by ·Comments Off on The Raven (1963, Roger Corman)

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:

by ·Comments Off on Shocktober 2022 Stop-Motion Shorts

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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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.

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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.

by ·Comments Off on The Day of Destruction and Tell-Tale shorts

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

by ·Comments Off on The Masque of the Red Death (1964, Roger Corman)

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:

by ·Comments Off on Tales of Terror (1962, Roger Corman)

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…

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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.

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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?

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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:

by ·Comments Off on Pit and the Pendulum (1961, Roger Corman)

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.

by ·Comments Off on Fall of the House of Usher (1928, Jean Epstein)

Everyone in a Poe adaptation is weak, white and willowy, and it’s expected that at least one of them will die of consumptive illness, as did Poe’s own wife, as we learned in the D.W. Griffith bio-pic. Here it’s Usher’s wife (played by Marguerite “wife of Abel” Gance), but not for a while. First, portrait-painting-obsessed Usher (Jean Debucourt, decades later the jeweler in Madame de…) has his “dear and only friend” over for the season, then mostly tends to his paintings (which move and blink) while his wife dies (shades of Dorian Gray).

I love how this silent film portrays music. Everything starts moving in slow-motion until Usher plays his guitar, then his playing is illustrated with quick cutaways to nature shots. Overall lots of camera movement for 1928, with crazy angles and ghostly superimpositions – a slow and moody film. Excellent looking except for the fake castle (in wide shots) and owl.

This is the third House of Usher movie on the blog after the Watson & Webber and the Ken Russell, but the first to tell the Poe story in a way I can follow. IMDB says assistant director Luis Bunuel quit over liberties taken with the adaptation. In the Poe story Madeline is his twin sister instead of his wife, but otherwise doesn’t seem too dissimilar. Epstein made this the year before his amazing Finis Terrae.

Ed Gonzalez in Slant:

The film’s tour-de-force is a hulking funeral procession of overlapping visual textures and animal-like camera movement, a startling vision of metaphysical passage and metamorphosis. With the castle’s dripping candles in ominous tow, the men proceed through land and water toward the netherworld of Usher’s catacombs, with Madeleine’s veil weighing them down like an arm digging into the ground; all the while, an owl keeps ominous watch and two toads get their groove on. Madeleine will not go gently into this sinister night, nor will Usher let her, insisting that her coffin remain unnailed, which, in effect, precipitates a supernatural spill between worlds.

by ·Comments Off on Auteur Shorts, Summer 2014

Berenice (1954, Eric Rohmer)

An Edgar Allen Poe story about a talky, sickly shut-in who stares at everyday objects all day is an odd choice for your first film. The guy (Rohmer himself!) lives with an epileptic cousin, becomes monomaniacally obsessed with her teeth, and eventually they get engaged since neither can deal with the outside world. But she dies one night, and he takes this very melodramatically, then awakens from a fugue days later having dug up the grave and stolen the teeth. It’s all narration and sound effects, shot by Jacques Rivette, still a couple years before his debut short.

Khan Khanne (2014, Jean-Luc Godard)

“This is not a film anymore, although it is my best.” What Godard sent to this year’s Cannes instead of appearing in person. Godard is his usual latter-day self, acting the scatterbrained professor, possibly quoting Hannah Arendt and/or referencing Chris Marker, cutting in excerpts from Alphaville and King Lear, using camera shots and sound editing that make it seem like he doesn’t know what he’s doing, ultimately making little sense to me, but with a weirdo bravado.

Adieu a TNS (1998, Jean-Luc Godard)

Swaying, smoking, Godard recites a singsongy poem over gentle accordion in three parts, the framing tighter each time. I’ve read that this was “a bitter and mournful farewell to the National Theater of Strasbourg.”

The Accordion (2010, Jafar Panahi)

Two brothers play music for spare change, not realizing they’re outside a mosque. A guy threatens to report them to the police, takes their accordion and runs. But it turns out he’s just a poor bastard hoping to earn money with the instrument, so the kids join him instead of killing him with a rock, which had been the other option.

The Nest (2014, David Cronenberg)

Single-take nine-minute shot from first-person perspective of surgeon (Cronenberg) interviewing patient (Evelyne Brochu, Tom’s ally/coworker in Tom at the Farm) who claims she has a wasps nest inside her left breast. Doubles as a commissioned short for some exhibition and a trailer for his first novel, Consumed, out this fall.

Gradiva (2014, Leos Carax)

Another gallery commission featuring a naked girl. This time the girl has gone to buy cigarettes, returns and has a short conversation with Rodin’s The Thinker.

