Creature Double Feature Night 6: SEVEN DEATHS IN THE CAT'S EYE (1973), THE GHOUL (1933)

 Tonight, a double feature of prime Prime old dark house thrillers, each set rollicking over gloomy Gothic estates with their own secret chambers to the burial grounds, tombs with cats, gems and vows of vengeance beyond the grave, an assortment of shifty-eyed suspects and a couple of 'kissin' cousins' who haven't seen each other since they were kids, teaming up "shoulder-to-shoulder" in a kind of young hip 'divine right of hotness after a key death in the family ramps up the antics of a relentless killer. The denouement of both is even similar, with surprise villainy where you used to least expect it. Prizing heavy Gothic atmosphere over whodunnit base tagging, these films make a perfect October night in. Working can wait, as the old hillbilly in that WB cartoon once sang, this is para-diise... for some of us. I'm rating and reviewing these according to my eccentric patriarchal whims, as stated in my will...

SEVEN DEATHS IN THE CAT'S EYE

La morte negli occhi del gatto

1973 - Dir. Antonio Margheriti 

***1/2 / Amazon Image - C

Often creatively ranslated or interpreted (the English credit is "Seven Deaths in the Cats Eyes" and on imdb it's "Seven Dead in a Cat's Eye"), La morte negli occhi del gatto is worth seeing under any guise or language track, provided the colors are as lovingly soaked in dusky golden, maroon and black, as here. And with her huge eyes and endearingly crooked smile, Jane Birkin makes a fabulous Edgar Wallace-style heroine; her suitor/cousin, Hiram Keller (Satyricon) is the pretty but blank Hamlin-esque 'madman' Lord James MacGrieff, kept a virtual prisoner up in his fabulous top of the castle salon with his paints and pet gorilla (you know it's an old dark house movie when there's a gorilla, provided it's played by a guy in a gorilla suit- and this is one of the worst I've ever seen. I'm in a peculiar kind of heaven). This international-Italian/French co-production finds Lady Corringa (Birkin) hiding the fact she's been expelled from the nun-run girl's boarding school she's been attending and dropping in unannounced on her mother and her aunt, who lives in the ornate castle and won't sell it even though she'll get no more money to run it. Soon mom is dead and our unlucky ingenue is possibly going mad in a mansion full of eccentrics all vying for possession of the elaborate yet crumbling secret passage-ridden ancestral estate. She's a bit like Paulette Goddard in the 1939 CAT AND THE CANARY if the Bob Hope part was played by a brooding Byronic pretty boy chief suspect... and he had a pet gorilla; and she came to the reading of the will with her mom, but her mom was murdered and then appeared to her as a vampire ghost at night, with a Hamlet-like demand for vengeance.

The score's a bit on the dimestore Morrione cop show side, but that's hardly bad thing. The main benefit here is gorgeous photography lush enough that at times Birkin's luminous hair is so perfectly reflected in her candelabra's lamplight we can count the strands. This film bumps up three stars now that it's not a panned, scanned, washed-out mess. Margheriti clearly loves along with the writing of the godfather of the giallo, Edgar Wallace.



One of the stand-out elements here are the clothes, which 'nod' to an assumed setting of 1930's England, but just nod, keeping the high fashion edge rather than getting bogged down in stuffy details like bowler hats and woolen overcoats. For her mourning wear (above) Birkin is given a beautiful black fur collar and her nightgown's sexy without being tacky (Von Sternberg would have approved). The whole production, aside from lingering close-ups of rats eating the face of victim #1, is very tasteful. The music is the orchestral suspense-generating variety rather than the moody giallo electric guitars of the time, but that's not worth a demerit. Indeed, the only demerit is maybe dubbing Serge Gainsbourg (he's the detective) with a fake Scotch burr.

SPECIAL NOTE: My experience with Prime, and finding a good stream, is that there are often numerous options --the one in the upper left of the screenshot at right has a picture of the DVD cover art, so seems to be the most reliable, but it has an issue in the last half where the image jerks around like every third frame is missing. Too bad, as the image is divine. The middle version (left) with a green frame isn't 'Prime' so who cares?

Then there's another version, also "Prime", with no cover thumbnail art at all (circled) but there's no jerking; however the image is somewhat softer, though not to a dealbreaker extent. The beauty still comes through. This is of course subject to change. However, it's good enough that if you love the film you may be prompted to buy the Blue Underground DVD and you'll be glad ya did. 

