice' by an angry torch toting mob because there's really no other kind of justice than angry mob justice, and Henry Frankenstein (reprising his role from the first and playing it to a nervous, hand ringing tee by Colin Clive) has seemingly perished in the melee, along with his abominable creation. Henry is taken back to his homestead, where a tearful Elizabeth (the beautiful ingenue Valerie Hobson) awaits. Seems that this night was to be their wedding night.

All is not lost, however, as Henry isn't really dead after all and he and Elizabeth decide he's done with the mad scientist racket and that they'll be married and then go away, leaving all this business about playing God behind them. Seems it just ain't all it's cracked up to be. But before you can say Here Comes the Bride, a creepy old flamboyant eccentric, Dr. Pretorious (played to with much gay aplomb by an old friend of Whale's from his stage days, Ernest Thessinger), shows up and seduces Henry away from Elizabeth with the prospect that he has created life.

Here's where it really starts to get interesting. It's really a complex tale and a great deal of subtext to be argued. We've got the constructed woman in the Bride, but more on that in a second, once we get to her creation scene. But this film can also function as a metaphor for the moral responsibilities of parenthood and as an abortion debate, the concept of asexual reproduction or even homosexual reproduction, and even more subversive ideas about reproduction in general. There's certainly homosexual presences in front of the camera here, but behind it as well as in front of it, Whale having been openly homosexual in the 30's. There's a lot going on here, and not to get all AS A WOMAN on your asses, but let's unpack some of this stuff (that's my teacher talk - not 'asses' but 'unpack.' That made me LOL. I should stop. We're being serious here, lots of critical analysis and what have you.).

So Pretorious comes to get Henry and immediately is able to seduce him away from Elizabeth, with the prospects of SCIENCE, another reason to love the hell out of this movie. I'm a sucker for SCIENCE, especially of the MAD variety, and this film has its share. Pretorious has been hard at work creating life, namely these cute little guys that live in jars, a king, a queen, a mermaid, and a baron, his babies, as it were. It's a great scene and one that smacks of Whale's creativity and talent. Henry's hooked, but conflicted, and agrees somewhat reluctantly to help Pretorious find a way to bring an artificially created brain to life.

Meanwhile, Henry's bastard son is out 'terrorizing' the countryside. In the Monster's fleeing from the angry villagers, he meets a blind and companionship starved hermit in the woods. Being as how the hermit can't see, he isn't afraid of the Monster and the two begin a relationship - the hermit introducing the Monster to the pleasures of smoking and drinking, kinda like your older friend when you first went to college, and the Monster is all the more grateful for it. Seems these two have finally found exactly what they need in each other. One could argue that this is the only really successful and happy relationship in the film, a relationship between two males (although, and this is something I've pondered for awhile, how is it that monsters are male or female, really? I mean, I guess it's through language and prescribed gender roles already in place, but seriously, I might be getting ahead of myself, but this enters into the reproduction debate WRT this movie and monsters reproducing in general), in that Henry's relationships with both his woman and Pretorious are strained at best.

Well, happiness is fleeting, as we know, and the villagers eventually arrive at the hermit's place to take the Monster to jail. Both the Monster and the hermit are crushed, their happy little love nest disrupted. We can't have the Monster in jail for too long because that wouldn't be any fun and he eventually comes to Pretorious to aide him in his badgering of Henry. Elizabeth has put her foot down once and for all, and she and Henry are leaving! No more mad science, no more gay Pretorious, and certainly no more monsters! But Pretorious knows how to use what he's got - and since there's been some developments in the Monster - namely he now speaks with a fair amount of reason but has also developed a taste for scotch, which Pretorious definitely uses to his own advantage - and Elizabeth ends up becoming the damsel in distress when Pretorious orders the Monster to capture her so Henry will do his bidding.

I'm glossing here a bit because I'm so excited to get to the final creation scene when we actually get to meet the Bride. The film is unusual in this regard - yes, she's titular and yes, she's really what you remember from the movie - but honestly, I think she has like less than five minutes of actual screen time at the very end. Everything I've mentioned up to this point is very important - especially the Monster being given speech and reason - it brings up a whole host of other questions about the nature of humans with serious religious undertones - but you know, with me it's always the SEX part I'm interested in.

