Recent Spooky Movies

Damn it's already late October and I've barely even gotten into the spooky feeling... I haven't carved a pumpkin, walked in a graveyard, I haven't even said "a touch of the macabre" out loud to anyone, that's like bare minimum for me. I guess I could blame the horrors of the world, which are abundant, but that's a cop-out. I mean the horrors of the world, at the moment, it's like there's fear all around, but no mystery. It would probably be good for the psyche to engage in something spooky, which is an eternal feeling. "Engage with the eternal" is a good year-round coping strategy actually.... Gotta remember that. "Eat seasonal fruits" is also relevant here but I don't need help remembering that, that's on lock.

Well anyway I don't have all day to craft a post today-- of the 10,000 hours alloted to us in every day I have to put a few of them into helping my friend Mr Z with a photoshop project, and then I have to go to the ice cream store to get a boutique flavor I preordered (Concord grape - a current household obsession), then I have to go to band prac. We've got a gig coming up playing with an Elvis impersonator at a friend's birthday party so we've got to get our game up. I'm not going to go all the way out there just to get hosed by a living shadow. Anyway today's post is a spotlight on a few recent spooky movies I've enjoyed. Recent like I watched them this year, not recent like they came out this month.

If you crave this kind of thing you can check out more (too much more) in the castle's TV room, where I've moved all my Movie Diary data. I'm still working on my tagging system but for now you can click a button and see only the spooky movies. Or you can leave the button unclicked and see everything since I started keeping this kind of data (2019). If you do check out the Movie Diary you may notice that in the notes below I skipped over Ghoulies 3: Ghoulies Go To College, even though it was well within my review period window. That is my right to do so, as every rule and law is meaningless against my evil will. Take the stairs to the second floor, to the left, past the haunted mirror, and the TV room is behind the second door.

Recent Spooks

• The Boxer's Omen (1983) - Really fun puppets + entrails movie ala Brain Dead (1992), but produced in 1983 on a Buddhist horror motif. Maybe Exorcist (1973) was the jump off? A boxer-turned priest fights a demon and it's not even his fight. But it's durian this time, not pea soup. Kind of a stretch I guess but it's not hard to imagine the Shaw Bros boardroom looking at the box office receipts for the Catholic horror subgenre and deciding "Let's make a stern religious pukefest for a Southeast Asian audience". I could be way off here. Anyway I loved it. There's no (or not much) "gore" (in terms of someone getting slashed and their guts fall out), but there's LOTS of really gross stuff with ACTUAL entrails and a great supporting role for black soldier fly larvae. My favorite part was when a guy peels a banana, throws away the fruit, and eats the peel. Unlike a lot of black sorcerer media, this one makes the occult art really seem like loser shit compared to the True Path, although I did get swept away by the brief sequence in which a small crew toils in their garage to perfect a device (in this case a beautiful ghoulie). With Bolo Yeung Sze from Enter The Dragon (1973) and Phillip Ko Fai from Magic Crystal (1986). If you're picking a snack for this choose something dry, like popcorn or chips. I had a small bowl of concord grapes and I got yucked out.
• The Brides of Dracula (1960) - Warning! No Dracula! Peter Cushing says "Dracula" out loud, as an afterthought, and that's it. And there's vampires. But this isn't a problem with the movie per se, that's a problem with the promo department. If you love lush castle interiors and zooming in on a starlet's mascara you're really going to dig this. I do and I do and I did.
• Daughters of Darkness (1971) - really great lesbian vampire movie that puts most of the vampirey details in the background. You never even see a pointed tooth! Delphine Seyrig is extraordinary as Countess Bathory (via Marlene Dietrich), a splendid addition to the proud canon of glamorous movie vampires. Her gowns get better and better, and I'm not ashamed to say I gasped when the penultimate gown rolled out. I hated the main guy (CW domestic violence) but it's productive to speculate about "what's his deal"-- he's not just some jabroni there for contrast, or an impulsive agent of chaos on whom the story relies. Leaves a lot of questions, a move I respect! An absolute MUST for any lesbian vampire fan, old hotel aficionado, gown buff, or films-set-in-Belgium completist. If you want to drink along with this one you'll need equal parts crème de menthe, crème de cacao, and cream. Pour into a cocktail shaker with ice, shake briskly, then strain into a chilled cocktail glass.

• The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) - love it when a movie has people puzzling over a tiny sound. In this case the answer to "what is that sound" is so outlandish they had to put it in the title so it would hit like a memory and not like simply an unusual decision on the part of the filmmaker. Also there's both a spooky painting AND a deadly sculpture, by different artists. I feel like painting in a movie is a stand in for film itself, and painters are the directors-- in that regard I loved the painter in this, who is both extraordinarily closed-off and also very open. "I'm in a mystical period" why? "BECAUSE I'M FEELING MYSTICAL".

  Got to see an original 35mm print of this at Brown University, which looked so fucked up, I loved it. Lots of scratches from thousands of showings in sub-par conditions, and an overall color fade that turned all the black into purple and pink, giving it a "Hot Rats" look. Of course I'm happy that downloading a beautiful restoration is only a few clicks away, but it's nice to see the primary documents, be they pristine or absolutely partied to shit. With Reggie Nadler from Mark Of The Devil (1970).

