“Man is a feeling creature, and because of it, the greatest in the universe….”
Hell yeah! You tell ’em, Peter Graves!
In 1956’s It Conquered The World. Graves plays a scientist who watches in horror as his small town and all of the people who he loves and works with are taken over by an alien. Rival scientist Lee Van Cleef thinks that the alien is going to make the world a better place but Graves understands that a world without individual freedom isn’t one that’s worth living in.
This is one of Corman’s most entertaining films, featuring not only Graves and Van Cleef but also the great Beverly Garland. Like many horror and science fiction films of the 50s, it’s subtext is one of anti-collectivism. Depending on your politics, you could view the film as either a criticism of communism or McCarthyism. Watching the film today, with its scenes of the police and the other towns people hunting anyone who fails to conform or follow orders, it’s hard not to see the excesses of the COVID era.
Of course, there’s also a very persuasive argument to be made that maybe we shouldn’t worry too much about subtext and we should just enjoy the film as a 50s B-movie that was directed with the Corman touch.
Regardless of how interpret the film, I defy anyone not to smile at the sight of ultra-serious Peter Graves riding his bicycle from one location to another.
Here, for your viewing pleasure, is It Conquered The World!
Whenever it’s time to share this film for Horrorthon, I have a little story that I like to tell:
Enter singing.
Little Shop.…Little Shop of Horrors.…Little Shop.…Little Shop of Terrors….
When I was 19 years old, I was in a community theater production of the musical Little Shop of Horrors. Though I think I would have made the perfect Audrey, everybody always snickered whenever I sang so I ended up as a part of “the ensemble.” Being in the ensemble basically meant that I spent a lot of time dancing and showing off lots of cleavage. And you know what? The girl who did play Audrey was screechy, off-key, and annoying and after every show, all the old people in the audience always came back stage and ignored her and went straight over to me. So there.
Anyway, during rehearsals, our director thought it would be so funny if we all watched the original film. Now, I’m sorry to say, much like just about everyone else in the cast, this was my first exposure to the original and I even had to be told that the masochistic dentist patient was being played by Jack Nicholson. However, I’m also very proud to say that — out of that entire cast — I’m the only one who understood that the zero-budget film I was watching was actually better than the big spectacle we were attempting to perform on stage. Certainly, I understood the film better than that screechy little thing that was playing Audrey.
The first Little Shop of Horrors certainly isn’t scary and there’s nobody singing about somewhere that’s green (I always tear up when I hear that song, by the way). However, it is a very, very funny film with the just the right amount of a dark streak to make it perfect Halloween viewing.
So, if you have 72 minutes to kill, check out the original and the best Little Shop of Horrors….
Today’s horror scene that I love comes from 1935’s Bride of Frankenstein!
In this scene, directed by James Whale, the Monster (Boris Karloff) meets his first friend, a blind hermit played by O.P. Heggie. It’s a scene that features Karloff at his best and it’s still touching, even if it is kind of hard to watch it without thinking about Peter Boyle accidentally burning down Gene Hackman’s shack in Young Frankenstein.
2021’s The Order of Rights tells the story of two teenagers.
Emma Stein (Emma Elle Roberts) is artistic and creative and we know this because she’s working the lights for the current high school theater production. I have to say that I did a lot of high school theater and I always really disliked having to deal with the members of the backstage crew, They were always worried about something. Whenever I was waiting to make my entrance, I always knew some crew person was going to wander up and start talking to me about the lighting cues. And I would just be like, “Just make sure I look good.” Wow, that was mean of me. I feel kind of bad now.
Anyway, back to the movie….
Ethan (Ben Davies) is a jock. When know he’s a jock because he always wears his baseball cap backwards. For Ethan and Emma it’s love at first sight. Ethan is also a Christian and he feels really guilty after he and Emma give into temptation and have sex. He feels even more guilty after Emma informs him that she’s pregnant.
Ethan talks to his parents (Matthew Welling and Julie Silcott). They tell him that, before he was born, they found themselves in a similar situation. They weren’t married at the time so Ethan’s mother decided to have an abortion. They have always felt that they made a mistake. When they learn that Emma’s mother is pressuring Emma to get an abortion, they hire a lawyer (Richard Cutting) to file a civil case against Emma, claiming that Emma is denying her baby its rights under the 14th amendment.
The case becomes national news. We get a montage of real-life conservative podcasters and talk show hosts discussing the case. The second half of the movie takes place almost exclusively in the court room and if you enjoy scenes of people saying, “Objection!” and a judge replying with “Overruled,” rest assured that this film is full of them. Each side is given a chance to make its case. That said, it’s hard not to notice that Ethan’s lawyer is extremely earnest while Emma’s lawyer is extremely smug.