So yeah, the creation scene - my favorite scene in the movie - mad science abounds, the wind howls outside the turret, the storm begins to rage, the lab-or-a-tory is teeming with artificial life, and we have Dwight Frye as an excellent lackey for Pretorious. Apparently there was a bit more a subplot involving Frye's character, Karl, but Whale took it out of the movie for a reason I cannot recall at this moment. But, but, then then the slab is raised and our girl is finally brought to life. As I mentioned, we've got two men toiling away at SCIENCE, sleeves rolled up, brows furrowed, intent on their work, a traditional scene. But what makes it work for me is the fact that they are toiling at creating female life, asexually. The whole thing is specifically and hyperbolically phallic - what with the long shaft that elevates the Bride to the roof to Henry's excited shouts of 'It's coming up!' and then finally, the orgasm in the quality of the lightning hitting her slab so that she can live.

After the Bride's birth, she's dressed in white, typical of brides and virgins, although her behavior after her birth is anything but typical. She immediately clings to Henry, seemingly very vulnerable. She's the victim here. However, she shuns the Monster immediately at his attempts to be near her or hold her hand. She hisses at him (something Elsa brought to the character based on seeing the swans hiss at Regent Park) and screams bloodcurdling screams. When she rejects the Monster, she's no longer that female victim you see in horror movies (starting as early as Griffith's BIRTH OF A NATION). The Bride was literally made for the Monster, at least according to the poster art (and I could write a whole other diatribe about the marketing for this film), but she powerfully decides on her own that this is not what she wants. So she was created as a male fantasy, maybe even as an extreme version of Elizabeth, but there's definitely some relation here between psychoanalytic and structuralist models of gender exchange, although I don't know if I'm smart enough to really pinpoint all of them ;P There's female powerlessness (what you see in early horror paradigms) and there's female agency. The Bride has her own agency, which you wouldn't expect I should think, and I love her all the more for it!

I could really go on for days about the stuff I love about this movie, from Franz Waxman's amazing score (I love the Brides three-toned open ended 'theme' - you even hear it when they first start talking about her before she's even 'born'), to the amazing, but in many cases befuddling, poster art -something we horror fans have learned to put up with by now, to even more SEX issues buried deep within as well as issues dealing very subversively with religion, to the venerable Jack Pierce's amazing makeups for the movie (have you noticed how gorgeous the Bride's makeup is - she's almost wearing glamour makeup if it wasn't for the nasty scar on her neck), but I do have other things to do and one of them involves baking many pumpkin pies and eating most of them myself so I'll conclude here...

This film encompasses all the reasons I love great horror movies and what got me started on them in the first place, even when I was young and couldn't quite grasp all the underpinnings and whatnot. It's complex, it's smart, it has lots of issues (not a bad thing), it's stunning to look at and listen to, it's imaginative, and it's just all around great. I think you owe to yourself, as you watch ubiquitous amounts of horror movies in honor of Halloween, to give the Bride some props. It is seriously in my top five of my favorite films of all time.

I'm afraid all of this is just from my abnormal female brain and I have no sources to cite - a lazy scholar is me. But I absolutely love David J. Skal's musings about all things Universal in his book THE MONSTER SHOW as well as his other critical book on horror flicks, SCREAMS OF REASON. Another great book is THE DREAD OF DIFFERENCE: GENDER AND THE HORROR FILM, and has been a great source wrt to my interests for quite some time. Elizabeth Young wrote a great essay in that book dealing specifically with many of the issues I touched in this post. Check it out!

White Zombie

It might be hard to imagine, but zombies weren't always the trendy shuffling brain eaters they are today. You know, I've grown quite tired of zombies lately, having pretty much abandoned the subgenre for SciFi originals, sexploitation from the seventies, and 80's camp I procure on VHS, the real intellectual stuff. Zombies have been the new pirates for awhile now. But one zombie movie I never tire of, partially because it doesn't feature drooling, rotting gut muncher zombies and stars Bela Lugosi, is White Zombie. It's classics like White Zombie that make me remember why I love horror movies in the first damn place. White Zombie is smart and allegorical and, although it predates much feminist literary criticism, it can be read and argued in feminist terms, mainly the concept of the madwoman in the attic.

