TOD BROWNING’S ‘DRACULA’ (1931): CHALLENGING THE REVISIONISTS April 2, 2009
Posted by 366weirdmovies in Guest Reviews.Tags: Bela Lugosi, Horror, Tod Browning, Vampire
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Guest review by Alfred Eaker
Tod Browning’s Dracula is often unfairly compared to Murnau’s unauthorized Nosferatu, and it is an unfair comparison because the two are very different films, which merely happen to share the same literary inspiration. (Neither are mere adaptations. The only film to fairly compare to Murnau’s would be Herzog’s remake with Kinski and, indeed, it compares very favorably). The vampire of Murnau and Schreck is an accursed, repulsive animal, the carrier of a dreaded plague and the beast fights fiercely to sustain it’s life, like a rodent in it’s death throes. The Dracula of Browning and Lugosi is an outsider, a mesmerizing and intensely austere intruder, who comes to nourish on the aristocratic London Society, who he, paradoxically, yearns to to join (fittingly, for a genuine outsider, it is to no avail of course; he makes rather pronounced overtures and goes to extraordinary lengths to fulfill his ambition there).
Dwight Frye’s pre-bitten Renfield is nearly as strange an outcast as he is after his transformation, albeit in a far 
different light. Renfield is a bizarre, urban effeminate in an old meat, potatoes and superstition land. The villagers are outcasts too, but among them, Renfield is the doomed jester, misguidedly blinded by his foolhardy feeling of superiority over them and stubbornly oblivious to the peasants’ warnings.
The introduction to the inhabitants of Castle Dracula is among the most discussed in the annuls of Universal Horror and, to many viewers,it is also most perplexing. This is quintessential Browning. The static silence is punctuated with genuine dread, surreal humor, and the unnerving whimpers of a opossum. Karl Freund’s camera pans over a decidedly unreal set. The vampire brides slowly emerge as a bee scampers out of it’s little coffin. An opossum seems to be ducking for cover in it’s dilapidated coffin and it’s cries are the only living sounds we hear as we are introduced to Lugosi’s Count staring directly at the camera.
Renfield’s journey to Castle Dracula perfectly captures the sensory view of a crepuscular world. Indeed, no other Universal horror film would convey it as vividly and attempts to do so in later films proved pale imitations.
Renfield’s arrival to the castle, and state of confusion, is juxtaposed against the awkward but pertinacious emergence of Dracula. Lugosi’s emergence seems to partake of a genuine struggle and this echoes the delivery of his greeting which follows. This emergence sharply contrasts with the startling and confused appearance of armadillos scurrying in the ruins below, which also heightens Renfield’s confused state.
Critics have unfavorably compared this scene to Melford’s much more fluid shot of Villar’s Count appearance atop the stairwell in Dracula (The Spanish Version). This can be dismissed as sloppy, revisionist criticism. Browning is a master at those elongated pauses where little seems to be happening. With careful, focused attention, this proves to be deceptive, but admittedly is a struggle for viewers corn fed on television bred aesthetics. Comparing the two is akin to comparing an artist as opposed to a mere craftsman. Melford’s scene is surface dramatics and cannot illicit anything remotely comparable to the surreal queasiness Browning evokes here. Additionally, Melford’s entrance climaxes with a jerky and unintentionally comic Villar greeting his visitor. With Melford, the effect is ruined, never recovers,and only worsens. With Browning, the unreal dread has just begun.
The vampire’s lethargic descent, set against the massive sets, resembles the
16. CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962) March 31, 2009
Posted by 366weirdmovies in Weird Movies.Tags: 1962, Alienation, Five star, Herk Harvey, Horror, Low budget, Psychological, Sexual repression, Twist ending
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“We hoped for the look of a Bergman film and the feel of Cocteau.”–variously attributed to screenwriter John Clifford or director Herk Harvey
DIRECTED BY: Herk Harvey
FEATURING: Candace Hilligoss, Sidney Berger
PLOT: Mary Henry, a church organist, is the lone survivor of an accident when the car she’s riding in plunges over the side of an old wooden bridge. Looking to start over, she takes a job as an organist at a new church in a town where she knows no one. She finds herself haunted by the sight of a pale grinning man who appears to her when she is alone, and fascinated by an old abandoned carnival pavilion visible from the window of her boarding house that she senses hold a mysterious significance.