The Legend of Hallowdega (2010, Terry Gilliam)

Unfunny fake investigation into haunted goings-on at the Talladega racetrack from a Daily Show writer. Just terrible. I won’t give away the twist comedic ending because I’m too embarrassed. Ends with a nice Wolf Parade song, at least.

On demande une brute (1934, Charles Barrois)

Early Jacques Tati, who wrote and starred as a hapless actor who accidentally signs up to be a wrestler. Despite all the time spent on audition scenes and the wrestling match, the only good bit is when he tries to keep his shrew wife from absentmindedly eating a pet fish at the dinner table.

Gravesend (2007, Steve McQueen)

Beautiful shots that seem to go on longer than they should, check, yep it’s the guy who made Hunger. One of those art installation pieces that is very cool to read about and less fun to watch. I wanted to like it, and almost did…

From the official description:

Gravesend uses a documentary approach to focus on the mining of coltan, employed in the manufacture of cell phones, laptops and other high-tech apparatus. The film cuts between two sites: a technological, highly automated industrial plant in the West where the precious metal is processed for the final production of microelectronic parts, and the central Congo, where miners use simple shovels or their bare hands to extract, wash and collect the ore on leaves. .. coltan, traded at an extremely high price, represents one of the key financial factors in the armed conflict of the militia in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where decades of civil war have cost several million human lives.

Away From It All (1979, John Cleese & Clare Taylor)

Fake travelogue disguised to look and sound like a real one (unless you recognize John Cleese’s voice), very gradually straying from the company line, slipping in notes of humor and aggression. Stock footage takes us from Rome to Venice to Ireland to Bulgaria to Vienna to New York, back to Venice to Acapulco, to a rapid montage of vacation spots as the narrator begins ranting about existential terror. Accompanied Life of Brian in British theaters.

by ·Comments Off on Shorts Watched 2014 in Atlanta

The Signalman (1976 Lawrence Gordon Clark)

A fellow with too much time on his hands stops to visit a train signalman (Denholm Elliott of Brimstone & Treacle), whose apparent job is to live in a little house next to a train tunnel signaling whether another train is approaching or not, never leaving his post. The signalman tells of a ghostly visitor, who appears next to the tunnel apparently warning him of something, always shortly before a train accident. The final time he sees the spectre, he runs out to confront it and is killed by a train. Based on a Charles Dickens story, a good little movie.

Anger Sees Red (2004 Kenneth Anger)

Guy in red hat visits Rudolph Valentino’s grave, lays down, walks about.
Looks like this was shot by just anyone with a camera, not by a sixty-year filmmaking veteran.

Edgar Allen Poe (1909 DW Griffith)

Woman (played by Linda Arvidson, Griffith’s wife) awakens and stumbles around a room before collapsing into bed. Poe (Barry O’Moore, who’d later find fame as Octavius, the Amateur Detective), dressed like Jeffrey Combs in The Black Cat, gesticulates wildly towards a Melies-trick raven, dashes off a quick poem and runs to the newspaper, where he’s roundly dismissed, gesticulating wildly. But he argues his way into the editor’s office, sells the poem, runs home with blankets and food, but his wife has just died. He responds by gesticulating wildly.

Jabberwocky (1971 Jan Svankmajer)

A stop-mo masterpiece from the ass-slapping percussive opening credits on. A girl reads the poem on the soundtrack for the first couple minutes, then Jan runs out of poem and just riffs for the next ten. Love how objects appear and grow using replacements of progressively larger objects. As usual, he obsesses over dolls and food. Funny that two very different stop-motion animators would make Jabberwocky movies in the 1970’s.

Herzog and the Monsters (2007 Lesley Barnes)

Motion graphics, 3D camera moves, typography and a groovy song tell the story of Herzog, living in his grandmother’s house full of books but not allowed to touch them.

Johnny Express (2014 Kyungmin Woo)

Overrated delivery man has a scale problem when attempting to deliver a microscopic package to a tiny planet, wrecks planet, kills everyone. But it’s very funny.

The Dover Boys at Pimento University (1942 Chuck Jones)

Gag-filled parody of stories where square college boys save damsels from drunkard villains.

Sculpting Sound: The Art of Vinyl Mastering (2014 The Vinyl Factory)

Only six minutes – I wouldn’t have started watching it if it’d been three times longer, but now that I’ve watched, and half its runtime was stock footage of archaic gear and focus-pulls on the modern engineers’ dials and knobs, I want to know more specifics, for instance to follow a song through the recording, engineering, mastering and pressing process, hear exactly how the nature of the sound changes at each step. Can somebody do this please? Music in the doc by James “UNKLE” Lavelle

Also: saw more making-of footage of The Day The Clown Cried online, now with an on-set Pierre Etaix interview (in french).