Beginning with Jane Eyre, the madwoman is a figure throughout the literary canon and film. In 1932, Haitian resistance to American occupation was increasing. White Zombie, arguably the first zombie movie, treated audiences to seminal elements of the myth of the zombie. Murder Legendre, played with eerie creepiness by Bela Lugosi, is a voodoo sorcerer that reanimates the dead to work in his sugar fields. He falls in love with a young white woman, who he transforms into the white zombie of the title. Poster art from the movie shouted, “A white girl caught in the zombie spell – slave to the evil will of the master zombie!” Haiti was long vilified as a land of voodoo and evil, which sustained Americans indifference towards the island. In this film, the terrorized peasant transformed into the soulless zombie is transferred over to the young virgin, “lustfully coveted by the evil ‘Voodoo’ sorcerer, the quintessentially innocent victim who must be rescued from her zombification before she is basely violated by racially impure hands” (Paravisini-Gebert 43).

Madeline is the young woman who arrives on the island of Haiti, in love with a man she met while aboard the ship to the island. Since she is so blissfully in love with this man, she is dumb to the entreaties of a rich planter on the island that covets her, a man controlled by Legendre. The planter solicits Legendre’s help in procuring a zombie poison to administer to Madeline so he can possess her. He gives her the poison literally as she is walking down the aisle to her groom and she falls into a coma at the altar. She is buried in her wedding dress on what would have been her wedding night. The wedding dress/night motif is indicative of her status as zombified/commodified woman. Paravisini-Gebert claims, “the wedding night motif, with it’s promise of carnal fulfillment, emphasizes the erotic quality of her death-like vulnerability, as does with the flimsy shroud (the wedding dress) in which she is buried and in which she will spend the rest of the movie” (43). Erotic gazing continues when Legendre sees Madeline as zombie; he is enchanted by her lack of will and decides he must possess her as well. Another ad for the movie told audiences they would be treated to, “A beautiful girl torn away from her lover on her bridal night, rendered lifeless…soulless…then brought back to life again by a fiend and made to perform his every desire!” (Rhodes 316).

Toward the latter part of the movie, there is a telling scene of Madeline squirreled away in the turret of a castle. The planter has completely turned her into the zombified madwoman in the attic. She stands on her balcony, glassily staring out to the rough sea below, perhaps trying to remember what her life was like before her capture. The final climatic scene of the film finds all the aforementioned characters on a high cliff, the sea raging below them. The resolution confirms hierarchies as Legendre is killed by the white planter in a burst of coming to his senses and Madeline is returned to her lover undefiled, or so we are led to believe.

This tale ends happily, given that it was made by Hollywood in a golden age of cinema. Although Madeline is released from her zombie state, she remains commodified because she returns to the arms of her lover. She does not descend from the attic, as it were; she rather retreats to her normal role of sweet, complacent bride. She still dons her wedding dress, indicating her gender and her race will not be challenged any further. However, the film, and others like it, is radical in many ways and zombie woman can be viewed favorably in some feminist terms.

Ellen Draper argues for the support of zombie woman films. She says, “the film recognize that the world beyond their fiction is riddled with sexism, an in no way preclude a further feminist critique of Hollywood film practice. The second thing to be said in support of these films’ exploration of patriarchal fiction is that the patriarchy itself is a fiction…erected and maintained by feminist theory to unite disparate experiences into a cohesive political force” (55). Draper’s statement indicates how these films predate much feminist film theory. Like Rhys' novel Wide Sargasso Sea, “the zombie woman films claim to have inherited directly from the Romantic poets artistic self-consciousness: both the possibility of radical mastery and the isolation of authorial creation are addressed by these horror films from the Thirties” (Draper 59).

White Zombie then function as text at odds with a classic Hollywood style, rather than merely commodifying woman, but depicting them with an almost passion for madness. And let us not forget, it's where Rob Zombie got the band name.

Other good, if not great, movies features old school zombies include but are not limited to I Walked With a Zombie (another great madwoman in the attic example), and a bit more recent, Serpent and the Rainbow.

Lemme know if you wanna see my list of sources.