THE GHOUL

(1933) Dir. T. Hayes Hunter

*** / Amazon Image - B (various versions exist on Prime)

To be a classic horror fan is to love any movie that features both Boris Karloff and Ernest Thesiger (they co-starred in two James Whale classics: Old Dark House and Bride of Frankenstein), so we love The Ghouls. Here they're back home in England, at lovely old Gaumont, but with Universal's horror film tropes at the forefront of their producer's minds, and we love their minds for loving those tropes as we do, even if they don't quite have a full-on horror knack, and this bends more towards Gothic chiller, the type with wry wit and--thankfully--no scenes of local color shootin' the shit down the pub, a British staple. Here we get lots of swirling fog and no daytime scenes whatsoever, which I love. Karloff is a dying Egyptologist living on a big dark estate with its own Egyptian tomb. Most of his remaining fortune has been spent on a huge mystical emerald which he thinks will bring him back from the dead once he rises in the shadow of giant statue of Isis (ala The Mummy). His big worry, some quick-thinking pallbearer will steal it before he gets walled-in. After he dies, and his eerie Egyptian-style funerary procession to the strains of Wagner's immortal "Siegfried's Funeral March" is concluded, the real show begins with the jewel and A+ MacGuffin. The first person to break in finds the gem already missing, thanks to nervous but well-meaning butler (Thesiger) but there's also Ralph Richardson as an overly-friendly parson; Cedrick Hardwicke as a grumpy Dickensian lawyer; the great Harold Huth is Aga Ben Dragore, the art dealer who sold Karloff the jewel, and the shifty agents he stole it from. Dorothy Hyson and Anthony Bushell are the young, attractive, egal inheritors of the estate and therefore the jewel (depending on who you ask). Cousins who bicker over old grievances, they stand "shoulder to shoulder" once the spooky goings on commence. Kathleen Harrison provides the comic relief as Hyson's pal who comes along for moral support and ends up swooning over Dragore's tales of whipping slave girls for miles across the dunes. It all takes place over a single, wild night in almost real time (my favorite kind of movie). Naturally Karloff come back from the dead and skulks about the mansion search of his expensive emerald, scaring, killing, and even the bit where he carves an ankh symbol on his chest has been restored!

Long just a streaky duped public domain blur, available only on second-hand dupes, The Ghoul has since been spiffed up and now is a personal favorite that's just oozing with delicious spooky Universal-does-Edgar Wallace atmosphere (with dabs of The Mummy).  Pure 30s horror / old dark house mood it is, with enough fog to carry it through to the giddy end (no tired moments or tedious exterior daytime shots). And if you lose track of who has the jewel, or where it's hid, or where everyone else is relative to everyone else on the grounds, don't worry, just vibe on the old dark house glory of it all, and watch it again later. It gets better, and easier to understand, with every viewing... now that you can see what's going on, kind of, in the fog.

Amazon also has a 1970s Ghoul with Peter Cushing, no relation to the 1933 version, and with terrible dupe streaks and bad framing. There are several uploads of the 1933 version on Prime too, so pick a good one. The green and white cover with Karloff's face is the one I'm covering here. It's a slow burn joy, so is Seven Deaths. 

Optional Third Choice (for the die-hards)

THE RAVEN

1963 - dir. Roger Corman
 **** / Amazon Image - A

A personal October perennial, this loose comedic 'adaptation' of Poe's poem has reluctant sorceress Vincent Price longing for his Lenore on a dark and stormy night, reading forgotten lore until Peter Lorre (bloated but hilarious) as the raven interrupts his moody brooding with a request for wizarding aid. A drunken sorcerer of lesser skill, Lorre tells Price he was turned into a raven by Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff)--whose castle is right down the coast (Big Sur, naturally). It just so happens Scarabus killed Price's master sorcerer father in a duel years earlier. Price lost Lenore (Hazel Court) to him as well (a bit like Karloff stole Lugosi's wife in the 1934 Black Cat --another Poe "adaptation") but doesn't know she's still alive. Soon they're all packed away in a carriage, along with a young Jack Nicholson as Lorre's son Rexford and Olive Sturgess as Price's cute daughter.The Les Baxter score at times errs on the side of the Mickey Mouse-ish but this is pure uncut Halloween delight, so you might as well bring the kids, by which I mean depressed lovelorn sophomores reeling from too much bad acid, as I was, catching this at the Student Union while a sophomore, and needing desperately at the time to return to the Gothic chambers and forgotten lore of childhood, wherein every fairy tale was grim. 

