Today Marks the 22nd Anniversary of the Passing of Vincent Price

JimD reminds me that today marks the anniversary of the passing of Vincent Prince.  The actor lived from 1911 to October 25th, 1993.

The more movies I see, the more I'd want Vincent Price as one of my guests at the table in that game where you imagine your fantasy dinner.   He just seems like a heck of a guy.

I really like how Price not only embraced his transition from handsome young man to Master of Horror, with enthusiastic good humor in interviews and whatnot, and retaining a level of class you don't find often in Hollywood.

And, hey, he made so many good movies.  I will need to bust open the box-set I picked up earlier this year and watch a few more during this spooky week.

Maureen O'Hara Merges With The Infinite

Several news sources are reporting the passing of actress Maureen O'Hara.

O'Hara starred in movies from the closing of Hollywood's Golden Age to the modern era, playing the leading lady in some fantastic movies across a wide range of genres.  

• Esmerelda in the 1939 vcrsion of The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Doris in Miracle on 34th Street
• Kathleen in Rio Grande
• Angharad in How Green Was My Valley
• "Spitfire" Stevens in Against All Flags
• Mary Kate Danaher in The Quiet Man
• Maggie in The Parent Trap

to name a very few.

Monster Watch: The Monster Squad (1987)

When I was about twelve, one of the signs that The Admiral was secretly listening to me, and not just thinking up new and interesting fatherly pearls of wisdom to dole out, was when he took the afternoon off from work to take me to see The Monster Squad (1987).  I'd wanted to see the movie, no one else did (except for him, I guess), and so one day he took the afternoon off in the middle of the week - I guess it was summertime - and we hit the Showplace 6, ate some popcorn and watched Wolfman take one in the crotch.

I recall we both liked it, it was darker than I expected, maybe even a little grittier, and Dracula was straight up frightening in my twelve year old eyes.  And, as anything you consider to be not-dinner-table-conversation occurred, I sort of cringed at having to let my dad know I knew what a virgin was outside of the Christmas story.

The prior year, he'd also taken me to see Little Shop of Horrors when no one else wanted to go, so apparently The Admiral was into taking me to see movies that would bomb at the theater, but gain a following on home video.  But he also got really jazzed at the opportunity to watch old sci-fi movies like War of the Worlds with me, and was always up for a trip to see something like The Last Starfighter or The Untouchables.  Way to go, man.

But, man, it really seemed like nobody else but The Old Man and myself had seen this movie until the last fifteen years.  Although, eventually friends did see it on VHS or cable, as did I.

At some point, maybe in 2008, pal JackBart and I caught a screening at The Alamo Drafthouse with a good chunk of the cast, director Fred Dekker and screenwriter Shane Black in attendance.  The place was packed, the Q&A was great, and the cast and crew pretty forthcoming with details.  I was one of five people who let out a loud whoop when Black mentioned he was working on Doc Savage.

One thing that really stuck with me from that screening was the honest recollection of studio compromise, of what was originally envisioned, and a script that the director felt had been very watered down to serve studio hopes for a Goonies-type film leading to franchise dreams, rather than a movie about adolescents growing up when you know, Dracula shows up.  I'd love to read that original script some day.

MONSTER SQUAD! 2NITE (in, like, 1 hr, 45 min)

Hey, y'all.

It's been pointed out that I have not reminded folks enough that we're watching Monster Squad tonight.

Movie: The Monster Squad (1987)
Day: Friday, October 23rd
Time: 9:15 PM Central, 10:15 PM Eastern, 7:15 PM Pacific
Stream From: Netflix
hashtag: #wolfnards

Curbing My Enthusiasm: Approaching "Star Wars - The Force Awakens" with caution

I may not have been the most excited kid on my block for the Star Wars prequels in 1999, but I was pretty darn pumped.  I like to think I had some serious Star Wars nerd-credentials back when that meant something, back in an era when the internet was not around to provide you with an endless amount of trivia via a super computer in your hand.  I could name most of the characters, vehicles, planets, had the posters, the toys, etc...  Grew up with the bedsheets, the wallpaper, all that.  Typical American 80's kid.  No, I didn't have a tattoo or anything, and I certainly didn't quit my job to go sit in line for weeks until the tickets went on sale.  In short, I was a pretty big fan, but I hadn't made it a lifestyle.

