John Rozum's Blog, page 20

31 Days of Halloween - Day 16 - Movie

After he and his wife, Mandy (Andrea Riseborough), are victimized by a cult, Red (Nicolas Cage) goes on a psychotic revenge spree.

Mandy (2018) is thin on plot and populated by sketches of characters, but it has lots of style and visual interest to keep the viewer engrossed as Cage brings on the excessive violence. It's a cult classic in the making, and while the story, such as it is, has been depicted numerous times before, I was taken with quite a number of the visual elements in this film, and will be keeping my eye out for future projects from director, Panos Cosmotos, whose vision and inventive flourishes, may not have been able to elevate this movie into something truly good, kept it from being something truly bad.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 15 - Movie

A pair of scientists and specialized soldiers find themselves battling a winged creature out of Thai folklore in Garuda (2004).

If you make a movie featuring a creature out of mythology I'm pretty likely to want to watch it. Most times I end up being disappointed. This was one of those times. The intentions were good here, the performances, while uneven, were ernest, but the film itself was way longer than it needed to be. It took too long for the story to get moving, and featured some really terrible science in a proposal that was meant to put the scientists together with the garuda. The garuda itself swung back and forth from looking pretty decent, to being really shoddily rendered in CGI, often depicted in a quality you'd have found in video games in the decade previous to when this film was made. Set mostly in a bunch of tunnels and corridors which kept the creature from doing much flying until the climax. The idea that these soldiers were trained specifically for fighting legendary creatures such as this one was nice, but not really explored. Instead of getting tight, suspenseful narrative we get a padded story where the mostly interchangeable soldiers are picked off one by one, and the garuda, while demonstrating intelligence does not seem to have much motivation other than killing everyone off one by one.

Scooby-Doo 50th Anniversary Giant #1

The Scooby-Doo 50th Anniversary Giant #1, published by DC Comics, is a 100 page collection of Scooby-Doo comics, old and new, including my story (with Leo Batic, Horacio Ottolini, Nick J. Napolitano, Harvey Richards and Joan Hilty) "Wolf In Creep's Clothing" which was nominated for a Rondo Award when it first saw publication. This comic is $4.99 and available at Walmart, up at the front of the store near where all the Pokemon cards are sold.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 14 - Movie

In an almost completely abandoned city of decaying houses, where nature has rapidly begun to reclaim the land, a mother and her two sons struggle to eke out an existence. Now, essentially lawless, the city is claimed by brutal, scissor wielding, Bully (Matt Smith) , who has it in for the elder son (Ian De Caestecker) for stripping properties, he claims now belong to him, of their copper pipes and wiring. Meanwhile, the mother (Christina Hendricks), desperate for income to keep them from losing their home, takes a job at Grand Guignol styled nightclub. Their one neighbor (Saoirse Ronan) who lives with her grandmother (Barbara Steele) claims the place has been cursed ever since the reservoir was put in decades earlier.

The synopsis may not make it seem like much of a horror movie, but Lost River (2014) bears a strange, dreamlike quality and plenty of horrific elements. There's something of a Twilight Zone quality to the story, too, that suggests that the world outside this essentially post-apocalyptic city is normal, and the characters are torn between wanted to remain in their homes and a desire to want to leave that is made nearly impossible for one reason of another, while their world becomes more and more hellish.

This film, written and directed by Ryan Gosling, did not find a lot of love and quickly fell through the cracks, but I rather liked it. It does occasionally feel a bit slow going, but there are some really strong performances here, and Detroit, standing in for the city of Lost River, is used to great advantage providing some extraordinary scenes of urban decay and isolation.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 13 - Movie 1

Based on the short story by Edgar Allan Poe, The Black Cat (1966) is about a drunk asshole who abuses his wife and pets, becoming more and more psychotic until he is driven to murder.

This movie is amateurish in every regard, yet also manages to be disturbing in its scenes of what is, hopefully, staged, and not genuine animal abuse. I wouldn't go so far as to recommend it, but considering how many elements it has stacked against it, it still turns out to be a pretty effective adaptation.