In the land of the damned Price is as the soothing balm of Ativan to the alcoholically twisted. 

Creature Double Feature Night 5: DOLLS, THE MONSTER SQUAD, + Trilogy of Terror's "Amelia"

Here's a two 1/3 films for the whole family, rich with scary dolls and vampire brides, waiting right there on Prime, in glorious HD. And by family, I don't mean in a sticky, irritating way where the kids who star in the film are saints with little string leitmotifs accompanying their dewey-eyed close-ups or passively suffering Stephen King-style bullies and shady government agents. Hell no. These two films have kids in them, but they're cool kids. They don't grate a childless old curmudgeon's last nerve the way some do. What happened to kids in movies, man? They used to be cool, like Tatum O'Neal and Jackie Earle Hayley cool. Well, we have to films with their like within them. These have cool settings, deep blacks, and interesting approaches to the good vs. evil dichotomy. Shall we go then, you and I?

11. DOLLS

(1987) Dir Stuart Gordon

***1/2 / Amazon Image - A+

A disparate bunch of dislikable travelers, along with two 'good' ones, seek shelter at a remote mansion full of dolls when their cars run into a sudden storm and mysterious engine trouble. Little do they suspect, the eerily tolerant elderly couple (Guy Rolfe and Hilary Mason) who live there are... well... I can't say more. Creepy and colorful, beautifully photographed, and with just the right note of macabre glee, all ages are welcome to DOLLS if they don't mind a little or a lot of blood. Of the six travelers, only an sweet-dispositioned endomorph (named Ralph, what else?) who never lost his inner child, and the very imaginative daughter (Carrie Lorraine) of a particularly hammy pair of life-size dipshits (Carolyn Purdy-Gordon [the 'mean' rival shrink trying to give everyone electroshock treatments in From Beyond] and Ian Patrick Williams) may be spared. Everyone else is asking to die--or be shrunk and locked inside a ceramic doll-shaped encasement. Even the jangly-jeweled over-acting Madonna-ish Aussie new wave punk hitchhikers (Cassie Stuart and Buntley Bailey) are asking for it by, amongst other things, trying to rob the place after the humans go to bed. See, late at night the dolls come to life and are rather insistent on everyone else doing the opposite. The pissed off parents accuse Ralph of the murders since he's running around covered in blood and his habit of running around with the daughter, screaming.

The all-in-a-single-night pace and a refreshingly non-carousel-sourced score by the impossibly named Fuzbee Norse help this one sing briskly and without insufferable whimsy. Producer Charles Band's main man Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator) directed, so it's invested with considerably more style and care than usual for a New Moon/Empire production. The HD Prime print is sublime, better than great, allowing Marc Ahlberg's cinematographic craftsmanship to fill in every ornate room and hallway with deep black dark corners, and nooks brimming with malevolent lifeless doll eyes, all lit seemingly only by the fireplace, candles, or the incessant cracks of lightning from outside. (That's the Charles Band secret, shooting in cash-strapped European countries with affordable genius lighting craftsman) Pretty darn perfect for an October drinking sesh, bro. Just be respectful of the noise levels, or we newly sewn-together old folks are gonna get ya. ++

12. MONSTER SQUAD

(1987) Dir. Fred Dekker 

***1/2 / Amazon Image - A+

It was easy for me to steer away from a child-encrusted title like The Monster Squad for years, expecting a kind of super-tacky faux-Spielbergian/faux-hip family stickiness with monsters and kids teaming up to fight illiteracy or something, a kind of ET-meets-Ghostbusters with, presumably, a fat kid who never stops eating his feeling and getting chocolate on everything he touches. Boy was I wrong. I should have looked at the screenwriting credit, seen Shane Black's name, and known these kids were going to be cool (as per his great kid characters in Iron Man 3 and The Nice Guys). Black and Dekker (!) were UCLA English majors together and this was their big collaboration - it died on arrival but found a second life on cable and is now highly regarded, so finally I had to see it. Wow! Now, here's a film ahead of its time as far as depicting the kind of reasonably cool kids where the local cops (the main kid's dad is a bewildered homicide detective) don't mind the boys taking their guns during big stand-offs with armies of monsters. These kids are like my buddies and I were back in the day, i.e. well-armed and well-versed in self-defense, the types who don't flinch from a fight with the local bullies, or monsters, and have perhaps the coolest tree house in all tree houses; the type who draw monsters in science class instead of taking notes. It's such a breath of fresh air if you grew up psychically harassed a priori by all the bullies in Stephen King movies (and that includes IT), you'll be like 'at last, here's a film for the kids who actually fight back right out the gate' and not have to endure proxy humiliations and wait for the later moment of vengeance. And lo, there's the ultimate in cool Stan Shaw (TNT Jackson) as dad's partner. Dekker also gave us Night of the Creeps and House, two other pastiche films done with real love and care, for a certain type of viewer. The Amazon HD print is sparkling, with great dusky golden colors (as per the tree house above) and the monsters are genuinely kind of scary, able to provide chills as well as laughs and never resorting to self-aware camp. Any movie where Dracula fights those humans out to kill him by dynamiting their houses and cop cars definitely has something on the beam.  The big extended Main Street climax, an all out war between armed kids, cops and monsters, guns blazing, death toll mounting, is just about the neatest thing this side of the Stay-Puff marshmallow man. Best of all, Dekker doesn't forget the three sexy vampire brides (top), though they die a bit too easily.



