Catching up on some of the famous Universal Horror films I have missed a chance to review until now. Just in time for Halloween too! ‘Tis the season…

The Wolf Man

After a trio of terrific Frankenstein features, a pair of other memorable monster pictures, and a cabinet of curiosity’s worth of assorted slippery cinematic tricks and treats, Universal finished off the 1930s in fine style. Having almost single-handedly ushered the silent cinematic stylings of playful expressionism and fantastique into the sound era, the company was apparently tired. Very tired, and withering away, but not before one final ride into the sunset before the dark days of WWII made fantastical cinematic horror largely irrelevant and quaint compared to the sandblasted nihilism of the curdled noir genre. Continue reading →

Catching up on some of the famous Universal Horror films I have missed a chance to review until now. Just in time for Halloween too! ‘Tis the season…

The Mummy

With Dracula and Frankenstein enshrining Universal Pictures as the new patron saint of genre cinema, the prospect of renewed wealth stoked a fire in the loins of the company. Projects were suddenly being green-lit left and right. Expediency was the name of the game, but the pedal-to-the-medal production and narrative qualities of Universal Horror never diminished the prowling crawl of the individual frights within their films, works which, in the early days, were not only commercial ventures but artistic expeditions into the unknown as well.

Still, there was no time for ego or excess in the early days of Universal, and productions were humble and forthright. This was never more-so true than with The Mummy, a reminder that, if Universal wasn’t always the most experimental or transgressive production company circa 1932, they were a well-oiled cinematic machine all the same. Continue reading →

As with his prior film Knife in the Water, which was fittingly set at sea and stitched together by jagged, knife-like, tetanus-inducing cuts, Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-sac is filmed like a pirate on a bad day. It’s as though the camera is a sword constantly teetering between literate, venomous pen and protruding phallus, both of which seek to do bodily harm to the characters in the film in their own respective ways. The film, like all of Polanski’s best cinematic scalpels, feels dangerous down to its very artistic construction – the way shots are not so much sewn together as they are stabbed into one another – rather than simply dangerous in its subject matter. That distinction between cinema with dangerous subject matter and cinema with dangerous form to test that subject matter is what separates a film with something to say and a film with a means to say it. It is what separates a mere provocateur from a truly demented, haphazard genius of the form. Roman Polanski laughs at us because he is proud to be both. Continue reading →

Angel Heart begins as many film noirs do, with the grim patron of New York City – nominally in the 1950s but very much marinated in the nightmarish mental collapse style of noir so popular in comic books around the late 1980s. It’s a city with a death wish, but Angel Heart moves beyond the urban decay that so christened 1980s cinema and into the soaking wet juices and oils of sewage-filled Southern decay and centuries of forlorn backwater communities. For a decade of cinema so replete with misbegotten depictions of city life, Angel Heart is not only a lurid noir genre piece, but a trenchant reminder of the areas left unspoken and unanswered in industrial-focused American cinema. It quickly transplants its hero from the deathless New York to the backwoods of Louisiana, and the film follows him. It becomes a tale of Southern conjuration, a capsule of thought that reconnects the mystique of the urban nightmare with the cruelty and majesty of the rural areas of American imagination from whence those cities grew out of the earth. Continue reading →

Brian De Palma made a career out of sequestering the erogenous zones of Alfred Hitchcock’s high-class gutter-trash and cheekily admitting to and perverting the suspense-maestro’s more titillating habits. He scrubbed Hitch down to the bone, leaving the material wide open for its more adolescent fixations to rush in. He was always accused of lessening Hitch’s provocative exploration of the internal human mind in external camera space. He was accused of turning Hitch into misogynist smut. The complaint holds water; one would not stack Dressed to Kill, or any of De Palma’s films for that matter, up against Vertigo and expect a fair fight.

