Me (2024, Don Hertzfeldt)

A Don Hertzfeldt dystopian jukebox musical? This made my heartbeat shift in a weird way. I’m going to try to stop thinking about it for the rest of the night, will revisit at a later date.


GUO4 (2019, Peter Strickland)

Montage of still photographs set to (good) pounding noise music. Nude male locker room wrestling? Filmed after In Fabric, a time when he was clearly going through some things.


Notes on Monstropedia (2017, Koji Yamamura)

I think it’s Edward Gorey with some Adult Swim thrown in, and inexplicable harpsichord music – either the combo isn’t working or the translation is off or it’s just not clever enough. A lesser work from the Mt. Head / Country Doctor animator.


The Curse of Dracular (2023, Jack Paterson)

Cute claymation retelling of the British Dracula movies as written by the director’s dad when he was nine. Worth it for the ending, when a five year-old says “don’t like you” and kills Dracular easily.


The Tell-Tale Heart (2008, Robert Eggers)

Ornate live-action movie with stop-motion tendencies, maybe Quay-inspired, and the rich old man played by a muppet. This movie loves clocks, and it’s right, clocks are cool. Shocking to hear spoken dialogue for the first time three-quarters through the film. The actual heartbeat part is very short, this guy is driven mad pretty easily. What is this “inspired by” credit when it’s a straight adaptation?


The Events at Mr. Yamamoto’s Alpine Residence (2015, Tilman Singer)

In a similar secluded fancy euro-house to the Cuckoo home, tennis girl opens a package unleashing a self-expanding white balloon that consumes everything. Everything I watch this weekend reminds me of The Prisoner. I don’t know that this was “any good” or “made sense” but it is fun to make and watch movies.


The House of the Plague (1979, Zlatko Pavlinic)

The plague is personified as a purple-eyed woman in mummy bandages. This is animation in a loose sense, drawings cross-faded. A woman coming home into town gets blackmailed into bringing the plague along. The plague-process images are cool but the movie’s main stylistic triumph is the rhyming (in Croatian) roboticized narrator.


Light, Noise, Smoke, and Light, Noise, Smoke (2023, Tomonari Nishikawa)

I’m glad this rhythmically edited montage of fireworks with a garbage soundtrack brought joy to the avant-garde cinephiles last year. Fireworks are cool, it’s true.

Watching this and Body Bags together, an anthology of anthologies, two horror kinda-features from the head and tail end of Tales From The Crypt‘s cable run.

We open with the segment by Romero, not in his prime era. It’s his least scary zombie movie, and this seems like a half-hour script padded out to an hour since the actors say everything at least twice. I get that they’re trying to modernize a Poe story, but without that Corman/Price flair it feels like a TV episode. “Sick stuff always turns out to be rich people.” Adrienne Barbeau (after her John Carpenter heyday) is keeping her rich husband alive long enough to transfer everything into her own name with help from her hypnotist boyfriend. Husband dies too soon, and they consider Weekend-at-Bernies-ing him but settle for tossing him in the basement freezer (my second frozen body of the week after Crimes of the Future). Since he died while hypnotized and is still responding to questions, the doctor has got an open channel to the afterlife, very exciting for him until the scared wife just shoots the zombie husband in the head. Two cops arrive at the rich guy’s house to investigate, then when the spirit of the zombie husband kills the hypnotist in his sleep the same two cops arrive at his hotel – there are only two cops in NYC. At least it’s fun that everyone here except Dr. Boyfriend was in Creepshow.

Dr. Boyfriend and his comatose patient:

Argento’s half opens with police photographer Usher (Harvey Keitel) shooting a woman who died by pendulum, this is more like it. Harvey’s wife brings home a cat, he kills it to photograph its death then when she rightly accuses him he attacks her in a mezcal rage then dreams of being sentenced to the Ga-ga pole treatment at a ren faire. Of course she knows he killed the cat because she finds the photo book he published of its murder, and when she brings home a new cat he kills his wife with a cleaver and bricks her up to rot within the walls. When yet another cat alerts visiting cops to the body Harvey kills them and then, as foretold by prophecy, accidentally hangs himself trying to escape out the window while handcuffed to a dead cop.