Though one caveat, why are these genius kids totally unwilling to use crosses when fighting Dracula? It never seems to occur to them! The end rap theme is terrible and might make you belatedly realize this film was trying a little too obviously for a Ghostbusters-style hit and maybe franchise, but don't let that stop you from giving it the chance it never got on the big screen! There's even a cool little sister (don't ask me to list any of their names). Even if, like me, the idea of a bunch of kids fighting the Universal pantheon seems tacky to you, believe me, it's done right. Those idiots who ruined the Mummy reboot should have given it a close gander. Even the tagalong little sister is cool, even her tearful goodbye to Frankie is done nicely, with nary a shred of Spielberg maudlin tack. If you're like me, still traumatized by the death of little Maria in the 1931 original, seeing her holding that hunted and despised monster's hand and leading him not into flower-throwing temptation proves a truly healing moment.

 TRILOGY OF TERROR: 

part 3:"Amelia"(start at 45:42)

(1975) Dir. Dan Curtis

***1/2 / Amazon Image - B+

Karen Black got a chance to show off her versatility in this Robert Bloch-penned horror triptych TV movie, and, wigged out those of my generation who got to stay up late and see the last story, forever known as 'the one with the crazy fetish doll'. And since we're all digital now it's super easy to skip the first two, not that there's anything wrong with them. They're okay. But nothing like "Amelia," the tale that starts at the 45:42 minute mark. So since we've already seen Dolls and The Monster Squad, consider this one a final chaser, not really aimed at kids but we who were kids in 1975 regard it as one of the key touchstones of our TV horror youth, the sort of tale told in dark closets with flashlights illuminating our faces, or at night around campfires.

The story has Karen Black as a woman under the thumb of a domineering mom (we hear her dealing with, and submitting to, mom's unreasonable manipulations via a phone call), who we never see leave her high-rise apartment after walking in with the package containing a large "Zuni" fetish doll she receives as a gift. The note with the doll proclaims it promotes fertility etc. and is supposedly a god trapped in the doll by a chain around its waist. If the chain falls off, the doll... well.... it comes to life, and it chases her around the room, even into her bath. Yes I know that sounds crazy and m-m-maybe it is but you have to believe me when I say everyone I know who saw it during its initial broadcast never forgot it. My strict bedtime meant I missed it and could only hear of it from kids with cooler dads. It sounded kind of silly to me that a crazy doll with a spear could inspire such a reaction. The doll is great but all the kudos go to Karen Black. She brings so much life to the story she could freak you out using just a sock puppet and some string if she half-tried. Either way, you may never take a bath in a room with a Zuni fetish doll again! Fairly warned be ye. 

If you're really into Black, you can start Trilogy over after it's done and see the first two stories, also written by Robert Bloch, but not half has freaky. Or you could just go to bed! Good luck!

Creature Double Feature Night 4: BAFFLED! (1972); CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD (1980)

Tonight, here's an oddball pairing of films (currently on Prime) about oddball couples investigating strange happenings together based on an eerie and unexpected premonition that strikes one of them out of the blue. In each film, one is a layman with the vision, the other is an investigator with a yen for a big story, eager to visit the place they saw in the vision. To balance things out, in one film its a NYC woman (Catriona MacColl) who has the premonition and the man is a cigar-chomping newspaper reporter (Christopher Plummer) sensing a scoop and maybe some chemistry (he rescues her from a coffin --and nearly splitting her head open with a pickaxe doing so, after she 'dies' in the midst of a seance) and the town is in New England. In the other, the seer is a race car driver (Leonard Nimoy!) who almost dies in a racing accident while having the vision, and the investigator is a spunky lady Brit rare occult book detective (Susan Hampshire) and the town is nestled in the remote English countryside. One is a gory nightmare of zombies and creepy violence; the other an early 70s TV movie/pilot. Can you ask for a more/less at the same time? A veritable yin/yang they are.

