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Post by brutalis on Oct 10, 2020 10:42:38 GMT -5
Saturday morning Halloween watching takes us to 1968 for Director Michael Reeves and actor supreme Vincent Price in the darkly cruel Witchfinder General. A superb movie which looks and feels like a classic Hammer film. We get to go to the hangings, burnings, tapings, torture and torment as our man Price goes about delivering the Lord's work purging the British countryside of witches, followers of Satan and demon lovers. All in the name of money of course.
Reeves bring out an edge of meanness from Price not often seen. An evil spirited and predatory killer out for his own desires and satisfaction. His dark deeds are all the scarier for being performed in the name of God in the destruction of body and soul of those he accuses.
That in the end good people are driven mad in delivering justice upon the Witchfinder and his men gives proof there is terrible and horrible demons of our own making in the world.
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Post by brutalis on Oct 10, 2020 13:16:32 GMT -5
Another Witchfinder movie for Vincent Price is 1970's Cry of the Banshee where this time he portrays an Elizabethan Lord who rules over his land. He creates false charges of witchery in order to have his control over the peasantry. Until there are sudden deaths of sheep and he finds a coven of true witches. Battling the coven alongside his sons he finds one has become cursed as a werewolf.
Another malevolent, dark role for Price to chew up the scenery with during this fall prelude to All Hallow's Eve.
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Post by brutalis on Oct 10, 2020 23:01:45 GMT -5
Thanks to Svengoolie tonight I enjoyed yet another favorite Halloween treat watching the 1955 bigger is better bug monster movie the Tarantula as it rampages across the Arizona desert. Exquisite special effects utilizing real animals rather than puppet or prop monsters adds to the more believable terror. Especially if like most folks you don't care for spiders then the idea of a giant bigger than a house creepy crawly spider will provide plenty of hair raising shivers.
Good cast, don't sneeze or you will miss seeing Clint Eastwood. John Agar and Leo G. Carrol provide the science which creates as well as explains the monstrous eight legged beast before it is napalmed to death.
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Post by Hoosier X on Oct 11, 2020 11:14:11 GMT -5
Thanks to Svengoolie tonight I enjoyed yet another favorite Halloween treat watching the 1955 bigger is better bug monster movie the Tarantula as it rampages across the Arizona desert. Exquisite special effects utilizing real animals rather than puppet or prop monsters adds to the more believable terror. Especially if like most folks you don't care for spiders then the idea of a giant bigger than a house creepy crawly spider will provide plenty of hair raising shivers. Good cast, don't sneeze or you will miss seeing Clint Eastwood. John Agar and Leo G. Carrol provide the science which creates as well as explains the monstrous eight legged beast before it is napalmed to death. Tarantula is one of my favorites. I saw it a bunch of times as a kid. I had it on VHS and watched it all the time in the 1990s. Maybe I wore it out a little because I’ve never had much desire to own it again, but I still see it every so often on cable. I would have loved to have seen it on Svengoolie!
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Post by EdoBosnar on Oct 25, 2020 6:47:50 GMT -5
The Last Chase (1981) Saw this as I was scrolling through the catalog of movies offered for streaming by HBO; I'd never heard of it before so I gave it a watch last night out of curiosity. It was ... interesting. It's a dystopian SF movie set in about 2010 or 2011, in which the US is a police state. The main feature of this future society is that there's no longer any gas-powered motor vehicles (or planes, boats, etc.) because of a severe petroleum shortage. Also, it's heavily depopulated because due to the heavy death toll from a 'plague' (something similar to Legionnaires' disease) in the early 1990s (I have to say, the few scenes at the start of the film when this was recounted really struck a chord). The main character, Frank Hart (played by Lee Majors), is a former race-car driver who now works as a spokesman for the mass transit authority. He chafes at the job and all of the oppressive rules and regulations of this society and eventually snaps and takes his former race car, a Porsche formula roadster, out of mothballs to set off on a cross country road-trip to California (which is either an independent country or just rebelling from the rest of the US; in any case, they're not under central US authority). He's joined in his trip by a rebellious teenager named Ring (Chris Makepeace), who's a genius at chemistry and electronics and an outcast in his high school. The government, having no vehicles of their own to pursue him, commands a retired combat pilot (played by Burgess Meredith) to refurbish his old fighter jet and hunt him down by air... It's always interesting to watch obscure SF movies from the 1970s, but outside of that, this is a pretty one-note movie. Most of the actors seem to have phoned in their performances, with only Meredith providing some entertaining - but also borderline creepy - moments when flying around in his fighter jet. It also seems like this movie was propaganda for the automobile and petroleum industries, not just because of the obvious product placement for Porsche, Exxon and STP (and Coca Cola also makes a showing), but because the entire theme is that it would be so horrible if people could only get around on bikes and in public transport (light-rail trains). The few glimpses we get of everyday urban life in this horribly oppressive future didn't look so bad to me. Edited to add: I forgot to mention one particularly disturbing scene, when Majors and Makepeace find temporary refuge with a community of mainly Native Americans (who reclaimed a bunch of their land thanks to the depopulation caused by the 1990s pandemic). The police eventually find them and, in full black riot gear, attack the community with automatic weapons, shooting indiscriminately at innocent, mainly Native, bystanders.