The cat’s distinctive mark:

Good cast – the landlords are from Psycho and The Seventh Victim, the wife’s music student from Maximum Overdrive, one cop is McDowell from Coming to America, and the hotgirl he meets at a bar is a Warholian who played “Diane Paine” in a sports slasher. Released the week after the Living Dead remake, with a cameo by Savini as a madman. It still feels like a Crypt episode, but a good one.

Usher’s wife, dream sequence version:

“That almost looks like an image from a Roger Corman Edgar Allen Poe movie” says the Messiah of Evil audio commentary the first time the lead girl gets to the beach. “Don’t mind if I do,” said I. This was the first of the Price/Poe movies, made the year after A Bucket of Blood, and the color is really nice but they didn’t have their groove down yet, it feels draggy and drawn-out.

Visitor Phil makes a poor first impression, throwing a fit over being asked to remove his shoes indoors, then insists he’s the fiancee of sickly Lenore and is taking her away with him. Her brother Vincent disagrees (a delicate shut-in, this must be the performance the Burton cartoon was based on). Vincent goes on to explain that all his ancestors were evil and so is the house itself, and anyway, whoops, Lenore just died. But the butler slips and mentions catalepsy, so Phil goes barging through the family catacombs trying to rescue his beloved. She’s either driven insane from being buried alive or just wants revenge on her gothy depressive brother, and they go up in flames together.

Ever since Tales of Terror I’m collecting shots of Price being throttled in front of fire:

Phil was Mark Damon, who went on to exec-produce Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, and Lenore would guest-star on TV’s Batman. The butler is Harry Ellerbe of The Haunted Palace, which also has Elisha Cook Jr., so could’ve been an equally smart double-feature with Messiah of Evil.

Phil, having a foggy dream that used up the movie’s entire dry ice budget:

Corman the year after The Intruder and Tales of Terror, same year as X, lightens things up with a very silly Poe comedy. Based on the opening poem and magician Vincent Price casually drawing with light in his living room, you don’t get a sense of the movie’s tone, but as soon as the raven transforms into Peter Lorre you know what you’re in for.

Adventurers Price, Lorre, and their kids Jack Nicholson and Olive Sturgess:

Rival magician Boris Karloff has got the traitor Lenore (Hazel Court), and speaking of traitors, Lorre has been sent to retrieve Price by claiming to be in trouble. There’s a henchman named Grimes; Price zaps his brains with magic finger-bolts. Lorre gets turned into goo during the ensuing magician’s duel, I think the kids survive, and Price goes back to his happy place: giving soliloquies to birds.

Price and the gang are all good but the real MVP is the trained raven:

Invocation (2013, Robert Morgan)

Robert Morgan is back, baby! Or rather I’m back at his vimeo, watching some recent-ish stuff. Incredible couple minutes here of meta-stop-motion. The animator bleeds into his camera, inadvertently causing the filmed frame images of his stuffed bear to become flesh, birthed from the camera, which then destroys the animator and stop-motion-animates the human body before the camera (and before the animator’s flesh-birthed in-camera avatar). Takes less time to watch than to explain. The actor-animator Robin King has made some intriguing-sounding shorts himself.


The Ossuary (1970, Jan Svankmajer)

Time to rewatch some ancient Jan Svanks which I’ve completely forgotten. He sets up the scene outdoors, then goes bananas when he gets inside this church made of bones. The photographer was alone, but the audio is a tour guide explaining it all to a group of unseen kids… one of whom is coughing incessantly in a confined space full of the bones of plague victims, argh. The tour is broken up the the sounds of a squeaky bicycle. Rating: 10 out of 10 bones.


The Fall of the House of Usher (1980, Jan Svankmajer)

A decade after the Ossuary but the same idea – Svank alone in an empty old place, no humans are seen as we hear dramatic stories on the audio. This time it’s a rushed narrator reading the wordy Poe story while Svank’s camera reels seasick around a house, and the objects inside are less ancient and precious, so the animators can destroy them in stop-motion (a hammer’s wood handle, and in the final seconds a stuffed raven) or cover the floor in mud and make fun patterns. Poor Usher apparently buries his sister alive then dies of shock in front of his narrator friend.