Mid-tier nerd.  I know there are people out there who actually run around training to becomes Jedis.  Folks gotta do, I suppose.

Prior to the movie, I went out and bought the toys when they arrived at Toys R' Us, and before that I'd been buying the re-issued toys.  I remember having to explain to my pre-Jamie girlfriend that, yes, I WAS going to buy an X-Wing fighter, right in front of her.

I was never much of an expanded universe guy.  I guess I knew from a young age that anything not in the movies-proper didn't "count", and that the books at B. Dalton and Waldenbooks were a cash grab as much as the Marvel comics with the green rabbit character, but nothing the movies wouldn't run over in a second as it seemed laughable that George Lucas read any of that material.  

When Episode I came out, Jamie and I stood in line - she, fresh out of the hospital, and wearing my Darth Vader helmet (it wasn't a size 7 7/8ths helmet, so it never fit me) and carrying my Vader light saber (I carried my green Luke light saber).  

We were in one of three or four midnight showing screens at the Gateway theater in North Austin, and there was a huge party atmosphere.  Light saber duels on the stairs and people cheering hard against the late hour.

The credits came up, we cheered.  I remember thinking "oh, this isn't entirely what I expected", and just let it wash over me.

Let's Watch "The Monster Squad" this Friday!

Movie:  The Monster Squad (1987)
Day:  Friday, October 23rd
Time:  9:15 PM Central, 10:15 PM Eastern, 7:15 PM Pacific
Stream From:  Netflix
hashtag:  #wolfnards

This Friday I'll be barreling across Texas in the afternoon to make it home in time for a screening of The Monster Squad, the 1987 adventure/ horror film.  It's a great Halloween, all-ages fright-fest with a post-Spielbergian depth to our suburban characters.

Note the Shane Black screenplay.  No, it doesn't take place on Christmas, but good question.

Halloween Watch: The Black Cat (1934)

I know I rented this movie once before (on VHS, to put a date on it) but I realized in watching it that I had no recollection of the movie, which means I didn't really watch it the first time.

The Black Cat (1934) marks the most famous pairing of Lugosi and Karloff,  and while it is most certainly a horror film of a type, it's in no way a creature-feature or monster film.  It's a movie that would predate a lot of later horror films from Karloff and Lugosi as they adapted Poe, and, of course, later films with Vincent Price.

American honey-mooners Joan and Peter Allison are seeing post-WWI and pre-WWII Eastern Europe by train when they meet Lugosi, who plays a doctor who is en route to see an old friend.  From the station, they travel together to head to the next town in a bus which slides off the road near the friend's house, killing the driver and injuring Joan.  All of them head to the house, a fantastic bauhaus-style mansion.

80's Watch: Valley Girl (1983)

I was 11-ish when Valley Girl (1983) hit cinemas, and didn't wind up seeing the movie until circa early 1995 on VHS.  I have almost no memory of that 90's-era viewing, and it wasn't just the case of "Red Dog"we were going through.

Unfortunately, its safe to say that Valley Girl is not a movie for me.  That's fine.  It was never aimed at me as an 11 year old, a 20 year old dude of the 90's nor was it ever supposed to be watched by a 40-something me.

I mostly see the movie as an interesting artifact of the era, but it's not like the movie was reflective of much more than a very regionally specific view into kind of dull high-schoolers with an after-school-special obsession with popularity.  I don't like to use the term "shallow", but if I had difficulty remembering the film, perhaps it's because it's hard to get past the notion that both the main characters and A Plot of the movie wouldn't even really get your shoes particularly wet were you to wade through them.

In 2015, the movie is remembered for three things:

Lagoon Watch: The Creature Walks Among Us (1956)

I quite like the original Creature From the Black Lagoon.  It's just really well shot, has a compelling story, and it is nigh-impossible to beat the creature design.  I just love the way that fella looks.

I'd love to see an updated remake, but when I consider what it'd be like without Julie Adams, well, I have a moment of pause.  And it's that moment of pause that's kept me from ever watching the sequels, two of which I own on a DVD set I purchased at least a decade ago.  But I told myself I was going to watch both sequels this October, because, hey... why not?  I mean, aside from the glaring mistake of not including Julie Adams.

