4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films is all about letting the visuals do the talking.
This October, I am going to be using our 4 Shots From 4 Films feature to pay tribute to some of my favorite horror directors, in alphabetical order! That’s right, we’re going from Argento to Zombie in one month!
Today’s director is Freddie Francis. Though Francis may be best remembered as a cinematographer (who worked on three David Lynch films), he was also a director who did memorable work for both Hammer and Amicus in the 60s and 70s.
4 Shots From 4 Films
The Evil of Frankenstein (1963, dir by Freddie Francis)
Torture Garden (1967, dir by Freddie Francis)
Dracula Has Risen From The Grave (1968, dir by Freddie Francis)
This week’s edition was inspired by watching TCM Underground last night. In fact, the last two trailers features are for the two films that I watched.
Abby (1974)
This film was also released under the title Black Exorcist. Warner Bros. actually brought suit against Abby, claiming that it was such an obvious rip-off of The Exorcist that it should not be allowed to play in theaters. Warner Bros. actually won their suit but not before Abby made a lot of money.
2. Sugar Hill (1974)
Sugar Hill is a popular film here at the Shattered Lens. Check out the reviews from both Arleigh and Gary! And be sure to watch the trailer.
3. Blackenstein (1973)
Blackenstein is one of those titles that sounds like it has to be a parody but no, it’s a real movie. There’s even a trailer to prove it.
4. Dr. Black, Mr. Hyde (1976)
Again, the title might sound like a parody but this is a very real film and, from what I’ve read, apparently a rather highly-regarded one as well. This is on my list of films to see, though I have a feeling that Gary will probably beat me to it.
5. Blacula (1972)
From William Crain, the director of Dr. Black and My Hyde…
And starring William Marshall, the star of Abby…
It’s Blacula! This is the first film that I watched on TCM Underground and it’s a legitimate classic. Check out Gary’s review here! And watch the trailer below:
6. Scream, Blacula, Scream (1973)
Of course, any successful film is going to get an inferior sequel. This was also the second movie that I watched on TCM Underground last night.
Directed in a dream-like fashion by Herk Harvey (who also directed several of the educational short films that I’ve occasionally shared on this site, including Cheating, The Show-Off, andThe Gossip), Carnival of Souls tells the story of Mary (Candace Hilligoss) who, after a car accident, finds herself haunted by visions of ghostly figures. Independently produced and distributed, Carnival of Souls did not get much attention when it was originally released but it is now generally acknowledged as a horror classic. Reportedly, David Lynch loves this movie and, when you watch it, you’ll be able to see why!
It’s October. It’s 16 more days ’til Halloween. It’s time to watch Carnival of Souls!
What’s an Insomnia File? You know how some times you just can’t get any sleep and, at about three in the morning, you’ll find yourself watching whatever you can find on cable? This feature is all about those insomnia-inspired discoveries!
If, on Saturday you were having trouble sleeping at three in the morning, you could have turned on TCM and watched the 1969 film, The Arrangement.
The Arrangement is one of those films where a rich guy gets hit by a sudden case of ennui and, as a result, spends the entire movie acting like a jackass. However, as often happens in films like this, The Arrangement makes sure that we understand that it’s not the guy’s fault. Instead, it’s his wife’s fault for not being as much fun as his mistress.
In this case, the guy is an ad executive who goes by the name of Eddie Anderson (Kirk Douglas). His original name was Evangelos Arness but he changed his name when he was younger because he apparently didn’t want anyone to know that he came from a Greek family. When we first meet Eddie, he’s attempting to commit suicide by driving his car into an 18 wheeler. If he had died, the movie could have ended quickly. However, since Eddie survived, the audience is now required to spend two hours watching Eddie as he tries to figure out what it all means.
Eddie’s father (Richard Boone) is dying. His long-suffering wife (Deborah Kerr) just doesn’t understand that Eddie needs more than a big house and a nice pool to feel like a man. Eddie’s mistress is Gwen (Faye Dunaway), whose new baby may or may not be Eddie’s. Who could blame Eddie, the film demands to know, for being disillusioned with his comfortable life?