Belial’s Dream (2017, Robert Morgan)

“Belial, the deformed conjoined twin from the Basket Case series, has a strange dream.” More stop-mo monstrosities, this trounces the original movie.


Down to the Cellar (1983, Jan Svankmajer)

Girl goes to the cellar to get a basket of potatoes, but she’s haunted by a cat in the walls, self-propelled potatoes and shoes, and coal-obsessed basement-dwelling neighbors. She almost makes it back upstairs, too.


The Pendulum, the Pit, and Hope (1983, Jan Svankmajer)

Dual adaptation, stitching stories by different authors. First-person narrator is tied beneath the pendulum blade, frees himself by smearing delicious glop on the ropes for the rats to chew through, defeats the flaming clockwork demon walls from closing in and forcing him into the pit, flees down the halls and escapes through a hole to the outside, where he’s accosted by an evil monk.

Pendulum:


Tomorrow I Will Be Dirt (2019, Robert Morgan)

An authorized, stop-motion sequel to Jörg Buttgereit’s 1993 film Schramm. That is by the guy who made Nekromantik, so I never planned to watch it. The feature must end with Schramm dead, because this short follows his hellish afterlife, smashing himself in the face and dick with a hammer before getting eaten by a vagina dentata. Verdict: cool.


The Flat (1968, Jan Svankmajer)

A more pranksterish version of Pit/Pendulum/Hope, a man in an apartment full of traps, nothing as solid as it seems, trying to have a meal and a rest. One of Svank’s best live-action/stop-motion blends. Threatens derailment when a man enters with a chicken and a hatchet, but the chicken survives.


A Quiet Week in the House (1969, Jan Svankmajer)

Man is hiding, surveilling house, then breaks in with his equipment to spend the week, each day drilling a hole in a different spot and observing stop-motion antics.

1. screws escape from their candy wrappings to sit atop typewriter keys
2. sentient tongue grinds itself into bullet casings
3. wind-up bird eating beans causes the cabinetry to shit in revolt
4. pigeons fly into offscreen shredder, feathering a chair
5. suit jacket siphons water from potted plant then pisses itself
6. spool of wire picks lock to cabinet of body parts and winds itself horribly around them

Then the man wires the six holes with dynamite, sets a timer and runs for the hills. Technically, his segments have amateur-looking editing and projector noise, like he’s being followed by a guerrilla crew. The six animation pieces have weirdly blended frames, like someone screwed up their pulldown settings in handbrake, and that someone may well have been me.

The Day of Destruction (2020, Toshiaki Toyoda)

A movie shot quickly in 2020, in which a masked woman screams that we’re all dying and can’t even hold funerals. A man pays his way into a closed mine, walks for a very long time, music only appearing as periodic blasts of static, looks at the epidemic-causing monster for ten seconds then turns around. We hear unconfirmed rumors of a Masque situation, the rich waiting out the plague together in an estate. But it’s an arthouse punk movie, and instead of going anyplace narrative it stays slow and philosophical. Issey Ogata (emperor of The Sun) appears, and I recognized the professor from Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. Some good percussion on the soundtrack almost saves the movie, not quite.


The Tell-Tale Heart (1941, Jules Dassin)

Sorry to say I prefer the 1950’s animated version, the 2005 animated version, and the expressionist version all over this one. Dassin’s film debut is pretty good, with some cool lighting and camera moves, but the cinema is rich with Tell-Tale Hearts, and the 1940’s were the least frightening decade in the movies, unless you count the newsreels. Joseph Schildkraut (an oscar winner a few years before) isn’t even tormented by the evil vulture eye of the old man (Roman Bohnen, later Ingrid Bergman’s uncle in Joan of Arc), he’s just unstable and tired of being told what to do by such a miserable geezer, and he’s a terrible liar when the cops come around.


Metrograph ran a series of very average old-timey holiday shorts…

The Cuckoo Murder Case (1930, Ub Iwerks)

One of those cartoons where every single object is anthropomorphized, all swaying to the rhythm of the score. Detective Flip The Frog is on the case of a murdered cuckoo. I think Flip escapes into hell at the end but I’ll have to watch the sequel to be sure.


KoKo’s Haunted House (1928, Dave Fleischer)

KoKo sends his dog into the haunted house, too chicken to go himself. Primitive silent animation, with plenty of ghosts – some frantic out-of-the-inkwell stop-motion saves it at the end.


