At Hallmark, it's been Christmas Since October 17th

In case you were wondering, we're already Counting Down to Christmas over at the Hallmark Channel.  

Back in September we shared Hallmark's forewarnings, and the schedule, as it was then published.  What it didn't indicate was that Hallmark was dipping into its now endless stash of movies and that, as near as I can tell, they went into Christmas rotation on two of the three Hallmark channels on October 17th with the arrival of a new seasons of The Mistletoe Murders.  But, for days beforehand, they had been playing Christmas stuff, but I didn't really pay it much mind.

For those who don't check in on these things, Hallmark moves around when it goes all in on the Christmas season, and in many years refuses to stick to the internationally favored Mariah Carey Calendar, which declares 12:00 AM on November the First as when we can begin prepping for the holidays.  

Final Hallo-Watch: Frankenhooker (1990)

Watched:  10/31/2025

Format:  Amazon

Viewing:  First

Director:  Frank Henenlotter

So, I wrapped up Halloween with Frankenhooker (1990) a movie I've somehow not seen before in the past 35 years, but been aware of since at least 1993.

Wow.  They truly do not make them like this anymore.

I was never a Troma guy, but my continual viewing of USA Up All Night in the 1990's should be a sign of what I will tune to on a Friday night.  I am happy to go in for questionable taste.  I am a person of deeply questionable taste, if this blog is any indication.

My favorite bit was the revived Elizabeth storming around Manhattan spouting prior dialog and knocking people over.  That's just good stuff.  I guess Patty Mullen was a Penthouse pet who barely did any movies, but she really went for it and she's really funny.

Anyway, the movie is kinda exactly what I expected in some ways, but vacillated between truly hilarious and "okay, I get it.  We can move on." in the ways of these kinds of movies.  What I will say is that the end was *chef's kiss*.  Glad I finally watched it.

JLC Hallo-Watch: Halloween H20 - 20 Years Later (1998)

Watched:  10/30/2025

Format:  HBOmax

Viewing:  First

Director:  Steve Miner

This movie has a "and introducing Josh Hartnett" credit at the beginning, and knowing what we'd soon know about Hartnett's quality as a lead and Hollywood hunk...  it's absolutely inexplicable that he has one of the dumbest haircuts in cinema.  I was alive and a young adult in 1998.  Nobody had this haircut, this was not a haircut I literally saw on anyone then, before then, or since. It's somewhere between the male version of the Karen/ Kate Gosselin haircut, like he just woke up, like maybe he deeply offended a barber, or someone pulled a prank on him or her took pinking shears to his own head.  

"...so you're saying there's a chance?"

It's so odd, in part because the hair changes moment by moment in the film, like they really couldn't manage it.  It required some weird trimming, and in some shots it's one way, and some shots it's not, and he just looks insane through the whole movie.

The haircut is just a minor indicator of what's happening with Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998), a shockingly unnecessary movie and a reminder of why sequels and horror movies have such a bum rap with many critics.  It is predictable, it's not enough and too much, doesn't seem to know when Halloween occurs or think the holiday matters in the Halloween franchise.   

Hallo-Franken-Watch: The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

Watched:  10/30/2025

Format:  4K

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  James Whale

What's not to like in Bride of Frankenstein (1935)?

Yes, if you come in expecting to be genuinely scared, that won't happen.  If you want to see something weird, uncanny, funny, touching, cheer-worthy, wildly subversive and camp (a word we throw around a lot but don't correctly use), Bride is your movie.  

This movie is about so many things.  

Rather than have someone directly speak to the audience in this installment, we recreate the Percy and Mary Shelley (nee Godwin) and Lord Byron conversations that famously spawned Frankenstein.  Mary Shelley is posed as the one explaining the hubris of what we're to see, as the scene echoes what will come later with Dr.'s Frankenstein and Pretorious.  

Hallo-Franken-Watch: Frankenstein (1931)

Watched:  10/28/2025

Format:  4K

Viewing:  Unknown

Director:  James Whale

As longtime readers know, every year I watch Frankenstein (1931) and Bride of Frankenstein (1935) as we enter the spooky season.  

Since last Halloween, I picked up the first film in 4K, curious about how a film I know as much for its 1930's black and white grain and the hiss on the soundtrack as I know any other aspect of the movie would present in the format.  Would they clean it up, or if would they leave those artifacts intact?  

