DailyView: Day 164, Movie 245

Continuing the run of horror/thriller movies in the DailyView, October edition, I found a film called Session 9, a film that depends on mood and imagery to build the feelings of the audience. At that level, the film does a decent job. However, the film does not reach on too many other levels.

An asbestos abatement crew wins a contract to work on an old, abandoned mental institution that had a frightening past. When things from the past seem to start coming back and affecting the crew, troubles mount and dangers arrive.

This movie just never grabbed me the way it hoped. I was bored by the early part of the movie and the third act felt very forced and threw a twist into the story that did not make much sense.

The cast was decent, led by David Caruso. It also included Josh Lucas, Stephen Gevedon, Peter Mullan, Brendan Sexton III, and Paul Guilfoyle.

Part of the plot included one of the crew playing a tape from a session in the past of a person with multiple personalities, with the dominant, possible alter, “Simon.” While that sounds creepy, one of the problems is that some of the voices on the tape sounded so cartoonish that it negatively affected the mood they were trying to go for in the scene.

I had a lot of problems with the film, from its lack of characterization in many of the characters to the out of nowhere ending. While it does create a certain mood, Session 9 just cannot sustain that across the entire film.

DailyView: Day 163, Movie 244

As I was going through the list of different horror movies of the sixties, I found a mention of a film considered one of the worst ever made. A zombie movie that was a musical. What?

Of course, the ridiculous title was a drawing factor as well.

As I was looking for a version to watch, I saw that MST3K had done this on their program which, after seeing it, makes perfect sense. MST3K would improve this exponentially.

Full fledged ridiculousness, terrible acting, terrible special effects, a rambling story that makes no sense with no character motivation and a bunch of song/dance routines.

Now I do not consider this a musical because no one ever just broke out in song. All of the numbers took place on a stage in front of an audience. This is Spinal Tap is not a musical, but there is music that is a signature piece of the story.

I did not mean to compare this flaming pile to This is Spinal Tap, a true legendary film, but I needed an analogy.

The zombies were not the only ones in this movie that were mixed-up. I was too.

Legitimately, there is no protagonist. There was barely any zombies. However, we did get plenty of songs and dance numbers, so there is that.

I would like to see the RiffTrax guys do this one for Halloween or something like that. It truly is one of the worst films ever done.

Now I’m going to watch Muppets Haunted House. I expect better acting, for sure.

DailyView: Day 162, Movie 243

Cassandra Peterson was able to parlay a horror host job showing “classic” B movies into an iconic role as Elvira thanks to her huge… charisma.

Elvira was the stage name of Peterson and she became a national hit hosting the weekly LA television program Elvira’s Movie Macabre. She developed into a cult character and wound up with her own film, Elvira: Mistress of the Night.

In order to find money for a Vegas show, Elvira went to the reading of the Last Will and testament of her Aunt, an aunt she did not know she had. The local residents were too conservative (putting the Footloose people to shame) and wanted no part of Elvira and her tight-clothes, cleaving-showing, character. Meanwhile, her aunt’s brother Vincent (W. Morgan Sheppard) was in search of his sister’s “cook” book for all of the power it contained.

This film is a big, really dumb hoot for one reason only…Elvira. She is fantastic in this movie, providing the best sexual innuendos I can ever remember hearing in a movie. She delivers these lines in a perfect, dry tone that hits you with an unexpected blast. My eyes bulged out several times from the brazen dialogue, shocked that they were able to “go there.”

The acting is not good. The story was simplistic and dumb. However, I really loved Elvira’s work in this movie. She totally saved it.

DailyView: Day 161, Movie 242

With the Dodgers game tonight on TBS, I knew it would be difficult to get a movie watched for the DailyView today so, after watching What If…? this morning, I pulled up HBO Max and found one of the Charlie Chaplin movies, Shoulder Arms.

