Tag Archives: Bela Lugosi

Let the Right One In

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I love horror movies.

Good, bad, silly, gory, American, Spanish, Italian, British, Chinese, Argentinian, Japanese, French, Mexican, German, Brazilian…even Swedish.

Especially vampire flicks.

Why?

I think those seeds were planted early by scarcity.

Through my high school years, we only had the three local TV channels, and Dad essentially controlled the remote. The remote, at that time, was me.

“Roger, go over there and switch it to channel 27.”

After high school, I didn’t have a TV at all until I was 22. I intruded on my friends’ TV’s, or schlepped up to the communal screens on the top floors of the towers at UK. Thus, film viewing opportunities were sparse and sporadic. I didn’t see Bela Lugosi’s DRACULA until I was about 14 (a bleary late Saturday night, installed on the living room floor, armed with a pillow and a hope that the rooftop antenna was aimed in the correct direction). I think I saw my first Christopher Lee bloodsucker in my 20’s and I had that Groucho Marx epiphany; “How long has this been going on?”

Now, that sounds pitiful, but it’s not.

In those years, eight nights out of ten, I was rehearsing a play somewhere, and working to pay the rent during the day. Who had time for movies? Not me, no time…but a pent-up desire musta been a’building.

Since those brutally-deprived days, I’ve tried to make up for lost vampire flicks. Happily, I still haven’t exhausted the historic backlog, and that was proven again last night.

A friend called and invited himself over to watch a film he wanted me to see. It was Tomas Alfredson’s 2008 Swedish film; LET THE RIGHT ONE IN.

There was much to like here.

The vampire element of the film is innovative and empathetic. One cares about and frets over the challenges being faced by this 200-year-old/12-year-old child hazard. One cares about and frets over her bullied and neglected 12-year-old/12-year-old neighbor. One cares about and frets over the flawed, ineffective adults around the children’s lives. The only unsympathetic characters are the young school bullies who are simply making Scott Farcas-like decisions with similar results.

The ending is satisfying and troubling simultaneously. It made me long for a sequel just to answer a few questions I’d like to pose.

I really have only two complaints with the film.

  1. I watched a dubbed version. I thought the voices were disconnected and flat from the happenings on the screen. It reminded me vaguely of the dubbing in those awful/wonderful Mexican monster movies of the 60’s. I think I would have preferred subtitles.
  2. It’s full of all that Nordic gloom and snow and cold. This child of American South sun and humidity just can’t………. But that’s me.

This is a real nice flick.

I think you can let it in.

Octopi Flicks (er…Octopuses)

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It’s an understudied genre.

Why?

And why should we…

Make that…why should I…care now?

Well, I’m always arrested by synchronicity. I noticed and leapt on the opportunity to see the Golden Gate Bridge destroyed on successive nights by movie monsters from the sea. Both films featured a giant octopus. It got me thinking (eight to the bar, no less) about my favorite cinematic cephalopods.

Here’s a useless little list;

Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus (2009) is a classic zero on a scale of one to ten, BUT it does posit and show in a flash the implausible result from an aerial giant shark attack on an airplane, and an equally implausible performance by Debbie Gibson. On the positive side, the Golden Gate goes down, and the truly big octopus achieves a deadly draw in his death match with the titular fish…though to honor true disclosure, I should point out there are sequels. I suspect the sea creatures and the sequels should be avoided.

It Came From Beneath the Sea (1953) also destroys the Golden Gate, but this time the octopus gets the assignment and does a much better job.

This flick had serious world-ending talent involved.

Faith Domergue was in the midst of a great few years of weird movies. She was imperiled twice in 1955 in This Island Earth and Cult of the Cobra.

Kenneth Tobey was capping off a trilogy of sci-fi adventures; The Thing from Another World (1951) and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953).

And of course the star of the show was the creation of Ray Harryhausen, genius of stop-action wonders.

All of this talent and effort just to produce instant calamari – a San Francisco treat?

Isle of Fury (1936) is a tedious little film that allows Humphrey Bogart to shuck his impeccable South Sea Island white suit and wrestle with an octopus on the ocean floor. I’m believin’ every minute.

Sometimes the octopus is human. Maud Adams plays the title role in Octopussy (1983). The actual octopi in the film are fairly inconsequential. Ms. Adams is most certainly not.

Two films depict the same octopus. Bride of the Monster (1955) is a dreadful Ed Wood-directed exercise that features a ludicrous performance by Tor Johnson and an even more ludicrous watery struggle between Bela Lugosi and a rubber octopus. Ed Wood (1994) recreates that cinematic moment in a funny and pitiful way. I loved them both.

Without hesitation, my favorite octopus film is Cannery Row (1982). There are special performances by Nick Nolte, Debra Winger, Frank McRae, and M. Emmet Walsh. John Huston’s narration, the great frog hunt, Doc and Suzy thinking they could dance, and the beer milk shake episode are all remarkable elements, but all of it revolves around those eight baby octopi and their ill-fated dangling of a misplaced hope at the edge of the end of the Western World.

What’s my takeaway from this foolish survey?

Perhaps a word of advice to San Francisco;

Yer gonna need a bigger bay.

End-of-the-Earth Day

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I think the most un-heralded holiday is Earth Day and I hope you had a jolly one…or a merry one…or at least a hopeful one.

It can be a grim celebration. If you need proof of that, check out Turner Classic Movies’ (TCM) schedule for the day after Earth day a couple of years ago. I’m thinkin’ it must have been End-of-the-Earth Day. It was one mad scientist after another.

It featured devil bats (floppy puppets), giant shrews (big dogs with fake plastic teeth), human flies, perilous body fluids, disappearing corpses, human panthers, living heads on the wrong bodies, and of course man-made men who tap dance (“Oh, sweet mystery of life…”).

Whatta buffet of planet-threatening buffoonery.

I loved it.

And I love TCM.

A few days ago, an affable representative from Metronet called on us to explain their new venture aimed at competing with Spectrum for our cable and internet service.

Janie will make that decision for us. She’s a smart modern gal who watches a wide selection of TV and visits a large number of useful websites and services, all of which make our lives infinitely better. That’s what she said.

I’m a well-oiled geezer who toddles from TCM to CNN to MLB. It’s about the same number of channels I watched when I was ten and three channels were all we had. I’m told we grow and progress, but sometimes the evidence…

As Janie absorbed the pros and cons (and prose and cons – see what I did there?) of the pleasant and earnest sales rep, I perused the list of channels offered by Metronet. It was the usual 5,436 channels (50 of which were binge-broadcasting “Law and Order”).

I skipped through the 400-page document until I had assured myself that TCM, CNN, and my beloved Reds were represented.

My work here is done.

Wait!

If we switch to Metronet, will I still be able to see the Spectrum “monster” commercials? I would truly miss that sandstorm-loving mummy and his murderous puppet friend.

That might be a deal-breaker for me.

And that friends, is why we let Janie make those decisions.

Happy End-of-the-Earth Day!