  

  Got this CD for 1¢ from BMG Music Services in 1997

• Death Line (1972) - Donald Pleasance is so unpleasant in this it's like he's a big guy named Tiny. He's great but he really underscores the fact that you should avoid talking to cops whenever possible, as true today as it was in the wet brown England of 1972. This movie has a few verrrrrry languorous sweeps across an interior landscape of gross-outs-- horror fans of the current era might be like "enough already" but I admired the trust that the filmmakers put in the props department and indeed I got yucked out. Watched this for Mr Mittens' birthday and then crashed out on a couch where I had a dream about a zombie Jesse James. Then I looked in the fridge and there was a small piece of hand in a Tupperware container and I thought "I should eat that and turn into a horrible ghoul". Then immediately "no, I should actually avoid doing that". Then I woke up. Your mileage may vary.
• The Church (1989) - Nice comfy Italian Catholic horror / architecture flick with a good role for 14 year old Asia Argento, produced by Dario Argento. There's enough weird stuff to make it worth your while but I have to say that the monsters and effects didn't have enough oomph behind them, they just sort of show up and disappear, on a "thought I saw something" vibe. I would've liked to be a little more engaged with that stuff. Someone worked hard on that fish monster, I want to have more than a second to watch it glisten and pulsate. Or I don't know, maybe they're right, maybe there was a "too much fish man" cut that bombed initially. "1 sec max fish" double underlined on an index card and handed to director Michele Soavi. Cool score with Philip Glass and Goblin. I eBayed the book by Fulcanelli (alchemist circa 1920) that is onscreen briefly in this. It's a cool book, and tangential to castles, I'm enjoying it. A horror movie with a real book in it that makes you seek out the book, that's an underutilized vector for sure. I mean the Necronomicon is fake so that kind of doesn't count but why isn't there a movie with Maldoror or Story of the Eye or Against Nature or even Catcher in the Rye as a legible prop in the chamber? I can't see a downside to this. Teenage edgelords reading Walt Whitman Leaves Of Grass because of Slender Man 3 The Slimmening (hypothetical).
• Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) - something crazy about these Hammer Studios Dracula movies is that Dracula isn't even having fun. If that was me up there and I was accidentally resurrected in this preposterous fashion, wow, I'd be so psyched. I'd leap and frolic and laugh with my entire body. I'd run to a mountain stream and stick my face right in it and drink drink drink. But Dracula immediately and intractably becomes full of searing rage at a pretty basic slight. Someone essentially parked in his parking space, forcing him to park somewhere else for a short time, and he spends 87 minutes nearly paralyzed with indignation. It's pathetic. Others are carousing, drinking beer, kissing, eating big hearty loaves of fresh bread. And then there's Dracula, fuming silently for no reason, even though he was very recently dead and frozen in ice, and now he's not. I wonder if that's what it's like being family rich-- getting zero pleasure from your palatial estate and then blossoming into horrid spasms of life only when someone brings you the wrong beverage or forgets "no onions". He's not even getting revenge on the people who killed him! Come on guy!!!!
• Subspecies (1991) - All I could get from my beloved torrent community was a 4gb copy of this, and when I sat down to watch it with my buddy my ancient computer couldn't do it. Luckily my buddy had the fix, which was one of those websites. Remember when everyone had some fucked up movie website that seemed to have almost everything and it was chill as long as you didn't click anything on the page other than the play button? Those sites are still out there and they still work, even though the landscape is forever shifting. Anyway great movie, I'm guessing the inspiration for this was Bugles corn snacks? I could immediately relate to the feeling of "I'm a spooky creep with long pointy fingers" and I recognize the childhood genius of "my fingertip broke off now it's a little guy coming to get you". There's a few points like this where they added to a legend in a cool way, another one I liked was like "everyone knows about driving a stake through the heart, our thing is we boil the heart and drink the heart's hot dog water". My viewing party loved these embellishments, loved the little claymation guys, and loved that the main guy looked like Lux Interior. The only thing we didn't like was that the grizzly old familiar was terrible at his job. They kept saying "let's find his coffin during the day and get rid of him" and the dude's like "yes, let's", and then he spends all day sharpening a stick (which was already sharp) and then it's almost nighttime and he's like "OK let's go". Would've been no problem if he just did what he said he'd do when he said he'd do it! To be honest, I have this tendency too, I can't pretend like this is unrealistic. And I guess it's ultimately helpful for me to see how annoying this is for other people in my life and how much it holds me back. Let's get that bread everyone.

Links

• Fujichia Movie Diary: [link]
• if you want some killer SPOOKY TUNES for this or any season I HIGHLY recommend Flan's radio show "New Flanland" on WFMU. it streams live on Wednesdays at 8 Eastern, but every episode is also right there for you in the archive at any time. She does a whole month of spooky shit every October and it rules, but also every episode rules. The genre is like... cool music from anywhere :) [New Flanland on WFMU]

  

• I have a couple copies left of Mr Z's band's first 7"-- the band is called OUT OF THE BLUE and features members of Big Kids, Tiny Hawks, Nadir, and the Goonies. Let me know if you need one and I'll try and get it to you. You can also listen to the record on their toll-free phone number (!!!!)

  Leave a message!!!!

• The wikipedia entry on Fulcanelli is a trip. I love reading biographies of magicians, and if you do too then run don't walk. [wikipedia]
• OK I am not made of stone. In lieu of a review and as a reward for getting to the bottom of this post, here's 2 screengrabs from Ghoulies 3. [EVIL & POWER]; [the hand of the puppeteer]. This is not an endorsement!!!!!

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