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Post by brutalis on Oct 25, 2020 19:06:32 GMT -5
What lousy timing! This Tueday the ONLY drive-in theater here is running special $8 admission Halloween treat. Choice of 3 different triple features of the classic Universal Monster movies. Starts 6:15pm until midnite. A Friday/Daturday note and I would so be there. Or spread em out on 3 different bites so could see all of them on the big screen. But noooooo, all shows one nite in the middle of the week. How cruel!
Screen 1 shows Abbott/Costello meet Frankenstein then Frankenstein followed by Bride of Frankenstein.
Screen 2 has Dracula, The Mummy and Wolfman.
Screen 3 showing Creature from Black Lagoon, then King Kong and then Invisible Man.
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Post by Slam_Bradley on Oct 25, 2020 19:19:34 GMT -5
What lousy timing! This Tueday the ONLY drive-in theater here is running special $8 admission Halloween treat. Choice of 3 different triple features of the classic Universal Monster movies. Starts 6:15pm until midnite. A Friday/Daturday note and I would so be there. Or spread em out on 3 different bites so could see all of them on the big screen. But noooooo, all shows one nite in the middle of the week. How cruel! Screen 1 shows Abbott/Costello meet Frankenstein then Frankenstein followed by Bride of Frankenstein. Screen 2 has Dracula, The Mummy and Wolfman. Screen 3 showing Creature from Black Lagoon, then King Kong and then Invisible Man. That would be like trying to choose a favorite child.
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Post by EdoBosnar on Oct 26, 2020 5:01:26 GMT -5
Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) Another 'hit' from the groovy age, starring none other than William Shatner. Here, he plays a vet in a small town in Arizona that's troubled by the inexplicable deaths of livestock (and the occasional disappearance of house pets) just weeks before the county fair is scheduled to open. After Capt. Kirk sends a blood sample from a dead calf to a university lab, they send out an arachnologist (an attractive young blonde woman, of course), because apparently the animal died from a massive dose of spider venom. Eventually thousands of tarantulas, acting unusually aggressive and also unusually cooperative (they're normally solitary hunters) start appearing everywhere, attacking animals and people alike. The movie has a bit of an environmental message, as the arachnologist posits that the tarantulas are acting this way because their natural food supply has been decimated by the heavy use of pesticides in farming. This is one of many movies made in the later 1970s and early 1980s in the wake of Jaws, like Pirhana, Swarm, Alligator, etc. that involve an animal or animals going on a rampage, and there's little remarkable about it. And if you're squeamish about spiders, you won't like the scenes in which dozens of tarantulas are crawling over people's bodies and biting them. I'd heard about this one for years, but I think the only reason any one remembers it is because Shatner is in it. And speaking of him, he played it pretty straight here - no hamming it up and no improbable heroics, although his initial encounters with the university arachnologist were a series of me-too moments.
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Post by codystarbuck on Oct 26, 2020 22:53:39 GMT -5
Kingdom of the Spiders (1977) Another 'hit' from the groovy age, starring none other than William Shatner. Here, he plays a vet in a small town in Arizona that's troubled by the inexplicable deaths of livestock (and the occasional disappearance of house pets) just weeks before the county fair is scheduled to open. After Capt. Kirk sends a blood sample from a dead calf to a university lab, they send out an arachnologist (an attractive young blonde woman, of course), because apparently the animal died from a massive dose of spider venom. Eventually thousands of tarantulas, acting unusually aggressive and also unusually cooperative (they're normally solitary hunters) start appearing everywhere, attacking animals and people alike. The movie has a bit of an environmental message, as the arachnologist posits that the tarantulas are acting this way because their natural food supply has been decimated by the heavy use of pesticides in farming. This is one of many movies made in the later 1970s and early 1980s in the wake of Jaws, like Pirhana, Swarm, Alligator, etc. that involve an animal or animals going on a rampage, and there's little remarkable about it. And if you're squeamish about spiders, you won't like the scenes in which dozens of tarantulas are crawling over people's bodies and biting them. I'd heard about this one for years, but I think the only reason any one remembers it is because Shatner is in it. And speaking of him, he played it pretty straight here - no hamming it up and no improbable heroics, although his initial encounters with the university arachnologist were a series of me-too moments. That's because he used up his hamminess on The Six Million Dollar Man and Columbo. He had to restock for the Star Trek movies and TJ Hooker. He was capable of being a very good actor, before he went nuts with that stuff, as can be seen in Judgement at Nuremberg, where he spends most of his time working opposite Spencer Tracy. Nicholas Meyer could get it out of him, when he directed Trek. he said he would just have Shatner keep doing takes until he got it out of his system and settled down into a more natural performance.
