For today’s horror on the lens, we have 1942’s The Undying Monster!
It tells the story of the Hammonds, a noble British family who, for centuries, have been haunted by suicide, murder, and rumors of a curse. When a mysterious creature attack Oliver Hammond, Scotland Yard dispatches a scientist to figure out what’s going on. Perhaps not surprisingly, the local villagers insist that it’s the curse. The scientist, however, is convinced that it has to be something else…
Clocking in at 63 minutes and made on an obviously low budget, The Undying Monster is actually pretty good. Director John Brahm emphasizes shadows and darkness, taking an almost film noir approach to this tale of gothic horror. The Undying Monster is a hidden gem of 40s horror and here it is!
That sure is an interesting poster, isn’t it? The poster for Color Me Blood Red pretty much screams grindhouse and if you didn’t already know that this 1965 film was directed by Herschell Gordon Lewis and produced by David Friedman, you’d be able to guess just from looking at it. My favorite part of the poster is the promise that Color Me Blood Red is “drenched in crimson color.”
There’s a lot of blood in Color Me Blood Red. In fact, it’s a movie about blood. Adam Sorg (played by Gordon Oas-Heim, who I’m going to guess was not a professional actor because, otherwise, why wouldn’t he have changed his name to Gordon O?) is a painter who hasn’t had much success. Sure, he has a house on the beach and he has a girlfriend named Gigi (Elyn Warner) who is willing to model for him but one thing that Adam doesn’t have is respect. No one wants to buy his paintings! Could it be because Adam is living in a city full of Philistines? That’s what Adam seems to believe but I think a far bigger problem is the fact that Adam is not a very good painter. His paintings are cartoonish and his use of color is more than a little dull. However, after Gigi cuts her finger and bleeds all over one of his canvases, Adam discovers that he has now found the perfect shade of red!
So, he decides to paint with blood. Unfortunately, Gigi doesn’t want to give him any more of her blood. So, Adam decides to open his own veins and use his own blood but he faints before he can finish his latest masterpiece. What is Adam to do? Well, he can always kill Gigi and use her blood. And, of course, there’s always a fresh supply of teenagers showing up on the beach…
What’s sad about all this is that, even after Adam discovers that blood is the perfect shade of red, he’s still not a very good painter. Believe me, I understand. I majored in Art History. The majority of my friends are artists. Some paint, some write, some take pictures. Believe me — I get it. We all go through that phase where we fool ourselves into thinking that undeveloped talent, lazy thinking, and lack of ability is the same thing as having a unique vision that is destined to be unappreciated. But most artists either eventually find their own voice or they give up by the time they turn 28. Adam, on the other hand, is a middle-aged guy who is still acting like a student in an Intro to Graphic Design class. What I’m saying is that blood is useless without a unique vision. The perfect shade of red isn’t going to help if you still don’t have your own voice.
Then again, maybe I’m taking the film too seriously.
And really, that’s something you should never do when you’re reviewing a Herschell Gordon Lewis film. Color Me Blood Red was the third part of Lewis’s blood trilogy but, unfortunately, it’s never quite as effective or memorable as either Blood Fest or Two Thousand Maniacs. As silly as certain parts of the film may be, Blood Feast‘s gore still has the power to shock. Two Thousand Maniacs is pure nightmare fuel. Color Me Blood Red, meanwhile, is kind of bland. It feels more like a successor to The Undertaker and His Palsthan Blood Feast.
That said, the film is worth watching for some of the dialogue. The entire film is full of campy lines, the majority of which are so strange that they give the proceedings an almost dream-like feel.
“Dig that crazy driftwood!” someone says upon spotting a corpse in the water.
“You mean the type who earn an honest living painting houses?” someone else says when asked for his opinion on artists.
And, of course, there’s my favorite line: “HOLY BANANAS! It’s a girl’s leg!”
Color Me Blood Red is the least essential entry in the blood trilogy but, if you’re a Lewis/Friedman completist, you know you’re going to have to watch it. So, you might as well sit back and enjoy it for the frequently silly little movie that it is.
