A serial killer known as “The Avenger” is murdering blonde women in London (which, once again, proves that its better to be a redhead). And while nobody knows the identity of the Avenger, they do know that the enigmatic stranger (Ivor Novello), who has just recently rented a room at boarding house, happens to fit his description. They also know that the lodger’s landlord’s daughter happens to be a blonde…
Released in 1927, the silent The Lodger was Alfred Hitchcock’s third film but, according to the director, this was the first true “Hitchcock film.” Certainly it shows that even at the start of his career, Hitchcock’s famous obsessions were already present — the stranger accused of a crime, the blonde victims, and the link between sex and violence.
Also of note, the credited assistant director — Alma Reville — would become Alma Hitchcock shortly before The Lodger was released.
On tonight’s episode of One Step Beyond, fashion designer Karen Wadsworth (Joanne Linville) believes that she has the power to cause people to die just by wishing death upon them. Her psychiatrist tells her that this simply isn’t possible and then dares her to try one little test of her supposed powers.
This episode features a good performance by Joanne Linville and, if nothing else, it perhaps makes the case that we should be a little bit less quick to wish the worst upon other people. Just imagine all of the damage that Karen could have caused if she had ever set up a twitter account.
This episode originally aired on October 25th, 1960.
The Banana Splits Movie takes viewers behind the scenes of a children’s television show and shows us the sordid world that nobody knows about.
The stage manager is overworked. The new head of the network is a jerk. The star of the show is a drunk. The lovable Banana Splits, who play silly games and all play music instruments, are all actually robots who are looked down upon by their human coworkers. When Stevie (Richard White), the star of the show, learns that the show is being canceled, he makes the mistake of telling the robots and, before you know it, all Hell is breaking lose. People are getting stabbed to death with lollipops. Network executives are getting dismembered. One unfortunate person gets slammed in the head with a giant hammer. You gotta be careful who you piss off, folks. Robots are ruthless.
To me, the most shocking thing about The Banana Splits Movie was the discovery that it was based on an actual show. Apparently, the Banana Splits were real and they had their own show in the late 60s and early 70s. I’m going to guess that the Banana Splits were played by people in costumes as opposed to just being big robots. At least, I hope that’s the case because, after watching The Banana Splits Movie, I’m kind of over wanting anything to do with robots.
I will say this. If I imagine the characters from this movie not killing people, I can kinda understand why they would have their own TV show. I mean, they’re all really cute, except for when they’re covered in blood and brain matter. My personal favorite was Snorky, who was a big elephant and was a bit less murderous than the other three members of the Banana Splits. In fact, I have to admit that the film kind of left me feeling a little bit depressed because all of the robots are so cute that you really don’t want to see them murder people or get damaged themselves. The film actually does a pretty good job of contrasting the adorableness of the Banana Splits with the pain and carnage that they caused.
And make no doubt about it. There’s a lot of blood spilled in this movie. The Banana Splits are ruthless murderers and they don’t care how nice you are or if you paid money to see the show or if you’re just trying to make your daughter into a big star. If they see you, they’ll kill you. In fact, I have to admit that it sometimes got to be a bit too much for me. I got a little bit tired of all the violence but, at the same time, I also appreciated the film’s satiric intent. In a world gone mad, why wouldn’t the stars of a children’s TV show turn out to be a bunch of killer robots? When you think about all of the once beloved celebrities that have fallen from grace over the past 10 years, it makes an odd sort of sense.
Anyway, The Banana Splits Movie is well made splatter film with a satiric vein running through all blood and guts. It was a bit much for me but I respected it for sticking to its subversive premise and I do think it will be appreciated by a lot of other horror fans and pop culture fanatics.
I’m just hoping that the sequel features more Snorky.
Anyone who is a fan of Italian exploitation films will knows the name and the face of actor David Warbeck. Warbeck was the handsome, rugged, and surprisingly likable New Zealand-born actor who went from studying at London’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts to appearing in films that were directed by everyone from Russ Meyer to Antonio Margheritti to Lucio Fulci. He played a small but pivotal roles in Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dynamite and then went on to star in The Beyond, The Black Cat, The Last Hunter, Rat Man, and so many others. While his films may never have been critical favorites at the time of their release (though several have been positively reevaluated), Warbeck’s movie did well enough at the box office that he was even considered for the role of James Bond, Warbeck was one of those actors who was consistently good, regardless of the quality of the film in which he was appearing.
Sadly, Warbeck passed away in 1997, before many of his films were rediscovered. It’s a shame because — as the commentary track that he and Catriona MacColl recorded for The Beyond shows — he was a charming raconteur who had a way with a story. Fortunately, in 1996, Warbeck did sit down and gave a lengthy interview to Jason J. Slater, in which he discussed his career and shared many anecdotes about his life as an international exploitation superstar. That interview is at the center of a short but interesting book called David Warbeck: The Man And His Movies.