Betty Boop’s Hallowe’en Party (1933, Dave Fleischer)

Oh, I last watched this short from Clay’s collection at the Plaza. Those were good times.


The Haunted Ship (1930, Bailey & Davis & Foster)

A couple of dumbasses flying a tiny plane tempt fate until fate sinks them, so they explore a haunted ship on the sea floor. Hard to return to something this primitive after the Boop. I thought the sync sound would be limited to sound effects until a barbershop quartet of drunken turtles sang Sweet Adeline


Pete’s Haunted House (1926, Walter Lantz)

Cheeseball animator who puts on a suit to work from home keeps a cartoon dog in a model house in his office, sadistically torments the dog every chance he gets. The dog discovers the plot and blows the man to bits, good ending at least.


The Cobweb Hotel (1936, Dave Fleischer)

A fly hotel run by a spider, uh oh. Champion fighter fly and his equally strong wife bust it up and free the fly-prisoners. Pretty inventive. Our print was pink.


Felix the Cat Switches Witches (1927, Otto Mesmer)

After being a total dick and pranking everyone around, Felix gets his fortune told and learns he’ll marry and have a bunch of kids, but his bride is a horrible witch. Naw, it’s a hot girl cat in a witch costume.


Bold King Cole (1936, Burt Gillett)

Felix is just trying to get inside from a thunderstorm, ends up at Old King Cole’s castle. The King is a loudmouth braggart, and the castle ghosts have chosen this night to torment him for it. Felix harnesses the lightning to rescue the king. I was rooting for the ghosts.


The Garden (2019, Patrick Müller)

Real 60’s 8mm-looking film of Savannah trees (reminded me of Charleston, which we’ve visited more recently) with a spoken Lovecraft poem. A nice breather after the cartoons.


The Pit and the Pendulum (1964, Alexandre Astruc)

Back to the classics – this is our third Pendulum on the blog, sticking closer to the original Poe story since the Stuart Gordon and the Roger Corman added whole plots to expand out to feature length. This is the mid-60’s version of arthouse slow cinema, entranced narrator speaking the story we see playing out with Maurice Ronet (star of The Fire Within) alone in the torture chamber. His great idea with minutes left to live is to have the rats chew through his ropes – I’d think that would take longer, but it works. The walls close in to force him into the pit, then they stop short, because just then, at that moment, the 350-year reign of the Spanish Inquisition ends. So it’s pretty much just as narratively suspect as the Stuart Gordon, but nice and short. Astruc was a pre-Cahiers auteurist known for his blandly-titled feature Une Vie.

My third Poe/Corman/Price movie of the month, and not counting the ending of Pit and the Pendulum when he psychotically turns into his Inquisition-torturer father, it’s the first time Price has gotten to be truly evil. He is all kinds of evil here, a Satanist who lets almost everyone in the nearby village die of plague then has the survivors shot, who cheers when his party guests are murdered, and entertains himself by letting a girl choose whether her father or her lover will be killed.

So much death in this one that it’s hard to keep track of whether the young lovers survive – maybe they don’t? Eventually the Red Death (Price vs. himself) creeps into the castle, bathing all the revelers in blood, then joins a rainbow of other Deaths outside. Kind of a celebration of sadism (complete with another Inquisition-torturer ancestor) in widescreen with colorful costumes and sets (and a giant clock with a battle axe pendulum), stabbings and swordfights and a murderous falcon. And a dwarf setting a man in a gorilla suit on fire.

Jane Asher is appalled by Price’s murderous falcon:

Jane Asher is appalled by Satan-loving Hazel Court:

The peasant girl Price keeps by his side is Jane Asher (Deep End) – she’s our audience surrogate whose main job is to look appalled. The attention paid to Jane pisses off Price’s main girl Hazel Court (Lenore in The Raven), who tries to hold onto him through satanic ritual. The firestarting dwarf’s wife is upsettingly played by a seven-year-old dubbed by a grown woman. And Price’s horrible friend Alfredo is Patrick Magee (the victim-turned-torturer in A Clockwork Orange).