This one image is more or less that whole movie in a nutshell

Alas, we're not here to ponder Julie Adams.  We're here to talk about the inevitable Universal sequel, The Creature Walks Among Us (1956).  Actually, it's the sequel to the sequel, but I watched the damn things out of order, so, there you go.

Mars Watch: The Martian (2015)

Back this last summer, we read the novel The Martian by Andy Weir, and so it's kind of hard to ignore that fact as we roll into discussing the movie.

On Saturday we headed out to the Alamo to see The Martian (2015) in 3D directed by Ridley Scott and featuring a busload of name actors - headlined by Matt Damon as astronaut Mark Watney.  As one would expect, the movie has some changes from the novel, cuts a lot in order to work as a movie (and for time), and makes some extremely minor plot changes.  But, in general, like a lot of book-to-movie translations of the past decade of newer, very popular books, there's a tremendous fidelity to the source material (funny how it only took movies a century to figure out people liked for these things to match).

Just like the book, the movie is about a Mars mission in the very near future which experiences a surprise weather event which surpasses expectations in terms of severity and thus threatens the crew  NASA protocol insists that the crew scrub, get to their launch vehicle, escape to their orbiting spacecraft, and return home.  As the crew leaves their base, Biologist Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is struck by a piece of loosed debris - the antenna - and is sent hurling over a hill, his bio signs offline.  Presumed dead, the crew takes off, leaving Watney on the planet's surface.

Watney re-awakens to find himself alone, with no means of communication with Earth, and supplies in the "hab" will account for only a short amount of time on the planet.  And the lack of moisture, and living in a structure that was never intended to last forever against the Martian environment are just the start of his woes.

The loss of an astronaut is a disaster for NASA, and Watney is given a hero's funeral, but within days, a staffer at NASA notices evidence of Watney's survival on satellite photos of the base and things back at NASA and JPL go into overdrive.

Ed Watch: Ed Wood (1994)

Really, Ed Wood (1994) could not have come out at a better time for me, personally.  I was 19ish and headed into the production track for Film at Univ. of Texas.  The movie landed with a thud in theaters (less than $6 million at the box office on an $18 million budget), but I think found its audience on home video.  Maybe not a huge audience, but I'm not really sure what anyone expected from a biopic about an unknown figure of questionable contribution to humanity, shot in black and white, that involved staunch support of cross-dressing, and, arguably, it's biggest star circa 1994 was Bill Murray who was in a smaller part.

The movie meant a lot to me at the time as a wanna-be filmmaker - especially as I realized I would always be one of questionable talent and choice-making, and even today I rank it pretty highly not just among my favorite Tim Burton movies, but among movies in general.  And, as we went through film school, it basically gave us a script to quote from, not the least being "Let's shoot this @#$%er!"

If you haven't seen it, and don't know what I'm talking about, Ed Wood tells the story of Writer/ Actor/ Director/ Producer of B-pictures, Edward D. Wood, Jr., who was considered, for many years, the worst director to ever make movies.  And if you've seen his most popular offerings, Bride of the Monster and Plan 9 From Outer Space, they make a pretty strong case for that supposition.*

Ed (Johnny Depp) is a man of big Hollywood dreams, who wants to create the same movies that inspired him, like Dracula and Citizen Kane, but his stabs at creative work via live theater aren't really panning out, and he can't get funding until he hears about a small studio thinking of making a biopic of Christine Jorgensen, one of the first Americans to undergo gender re-assignment surgery.  Ed lands the job by revealing he understands Christine as he, himself, likes to dress in women's clothing.  Of course, Ed's actually a cross-dresser, not transgendered in the same way, and so he delivers a completely different movie with Glen or Glenda?, which is basically his own story.

Full Review of Kino Lorber's "Phantom of the Opera" 2-disc BluRay collection

Lon Chaney, man of 1,000 faces, as The Phantom of the Opera.

Credit Kino Lorber

Preamble:  This review was originally released at Texas Public Radio.  As I'm a bit obsessive about losing columns at other sites, I'm archiving it here.  But, if you haven't read this one yet, I recommend clicking the link back to TPR and giving them a hit rather than reading here.

