Aeronautic Primates and Other Delights

It's December, apparently!

Movies I've seen before are in italics.

Little Shop of Horrors (1960)
Our Man Flint (1966)
Holiday (1938)
Much Ado About Nothing (2012)
Scanners (1981)
Whip It (2009)

sol_se hadn't seen the original Little Shop of Horrors, so we watched it. It's a difficult film to judge, because it is so tossed off, but it's fun.

I gave in and bought an HBO Max subscription and Our Man Flint was the first thing I gravitated to. It's a spy spoof starring James Coburn as a secret agent who has all of the answers all of the time.

Holiday, another delightful Katharine Hepburn/Cary Grant team-up, was on Criterion Channel, so I had to show sol_se.

I'm pretty spoiled by the Branagh version, so I found Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing middling. Some of the actors just could not get their heads around their dialogue.

HEADSPLOSION

In honor of Elliot Page, we watched a film in his earlier oeuvre. It was fine. Both sol_se and I felt it could have been more tightly edited. Elliot was quite good, though.

Finished The Good Place Season 4. I think I expected more of an impact out of it, given how other people responded to it. I still liked it a lot, but it didn't really eff me up or anything.

Voted on Thursday! If you're an American citizen and you haven't already voted, do so. Make a plan to vote. Go to IWillVote.com. Nothing is more critical than this moment.

Oh, also, sol_se and I have handily met our 31 spooky movies in 31 days goal for October. Everything after this is gravy.

Movies I've seen before are in italics

Masque of the Red Death (1964)
It's Alive (1974)
Evil Dead (2013)
Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979)
The Blob (1958)
Beware! The Blob (1972)
Fall of the House of Usher (1960)
Suspiria (2018)
Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

As you can see, I'm starting sol_se on the Corman/Price Poe movies. We'll see if we can work through the rest before Halloween. These were very formative for me. Of the three we watched, I think we both agree that Pit and the Pendulum is the most enjoyable. This is one of the very first horror movies my mother ever showed me, incidentally.

I really like It's Alive, but man, they needed to replace their sound guy. So much dialogue was unintelligible or too quiet. Still, it's very effective for being a killer mutant baby movie.

I didn't know what to expect out of the Evil Dead remake. I knew there wasn't going to be an Ash character (although there kinda-sorta was). I didn't agree with all the choices made, but overall it was pretty good. It's certainly the most disgusting film I've seen in a while.

A quibble: Criterion Channel listed the Nosferatu remake as Nosferatu the Vampyre, but then showed Nosferatu Phantom der Nacht. These are two different movies! Not substantially different, but the film was shot in separate English and German versions, so there are subtle differences between the two. I don't have a preference one over the other, but I did tell sol_se we were getting the English version before, lo and behold, German. In either version, this is a very ponderous movie and I don't necessarily mean that in a bad way. It's incredibly deliberate and takes its time saying what it wants to say.

The Blob remains a very workmanlike movie about killer jello. It doesn't add a lot of flair, but it knows what it's about and gets the job done. The same cannot be said for its execrable sequel Beware! The Blob (directed by Larry Hagman(!)). This was mostly a series of loosely connected unfunny sketches that all ended with someone getting eaten by the blob. I kept getting thrown off by the male protagonist, played by Robert Walker Jr, who may be better known as Charlie X from the Star Trek episode.

I do not know if I liked the Suspiria remake. I can definitely say I did not understand it.