Chadwick H. Saxelid's Blog: Ghoulies, Ghosties, and Long-Leggedy Beasties, page 16

Alien (1979) - Trading Card #67

Again, the image being used is out of sequence with the events of the film's narrative. So it goes.

Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025) - Review

I tapped out on the Jurassic Park franchise after 2015's Jurassic World. While I did not think it all that bad of a movie, it also was not all that good of a movie, either. There was a hollowness to it that left me unsatisfied. So I wound up skipping both Fallen Kingdom (2018) and Dominion (2022). 

Which is both sad and odd, considering my love of giant monster movies and creature features. How is it I can still get giddy about seeing a new Godzilla or King Kong movie, but the thought of a new Jurassic World movie has me disinterested and cold?

Two things, I guess. First there is the lingering memory of that unsatisfying hollowness at the center of the first Jurassic World entry. Second might be the bland sameness to the proceedings. Despite all the lip service promises of dinosaurs escaping and integrating into the world, each movie seems content to just keep recycling endless variations of iconic set-pieces from the first Jurassic Park (1993) and its source material.

Gripes about sameness aside, though, I must and will give The Lost World: Jurassic Park props for its San Diego sequence. That was fun.

Yet there was a thing or two about Rebirth that managed to pierce my cocoon of disinterested lethargy regarding the franchise and intrigue me enough to go and give this entry a shot.

First is that Gareth Edwards had directed the film. I have been a fan of Edwards since Monsters (2010) and thought he did a fine job with Godzilla (2014), a wonderful job on Rogue One (2016), and a superlative job with The Creator (2023). Here was someone I thought well-suited to coax something new and interesting out of this timeworn and threadbare franchise.

Second, and something that connected with the core of my inner monster kid heart, was this film having an actual mutant dinosaur (i.e. an honest-to-goodness giant monster element). I could not pass on that...

Well, shame on me, kind of. While competently directed, with a sense of both scale and fun to the proceedings, Edwards was unable to really bring anything new or all that interesting to this entry. While it starts off strong enough, with a nifty and almost terror inducing introduction to the 'D-Rex' mutant in a cold open, everything that follows is just more of the same perfunctory and repetitive stuff.

David Koepp's script is both overstuffed and underdeveloped, offering a collection of character sketches in dire need of some fleshing out and coloring. This is also one of those movies where it is quite easy to suss out who will live and who will be dinosaur chow.

What Rebirth needed was a serious trim. Either cut the stranded family out of the script - which would allow space for the 'characters' played by Scarlett Johannson, Mahershala Ali, Johnathan Bailey, et al, to develop some much needed interesting textures and interpersonal dynamics - or cut down on the mercenary and scientists stuff and make the stranded family the primary characters and play it as a frightening and dangerous fish-out-of-water style adventure.

Either approach might have worked better than the lifeless and disinteresting mishmash of cliches I wound up sitting through. So it goes.

The 7 Brothers Meet Dracula [The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)] - Newspaper Ad

Oakland Tribune - July 11, 1979
The 7 Brothers Meet Dracula was the truncated version of The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, one of the very last gasps of the foundering and failing Hammer Film production company. While the original version ran 89 minutes, The 7 Brothers Meet Dracula, shorn of some 14 minutes, was a brisk and, perhaps, borderline incoherent 75 minutes.

Adding further insult to injury was the film having been shelved, or passed over, for theatrical distribution for a whopping five years before getting a token release. My guess is the distributor wanted a Dracula title to capitalize on the expected box office success of Universal's big budget remake of Dracula, which was opening the following Friday, July 13th.

For snorts and giggles, I thought it would be fun to consult the theatre guide for the co-hits(s) that were paired with The 7 Brothers Meet Dracula.

The LUX co-features were Hot, Cool and Vicious, a 1977 martial arts import, and Caravans, a historical adventure from the director of The Enforcer (1976) and Every Which Way But Loose (1978). 

But if triple-features were not your kind of thing, then the Eastmont Four had The 7 Brothers Meet Dracula paired with Mean Frank and Crazy Tony, which was an Italian buddy film about a small-time criminal (Tony LoBianco) teaming up with a high-profile gangster (Lee Van Cleef) to escape from prison. 

I know Mean Frank and Crazy Tony better as Escape from Death Row and remember being low-key surprised by how light-hearted and delightful the movie turned out to be.

The Blair Witch Project (1999) - Trading Card #69

Heather's Journal
The disturbing tape/film footage and Heather Donahue's equally unnerving journal elicited an array of responses. Some psychologists suggested that the starving, fatigued students may have turned on one another; others feel they were most certainly stalked and murdered by unknown assailants. Still others place the blame squarely on the Blair Witch, feeling that the tragedy is merely the latest in a series of bizarre occurrences dating back to 1786. 