Full disclosure - The disc was a review copy provided by Kino Lorber to Texas Public Radio, and this column was edited with the generous help of NathanC of TPR.  

2015 marks the 90th anniversary of the release of seminal American horror/thriller, The Phantom of the Opera starring Lon Chaney. The film stands as a hallmark of both horror film and silent cinema, and as a survivor of the many mishaps and hardships that befell many other films of the era. Today, it continues to thrill audiences.

This fall, Kino Lorber delivers a terrific two-disc Blu-ray set which fans of the film will enjoy as they dig in to the treasure trove of special features, and those newly arrived to the film can enjoy for the magnificent presentation and contextualizing available in the special features.

Lon Chaney, in both his make-up and performance as Erik, remains such a recognizable concept that The Phantom of the Opera has endured in the popular imagination while the film’s contemporaries have faded, surviving mostly in the domain of serious film buffs and historians. The film stamped itself onto the zeitgeist thanks not just to the film’s perennial Halloween showings, but because it brought audiences something both novel and universal in its shadowy tale of outsiders and the chilling wonder of the unknown.

Reeve Watch: Somewhere in Time (1980)

It's not always easy living with me.  Jamie has to watch a lot of movies that she might not really care to see.  So, trying to be nice, I selected the Christopher Reeve movie Somewhere in Time (1980), a movie I had seen only one time before circa 1994, and didn't remember particularly well.  But, you know, it was supposed to be romantic and have no monsters or superheroes anywhere in sight, and it has that dreamy Chris Reeve, so I figured I was doing her a solid.

It turns out Somewhere in Time is kinda boring.  It's beautifully shot, and you can't complain that Reeve and his partner in the film, Jane Seymour at her loveliest, aren't doing their jobs.  But...  the script is weirdly hung up on the concept over character.  If I were to be unkind, I'd say that Seymour's entire role in the movie is to be pretty and to stand as still as the photo Reeve's character falls for in the first act.

Halloween Watch: The Mummy (1932)

Hot on the heels of the success of Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931), Universal wanted to catch lightning in a bottle for third time, so they threw in the Egyptology craze that was still echoing a bit after the King Tut discoveries of 1923.*

if the poster makes you think this movie is about a dead guy and a gal in slinky dresses, you are correct

The Mummy (1932) isn't my favorite Universal horror film, but every time I watch it, I like it a bit more.  It's part Dracula, part Jack Pierce make-up genius, has loads of Karloff, a mythology that's been ripped off so many times it feels almost bland in 2015, and Zita Johann, who is busily trying to compete with Bette Davis and Joan Crawford for most memorable eyes in a Hollywood film, 1932.

Weirdly, it's only really book-ended by thrills at the beginning and end of the film, and the rest of the movie is sort of a slow, mystical boil.  For my dollar, one of the creepiest things in a Universal Horror film is the opening of The Mummy's eyes in the first few minutes of the movie.  It's everything you absolutely do not want to see happen around a guy who has been dead for 3 millennia.  And all of that works thanks to the astounding conception of the scene in lighting, make-up, direction and Karloff.

Colonialism Watch: Dark of the Sun (1968)

For some time, SimonUK had been insisting I see this movie after we'd watched Wild Geese (1978).  He assured me Dark of the Sun (1968) would be manly, but I also knew it would have some fairly serious overtones as, like Wild Geese, it's a movie about the end of colonialism, in this case, it's in the revolutionary period in The Congo.  As the colonists gave up and lost power, locals who were trying to maintain their place all across the continent were surprised to find that maybe the locals had taken exception to being under the European boot heel, and maybe that meant, well...  Fast forward to 2015, and check in on the Congo now.

The movie was made when people weren't really sure what would happen, and so takes place as a new President has taken power, but lost the backing of European banks and other supporters.  He calls in a mercenary, played by The Time Machine's Rod Taylor in a role that could not be more different from his starry-eyed scientist, who arrives with Jim Brown, playing a Congolese native who has been educated in the US but is in The Congo trying to lend support where he can to the right causes.

All of this takes a bit to sort out, as our mission is to board a train, get to a mining colony a day's-plus ride away, and get back to the Capital in 3 days with $50 million in diamonds (that's about $340 million in today's dollars).  Oh, and bring back the colonists safely, too.