“History shows again and again, how nature points out the folly of man”-
“Godzilla” by Blue Oyster Cult
Let’s kick off this year’s “Halloween Havoc” with the Grandaddy of kaiju eiga, GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS. The Big G first hit Japanese movie screens in 1954, and made its way to American shores two years later in a reedited version with new narrative footage. I’ve only seen the Americanized interpretation, so I can’t comment on Inoshiro Honda’s original vision, but I do enjoy this film a lot more than the endless, silly sequels that ensued. I’d go as far as saying GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS is one of the best sci-fi flicks of the 50’s, one that’s influence looms like Big G’s shadow even today.
We start with a familiar sight: Tokyo in ruins, “a smoldering memorial to the unknown”! American reporter Steve Martin (played by Raymond Burr, not the “wild and…
The name inspires a lot of reactions. Some people will tell you that Dario Argento is one of the greatest directors of all time. Some people regularly cite him as being a prime example of an artist who hit his peak too early and who has spent the latter part of his career imitating his previous successes. Some people will tell you that his films are dangerous. He’s one of those directors whose films always seem to end up getting banned in certain communities. Other cineastes will always praise him as a superior stylist whose influence is still felt to this very day. Argento’s films have inspired thousands of horror filmmakers. His films have also inspired a countless number of viewers to fall in love with horror. Without the influence of Argento the horror genre would be not only less interesting but less profitable as well.
Myself, I’m a huge Argento fan. Yes, I do love Suspiria but then again, everyone love Suspiria. I have also made it a point to track down and watch the forgotten and/or critically reviled Argento films, like Trauma and The Phantom of the Opera. My love of Argento is so strong that I usually even find myself enjoying his less acclaimed work as much as his acknowledged triumphs. He is one of the masters of horror, a true maestro of Italian art. For the longest time, I’ve been meaning to watch and review all 21 of Argento’s cinematic thrillers. (Sadly, his one non-thriller, The Four Days, is notoriously difficult to see.) With this being October, I figured why not now?
Dario Argento made his directorial debut in 1970 with The Bird With The Crystal Plumage. Before directing his first movie, Argento had been a film critic and a screenwriter. (Among other credits, he is listed as being one of the writers of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West. Interestingly enough, his co-writer was another future director, Bernardo Bertolucci.) With his very first film as a director, Argento established himself as a master of both suspense and horror.
I have seen some reviews that have identified The Bird With The Crystal Plumage as being the first giallo film. That’s not at all true. If anything, the credit for directing the first giallo should probably go to Mario Bava (who directed The Girl Who Knew Too Much in 1964) and some students of Italian cinema would even disagree with that. However, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage undoubtedly did a lot to popularize the genre outside of Italy.
The film tells the story of Sam (Tony Musante) and his girlfriend, Julia (Suzy Kendall). Sam is a writer and he’s living in Rome. Argento is not traditionally known as an actor’s director but Musante and Kendall are both remarkably sympathetic in their roles and they seem to have a very real chemistry when they’re both on-screen together. You actually do care about them as a couple and you find yourself hoping that nothing bad happens to them. One thing that I liked was that their tiny apartment looked like it was someplace where a couple actually would live, love, and try to solve a murder. Looking at Sam and Julia in that apartment (which is decorated with a picture of Albert Einstein and a poster reading “Black Power!”), you get the feeling that they have an existence outside of what you’re seeing during the film’s 94 minute running time. They feel real.
Reportedly, Tony Musante and Argento did not have a great working relationship. (Mustante was a character actor who wanted to talk about motivation. Argento was more concerned with the technical aspects of shooting the film.) Mustante may have been miserable but that actually works for his character. When we first meet Sam, he’s frustrated because he’s suffering from writer’s block. He’s so frustrated that he’s on the verge of moving back to the United States. Sam’s frustration feels real and if that’s because Musante happened to be frustrated while shooting the film, so be it. Whatever works.
One night, Sam goes for a walk and witnesses a stabbing in an art gallery. Monica Ranieri (Eva Renzi) survives but it appears that her assailant has managed to escape. The police suspect that Sam might be more than just a witness so they confiscate his passport. Until the attacker is caught, Sam is stuck in Rome.
