Chance of Showers

I honestly thought that with the move behind me, things would soon be hunky-dory. All I needed was some downtime to gather myself, and I would be off again, working on personal projects, moving right along, right as rain.

But things are so not hunky-dory and the rain is a depressive one that, some days, is stronger than the drugs. I seem to be stuck. Still can't seem to get through a day without tears. Whenever Pandy Bear hears me crying he comes over to me and looks up with an expression that seems to say, "I understand. Don't be sad. We love you." and that makes it worse.

I think that the activity of the move and the focus it provided was the thing keeping sadness, relatively speaking, at bay. At least it was a distraction. There was little time to think about anything other than what needed to be done, and little to do other than forge ahead.

It shouldn't be like this. I have a nice new home filled with memories and I'm grateful for that. I'm trying to do all the right things. I talk a walk around the neighborhood every night. I'm keeping my brain fed with books and telly. I'm eating well, although lately I have begun to lose my appetite again. Can't give in to that, it had disastrous consequences for me last year.

But I feel like I'm hiding all the while, from things that are only growing stronger while I pretend they don't exist.

Then again, maybe I'm over-thinking it. I shouldn't blog when I'm in this kind of a mood. I don't know whether it releases those feelings or makes them worse.

Here's something funny: The book I've chosen for our Book of the Month here at the store has this in its description: "[Funeral for a Dog] tells the parallel stories of two writers struggling with the burden of the past and the uncertainties of the future." Hmm. Wonder why I chose it. Maybe I should read this one.

-- Freder.

Gorilla My Dreams

It's been a less-than-thrilling Halloween season for one reason or another. I couldn't decorate the yard early on because of the Big Clean-Out, and now with six days to go, there doesn't seem much point. I haven't been able to pig out on Halloween DVDs because I've felt it more important to spend my evenings working on making the house as comfortable as I can. (I've made some progress on that front, and am spending more time in the living room with the quats, listening to music and working on a scrapbook of the photos I took before the house was taken apart. This would not have been possible before). I haven't been able to read anything because I fall asleep after a sentence or two. And now my DVD player has died -- with one of my discs stuck inside. Anyone know how to pry open the jaws of a dead DVD player?

I did manage to squeeze in Fox's 1942 Dr. Renault's Secret last night. At just over an hour, there isn't much to squeeze. It's a creditable little B-picture that does what it sets out to do, though hamstrung a bit by its deep resemblance to the much more accomplished and more chilling Island of Lost Souls. J. Carroll Naish plays the secret of the  film's title, which makes him both one of the picture's strongest elements and one of its disappointments.

He excelled at playing sympathetic monsters (his hunchback in House of Frankenstein is another great example), and he clearly studied monkey mannerisms for this role. Which makes the secret much too obvious if you're at all familiar with this type of story. It's so obvious that I was hoping there would be an additional wrinkle. If I had been writing this thing, it would have involved the Bad Doctor's daughter. She's the hook that gets the hero involved in the story -- they are engaged to be married.

But -- there's no evidence that she actually has a mother. So I was really hoping that she was going to be the secret of the film's title, another of George Zucco's experiments, and rather a more successful one. I imagine a closing scene involving her and the hero on their wedding night, and a revelation that sends Mister Hero screaming out into the dark. But then I'm sick like that.

It wasn't until a year later that Universal made a girl into the monster for Captive Wild Woman -- another B picture that turns out to be better than it has any right to be. I mean, with a title like that one expects a rank exploitation movie. Instead, what you get is a bit of funhouse frippery that just wants you to think it's an exploitation movie. Oh, we do get to see John Carradine chowing down on the draperies. In fact, Captive Wild Woman may be the picture that inspired Woody Allen to cast him in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.

I just popped over to Wikipedia to make sure I was spelling Carradine's name correctly. He seems to have died exactly the same way my mother did.

That's neither here nor there. I have to get cracking! It will be a movie a night, every night, in order to get through all the "scary" stuff I have lined up by Halloween. Two more Abbott and Costellos, three more obscure chillers from Fox, and Something Wicked This Way Comes on Halloween night.

Where has the month gone? Never mind that, where has the year gone? Now, that's scary!

