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Post by Hoosier X on May 21, 2016 20:20:12 GMT -5
I love The Addams Family and The Munsters both. (I do prefer the Addams family a tiny bit.)
I have never heard that Marilyn was a zombie. I always thought she was just a normal person somehow, and thought to be deformed by the rest of the family. I'm not even sure how she was supposed to be related. Was she just vaguely referred to as a distant cousin?
And both Marilyns were smokin' hot! Beverly Owen and Pat Priest. Wowie Zowie!
The Addams Family was also a bit vague or inconsistent on some of the family relationships. Fester was sometimes Morticia's uncle and sometimes he was Gomez's brother. And Granmama - whose mother was she? I don't think Morticia and Gomez knew.
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Post by Batflunkie on May 21, 2016 20:25:52 GMT -5
Looking up on the Wikipedia page, I not entirely sure if she is either. I think it might have been something I came up with myself due to how "normal" she seemed compared to the rest of the Munster clan. She could have also been a "ghoul", they're thin-blooded servants for Vampires that lack the numerous benefits of being "creatures of the night" except for a lust for blood. They're sort of like Zombies, but not really
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Post by Hoosier X on May 21, 2016 20:46:50 GMT -5
Looking up on the Wikipedia page, I not entirely sure if she is either. I think it might have been something I came up with myself due to how "normal" she seemed compared to the rest of the Munster clan. She could have also been a "ghoul", they're thin-blooded servants for Vampires that lack the numerous benefits of being "creatures of the night" except for a lust for blood. They're sort of like Zombies, but not really Speaking of ghouls ... Have you read "Midnight Snack" from Tales of the Crypt #24? Art by Johnny Craig. It's my favorite EC horror story. And also my favorite story about ghouls.
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Post by Batflunkie on May 21, 2016 20:56:00 GMT -5
EC Horror titles are one of many things that I "feell" that I should like, but I unfortunately don't
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Post by Hoosier X on May 21, 2016 21:41:47 GMT -5
TCM was showing a bunch of "mountain men" movies and I shoulda probably DVRed Jeremiah Johnson because it's an acclaimed movie that I've never seen. It's probably pretty good, what with having Robert Redford and Will Geer and bein directed by Sydney Pollack and all. But I saw The Last Frontier (1955) on the schedule and I saw that Victor Mature was in it (along with Anne Bancroft, Robert Preston and James Whitmore) and also it's directed by Anthony Mann. And I'm always in the mood to see Mature's super-hammy performing style because he's so hilarious. I thought it would be very interesting to see him in an Anthony Mann western. Because, yes, I admit it. I love Victor Mature, storming in like he wants to make sure EVERYBODY can hear him! And see how worried or tormented he is! And he thinks he's performing in a circus and that he has to compete with elephants and horses and cannons and things like that. And I love to see his teethmarks all over the scenery at the end of the movie. (And he knew it, too. He's supposed to have said something like, "I'm not an actor. And I have made 100 films to prove it.") I find him endlessly fascinating. But I also find it especially worthwhile to catch him in a movie where he's right for the part and he knows it and he is really quite amazingly good now and then. I noticed this two or three year sgo the second Time I saw Million Dollar Mermaid. (Which I love, by the way.) He's great in it! The part fits him and his style so well! He's also great in After the Fox, and I think he's pretty good in some his crime thrillers in the 1940s and early 1950s. I was a little disappointed because good actor Victor Mature showed up to work in The Last Frontier, so it wasn't the hilarious spectacle of arm-waving and shouting I was expecting. But it's a great movie! And I quickly warmed to Mature's performance, partly because the supporting cast is excellent (especially Robert Preston!) and partly because it's a well-made western in the Anthony Mann mode, just on a slightly larger scale. The Last Frontier is highly recommended for people who like westerns. And it's probably a good bet for people don't particularly like westerns but are open to taking a chance on movies in general, even if the genre is not your favorite.
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Post by Prince Hal on May 21, 2016 22:06:18 GMT -5
And "Green Acres," of course, is one of the high points of television's long history, right up there with "Hogan's Heroes" and "The Addams Family." (I'm not being sarcastic. I love them all. Also, "The Munsters"!) Huzzah!
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Post by Hoosier X on May 21, 2016 23:45:58 GMT -5
And "Green Acres," of course, is one of the high points of television's long history, right up there with "Hogan's Heroes" and "The Addams Family." (I'm not being sarcastic. I love them all. Also, "The Munsters"!) Huzzah! I also love "Petticoat Junction," "Car 54, Where Are You?" "The Beverly Hillbillies," "The Brady Bunch" and "The Dick van Dyke Show." Also "Gunsmoke," "Maverick," "The Twilight Zone," "The Outer Limits," "Thriller" and "Dragnet." And "Star Trek" should probably be assumed as a favorite without mentioning it.
