Scarecrow's Blog From the Darkside

 My poor DVR. It is chock full of horror movies. Just a whole shit-ton of titles that I'll probably never be able to fully watch during an October schedule. With other films set upcoming as well, the blog that blows will be obliterated by my gibberish for 31 days. Deciding to take the evening off, I can only imagine my first October weekend will be quite busy and active. I imagine I won't have a lot of time for deep clinical analyses of anything. More likely a blob of nonsense and blather, I still have a lot more enthusiasm this year as opposed to last year. I got through that second vaxx shot a few weeks ago, went to Spirit Halloween and picked up some stuff, purchased some stamps and poster boards of my favorite Universal Monsters, and began pouring over my huge movie list on the DVR. I have a mix of films I've seen and films I haven't, so I hope the deep dive yields some nice surprises and gems, while also enjoying a lot of the faves of the past. Plus, revisits of fi...

 This will also include old user comments from August 30th, 2008. I knew Larry Cohen's The Stuff (1985) wouldn't be making the October lineup this year, but I have been itching to watch the film as presented on Joe Bob Briggs' Last Drive-In on Shudder. Joe Bob picked it apart and wasn't particularly kind to it, while Darcy (modeling The Stuff yogurt in a blue bikini quite seductively and to great effect) seems to like the film a lot more than he does. Joe Bob's main criticism was there really wasn't that big villain and the ending where folks just ditch all the Stuff yogurt in the fire and wholly abandoning the addictive bubbling white cream because Marcovicci spoke to them off a teleprompter through a television signal at a commandeered station thanks to militant crazy, Paul Sorvino. I can see why Joe Bob has issue with the film, "The Stuff" he considers Cohen's worst film. I think that is "Wicked Stepmother" (1989), but I digress. This ...

 Yikes. Granted when Julia tells Frank she'd do anything he wants, I believe her wholeheartedly. I asked myself while watching Hellraiser (1987) again, why is Julia with Larry to begin with. I don't think the entire time they are together they fit at all. Julia looks as if Larry makes her skin crawl on her worst days and shows outright boredom and apathy towards him on her best days. The moment Julia lays eyes on Frank, though, SWOON! He's wet and cold, but you'd think Julia saw the man of her dreams. I don't think he's ever not off-putting or creepy. But to Julia he's a stud she just wants to fuck at all times. Even when he doesn't have his fucking skin, Julia wants to mount him. That's a guy who has a hold on someone! When you will lure guys to an upper room in an old brownstone and just smash them over and over so your former lover, and husband's brother, can gain his body whole, I think it's safe to say that's commitment at the highe...

 I'm thinking of a werewolf week, as we approach October, watching one film with werewolves each night. My daughter had asked me in the past when we would be watching Bad Moon (1996), so I thought tonight would be just as good a time as any. We watched it on Tubi TV, so despite being 79 minutes, the film was a little longer with commercials. I used to watch it all the time on Encore (before Starz really grew into one of the big premium services on cable and satellite) in the late 90s. I want to say I remember watching this film when I was just out of high school. 

  That scene where the entire body--besides the head--grabs blood bags from a little refrigerator and squeezes all of the "red juice" into the pan holding Dr. Hill's head remains one of the most memorable to me because of how David Gale plays it as if he's having an intense orgasm. His eyes roll back and he just lets off a long moan of pleasure. The blood really provides serious "nourishment" to his severed neck "mangled flesh meat". That and when the hand injects some of Herbert West's reagent into the back of the head of Dr. Hill, with the evil surgeon -- with the unhealthy lust and fixation for Megan -- once again seemingly reacting with great pleasure at how it feels. It is always important to show how missing a head leaves Dr. Hill's body fumbling about, while never quite falling because his eyes (and brain) still had control.