-- Freder.

The Somnambulist

The "pop culture blather" aspect of this blog has not happened lately -- and not only because I have so much else to write about.

I can't seem to stay awake for anything!

For three nights in a row I've tried to watch Fox's 1932 Chandu the Magician, featuring Bela Lugosi. It's a good movie. The parts of it directed by William Cameron Menzies are great. The parts of it directed by the French guy -- not so much. All three nights, I've conked out on it.

It took me two nights to get through Abbott and Costello Meet the Invisible Man. It's a cute, fun movie. I'm still not sure how it came out.

My days have been so full in so many ways that I'm just too pooped to stay awake for anything. It doesn't help that since the house was taken apart, my kitties have been so emotionally needy that I get three (and sometimes four) piling onto me as soon as I sit down. There's nothing that brings on sleep faster than being blanketed by pussy cats.

About the only thing I've been able to stay awake for is my nightly episode of Dark Shadows -- and that only because it's short. Rather than continue on with the Leviathan storyline from later in the series run, which I find extremely dull, I decided to circle back and pick it up from the arrival of Barnabus Collins. This must have been arresting stuff when it first aired and you didn't already know that a hand was going to come out of that coffin... Jonathin Frid benefits from the fact that they prepared for Barnabus's arrival well before he actually appears for the first time.

The last movie I was able to get through in one sitting was The Witches. I always thought of this as a Jim Henson production -- had forgotten it was directed by Nick Roeg. Yet, if you've seen Don't Look Now and The Man Who Fell To Earth, it's obvious that Roeg's fingerprints are all over this.

The Witches is just a great lot of fun from beginning to end.  It's scary and funny and fanciful... and Angelica Huston creates a marvelous villainess, whose obvious sexual pleasure in turning boys into mice adds an uncomfortable Freudian element to the thing.

Tonight -- I'm going to get through Chandu. Really and for true! Of course it's shopping night so I will be running late all the way...

And I promise that my viewing fare will get more dignified once October is behind us.

-- Freder

Now entering The October Country

Ray Bradbury is a preacher who lost his faith. A lifelong fan of all things Halloween, Bradbury threw all his pumpkins out into the street when his friend Frederico Fellini died on Halloween day.

Although it's not as fun as it used to be (more on that subject in a later post), I am determined not to suffer the same loss. Every year when October first rolls around, I drop whatever I'm watching and reading and switch to all-spooky fare. This year I am not making an exception. Time to revisit my old friends The Addams Family, Carl Kolchak, Mulder and Scully, and Mr. Serling's Night Gallery.

Time also to break out the new selection of Universal horror movies that arrived a few weeks ago. I bought it to replace my VHS copy of Man Made Monster with Lon Chaney Jr., and for under fifteen bucks I got four other pictures that I'd never seen before.

These are the kind of horror movies I like: atmospheric, moody, with monsters that are more intellectually gruesome than viscerally so. You might as well know that I have deep moral objections to the kind of horror movies they make today, and am appalled that the kind of torture porn that used to be confined to dingy theaters on sidestreets is now commonly available in our suburban cinematechs and our "friendly neighborhood" Wal-Marts. There's something wrong when the DVD aisles of department stores are weltering in gore -- and you know that Wal Mart isn't being particular about who they sell to.

The kind of zombies I like are the kind in Val Lewton's I Walked With a Zombie. For what George Romero did to the culture, I think he should be locked in jail.

The most recent horror movie that I'll watch is Ridley Scott's original Alien. And I prefer to go back much further than that.

This past weekend I visited 1941 twice, first with the aforementioned Man Made Monster. It has all the elements. Chaney plays a sympathetic but simple-minded circus performer who, after surviving a freak electrical accident, is taken in for experimentation by a kindly doctor and his not-so-kindly assistant, well played by Lionel Atwill (I'm hearing whispers that Atwill was kind of a pervert in real life, which lends a layer of squirminess to his work). Soon Chaney is lumbering around in a rubber electrical suit, glowing with electricity, fatal to the touch. Considering the ultra-low budget, even by Universal standards, this is wonderfully atmospheric and ends in tragedy with Chaney's life literally running out on a line.