1. BAFFLED!
(1972) Dir. Phillip Leacock

*** / Amazon Image - B-

The weird surprise of this one-off bloodless supernatural comedy-thriller pilot is the odd duck chemistry between Leonard Nimoy and Susan Hampshire as a pair of pre-Minority Report solvers of crimes yet to happen. Nimoy plays a race car driver suddenly stricken with the ability to see future events, in this case it's a murder at some weird English mansion. Nimoy can't shake his alien aura long enough to convince as a regular Formula 500 joe, but he seems to be having a wry blast of a time running around the countryside with Hampshire and his Satanic alien head seems natural for a hip soothsayer. For her part, Susan Hampshire radiates a kind of can-do British cheek as occult bookseller Michelle. She sees him on TV after his big race, talking about a flash to a murder yet-to-happen and she's determined to help him find the mansion and prevent the crime. Rachel Roberts (Picnic at Hanging Rock's uptight headmistress) is in charge of the place (open to guests in summer); Vera Miles as the rich middle aged actress Kovak sees falling out of an attic window. She's with her daughter (Jewel Blanche) while her estranged ex-husband (Mike Murray -She-Devils in Chains), sporting the most cruelly Satanic haircut of the entire decade--hides in the greenhouse where he lures his daughter to dark side with the help of a mystic wolf amulet. See? BAFFLED! is Cool! 

Lots of turtlenecks and medallions and occult signifiers; fancy British cars tool around the grounds to make sure the car fanatic aspect of Kovac's character fits in (with some unconvincing but just dandy rear projection during the chase scenes). There are way too many daylight exteriors and extraneous herrings about but I like the weird non-sexual friendship chemistry of Nimoy and Hampshire's characters. They're into each other but not enough for it to get in the way with their strange bond, which means they're smart enough to leave it as a will they-or-won't they. Between her trenchant knowledge of arcane texts and his weird flash forwards to strange murders somehow tied in with an an occult group of weirdoes known as the House of the Wolf, they're kept too busy, aside from being stuck in an elevator shaft during most of the hair-raising climax, too get gooey (but Kovak's already seen the previews).  The cast of British BBC stock are all in their best chipper form. Hampshire is especially a delight: animated, assertive, fearless, funny and forthright, bouncing around in her 70s peasant frocks and groovy turtlenecks. A bewildered Nimoy can't help but laugh in admiration.

Richard Hill's score is over the top cop show pumping, never quite on the nose as far as being bouncy when it should be scary or scary when it should be bouncy, but that adds an almost mocking tenor that's most invigorating. The Prime image is pretty solid, albeit in that usual drab TV movie frame, luckily the colors are strong, as you can tell from the red of Michelle's turtleneck, above. There's a great final line after their awkward near-kiss goodbye: "Michelle… we’re leaving for Paris. Someone’s in trouble… I don’t know who, yet…”

---

CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD

(1980) Dir. Lucio Fulci

***1/2 / Amazon Image - A

Despite its excessive gore, sub-basement Freudian dialogue (everyone's hung up about porno flicks, incest, prostitutes, and witch burning), and endless parade gross-outs (including open mouths full of food, rotting carcasses covered with neon pink worms, muddy offal rubbed in faces, intestine-vomiting and maggot storms), City of the Living Dead is a strangely beautiful film. Thanks especially to a great HD transfer capturing every silken web glisten against the stygian blackness of Sergio Salvati's gorgeous cinematography. Its script makes no logical or linear sense but on a purely dream level, it's like an HP Lovecraft book read by lamplight in the dead of night in a quiet old country house. The ground is ever laden with billowing fog. The hair of the ladies is wondrously loose, auburn and backlit so it glows with an unerring luster. The hair is still 70s perfect. No 80s perms here, except on Gerry (Carlo De Mejo) the unprofessional shrink, and the NYC psychic lady who foretells the dead rising from their graves and only  the woman who had the vision and the journalist who nearly impaled her skull while rescuing her from being buried alive can drive out to New England to stop it. 