There’s a serial killer terrorizing Rome and both Sam and the police suspect that Monica nearly became the killer’s latest victim. Some of the film’s most unnerving sequences are shot from the point-of-view of the killer, a technique that both leaves the killer’s identity a secret and also makes the audience complicit in the murders. It’s as if Argento the film critic is daring the audience to consider why they’re watching what Argento the director is doing.
(And the murders in The Bird With The Crystal Plumage are brutal, even by the standards of Italian cinema. The first murder that we actually witness — which is usually referred to as being “the panty murder,” for reasons that I’m not going to freak myself out by describing — is pure and total nightmare fuel.)
Everything that you might expect to find in a giallo is present in The Bird With The Crystal Plumage. It may not have been the first but it’s definitely one of the prototypes for what the genre is usually considered to be. Graphic violence, sexual perversion, point-of-view shots, a constantly roaming camera, a dramatic musical score, a killer who wears black gloves and carries a razor, a witness who has to prove his innocence, and a solution that’s revealed only when Sam reexamines what he thinks he saw; it’s all here.
What distinguishes The Bird With The Crystal Plumage is the style with which Argento tells his story. Dario was 30 years old when he directed The Bird With The Crystal Plumage and there’s an infectious enthusiasm to the way he frames the mayhem. Like many film critics directing their first film, Argento fills his debut with homages to earlier films. You can tell he’s having a lot of fun while discovering just how far he can go without losing his audience.
46 years after it was first released, The Bird With The Crystal Plumage holds up surprisingly well. It’s a nightmarish but compulsively watchable thrill ride and it remains one of Argento’s best.
Hello and welcome to the start of TSL’s annual October horrorthon! All through the month of October, our focus will be on horror. We will be sharing reviews and thoughts on some of the best (and worst) horror films ever made! I have to admit that this is my favorite time of the year. I love horror … like all good people!
I want to start things off by taking a look at a film from 1945. The Picture of Dorian Gray is based on the famous novel by Oscar Wilde (a novel that some people think was inspired by the Jack the Ripper murders). Dorian Gray (played by Hurd Hatfield) is a young and handsome aristocrat who lives in 19th century London. When we first meet him, Dorian is intelligent, kind and virtuous. He’s also more than a little boring. He is the bland face of the establishment, a man destined to be celebrated for his position in society and largely forgotten after his death.
Dorian is posing for a painting that’s being done by his friend, an artist named Basil Hallward (Lowell Gilmore). One day, Lord Henry Wotton (George Sanders) stops by the studio while Basil is painting Dorian. Lord Henry is everything that Dorian Gray is not. He’s a worldly and cynical man and he is very proud to live a life devoted to complete and total hedonistic pleasure. He immediately sets out to corrupt Dorian and it turns out to be a lot easier than he was expecting. Henry convinces Dorian that he can have everything that he wants as long as he’s young and handsome. Dorian announces that he wishes the painting could age instead of him…
Now, here’s where the film takes a huge departure from Wilde’s novel. In the novel, the painting ages while Dorian stay young. No specific reason is given. Instead, it’s just something that happens. In the film, it turns out that Basil owns an ancient Egyptian statue and that the statue has mystical powers. Dorian makes his wish in front of the statue and that’s why the painting starts to age. Personally, I think the bit with the Egyptian statue is unnecessary and a little bit silly. To me, the story is a lot more effective if the painting starts to age without an explanation. The filmmakers obviously disagreed.
But no matter! In the end, the Egyptian statue isn’t that important. What is important that, freed from getting old or physically suffering for his actions, Dorian transforms into a different person. Soon, he’s even more hedonistic than Lord Henry. When he breaks the heart of a tragic singer named Sybil Vane (Angela Lansbury, in a poignant and Oscar-nominated performance), Dorian sees that the painting is now cruelly smirking while his own face remains innocent and untouched. When Dorian eventually commits a murder to keep his secret from getting out, the blood appears on the painting’s hands while his own remain clean.
