This scene that I love comes from the classic 1931 horror film, Frankenstein. In this poignant scene, Frankenstein’s Monster (Boris Karloff) meets young Maria. Maria is the first human to treat the Monster with true kindness. Unfortunately, the Monster does not understand that, unlike flower petals, Maria does not float.
This scene features Karloff at his absolute best!
Today’s Horror on the Lens comes to use from 1980. In Death Ship, a cruise ship collides with a mysterious black freighter. When the survivors board the freighter, they discover that it appears to be deserted. But is it really? As the survivors explore, they start to suspect that they might not be alone. Even worse, the already unstable captain (George Kennedy) starts to hear a mysterious German voice, encouraging him to kill everyone else and stay on the freighter forever.
It’s kinda like The Shining, except it takes place on a boat and it’s not as good.
But then again, very few horror films are as good as The Shining! Death Ship is an enjoyably pulpy exercise in ghostly horror and it can actually be quite scary, especially if you have an obsessive fear of drowning, like I do!
Plus, George Kennedy really puts his heart and soul into being possessed.
Watch Death Ship below!
Let’s continue our look at Horror on TV with another classic episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer! Just as yesterday’s episode focused on a supporting character (Xander), this episode focuses on Willow!
I was going to say that Doppelgangland was one of my favorite episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer but then I realized that everyone would probably say that. This is an episode that truly shows why countless fans continue to love the show after all these years.
“Murder is fun and doesn’t cost a thing!”
So says aging stand up comedian Norman (Marvin W. Schwartz). Though we don’t learn much about Norman’s background, it’s obvious that he’s been pursuing his career for a while and he has yet to achieve much in the way of success. With his dark suit, gray hair, and sarcastic delivery, he really does seem like he should be working in a cheap casino or a Catskills resort or maybe on a cruise ship.
But then you hear his act and you discover that he spends most of his time talking about how better the world would be if we just killed each other. At one point, he even mentions that he’s working on a new act in which he’ll basically order the people in the audience to kill anyone sitting near them. Eventually, he offends the wrong person and he’s told that he’ll no longer be allowed to perform at the local comedy club. Norman replies by saying that the club’s owner probably would have hated Lenny Bruce as well.
And so Norman wanders around New York City. He talks to a fellow comedian and notes that Jack the Ripper only killed five people but yet he’s had more books written about him than any president. Everyone that Norman talks to nods along, humoring him. It’s the same basic approach that Peter Boyle took to Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver and look how well that turned out.
Eventually, still wearing his black suit, Norman tries to play in the park. For a few minutes, Norman is actually enjoying himself. Of course, this is when Norman has a heart attack and nearly dies. Norman, who dreams so much of being famous, is forced to consider his own mortality.
And, while all this is going on, Norman also finds the time to brutally murder 11 people. That’s right. Norman’s a serial killer. If he can’t find fame as a stand-up comedian, he’ll find fame as a murderer. However, as Norman discovers, even killers have to struggle to get the recognition they think they deserve. Norman’s comedy is ignored and his crimes are only listed in the back pages…
I Hate You was released in 2004 and has been included in several box sets. (I saw it as a part of the same Decrepit Crypt Of Nightmares box set that included Burning Dead and Dead 7.) It’s a low-budget film that really doesn’t go anywhere but I have to admit that I actually liked it. Marvin W. Schwartz (who also co-wrote the script) gives a good performance as Norman and the movie, which is shot in wonderful black-and-white, provides a lot of wonderful shots of New York City.
Plus, it’s barely an hour long! So, right when you’re getting tired of it, it ends. That’s a lesson that many movies could stand to learn from I Hate You.
“This is no dream! This is really happening!”
— Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) in Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Yes, Rosemary, it is.
The classic 1968 horror movie Rosemary’s Baby is probably best remembered for a lengthy and wonderfully surreal “dream” sequence in which naive newlywed Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow) is raped by the Devil while a bunch of naked old people stand around her and chant. At one point, she sees her husband, Guy (John Cassavetes), saying that she’s awake and that she knows what’s going on. Their neighbor, Minnie Castevet (Ruth Gordon), tells him that Rosemary can’t hear anything and that it’s like she’s dead and then snaps at him, “Now, sing!” It’s a great sequence, one of the greatest of Roman Polanski’s career, a perfect blending of horror and dark comedy.
For me, the most interesting part of that dream sequence comes at the start. Rosemary envisions herself naked on a boat and, as she tries to cover herself, who is sitting next to her? None other than John F. Kennedy! Suddenly, Rosemary is wearing a bikini and she’s relaxing out on the deck with a glamorous group of people who I assume were meant to be Kennedy relatives. As the boat leaves the dock, Rosemary sees that her friend and protector, Hutch (Maurice Evans), is standing on the dock.
“Isn’t Hutch coming with us?” Rosemary asks.
“Catholics only,” John F. Kennedy hisses in that famous accent, “I’m afraid we are bound by these prejudices.”
