But ohmygosh, it’s fun to watch a horror movie every day.  Fun, fun, funnity fun.  Even if you end up looking a little like this toward the end:

Halloween night, we watched the original Ju-On (2002) film, just to round out all the Ju-oning we’d been doing all week.  It was pretty scary and very enjoyable.  I love a good ghost story and Ju-on delivers. There were great performances and darn good effects for a lower budget.  And I really liked the way the ghosts could screw with space and time. Very creative storytelling.  If only they could make October last a little longer, I could have seen all the movies I’d planned.

So, how did I do?

Movies watched: 31 in 31 days.
Movies with Christopher Lee: Five
Movies with Peter Cushing: Four
Movies with Boris Karloff: Three (more next year, darn it)
Haunted Houses visited: two plus a haunted hayride!
Desire to do it again: 100%
Lesson learned: Organization! I didn’t get to see a number of the movies I meant to, and resorted to dashing around a little too much.  And Boris Karloff, more Boris Karloff.

But what funnity fun it all was. October, you’re the best.

Monday, October 26:  Mausoleum (1983): D was out of town, so I eschewed watching John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) which was on AMC that night.  Even after seeing it approximately 6.8 million times, I still cannot watch it alone. A classic is a classic for a reason, right? Anyway, remakes are for losers.

So, I settled instead for a bucket full of crazy from 1983, Mausoleum.  Somewhere, I have both audio and video tapes of all of the host segments from a Commander USA showing of this movie.  (Audio taping from tv, specifically Commander USA, used to be a big thing with me.  I was a lonely child.)  So, I’ve had a special place in my heart for Mausoleum for a long time, even though I couldn’t remember a thing about it, except that it inspired The Commander to make a rash of cemetery jokes, and even turn his Video Vault into a temporary morgue. But the movie was a vague memory to me.  I figured it was because I was really only into the host stuff that I just discarded what I’d seen of the movie, rendering what I could remember as a hazy mish-mash of scenes and dialogue.

But no, I learned from finally seeing the movie in its entirely again that it wasn’t just my twelve year-old attention span, it was the editing for TV that did it! Mausoleum is so full of boobs and demon-possessed sex scenes that to air it on basic cable required quite a hatchet job to the (admittedly thin) story.  It’s not like we had a lot to begin with, either.  It’s your basic early 80s Exorcist rip-off: Bobbi Bresee (owner of the much-filmed boobs) is possessed by an evil demon named Nomed, and it causes her to turn from a sweetly naive housewife to a rampaging vixen who has a lot of sex with her husband, that actor with my favorite name ever, Marjoe Gortner.

When Marjoe turns out not to be enough (no surprise there), Bobbi starts in on her gardener, the guy who delivers the landscaping supplies, and her therapist, I think (all those early 80s guys look alike to me).  Oh, and she gets more demonc and a bit more kill-ish which each guy.  It’s very gory and ripe with the stench of a Madonna/whore backlash theme (paging Susan Faludi).  But, it was good to finally see the whole thing, I guess, though it left me wondering where my Commander tapes are.

Tuesday, I watched  Horror of Spider Island (1960), the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version, because that’s the only way to watch this really crappy movie.  After an uneccsarialy long audtion sequence (which gave ample screentime to a gaggle of women in huge early 1960s bras), a seedy producer and his dance troupe set off for a show in Singapore. Their plane crashes en route, and the whole kit and ka-bra-dle is stranded on a remote island – Spider Island, to be exact. The seedy guy is bitten by a comically oversized spider, and turns into a slightly uglier version of himself, basically.

The girls (and their bras) spend most of the rest of the film looking for him, and a couple of them get killed, naturally.  And then some guys show up and (spoiler!) rescue the rest.  And that’s pretty much it.  Do not try to watch this without Mike & The Bots.