 So "The Stepfather" (1987) has been on Shudder for a few months, but I noticed that it was getting a TCM Underground showing at 1:00 AM here Central time so I decided on recording it for a revisit next week. After it, Turner Classics showed as a double feature with it Larry Cohen's Wicked Stepmother (1989), the notorious final film of Bette Davis. What made this film so infamous is that Davis was barely on the production for a few days before leaving in disgust due to not liking the script or Cohen's direction. So Barbara Carrera was brought in as a second witch, getting to occupy a family's home when Davis's witch takes her place in a black cat named Pericles. Carrera is certainly sultry enough, although her sexy dance on the pillar of Lionel Stander's home for spying PI Richard Moll is outrageously campy. Carrera seems inspired to go the extra mile to make her Priscilla a catty seductress trying to gain the desire and lust for Colleen Camp's beau, ...

 This film has been sitting on my DVR for months. I didn't know what to expect, but after I finished Before Midnight (2013), I do admit that there is this feeling that Jesse and Celine won't make it much longer after we depart them at that table of the cafe where they seem to somewhat reconcile a very emotional attack on one another in their Greek hotel room at the end of a vacation as their twin girls (that one time they don't use a condom...) stay with friends. Jesse's son, Hank, spent nearly six weeks with them, and the mother (Celine calls her an alcoholic cunt) back in Chicago has made sure he continues to know that what happened in Before Sunset (2004) is the root cause of the divorce and any misery as a result. Jesse feels bad that he hasn't spent as much time with his son as he should have, mainly because he wanted to be with Celine. So that obviously comes up when they spend plenty of time in their hotel room fighting. But before the hotel room, these two ...

  Carnival of Souls (1962) is on Shudder right after I turned to Elvira's 40th Anniversary Celebration film Messiah of Evil (1973), so I was like, "What the hell, why not?"

I recently purchased Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015) and Insidious: The Last Key (2018) after my daughter and I watched the first film last weekend. It is one of those film series you watch with someone you love and want to share the experience with.  

  Marilyn Jones was in a previous episode of "Tales from the Darkside", so she had a connection to a Richard Rubinstein executively-produced show. In this episode of "Molly's House", Jones portrays a robotic engineer, inventor, and remote control / voice artist on a kid's show called Holly's House. She is in a romantic relationship with "Mike the Mailman", Lenny (Perry Lang; also a "Tales from the Darkside" alum), who endures cake to the face when the Cabbage Patch Kid Robot, Holly, doesn't like him. Yep, Holly, the robot, "comes to life", perhaps AI run amok. Jones' Kathy is trying to figure out why Holly is "misbehaving", often shown tinkering away off-camera on the robot, hoping to fix the "glitch". Meanwhile, Kathy tells Lenny she's pregnant, and he proposes marriage. Lenny's agent seems to think he's got a soap commercial coming, and he's happy when Kathy tells him she plans t...

  Romero's cinematographer, Michael Gornick, directed this very first episode of Richard Rubinstein's executive-produced Monsters, titled "The Feverman". Starring David McCallum as a sort of alcoholic, disheveled healer who always asks high and is paid the highest price in order to cure the harsh fevers of the sick if they meet the financial demands for such an undertaking. McCallum's Boyle looks as if he hasn't bathed in days and is sick with some sort of wasting-away disease. With "the crystals" on a chain around his neck and enough financial incentive, Boyle toils away in the basement of his two-story home with whatever Big Bad emerges as the sickness plaguing someone brought to him to help. In this case, a desperate father (John C Vennema) has a little girl with a high fever in need of Boyle's healing, but his physician comes along skeptically, Dr. Burke (Patrick Garner). Burke assumes Boyle is a hack taking the money from in-need people, not...

 This is the kind of film that reminds me of why I LOVE horror films done on the cheap but with ingenuity, cleverness, a fantastic sense of humor, and unpredictability. God, how often have I just said, "Fuck no" lately to Hollywood horror? At some point I turned to independent horror done by hungry filmmakers with content finding its way to the likes of Shudder. I just fucking want to watch a good horror movie again that knocks me for a loop in a good way. Well Friday evening, I watched the absolutely wonderful One Cut of the Dead (2017). What I was particularly thrilled about while watching this was how all kinds of disasters that happen outside the purview of the audience are revealed to us, while what is created in front of the camera disguises a lot of the problems! 