It's not perfect, the way say, Fulci's The Beyond or House by the Cemetery is. Some of the gross outs are a bit overdone, such as when sultry Daniela Doria literally hurls her literal guts out and cries blood after seeing a vision of a hung priest while trying to make out with Michele Soavi in a car. Those who consider 'nightmare logic' merely an excuse for narrative inconsistency and lazy writing won't like that the zombies can sometimes appear and disappear at will, or that someone might die early in the evening and then have an autopsy done before arriving in undertaker makeup (replete with tissue stuffed up her nose) later that same night lying dead on Janet Agren's kitchen floor; or that people tend not to defend themselves well when attacked, or run fast, or get out of the way, but anyone can make another "shoot 'em in the head" flick. Nightmare logic is way beyond that. If it does its job well--like it does here--we resonate with the paralyzing sense of total shock. If anything here it's the occasional feints towards daytime familiarity that seem out of place: the handful of cop cars, coroners leaving funeral homes, emergency news announcements on the bar radio, and wrongly accused suspects violently murdered by superstitious locals, etc. indicate Fulci hasn't yet totally severed the connection to his earlier giallos like Don't Torture a Duckling, but he sure soon would.

On the fourth or fifth viewing, the nonsense makes more sense even when marveling on the weird web of sexy relationships and inappropriateness going on in the lives of Dunwich's doomed residents. We find time to dial in and wonder whether Gerry is dating the much younger Emily (Antonella Interlenghi) and if she was once a patient (how unprofessional!) and if so, why she feels she has the right to casually barge in on his session with sultry Janet Agren (who self-deprecatingly dismisses her own dreams as just 'daddy issues") because she has to (for some unknown reason) break her date to go check on 'Bob,' (Giovanni Lombardo Radice) a deranged probably probably pedophile who lives in a hovel on the outskirts of town with his inflatable girlfriend. It makes no sense why Emily thinks she must barge in on a session of psychoanalysis just to break up a date in order to drop in unannounced at the derelict squat of a confirmed pedophile in the dead of night, just to pose seductively (and uninvitedly) on his rotted mattress. You could say it's all just haphazard the way 'story' is in a XXX movie (with scenes an excuse for linking gory tableaux) but that's like saying who cares what dreams mean since their sole intention is to keep you from realizing you're asleep, 

Nothing we imagine or expect ever does happen. Even the title is misleading: we leave NYC early on (very much alive) and spend the rest of the movie in the small town of Dunwich (hardly a city), so the images of grungy urban squalor full of dead commuters conjured by the title never materialize. But succumbing to its pleasures is like sliding upright down a slimy marble stairs in the dark with no handrail. You could step very carefully downward and get there safely but you'll have to wake up in a few minutes either way so why not go as deep as you can. What's important isn't that you don't break your skull open, it's that you feel that queasy vertigo twinge on the way down where you feel it almost happen, as Fabio Frizzi's mellotron-sampled male chorale-led synth anthem pronounces you triumphant over death itself. 

Third Feature Option:

18. THE ETERNAL

(1998) Dir. Michael Almereyda

*** 1/2 / Amazon Image - A-

A kind of Lower East Side downtown hipster coffee and cigarettes experimental and cool, The Eternal is a boozy metatextual dissertation on memory, alcoholism, and the bonds of the moment transcending the bite of history and vice versa, it's also a loose, sexy update of a kind of combination of Hammer's 1972 Blood from the Mummy's Tomb (and its Stoker source novel) and the 1951 The Thing. The story has boozy rich couple Alison Elliot and Jared Harris leaving NYC for her ancestral Irish moor's estate, as if called home by some archaic homing signal (shades of 1934'a Black Moon, though I can't imagine Almereyda has seen it). As far as the previous two films, it's got that American out of water vibe as an ancestral estate is visited, strange visions, sudden corpses, and a sense of nonchalant cool highly unusual for the horror genre.