Carrie the musical - Soundtrack

In October of 2013 the revived and revamped version of Carrie the Musical was mounted and performed by the Ray of Light Theatre in San Francisco.
While I remembered reading of the legendary smoking crater the original production made on Broadway, closing after only 16 previews and 5 performances, I never dreamed I would ever be able to see the damn thing.
Which remains true. Because this version had a retooled book, which reshaped the show into a psychological-drama focused on the effects of bullying. Seven songs from the original show had also been dropped and replaced with all-new ones. Not that I knew any of this at the time I took my seat at the Victoria Theatre in San Francisco.
Perhaps it was my diminished expectations for the show going in, but I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I even bought the revival's Premiere Cast Recording.
It is unlikely this show will ever truly get out from under the shadow of its legendary Broadway failure, but I am still rooting for it to do so. I guess I am a sucker for lost causes.

Moby Dick (1956) - Newspaper Ad

San Francisco Examiner - July 10, 1956
I remember watching Moby Dick on television and being blown away by it. So blown away that I immediately checked the book out from the local library and attempted to give it a read. I made it through one or two chapters, at most, before giving up. Not bad for somebody that was, most likely, in middle school at the time.

Twelve or so years later, maybe, the novel was assigned reading in an American Literature course I was taking at San Francisco State University. Surprise, surprise, surprise, but I made it through the entire, albeit seemingly endless, book this time around.
While I cannot say that I felt it was the transcendent reading experience the professor teaching the class found it to be, I was surprised at just how much the climax of Peter Benchley's novel Jaws seemed to have cribbed from the climax of Moby Dick. Really.
A few years after that I read Ray Bradbury's novel Green Shadows, White Whale, which was a fictionalized version of his experience working with John Huston to craft the script for the movie adaptation of Moby Dick that I had just so happened to watch and love so many years before.
Bradbury incorporated a great many of his Irish stories, which were inspired by the time he spent in Ireland working on Moby Dick, so the resulting book is more a phantasmagoria of sights, sounds, and experiences than it is a structured story. Which is pretty much par for the course for most, if not all, of Bradbury's novel length works. 
Green Shadows, White Whale was the second novel penned by a disgruntled and traumatized screenwriter dramatizing what it was like working with, or for, John Huston. The other was White Hunter, Black Heart by Peter Viertel. While I have seen the Clint Eastwood movie adaptation, I have yet to crack open the actual book it was based on.
I need to do that, some time.

Alien (1979) - Trading Card #66

Captain Dallas, convinced that the Alien is using Nostormo's air shafts to move around in, crawls into one of the vents in an attempt to drive the Monster out. Dallas' disappearance chills the blood of his crew-mates... 

Another out of sequence image used for this plot summary. This looks to be from when the Nostromo is either landing on, or taking off of, the inhospitable planetoid upon which the alien craft had crash-landed.

Escape from New York (1981) - Newspaper Ad

Oakland Tribune - July 9, 1981
I was so stoked to see this. Sure, it was not a horror movie, but it was a new John Carpenter movie and Debra Hill Production. The dynamic duo responsible for Halloween and The Fog. Adrienne Barbeau was in it, too! And Lee Van Cleef! And Ernest Borgnine! And Harry Dean Stanton!

Man, what a cast. What a concept. What a fun movie it turned out to be. I loved it then and still do today.

The Blair Witch Project (1999) - Trading Card #68

Retrieved Video Camera
Both the video and 16mm footage from the discovered backpack prompted FBI investigators to reopen the case of the three missing college students. A special FBI/local authorities task force was set up, but for the second time in as many years, law enforcement officials abandoned the search. Stung by criticism, Sheriff Ron Cravens insisted that he and his people did everything possible to solve the mysterious case. 

Carrie (1976) - Soundtrack

Bruce Kimmel's liner notes for this two disc limited edition release from Kritzerland lavishes an almost hyperbolic level of praise on Pino Donaggio's score for Carrie. In a single sentence Kimmel calls it both "a perfect score" and "a masterpiece of film scoring" with "unforgettable themes that capture every nuance of the film."

The soundtrack album that was released back in 1976 was an abbreviation, of course. 35 minutes of music that, for the most part, was from the second half of the film.
As would be the case with just about every soundtrack album of that era, there were snippets and selections of the score that I loved that were excluded from the album. Not so with this release. It contains every note of the film score, in film order.
The snippets and selections I am glad to have included here? The second part of Track 2 - The Ashtray, Track 5 - Calisthenics, and Track 8 - The Tuxedo Shop.