For the latest song of the day I couldn’t make up my mind on which of the two I had picked I should post so I decided to just treat the two as a pair thus the latest “song of the day” is, for today, “songs of the day”. Once you hear what I had chosen you will realize why they had to be together.
The latest song of the day is from film score composer Basil Poledouris and comes from his best work and what many consider as one of the best film scores ever put up on the big-screen. They are “Anvil of Crom” and “Riddle of Steel/Riders of Doom” from Poledouris’ score for Conan the Barbarian. These two pieces, especially from the Varese Sarabande release of the soundtrack, form the very powerful introduction to the Hyperborean world that Conan inhabits.
“Anvil of Crom” starts off the film and does it with such a bombastic combination of timpani drums setting the rhythm with French horns (a massive 24 in total) keeping up to speed with some very strong brass work. This intro to the film has become synonymous with the film and has become famous for being used by other filmmakers to score trailer for their own films. While the piece is just under 3 minutes in length the power of the sound Poledouris creates helps set the tone for the rest of the film and what audiences should expect.
Following up “Anvil of Crom” is what will turn out to be the motifs for the two main characters in the film. “Riddle of Steel/Riders of Doom” comes in in a peaceful manner which builds up to become Conan’s theme. This is the riddle of steel of the tracks title. But this doesn’t last long as “Riddle of Steel” is suddenly joined by the more orchestral and doom-laden sound of “Riders of Doom” which will forever become the theme for Conan’s nemesis, Thulsa Doom. This second track bears a significant resemblance to Carl Orff’s own orchestral masterpieces, “Carmina Burana”. While there’s still a few people out there who thinks that Poledouris cheated somewhat in using Orff’s work as too much of a guide I would have to disagree. Poledouris might have used “Carmani Burana” as a template but the overall execution and final product stands on its own and have become one of the most iconic piece of film music ever heard.
When listened to back-to-back it would come to no suprise why the two had to be picked together. “Anvil of Crom” and “Riddle of Steel/Riders of Doom” belong together and should be listened together. Everytime I listen to it I instantly imagine times of high adventure and lands long-forgotten by the march of time.
I first found out about this little cult film starring the very awesome Christopher Walken around 1993 or so when I was at the local Waldenbooks (yes there used to be bookstores not named Barnes & Noble or Borders back in the day) looking at the latest issue of Fangoria. Inside the magazine they were doing a brief feature on an upcoming horror film tentatively called God’s Army. All I saw was that it was to star Christopher Walken and it had gore and angels in it. That alone peaked my interest and I was looking forward to seeing it in the theaters. Almost two years passed and nothing about it was ever heard again until I visited the video rental place near my house and saw a VHS tape (yeah, those big videocassette thingies) with the title of The Prophecy and starring Christopher Walken.
This was the film I was so hyped to seeing in the theaters. The title had changed from it’s earlier (and much cooler) one of God’s Army. It would seem that it’s film distributor had little to no faith in the box-office potential of the film and just delayed it’s release to the point that when it did come out no one knew about it barely anyone saw it. It was a real damn shame since filmmaker Gregory Widen made such a good film that was able to mash-up horror, angels and a detective story all in one without creating a mess of things.
The Prophecy was about the war in heaven we were never taught about in Sunday school. We all know about the war in heaven where Lucifer and the rebel angels who followed him tried to overthrow God. That didn’t go over so well for Lucifer and he and his band of fallen angels were cast out into Hell by God and his right-hand man the Archangel Michael. This film talks about the second war in heaven soon thereafter which no one outside those who wrote little-known apocryphal texts about it (and being apocryphal they never were included in the Bible). This war now had a new group of angels led by the Archangel Gabriel rebelling against God for choosing humans (talking monkeys as these new rebels called them) above all living creatures including the angels themselves for God’s love. This war was now in a state of stalemate after countless millenia, but a prophecy about a soul so dark and evil was to be the tipping point for either side. This particular soul was to be found on Earth and whoever acquires it would break the stalemate and finally bring this second war to an end.
With this in mind we have Walken as the Archangel Gabriel coming down to Earth to look for this soul so he can finally win the war for his side (which also means the end of mankind). It’s the angel Simon (played by Eric Stoltz) who comes down to stop him from getting this soul or, at the very least, hide it from Gabriel. With these two factions of angels vying to acquire this soul we have a Detective Thomas Daggett smack in the middle of the case investigating all the weird happenings and deaths surrounding the battle between these two factions. The dead bodies of angels begin to appear on morgue slabs looking like eyeless, hermaphroditic specimens and angelic script found in crime scenes brings Daggett back to his time studying to be a priest before images of angels warring amongst themselves breaks him down and he quits the seminary to become a cop instead.
It would come down to these three factions racing against time to acquire this dark soul.