We tried something a little different on Wednesday night.  We played and finished Wii game based on the 2003 Japanese film, Ju-on: The Grudge. And despite some problems with the controls (you feel like you’re walking through mud, for one thing) we had a lot of fun.  Ju-on has this cool multiplayer mode where player two can use his or her controller to make things pop out on the screen at random times.  The game already has you searching dark and decrepit buildings (for your dog in one episode, to deliver a package in another) with only a flashlight for illumination (and your batteries are about to die), and creates a generally scary atmosphere.  So when the other player throws a cat-boy at you, it can be really effective.  It can also get really repetitive. But really, it was good fun.  And since we spent something 3-4 hours at it, it totally counts.

So it shouldn’t surprise you, then,  that we had to watch the real film on Thursday.  My library didn’t have the Japanese version in, so we settled on the American remake, The Grudge (2004).  And it was pretty darn good, far surpassing my expectations.  I’m telling you, the creepy horror noise that the ghosts make, the cat-boy, and the use of as little CG as possible in creating the very scary ghosts made for a really decent scary movie.  It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a modern horror film that is able to really scare you without resorting to derivative gore shocks or torture porn (or both).

Friday, I still hadn’t returned Countess Dracula (thank you Interlibrary Loan!) and on the other side of the disc was a weird little gem, The Vampire Lovers (1968).  After a visit to a local haunted house (fun, but the actors were really agressive.  SO. MUCH. SHOUTING!), we settled in bed to watch Ingrid Pitt do her stuff in this Hammer adaptation of Le Fanou’s Carmilla.

There was some excellent imagery here, some lovely atospheric set pieces, and a frightening tension toward the (typically abrupt) end of the film.  Ingrid Pitt is fun to watch as Carmilla.  She’s not a subtle actress, but she has an incredible face that can transform from one emotion to another in a moment.  The women really own this one, with adorable Pippa Steele and the terrific Madeline Smith as Carmilla’s objects of obsession, and Kate O’Mara as a stalwart governess who can be controlled by a broach.  Wait, what?  Yes, the logic is none too clear most of the time, but The Vampire Lovers delivers what Hammer does best – great costumes, solid acting, and fabulous scenery.

And then it was Saturday.   Halloween.

Sunday October 19 – Sunday October 26

Brainiac (El barón del terror (1962): My goodness, what a strange movie.  I stretched my rules a touch and watched this one twice this month; first was back around the 5th or so, and I watched a version with dialogue dubbed in English.  I was so befuddled by the impenetrable plot that I hunted down a version in the original Spanish and watched it again.  It did not help.  This movie defies an easy synopsis:  there’s a 300 year-old revenge plot, a guy who eats brains, a female astronomer who makes coffee for all of the men in the movie, and a skeleton with no feet.  Really, a must-see.

The Devil’s Hand (1962) - Sort of fun little film about Satan, starring Alan Alda’s dad.  Poppy Alda is a good actor, and he elevates the really lame material involving his joining a cult, the members of which couldn’t seem to get enough of using the word cult, which I found funny for some reason.  Sample dialogue went something like:

Cult Leader: You must be loyal to THE CULT!
Member: I am ready to go to the meeting of THE CULT!

Plus, all the members of THE CULT wore very smart late 50s business suits. The spinning knife chandelier was fun, though.

Horror Hotel (1960) – This time there’s witches along with Satan, and Christopher Lee makes a “surprise” appearance toward the end (which really isn’t much of a surprise at all).  I sort of loved the lead actress though, and her kind librarian friend, who ends up pulling the facts together – go librarians!

Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973) – combine most of the above elements – Satan, Christopher Lee, weird cults that emphatically call themselves cults, – add Dracula, and you have this sub-par Hammer film.  Fun to see The Fanged One in modern (well, 1973) day London, with an office in a high rise. And Peter Cushing is great, of course.

Phase IV (1974) – Wow, I can’t explain this.  I really can’t.  Ants, 100% yellow, a scenery-gnashing Oliver Reed substitute, and a mantis or two.  It’s sort of arty and very 70s, and it hurt me. But I owed it to D after some of the things I’ve put him through this month.

Bug (1975) – Continuing with the insect theme here, Bug is a doozy of a disaster-monster-message film (Don’t tamper in God’s domain. Think about it won’t you? Thank you). I love love love when the super-atomic roaches spell out WE LIVE on a wall.  Of course you live! How else could you have spelled it out?  Sheesh.