Much like One Nation Under God, this is a film that was largely made to annoy liberals and, judging from the reviews left on Letterboxd, it certainly managed to do that. It’s really not any more heavy-handed than most mainstream movies about abortion. It’s just, in this case, the film comes at things from the pro-life point of view as opposed to the pro-choice point of view. It’s a film that’s full of awkward scenes and there are quite a few performances that don’t work, especially during the film’s first half. The actors playing Emma’s theater friends offer up some of the worst line readings that I’ve ever heard. That said, Emma Elle Roberts probably gives a better performance than the film deserves and, regardless of what else you may want to say about the movie, it doesn’t turn Emma into a cardboard villain. In the end, one feels very sorry for her as both sides are just using her pregnancy to push their own agenda.
This film was released in 2021. A year later, Roe v Wade was overturned, making The Order of Rights feel very dated indeed.
In 1996’s DNA, Mark Dacascos plays Dr. Ash Matteley, an American doctor who works to bring healthcare to the residents of Borneo. When Ash’s former boss, Dr. Carl Wessinger (Jürgen Prochnow), approaches Ash and invites him to take part in a jungle expedition to track down some beetles whose genetic material can cure all known diseases, Ash agrees. However, once Wessinger, Ash, and their native helpers find the beetles in an ancient tomb, it turns out that Wessinger has plans of his own. He shoots Ash in the shoulder and then makes his escape.
Two years later, Ash has long hair and he’s taken to wearing a Hawaiian shirt, but he’s still dedicated to taking care of the poor of Borneo. When CIA agent Claire Sommers (Robin McKee) approaches him and asks him to help lead her through the jungle, Ash says that he’s not interested. But when Sommers reveals that she’s looking for Wessinger, Ash realizes that he has no choice but to help her. For some reason, they take a child named Matzu with them. Why you would recruit a child for a dangerous mission that involves going upriver in a canoe, I’m not sure. Then again, I’m also not sure why Claire would wear a dress while exploring the jungle either, other than the fact that the film needed an excuse to have Ash look away and then sneak a peek while Claire undresses and changes into something more jungle-appropriate.
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Dr. Wessinger has not been spending his time trying to cure all known diseases. Instead, he’s been splicing genetic material to try to bring an ancient creature back to life. Now, before you say that this sounds like a Jurassic Park rip-off, allow me to point out that Wessinger is not bringing back a dinosaur. Instead, he’s bringing back a big alien creature, one that perhaps crashed on Earth during the prehistoric age. This is not Jurassic Park. At most, it’s Jurassic Alien.
Or maybe it’s just Alien. Once Ash and Claire and the little kid make it inside Dr. Wessinger’s headquarters, there are a lot of scenes of people hiding in offices and nervously walking down hallways and hoping that the monster won’t jump out of nowhere and kill them.
Then again, maybe we should just call this movie Predator because eventually, the action moves back into the jungle and Ash finds himself being stalked by the alien, who is apparently a very good hunter and who lives for the hunt. Ash goes from being a hippie doctor to being a full-blown action hero. There’s even a scene where he and Claire and the kid have to run away from a crashing helicopter. Of course, the helicopter was obviously a model. Still, it was hard not to imagine Mark Dacascos saying, “Get away from da choppah!”
My point is that a lot of different DNA was spliced together to create this movie. Take a little from Indiana Jones and a little from Apocalypse Now and then toss in Alien, Predator, and Jurassic Park and you’ve got DNA. Unfortunately, the film still isn’t as entertaining as it should have been. Mark Dacascos barely gets to show off his martial arts skills while the film can’t even give us one good Jürgen Prochnow freak-out. Even with all of the shameless plagiarism, the film still feels like it’s just going through the motions. Sadly, DNA is never as much fun as it should have been.
Why am I supposed to care about this woman? Ok, she lives alone and she ordered food. Maybe, the guy delivered the food to the inside of her house. But how? She was at the door and there was no way he could’ve gotten past her and she didn’t have headphones on.
Is he a ghost delivery driver? If so, score! No tip! I’m not tipping a dead guy and neither should you. I think that I’m going to review AI again because people are really disappointing me!