“I understand,” a dazed Rosemary replies.
And it’s a wonderful little moment, though I have to wonder if I’d react as strong if my own background wasn’t Irish Catholic. But still, there’s something so wonderfully subversive about a bunch of elderly Satanists pretending to be the Kennedys.
And really, Rosemary’s Baby is a wonderfully subversive film. I imagine it was even more subversive when it was first released back in 1968. It’s been ripped off and imitated so many times that it has undoubtedly lost some of its impact. (That’s one reason why I wish I had a time machine, so I could go back in the past and see it was truly like to see a classic film for the first time.) But still, 47 years after it was initially released, Rosemary’s Baby is still a surprisingly effective horror film.
The film opens with newlyweds Rosemary and Guy moving into the Bramford, an exclusive New York apartment building. Guy is an actor who, despite having appeared in two off-Broadway shows (one of which was entitled Nobody Likes An Albatross and really, that is so true) and a few motorcycle commercials, is still waiting for his big break. There are hints that, before she married Guy, Rosemary had a very active and interesting life (when we briefly meet her old friends, they all seem to be a lot more exciting than boring old Guy) but, when we meet her, Rosemary appears to have happily settled into a life of domesticity.
Life at the Bramford is strange. For one thing, Guy and Rosemary appear to be the only young people living in the entire building. (There is a young woman named Terry but she ends up jumping out of a window.) The Woodhouses befriend elderly Minnie Castevet and her husband, Roman (Sidney Blackmer.) Roman claims to have traveled all over the world and embarrasses the Catholic Rosemary by criticizing the Pope. Minnie, meanwhile, is the noisiest person in the world. Guy makes fun of both of them and, yet, he still decides to spend his free time with Roman.
One day, Guy gets a role that he had previously lost. Why? Because another actor is struck by a sudden case of blindness. Shortly afterward, Rosemary has her “dream.” She wakes up and discovers that her body is covered with red scratches. Guy claims that he had sex with her while she was asleep and promises to cut his fingernails.
Soon, Rosemary is pregnant but the Castevets insist that she use their doctor, the firm and sinister Dr. Saperstein (Ralph Bellamy, who just 8 year earlier had played FDR in Sunrise at Campobello). Rosemary knows that something is wrong with the baby but she can’t get anyone to listen to her. It all leads to one of the best and most iconic endings in the history of horror cinema.
Rosemary’s Baby is a classic of fear and paranoia and it holds up surprisingly well. See it this October, whether you’re Catholic or not.
(However, do not see the needless 2014 remake. Seriously, what the Hell was up with that?)
(By the way, is anyone else amazed that I made it through this entire review without making a single joke about either Ronan Farrow or Mia’s lame Sharknado live tweet? I am shocked.)
Sisters of Death, which is included in a countless number of Mill Creek box sets, is not necessarily the greatest film ever made but it is a personal favorite of mine.
This 1977 film opens with a very baroque sorority initiation that ends with one of the sisters being killed in a game of Russian Roulette. A few years later, the surviving sisters are invited to an isolated and lavish estate where it turns out that the dead girl’s father (well-played by Arthur Franz) is looking for revenge. This film is predictable and a lot of the plot depends on people refusing to use any common sense but Sisters of Death is such a fun little melodrama that I can’t complain too much. The film plays out like a surprisingly violent Lifetime movie and it has one of those wonderfully cynical 1970s endings.
Enjoy!
OH MY GOD, IT’S BUFFY!
I love Buffy The Vampire Slayer and it’s always bothered me that I haven’t been able to share any episodes on this site. But, fortunately, this Halloween, Hulu has come to the rescue!
The Zeppo is one of my favorite episodes. While Buffy and the Scooby Gang save the world in the background, Xander (Nicholas Brendon) finally gets an adventure of his very own! Actually, there’s a lot of things that Xander finally gets to do in this wonderful episode!
(On a personal note, it breaks my heart whenever I read about Nicholas Brendon getting arrested and I’m reminded that Xander was just a fictional character.)
Seriously, enjoy Buffy the Vampire Slayer!
Many years ago, a teenager named Jim Reed was one of the few people to survive a fire that burned down the entire town of Maxwell and killed nearly the entire population, including his parents. As you might guess, even after he grows up, Jim has some issues. He feels tremendous guilt. He has nightmares. He feels he’s responsible for the deaths of thousands. And even worse, he can’t really remember how the fire started or why. All he knows is that he keeps seeing terribly burned people and they all keep telling him that it’s all his fault.
