Aeronautic Primates and Other Delights

My Week in Movies: October 4 - 10

Mon, 12 Oct 2020 00:03:39 GMT

Lots of movies this week, as sol_se and I were able to pull ahead of our 31 horror movies in October goal.

Movies I've seen before are in italics.

The Wicker Man (1973)
Let's Scare Jessica to Death (1971)
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)
Brides of Dracula (1960)
Horror of Dracula (1958)
Grizzly (1976)
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)
Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970)
Scars of Dracula (1970)
Dracula AD 1972 (1972)
Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973)

I love The Wicker Man (I vidded it after all) and it was a joy to show it to sol_se for the first time.

Let's Scare Jessica to Death is... not what I expected. I think I expected teenagers from the title, not vaguely hippie adults. The movie is about the effect of supernatural happenings on the mind of someone who recently experienced a breakdown. It's very weird and I'm not sure how much I liked it.

I've been running around singing "Twenty days to Halloween, Halloween, Halloween, Twenty days to Halloween, Silver Shamrock!" I eventually had to let sol_se in on the reference. As a movie, it's Fine. It's really not game changing enough to justify the temporary shift in the Halloween series.

We started on Dracula: Prince of Darkness because it's my favorite in the Hammer Dracula series, but then we just fell down the rabbit hole. The films generally decline in quality after Prince of Darkness. You can also sum up Dracula's motivations thusly:

Horror: Lust
Prince: Lust
Risen: Revenge
Taste: Revenge
Scars: Sadism
1972: Revenge
Rites: Megalomania?

I buy lust, but revenge became a really tired touchstone to come back to over and over again. Also, Dracula should never be driven by base sadism, what the hell is that crap?

Grizzly is Jaws with a bear, but it doesn't hew as closely to Jaws as my memory of it indicated. Still, it's a fun little animals attack movie with some funky bear effects.

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My Week in Movies: April 26 - May 2

Sun, 03 May 2020 20:32:05 GMT

This is more like it! Lots of films watched this week. I also finished God of War PS4 (except for the side quests, which I don't think I'll go back for).

The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)
The Ex-Mrs. Bradford (1936)
My Dinner with Andre (1981)
Shaft (1971)
Un flic (1972)
The House That Dripped Blood (1971) w/sol_se

The Devil and Miss Jones, not to be confused with a similarly-titled film from the 1970s, is basically an extended comic episode of Undercover Boss, if the boss went undercover to bust unions. However, he soon learns the value of his employees and it's all very heartwarming. I had my usual issues watching a film where deception is the primary thrust of the storyline.

RKO made an attempt to make their own The Thin Man with The Ex-Mrs. Bradford, bringing in William Powell and matching him with Jean Arthur as his goofy ex-wife. Powell character is drawn into a murder mystery to the delight of Arthur, who tries to help and mostly muddles. The leads don't have the same Nick and Nora chemistry, unfortunately, and the mystery itself is something of a cludgy mess.

I watched My Dinner with Andre to better appreciate the Community episode that homages it. It's a really great film. You'd think two guys talking in a restaurant would be anathema to my ADHD, but my mind only wandered once or twice and it didn't really matter. That's not the point. You get drawn in by these conversations that are full of vivid imagery and startling revelations, revelations that may or may not have actual substance. But what is substance? ...and you can go on from there.

Shaft is a lot of fun and really earns its place as one of the crown jewels of blaxploitation.

I had previously enjoyed other Jean-Pierre Melville crime films, so Un flic was a no-brainer. It's about two parallel stories -- a police commisar going through his daily toil and a thief planning an elaborate heist. The two stories are joined because both men are involved with Catherine Deneuve, who can be read as acting as a proxy for their mutual attraction.

sol_se and I are coming down to the last few of our remote Saturday night movie dates. Pretty soon they'll be unnecessary because she'll be here in LA. I'm very excited to watch movies any day of the week in person. As selections go for these last few dates, The House That Dripped Blood was actually a last-minute replacement for Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter, which slipped off of free Prime viewing unexpectedly. THTDB is an Amicus anthology, comprising four stories all roughly related to the eponymous house (which never drips blood). It features great lead performances from Denholm Elliott, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, and Jon Pertwee. It ended up being a lot of fun.

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Christopher Lee (1922 - 2015)

Thu, 11 Jun 2015 19:25:40 GMT

The last of the classic horror greats has left us. I don't have words, so I'll repost my Hammer Dracula vid from last year.

Password: vampires

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VID: Dracula Has Risen from the Dance Floor (Hammer Dracula)

Sun, 10 Aug 2014 04:34:40 GMT

Title: Dracula Has Risen from the Dance Floor
Song: Dragonette - Fixin to Thrill
Source: Hammer Dracula
Length: 4:00
Warnings: Metaphorical sexual violence. Violence. Blood.

Summary: If Drac is a DJ, death is a dance floor, blood is the rhythm, your screams are the music.

Vimeo password: vampires

Dragonetteula from Jetpack Monkey on Vimeo.

Download MP4

Notes: This vid uses at least one clip from every Hammer film that features either Christopher Lee's Dracula or Peter Cushing's Van Helsing. I've been meaning for years to do a companion piece to Don't Stop Me Now, my Hammer Frankenstein vid. One day in IRC, joyo raised the challenge: more vidders should be making vids to Dragonette songs. I popped into Rdio and the first song that came up started with this dark, minor key dirge that sounded similar to but distinct from James Bernard's score for 1958's Horror of Dracula. And thus, Fixin to Thrill became my vidsong.

My vidding process on this one was a bit different. I literally just pulled every clip I liked down onto the timeline. My hope was to create a visual melange based on the qualities of the footage divorced from the narrative context. My multi-source vids tend to collapse the narratives of multiple sources into one meta-narrative and I wanted to break away from that a bit. Unfortunately, my brain is just organized the way it's organized, and the end result is once again a meta-narrative. Sorry if you wanted something new from me, folks.

The one major issue I ran into while making this vid is that my fannish devotion to the source began decades before my personal social justice awakening. The dubcon/noncon subtext of the films turned me off a bit. Ultimately, I decided to turn into the skid and acknowledge the problematic nature (even if I was doing so in the midst of a vid that was supposed to be dancey fun).

I don't even remember everyone who looked at the vid ahead of time. I really must keep better notes. I know that thirdblindmouse took a gander, for which I am grateful.

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