In Italy, a young boy named Giacomo Gallo can only hide under a bed as he witnesses his mother being stabbed to death by an English horn. He doesn’t see the murderer, who is believed to be a serial killer known as The Dwarf Killer due to his short stature. All he can remember for sure is the blood and a strange hissing sound. Detective Ulisse Moretti (Max von Sydow) promises Giacomo that he will capture the Dwarf Killer.
Twenty years later, Moretti is retired. He never caught the Dwarf Killer, whose killing spree ended just as abruptly as it began. However, when a sex worker named Angela (Barbara Lerici) is brutally murdered on a train, there is evidence that indicates the Dwarf Killer has returned. Moretti comes out of retirement, determined to close the one case that he never solved. Unfortunately, it’s going to be difficult because Moretti’s memory is failing. As he puts it at one point, there are times when he can’t even remember his late wife’s face. Moretti has forgotten much about the case, though as he investigates, it all starts to come back to him. Moretti finds himself working with the now grown-up Giacomo (Stefano Dionisi), who hopes to finally capture the man who killed his mother. And while Moretti may be struggling to remember the past and Giacomo still isn’t quite sure what he saw while hiding under the bed, it soon becomes clear that the killer remembers both of them.
After the disappointingly mean-spirited Phantom of the Opera, Sleepless was a return to form for Dario Argento. The film is a giallo and, in typical Argento fashion, the mystery involves not just the physical clues but also how people interpret and edit their own memories. The hiss that Giacomo heard turns out to be not what he originally believed. The killer also turns out to be something even more disturbing than what the police originally assumed. At the heart of the mystery is a rather morbid nursery verse, the sort of thing that can be either innocent or dangerous depending on how one interprets the words. Sleepless is a throwback to the type of films that made Mario Bava famous and also the type of films with which Argento started his directorial career. Max von Sydow’s Moretti is not just a detective. He’s also a symbol of an aging genre, a reminder of the clever mysteries that shed blood with style without ever losing their essential humanity.
Argento has often been criticized for not getting particularly complex performances from his actors. I don’t think that criticism is always fair. One need only see David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi in Deep Red or Jessica Harper in Suspiria to see what Argento can do with the right cast. In Sleepless, Max von Sydow gives a strong performance as Moretti. In fact, it’s probably one of the best performances to have ever appeared in an Argento film. He plays Moretti as being a kindly man on a mission, someone who has seen the worst that the world has to offer but who hasn’t given up his soul. Von Sydow gives us someone who we truly care about, which makes the film’s set pieces (which are bloody even by Argento standards) all the more effective.
It’s become a bit of a cliché to claim that Argento went into a decline after Tenebrae. While it’s true that Argento’s post-Opera films have been uneven, Sleepless shows what he was still capable of producing.
I had not heard of TOO SCARED TO SCREAM when I came across it the other day on Tubi, but there were a few things that caught my interest. First, it had some cool artwork on the poster, which my fellow TSL contributor Erin has highlighted on the site before during Horror-Thon past. Next, I saw that one of the leads was Ian McShane. He’s been around for a long time, but I didn’t really discover his work until I got wrapped up in his excellent characterization of Al Swearengen in the HBO series DEADWOOD. This was a chance to fill in some of his back catalog. And probably one of the more interesting aspects of the film to me is the fact that it’s directed by the actor Tony Lo Bianco (THE HONEYMOON KILLERS, THE FRENCH CONNECTION, THE SEVEN-UPS). This is the only movie he would direct, so I needed to see it!
Lieutenant Alex Dinardo (Mike Connors) is investigating a series of knife murders at the upscale Royal Towers high-rise apartment building in New York City. One of the building’s doormen, the odd and theatrical Vincent Hardwick (Ian McShane), quickly becomes a person of interest. Dinardo brings in undercover cop Kate Bridges (Anne Archer) to help with the investigation, going so far as renting a room at the Royal Towers. As the victims continue piling up, the story gives us a variety of strange and suspicious characters, along with enough twists and turns to keep things moving.
I must admit that it’s been a blast discovering so many movies during this year’s Horror-Thon that have slipped past my radar over the years. Of course, sometimes you find a hidden gem, and other times you find a movie that seems to have fallen by the wayside for good reason. TOO SCARED TO SCREAM falls somewhere in between, but I’m glad I watched it. It has some interesting elements for sure, but it’s also a strange, oddball of a film. Its pacing is slow at times, and the opening credits theme song got my attention for all the wrong reasons. However, I did enjoy the combination of police procedural and slasher movie. Charles Bronson may have done it better around the same time in TEN TO MIDNIGHT, but there was still something nice about seeing veteran TV star Mike Connors (MANNIX) on the case. Another thing this had in common with the Bronson slasher is some impressive nudity! There’s a scene in a sauna that any red-blooded American male should enjoy!