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Post by Hoosier X on May 22, 2016 11:04:08 GMT -5
The Trip is a 1967 Roger Corman movie that is very similar to Psych-Out, another movie I watched recently and posted a few pages back. What's interesting is both of these movies are so alike, but they end up offering a different perspective on the acid culture. This one's also written by Jack Nicholson. The Trip stars Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper. All three actors would perform in Easy Rider two years later.
The Trip puts you in the shoes of Paul Grove (Peter Fonda), a TV director that is ready to take LSD for the first time. His friend John (Bruce Dern) acts as protector for Paul's acid ride, which they decide is best to try at Max's (Dennis Hopper) place. Paul's trip starts out innocently enough, with psychedelic images and trippy sexual caveats at hand, and then later descends into madness as he believes he's killed his friend John and escapes.
The movie takes on an interesting turn as we watch Paul stumble through the Sunset Strip high on acid. There is a pretty hilarious scene to mention, when he decides to go into a laundromat and begins to be amazed by the spinning action of a drying machine. There he gives the lone woman in the room some strange company. He ends up in a nightclub where he meets a babe and she takes him home and they have sex. The movie ends with him dreaming of being chased on a beach by men on black horses, and the screen "cracks" as if to indicate he's had a bad trip. But I have to assume a Hollywood bigwig forced Corman to put that in the end, as there is really nothing to indicate that Paul's trip was all that bad.
TCM is presenting a weekly tribute to AIP throughout May and thus I DVRd The Trip (1967) and watched it a few days ago. I liked it a lot! I was most pleasantly amused by the scene where he breaks into a family's house and spreads out on the couch and starts watching the news. The little girl comes down and sits on the stairs and says "Who are you, mister?" and he says "I'm just a man" and she's perfectly fine with that and he goes into the kitchen and gets her some milk. Bronze Age Brian's summary covers all the important points. I just have a personal observation and a trivial note. First, the trivia! The great Angelo Rossitto in his greatest role, passing around the loving cup in the 1932 classic Freaks. The dwarf in one of Peter Fonda's acid hallucinations is Angelo Rossitto, most famous for Freaks. He appeared in bunches and bunches of movies from the 1930s all the way into the 1980s. For a lot of people notably younger than me, his most famous movie is Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. I didn't know he was in The Trip. So it was cool to see him. Now the personal observation. What kind of looney thinks you should have Bruce Dern as the guy who stays sober and helps you get through your acid trip without thinking you killed somebody and running amok on the Sunset Strip?
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Post by Hoosier X on May 22, 2016 11:23:44 GMT -5
Last night I watched Twice-Told Tales (1963), with Vincent Price, Sebastian Cabot and Beverly Garland. It's a horror anthology, very much in the style of something like Roger Corman's Tales of Terror (1962). But instead of the stories of Edgar Allan Poe, Twice-Told Tales adapts the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne. I love these horror anthology films and I hadn't seen one for a while and I'd never seen this one. I'm not sure I'd ever heard of it. So I DVRed it off TCM. And it's a lot of fun if not particularly scary or insightful or innovative. The main cast members are great, doggedly doing their best with some slightly above average material. I recommend it for fans who like this sort of thing but it's not must-see. It should be quite a fun romp for Vincent Price fans. Natalie Portman is sending very clear signals that she is not in the mood to hear about your religion this morning. My brother and I watched Jane Got a Gun (2016) last night. (I know it's not a classic film. I just wanted to remind everybody that I occasionally watch movies that are less than fifty years old.) It's OK. There are some pretty cool scenes. There are so few westerns made nowadays that it's pretty easy to see most of them. Sometimes you get The Hateful Eight or The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. (I think both of these are great movies.) And sometimes you get something a little more average like Jane Got a Gun. I was never bored. I never rolled my eyes at anything that was too stupid for words. Beautiful cinematography. Pretty good acting, for the most part. But you get to the end and you wish there was a little more here.
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Post by Hoosier X on May 22, 2016 11:38:36 GMT -5
Here's a heads-up for all the John Wayne fans! TCM is showing a John Wayne marathon on Thursday, May 26. And it's not the real obvious John Wayne movies. So this might be a chance to see some rare John Wayne fans. They're showing seven of his silly but charming hour-long westerns from the 1930s. If you've never seen one of these movies, you owe it to yourself as a John Wayne fan to watch one, just to see what they're like and where John Wayne was coming from and why Stagecoach was such an important film for him. I recommend Haunted Gold. It's been a while since I saw it but I remember liking it a lot. Then they're showing Reunion in France (with Joan Crawford), Tycoon, Angel and the Badman and McClintock!.
