30 Nights of Terror October 7

Beverly was about to pack up her stuff and go when the Portises finally arrived, twenty minutes late.
She had considered peeing in the back yard of this wretched place but the memory of her colleague Susie Temple stopped her. Susie was so annoyed by her dilatory clients that she squatted and, well, defecated in front of the fixer upper in East Jesus as, guess what, the clients walked up the driveway. They'd had a flat tire three miles away and weren't amused by Susie's antics. Susie lost her realtor's license and bungled her new career choice, meth cook, in a literally flamboyant way.
Oh well, here are the fucking Portises at last.
Darren and Samantha Portis were a slightly attractive couple in their late twenties. They both spoke in an elongated upper New York state drawl.
" Hi, I'm Beverly Pills. Why don't .."
" Oh, Dare, this is it. They've painted it and landscaped but it looks juust like that Ann Roool book cover."
" Doctor Dickbiter's house! Get some pictures with your phone, Sammy."
" Darren, the owners prefer no amateur photos of the house or grounds."
" Oh shut up rreal estate lady. Grounds. That's rich."
" Yeahh Dare are they like the grounds Doccy Dick had for suing Ann Roool? As in nonexistent."
Sammy let out a horrid, braying guffaw. It didn't even sound human.
While the awful couple strolled around giggling and taking phone pictures Susie thought about the relative isolation of the place.
She'd have to improvise.

Dare walked around the corner of the house first. Susie let him have it with a nice two by four she'd found in the basement. The combined blood and mold was really pretty but Susie didn't have time for aesthetics. While Dare stood wobbling Susie rammed her pistol into his mouth and squeezed off two shots. Sammy was speechless for a second when she saw what was left of her DH on the ground. Exhaling loudly she grinned and said " Thank you, Bethany. I'm sorry i called you rreal est -"
Beverly only shot Sammy once, in her stomach. She screamed and complained while beverly kicked her repeatedly in the head. Beverly was reaching for her gun when, quite suddenly, Sammy quieted down, nice like. These goddamn crime tourists were always more trouble than they were worth. How long would it take to dispose of the bodies? The old sinkhole near Grippe's Farm was almost full. She tried to remember the Farmer's Almanac weather for this anniversary day. Nope, she thought as she doused the couple with accelerant, the rain should hold off long enough.

Tonight's movie: Wes Craven and Sean Cunningham's Last House on the Left.

30 Nights of Terror Oct.6

When Peter Lorre was acting in Fritz Lang's M , his night job was singing and hoofing in a musical comedy. Lorre always seems a very modern actor, even in an early film like Mad Love aka The Hands of Orlac. Cinematographer Karl Freund directed, Gregg Toland was dp. A digression: in Pauline Kael's The Citizen Kane Book, she presents stills from ML ( Lorre in baldpate, the drunken housekeeper's pet cockatoo) with similar images from Citizen Kane, visual ammo for her controversial theory that Kane did not spring Athenalike from Orson Welles' head. Toland, of course, was the cameraman on Kane and, I guess, responsible for Mad Love's lively Vorkapich montages.
Lorre is Professor Gogol, a brilliant surgeon who can restore lost limbs. He's hopelessly enamored of an actress, Yvonne Orlac. Nightly he visits the strange theatre where she performs and ogles her wax figure in the lobby. Yvonne appreciates Orlac's attentions as a fan but she's devoted to her concert pianist husband Stephen Orlac ( Colin Clive). When Orlac's hands are crushed in an accident, Gogol sees a chance to win his beloved. As this film can be seen free on TCM on demand, I suggest you check it out. Seventy three minutes of delicious weirdness. Another magesterial American movie seems to have nicked a detail from Mad Love. Can you guess its title?

30 Nights of Terror - Oct. 4

Hannibal Lecter is the best known villain since Professor Moriarty. Red Dragon, Thomas Harris' first novel about the FBI'S Behavioral Science Unit, was filmed twice. In 1986 Lecter wasn't a household word. He appears in Michael Mann's adaptation of RD three times and is played by Brian Cox. Manhunter is the story of the empathic Will Graham, called out of retirement after a serial killer has begun murdering entire families in a ritualistic fashion. Graham can enter a killer's mind fairly easily. It's the exiting that's difficult.
Graham ends up consulting Lecter in his cell at the Antonioni-white Chesapeake Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Lecter toys with him and sets off a panic reaction in Graham when he tells him
" We're alike, you and me." When it's discovered that the wanted perp aka the Tooth Fairy has been corresponding with Lecter through a tabloid's classified section, Graham stages an interview and photo op with the odious Freddie Lounds, tab journalism's star. Freddie is abducted and tortured by the Tooth Fairy. His awful reentry into the outside world is captured in a mere four shots.