 

31 Days of Halloween - Day 12 - Movie

Al Adamson makes Ed Wood look like Orson Welles by comparison. For evidence look no further than Brain of Blood (1971), the ponderously slow, inept, story of a crackpot scientist transferring the brain of a foreign country's leader into a healthier body so that the scientist can obtain power from himself in that country. On the plus side, the opening credits contain some great graphics. On the minus side, just about everything else. In a movie starring Grant Williams as the sort of hero, Angelo Rossito comes of as the most competent actor and he is essentially reduced to a mad dwarf henchman. The brain operation, which uses such high tech techniques as fast forwarding and rewinding a reel to reel tape at high speeds, goes on for ever. There are scenes and characters which seem to be there for no other reason than to pad this extremely thin plot beyond the fifteen minutes it might merit. We won't even get into the make-up effects, but the accompanying photo should say enough.

If I watch anything worse than this over the course of the rest of this Countdown, I'll be stunned.




 

31 Days of Halloween - Day 11 - Movie

The Crimson Ghost, a masked villain hiding behind the face of a skull, and his henchmen set out to steal the Cyclotrone, a device which can short circuit all electrical devices the planet. His goal is to sell it to a foreign power for $1million. Continually thwarting his efforts are criminology professor, Duncan Richards and his assistant Diana Farnsworth.

Technically, the 12 -part serial, The Crimson Ghost (1946), is more of a crime story, or even an espionage thriller, and not at all a horror story, but I'm including it anyway because of the appearance of the titular character, a character so iconic that he later became the logo to the band The Misfits.

As far as the Republic serials go, this is one of the best. The villain is great, his sidekick, Ashe (future Lone Ranger, Clayton Moore) is cold blooded. The fights are spectacular brawls that rarely leave even one item of furniture intact. Diana (Linda Stirling) is no traditional secretary, she gets right in the action, shooting guns, piloting planes, jumping from cars, engaging in chases, everything. The hero (Charles Quigley) , while he has Cary Grant-like good looks, is clever, and one hell of a fighter, often delivers his lines in an odd stilted manner that pretty much reinforces the idea that he was hired more for the action scenes than the exposition.

There are some nitpicky complaints I could make, including the fact that Duncan had a huge clue as to the Crimson Ghost's identity pretty early one, that given his often demonstrated cleverness makes you wonder why he wasn't able to flush him out a lot earlier, and without compromising himself so often as the story unfolds. This one was a lot of fun.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 10 - Movie

Two community college science teachers (David Duchovny and Orlando Jones) investigate a nearby meteorite strike and make the discovery of a lifetime. Not only is the meteorite crawling with rapidly evolving alien life, but it it terraforming the cave it landed in into an environment that can sustain it. Once the military gets involved all hell breaks loose as the creatures no longer remain quarantined underground and soon begin adapting to our atmosphere.

From director Ivan Reitman, Evolution (2001) is a comedy that is mostly played straight, but lightning is not striking twice for Reitman. This is no Ghostbusters. Where the laughs in that classic film grew out of the characters and situations, here they mostly come from groin, ass, and flatulence jokes, which fall flat. The creatures, and there are many, are pretty cool, though a number have too much of a touch of whimsy about their design to really convey menace. This movie was a somewhat enjoyable diversion, but if you don't see it, you aren't really missing anything.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 9 - Movie

Abbott and Costello end up in possession of a medallion that belongs to the living mummy, Klaris, leading them into trouble with the law and competing groups trying to obtain the medallion for their own ends.

Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy (1955) was the last of the movies in which the comedy duo met Universal's classic monsters and was also their 28th, and final, film for Universal, and essentially, the end of their careers. It's not surprising. The comedy in this film does not produce any grins let alone guffaws, as the pair falls back on stale, often poorly staged,  routines, which are not helped by the film's lackluster direction.

31 Days of Halloween - Day 8 - Movie

Dr. Marco, the leader of a band of vampires, plagues the family of his dead lover as he preys on her siblings in an attempt to bring her back to life in The Blood Drinkers (1964).

This stylish movie had me at its opening scene. if you distilled every cheap late-night, drive-in, knockoff of classic and not so classic vampire films into one movie, you might get this one. Marco's band includes an imbecilic hunchback with bad teeth and violent tendencies, a dwarf, a sensual gothic vampire chick, the human mother of his deceased lover, and his own bald villainous self. They are like a monster super-villain team. The film contains full color footage intercut with blue tinted scenes for night, and red tinted scenes indicating the presence of the vampires -- which turns out to be, not simply a style choice, but what happens to the light within the movie.

More importantly, the story, which is pretty fast paced,  is populated with characters you care about, and with some surprisingly sympathetic motivations from the vampires. Religion also plays a key role, including a really wonky explanation for why you need a wooden stake to kill a vampire.

This movie was a blast, pleasantly surprised me, and so far has turned out to be my favorite film this Countdown.