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Post by berkley on Oct 27, 2020 15:22:20 GMT -5
I like Shatner being over the top, at least some of the time.
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Post by Roquefort Raider on Oct 28, 2020 9:26:48 GMT -5
Another Witchfinder movie for Vincent Price is 1970's Cry of the Banshee where this time he portrays an Elizabethan Lord who rules over his land. He creates false charges of witchery in order to have his control over the peasantry. Until there are sudden deaths of sheep and he finds a coven of true witches. Battling the coven alongside his sons he finds one has become cursed as a werewolf. Another malevolent, dark role for Price to chew up the scenery with during this fall prelude to All Hallow's Eve. Thanks for the recommendation, brutalis! I watched it yesterday on Youtube and Price was indeed a lot of fun in it. It was like a long story out of an EC comic!
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Post by thwhtguardian on Nov 8, 2020 14:33:57 GMT -5
Thanks to tartanphantom I was able to sit down and watch the 1989 ITV adaptation of Susan Hill's The Woman in Black. Despite being a long time fan of the novel until this year's Halloween movie marathon I had never known this earlier adaption existed having only seen the 2012 Hammer version and its 2014 sequel but Tartan not only clued me into it but also helped me procured a copy and I'm glad he did because the film is fantastic. While I still think the 2012 big budget adaptation did a better job of establishing a creepy mood with its washed out color pallet and lighting I felt that the 1989 adaptation was much more subtle with its scares and had a much stronger lead in Adrian Rawlins as Arthur Kidd who looked much more convincing as a young lawyer trying to make it big than Radcliffe did.
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Post by tartanphantom on Nov 10, 2020 23:05:04 GMT -5
Thanks to tartanphantom I was able to sit down and watch the 1989 ITV adaptation of Susan Hill's The Woman in Black. Despite being a long time fan of the novel until this year's Halloween movie marathon I had never known this earlier adaption existed having only seen the 2012 Hammer version and its 2014 sequel but Tartan not only clued me into it but also helped me procured a copy and I'm glad he did because the film is fantastic. While I still think the 2012 big budget adaptation did a better job of establishing a creepy mood with its washed out color pallet and lighting I felt that the 1989 adaptation was much more subtle with its scares and had a much stronger lead in Adrian Rawlins as Arthur Kidd who looked much more convincing as a young lawyer trying to make it big than Radcliffe did.
I'm really glad you enjoyed the film. It's definitely not for everybody, but if you like period horror drama, you could do a lot worse than this version.
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Post by Deleted on Nov 21, 2020 12:15:13 GMT -5
I'm hoping maybe someone can help me identify a movie with very little info. My mom saw a movie years ago, and thought it was La Dolce Vita, but it wasn't. And she's not really sure why she thought that was the title.
Anyway, all she remembers is a man has a seemingly idyllic life with a wife and two kids. At some point during the film he hosts/attends a dinner(?) party. At the end of the movie he ends up killing his kids to spare them from having to grow up in a world he thinks is awful. I do not know if there is an event in the movie that makes him think this, or if it's something he thinks throughout the movie but doesn't act on it until the end. Since she didn't immediately realize it's not La Dolce Vita, I'm fairly certain it's black & white and likely not an English language film.
That is all I know.
edit: She brought the movie up in the context of a discussion of the saddest movies ever.
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Post by codystarbuck on Nov 23, 2020 2:37:17 GMT -5
I'm hoping maybe someone can help me identify a movie with very little info. My mom saw a movie years ago, and thought it was La Dolce Vita, but it wasn't. And she's not really sure why she thought that was the title. Anyway, all she remembers is a man has a seemingly idyllic life with a wife and two kids. At some point during the film he hosts/attends a dinner(?) party. At the end of the movie he ends up killing his kids to spare them from having to grow up in a world he thinks is awful. I do not know if there is an event in the movie that makes him think this, or if it's something he thinks throughout the movie but doesn't act on it until the end. Since she didn't immediately realize it's not La Dolce Vita, I'm fairly certain it's black & white and likely not an English language film. That is all I know. edit: She brought the movie up in the context of a discussion of the saddest movies ever. La Dolce Vita does feature a segment about a man, named Steiner, who is a distinguished intellectual. The lead character, Marcello, attends a party at Steiner's house, with their friends reciting poetry and playing music. Marcello envies his friends life; but, Steiner despairs that there is not enough love in the world and too much materialism and worries about his children's future, in this world. Later in the film, Marcello learns that Steiner murders his two children and kills himself. So, it sounds to me like that is the film. It has the closest plot to anything I have come across, in searching through Google and imdb.
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