The Arrangement was one of the last films to be directed by Elia Kazan, who was a big deal in the 40s and the 50s and whose goal with The Arrangement was apparently to prove that he should still have been a big deal in the 60s and 70s. Kazan’s way of doing this is to fill The Arrangement with all types of tricks that were designed to make young filmgoers say, “Man, that Eliza Kazan may be old but he’s one of us!”
Freeze frames? Kazan’s got them! Flashback after flashback? Kazan spreads them all throughout the movie, even when they don’t really have anything to show us. Scenes where the action is sped up for no identifiable reason? Just watch Kirk Douglas trot down that hallway! Rack focus shots? Zoom shots? A scene where the young Kirk Douglas argues with the old Kirk Douglas? Casual nudity that’s still filmed in such a way that it feels oddly reticent, as if the filmmaker was just including it to try to establish his rebel credentials? The Arrangement has it all!
It also has a lot of close-ups of Kirk Douglas. In far too many scenes, he’s just sitting around with this blank look on his face and it doesn’t quite work because, as an actor, Douglas has never exactly come across as the type to get trapped in an existential crisis. We’re supposed to view Kirk as being depressed and conflicted but, in all of his films, Kirk has always come across as someone who hasn’t known a day of insecurity in his entire life.
There are also a few scenes of Kirk just laughing and laughing. For some reason, movies in the late 60s and early 70s always seemed to feature at least a handful of closeups of people laughing uncontrollably. I’m not sure why. (If you want to see the most extreme example of this, check out Getting Straight.) These scenes are always kind of annoying because there’s only so much time you can spend watching someone laugh at the absurdity of it all before you want them to just close their damn mouth. Especially when the person in question is a middle-aged man. I mean, shouldn’t have Kirk figured out that the world is absurd before his 50th birthday?
Anyway, The Arrangement is a pretentious mess. Of course, most films from the 60s are pretentious. The problem with The Arrangement is that it’s also boring. If you’re going to be pretentious, at least have some fun with it, like The Graduate did. The Arrangement goes on forever and it’s never quite as profound as it seems to think that it is. I once read a short story that a former friend of mine wrote. She explained that writing the story had caused her to realize that, the longer you know someone, the more likely your initial impression of that person is going to change. “You had to write an entire short story to figure that out?” I replied. (That’s one reason why she’s a former friend.) But that’s kind of how The Arrangement is. For all the drama and the technique and the pretension, it has nothing to teach us that we shouldn’t already know.
Today’s horror scene that I love comes from the 1957 British film, Night of the Demon.
This is one of those films that deserves to be better known than it actually is. Directed by Jacques Tourneur, this is a moody and intelligent horror film, one that’s full of atmosphere and features a surprisingly effective demon. Reportedly, Tourneur didn’t want to show the actual demon in the film but he was overruled by the film’s producers. Typically, I usually side with the directors whenever it comes to stories of behind-the-scenes conflict but, in this case, I think the film actually works better with the demon as an actual physical presence.
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films is all about letting the visuals do the talking.
This October, I am going to be using our 4 Shots From 4 Films feature to pay tribute to some of my favorite horror directors, in alphabetical order! That’s right, we’re going from Argento to Zombie in one month!
Today’s director: one of the masters of Hammer horror, Terence Fisher!
4 Shots From 4 Films
The Curse of Frankenstein (1957, dir by Terence Fisher)
The Horror of Dracula (1958, dir by Terence Fisher)
For today’s horror on the Shattered Lens, we have 1980’s Without Warning.
In this horror/sci-fi hybrid, humans are hunted by an alien hunter who uses a variety of weapons and … what was that? No, we’re not watching Predator. We’re watching Without Warning. For the record, Without Warning and Predator may have almost exactly the same plot but Without Warning came out long before Predator.
(Interestingly enough, Kevin Peter Hall played the intergalactic hunter in both films.)
Anyway, Without Warning is probably the best film that Greydon Clark ever directed. Some would say that’s not saying much but seriously, Without Warning is a surprisingly effective film. It also has a large cast of guest stars, the majority of whom are killed off within minutes of their first appearance. That alien takes no prisoners! (I especially feel sorry for the cub scouts.)
