June Lockhart Merges With The Infinite

June Lockhart, born during the silent era of film and when Calvin Coolidge was president of the US, and who had her first credit in 1938 (the same year Superman debuted and Orson Welles freaked people out with a radio show) has passed at 100.

What's crazy is that Lockhart was in a *ton* of big movies in smaller roles right out of the gate.  I'll be watching, say, Meet Me in St. Louis, and there goes Lockhart, who has such a particular look (twinkly eyes and a huge smile never hurt anyone in Hollywood), you know it's her.

So, she was working with Judy Garland, Gary Cooper, Joan Leslie, Red Skelton, Lana Turner...  I mean...  She saw some stuff.  

Lockhart is most famous to folks of my generation and the prior generation as Ruth Martin, the matriarch of the second family featured in the popular Lassie program (the first kid was Jeff Miller, the second was Timmy Martin).  Or, they know her as Maureen Robinson, the matriarch of that space-faring family in Lost in Space.  

Lockhart's last appearance was in the 2016 film The Remake, but she had done voicework for the Netflix Lost In Space reboot.  The last thing I saw her in was a recent viewing of Holiday in Handcuffs from 2007, but which I watched in 2022.  

Here's to Ms. Lockhart, and a heck of a career and life.

Crampton Hallo-Watch: From Beyond (1986)

Watched:  10/25/2025

Format:  Amazon Prime

Viewing:  Third?

Director:  Stuart Gordon

Pal @iffywizardry watched From Beyond (1986) as part of his horror-a-day Halloween watching, and I decided, yeah, I wanted to re-watch it this year.  Because who doesn't need more Barbara Crampton in their movie-watching, really?

I wrote this up just last year, so no real need to re-litigate.  If you read that brief write-up, I kinda underplayed the push the movie makes about the pineal-gland stuff and madness and sex intertwining.  And it's right there.  And leads to the most famous scene in the movie, which sure made an impression on a generation of horror fans.  

But, yeah, this is a movie about a bunch of people with sexual hang-ups, and very little in the way of discussing it, and instead manifesting as weird shit.  And it's kind of great.  

It's a movie with transdimensional monsters, a warped villain, and a guy eating brains.  What's not to like?

Anyhoo, like Re-Animator, this is an oddly perfect movie hitting all the right notes and gets better every time you watch it, which for genre film I think is *the* defining sign of greatness, whether we're talking horror or The Third Man.    

I would pick this up on 4K, but it's currently $47.  Which... come on, man.

Hallo-Watch: The Crimson Cult (1968)

Watched:  10/24/2025

Format:  Amazon Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  Vernon Sewell

The past few years I had seen a few stills of Barbara Steele in this movie, and it was enough to make me wonder what American International Pictures was up to with this one.  This movie exists with a few names, but I found it under the title The Crimson Cult (1968) on Amazon, but it also is known by The Curse of the Crimson Altar.   

And who wouldn't be curious about whatever is happening here?

it's a living

Our movie is about a very British alpha-male who is an antiques dealer whose brother sends him some items at his shop, where our lead is very handsy with his employee, when he learns his brother didn't return from a trip as planned.  He picks up and heads to an old mansion in a small town where he first comes across people reveling in the way of the swinging 60's that is supposed to look wild but looks like a room of people in need of an intervention.  

Upstairs, just chilling, he comes across Christopher Lee who is like "I've never heard of your brother.  But why not just stay here at the mansion with my hot niece and her drugs and booze?"  Our Hero does, which:  fair.

He meets a professor, played by Boris Karloff, who is the foremost authority on local history and seems to take their local witchery stuff very seriously, indeed.  And *hates* that Our Hero is unimpressed with his selection of brandy.

Our Hero goes to a sort of lo-fi pre-Wicker Man burning of an effigy that is part of a town's ritual around a witch.

Our Hero, while manhandling the niece occasionally, lazily looks for his brother, who he, 2/3rds of the way through the movie, recalls used a nom-de-voyage, and suddenly everyone remembers him.  Sigh.

