Well, There Goes My Pigeon: A Glance Back at ’40s Horror
236. The Spider Woman Strikes Back (1946)
237. The Brute Man (1946)
238. The Mad Ghoul (1943)
I feel like I haven’t watched as much old school horror as I’d like, so I thought I’d dip my toe into the 1940s, a time where women were dames, men were square-jawed palookas and cops seemed to mostly be ineffectual and Irish.
First up in the punch is The Spider Woman Strikes Back, a lurid little tale that features one of the most ludicrous real estate schemes I think I’ve ever come across. A caretaker goes to work for a supposedly frail old blind woman, not realizing that she’s perfectly able and also draining the caretaker’s blood while she’s sleeping to breed poisonous plants to feed to and kill off cattle in the area so she can buy up the surrounding land cheap. I mean, there’s really not much more to it. The old lady has a big creepy assistant that does her grunt work for her. It has some nice shadowy moments with various characters creeping around in the dark but can’t help but play up to its B-movie trappings. Fans of classic Universal horror should probably look elsewhere but if you like these cheap, pulpy thrillers, you might like it.
Apparently I inadvertently watched a Rondo Hatton double feature. for those unfamiliar with him, he’s the huge creepy guy with very distinct malformed facial features that plays the titular Brute Man in this second film and the creepy assistant in Spider Woman Strikes Back. As the brute man, he’s a crazy murderer who falls for a sweet blind girl and decides to add theft to his rap sheet, unaware his new fixation will lead to his downfall. Rondo Hatton himself does indeed cut quite the figure here exuding a genuine menace. The script is pretty bad though. Hackneyed dialogue and bad acting from most of the supporting cast (which is pretty standard for these ’40s B-pictures) hamper this one considerably. Plus its so short that it’s pretty much over by the time the main plot kicks in.
The Mad Ghoul is a pretty fun little Universal B-picture that features a mad scientist (what else) who uses an ancient Mayan formula (naturally) to put people in a zombie-like stupor to do his bidding. It also has at its center a kind of love triangle (or maybe square?) that gives it a little bit of a tone not unlike that of The Mad Magician. The pace is brisk and unlike The Brute Man which I felt could’ve used a little plot to it, this one seems to pretty compactly convey what it needs to without an overabundance of exposition dumps. R.I.P. that poor monkey though….
Songs in the Key of Dead: Horror Musicals
239. Suck (2009)
240. Don’t Go In The Woods (2010)
241. The Devil’s Carnival (2012)
When one thinks of musicals, you don’t typically come up with horror, yet we have gotten a few stone cold classics over the years like Little Shop of Horrors, Rocky Horror Picture Show and Phantom of the Paradise. For some reason, I have this bizarre curiosity with musicals. I generally don’t like many of the ones I’ve seen yet feel compelled to keep watching more. So with that in mind, I decided to dive into these.
It would be easy to lazily just say Suck’s title describes it quality, but honestly I thought it was kinda ok. It’s about a band who gets in over their head with an old vampire who promises them riches, immortality and fame via the undead bloodsucker route. Jessica Paré is great as the vampiric driving force behind the band with a real charisma in how she plays her role, Malcolm McDowell is obviously having fun with his grizzled Van Helsing part, and David Foley is also pretty funny as the band’s stone cold ‘anything for a buck’ manager. If for no other reason, the movie is fun to watch as a “Spot the famous rocker cameo” game with appearances from the likes of Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, Henry Rollins, Alex Lifeson of Rush, Moby (!?), Dimitri Coats of Burning Bridges and a bunch of others. On the negative side, the script is kind of lazy to be honest with predictable plot turns and dialogue. Also frankly the songs aren’t great. They basically give off vibes of forgettable early ’00s power pop, not exactly the kind of music I would expect a super popular band of vampires pursuing fame and fortune to be composing.
Apparently Don’t Go in the Woods was basically filmed in Vincent D’Onofrio’s backyard in less than a month in between bigger shoots, and it definitely shows. This supremely half-assed “story” about a bunch of pretentious douchebags who head out into the woods to record an album (against the obvious warning signs) only to be murdered by a slasher is bad… Real bad. The actors are beyond amateur. I honestly think I could have done a better job in this. I can only assume they were cast based on an ability to sing in key (and some of them can’t manage that). The music is wildly hit or miss. Some of the songs aren’t half bad if you are into the laid back acoustic indie rock but some of it feels like half-baked Dashboard Confessional rip-off tripe only made more unbearable by how earnest they’re trying to be. One particular song highlighted in the movie just sounds like a Soul Asylum clone. The killings are also pretty lazy, standard stuff, and the ending is dumb. As you can guess, I was not a fan of this one…
The Devil’s Carnival is another horror musical from Saw director Darren Lynn Bousman who had previously waded into the sing ‘n’ scream waters with his weird clunky cult flick Repo! The Genetic Opera. If you’ve seen Repo and didn’t like it, there probably isn’t going to be much to change your mind here. The songwriting is in a very similar style but with more of a carnival theme to it, and honestly plot-wise it’s just too short. Maybe I need to watch the sequel but it felt more like a pilot for a series than a legit full-length feature. I will say, I do admire what Bousman did from a marketing standpoint around this one. Failing to get major studio backing, he basically financed mostly himself and took it on the road from town to town like the exploitation hucksters of the ’40s and ’50s to slowly grow its fanbase more organically which from what I can tell has actually paid off since he did get enough attention to warrant making that aforementioned sequel. My guess is that he’ll use the paycheck from this next Chris Rock-starring Saw movie he’s directing to make a third one at some point, but only time will tell.
