I was browsing some of my favorite blog sites a little while ago looking for new films or inspiration when it dawned on me suddenly that today is Halloween. I am in China and Halloween actually occurs here almost a day earlier than in the States but I had no inkling that Halloween had finally arrived since the holiday is not recognized in any form here. Why would it be I guess. There are no Jack-o-Lanterns or spooky cardboard monster on doors. The idea of Trick-or-Treating here would probably be as alien as a two party political system. From what I understand they had a party at the school I work for last year and some students said that they invited me to go but I do not remember. I do not usually do school events anyway. I asked my students if they would like to see a scary movie for Halloween and they almost all said no. They are around twenty years old but the idea of sitting through a scary movie is more than they can handle. There is no spirit for the day here and so it is easy to overlook I guess though inexcusable ultimately for a horror blogger. I am truly ashamed.

MORE HAPPY HALLOWEEN FROM THE URANIUM CAFE HERE >>

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GIALLO

2009/Director: Dario Argento/Writers: Jim Agnew, Dario Argento

Cast: Adrien Brody, Emmanuelle Seigner, Elsa Pataky, Robert Miano, Byron Deidra

God knows I have tried to like Dario Argento. His name pops up everywhere in the horror world and yet I have to admit I have cared for very little he has ever done. His sycophantic supporters say that even if his newer work is weak we must acknowledge the genius of his ‘high period’ when he helped to usher in the great giallo films of the late 60’s and early 70’s as well as his unique brand of horror. And that may well be unarguable. Some of his films from the period, that I have seen, are Bird With the Crystal Plumage, Tenebre, Deep Red, Suspiria, and Phenomenon. While these are classics of some sort, I guess, I have to admit that  all of these films are some of the most confusing and haphazard movies I have ever sat down to watch. When the killer and her motives is finally revealed in Deep Red (some minor female character who had about two or three minutes of screen time earlier in the film) I was so disappointed. Not to say that that is a reason to pan a film and not see it but I seem to missing something that hordes of other people are getting and don’t know what it is. Why is Deep Red (Profundo Rosso) considered to be one of the great giallo films of the 70’s? It is a mediocre film at best. One defense I have read of Argento (and most Italian giallo and horror in general) is that one must not look for a linear story in the Hollywood fashion and instead you have to let yourself go along with the surreal quality of the film and receive its messages on an almost unconscious level.  One is to not watch and analyze the film as a whole but you have look for those special moments that cannot be found in any other genre. I am not sure about all that but as time has gone on I have to admit I have developed a liking for Italian horror and suspense films I did not have when I was younger. I liked Italian post war dramas and pepla and spaghetti westerns for some reason but was confused by Italian horror until I explored Mario Bava’s work. Then I read that Bava was an inspiration for Argento and the men even worked together on some projects at the end of Bava’s career. I decided there had to be something there my Cro-magnon mind could not fathom. Years later I finally concluded some of the stuff is okay after all though I can still be at a loss and typically cannot finish an Italian made horror or crime film in one setting.

MORE GIALLO HERE >>

TODAY’S LUCIO FULCI GIALLO DOUBLE FEATURE:

PERVERSION STORY with DON’T TORTURE A DUCKLING

ENTER HERE TO SEE THE AMAZING LUCIO FULCI GIALLO DOUBLE FEATURE >>

COLOSSUS AND THE AMAZON QUEEN

A brief mention here about this remarkably odd movie called Colossus and the Amazon Queen (La Regina delle Amazzoni) directed by Vittorio Sala who also co-wrote the script with six other writers. If you brave this piece of cheese you may wonder why it took a total of seven men to scramble this story up. The general gist of the story is about a couple heroes named Pirro (Rod Taylor from The Birds) and Glauco (body builder Ed Fury) who wind up being tricked into becoming house boys on the island of the Amazons. The woman of the island are led by the lovely Amazon Queen herself (Gianna Maria Canale) and her bevy of beauties (Dorian Gray and Daniela Rocca among them). The warrior babes are supplied by cunning rogues with unwitting men who eventually evolve into effeminate acting house slaves. Clashes develop between some of the gals over who will be queen and who get what man, especially hunky Glauco whose presence has set the cold Amazon hearts all a flutter. The usually macho acting Rod Taylor has one the strangest roles of his career here as he plays the prissy acting brains of the duo. His voice is dubbed by another English speaking actor who makes him sound like a real sissy boy.