And the years pass. Dorian finds himself both being hunted by Sybil’s brother (Richard Fraser) and falling in love with the niece (Donna Reed) of a man that he earlier murdered. Dorian never ages but his portrait becomes more and more twisted. What’s particularly interesting is that we see little of Dorian’s evil actions. Instead, we watch and listen as other characters whisper about the horrific things that he’s done. Physically, Dorian remains an innocent and young aristocrat. But all we have to do is look at the picture and we can see what a monster Dorian has become…
The Picture of Dorian Gray is an absolutely gorgeous film, one that is full of elaborate sets that are often cast in shadow. (It’s interesting to note that the more corrupt Dorian becomes, the darker and more shadowy his estate becomes.) The film is in black-and-white, with the exception of three scenes in which the portrait is revealed in all of its Technicolor glory. If that sounds like a gimmick … well, it is. But it’s an amazingly effective gimmick.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a classic exercise in psychological horror. See it the next chance you get!
Hi there and welcome to October! This is our favorite time of the year here at the Shattered Lens because October is horror month. For the past three years, we have celebrated every October by reviewing and showing some of our favorite horror movies, shows, books, and music. That’s a tradition that I’m looking forward to helping to continue this year.
Let’s start things off by watching the 1953 sci-fi “classic,” Robot Monster!
Yes, Robot Monster is the movie where a gorilla wearing a diving helmet terrorizes that last surviving humans on Earth. It also features some oddly placed dinosaur stock footage. But, that being said … Robot Monster is a lot of fun. There are few movies that have truly earned the “so bad that it’s good” label and Robot Monster is one of them.
Add to that, watching Robot Monster in October is kinda of a tradition in these parts!
Welcome to The Most Wonderful Time of the Year!!! It’s October- Horror Month!!! I will be reviewing many great and terrible films for your reading pleasure. My advice to you Gentle Readers: decorate your house, turn the lights down low, read my posts, like them, retweet them, tell your friends and family about them BECAUSE if you don’t demons will get you! Here we go!!!
I am watching a man have extreme explosive diarrhea and cough up furballs, when I think, some poor asshole paid to see this.
Escape From Tomorrow is a quasi horror film about a man on vacation with his family to Disneyworld and things go absurdly weird and boring. It’s black and white, which gives it a good eerie feel. It is, in fact, filmed entirely at Disney World and Disney Land. My expectations were raised- too bad for me.
The dad is fired in the first scene over the phone right before he takes his family to tour Disney World. Upon entering the monorail to the park, the dad ogles and passively stalks two girls. One of the ladies he ogles is Annet Mahendru – “Nina” – from The Americans and the other is a REALLY young lady. He ogles them both on the monorail, in line, and pretty much all over the park. His stalking is the only part of the movie that is moderately creepy and scary. At so many points in the show I thought, Dude, your children are right there! Gross!
They arrive at the most wonderful place on Earth to find people coughing. The dad goes on rides and hallucinates. You expect it to get scary and it fizzles out like a damp sparkler. Eventually the mom and dad go to different parts of the park and the Dad is left to stalk the two girls again, but he gets distracted and blacks out and wakes having sex with a woman who looks a lot like a sexy version of the wicked witch in Snow White – It’s weird. The story gets rapidly off the rails and you have to grab at plot points like wet tissue paper. There’s a “Cat Flu, a ridiculous scene inside of Epcot, and redneck in scooter; it’s truly nonsensical and dull. SNORE.
This is why the film fails to do anything but disappoint: he had done it- Randy Moore got into Disney and did pure guerilla filmmaking. However, he forgot to have one thing: a story. OOPS!!! Maybe he left the story at Universal Studios?! I hear the shark can really startle you on the tram! From written accounts, Moore was so worried that he would be sued, he edited the film in South Korea. What a waste of cash! Disney realized quickly what I did- the film sucks and isn’t worth the paper to file suit in Court.
There was ONE and ONLY one part of the film that was compelling. The dad had a drinking problem. He does drink …. A LOT, but the movie strays from that interesting plot point to go off on some boring surreal tangent. If the movie got away from the surreal bullshit and focused on the dad ruining his family and himself at Disney because of alcoholism, it would have been the most moving story about drinking since Leaving Las Vegas. Moore, however, squandered that great opportunity and will either learn from this mistake or go into Real Estate.