Countess Dracula (1970) – Oooh, if you like costume horror, get your hands on this.  Lots of fun, some naked blood baths, Ingrid Pitt, and a whole lot of crazy.  Loosely based on a real legend of a Hungarian countess, it’s fun to see evil chicks get their due once in a while.

In Search of Dracula (1974) – This is one of my favorite films of all time.  If you’re at all curious about the origins of your favorite vampire films, or about the real-life myths and facts which swirl around them, you might love it, too. Christopher Lee narrates and is wonderfully solemn and a bit scary. The evolution of folklore into cinema is truly fascinating, and it’s all surrounded by campy, slightly gory, 70s-style reenactments.  And the section on Vlad the Impaler is just one of the best things I’ve ever watched. It gets a might slow when it veers into the very early history of vampire films, but pays you back with Vlad Vlad Vlad!

Well, the trailer says it all.  Enjoy, won’t you?

Whew.  More soon…

I mean, I know we need November (D’s birthday, and all that big old turkey feed) and December and everything, but my gosh, I love you and I want you to stay.  I’ve spent each of your days watching fabulous (or fabulously awful) movies and doing those little things that only seem, well, social appropriate in this one month a year: eating mini Reese’s cups by the bucketful, using the term “spooktacular,” and screaming at men in the dark.

Case in point?  A couple of Saturdays ago, we went to a pumpkin farm (only in October) which boasted a haunted house or two (screaming), a haunted hayride (more screaming), and fair food (funnel cakes!).  It was pretty darn fun, despite a completely lack of farm-grown fall favorites (the cider was from Michigan?!), a lot of mud, and cold funnel cakes.

I just love hayrides, I do, and I’m not (too) ashamed.  This one was a lot of fun, twice as long as I thought it would be, and not completely infested with chainsaw guys.  There were a few incongruous items, though, like a cutesy ghost thing, probably bought at Walgreens, stapled to a tree and with a big HAPPY HALLOWEEN speech bubble above his cutesy head (oooo, scary kids!).  Oh, and like three of those mirrored light things Spock had in his quarters in Star Trek: The Movie.  It was gone by The Wrath of Khan.  I guess even Spock can spot when a trend is over.

Of course, this wonderful – dare I say SPOOKTACULAR – farm was in a suburb way, way south, so we had a long muddy ride home, punctuated by a stop a Portillo’s (the onion rings married well with the stomachache I’d later get from the cold funnel cake) and a missed exit which almost made me miss my 11:59pm deadline except that I can u-turn like nobody’s business. We got home around 11:30pm – plenty of time for my movie: Night of The Living Dead (1968).

Okay.  I’m going to say something here that might upset those in the audience who are sensitive: this iconic, trendsetting, most influential zombie film of them all is, well, sort of boring.

I mean, yes, there’s a whole lot of groundbreaking flesh-eating going on here, but, my gosh, there is a whole lot more shouting in this movie than I remembered.  Shouting, and people nailing boards over windows.  Admittedly, part of the problem for me might have been the crappy colorization in the Legend Films DVD release I watched; another barrier to terror may have been the fact that I watched it with a commentary by Michael J. Nelson, of MST3K and Rifftrax fame.  So, while I wasn’t as scared as I wanted to be, I did get recipes for three different kinds of zombie cocktails.

Still, it is a classic.  I love how we’re just thrown into this living dead outbreak with little explanation, and no need for characterization.  Our protagonists are nearly anonymous and about as likable as anyone would be under horrific circumstances.  And I have to give it up for the dreadfully depressing ending.  I knew it was coming and I still felt awful.  It shaped a million movies to come and remains an important part of horror movie history.

Plus, it has one of the best lines in any movie, ever (at about 1:39):

For instance: music videos.  In the spirit of the season, D & I stayed up way, way too late the other night finding scary music videos online.  For me, it was like revisiting those years long ago, when MTV played nothing but videos (as crazy as that might sound) and I was frightened to death by the haunting vision of Grace Jones in her Demolition Man video:

I mean, I couldn’t sleep after watching this! What nine year-old wouldn’t be terrified by an army of Grace Joneses marching toward you? They could blind you with the glare from their collective cheekbones and then eat you, raw.