MORE AMAZON QUEENS HERE >>

BAD RONALD

1974/Director: Buzz Kulik/Writers: John Holbrook Vance, Andrew Peter Marin

Cast: Scott Jacoby, Pippa Scott, John Larch, Dabney Coleman, Kim Hunter

Bad Ronald is probably one of the more enduring Movie of the Week features. People of my decrepit age range will remember that each of the networks had a Movie of the Week during the early seventies period and the selections were often cheesy but I seldom missed any.  In ABC’s Bad Ronald sott Jacoby  plays the more eccentric than bad Ronald Wilby and Kim Hunter (Stella from A Streetcar Named Desire) plays his ailing but protective mother. He accidentally kills a bratty little neighbor girl and his mom seals him up in a secret room behind the pantry to avoid the cops sending him off to prison. While in the secret room he pursues his studies and his creation of his fantasy world Atranta where he makes himself the prince. His mother dies and a new family, with Dabney Coleman as the dad, moves in and Ronald spies on them and steals food from them while they are out. He becomes fixated on the youngest daughter who become his ‘princess’ in is fantasy land.  and soon his sanity is slipping over the edge. The character progresses well from dorky geek to delusional fugitive to psycho fairly well and one cannot help but feel sympathy for Ronald. Especially anyone who knew what it was like to be a school nerd. The movie inspired the name for a rap-rock band whose music I have never heard.

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DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK

1973/Director: John Newland/Writer: Nigel McKeand

Cast: Kim Darby, Jim Hutton, Barbara Anderson, William Demarest

Don’t be Afraid of the Dark was another memorable ABC Movie of the Week starring Kim Darby (True Girt), Jim Hutton (“Pee-ta-son, Pee-ta-son” from the John Wayne directed The Green Berets) and William Demarest (Uncle Charley from My Three Sons). The film is a haunted house feature that I have read is going to remade one day by Miramax. Darby and Hutton play a married couple who have moved in the huge house Sally (Darby) has recently inherited from her aunt. It needs some fixing up and grumpy handyman Mr. Harris (Demarest) is there to fix the plumping and keep everyone he can out of the basement. And for good reason. There are tiny, mischievous stop-action animated creatures living in the sealed up chimney there aching to get out and wreck havoc on anyone the take a dislike to. For some reason they focus their ire on sweet little Kim Darby. Jim Hutton plays her husband Alex who is busy moving up the company ladder and has little time for his wife’s vivid imagination. The move ends on a surprisingly (for the time) bleak note. The creatures look pretty creepy actually and it is a tight little story. Remember these films were only about 75 minutes long with 15 minutes of commercials. It can be hard to really develop a good story in such a short time and often Movies of the Week missed the mark, but with Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark they came as close to a bulls-eye as you could get.

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STRAYS

1991/Director: John McPherson/Writer: Shaun Cassidy

Cast: Kathleen Quinlan, Timothy Busfield, Claudia Christian, William Boyett

The rather strange and simply bad Strays is a TV movie made for the USA network in 1991. By this time the idea of the Movie of the Week has been replaced by the made for cable TV type movies that sometimes churned out some flicks almost as good as what one can find at the local theater. Well this one is not in that category but I sat through it and can recommend it for cheese lovers only. The movie is written and co-produced by former Teen Beat idol Shaun Cassidy and the movie could have almost worked except for the fact that the ‘monster’ who we see creeping around and stalking the inhabitants of a house out in the boondocks is actually a cat. Not a tiger or even ocelot. Not a pussy cat exposed to radiation or chemical toxins, but a fat but hardly huge feral house cat who is now pissed off at human beings and kills a few of them. The house is now occupied by the Jarretts (Kathleen Quinlan and Timothy Busfield) and their daughter Tessa (who appears to have been played by twins Heather and Jessica Lilly). There is some plot tension added by Linsey’s (Quinlan) sister Calire (played by the usually suspect Claudia Christian) in the form of her flirtations with the faithful husband, father and ruthless divorce lawyer Paul (Busfield). The feral cat does not work alone as he has a pack of cats that he is the leader of. In the final scenes Busfield is trapped in the dark house fending off the angry cat who is constantly being thrown on him by stage hands. Look, house cats cannot take down a full grown man. Maybe a hundred of them could, but this is dual, in the end, between a puss and a average sized human male. Silly, unnecessary ending showing new buyers of the house and the sound of ominous meows in the distance. The acting by the main actors is not bad but house cats are meant to jump out of the closet and shock teenagers right before Jason or Michael Myers hacks them up, not be the killers themselves unless they possess supernatural powers. At least in Night of the Lepus the rabbits were mutated and became carnivorous. Recommended for marginal camp value and to see what Cassidy did after he stopped singing teeny-bopper hits.