Strange Magic: Latin American Horror
242. La Llorona (2019)
243. La casa del fin de los tiempos a.k.a. House at the End of Time (2013)
244. Madre a.k.a. Mother (2016)
After devoting so much attention to Brazilian horror a few days ago, I felt I might’ve been unjustly neglecting the rest of the region, so I decided to correct that error with this trilogy of flicks from various countries in Central and South America.
First up is La Llorona from Guatemala which is significantly better than the recent US film featuring the same crying woman of legend. Unlike the US film which was basically a hacky, jump scare factory, this one is a unique slow burn with an interesting back story involving an ailing dictator in the midst of revolution who is forced to reckon with his past crimes while his family struggles with what he has been a part of. One of this movie’s biggest strengths is in how gorgeous it looks, bathed in shadow that fills the corners with a kind of melancholy menace. Even when no overt horror elements are happening, just the way it’s shot with such deep blacks like in the trial scenes conveys the foreboding quality of the narrative. This was a really good one to check out but don’t expect a standard “turn a corner and BOO” type setup.
House at the End of Time from Venezuela is an interesting although somewhat messy story of a family and a house. To say much more invites spoilers. The plot is constantly twisting and folding in on itself. Some aspects are a little predictable and some seem so out of left field that they seemed to need to be thought through a little more. Visually at times, it has a very nice atmospheric look to it that would occasionally give way to brightly lit, tonally jarring scenes that felt almost like a different movie. I know what the director was trying to do but it didn’t totally work for me. Still I have to admire the sheer ambition of such a dense script if it isn’t totally successful.
Madre from Chile tells the story of a put upon mother of a difficult-to-control autistic son, a husband who is always away working and who is pregnant and overstressed. As a result, she brings in a Filipino nanny at the behest of her spouse to lighten the load. Before long the son is acting more normal and the stress is starting to melting away with the new nanny something of a miracle worker. Slowly she starts to realize though that the nanny may have more sinister intentions in mind. This is a decent movie with some solid acting in particular from the lead actress, but it’s pretty easy to see where it’s going early on so it’s just a matter of waiting until it plays out exactly as you’d think.
245-252. Kiseijû: Sei no kakuritsu a.k.a. Parasyte: The Maxim E1-24 (2014)
For most of the month, I’ve been watching an episode of this anime each day, it being one of the few more well-known horror anime I hadn’t seen yet. Overall, my opinion is pretty positive. It has some truly grotesque body horror elements and some interesting ideas about the melding of human and parasyte into something more. Unfortunately, rather than really explore those elements and their possible implications on evolutionary survival, it occasionally devolves into less than fascinating big action sequences that feel like something out of a more generic shonen anime (like Naruto, Bleach, Dragonball Z, etc.). There were things about this I really liked, but by the end, it had me wishing there was something more to it.
KIDDIE KORNER!
253a. The Adventures of the Scrabble People in a Pumpkin Full of Nonsense (1985)
253b. Festival of Family Classics: Jack O’Lantern (1972)
253c. Monster in My Pocket: The Big Scream (1992)
The Adventures of the Scrabble People in a Pumpkin Full of Nonsense was really fucking weird. Everyone in it seemed to be a smartass or a jerk, and it really lived up to its nonsense name. Fans of bizarre animation should probably watch it out of morbid curiosity.
Jack O’Lantern is basically a Rankin & Bass production that is obviously trying to do for Halloween what Frosty the Snowman did for Christmas, creating a magical prancing mascot the kids are sure to love! Except they made this Halloween mascot a leprechaun who possesses a scarecrow with a pumpkin for a head that comes off much more weird than I’m sure they were intending.
Monster in my Pocket: The Big Scream was marketed as a Halloween special but I’m sure the producers were hoping for it act more as a pilot for an on-going series based on the titular toy line. Oddly enough, this was the only one of these three my daughter seemed to actually like. She thought the idea of little monsters she could put in her pocket was cute.