And on Sunday I braved The Black Cat -- not a remake of the 1934 classic starring Karloff and Lugosi, but a kind of misbegotten "old house" murder mystery with comedic overtones. Bela is in this one, too -- but he has maybe two lines of dialogue and spends most of the picture lurking about, looking through windows. At first the plot was difficult for me, as it concerned a crippled old lady in a big old house full of antiques and cats; pretty much my mother's situation! But then the murders start and everyone begins to act suspiciously, and the secret passages begin to get used with wild abandon. Broderick Crawford is completely miscast as the male lead, but he does try hard. And then there's Hugh Herbert: a very amusing guy and great fun to watch, but what in heck is he doing in this movie?

There are some good moments and as usual the picture looks great; but a lot of the scary stuff is funny and a lot of the funny stuff isn't. By no means is this in the league of The Ghost Breakers (with Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard) or Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein -- both of which got the Horror Comedy recipe just exactly right.

For more monster-movie blather from me, just stay tuned. And you can read my essay on Halloween Favorites here at The October Country.

-- Freder.

Nothing like a Yukon Ho

My Friday night movie was Bud Abbott and Lou Costello in Lost in Alaska -- as I work my way slowly back through time, saving their horror comedies for October.

This was a great improvement over A & C go to Mars! Although it was obviously made on a shoestring, this actually works in the boys’ favor: there is nothing to keep them from their appointed rounds and nothing to distract the viewer from the characters.

The first half-hour is especially fun, with the boys as volunteer firemen trying to rescue a guy from the Yukon who’s bent on doing himself in. Bud’s motives are not entirely pure, as he has his eye on the piles of gold that the prospector is weighted down with. In fact, Bud is kind of a sleaze all through this movie. . . very much in character with that godawful mustache he’s adopted at this point in his career.

Lou just concentrates on being very funny, and for the most part he succeeds. Like Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, he builds his simple-minded character with ticks and gestures that seem random, but are actually quite precise. He owes much to comedians who came before him, but he’s got his own thing going and by this point he knows the routine very well. I have to wonder what Bud and Lou were like in real life.

Once the action moves north, a very basic melodramatic plot is tacked on, so perfunctory that at the final fade-out the villains and the “good” guys are shaking hands all around. There are lots of good gags, but the comedy becomes more situational and less character-bound. Although I love Lou looking at seals for the first time and mistaking them for dogs.

Oh, nearly forgot: Bruce Cabot (Jack Driscoll from the original King Kong) plays the heavy.

The truth is, I did fall asleep on this one, but it had nothing to do with my feelings for the picture. It had been a long, emotional week, and I found that an hour spent with Bud and Lou was a little too relaxing.

-- Freder

Venus and Mars are all right

Desperately needing a break from Woody Allen's self-serving period, last Friday night I put on ABBOTT AND COSTELLO GO TO MARS. Not Bud and Lou's finest hour, I'm afraid. So far from that is it that I nodded off about 15 minutes in and had to finish it up Saturday morning. Even then it had me fighting off the Sandman.

I only have it because I wanted to replace a copy of A & C MEET FRANKENSTEIN that I taped off the air when our local PBS station ran it. Per usual, they got the reels out of order (this station was notorious for that. Can you imagine watching CITIZEN KANE for the first time with the reels out of order? They managed to do it!) -- so that's the only way I've ever seen Bud and Lou's best venture into scare comedy. I thought it was about time to trade up.

I could have bought the movie separately, but for a lower price I could also get this set with seven other A & C movies included. I thought that was a no-brainer.

If MARS is any indication, I might be wrong. This pure studio comedy is not without some chuckles (and some of those Venusian women are certainly out of this world). But any two comedians could have starred in this SF-mock-up. There's too much of spaceships running wild and not enough of Bud and Lou doing what they do best.

I hate Bud's mustache, too!

In its favor, there is a great Mardis Gras sequence with nifty costumes and masks galore. Really cute, and worth the price of admission by itself. I kind of live in that scene, in a house full of masks and parade animals and carnival toys and more. My mother would have gotten a kick out of it.

-- Freder