Christopher Walken has a couple of great scenes as a boozy call aesthete puttering around the mansion in his red robe, drinking Irish whiskey and, amongst other things, showing Alison the mummified corpse of a long dead druid priestess relative, found nestled in amidst old basement trunks. Amongst other curious things, the more Elliot starts to feel woozy and black out, the more alive and beautiful the mummy gets, until it looks almost identical to her, though gifted with immortal strength, a disregard for the life and death of those around her, and telekinesis. What's her deal? "It was the Iron Age," notes Walken. "You had to do a lot of nasty things, just to get by." Amen.
(see full article)

Creature Double Feature Night 3: THE NIGHTMARE, INFERNO

Here's a weird, unusual and very creepy double feature that explores dream logic and the very real terrors of sleep paralysis. Some people have it so bad they're as afraid to go to sleep as the kids on Elm Street. I remember a nightmarish man about 10 feet tall as a kid, just once, and it scared me for weeks, I would hold my eyelids open terrified to go to sleep. Now I know our old Lansdale PA house was haunted. All the signs are there. Here's the proof, a documentary by the maker of Room 237 and a perhaps justifiably under-praised Suspiria sequel from Dario Argento that takes the same colors and creepy nightmare logic and opens it up inside a vast strange apartment building in NYC. Both are on Prime; on their own they're just weird. Take them together and it's like banesteria caapi and an Mimosa hostilis... take 'em together and you get alchemical transubstantiation, and maybe some life-altering shadow person terrors.

4. THE NIGHTMARE

(2015) Dir. Rodney Ascher 

*** 1/2/ Amazon Image - A

The director of the strangely super creepy Shining theorist documentary Room 237 tackles another weird subject: sleep paralysis by, once again, interviewing a series of slightly un-normal people in depth about what can either be termed their deep transpersonal insight or near-psychosis, in this case with creepy re-enactments of their sleep paralysis experiences. Each recounted dream/waking nightmare is vividly is recreated for an approach that transcends mere 'documentary' to become something truly new, twisted, and deeply illuminating. Creepy highlights include the human figures composed of TV static and the awake encounter during a hike between a man's weird hippie girlfriend and blue light being. Somehow the girl herself is almost as surreal and otherworldly as the blue glowing spirit. In another uncanny moment we see the bedrooms of the sleepers all connected by a common interdimensional soundstage where the beings move between rooms, conjuring Monsters Inc. and Dr. Who's "The Girl in the Fireplace" episode, and too many other things not to cause a jolt or realization. Have we seen this room before ourselves.... in dreams? Jonathan Snipes, who crafted the moody analog synth score for Room 237 (a propulsive, chilling soundtrack I still listen to) does the eerie score of slow traveling synth drones and creepily accelerating 'asleep on the highway' rhythms, with his creepy percolating klave during the scary recollection of "The Hat Man" being a special highlight of uncanny disquiet.

In short, though technically a documentary, Asher's film makes a fine addition to any streaming horror marathon or, in this case, dream logic double feature.

(For more on sleep paralysis on Acidemic's sister site Divinorum Psychonauticus, see: Demon Sheets: Sleep Paralysis Theories)

See also Ascher's Shudder documentary short Primal Screen covering one man's recollection of being terrified as a kid watching a commercial for that Anthony Hopkins as a tortured ventriloquist movie Magic. Rodney, if that's going to be a series, I'm happy to share my own reminiscence of a similar 'TV commercial' alchemical horror paralysis via a long ad for what was then called: Silent Night / Deadly Night.

3. INFERNO

(1980) Dir Dario Argento

**1/2 / Amazon Image - A

The follow-up to Suspiria maybe had expectations too high, OR it was just a case of the music not being as wild and eerie as Goblin's certifiably insane score in the original, which proved a key factor in making the wild visuals and sudden jarring horrific violence all the more raw and unsettlingly poetic. Between that film and Carpenter's score for Halloween the following year there was no doubt that a musical score could make or break a horror movie, usher it into the cannon or escort it out. But Goblin "couldn't do it" they say. What, they were busy? How hard can it be to rattle some sheet metal and howl? Ennio Morricone, who had done Argento's first three films, could have knocked a killer score out in an afternoon and it would leagues better than old Keith Emerson's clunky 'Thelonious Monk -cum-Englebert Humperdink grand piano, and super high operatic prog rock Verdi (Meco's disco version of Star Wars and Walter Murphy's A Fifth of Beethoven were chart toppers at the time) and latin dirge chant funk. Running riot over the visuals, these missed-mile atrocities have the opposite effect of what Goblin provided. His yen for metal and prog rock would lead, alas, to many such 'suddenly we're watching MTV Europe' moments in his later films. Truly, pumping its soundtrack full of prog rock and hair metal tracks is a sure way to make your film truly dated in years to come.