The movie has some really fun bits.  All of the cult-dream sequences are just gold, and it's the only place we get to see Barbara Steele in her glory as the blue-tinted witch.  There's other general wackiness, secret passages, etc...  but the story just feels like it was a total afterthought.

It is Karloff's last movie, and he's clearly mentally 100% there, and physically declining.  Which, fair enough, he was born in 1887, so by 1968, he's not a kid.  And, in a twist, he is NOT evil in this movie.  He's just crotchety.  Which we don't know til the last 1/4th of the film.  

Anyway, the movie is *fine*.  But the highlight is 100% the cult sequences, which are just fun.  (This is not an endorsement of witchy cults, but it looks like a good Saturday night activity.)

Hallo-Watch: John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness (1987)

Watched:  10/24/2025

Format:  Simon's 4K

Viewing:  First

Director:  John Carpenter

As I said to Simon 3/4ths of the way through this movie, "I would have loved this in high school".  

That isn't to say I didn't like it *now* on my first viewing.  I did.  I just never got around to it, which is kind of a bad call with John Carpenter.  

Once again Carpenter tells a story about a group of people stuck in a single location as things go sideways (Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing, etc...) but this time he's getting metaphysical.  

Donald Pleasance plays a Catholic priest who learns a secret Catholic sect has been keeping the world's biggest secret.  Apparently they have a cosmic horror buried under a church in LA, but they need SCIENCE.  

To this end, they recruit a world famous physicist and his PhD students to come in and take a look at what they've got (a cylinder spinning and full of green liquid), and scientists from a few other disciplines.  They all set up shop in an old church, and begin to try to sort out what's happening.

Team, what's happening isn't good.  

What follows is a bit of cosmic horror that plays out over about two days inside the church.  And I am not here to spoil it.

Now, the movie has some issues.  I think they could have cut off the first ten minutes and we'd lose very little.  We could have had more of the great characterization we got in other Carpenter films with large casts like The Thing and Escape From New York.   Someone could explain who was keeping all 700 candles going in the basement of the church.   And I kept wanting to know why the movie wasn't about a school like Georgetown that is both high end and is also a Jesuit school.  We could have had a nice connection there, but it also might have undercut the idea Carpenter had about faith in both religion and science failing in the face of horror.

And that's the bit that I would have dug in high school.  Gimme that "your much beloved rules aren't going to help you now" jazz, and back then, especially peering into the unknown.  

I do wish Carpenter had found more ways to tie in the quantum physics conversation into what was going on with our cosmic problem.  It's okay that it kind of doesn't, but so much time is spent worrying about Schroedinger's cat and the nature of reality once we're talking particle physics, I can make some loose connections narratively, but it would have been cool to see those things tie directly together, even with some hand waving.

Anyway, I'm super bummed I took so long to get to this one, but it sure feels like a great movie to team up with The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness.  

Fun fact!  That's a young Dirk Blocker in this movie, who would go on to play Hitchcock on Brooklyn 99.  

Hallo-Watch: Black Sabbath (1963)

Watched:  10/23/2025

Format:  Disc

Viewing:  First

Director:  Mario Bava

This movie was baller.  

I haven't seen much in the way of Mario Bava, and maybe I need to remedy that.  Previously, I'd only seen Danger: Diabolik, which I still think kicks ass.  And I knew Bava was more famous for his horror films, so pairing his name with Boris Karloff, and I was in.

This is an anthology film.  And so I was able to check off my annual Halloween anthology film viewing, while also getting three very different stories.  

• The first was about a nurse called to tend to the body of her client/patient, who held seances as a spiritualist.  She steals a ring from the body, and immediately things go badly for her.  
• The second is a young woman who seems to have an active nightlife, and keeps receiving phone calls, threatening her, describing what she's wearing and what she's doing, although she's by herself in her apartment.  
• The third is a longer story about a nobleman who comes first upon a corpse and then upon a family who inform him that their father likely made the dead bandit into a corpse, but that the bandit was a sort of vampire.  Soon, the father (Karloff) returns from the mountains looking pretty rough.  