He recruits a German ex-Nazi soldier working Congolese security and his forces, and a drunkard doctor for color, and they're off.

The movie doesn't pull punches with the risks, the moral compromise or the bodycount.  It also looks both backward at the patriarchal society crumbling and burning (and doesn't seem to have a positive opinion of those stewards), and forward toward the potential for The Congo through the eyes of Jim Brown's character - even as he sees the chaos all around him.

So it's an interesting film for what sometimes wants to be an action film, but at the end of the day has a conscience and a heart.  Curry, Taylor's character, has been taking from the situation for so long, profiting as a mercenary, that when he's asked about how he actually sees the situation around him, you get the feeling he really hasn't thought on it, not in those terms.  He's always had the ability to walk out and go live anywhere else when he wants to, there's nothing at stake for him here.

All this, and gun fights with Spitfires, fistfights that involve trains and chainsaws, and drunk doctors to sober up.  It's a heck of a movie, really.  Highly recommended.

Halloween Watch: Trick 'r Treat (2007)

Well, this was a nice surprise.  I think a few of you had suggested this one to me over the years, but I'd always look at the poster and think "eh, this is one of those movies with a 'scary' antagonist that's more visually interesting than actually all that scary".

I watched the movie with pal SimonUK, and as the WB logo went up, he said "You know, I think this is going to be one of those movies people wind up watching every Halloween."   Which, about 2/3rds of the way into the movie, I paused the movie and said "yes, I can see why you'd say that, and I think you're right on the money."

That's So Craven! We watch "A Nightmare on Elm Street" and "The Hills Have Eyes"

When Wes Craven died, I realized I'd only seen a portion of his filmography.  Sure, I'd seen Scream and a few Freddy movies, but I'd never seen his two earliest hits, The Hills Have Eyes and Last House on the Left.

It had been 20 years or more since I'd last seen A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), and I am pretty sure the last time I watched it all the way through was in high school.  There's no question there is genuine horror and a great bit at work in this movie, but there are also some clunky moments, and we're far from thinking of Freddy as the wise-ass franchise character he'd become in subsequent movies.

He-Man Watch: Masters of the Universe (1987)

Friday night we had our first organized Live Tweet event with The Signal Watch when we got together on Twitter and partook of Master of the Universe, the toyline/ cartoon turned into a feature film and probably Burger King glass ware.

I want to thank everyone who came out online and made the event so much fun!  That was pretty great.  I think we had a good time, had our say and I think nothing got broken we can't fix.

We'll do it again at some point, as soon as we find something on Netflix we all want to watch.  So, send your candidates our way.

Down to business:

I wasn't a He-Man kid.  The only one of the figures I spent my own allowance on was Mer-Man.  For some reason, I really liked the sculpt on ol' Mer-Man.  No idea why.

I confess, I just really identified with this guy

But I really liked underwater adventure toys as a kid, so that probably had something to do with it.  Who knows?

In the summer of '87, when the movie was released, I would have already been 12, and, as recently discussed with pals JuanD and PaulT, just past the age where you didn't really know how to play with an action figure anymore.  I might still watch the He-Man cartoon after school, but it was kind of that or stare at a wall until my mom got home from work (lord knows I wasn't going to read, do my homework, or get exercise).

Ferrell Watch: Blades of Glory

There's no good reason to watch most Will Ferrell comedies more than once, but I've seen a good chunk of them, like, eight times.  Not the least of these is Blades of Glory, the 2007-era Jon Heder co-starring comedy that also features the always terrific Amy Poehler, then-husband Will Arnett, pretty darn good in this movie.  It also features Craig T. Nelson as their... coach.  Jenna Fischer trying out feature films.

And there's really no good reason to spend a lot of time writing about it.

So.  Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Who Wants to Watch "Masters of the Universe: THE MOVIE"?

Well, technically, only Stuart.

What day:  Friday night, October 2nd, in the Year of Our Lord 2015
What time:  9:15 PM start (have your popcorn ready) Central Time
How:  Streaming on Netflix
Live Twitter:  look for me @melbotis
Hashtag:  #noorko (although we're taking better suggestions in the comments and to twitter)
Breaks:  whenever I have to pee
Pre-show:  we'll start rounding people up and talking He-Man around 9:00