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Post by Hoosier X on May 23, 2016 8:58:21 GMT -5
Today on YouTube Theatre: The Criminal Life of Archibaldo d la Cruz (also known as Ensayo de un crimen) (1955), directed by Luis Bunuel. Archibaldo does not like it when you touch his books without asking. I saw another masterpiece of world cinema! The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz is available on YouTube. It's divided into nine ten-minute segments, so it's a bit awkward, but it's worth it! Luis Bunuel is probably world cinema's best known surrealist filmmaker, renowned for films like Un chien andalou, L'age d'or, Tierra sin pan and La charme discret de la bourgeoisie. He's one of my favorites, but he's not for everyone. If you're at all familiar with Bunuel, you know that even his biggest fans expect to be scratching their heads in confusion at some point in almost all of his films. The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz is about a fellow who thinks he's a serial killer. But every time he tries to kill someone, his victims all die by some other means than his own hands. It's amusing and frustrating at the same time. And very very strange. Of course, there's more to it than that. Bunuel is usually very subtly criticizing society or religion or something in his films, and he's usually too subtle for me. Sometimes I read the critiques of his films and I think to myself: "So Bunuel was commenting on the Catholic church in that movie! Who knew? I guess I can see it." I don't usually get his point. But I love his movies anyway for being so absurd and so endlessly fascinating. They are like feature-length episodes of "The Twilight Zone," produced in French or Spanish instead of English. The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz could be a parody of Hollywood crime thrillers, and it certainly worked like that for me. But I have no idea that this is what Bunuel intended. If you ever watch the films of Pedro Almodovar, you might have seen clips of The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz. You can see it in the background on television in Carne tremula (known as Live Flesh in English). I'm not the least bit surprised to find out that Almodovar is a Bunuel fan. Bunuel made this film in Mexico because he had left his native Spain because of the Franco regime. He made a lot of movies in Mexico and I've only seen a few of them. The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz is one of the best films he made in Mexico. The other one I like a lot (and also the one most likely to make it onto a list of Best Movies of World Cinema) is The Exterminating Angel, which is about a bunch of people who can't leave the room.
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Post by Hoosier X on May 23, 2016 10:18:05 GMT -5
Cinemoi showed Madame Sin (1972) a few days ago and I DVRed it because I will watch anything with Bette Davis in it. I watched it before reading about it. When I later took the time to check out the vital stats on IMDB, I discovered it was made for TV. That explains a lot! It was apparently meant as a pilot for an ongoing series with Bette Davis as Madame Sin, the international criminal mastermind. In the movie, Madame Sin's operatives kidnap Robert Wagner, a former CIA agent who has left the service, and forces him to help her steal a Polaris nuclear submarine for a client that I think is supposed to be Fidel Castro. Denholm Elliot and Catherine Schell are also along for the ride. I found it very entertaining and very very silly. Bette Davis is pretty awesome.
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Post by Prince Hal on May 23, 2016 11:41:34 GMT -5
Cinemoi showed Madame Sin (1972) a few days ago and I DVRed it because I will watch anything with Bette Davis in it. I watched it before reading about it. When I later took the time to check out the vital stats on IMDB, I discovered it was made for TV. That explains a lot! It was apparently meant as a pilot for an ongoing series with Bette Davis as Madame Sin, the international criminal mastermind. In the movie, Madame Sin's operatives kidnap Robert Wagner, a former CIA agent who has left the service, and forces him to help her steal a Polaris nuclear submarine for a client that I think is supposed to be Fidel Castro. Denholm Elliot and Catherine Schell are also along for the ride. I found it very entertaining and very very silly. Bette Davis is pretty awesome. cool! never heard of this one!
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Post by Deleted on May 23, 2016 14:34:11 GMT -5
Yesterday I watched Burnt Offerings--a creepy movie featuring Bette Davis and starring Oliver Reed and Karen Black. It wasn't what I was expecting and I was pleasantly surprised.
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Post by Prince Hal on May 23, 2016 15:59:21 GMT -5
Yesterday I watched Burnt Offerings--a creepy movie featuring Bette Davis and starring Oliver Reed and Karen Black. It wasn't what I was expecting and I was pleasantly surprised. Had the same experience when it came out. Went thinking it would be campy, but it wasn't bad at all. And that chauffeur. Jokeresque grin on that creep.
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