Enough of the synopsis. Red Dragon was filmed again in 2002 with Anthony Hopkins in his final appearance as Lecter. It's a dismal film that shows us its best sequence ( Graham's capture of Lecter) before the credits roll. Michael Mann's somewhat dated version is, according to me, the better of the two. Tomorrow - Lucio Fulci's The Black Cat.

30 Nights of Terror - 10/02

In October I try to watch at least one horror movie, or what i deem horror, a day. This is a log of those afternoons, evenings, nights and mornings.

Cloverfield - JJ Abrams' American Godzilla movie, shot a la Blair Witch Project, is a first rate roller coaster movie. No one will ever cite it for psychological depth or great characterization. It's a good example of social observation that answers the question: What would a group of blithe upwardly mobile 20somethings do if their party was interrupted by a monster attack? A lot of dialogue was apparently improvised. Although the film was actually shot by a number of camerapersons and edited with a finetooth comb, it's easy to believe you're watching the calamitous events of that night through one person's POV.
Ok. Fine. My only reservations about this movie began rising to the surface as the credits rolled. Abrams and company seem to have watched all the available 9/11 footage. This very enjoyable movie is, on some levels, a terrorist attack restaged as a thrill ride.
Die Monster Die - An American International adaptation of Lovecraft's Colour Out of Space with Boris Karloff, Nick Adams ( looking very spruce) and Suzan Farmer. Lots of fun. Tonight may be Hammer Night. You six will have to click my link and see.

Prawn to the People / District 9

District 9, the South African science fiction tale of exoskeletal aliens segregated in Johannesburg townships, is the best foreign genre film since last fall's Let The Right One In. Its' mockumentary format, which breaks down after about thirty minutes, is so deadpan and hilarious that I thought I was watching an ultradry comedy, more Mars Attacks than Independence Day. Wikus, a moronic bureaucrat, heads the project to relocate the disliked, unwanted catfood noshing aliens. After being exposed to a mysterious fluid, his mangled right hand is replaced by a prawn claw, giving him the ability to operate alien weaponry, which requires alien DNA to work. Humans can't fire these weapons, at least not until Wikus, who's become the most wanted man in Johannesburg after news of his transformation spreads. He falls in with Christopher Johnson and his son, little CJ. Big CJ has a very interesting secret that it would be unfair to reveal.
As a matter of fact, as much as I'd like to babble on about this movie, its' various borrowings and the really weird treatment it's gotten from reviewers, ranging from the clueless types who have no business writing about this sort of film to more perceptive mainstream / "alternative" critics who don't seem quite sure what they've seen, I'll keep my peace until at least one of my four readers has had a chance to see this unexpected gem.

OP ALAS 1 - I,JFK

( first in an irregular series of posts about books which have gone out of print to my great sorrow)

I, JFK is a comic fantasy by Robert Mayer, author of Superfolks. It was published in 1990 by St. Martin's and appeared in paperback in time to get on the Oliver Stone JFK fantasy bandwagon. Kennedy is in heaven with his brother Bobby, LBJ, Martin Luther King and Marilyn Monroe. He must explain himself before moving on to heaven's next level. I bought this book in paperback and initially suspected that it was the work of Gore Vidal or perhaps Thomas Disch. Wrong. It's the work of a novelist who is proud that he never repeats himself.( That's fine but it makes the people in marketing reach for the Xanax.)
It's an awful temptation to recount the funniest parts of this book but I shall resist. I'll only say that Mayer's vision of November 22 Dealey Plaza outdoes Robert Anton Wilson's fantasia of multiple assassins in Illuminatus! It's topped only by the account of what really happened the night Marilyn Monroe died. A book that deserves more readers.

WV or Terror of the Random

Blogger likes to keep the spammers at bay with its word verification device. In order for his comment to appear, the poster must type a more or less random series of letters that sometimes form an actual word but more often are a bizzaro portmanteau wordoid. At times the WV seems to possess an oracular editorial spirit. Some have called it the I Ching of the internet.
That way lies madness, according to Portland writer Ronnie Cordova, who refers to the wv as a schizophrenia test. If you think its cybergibberish means anything, you should be on Prolixin maintenance. Cordova's brutal common sense approach to anything spooky or outre' has its merits.
But I must disagree. The wv is the happiest, and most treacherous, verbal accident since Brion Gysin's discovery of the cut up technique.