After spending years just drifting, an adult Jim (played by D. Vincent Ashby) returns to the town of Maxwell. It’s been rebuilt and, amazingly enough, there seems to be next to no sign that it was ever the site of a huge apocalyptic fire. (I suspect this has more to do with the film’s budgetary limitations than anything else.) He ends up staying with his brother and occasionally, he seems to be possessed by some unseen force. (For example, there’s the time that he wanders into his nephew’s bedroom while wielding a hammer.) Jim meets his ex-girlfriend Shelly and an old friend named Bill. And, through it all, he continues to have visions of horribly burned zombies telling him that everything is all his fault…
It’s always tempting to get snarky when talking about a movie like 2004’s Burning Dead. This is a microbudget film that was obviously made with a largely amateur cast, the majority of whom are quite stiff as they deliver their overdramatic dialogue. Yes, it would be easy to make fun of Burning Dead but you know what? For what it is, it’s not that bad. It’s a horror film that had a lot of interesting ideas but not the budget to really execute them. But there are films with huge budgets that have absolutely no interesting ideas. Ridicule the limitations of Burning Dead if you must but, as far as I’m concerned, the filmmakers deserve some credit for trying to create something more than just your standard low-budget zombie film.
Add to that, I am an admirer of the stoned nonchalance of D. Vincent Ashby’s lead performance. It may be a the result of a lifetime of trauma but Jim, at times, seems to be one of the most mellow in protagonists in the history of horror cinema. No matter what he’s confronting or explaining, Jim retains the same casual attitude.
My favorite moment in the film came when Bill asked Jim if his parents lost anything in the fire.
“Their lives,” Jim replies with a slight shrug.
Obviously, Burning Dead is not the easiest of films to find. It’s included in the Decrepit Crypt of Nightmares Boxset and that’s where I found it.
(One final bit of trivia: according to his imdb page, director George Demick previously played a zombie in George Romero’s Day of the Dead.)
D. Vincent Ashby considers Burning Dead.
Though it seems that he’ll never get the credit that he truly deserves, Italian director Mario Bava was truly one of the most influential and important filmmakers of all time. While he spent most of his long career making genre films, Bava was also an artist who put his own unique stamp on the horror film and whose influence continues to be felt in film today. With Blood and Black Lace, Bava helped to launch the entire giallo genre and every slasher film that has ever been made owes a debt to Bava’s Bay of Blood. While Bava’s final work as a director, 1977′s Shock, may not be as well-known as some of his other films, it’s one of his best works and it’s certainly worthy to be listed with the rest of Bava’s oeuvre.
Shock is a haunted house film. Dora (played by the great Daria Nicolodi) is a mentally fragile woman who is still in the process of recovering emotionally from the suicide of her first husband. When Dora marries Bruno, an apparently well-meaning airline pilot (but he’s played by John Steiner and anyone who loves Italian exploitation knows that it’s always dangerous when Steiner shows up as a sympathetic character), it briefly appears that Dora’s life might be getting back on the right track.
Except, of course, for the fact that, whenever Bruno leaves the house, Dora gets the feeling that she’s not alone. Things fall off of shelves. A razor blade suddenly shows up hidden between the keys of a piano. Worst of all, her young son Marco (David Collin, Jr.) starts to act differently. When he’s not sneaking into the master bedroom and using a kitchen knife to chop up Dora’s underwear, Marco is doing things like aggressively wrestling with his mother and cutting Bruno out of all the family pictures.
Dora quickly becomes convinced that the spirit of her first husband is both haunting the house and possessing young Marco. Bruno, meanwhile, worries that Dora may be having another nervous breakdown. As for Marco, he’s busy spying on Bruno and Dora while they’re sleeping and calling them dirty names under his breath…
The plot of Shock will probably not shock anyone who has seen a haunted house film but one doesn’t really watch a Bava film for its plot. With a Bava film, the story is never quite as important as the way that Bava tells it. Working in the years before CGI, Bava was a master at creating special effects that were cheap, simple, and ultimately very effective and that’s what Bava does here. In perhaps the film’s most effective (and famous) moment, Marco seems to transform into Carlo right before our eyes. It’s pretty easy to figure out how Bava achieved the effect but that doesn’t make it any less of a frightening moment.
However, the main reason that this film works is because of Daria Nicolodi. Bava was never known for being a great director of actors but, for this film, he managed to capture one of the best performances in the history of horror cinema. In the role of Dora, Nicolodi is like an exposed nerve. It’s impossible not to sympathize with her, even if you’re never quite sure just how sane or insane that she may actually be. Watching Nicolodi’s performance in this film, it’s hard not to regret that, in the years to come, her talent would be so overshadowed by both her former boyfriend Dario Argento and their daughter, Asia.
By all accounts, Mario Bava was in failing health during the making of Shock (and perhaps that’s why he showed so much empathy for the similarly frail Dora) and he was aided, in the making of the film, by his son Lamberto Bava (who would later become a well-known horror director himself). Sadly, Mario Bava died three years after completing Shock and the film has never quite gotten the amount of attention that it deserves. Shock is a worthy end to a brilliant career.
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.
4 Shots From 4 Films
Messiah of Evil (1973, directed by Willard Huyck and Gloria Katz)
Burial Ground (1981, directed by Andrea Bianchi)
Happy Birthday To Me (1981, directed by J. Lee Thompson)
Zombie Lake (1981, directed by Jean Rollin)
Through the Shattered Lens 