BACKGROUND:
- Carnival of Souls was made in three weeks for less than $100,000 (figures on the budget vary, but some place it as low as $33,000) . The film was a flop on its initial release, but gained a cult following through late night television showings. The film was restored and re-released in 1989 to overwhelmingly positive reviews.
- Director Herk Harvey, screenwriter John Clifford and composer Gene Moore worked together at Centron Corporation, an industrial film company, creating short safety documentaries such as Shake Hands with Danger and high-school propaganda/hygiene films such as What About Juvenile Delinquency? None were ever involved with a feature film again.
- Mesmerizing star Candace Hilligoss acted in only one other feature film, 1964’s The Curse of the Living Corpse, before retiring to raise a family.
- The movie has been very influential on other films, particularly low-budget horror films. Director George Romero has said that the ghostly figures in Carnival of Souls inspired the look and feel of the zombies in The Night of the Living Dead (1968). Other writers see a Carnival of Souls influence on films such as Eraserhead (in regards to its ability to evoke the nightmarish quality of everyday objects), Repulsion (disintegration of the mind of a sexually repressed woman), and even Apocalypse Now (the shot of Martin Sheen rising from the water mimics a similar scene involving The Man–thanks to Matthew Dessem of “The Criterion Collection” for the catch).
- Carnival of Souls was “remade” in 1998, although the plot (about a clown killer and rapist) shared nothing with the original except the name and the final twist. Wes Craven produced. The remake went direct to DVD and was savaged by critics and audiences alike.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: What else, but the titular carnival? Ghostly figures waltz to an eerie, deranged organ score on what appears to be an old merry-go-round at the abandoned amusement park. The tableau recurs twice in the film: once clearly in a dream, and once near the end as a scene that may also be a dream, but may be another state of being entirely.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Carnival of Souls is set in the ordinary, everyday
8 minute clip from Carnival of Souls (with annotations supplied by a youtube user)
CAPSULE: THE MOTHMAN PROPHECIES (2002) March 25, 2009
Posted by 366weirdmovies in Capsules.Tags: "Based on a True Story", 2002, Horror, Mark Pellington
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DIRECTED BY: Mark Pellington
FEATURING: Richard Gere
PLOT: A Washington Post reporter loses his wife in an automobile accident,
then finds himself spirited away to a West Virgina town where the residents are spotting monsters and undergoing horrifying precognitive hallucinations.
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Not weird enough. Taking its cues from parapsychology and cryptozoology, and positioning itself as a “true story,” The Mothman Prophecies paranoidly posits a world where omniscient Mothmen are simply a part of the natural order. I wouldn’t want to dishonor the producer’s sincere “the truth is out there” vision by suggesting there’s something a little weird about it. On a more serious note, The Mothman Prophecies is an effective chiller with a mildly unique spin on a conventional horror yarn that generates enough unease to make it worth checking out for fans of the eerie side of the weird, but it’s ultimately too lightweight and conventional to be more than a passing diversion.
COMMENTS:
Director Mark Pellington, who previously explored themes of conspiracy and paranoia in the thriller Arlington Road, translates his talents to horror well and does a very fine job of pleasantly chilling the viewer’s blood through the early segments of the Mothman Prophecies. Unexplained occurrences, from an impossible car detour that lands our protagonist on the Ohio border with West Virginia to a yokel who swears he’s been visited by Richard Gere before, pile on top of each other until the viewer is pleasantly on edge and disoriented. When the antagonist is eventually revealed, his powers verge on the omnipotent and his motives lie firmly in the realm of the inscrutable. The conclusion ties things up in a nice little bow–sort of, because all the pieces resolved belong to subplots. The central mystery of the Mothman is never even touched, which frustrated viewers who crave nothing more than narrative cohesion but shouldn’t bother weirdophiles a bit. Despite its silly premise, Mothman is a highly effective unease-generating machine, which is (or at least, should have been) its only aspiration.