The book not only features the interview with Warbeck but it also takes a detailed look at his filmography, reviewing some of his more interesting (and, in some cases, infamous) films. The reviews are well-written by people who obviously love these often underappreciated films.
If you’re a fan of Italian exploitation, this book is simply a must-have. Admittedly, it’s not an easy book to find. I ordered a copy off of Amazon and it wasn’t cheap. But it was worth it!
That line is actually from another Jean Rollin film, Requiem for Vampire, but it also perfectly sums up the plot of his 1973 masterpiece, The Iron Rose.
A man (Hugues Quester) meets a woman (Francoise Pascal) at a wedding party. They agree to go on a date, one which includes a railway station, a picnic, bicycling, and finally a walk that leads to a seemingly deserted cemetery. On what seems to be a whim, the two of them enter the cemetery. The woman seems to be fascinated with the place. The man is dismissive, saying that funerals are an expensive, waste of time. The woman believes that there is something after death. The man is cynical, saying that once you’re dead, you’re dead. As any couple would do after having a theological conversation, the two of them enter a crypt and make love.
While they’re busy making love, we discover that there actually are others in the cemetery. There’s a clown that places flowers on a grave. There’s a mysterious man who has been watching the couple as they walk among the graves. (In the credits the man is called “Le vampire,” though he never actually does anything in the film that would indicate that he’s a bloodsucker.) And then there’s the old woman who, as night falls, promptly closes the cemetery gates.
When the man and the woman emerge from the crypt, they discover that they are trapped. There’s no way to open the gate and there’s no way to get out of the cemetery. The two of them start to walk around, searching for either an exit or, at the very least, some sort of shelter for the night. As they walk, strange things start to happen and we’re forced to reconsider our previous assumptions about not only the man and the woman but also the cemetery itself. Did they enter the cemetery on a whim or did one of them specifically lead in the other? As the night progresses, the feeling of impending doom only grows. It all leads to a rather macabre fate for one of our lovers and a dance among the tombstones for another.
The Iron Rose is one of Jean Rollin’s best films and, sadly, it’s also one of his most unjustly obscure. Even by the standards of Rollin’s early vampire films, The Iron Rose is a surreal film, one that is far more interested in creating a haunting atmosphere than in telling a traditional story. What is the real reason that leads to the man and the woman entering the cemetery? The Iron Rose is full of hints but, for most part, it’s left to the audience to answer that question for themselves. The film’s haunting final scenes force us to reconsider everything that we previously assumed by the characters and their actions. Are they obsessed with love or are they just in love with death? There are no easy answers.
Obviously, a 90-minute film about two people walking around a cemetery is going to have some slow spots but, in this case, those occasional moments just add to the film’s ennui-drenched atmosphere. As filmed by Rollin, the cemetery becomes as important a character as both the man and the woman and a reminder that the present is always going to be tied to the past. The Iron Rose is Rollin at his dream-like best.
One of the best (and scariest) zombie films of all time came to us from Hammer Studios.
The 1966 film, The Plague of the Zombies, takes place in a small, fog-filled English village. The village has been hit by a plague, one that is wiping out all of the inhabitants. Unable to combat or even diagnose the mysterious illness, Dr. Peter Tomlinson (Brook Williams) calls in his friend, Sir James Forbes (Andre Morrill) for help. Sir James arrives with his daughter, Sylvia (Diane Clare) and suggests that the graves of the recently deceased should be dug up so that he can examine the bodies himself.
Sounds like a reasonable idea, right? There’s only one problem. ALL OF THE COFFINS ARE EMPTY! Now, before anyone asks, they weren’t empty when they went into the ground. There were dead bodies in them when they were originally buried. But now the coffins are empty, the bodies are missing, and that can mean only one thing — ZOMBIES!
And since this is a Hammer film, that also means that a squire is to blame! Seriously, if there’s anything that I’ve learned from watching British horror films, it is to never trust a squire. Squires always seem to end up practicing some sort of black magic. In this case, Squire Clive Hamilton (Jack Carson) has just returned from Haiti, where he apparently spent some time researching the art of zombie creation. Squire Hamilton has a tin mine to manage and undead workers are apparently far less demanding than living workers.
(Of course, today, Squire Hamilton could have just automated the mine and brought in robot workers, who would probably be even less demanding than zombie workers. In fact, with the march of progress, there may soon be no need for zombie workers at all.)
This is a Hammer film so, needless to say, Sylvia eventually gets kidnapped and it’s up to Dr. Tomlinson and Sir James to put an end to the Squire’s evil plans before Sylvia is transformed into a zombie herself. That’s not going to be as easy as it seems, because there’s zombies everywhere!