The film is not as gory as it’s feature in Fangoria made it out to be, but it is quite violent and bloody that I understand why it got the horror label attached to it. It’s more a dark fantasy thriller more than horror. It’s rare in today’s film that we see angels portrayed as the bloodthirsty beings that the really are. The film even points out this oft-ignored detail of God’s messengers. Angels are always the ones God sends to punish or send a very serious message to his chosen beings that is Man. The Prophecy shows this aspect of angels in full light and how their attitudes about humanity might lead some of them to hate God for raising Man above even them.
Christopher Walker does a great job conveying Gabriel’s hate and contempt for humans. His Gabriel is like one of those pundits always on tv (both liberal and consevative) who are so into their sides’ message that they never see the other side as anything but the enemy. One could almost say that Walken’s Gabriel is like then apocalypse-hungry version of Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann in one body. This is not to say that Walken goes over-the-top with his performance. In fact, he’s quite subdued in how he uses those many tics and voice mannerisms a whole cottage industry has grown around in.
Walken’s portrayal of Gabriel infuses what could’ve become a one-note villain with lots of layers and complexities that the rest of the cast were able to play off from. His character would be terrifying one moment then smoothly switch over to being funny and charming then back to terror. It’s due to his great performance that the other cast members like Stoltz as the weary, loyal angel Simon and Koteas as the fallen religious cop Daggett were able to bring their own performance to another level. This is quite a feat since the dialogue in the film was a mixed bag of horror cliches and interesting Biblical-speak about secret wars, apocryphal books and prophecies. The film even has a nice appearance of the first fallen angel himself and none other than Viggo Mortensen plays Lucifer.
The Prophecy does have a feeling that it was always one misstep away from becoming an awful film. This had happened with 2010’s Legion and did that film about angels and the apocalypse turn out to be a huge steaming pile of shit-turd. But while Dimension Film saw the film fall over on the side of bad for myself and those who have come to admire and love this cult classic the film stayed balance between good and bad. Widen’s film never went over to the side of becoming a truly great film, but it also never fell on the side that Legion ended up on. What Prophecy ended up becoming was a film that was almost grindhouse in nature, but even then it still looked too good with too many good performances to be given that label. The fact that it contains one of Christopher Walken’s best performances speaks well of a film that many critics during it’s early days had dismissed as just another bad horror film.
In the end, this film became just one of the many little-gems that got lost in film studio money politics. I definitely would recommend this cult film to people who haven’t seen it, but I would tell them to stop at just this film and not even go near the four sequels which came after it.
I had to include this trailer at some point since Vanishing Point is one of the key influences on Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof section of Grindhouse. Is Vanishing Point the ultimate trip? Maybe but I think there’s one other film that came out the same year that might disagree…
And here it is! I haven’t seen this actual film but the trailer would seem to indicate that this is some sort of religious biker film. But then you have that final scene in the trailer and you’re kinda like, “Uhmmm….sacreligious much?” Anyway, this is one of those trailers that I find myself watching over and over again. I guess I was destined to grow obsessed with this trailer as it appeals to both my exploitation fanatic side and my fallen Catholic side. Put them both together and I guess you’ve got The Jesus Trip.
I’ve come across this film on DVD a few times and I’ve always been seriously temped to buy it just on the basis of the title. However, I may just end up settling for having seen the trailer because, to be honest, the trailer would seem to indicate that there’s a lot of really, really ugly people in this movie. And ugly people kinda sorta make me nervous.
I guess this is like the grindhouse version of Bring It On. Watching the trailer, I have to wonder why high schools in 70s movies always looked so dirty and unwashed. I mean — BLEH! Seriously, if my school had been that dirty, I would have ended up dropping out of school when I was 15. I mean, gawd damn! Get out the Scrubbing Bubbles and every sanitizer you can find and just — oh my God. I think it’s the cafeteria that really makes me shudder. Anyway, as for the rest of the trailer, I asked my sister Erin if it looked like a truthful depiction of high school cheerleading since she used to be one and she said no because most cheerleader don’t survive getting blown up as easily as the ones in this trailer.
This is a film from the notoriously odd Doris Wishman. Someday, somebody — maybe even me — is going to turn the life of Doris Wishman into a great novel and an even better film.
If you’re following the news then you probably heard that Dallas got hit with like a 100 inches of snow yesterday. Seriously, more snow fell yesterday than has even fallen in recorded history (or, at the very least, in my recorded history). You want to talk about Snowmageddon? Well, we had a Snowpocalypse.
The neighborhood on Friday morning (picture taken by Erin Nicole Bowman)
So, I spent most of yesterday cooped up inside with my sister and our cat and once we got over the whole fun of being able to go outside and scream, “SNOW DAY!” at the top of our lungs, there really wasn’t much to do. So, in an attempt to fight off cabin fever, I raided my DVD collection and we ended up watching one of the old Christopher Lee-as-Dracula-films from Hammer Studios. Specifically, we ended up watching Dracula A.D. 1972.