My new TV category will focus on TV movies, series and specials as I recall them. Don’t expect much on Lost or Prison Break here, but do look for mention of The Munsters, Star Trek (the one with James T. Kirk), Kung Fu, Gilligan’s Island, assorted Creature Features, TV Movies and similar shows. Not all will be pre-cable. Expect some articles about newer shows like Masters of Horror as well. I really am not stuck in a time warp.

HERCULES UNCHAINED (Ercole e la Regina di Lidia)

1959/Director: Pietro Francisci/Writer: Ennio De Concini/Cinematography & Special Effects: Mario Bava

Cast: Steve Reeves, Sylva Koscina, Sylvia Lopez, Gabriele Antonini, Primo Carnera

Also Known As:
Hercule et la reine de Lydie
Hercules Unchained
Hércules e a Raínha
Hércules encadenado
Hércules y la reina de Lidia
Heracles y la reina de Lidea
Hercules and the Queen of Lydia
Hercules and the Queen of Sheba
Herkules ja Lyydian kuningatar
Herkules und die Königin der Amazonen
O iraklis kai i vasilissa tis Lydias

Boy, I’ve been waiting to start this new sword and sandal category for a long time. Also called peplum or pepla as a term that covers the entire category, the Sword and Sandal genre is one of the most ridiculed and maligned in the whole film division of cult cinema. The overly harsh criticisms range from everything like worst movies of all time, inept and amateurish to just downright being ‘homoerotic’. It is as if a film being homoerotic means it will be a bad film. I have seen plenty of great homoerotic films but maybe we can go into that another day. Well, who knows, maybe all these criticisms are true to some degree or another but I have found these films to be some of the most entertaining low budget B-films, long with old serial westerns, I have ever sat down to watch and I have seen quite few. Lately I have been able to locate scores of these online and have around a dozen or so queued up for viewing. I actually began watching these as a wee lad in the late 60’s on Saturday afternoons, at about the time the movement was losing its steam to new genres like Spaghetti Westerns and spy films. They were shown on a afternoon show that was called The Mighty Sons of Hercules and I can still hear the macho theme music in my head as I type this. We had a crappy b/w TV with ‘rabbit ears’ back then and I never saw any of these films until only recently in color.

MORE OF MARIO BAVA AND HERCULES HERE >>

VIOLENT MIDNIGHT (aka PYSCHOMANIA)

1963/Director: Richard Hilliard/Writers: Richard Hilliard, Robin Miller

Cast: Lee Philips, Shepperd Strudwick, Jean Hale, Lorraine Rogers, Dick Van Patten, James Farentino

This is a really decent early slasher/stalker style film produced by Del Tenney, who would go on to direct films like The Horror of Party Beach, I Eat Your Skin (Zombies) and Curse of the Living Corpse. The direction by Richard Hilliard is stylishly dark and moody. It came out at a time when a spat of films where showing the influence of Hicthcock’s 1960 masterpiece Psycho. But the film is a cut above the rest in terms of story, acting and imagery. We have a pretty decent police style mystery (with none other than Dick Van Patten, from prime-time’s Eight Is Enough, as the tough talking detective who has two men suspected of some slashing murders in the local college town. There is the tortured artist type (Lee Philips) who paints nude women and has anger issues and a incorrigible punk (James Farentino) who seems the logical suspect but we are thrown a surprise ending that seems more like a Giallo shock style ending. In fact the film has a few Giallo elements, including a black leather gloved stalker and lots of strange camera shots but the film in fact predates the Giallo genre by a year or two. Bava’s stylish trend setting Black and Black Lace had yet to be released. Shot in sharp b/w with a good music score it is a must for any fan of stalker/slasher styled films but before they became an actual film genre.

CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTAR (aka THE CRIMSON CULT, THE CRIMSON ALTAR)

1968/Director: Vernon Sewell/Writers: Mervyn Haisman, Henry Lincoln

Cast: Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee, Mark Eden, Barbara Steele, Michael Gough, Virginia Wetherell, Rosemarie Reede

Barbara Steele plays the evil witch Lavinia who has placed a curse on the descendants of the small village where she was executed centuries before during the witch trials of Europe and Britain. She looks great all painted green and wearing some sort of gold, horned witches hat. Of course the curse has finally found it way down the line to last of the descendants Robert Manning (Mark Eden) who has come to the village, during the time of the year when it celebrates its witchy history, to find his missing brother. He attempts to enlist the help of Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff in his search and I think you can imagine how that turns out. The film has that psychedelic feel of the period with mod dances and groovy parties. Sexy women run around in skin tight clothes and the acting is great, of course, but the film over all is not what you might have wanted from all the talent involved. Karloff was ill during the production and I am not sure if his character being confined to a wheelchair was part of the script or was necessary for the ailing actor. Torture chambers and scenes bordering on S/M make this a must see for fans of the 60’s and 70’s witch films. Michael Gough has a small but effective role as the slightly touched butler. A departure from his usually over the top loud mouth egotist characters like he portrayed in Horror of the Black Museum, Trog and Konga.

FROGS

1972/Director: George McCowan/Writers: Robert Hutchison

Cast: Ray Milland, Sam Elliott, Joan Van Ark, Adam Roarke, Judy Pace, Lynn Borden

One of the first eco-horror or animal attack films API’s Frogs is not really that spooky in any real way and the Frogs themselves pose no threat to anyone except to a wheelchair bound Ray Milland at the film’s end despite the misleading poster art that shows a giant frog swallowing a human hand. Millionaire Jason Crocket (Milland) is not going to let anything ruin his annual 4th of July celebration on his plantation style mansion in the Florida swamps. The celebrations are joined by a recently boatless, and sometimes shirtless, Picket Smith (Sam Elliot). Smith was knocked into the swampy lake waters by Crocket’s typically drunken son Clint, played by Adam Rourke who made some of the better biker films of the late 60’s like Hells Angels on Wheels with co-star Jack Nicholson. Also running around in an extremely tight little yellow 70’s style suit is Jason’s daughter Karen (Joan Van Ark of the Dallas spin-off Knot’s landing). While nothing much ever happens in the film I still found it fun to watch. Sam Elliot is good in his super-macho way in this early role. The deaths actually occur by rebelling against destructive mankind animals like snakes, spiders, alligators and even lizards who can somehow figure out the right combinations of poisons to knock over to kill one party-goer in the hothouse. An interesting synthesizer score that sounds like someone just a new Moog or Arp and was pluncking around on the keys and turning the dials to see what would happen. Strangely interesting film overall.

BAMBOO SAUCER

1968/Director: Frank Telford/Writers: John P. Fulton, Frank Telford

Cast: Dan Duryea, John Ericson, Lois Nettleton, Bob Hastings, Vincent Beck

Not one of those films too many people have ever heard of and so all the more deserving of a mention here at the Café. A cold war period sci-adventure that is mostly for cheese lovers. While the film is campy from the get-go the film makers were trying to make a real science fiction with a message. The American military has information that the Red Chinese are holding onto a downed alien space craft which they are keeping in the super secure location of a run down old church in the undeveloped countryside. A team led by Hank Peters (Dan Duryea in his last role) sneaks into China with little trouble and there run into a team of Russians who are on the same mission. The film focuses not so much on the threat of the aliens but on the message that we have to cooperate as a species in order to survive (too bad, I wish a big bug had jumped out and eaten a Red myself) and the Ruskies and Yanks unite to use the UFO escape the more evil of the three Chinese. The acting is pretty bad and the camera work and editing are worse, but I enjoyed this one anf recommend it. I chose to show the more exciting looking DVD cover rather than the original movie poster, which I usually prefer to do. The original cover just was not as cool as the DVD cover.