 The fog is alive in Cornwall as the headless corpse of Morgan seems to be walking the woods near a village where a tin mine appears to be haunted. 

 I had watched "The Seventh Victim" last night and decided to go ahead and revisit Cat People (1942) tonight instead of October. I'd like to try and get in a bunch of the usual suspects that typically do show up in October in September, freeing up some space for other films that perhaps never get room in the month of Halloween. Simone Simon, as Serbian fashion artist beauty, Irena, is so demure and sweet, seemingly so harmless when introduced, but, by film's end, goes full panther with Tom Conway's soothing-voiced intellectual psychiatrist (infatuated with and attracted to her), ripping him apart...you see Irena's "claws" coming out in what is left of Jane Randolph's robe in the iconic swimming pool sequence. Irena, unable to make love to her boat architect husband, Kent Smith (as Ollie), spends most of their marriage either crying naked in her tub or her head against the bedroom door seemingly yearning to be intimate. But what happens to Conway...

  I tried and tried to watch American Horror Story, but I dunno, that tender, loving feeling just wasn't there. Bernard Hughes as the greedy old crone is perfectly nasty in the pilot episode of Tales from the Darkside, the very example of grinning capitalist who gets too much enjoyment from being a human debtor's prison, lording over the farmers and their families how much they owe him. 

 This particular Val Lewton film intrigues me. It isn't really on the tips of Lewton fans' tongues a lot, nor is it really mentioned a whole lot when 40s "noir horror" fans talk about the more recognized icons such as "Cat People" or "I Walked with a Zombie". I had only watched The Seventh Victim (1943) once before in October, and I was left sort of chewing the fat a bit on how I felt about it. Kim Hunter, a pretty, young, soft-faced, meek-voiced Mary Gibson, leaving her repertory school to find her sister (who hadn't paid for her school in six months), who seems to be missing. So you start with a missing sister story and Mary finds a psychiatrist, Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont), and her own doctor, Louis Judd (Tom Conway, who doesn't really show up until almost halfway through the film). Also, Mary finds good people such as cafe owners with rooms and a poet, Jason (Erford Gage; who died as a casualty of war two years later), so her life does...

  What I always love about this film is how John Holden remains such a skeptic practically the entire film, despite all the reasons to the contrary to take Karswell seriously. He uses pragmatic thinking, considers any talk of black magic or witchcraft, demons and devils, a load of nonsense, hogwash Karswell's cult swallow, pooh-poohing superstitions and beliefs in the supernatural. But when a mental case is awakened from a trauma-induced fugue state, willing to do whatever he could to avoid the enchantment piece of paper handed off to John Holden by Karswell, that changes everything. When a threat develops in a burning, smoking ball of flame, coming right at you from the sky, that might have a way of altering perspective. Sure at the end, John Holden didn't see Karswell picked up by the creature of the curse, palmed in one hand while shredded with the talons of the other hand, before being dropped into the rails of a train station, but he sure couldn't wait to get that pape...

  This was a lot of fun! Shot clearly on the cheap by director, George Blair (he might be considered the "Superman director" since his resume has a ton of Superman on it from the 50s), in a week and change, The Hypnotic Eye (1960) really feels like a holdover from the 50s. The men wore suits and ties while the women dresses that fit their voluptuous form. That feeling of noir is also in the film as a detective, Dave Kennedy (Joe Patridge, way down the cast list) is bewildered at a series of gruesome "self" mutilations where beautiful women (most blonde) "accost themselves" with horrible results. This feels almost like a B&W photographed, more "civilized" Herschel Gordon Lewis B-movie, except Blair is more talented -- HGL is a guilty pleasure of mine, but I'd never accuse him of being a good filmmaker -- with more style and craft. This is about a suave, handsome hypnotist who is able to perform his stage presentations with mostly women vo...

