movie misfires

October 20th Phantasm

I saw this move when it came out in theaters, in 1979. I hated it then. It spawned a series. I don’t understand why. I watched it again, figuring every thirty years or so, one should offer a second chance.

Or maybe not.

#2 son wanted to know why the hero’s hair was so girly. I told him, it was because it was the 70’s. Everyone looked like that, back then.

The hair and clothes were scary, as was the acting, and the brief musical interlude. Also, the fact that the chiller network blurs out bare nipples, but leaves the rest of the body give the gratuitous nudity in this movie a Barbie Doll quality that was pretty disturbing.

The rest of it was still dumb.

October 21st The Abominable Doctor Phibes

Now that’s more like it. This movie knows it’s cheesy. It’s all right with that, and so am I.

I remember first seeing the climactic “He shall have a face… like mine…” scene on a Saturday morning kids show on ABC. There was probably something seriously wrong with showing horror movies to us little kiddies, along with all the violence in our cartoons.

It probably explains a lot about the warps in my character.

October 22nd Let Me In

The American remake of the movie I just watched last week. Definitely worth going to the theater for. Belongs firmly in the ‘movies that don’t suck’ category.

I’ve always thought that actual childhood can be much scarier than anything in a horror movie, and this story proves it.

Ocober 23rd Five Million Years to Earth

#2 was rolling his eyes at me, but I like this movie. Another Hammer film, and of a character more popular in Britain than America, Professor Bernard Quatermass. A kind of proto Doctor Who. I watch it every time it is on, which is about once a year.

The effects are cheap, with things flying around on wires. But by the time the aliens drive everyone mad, and the rioting and wind machines start, I am always properly creeped out by this movie.

October 24th Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy

Ouch.

I saw the Abbott and Costello movies when I was a kid. And then saw a rerun a couple of years ago, and thought they were still fun.

I must have been drinking heavily at the time. Or else the quality fell off by the time they got to the Mummy. The high point of this was trying to decide if that was Mel Cooley from the Dick Van Dyke Show, under all that Egyptian make-up.

It was.

Other than that, it was a long 90 minutes.

We are now up to the last week before Halloween. Where are all the good movies? I have taken over the remote, and am spending too much time flipping through the channels, amazed by the amount of things that are not frightening me this year.

A targeted application of Netflix will be necessary to get me through the last few days of this month, since it does not appear that I can depend on satellite TV to do its job.