 

Still, there are all sorts of termite details reflecting arcane tarot meaning (all four elements - it starts with water, ends with fire), lots bibliophilia ("our lives are governed by the words of dead people" intones the Sataninc looking archaic bookstore owner) and pretty lighting (especially on Prime's solid HD transfer, which looks better than my Blu-ray). So hey, it's just like any dream in that the parts are more than the sum, and that's why it's a perfect movie for Halloween or when you're expecting to be distracted throughout. It may be disjointed, and some scenes may drag (as in the nighttime rat attack in Central Park) but other parts are wild - including a strong opening with an underwater flooded ballroom in a cellar; a surreal visit to an old Roman library and its deep dark basement spine re-binding room, and various extended scenes of hanging around scared in red/blue apartment rooms listening through vents in the walls, exploring strange corners of the bizarre apartment building where rain gets in in the roof and basement, and no one seems to be around, aside from killers and victims. Apparently there were all sorts of problems with the production end, leading to many things not getting shot, or bad second guessing, etc, but what we have is still worth seeing- and rewards multiple viewings --if it's not exactly better each time, it's certainly no worse. (see also: Deep Red, Phenomena, Opera and Trauma - also on Prime)

For an optional third feature, consider: 

MANHATTAN BABY

(1982) Dir. Lucio Fulci

***/ Amazon Image - B

Fans of Fulci often disparage Baby for the same reasons I dig it: the discordant dream logic. If you let go of 'sense' and admire the framing, the mood, and the raucously ironic Fabio Frizzi synths, and the strange way music and sound effects merge into such a way we can't quite tell which, the way it plays on the rhythm of other movies as if a jazz counterpoint (in this case, the other movies would be both the original Exorcist and the sequel) as well as the narrative tricks of our own nightmares, well, maybe that's enough. Franco and Rollin make films that flow like idylls dipped in the brush of nightmare, but Fulci does the reverse, he's the quicksand that lets you appreciate the beauty of the flowers even as a shambling corpse filled with maggots pulls your eyes out of their sockets. That's why firm supporters of his House by the Cemetery (see 'Nightmare Logic') should seek out Manhattan Baby, for the cast is largely the same and--hey--it's even less coherent, by which I mean good.

The plot involves a mysterious amulet given by a mysterious old lady somewhere in the Valley of the Kings, to a little girl who's visiting Egypt with her parents. Dad (Christopher Connelly) is an Egyptologist investigating a strange tomb; mom writes or photographs for Time or Life (at least there are exteriors shot at the building). At night, back in NYC, the jewel opens up a stargate between some lost Pharaoh tomb and the little girl and her brother's bedroom in (this leads to lots of sand on their bedroom). The dad meanwhile was temporarily blinded back in Egypt by the gem's twin embedded in a wall in a secret part of a tomb. It shoots him with blue lasers when he looked at it too long in a mysterious cave/tomb wall carving. As his eyesight slowly returns, a psychic tosses the family a note from a window that lets them know they're not out of the woods: the amulet is a gateway to evil that gets off on possessing children and trapping their souls within its sinister facets. Anyone who gets in its way, including a taxidermist, a louche family friend, and the psychic herself--all wind up either attacked by stuffed birds, real cats, or dropped through an interdimensional doorway that dumps them in Egypt and leaves lots of sand on the carpet after it closes again.

The parents' initial skepticism soon gives way to concern and once the amulet is found - well, it becomes harder and harder to tell what's real, what's a dream (the kids call their ancient Egypt astral traveling 'voyaging') and what's supposed to be happening in real time; if there's a difference between being actually in modern Egypt, floating around ancient Egypt, visiting either one inside the jewel, or a collective dream, don't expect to find it out - just savor the eerie sense of meta timelessness Fulci culls from his mix of location shooting, strange interiors and his groovy style. If you can do that, and if it doesn't bother you that when the wife sees the sand on the floor of the bedroom we can't tell if she's in Egypt looking down from a mountain or New York looking down at the carpet, then this is your movie. And if you like catching odd little details, like when the dad catches a scorpion to give to his daughter as a souvenir (says his guide: "be sure to tell her it's a symbol of death!") then this is your movie, too. As long as you're open to surreal 'you are there/not there' duality, and as long as you stop trying to understand and just think, hey - the taxidermist psychic is named Adrian Mercata, a reference to Rosemary's Baby's Adrian Marcata), then suddenly the weird title makes sense at last. And you find, strangely enough, you love Manhattan Baby.

And the next time you're stricken by sleep paralysis, don't fight it, just say 'please, give me Goblin or Fabio Frizzi and not Keith Emerson for the soundtrack! And keep an eye out for the bewitching anima figure played by Ania Pieroni in Inferno. Sure she's terrifying, but she's you.