 Okay, I really liked Joan Fontaine in the film. But this lost me by the end. So Fontaine is Gwen Mayfield, an English schoolteacher hired in a village that could be a haven for witchcraft. I did really like the twist with Kay Francis, as Stephanie, who seems to be a reasonable, rational mind, an ally to Gwen, only to be quite the opposite.

 There are those solid sci-fi B-movies you might find on a fun Saturday afternoon double bill perhaps in the late 60s and early 70s. I could definitely see myself attending a fun matinee that consists of Terence Fisher's The Earth Dies Screaming (1964) and one of the Quatermass films on a Sunday evening. The slim running time is really a gift because I think way too many films today are just overlong. I just can't understand why some of these films are extended past 2 hours when a solid 100 minute movie could suffice. I don't really know why there was the storyline decision to have Dennis Price grab cash that would probably be completely meaningless when the planet has been attacked with a gas attack that has left open-aired people dropping dead where they were, unless sealed where folks couldn't breath in the toxins. I did get Dr. Who Cybermen vibes from these walking robots with a deadly touch, while the animated human slaves of these machines have white eyes and mo...

 It does seem as if in the past when I would get all knee-deep in the show again it would be starting with "Little Green Men" in the second season, and I would be once again off to the races. And, oddly enough, I'd watch "The Erlenmeyer Flask", which included the killing of Deep Throat by the Crew Cut Man (often sent on missions to assassinate), and seem to stop watching the show. Not sure what that is, but I'm still quite dialed-in, so I don't think finishing the first season of The X-Files with "The Erlenmeyer Flask" will lead to me abandoning the series again. Now I'm fastly approaching the Halloween season where series are often put on the backburner as I rev up my horror movie watching, concluding the year typically with Twilight Zone. I've watched a ton of episodes focused on alien/human hybrids, extraterrestrial DNA, clones being produced and then annihilated by the alien bounty hunter looking to get rid of all "abominations...

  I am clearing out the first season, really stoked about it before October gets here and "Roland" is the next to last episode. Zeljko Ivanek, for whom I know from The Sender (1982) among so many other film and series -- this actor is simply a sensational character actor who has remained busy his entire career for a reason -- is an autistic young man working as a janitor at a wind tunnel laboratory as certain scientists are working on an engine that could possibly go to an incredible speed not yet reached, perhaps Mach 15. So the episode deals with twins again, this time one among the aeronautics lab team, a brilliant scientist, Arthur Grable (a bit heavier, with a beard), separated from his autistic brother, Roland. So Mulder notices changes to mathematic notations and equations being done on whiteboard in the lab and on an accessed computer after scientists connected to Arthur's team were murdered, leading him to believe that Roland's presence at the facility could ...

 I do admit that this particular episode of the first season isn't one I watched all that much in the past. It isn't that the episode, "Born Again", is lousy or not quality enough. Watching it this afternoon, "Born Again" has a fun enough premise if not exactly spectacular or memorable. I think that is why it felt like such a fresh viewing. I might have watched it once in the 90s and once in the 2000s. It concerns a little girl who seems to be the vessel for a reincarnated spirit of a cop who died under grisly circumstances. What seemed like retaliation from a Chinatown crime syndicate, with the cop having an arm cleaved off and eye gouged out, as Mulder and Scully investigate the mysterious death of a detective in Brooklyn, left alone with a little girl by another cop who can't seem to get her to talk, Sharon Lazard (Maggie Wheeler), they realize there is more to this than meets the eye. The little girl tells the police that the description of the man w...