For animal cruelty-themed videos, nothing is better than Peter Gabriel’s Shock the Monkey, but it just seemed a little too easy.  Instead, we settled on Games Without Frontiers, which is sort of a scary song to begin with, and then there’s that revolving baby head. Argh!

And I must note that until, um, last week or so, I thought the chorus of the song was “She’s…so popular.”  Turns out it’s not.  So, I guess she isn’t.

The Talking Heads could not be left out of Scary Video night. Burning Down The House has a pretty freaky video, but it really can’t hold a candle (har har) to Once in a Lifetime. This video had me afraid of David Byrne for years. Years.  I mean, what is he doing in this video?  The arm thing!  The head smacking thing!  The tiny-Davids-all-dancing-in-the-background thing!  And now the song is in top rotation on my ipod.  I’m just that way.

The hands down winner of the night, though, was Nine Inch Nails’ Closer. D had never seen it, so boy, was he in for a treat. I’ve seen it something like a million times, but I was surprised that I was shocked and creeped out all over again on viewing it that night. Maybe it was the late hour. Maybe it was sharing in D’s genuine shock over some of the images. Maybe it was the revolving pig’s head.

Good times, right?  What do you think we missed?  I’d love to hear how MTV scared you.  In the meantime, you can check out our entire playlist:

Oh dear.

I remember Tuesday (10/12) well.   I watched The Terror (1963), a real beast of a film which I thought was going to be a whole lot better than it was.  I’d barely started the film when I had a bad feeling.  Something’s wrong here, I thought.  What is it?

Ah yes, that it explains it.

The Terror has a somewhat intriguing story: a French soldier is separated from his regiment somewhere in Germany, and stops a mysterious girl he meets on an obvious California beach along the German ocean, I guess, to ask for directions.  She is so beautiful, he falls in love on sight (as you do), and when she disappears suddenly, he tracks her to a creepy castle (of course) inhabited by a very depressed Boris Karloff, who insists she does not exist.

The first problem here is that the soldier is played by Jack Nicholson, who, though very young, is pretty much playing the Jack Nicholson who all know and, er, love. Or loathe.  I mean, who is less French than Jack Nicholson?

Despite Jack, there are a lot of interesting elements here (is the girl real? alive? dead? a hawk? who is the scary witch lady in the hut? what’s with the mute guy that lives with her? why is Boris so sad?) that unfortunately add up to, well, not much.  Since Corman is at the helm, the mysterious plot is irrevocably and improbably wrapped up in the last 5 minutes or so, with a talky, truly unbelievable reveal.  Oh Roger, I want to like you but you make it so hard.

The moral here? Don’t believe the poster:

Wednesday was a revisit of a classic Month of Madness entry: The Manster (1962) I’m not sure I can add much to my review from 2005:

Wow. A perennial Month of Madness favorite in my house, this film has earned a place close to my heart because it is so earnest in its suckitude. It is so bad, yet everyone involved seems very committed to making the best film they can, and you have to admire that. The production values are surprisingly good, and the performances are quite decent. Peter Dyneley’s tortured journalist working in Japan and caught in a descending madness chews the scenery with a stunning, forceful mediocrity. The scares in this one come way before the actual Manster shows up, and at least one is somewhat ghastly. The Manster himself? Well… He’s what you’d expect from a film with Japanese scientists named “Robert” and “Tara” who don’t seem to speak Japanese. A scream and a half.

Yeah, it’s pretty fabulous in a Manster-y kind of way.  I guess I can add this for you: Here’s Peter Dynley, doing his thing.

Inspiring, right?  And the man can bellow like a sea cow.  It’s impressive, and you can hear for yourself.  Manster is apparently in the public domain now (which explains the horribly edited copy I found – the whole ending was missing!), and can be viewed in its entirety (or downloaded) at The Internet Archive.  I love that site.

So that was Wednesday.

Thursday, last night, D and I settled in for something really…special.  Have you seen 1988′s Waxwork? Words fail me, they really do.