And what a cast this movie has! I’ve mentioned before that one of the things I love most about movies is watching actors I enjoy. This is filled with so many familiar faces. Honestly, the show MANNIX was a little before my time, as I was only 2 when it ended its run, but I still enjoyed seeing Connors and being able to appreciate him really for the first time. My guess is that the character he plays here is a lot like Joe Mannix. Ian McShane seems to be having a lot of fun. His character is very strange, but the actor goes all in, and his performance gives the movie some personality. Anne Archer has always had that ability to portray tough and smart, and her character here has that in abundance. To those leads, you can add even more flavor with actors like Leon Isaac Kennedy (LONE WOLF MCQUADE), Maureen O’Sullivan (THE TALL T), Murray Hamilton (JAWS), Val Avery (LOVE AND BULLETS), and even John Heard (HOME ALONE), with each actor taking me back to memories of movies past.
One of the more interesting aspects of watching this film is that it feels very much like watching an 80’s television show until the clothes start coming off or the blood starts flowing. We see the murders, watch the matter-of-fact investigation, meet the suspects, and at the end the killer is revealed. I’m not very good at guessing who the killers are in movies, and I certainly would not have gotten this one. I’ll be honest, I’m not sure the ending would stand up to the scrutiny of a rewatch, but it actually made me smile in its absurdity.
TOO SCARED TO SCREAM isn’t a great movie, and there’s probably a legitimate reason that it’s not very well known or remembered these days. However, with its oddball mix of the 80s slasher film and TV police procedural, I still had a good time with it, especially when you consider the game cast of actors that pop up throughout the film. Part of our joy in movies comes from discovering them at the right time. I may or may not ever watch this one again, but this year, it was a fun part of my October.
In 1944’s One Body Too Many, Jack Haley stars as Albert L. Tuttle. Tuttle is an insurance agent. He’s a rather mild-mannered one. In fact, people often have a hard time remembering his name. He’s called “Mr. Turtle.” He’s called “Mr. Title.” Patiently, he explains over and over again that his name is Tuttle. Looking to secure his job, Tuttle hopes to sell $200,000 in life insurance to an eccentric millionaire named Cyrus J. Rutherford.
What Tuttle doesn’t know is that Cyrus J. Rutherford has recently died. His entire greedy family and all of his servants have gathered at the Rutherford Mansion so that they can hear the reading of the will. In his will, Rutherford lays out all the reasons why he didn’t like his family or anyone who worked for him. He accuses the butler, Merkil (Bela Lugosi), of padding his expense account. He accuses his lawyer (Bernard Nedell) of always trying to take advantage of him. Rutherford writes that his last request is that his body be placed in a glass-domed vault so that the stars can forever shine down upon his face. He says that anyone who leaves the house before the glass vault is built will lose their inheritance. If the body is buried instead of in the vault, then Rutherford’s largest beneficiaries will instead become his smallest beneficiaries and vice versa. It’s a bit of an odd will, to be honest. I’m not particularly sure that it would stand up in court today, but in 1944, eccentric millionaires could pretty much do whatever they wanted. Myself, I have to applaud Rutherford for messing with everyone even after death. That takes determination.
When Tuttle shows up, the family mistakes him for a detective that has been sent to make sure that Rutherford’s body isn’t stolen before the glass dome is constructed. Tuttle, not picking up on how weird this all is, assumes that the family is just really excited about insurance. When Tuttle finds himself locked in with the dead body, he immediately demands to leave. However, since the real detective has failed to show up, Rutherford’s niece, Carol (Jean Parker), asks him to stay and guard the body. A good Tuttle appears on one of Tuttle’s shoulders while a bad Tuttle appears on the other. After listening to the debate, Tuttle decides to stay if only because Carol is attractive.
It’s going to be a long night, though. Not only does the body disappear, but it appears that there is a murderer in the house!
One Body Too Many is an amiable comedy, one that features a very 1940s mix of absurd dialogue and slapstick humor. Though Jack Haley, who is best-remembered for playing the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, is the lead and a very likable one at that, the movie is pretty much stolen by Bela Lugosi. Lugosi’s later films tend to be a mixed bag, but One Body Too Many allows Lugosi to give a good and genuinely funny performance as a butler who is far more clever than anyone realizes. Lugosi’s snarky reactions make the film, and they’re a nice reminder that Lugosi was a far more talented actor than he’s often given credit for.