The “based on a true story” angle is patently a scam. Although it’s true that there were “Mothman” sightings in West Virginia in the 1960s and a bridge collapsed soon thereafter, anyone who doesn’t recognize the convenient presence of an attractive romantic foil for Richard Gere and the archetypal visit to the reclusive old wizard for a bit of exposition and dire warnings as the work of a screenwriter rather than a documentarian probably should be permanently ineligible for jury duty.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: CORALINE (2009) March 2, 2009
Posted by 366weirdmovies in Capsules.Tags: 2009, Animated, Childrens' Film, Fantasy, Henry Selick, Horror
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DIRECTED BY: Henry Selick
FEATURING: Dakota Fanning (voice), Teri Hatcher (voice)
PLOT: A petulant little girl finds a parallel universe behind a hidden door in an
old house, a world where her parents are more attentive, her neighbors more fascinating, and the entire universe seems set up to pamper and delight her; she can stay there forever, but of course there’s a catch.
WHY IT’S NOT WEIRD ENOUGH: I attended a screening with a ten-year old and asked him if he thought the movie was “weird.” His answer: “Nah, not unless you think every fantasy movie is weird.” Smart lad.
COMMENTS: Coraline is a welcome dark fantasy for children, although its themes of evil Doppelgänger moms, frightening buttons, and implied eye-gouging are too scary for very little ones. Since it’s from Hanry Selick, the director of the borderline weird Nightmare Before Christmas, we suspect going in that the art direction and stop-motion animation will be the real stars. Selick does not disappoint, shuffling the viewer through three distinct visual styles: the dingy earth tones of real life, a brightly colored, eye-popping fantasy world, and a sinister, disintegrating universe with an insect trapped in a spiderweb theme. The storyline, and the unexpected scares once the movie shifts from childhood fantasy to childhood horror in the third act, make Coraline more than just eye candy for the kiddies.
Presented in theaters in 3-D, but the novelty doesn’t add anything significant to experience: I would have been just as happy to watch the same moving pictures tell the same story on an unabashedly flat screen. Though there’s nothing really weird to be found here, Coraline, in the best children’s’ movie tradition, is worth a trip even for adult fans of fantasy and pure escapism.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: THE SERPENT AND THE RAINBOW (1988) January 1, 2009
Posted by 366weirdmovies in Capsules.Tags: Horror, Wes Craven, Zombie
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DIRECTED BY: Wes Craven
FEATURING: Bill Pullman, Zakes Mokae
PLOT: An anthropologist travels to Haiti in search of the legendary “zombie
drug” and gets mixed up in voodoo and third world politics.
WHY IT’S NOT WEIRD ENOUGH: There are three to four vivid hallucination/dream sequences in The Serpent and the Rainbow that are a visual treat. (The most unusual and striking vision is a disembodied zombie hand crawling into a bowl of soup). For the most part, however, Craven uses only the canonical scare iconography–corpses and skulls, blood, snakes and spiders–which makes the scenes add up to standard, if well executed, nightmare sequences. Coupled with an ordinary horror movie plot (although it’s disguised well for the first two-thirds of the film), Serpent is fantastic, but not weird.
COMMENTS: Serpent is an above-average horror outing, but ultimately a disappointment because the black magic premise has so much unrealized potential. The voodoo milieu the civilized doctor encounters in Haiti is memorable and spooky; it’s also unique in that it mixes witchcraft and politics by having the main villain be both a powerful warlock and an officer of Haitian dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier’s secret police. In the end, unfortunately, Craven can’t figure out how to keep the momentum rolling into a proper climax. What we end up with is a formula horror finale where Zakes Mokae’s brilliantly sadistic Dargent Peytraud transforms into a poor man’s Freddy Kruger. The eye-rolling climax comes complete with false deaths, catch phrases, an ironic comeuppance, and other silliness.
The movie was adapted from a memoir of the same name by real-life Harvard ethnobotanist Wade Davis, who actually went to Haiti to investigate the real zombie drug. To make this serious scientific book into a horror movie seems a bit like adapting “A Brief History of Time” as a space opera. Davis called the film “one of the worst Hollywood movies in history”; it’s not nearly that bad (in fact, it’s pretty good), but his frustration is understandable.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
CAPSULE: HABIT (1996) December 12, 2008
Posted by 366weirdmovies in Capsules.Tags: Horror, independent, Three and a half star
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PLOT: Slacker and (barely) functional alcoholic Sam–still smarting from the 
recent loss of his father and separation from his live-in girlfriend–finds his health growing worse and worse as he gets more and more involved with a mysterious beautiful woman he meets at a Greenwich Avenue Halloween party.