Let me start with a plot: a group of carefully stereotyped teens visits a “private showing” at a neighborhood waxwork museum, owned by David “I’ll-do-anything-for-a-paycheck” Warner.  Predictably, some of the teens go missing.  The leftover teens investigate, Scooby-Doo style, and learn that there’s a Satanic thing going on with the wax museum, something about each display representing the most evil people in all of history who each need to kill one vicitim in order to come alive again and, yawn, take over the world.  This leads me to wonder who the most evil person form history was represented by the alien baby display.  Or the faux Night of the Living Dead display (Romero?).

Zach Galligan, of Gremlins fame, stars here as our petulant hero, along with a perpetually moistened Deborah Foreman (Valley Girl) who has a Marquis de Sade fixation that pops up in inconvenient moments.  Their performances are a tad better than the rest of the nameless teens, which really isn’t saying much.  Basically, this film was a stinkburger.  The DVD also has Waxwork 2 on it, so, give me strength, you’ll probably be hearing about that soon.

Today (10/16), I watched a really decent Lugosi flick, The Return of the Vampire, from 1944.  It was Universal’s attempt to revive the flagging Dracula franchise, with a totally non-Dracula story.  On its own, it has a lot of appeal.

Lugosi is restrained and even a little chilling as ancient, evil Count Tesla (awesome name, eh?), who was killed many years ago by a Lady Jane Ainsley, (Frieda Inescort) and accidentally brought to life after the Germans bombed the cemetary where Lady Jane buried his staked body.  The WWII setting gives it a different flavor than a lot of vampire mopvies, and the lead vampire hunter, Lady Jane, is a surpisnlgy strong female character for the time.  She’s a sort of Rosie the Riveter Van Helsing kind of a gal.

It was a delightful way to end a week of wobbly films. But what the heck did I watch Monday?  Oh dear.

So, this post is brought to you by the letter C. COFFEE.

First, Svengoolie helped me out again with the strange and chuckle-worthy Food of The Gods (1976).  This film has a lot going for it, but what it has going for it also makes it ridiculous.  A tough quandary for a film.  It was directed by the somewhat infamous (if you’re into old horror films like me) Burt I. Gordon, of The Beginning of The End (1957) and The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) fame.  Those films feature giant grasshoppers and a giant man (in a giant diaper), respectively.  Food of the Gods, (based on a story by H.G. Wells) is replete with huge rats.  I guess Burt I. is into big, big stuff.  I mean, look at his initials.

Gods also features the delightfully named Marjoe Gortner, a name I kept repeating all night.  Say it with me: Marjoe Gortner.  Ahhh.

It’s an odd little film, with bad “author’s message”-style voice-overs bookending it (they rival the “he tampered in God’s domain” line from Ed Wood’s Bride of the Monster for blandly stated preachiness ), regular-sized rats crawling on tiny houses, one horrible giant-chicken, and again, Marjoe Gortner.  What else can I say?  Nothing much, so enjoy this photo montage, will you?

I also must point out that a Google image search for Food of The Gods netted this result:

From Beyond That Grave (1973) has a weird poster:

The wonderful Peter Cushing as a wizened antique shop owner who sells young Londoners the trinkets they deserve:

…and Donald Pleasance in an unusually sympathic role (or is it?) for him:

His segment, “An Act of Kindness,” about a henpecked husband who makes an unlikely friend in a street vendor (Pleasance) was the best of the lot.  It was quiet, slowly building the tension around the unhappily married man (beautifully played by Ian Bannen) and his strange friendship with Pleasance and his slightly creepy daughter.  Unfortunately, a couple of plot points are dropped and the ending is just out of nowhere, but with a little revision, this segment could have been a film all by itself.

Another  segment about a man who has a weird demonic possesion removed from his shoulder (seriously) was actually pretty horrible, but that was made up for by an eerie story with David Warner as a man who buys a strange old mirror that relflects something terrifying.  I love scary mirrors.  Overall, From Beyond The Grave was an enjoyable surprise, full of funky 70s fashion and a few genuine scares.