But it also misses the broader point, De Palma’s point: Hitch was a smut peddler too. A magisterial one, a beautiful one, a perfect one, but a smut peddler no less. De Palma knows – he idolizes Hitch for it, but he also interrogates him – and Dressed to Kill is a dare: admit to ourselves that we know it, or suffer the consequences of sterile, dishonest criticism and the perpetual need to rub away the immediate urges that guide audiences to all manner of films, not only the uncomfortable, disreputable likes of De Palma. Dressed is a reminder, queasy and necessary, that we do not only hide our eyes at the first whisper of Bernard Hermann’s nervous panic attack score to the shower scene; we also watch because cinema caters to our reptilian brain. Continue reading →

And another Midnight Screening, because I had it prepared this week anyway, and because it celebrates the 25th anniversary of a personal favorite. 

Once upon a time, Tim Burton loved cinema. He loved everything that cinema had been and everything it could be, thus his penchant for reworking cinema’s history into warmly inviting, devilishly cunning new wholes. It is also why he fell for characters who, in one way or another, resembled himself. In his masterpiece, Ed Wood, it was the titular character – a warped conjurer of perverse kitsch and American lore – who Burton no doubt saw in himself. In Edward Scissorhands, though, Burton’s proxy isn’t the titular character, but the gentle old inventor, played with loss in his eyes by Vincent Price, finding an avuncular warmth struggling to survive the cryptic winter of the life of an outcast inventor known only to his creations. His life is an attempt to meld a friend for himself, a gentle, sweet variation on the mad genius myth of so many horror films long past, and a tacit reflection of Burton’s undying sympathy for his material. Continue reading →

It is with a heavy heart that I post this Midnight Screening on the occasion of horror maestro and professional boogeyman Wes Craven’s untimely demise. But what better way to honor his legacy than with a review of his best film?

 Once upon a time, Wes Craven was a wandering journeyman horror director of the micro-budgeted exploitation cinema school, wielding a fancy for American genre cinema and European art-house works (his debut remains cinema’s most demented Bergman remake, after all). He spent five years struggling up the funds to direct his second feature, 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes, after unleashing one of the most controversial features of the modern era in 1972: The Last House on the Left. As important as that film is, however, The Hills Have Eyes is a superior effort in every way. More impeccably crafted yet more divorced from the respectable doldrums of “prestige” that craft often carries with it, Hills is the Wes Craven film that feels most like tetanus. Continue reading →

I decided to write a regular Midnight Screening for Friday this week anyway, because I couldn’t resist the opportunity to immediately discuss Gun Crazy…

You are excused for thinking Gun Crazy was released in pre-Hays Code 1932, post-Hays Code 1968, or in Europe in 1950, the actual year of the film’s release. Sure, Gun Crazy isn’t brutally violent or pornographically sexual or anything. Director Joseph H. Lewis, an auteur among B-movie directors, relies on suggestion and implication more than overt expression, but all of this unstated terror and innuendo only makes the film naughtier and nastier. None of it hides the essential truth, revealed right in the film’s opening act when the main character’s older sister informs a judge that “something else about guns gets him, not killing”, that Gun Crazy is dripping with sexual metaphors and an indifferently Freudian, but nonetheless sharp and incisive, commentary on how violence and sexual gratification are intimately linked in modern American culture. Not exactly fair game for Hollywood in 1950, but then, that is the privilege of motion pictures produced on the cheap: they don’t have to appeal to a majority of Americans, and they can fly under the radar of “respect” by the brain and the heart and drive right into the gut. Continue reading →

Our two Midnight Screenings, both cult films from the ’70s, come early this week. Enjoy!

It ain’t easy remaking one of the greatest and most influential French films of all time. But after laying down the law (and critiquing it with a stern eye) with The French Connection in 1971 and unexpectedly repopularizing the horror genre with the pre-blockbuster success of The Exorcist, William Friedkin had virtual carte blanche to do just about whatever he wanted, and what the genre-film director and aficionado wanted was to pay homage to one of his heroes, Henri-Georges Clouzot, by remaking one of his most widely respected films: The Wages of Fear. Continue reading →