The Plague of the Zombies is one of Hammer’s best films and it’s also one of the few that, even to a modern viewer, remains frightening. The village is a wonderfully atmospheric location, mixing all of the usual gothic tropes that we’ve come to expect with Hammer films with a very real feeling of decay. Even before the whole zombie plague started, one gets the feeling that the village was already dying a slow, economic death. The tin mine may be the only way to keep the village alive but, at the same time, killing the village is also the only way to keep the tin mine open. The Plague of the Zombies is a moody and rather sad film, one that has a bit more on its mind than just supplying the usual Hammer combination of cleavage and blood.
Speaking of blood, Plague of the Zombies has one of the scariest zombie scenes of all time, in which one of our heroes finds himself wandering through a mist-covered cemetery while the dead rise around him. At one point, he literally steps over a pool of blood. Of course, the scene itself turns out to be a dream but it’s still effectively frightening. Also frightening are the zombies themselves, with their pasty, decaying flesh and their blankly hostile faces. It has been suggested that Plague of the Zombies was an influence on Romero’s Night of the Living Dead and you can definitely see that in its portrayal of the zombies as being a threat not because they’re fast but because they’re so relentless and pitiless.
The Plague of the Zombies is one of the best Hammer films out there so watch it this Halloween!
Today’s horror on the lens comes to us from 1924! In Dante’s Inferno, a businessman visualizes Dante’s trip to Hell while little realizing that his behavior is going to lead him to the same destination.
There’s a lot different prints of this film floating around. The original version ran for 60 minutes. The version below was a 49-minute version that was released on VHS. At the time of its release, it’s vision of Hell was considered to be so frightening and definitive that clips of this film were actually used in other films that depict Hell. In fact, Ken Russell used clips from this film in 1980 to depict a drug-induced hallucination in the film, Altered States.
The quality of the upload is not the best (again, largely because it was taken from an old VHS tape) and it’s impossible not to cringe at the character of the butler (whose portrayal, sadly, is typical of how African-Americans were regularly portrayed in films up until the 1960s) but this is still a bit of cinematic history.
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, around 2 in the morning on Saturday, you were having trouble getting to sleep, you could have turned over to Cinemax and watched the 2005 film, Elektra.
Elektra (Jennifer Garner) used to be dead but now she’s alive again. She was killed during the 2003 film, Daredevil, but, two years later, she was resurrected by a blind martial artist named Stick (Terence Stamp). Stick taught her how to not only fight but also how see into the future, which I guess is helpful if you have to decide whether or not to throw one of those little knife things at someone. (As you can tell, I’m definitely the expert when it comes to martial arts and ninja assassins.)
Elektra uses her training to become the world’s most deadly assassin, which is probably not what Stick had intended but what’s he gong to do, right? However, when Elektra is ordered to kill a totally hot guy and his 13 year-old daughter, she starts to have doubts about whether or not being a murderer-for-hire is really for her. And can you blame her? Not only do you not get to make many friends but I imagine that you’re also constantly having to buy new arrows for your crossbow and that has to get expensive at some point.
So, Elektra decides not to kill the hot guy or his daughter but it tuns out that an evil group of ninjas called The Hand are determined to kill the guy anyway and apparently his daughter is perhaps destined to maintain the balance between the forces of good and evil. (Don’t ask me, I didn’t write the script.) Elektra has to take it upon herself to defeat the Hand and hopefully ensure that the hot guy’s daughter gets to enjoy her adolescence without having to worry about balancing killing people with school work.
Elektra was released with a lot of fanfare back in 2005. It didn’t do particularly well at the box office, which apparently led to Marvel getting into their head that no one would pay money to see a comic book film with a female hero. (This belief was disproven 12 years later, with Wonder Woman.) Today, in the wake of the MCU and whatever DC calls their cinematic universe, Elektra feels almost like a relic. It’s a film that lacks of the self-awareness of the later comic book films but it also never matches them in their scope or their ability to make us feel as if we’ve entered into a separate, fully functioning universe. Elektra is from the age when comic book movie didn’t want to admit that they were comic book movies.
It’s a silly film but, at the same time, it can be kind of fun if you’re in a particularly undemanding mood. Watching it last night, I was shocked to be reminded of the fact that there was a time when Jennifer Garner actually kicked serious ass. The fight scenes are fun to watch, mostly because it’s a woman who gets to beat everyone up. The dialogue is fun to listen to because it’s all so terribly written. (All of the bad guys refer to the title character as being, “the female, Elektra!,” as if it was felt that there was some sort of danger of the audience forgetting who the star of the film was.) It’s an enjoyably dumb movie, which makes it perfect for insomnia-fueled viewing.
Through the Shattered Lens