The film opens in 1872 with a genuinely exciting fight on a runaway carriage that ends with the death of both Count Dracula (Christopher Lee) and his nemesis, Prof. Van Helsing (Peter Cushing). However, as Van Helsing is buried, we see one of Dracula’s disciples (played by Christopher Neame, who had an appealingly off-kilter smile) burying Dracula’s ashes nearby. The camera pans up to the clear Victorian sky and, in a sudden and genuinely effective jumpcut, we suddenly see an airplane screeching across the sky.
Well, it’s all pretty much downhill from there. Suddenly, we discover that a hundred years have passed and we are now in “swinging” London. The city is full of red tourist buses, hippies wearing love beads, and upright policemen who always appear to be on the verge of saying, “What’s all this, then?” We are introduced to a group of hippies that are led by a creepy guy named Johnny Alculard (also played — quite well, actually — by Christopher Neame). One of those hippies (Stephanie Beacham) just happens to be the great-great-granddaughter of Prof. Van Helsing. Apparently, she’s not really big on the family history because she doesn’t notice that Alculard spells Dracula backwards. Then again, her father (played by Peter Cushing, of course) doesn’t either until he actually writes the name down a few times on a piece of a paper.
Anyway, the film meanders about a bit until finally, Alculard convinces all of his hippie friends to come take part in a black mass. “Sure, why not?” everyone replies. Well, I don’t have to tell you how things can sometimes get out-of-hand at black mass. In this case, Dracula comes back to life, kills a young Caroline Munro, and eventually turns Johnny into a vampire before then setting his sights on the modern-day Van Helsings.
Dracula A.D. 1972 was Hammer’s attempt to breathe some new life into one of its oldest franchises and, as usually happens with a reboot, its critical and (especially) commercial failure ended up helping to end the series. Among even the most devoted and forgiving of Hammer fans, Dracula A.D. 1972 has a terrible reputation. Christopher Lee is on record as regarding it as his least favorite Dracula film. And the film definitely has some serious flaws. Once you get past the relatively exciting pre-credits sequence, the movie seriously drags. There’s a hippie party sequence that, honest to God, seems to last for about 5 hours. As for the hippies themselves, they are some of the least convincing middle-aged hippies in the history of fake hippies. You find yourself eagerly awaiting their demise, especially the awkward-looking one who — for some reason — is always dressed like a monk. (Those crazy hippies!) But yet…nothing happens. All the fake hippies simply vanish from the film. Yet, they’re so annoying in just a limited amount of screen time that the viewer is left demanding blood. Add to that, just how difficult is it to notice that Alculard is Dracula spelled backwards? I mean, seriously…
Still, the film isn’t quite as bad as you may have heard. First off, the film — with its middle-aged hippies — has a lot of camp appeal. It’s the type of film that, once its over, you’re convinced that the term “groovy” was uttered in every other scene even though it wasn’t. As with even the worst Hammer films, the film features a handful of striking images and Christopher Neame is surprisingly charismatic as Alculard.Â
As with the majority of the Hammer Dracula films, the film is enjoyable if just to watch the chemistry between Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. Both of these actors — so very different in image but also so very stereotypically English — obviously loved acting opposite of each other and whenever you see them on-screen together, it’s difficult not to enjoy watching as each one tried to top the other with a smoldering glare or a melodramatic line reading. As actors, they brought out the best in each other, even when they were doing it in a film like Dracula A.D. 1972. In this film, Cushing is like the father you always you wished you had — the stern but loving one who protected you from all the world’s monsters (both real and cinematic).Â
As for Lee, he’s only in six or seven scenes and he has even fewer lines but, since you spend the entire film wondering where he is, he actually dominates the entire movie. Lee apparently was quite contemptuous of the later Hammer Dracula films and, oddly enough, that obvious contempt is probably why, of all the Draculas there have been over the years, Lee’s version is the only one who was and is actually scary. F0rget all of that tortured soul and reluctant bloodsucker crap. Christopher Lee’s Dracula is obviously pissed off from the minute he first appears on-screen, the embodiment of pure destructive evil.  And, for whatever odd reason, the purity of his evil brings a sexual jolt to his interpretation of Dracula that those little Twilight vampires can only dream about. Even in a lesser films like Dracula A.D. 1972, Christopher Lee kicks some serious ass.
So, in conclusion, I really can’t call Dracula A.D. 1972 a good film nor can I really suggest that you should track down a copy of the DVD. I mean, I love this stuff and I still frequently found my mind wandering whenever Cushing or Lee wasn’t on-screen. However, it’s not a terrible movie to watch if you happen to find yourself trapped in the house by a mountain of snow.
Through the Shattered Lens 