The answer is: aside from one shot, I highly recommend this 4K transfer.  There's some hiss and some grain, but especially that hiss familiar to early sound films has been reduced to a less noticeable white noise.  The grain is still there, more or less.  I was replaying it with a commentary track (that was great) and walked close to the TV and it is WILD to see what the pixels are doing with this black and white.

I didn't pick up any weird AI mucking with the picture, and it just mostly looked like a very clean print, with many of the minute defects corrected.  In one shot, an item in the foreground is kind of wobbly, like the algorithm didn't know what to do with it.  But I'll leave that for you to discover (though I'll never not see it now).

Happy Birthday, Elsa Lanchester

 

Today marks the birthday of Elsa Lanchester, born this day in 1902.  

Lanchester was born in England, participated in bohemian and cutting edge theater of her day before arriving in the United States with husband Charles Laughton.  

She played parts large and small, and is by far best remembered for her portrayal of both Mary Shelley and The Bride in The Bride of Frankenstein, in which she has no speaking lines as the Bride (but several as Shelley) and appears for maybe seven or eight minutes of the film.  And, yet, a pop culture icon.

It's almost like James Whale was trying to say something here....

Hallo-Franken-Watch: Frankenstein (2025)

Watched:  10/26/2025

Format:  Drafthouse

Viewing:  First

Director:  Guillermo del Toro

Twenty years ago, on the heels of the runaway success of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Peter Jackson was given carte blanche to make an adaptation of the 1933 film King Kong.  It's tough to get into all the details and I'll spare you, but the basic gist is that Peter Jackson had long said his favorite movie of all time, and the one that inspired him as a filmmaker, was the Fay Wray screamer.  

The 2005 Kong film was not well received by critics or audiences.  Yes, it looked beautiful and was technically well-directed, but a near 3 hour run-time is quite a bit more than the 100-minute runtime of the original.  It was just too much of everything, a movie lasting the duration of two movies, where everything is turned up to an 11.

And, so it was, I was nervous going into Frankenstein (2025).  

Director Guillermo del Toro broke out with a few key films at the turn of the century, and made a reputation for himself as a master of the macabre.  Some I've liked, some not so much.  For a long time, he's very loudly proclaimed the 1931 Frankenstein starring Boris Karloff his favorite film.  And, hey, it's all-timer for me, as well.  

And, look, I will publicly say:  the book came out in 1818.  Monkeying about with the story is fair game.  After all, I love stuff like the Universal movies, I like Frankenstein comics sometimes, I love Creature Commandos...  sure.  Do whatever.

But I'm not sure what del Toro was doing, what he was trying to say or why he changed so many things in his movie from the novel when it seemed like it made the overall story of the novel weaker.  But I also think I'd need to watch the movie again to understand what he was doing and why as I'd be far less distracted by his careening variations from the text while also playing up certain aspects of the text. 

Light Spoilers

Hallo-Watch: Werewolves (2024)

Watched:  10/25/2025

Format:  Hulu

Viewing:  First

Director:  Steven C. Miller

On paper, I totally get what Werewolves (2024) was doing.  We're going to do The Warriors' run across a city plagued by monsters.  And the monster that makes the most sense to run from, without spending a lot of time worrying about the set-up, is werewolves.  We all get werewolves.  Moon.  Roar.  Kill kill.

It's basically an excuse to have a straight hour of nothing but action sequences as Frank Grillo and Katrina Law shoot their way across the city.  What's interesting is that it's a movie completely devoid of character moments, themes or story.  It is just a series of things happening.  Which is really a weird way to do things, because it *looks* like a movie in many ways.  It just functions more like...  a horror action screen saver.

Initially I was like "huh, this is like a SyFy movie but with good actors and a budget", but it's actually a Bizarro SyFy movie.  SyFy movies are mostly people standing around talking because they can't afford to do their bad FX.  Or driving from place to place looking mildly cross.  And then you get a giant CGI shark and snake at the end.  SyFy movies pull from the Banal Character Development Playbook and run through the motions of how this giant shark attacking people ties to their personal struggle.  But in the case of Werewolves, ain't no one got time for that.  What we do have are several practical werewolf suits, one detailed werewolf head we'll see in profile about 55 times during the movie, and Frank Grillo.  And shooting up sets, fighting and explosions.  And no real character beats.

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.