Of course, the main characters are four teenagers. One of them is played by David Caruso, which I have to admit amuses me to no end.
As our longtime readers know, I’ve seen my share of stupid movies but it’s hard for me to think of any recent film that’s quite as dumb as Rings.
It’s a shame, really. Rings, which came out in February of this year, is the second sequel to The Ring. Despite the fact that it’s been imitated by a countless number of inferior rip-offs and the film’s central premise of evil traveling through a VHS tape has become dated, The Ring actually holds up pretty well. But, Rings just does not work.
It should be said that Rings gets off to a good and chilling start, with passengers on an airplane asking if they’ve heard about “the tape that can kill you” and then Samara Morgan (Bonnie Morgan) suddenly appearing on every screen in the plane. It’s the film’s way of declaring, “Just because VHS tapes are a thing of the past, that’s not going to stop our Samara!” It’s a good opening but it’s also only five minutes and it’s followed by a “two years later…” title card.
Spoiler alert: two years later, everything goes down hill and the movie gets stupid.
The main plot of Rings deals with Holt (Alex Roe) and Julia (Matilda Lutz, who looks and sounds like Ellen Page but isn’t Ellen Page). They’re teenagers in love and when Holt leaves for college, they promise to skype each other every night. However, one night, Julia sits down in front of her laptop and discovers that Holt is not in his dorm room. Instead, there’s a woman demanding to know where Holt is.
HOLT HAS DISAPPEARED!
Julia goes to the college to find her boyfriend. She discovers that Holt has fallen in with a professor (Johnny Galecki) who apparently watched the infamous video tape. In order to avoid dying, the professor showed the tape to one of his students. And then he had that student find someone else to watch the tape and so on and so forth. I kept waiting for someone to ask the professor why he was ripping off It Follows but, apparently, no one at the college has ever seen a horror film.
Anyway, Holt has yet to force anyone to watch the video tape and he’s running out of time. In order to save her boyfriend’s life, Julia watched the video. Oddly, we don’t really get to see much of the video in Rings. I’m going to assume that the filmmakers felt that it would be pointless to show the whole video again since, presumably, the everyone in the audience has seen either The Ring or The Ring 2 or maybe even Ringu. But seriously, this is a Ring movie. Not showing the entire video without interruption feels almost disrespectful to the audience. It’s kind of like making a Friday the 13th movie and then refusing to actually show us Jason killing any of the counselors.
Anyway, after she watches the video, a weird symbol appears on Julia’s hand and somehow, all of this leads to Holt and Julia going to the town of Sacrament Valley, which is where Samara was buried after she was retrieved from that well at the end of the first Ring. Julia and Holt do some investigating, which basically means talking to a bunch of overacting character actors with inconsistent Southern accents. The film spends the majority of its time filling in Samara’s backstory, which is kind of pointless since we learned everything that we needed to know about Samara during the first two films. It’s enough to know that she’s a little girl who can pop out of your TV and kill you. She doesn’t really need the Ancestry DNA treatment that she gets from Rings.
Vincent D’Onofrio appears as a reclusive blind man, who might be the key to figuring out whatever’s supposed to be going on. D’Onofrio gives a performance that makes his work on Law and Order: Criminal Intent look subtle and nuanced. Normally, I wouldn’t mind an actor going over the top in a film like this but there’s nothing surprising about D’Onofrio’s character. Even when his big secret was revealed, I shrugged.
Rings is one of those worst movies of 2017, featuring bad acting, bad direction, and totally wasting whatever potential the franchise had left. The dialogue was so bad and the characters were so inconsistent that the movie actually made me angry. It doesn’t even work as a self-reflective parody.
For the sins of Rings, we all deserve to watch this:
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films is all about letting the visuals do the talking.
This October, I am going to be using our 4 Shots From 4 Films feature to pay tribute to some of my favorite horror directors, in alphabetical order! That’s right, we’re going from Argento to Zombie in one month!
Through the Shattered Lens 