The Body Snatcher (1945)

This is one of those horror films I first read about as a kid, in a book checked out over and over from the library.  Darned if I can remember the title now, but it was a guide to horror movies, aimed at a young audience; something to get us kids hooked right away so that we could grow up to be the pushers. I’m not sure, but I may have been the only kid who ever checked that book out – it was always in when I went looking for it.  It covered all of the films you’d expect: Frankenstein, Dracula, all that stuff from Universal.  And then it went on to introduce me to Fritz Lang’s M (1931), Rondo Hatten, London After Midnight (1927), Freaks (1932), and the shadowy films of Val Lewton.

One film in particular that stuck in my little kid brain was Lewton’s The Body Snatcher (1945). With a title that sounded like those pod-people movies, and a non-monster Boris Karloff, it stood out from the classic creature features surrounding it in the book. The author was lavish with his praise for this movie, citing specifically the end scene; his description of it has been imprinted in my mind ever since.

But twenty-five years ago, when I was sitting on the backyard swing eating a pb&j and reading this book for the fifth or tenth time, these classic films were really hard to come by.  They rarely came on television.  There were no internet videos or rentals. We didn’t even have a VCR.  So I made a mental checklist of Movies I Would See If I Ever Could Some Magical Day and The Body Snatcher was right at the top.

And guess what?  Some Magical Day has arrived!  I’m all grown up with a VCR and DVD player of my own.  Movies are plentiful.  They are for rent in mega-chains everywhere, and for loan (for free!) and my local libraries.  Netflix has given me access to a whole lot of movies that are hard to find, and there are a whole lot of horror fans like me who trade and share rarities on the internet. Sometimes I can scarcely believe my good fortune.

So why did it take me this long to get to The Body Snatcher? It’s been at my nearby library for years and I’ve even picked it up and put it down a half-dozen times. I don’t know why I haven’t watched it sooner, but last Tuesday, I finally sat down to take it in.  And I devoured it.  That horror movie book guy was right.  It was fantastic.  Little Meg was over the moon.

The story takes its general outline from a story by Robert Louis Stevenson, and from the real-life crimes of a couple of nineteenth century grave robbers named Burke & Hare. They dug up bodies and sold them to a doctor who used them to teach anatomy to his medical students.  When freshly-buried bodies proved harder to procure, Burke & Hare began rolling their own, if you know what I mean.  The Body Snatcher takes this general concept but doesn’t retell the Burke & Hare story, it follows along what happened after those diabolical gentlemen were long gone.

The need for bodies to study did not go away when Burke & Hare did; neither did the need for money in the hearts of unscrupulous men.  Our film’s unscrupulous man, John Gray, is masterfully portrayed by Boris Karloff.  He is a cabman and “resurrectionist,” supplying bodies to a school for anatomy, which is run by a doctor who seems curiously tied to Gray.  Directed by virtuoso lensman Robert Wise (The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), West Side Story (1961), The Sound of Music (1965) and The Andromeda Strain (1971) among many others), The Body Snatcher grabs you with a tight suspense in very first frame and keeps you in its grips until the last.

The performances are top-notch here.  The schoolmaster, Dr, McFarlane is played with a precise mixture of snobbery and desperation by Henry Daniell, an accomplished Shakespearean actor.  Bela Lugosi has a small role here in which he shines like in few of his post-Dracula films.  This is my favorite of Karloff’s roles.  He is at once charming and unnerving, completely generous and kind to children, menacing and frightening in the next moment.  I found him riveting in his ability to inhabit this character, making me forget he was Boris Karloff at all.  I really believe he was a master of the character piece, his incredible talent perhaps too overshadowed by the genre in which he excelled.

I am so glad I finally saw this movie.

I know little Meg, curled up in the backyard and wondering what it would be like to actually see such old, old movies, would never believe me if I told her that in just a few years she could see almost any movie in that book.  Well, I’m telling her now.  And she is freaking out.  I guess that, in large part, this is what the Month of Madness is all about.  I am treating my ten-year old self to the horror moviepalooza of her dreams.  You enjoy it, little Meg.

Wednesday, October 7, I watched a horrible, horrible thing called The Beast (1996).  I can explain this film in one (over-long) sentence: Peter Bencheley saw his hopes of long-lived franchise money dry up after the failure of Jaws 3 and decided to cash in his big sea creature cred one more time to plump up his nest egg, and yeah, a TV movie would do just fine.  Oh, I forgot to mention it’s a giant squid. And there was William Petersen who has an amazingly round butt.