  I have user comments to include from January 27th, 2016, but I'll add that is was fun seeing Skinner for the first time, trying to "rein in" Scully on how they close their X-Files cases, even though she brings up that they are successful 75% of the time. Mulder, with Tooms framing him through a shoe print -- that Mulder easily takes apart through how the print was pressed on his face -- gets help from Scully (lying for him about the time frame for which Tooms claims Mulder beat him) and Skinner appeals to him to take a vacation. With Cancer Man behind him just smoking away, Skinner seems like his stooge, acting in his interests. I always like how Skinner closes the case on Eugene Tooms asking Cancer Man if he believed any of what was written in the report by Mulder and Scully, with Cigarette-Smoking Man responding quite matter-of-factly, "Of course I do." This followed with Mulder letting Scully know that a hunch of his believes their division of the FBI is in...

 I had a "James Wan marathon" during the afternoon and evening on Saturday, so I'm exhausted. Four movies back to back to back to back is quite an adventure. I used to do marathons with relative ease, but I realize now that unless I'm doing this in October and December, watching so many movies in a day/night just isn't as ideal as it might have been when I was a teenager.  We -- my wife and teen daughter -- watched the recently-released Wan horror film in 2021 September, Malignant . This film is really being raked over the coals by some for its twist while others consider outrageous but campy fun. I am personally somewhere in the middle. When it turns into a Matrix film inside the Seattle Police Station as "brain face bro" uses a body to massacre practically an entire department of cops and detectives with a "trophy sword", I admit that I laughed out loud at how ridiculous it was. It is warped and certainly original, I'll give Wan and his t...

 I really had a good time with this one because Dexter is getting it from all sides. He's currently with a bonkers psychopath crazier than he is (and that's saying something!), his sister and cop buddy are working one of Batista and Doakes' old cases, locating a hoarder who keeps extensive notes and is always spying on anyone outside the window of his apartment so the car taken from Miami Metro (and used by Dexter to drive the criminal away, easily attainable because he worked in the police department, with no reason to believe doing so would come back to him), and Doakes covertly sneaks into his apartment and locates his "blood drop slide box". So how will Dexter ever get out of this ever increasing vice? I always like how Dexter is caught off-guard because too often he can stay one step ahead or get enough time to orchestrate an out for himself. But Lundy questions Dexter about a "case of bad blood work", actually purposely botched so he could kill the...

 I want to say the last time I watched this episode was during a marathon on BBC America. I want to say BBC America had the X-Files in 2018. I sort of went in and out of the show, as the now-defunct Chiller was showing it Sunday nights, I want to say 2016-ish. It would always depend on what had caught my attention at any given point and time. "Kaddish" focuses on Mulder and Scully arriving at Brooklyn to investigate a victim who might have been killed by someone associated with the death of Isaac Luria, a Hasidic Jew. Isaac was attacked by three Anti-Semitic cretins, influenced by a repulsive Neo Nazi who runs hateful brochures to spread to all of his clients (Curt Brunjes (Jonathan Whittaker)). When a Golem is conjured through the wet mud of Isaac's grave, a book left behind by his body assisting in its form reanimated, those who killed Issac are themselves murdered. While Scully believes someone is getting revenge for Isaac, Mulder believes its possible that the killer ...

  So here is a flipside to what we saw in "Hero Pants" where the episode follows Trish instead of Jessica, as Erik is roped into helping Trish find bad guys to beat up in order to "rescue" Jessica from being charged and imprisoned for the murder of the cop who killed poor kids. I thought this episode was neat because the camera / story gives us what was happening in Trish's head, flashbacking to certain memories involving her and Dorothy during the initial stages of child stardom. While Trish isn't allowed to be a child, Dorothy pushes her to pay the bills since the out-of-the-picture father isn't providing for them. Dorothy's pressure is this vice that expects so much out of this girl, nowhere near an adult. I couldn't help but think of Britney Spears the entire episode. I can imagine she underwent the same kind of arm twisting, high stress demand to be perfect, to pose perfect, to say her lines perfect, to perform for the surrounding audience w...