I've seen a few Amicus films and other anthologies, and other films by American International Pictures, and I guess it's Mario Bava working his magic on a budget, because this movie is just much better looking than 95% of the other movies in this budget range.  You can get a lot of mileage out of using a lot of colored lights, as it turns out.  Only cowards ask why there's purple and green light.  

The scenes also all really do have a pretty good scare factor.  The first one is pretty boilerplate stuff, with ghosts coming for a badly behaving nurse.  The second plays hard with the fear of a woman alone in her house (I do want to show Jamie the Joan Crawford movie Sudden Fear and Ida Lupino movie Beware, My Lovely.  The third movie lets Karloff go nuts, and we're all better for it.  He looks like a crazed Kurt Vonnegut as a 19th Century European vampire.  And it has some genuine great sequences that gave me genuine thrills, if not chills.  

In between, Karloff hams it up as a horror host, and it's gold.  

I had a groovy time watching this one, and recommend it. 

Hallo-Watch: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010)

Watched:  10/22/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Eli Craig

Ha!  I had zero idea what this was.  I just googled "Halloween Horror Comedy" and this came up on every list, so I gave it a spin.

I don't want to spoil this for anyone, but I'll say...  if you think the first twenty minutes are a little awkward or slow, hang in there.  There are absolute looney tunes moments in this that had me laughing so hard I missed the next minute.  Maybe that's me!  But I get why people love this movie.  

It's not perfect, but for a movie that knows "okay, you get it, we're out" just under the 90 minute mark, it's kinda ideal.  

Hallo-Watch: The Exorcist (1973)

Watched:  10/21/2025

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  Third or Fourth

Director:  William Friedkin

I put on The Exorcist (1973) before Jamie went to bed, and she immediately asked and then answered the question I'd asked myself.  When had I last seen this?  She informed me I'd shown her the movie circa 1998, so that is likely when I last saw it.  Which is wild.  I quite like The Exorcist.  But it is a journey.   It's not a movie I put on without wanting to watch the whole thing.  Obviously.

I have no notes.  I think this is one of those movies that is beyond comment in 2025, and has already been talked to death.  I wouldn't change a damn thing about this movie, and I have no questions about it.  

Happy Birthday, Carrie Fisher

Remembering the great Carrie Fisher on her birthday.

JLC HalloWatch: Halloween (1978)

Watched:  10/20/2025

Format:  4K disc

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  John Carpenter

I had been a bit dissatisfied with my Halloween horror movie viewing and decided to put on a favorite to cleanse the palette.  

Also, I don't always feel like an upgrade to 4K is necessary if I have a BluRay, but somehow I'd made it to 2025 without a BluRay of Halloween (1978), and I have to say, a 4K disc was the right choice.  The picture is phenomenal, the blacks and shadowing, which are key to the whole movie, are rendered perfectly (on my aging Samsung TV) and the image looks great without anything I detected as artificial or weird in the 4K transfer/ clean-up.

Halloween probably seems slow to modern audiences used to getting carried along on a rocket ride from the start of the credits, but I think for this movie to work, you need the sharp shock of the opener and then the hard gear shift to suburban normality as Michael Myers circles closer and closer, slowly building up the speed until we land in the red zone.  

That is far from a new observation, but what do you want from a free internet site?

Hallo-Watch: Werewolves Within (2021)

Watched:  10/19/2025

Format:  Hulu

Viewing:  First

Director:  Josh Ruben

I recall Werewolves Within (2021) coming out right on the heels of The Wolf of Snow Hollow, a Jim Cummings film I highly recommend.  And, wanting to let Werewolves Within breathe and not draw comparisons between two movies about guys in uniforms being asked to hunt down werewolves, I punted, and then forgot about this movie until it came by on my Hulu menu.

A sort of comedy/ horror/ murder mystery - it's a movie set up to keep you guessing in a locked-room mystery where there may or may not be a werewolf.

SPOILERS