Thursday, October 8, was an improvement with one of the Amicus Studio’s great quickie horror anthologies: The House That Dripped Blood (1970). This one has Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, a hammy Jon Pertwee and a lot of ascots.  Plus several great severed heads and a tiny, adorable girl who terrified Christopher Lee.  I loved the segment with Lee, though it was over-long in in setting up the sole scary moment, because Lee actually has a good bit of dialog.  Dracula speaks!  He has a wonderful baritone, full of gravitas and forboding.  Also, there was Denholm Elliot in a lovely pink sweater.  Fun movie with easy but effective scares.

Friday, October 9, I had my first close call.  I was busy all day with house-cleaning, shopping, and being worn out.  When I finally settled in to watch a movie, it was already 11pm.  We flipped on the great World of the Weird Monster Show, assuming I’d score my daily requirement with no trouble – but alas! The film of the evening was Plan 9 From Outer Space, and though I do love it, in a way, I just couldn’t sit through it.  I was over-caffeniated, tired, and cranky.  I couldn’t handle Ed Wood.

We got online to see what I had lined up in my Netflix watch instantly queu and searched vainly for something that would appeal to both of us.  At 11:58, I kid you not, I finally had a moment of clarity: looking at the pile of DVDs I’d picked up at the library earlier in the day, I surrendered to fate.  “Put in Black Sabbath!” I screeched.  D complied, and at 11:59, the movie started and disaster was averted.

Black Sabbath (1963) is a fun little Italian film, directed by one of my favorites Mario Bava.  The original title was The Three Faces of Fear, which makes so mch more sense as it is a trilogy of vingnettes, though Black Sabbath definitely sounds scarier, doesn’t it?

I’ve seen this film before – specifically during Month of Madness, 2005.  It was interesting to see it in the original Italian version this time, with English subtitles.  Oddly, the dialog looked as if it was being spoken in English, but with an Italian overdub.  Even more odd, the version I saw in 2005 was in English, but dubbed over as well.  Honestly, I sort of missed the English dubbing as I have a thing for poorly dubbed horror films.

The vignettes concern a taunting “Telephone”, a “Wurdalak,” and a menacing “Drop of Water.”  The telephone segment was my favorite in the first viewing; it was very different in Italian.  An entire lesbian subplot had been excised in the English-language version, but the English version had more of a supernatural, freaky feel to it.

All this compare and contrast is making feel this I’m in tenth grade Enlgish class again.

Oh! I forgot to mention Boris Karloff.  He hosted each segment and was a scary family patriarch in the Wurdalak segment.  It just doesn’t matter what this man does – he does it well.  I especially loved his scenes with his grandson.  You can see this tenderness in Karloff, a loving gentleness belied by a madness just underneath the surface.  He’s really great. And so is Bava.  I can just watch his films over and over.  But next time I’ll start one a little earlier than 11:59.

I’m so behind. Behind! Not in movie viewing.  Viewing I’ve managed.  But the writing… In my defense, I’ve had some major behind-the-scenes blog problems.  Was just trying to clean some stuff up, and, poof!  I deleted some important things.  Databases.  They are important.

I’ve had some sublime days and a little trash since Saturday night, and I’m feeling good.  Plus, I made a cake!  I’ll get caught up tomorrow, promise.  For now, let’s just talk about Sunday.

To make up for the rubbishy start to the month, I settled in with a classic:

Sunday, October 4

Horror of Dracula (1958): This is just such a good film.  I’ve talked about it before, in glowing terms, so there’s not much more to say.  Instead, I thought I’d go with a multi-media presentation.

Van Helsing & the Count fight it out. I actually squealed watching this.

And here’s  young Svengoolie (when he was still Son Of…) introducing it as his movie of the week.  What I wouldn’t give to jump in a time machine and fly back to 1983 to to see this episode again.  (And then I’d hurry right back.)

Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are like the chocolate and peanut butter in my Halloween goodie bag.  So delicious.