Magee, foreshadowing that he’s soon gonna be set on fire:

I was going to watch this right after Southbound then realized they were both anthology horrors, so spaced it out by a few days. My second Corman / Poe / Price movie this month after Pit and the Pendulum


Morella

“It’s Lenora, father.” Maggie Pierce (The Fastest Guitar Alive) hasn’t seen her dad Vincent Price in 26 years, and is visiting now because her marriage has failed and she has a mild cough (and therefore, since this is a movie, only a few months to live). Price still blames her for the death of his beloved wife Morella, is wasting away in his Miss Havisham house. Poor Lenora doesn’t even know how her mom died since she was an infant at the time, so Price explains that she collapsed at a party while yelling “it was the baby.” Hardly seems fair, but apparently Morella (Leona Gage of Scream of the Butterfly) still blames the baby, rises in the night to murder Lenora and burn the place to the ground.


The Black Cat

Montresor Herringbone is a hopeless drunk who steals from his working wife Annabel (Joyce Jameson, who’d costar with Lorre and Price again the following year in Comedy of Terrors) to get enough wine to stop the hallucinations. He’d be a hateful fellow if he wasn’t being played by Peter Lorre in comic mode… and speaking of comic mode, Price plays Fortunato Luchresi, a foppish wine expert whom Lorre challenges to a tasting competition in order to get free wine. Surprised by Lorre’s knowledge and (lack of) technique, Price follows him home and falls for Annabel. When Lorre finds out he chains them in his cellar and walls them in – the perfect crime if not for the black cat he accidentally bricks up, whose howls alert the police.

Loved the acting, the reptile hallucinations and dreams (Fortunato and Annabel playing catch with Lorre’s severed head, the picture smeared and distorted). Each scene ends with a 400 Blows zoom. Price calls the wife “my treasure,” but isn’t that what Lorre’s name “Montresor” means?


The Case of M. Valdemar

Valdemar (Price) is dying of an incurable disease, and mesmerist Carmichael (Basil Rathbone, Sherlock Holmes of the 1930’s and 40’s) agrees to relieve his pain for free in exchange for participation in an experiment – to mesmerise Price at the moment of death to see if they can extend it. Medical Doctor James (David Frankham, who worked with Price in Return of The Fly) is against all this, of course, but Price insists, and also wishes his devoted wife Debra Paget (the dancer in Fritz Lang’s Indian Epic) to marry Dr. James when he dies. But the hypnotist has other plans, and when he successfully has the dead Price’s soul trapped in mesmeric limbo, he holds it hostage until Paget will marry him instead. Price solves this problem himself, rising from his death bed and melting all over the amoral Carmichael.

The Good Doctor and Good Wife:

Third version of this story I’ve watched, after the Svankmajer short and the Stuart Gordon version, with which this has almost nothing in common. This was the second full-color Corman/Price Poe adaptation after House of Usher, and everyone was in top form.

In the mid-1500’s, Mr. Barnard (John Kerr of The Cobweb) shows up at reclusive Price’s spooky old castle wanting to know how his sister has died, is taking no shit from anybody. Price gets to be his haunted, tormented self for the bulk of the movie, explaining that his young wife died tragically of illness (but later changing his story), and later while bemoaning his dreadful family legacy he gets to be an evil maniac in flashback portraying his own father, an enthusiastic Inquisition torturer.

Also in the castle is Price’s sister Catherine (Luana Anders of Dementia 13 & Night Tide) and doctor Antony Carbone (art café boss in A Bucket of Blood). The place is being haunted by strange noises and Price has a phobia that his wife wasn’t dead when she was buried, so finally they dig her up and sure enough:

Of course I’d seen Barbara Steele’s name in the credits and recognized her face in paintings of the “dead” woman so was fully expecting her to show up. She’d fallen for the doctor and this is all a plot to drive Price mad so they can run off together. Unfortunately for them, Price’s madness takes the form of reverting to his family’s torture legacy, and he locks up Steele then puts poor Barnard under the razor pendulum while fighting off the others, eventually falling to his death in the pit (the only detail unchanged in the Stuart Gordon movie).

Screenplay by Richard “I Am Legend” Matheson, in lovely widescreen with some fun color-filtered anamorphic Raimi-effects and crazy oil-color swirls over the credits. I hope the other 1960’s Corman movies are this good.