He did manage to film in Disney without anyone giving a shit, which is novel and a bit impressive. Also, I have to be stingy with my “As” and “Fs”. Therefore, I give
Let’s get it out of the way right now- SEX KITTENS GO TO COLLEGE is bad. Real bad. Like mind-numbingly bad. Despite the presence of sex kittens Mamie Van Doren and Tuesday Weld, this movie is a smelly litter box in desperate need of cleaning. It’s an Albert Zugsmith extravaganza, so you know right off the bat it’s gonna be a stinker. Zugsmith had once been a producer at Universal, overseeing prestige films like WRITTEN ON THE WIND and TOUCH OF EVIL. But when he went into independent productions, Zugsmith chose to go the low-budget exploitation route and even though he managed to attract some well-known names, his little epics usually stunk to high heaven.
The movie revolves around the talents of Mamie Van Doren, a beautiful creature whose best assets weren’t her acting. She plays Dr. Mathilda West, a genius hired to take over the science department at Collins College. Thinko, a supercomputer/robot type thing…
Gene Roddenberry’s post-STAR TREK career had pretty much gone down the tubes. The sci-fi series had been a money loser, and Roddenberry wasn’t getting many offers. Not wanting to be pigeonholed in the science fiction ghetto, he produced and wrote the screenplay for PRETTY MAIDS ALL IN A ROW, a black comedy skewering the sexual revolution, with French New Wave director Roger Vadim making his first American movie. The result was an uneven yet entertaining film that would never get the green light today with its theme of horny teachers having sex with horny high school students!
All-American hunk Rock Hudson was in the middle of a career crisis himself. After spending years as Doris Day’s paramour in a series of fluffy comedies, his box office clout was at an all-time low. Taking the role of Tiger McGrew, the guidance counselor/football coach whose dalliances with the cheerleading squad leads to murder…
Leon Alastray (Anthony Quinn) is an outlaw in 18th century Mexico who is given sanctuary and hidden from the Spanish authorities by a kindly priest, Father Joseph (Sam Jaffe). In return, Leon agrees to escort the priest to a peasant village that is under siege from the Yaqui Indians. During the journey, Joseph dies and when Leon arrives at the village, he is mistaken for the priest. Even though Leon’s an atheist and a womanizer, he pretends to be a man of God and tries to broker a peace with the Yaqui’s bloodthirsty leader, Golden Lance (Jaime Fernandez). Standing in the way is Teclo (Charles Bronson), a mestizo rebel who wants to keep the Spanish and the Yaqui at war.
Because it features a score by Ennio Morricone and co-stars Charles Bronson, Guns For San Sebastian is often mistakenly referred to as being a spaghetti western. Instead, it was a big budget American-French co-production that was filmed, on location, in Mexico. (The majority of spaghettis were filmed in Spain.) While revolution in Mexico was a popular backdrop for many spaghetti westerns, none of them were as sympathetic to the church or the government as Guns for San Sebastian. If Guns For San Sebastian were a true spaghetti western, Teclo would be the hero.
Guns For San Sebastian is an above average western that starts out slow but gets better as it approaches the exciting final battle between the villagers and Yaqui. Morricone provides another great and rousing score but the main reason to watch Guns For San Sebastian is to see Anthony Quinn and Charles Bronson, two legendary tough guys, acting opposite each other and competing to see who can be the most intimidating. In the movie, Quinn may win but you can still see the determined presence that led to Bronson becoming an unlikely movie star in the 70s.
Leon Alastray (Anthony Quinn) is an outlaw in 18th century Mexico who is given sanctuary and hidden from the Spanish authorities by a kindly priest, Father Joseph (Sam Jaffe). In return, Leon agrees to escort the priest to a peasant village that is under siege from the Yaqui Indians. During the journey, Joseph dies and when Leon arrives at the village, he is mistaken for the priest. Even though Leon’s an atheist and a womanizer, he pretends to be a man of God and tries to broker a peace with the Yaqui’s bloodthirsty leader, Golden Lance (Jaime Fernandez). Standing in the way is Teclo (Charles Bronson), a mestizo rebel who wants to keep the Spanish and the Yaqui at war.