WHY IT’S NOT WEIRD ENOUGH: Critics didn’t perceive or acknowledge Habit as a “weird” movie, but it is at least a little weird. The movie is bifurcated into two parallel themes: essentially, it’s the story of Sam’s descent into alcoholic dementia, while ostensibly it’s a supernatural horror story. It contains a few surrealistic moments (nude women posing on the streets of New York, a clock moving backwards), a dream sequence that’s redolent of Rosemary’s Baby (complete with yacht), and tons of that spiritual sister of weirdness, ambiguity. Ultimately, the weirdest thing about Habit is the cinematography as Sam takes one of his frequent jaunts around Lower Manhattan: the camera bobs and weaves tipsily, causing us to see the bohemian atmosphere through Sam’s delirious eyes and giving the city a disorienting, Gothic cast.
COMMENTS: Habit is a worthwhile effort, consistently interesting despite being relentlessly seedy and occasionally pretentious (in precisely the art/drama school dropout mold of its main characters). The horror elements are definitely secondary, but they synergize well with the dramatic aspect of Sam’s pathetic story. The literal narrative and the metaphorical aspects of the supernatural subplot merge so well, in fact, that the ambiguity about what “really” happens is simply irrelevant: either of the two possible interpretations is equally satisfactory, and entirely complementary.
It’s somewhat surprising that Meredith Snaider apparently never acted in front of a camera after this role. She did well in a difficult role, but more importantly, she has an intriguing beauty and a willingness to disrobe that should have brought her a lot more work in the film industry.
5. EYES WITHOUT A FACE [LES YEUX SANS VISAGE] (1960) November 13, 2008
Posted by 366weirdmovies in Weird Movies.Tags: Dreamlike, Expressionism, Four star, Horror, Transplant
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AKA Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus [dubbed and edited version]
“I love images that make me dream, but I don’t like someone dreaming for me.” –Georges Franjou
PLOT: The face of the daughter of a brilliant plastic surgeon is horrifically scarred in an automobile accident. Her father makes her pretend to be dead until she can be cured, and she floats about his Gothic mansion wearing an expressionless face mask, accompanied by the howling of the dogs the doctor keeps in pens to perform skin grafting experiments on. When several pretty young girls go missing, the police and the girl’s fiancé start to suspect the doctor.
BACKGROUND: Eyes Without a Face was adapted for film by the famous screenwriting team of Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, who also co-wrote Les Diaboliques (1954) and Vertigo (1958), from a novel by Jean Redon.
Director Georges Franjou has stated that he was told to avoid blood (so as not to upset the French censors), animal cruelty (so as not to upset the English censors), and mad scientists (to avoid offending the German censors). Remarkably, all three of these elements appear in the final product, but the film did not run into censorship problems.
The film did poorly on its initial release, partly because the surgical scene was so shocking and gruesome for its day. It was released in the US, in a dubbed and slightly edited version, as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, paired on a double bill with the now-forgotten exploitation flick The Manster.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are several worthy candidates, including the haunting final scene with Christiane surrounded by freed birds, but the facial transplant scene is the centerpiece of this film (and comes almost exactly at the midpoint). An anesthetized woman’s face is peeled off like the skin of a grape, in surprisingly graphic detail.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: At least until the very final scene, Eyes Without a
Trailer for HORROR CHAMBER OF DR. FAUSTUS and THE MANSTER
4. HORRORS OF SPIDER ISLAND (1960) October 21, 2008
Posted by 366weirdmovies in Weird Movies.Tags: Dubbed, Horror, Sexploitation, So bad it's weird, Two and a half star
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Ein Toter hing im Netz, AKA A Corpse Hangs in the Web [literal translation], It’s Hot in Paradise, and others
PLOT: A plane carrying team of eight dancing girls, along with one male and one female manager, crash into the ocean en route to Singapore. There they find a cabin with the body of a man hanging in a giant spiderweb. The lone male is bitten by a spider and turns into a spider-human hybrid, who then briefly terrorizes the girls at a party to celebrate their impending rescue after two men row ashore.
