Aeronautic Primates and Other Delights

Finished Assassin's Creed: Origins and hopped right back to Assassin's Creed: Odyssey. Bad story choices aside, I'd really missed Ancient Greece. I really think this is one of my favorite games in recent memory.

I've been slowly working through Season 4 of The Good Place during lunch on Sunday-Monday-Tuesday. Wednesday and Thursday are reserved for Batman '66 (my bat-time, if you will).

I played a very weird D&D one-shot with settiai DMing last night. Still not entirely sure what I made of it. Didn't cast a single spell or get into any combat at all (which is probably for the best, because my character was built for hugging).

Movies I've seen before are in italics.

Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)
Wait Until Dark (1967)
Slumber Party Massacre (1982)
Blood and Black Lace (1964)
Curse of Frankenstein (1957)
Revenge of Frankenstein (1958)
Evil of Frankenstein (1964)
Frankenstein Created Woman (1967)
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969)
Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)

We finished off the Hammer Dracula series with the one non-Lee entry, the horror/kung fu mashup Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires. As usual, it's Fine. It doesn't have the best parts of either genre, so it kind of muddles along. Of the eight "major" Asian characters, only two have actual lines, which is ridiculous for a movie made in Hong Kong with Hong Kong financing.

I was going through a box of old DVDs when I ran into Wait Until Dark and even though it's not strictly horror, we watched it anyway. Still a very effective little thriller and Audrey Hepburn is splendid as always. Alan Arkin does a real uncomfortable sociopath.

Slumber Party Massacre is a curio in that it's a slasher film written by a feminist icon (Rita Mae Brown) and also directed by a woman. It's not a particularly outstanding example of the genre, alas. The killer, for one thing, is a real non-entity, despite his hilariously phallic weapon of choice.

sol_se  wanted fashion in her horror, so asked about Blood and Black Lace, which we watched on Amazon Prime. It's a giallo, an Italian subgenre of mystery-horror that was, in many ways, the forerunner of the slasher film in America. As with all films directed by Mario Bava, it's very striking visually.

Given our deep dive into Dracula last week, I thought we should do the same for the Hammer Frankenstein series. Peter Cushing (or PCush as sol_se likes to call him) is one of the best actors of all time, fight me. Curse of Frankenstein remains my favorite in the series, but I gained a new appreciation for Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed, which fires on all cylinders (with the exception of one regrettable scene that sol_se and I agree Did Not Happen). We skipped Horror of Frankenstein because no Cushing (and also $4 on Amazon).

For those curious, we are currently 27 films deep in our plan to watch 31 spooky movies in October.

Sorry I missed last week. Work was crazy busy to start the week off and then by the time it calmed down, it felt too late. So we're covering two weeks today.

I've mostly been playing Assassin's Creed: Odyssey (although I've kind of quit due to some disappointing forced plot elements). sol_se and I have finished Star Trek Season 2, but are kind of on a break from the show accidentally. We're trying to watch a horror film per day in October, although I think it will be more like we will watch a horror film for each day in October. So, some days may have no movies, but there will be 31 total by the end of the month.

Movies I've seen before are in italics.

Lured (1947)
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953)

Enola Holmes (2020)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)
The Vampire Lovers (1970)
Black Sabbath (1963)
MST3K: Pod People
Re-Animator (1985)
Bride of Re-Animator (1990)
Beyond Re-Animator (2003)

So Lured is early Douglas Sirk, stars Lucille Ball and George Motherf**king Sanders, with highish billing for Boris Karloff. It was okay. The plot didn't make a lot of sense, it had that weird thing where people who barely know each other get engaged, and Boris Karloff isn't throughout the film, just in one little bit.

In a turnabout of the way things usually are, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a classic Hollywood film that sol_se had seen but that I had not. It's a lot of fun. Marilyn Monroe is a comic genius, frankly, and Jane Russell is extremely horny throughout the film.

Enola Holmes is pretty good. I did not care for the compulsory heterosexual agenda, but Millie Bobby Brown is an engaging lead. I've also come around to being pro-Henry Cavill, his take on Superman aside.

Not much to say about Star Trek III except that Uhura got sidelined and I do not stand for that.

Sol_se loves a good lesbian vampire film and The Vampire Lovers is definitely in that category. Ingrid Pitt makes for a very seductive vampire. Plus Peter Cushing can never be a bad thing.

We watched the first episode of Monsterland and found it somewhat disappointing. It's definitely good, but also very depressing. It's not the spooky stuff that the trailers intimated. To get to a properly spooky place again, we watched Black Sabbath, a trilogy of terrifying tales from Mario Bava. It definitely did the trick.

I finally showed sol_se Re-Animator after talking it up for some time. She loved it and we immediately set about watching both sequels, one of which I had not seen. The quality of the series generally declines, but all three films are enjoyable to one extent or another.

This week's horror movie theme was Hammer Horror!

Movies I'd seen previously are in italics.

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966)
Night Creatures (1962)
Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968)
Phantom of the Opera (1962)
Nightmare (1964)
Scream of Fear (1961)
Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires (1974)
Le Cercle Rouge (1970)
Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964)
A Vampire in Brooklyn (1995) w/sol_se 

I love love love Dracula: Prince of Darkness and it's always a comfort to watch.

Night Creatures is not really a horror film, more a smuggling adventure, with the smugglers set-up as the anti-heroes.

The 1962 Phantom of the Opera was a disappointment on so many levels. It's boring, for one thing. The supposed masterful opera is anything but. The Phantom himself is barely involved in what happens. The chandelier falling is an accident. Also the murders, committed not by the Phantom but by his undeveloped henchman, seem arbitrary and random. You didn't have to do Patrick Troughton dirty like that.

Nightmare and Scream of Fear are both of a particular vein of Hammer thriller -- "Let's drive the female protagonist mad in black and white." See also: Paranoiac. Of the two, Nightmare is probably the better one. It does the Psycho thing of presenting one protagonist and then switching tracks at a particularly brutal moment.

I remembered Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires being more fun and funky. Oh well.

Le Cercle Rouge, a break in our regular Hammer programming, was watched at the recommendation of saraht -- thanks for that! It's a very cool French heist film, with the heist itself taking something like 27 dialogue-free minutes.

Curse of the Mummy's Tomb is not good. First, there's the racism/xenophobia that goes into most mummy films. Second, the script is poorly constructed. For instance, a valuable piece of information is just sort of dropped in about twenty minutes too late. I also dare anyone to explain to me how the mummy's final fate actually works.

A Vampire in Brooklyn is similarly not good. However, that works to the benefit of sol_se and I, since we are able to mock and react to the film as it plays.

This coming week, I'm going to attempt to watch all nine Val Lewton chillers.

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



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.