BACKGROUND: With some brief nudity included, this German/Yugoslavian co-production was originally released in the US as a sexploitation feature under the title It’s Hot in Paradise. After the nudity was clipped out, the movie was re-released under the present title and marketed as a horror film.
The movie was featured in the tenth season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (show 1011).
Horrors of Spider Island is believed to be in the public domain.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: The puppet-like evil spider, with it’s large, shiny, almost cute eyes and clawed hands.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Horrors of Spider Island takes place in an
4 minute clip from the film, including spider attack, courtesy of Something Weird video
CAPSULE: HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES (2003) September 18, 2008
Posted by 366weirdmovies in Capsules.Tags: Capsule, Grindhouse, Horror, Karen Black, Rob Zombie, Self-Indulgent, Sid Haig, Two star
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PLOT: Four college age kids are abducted by a backwoods maniac family.
WHY IT’S NOT WEIRD ENOUGH: Because the Texas Chainsaw Massacre ripoff plot was too tissue-thin to support a movie, heavy metal musician turned debutante director Rob Zombie’s fleshed the film out with stylistic excess. Home movies from inside the serial killers’ psyches, purposeless solarizations, classic drive-in intertitles, and clips of vintage B&W cheesecake constantly interrupt what action there is. The effect is not to make the film weird, but to draw attention to the director-“I’m Rob Zombie, trash horror aficionado, and I’m making a movie!”-and make him seem weird. It ends on a surrealistic note, but this is actually the weakest part of the movie.
COMMENTS: Make no bones about it: House of 1000 Corpses is bad. This movie is what happens when you take The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, drain out all the scary, and replace it with annoying. Still, if Zombie had to fail, at least he failed bombastically rather than meekly. If you took away the directorial flourishes from the movie and left only the plot, played straight, then this movie really would have been a nightmare (see the weirdly praised sequel The Devil’s Rejects).
The presence of trash film icons Sid Haig (Spider Baby) as the memorable sideshow Captain Spaulding (pictured) and Karen Black as the redneck matriarch adds some interest.
2. SILENT HILL (2006) September 18, 2008
Posted by 366weirdmovies in Weird Movies.Tags: B-Movie, Christophe Gans, Horror, Three and a half star, Video Game
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“Je me suis drapé dans ma conception du fantastique, et ce n’est pas celle de tout le monde.” – Christophe Gans
PLOT: After her adopted daughter’s sleepwalking problem turns hazardous, her concerned mother decides to investigate the name of the town that she mutters in her narcoleptic fits: “Silent Hill.” The pair travel to the titular locale, a modern ghost town that has been abandoned for decades due to a coal fire that continuously burns underground. Once inside the city limits, mother and daughter are separated, and the mother’s search for her lost child leads her through increasingly bizarre and portentous adventures in the haunted town.
BACKGROUND: This film was adapted from the cult/horror Sony Play Station video game, “Silent Hill”. Movie adaptations of video games were (are) a relatively new phenomenon, and had generally not been well received by either movie critics or fans. Although these movies debuted with the advantage of a built in fan base, Super Mario Bros. (1993), Wing Commander (1993), and Doom (2005) had all been massive critical and box office flops, and that’s leaving aside the efforts of Uwe Boll. Although the Lara Croft and Resident Evil franchises became minor hits, by 2006 the entire video game adaption genre had already become a critical punchline, synonymous with diminished expectations.
Director Christophe Gans, a French b-movie film-geek turned director, was a fan of the “Silent Hill” game series and convinced that he could fashion the first truly successful game adaptation. He had previously had a surprise international (and modest stateside) hit with Brotherhood of the Wolf [Le Pacte des loups] (2001), a weird but energetic historical/detective/horror/kung fu hybrid. Screenwriter Roger Avary assisted Quentin Tarantino on the scripts for Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), as well as handling both screenwriting and directing duties on his own projects, such as Killing Zoe (1994).
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Blankets of ash falling over a deserted town like snow, until the eerie stillness is broken by the shrill wail of a 1950s era air raid siren.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: Gans paints his murky canvas with the expected
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