Shoulder Arms was just shy of forty minutes long and saw Charlie Chaplin out of his “Little Tramp” persona. Instead, he was Charlie, the Doughboy, an infantryman during World War I. Charlie, along with his real life brother Sydney Chaplin, were two soldiers dealing with all kinds of situations in the war. Set in France, the film became one of the first films that was a comedy set in wartime.

Shoulder Arms is very funny as Chaplin is the master of this brand of comedy. The slapstick and pantomime is top notch. This was one of Chaplin’s most popular films and felt more epic than a lot of his other, shorter films that I have done during the DailyView.

This was a lot of fun and worked well to keep the DailyView going. Go Dodgers!

DailyView: Day 160, Movie 241

How about a Victorian era London horror/mystery/thriller featuring a Jack the Ripper style killer and a mystery worthy of the Scotland Yard gentlemen detectives? Yes, please. I found this one going through the film available on Hulu tonight and this sounded like a good one.

I have always had a fascination with Jack the Ripper and other serial killers, which they would eventually be labeled.

So I wanted to go ahead and watch this movie from 2016 called The Limehouse Golem starring Bill Nighy and Olivia Cooke.

The infamous Limehouse Golem killer was running around London causing panic and fear. Scotland Yard sent the well known detective John Kildare (Bill Nighy), an act that Kildare suspected was a plan to set him up as a scapegoat, a detective to be a failure to the public.

Kildare started investigating the case anyway and the evidence led him to the sensational trial of Lizzie Cree (Olivia Cooke) who was accused of poisoning her playwright husband John Cree (Sam Reid). She was facing losing the case and her life, but Kildare had the suspicion that John Cree was the Limehouse Golem killer.

The performances of the film were good, especially Bill Nighy as the Scotland Yard inspector. Olivia Cooke played her damaged character extremely well and you were never sure exactly what had happened with her. I liked how her character was played.

The story was filled with red herrings trying to make us confused with the killer. They did a neat thing during flashbacks of showing the suspect narrating the murder of the certain victims. It was clear that the film was using the technique to help tell the story and not just cause confusion. I liked that trick very much.

I did have a pretty good idea about who the killer was going to turn out to be. That did not bother mem even though it typically does. It all did fit together and I like when a movie works.

This was a good watch and a nice addition to the October DailyView.

DailyView: Day 159, Movie 240

I love Edgar Allan Poe. I teach an Edgar Allan Poe unit at my middle school every October/November. One of the key stories we look at is The Tell-Tale Heart and I always show the students the one man show version of the Tell-Tale Heart as performed by Vincent Price. In the 50s and 60s Vincent Price and director Roger Corman did a cycle of Poe stories together and this was the fourth one.

In fact, there were several stories included in this anthology. A couple that I did not recognize and a few more that I could see.

Part One: “Morella.”

This is a story I did not know and I was impressed with what the film did. The estranged daughter Lenora (Maggie Price) returned to her father Locke (Vincent Price) who had spent years mourning the loss of his beautiful wife Morella (Leona Gage). He had also spent years blaming her for her death. Morella claimed that the infant was responsible for her death. Lenora, who only had a few months remaining to live, discovered that her father had been keeping the corpse of her mother in his estate because he could just not say goodbye.

This was very creepy and Vincent Price does an admirable job selling the work, but it feels as if we are missing too many pieces of the story to really make this work. They seem to imply that she had died in childbirth, but it messes that bit up some. Locke changes his tune very quickly. At first he wanted no part of her, but he quickly changed that up. Too quickly. They could have used a few extra scenes to make it less like a slingshot. Then the weird ending really came from nowhere. This story needed more to it to have it make sense. Looking at the Poe story, it sounds as if those questions are all dealt with and it was more of the adaptation issue.

Interestingly, the daughter in the Poe story does not have a name and she is named here after one of the famous lost loves of Poe’s writing, Lenore from The Raven.

Part Two: “The Black Cat”

The Black Cat is one of my favorite Poe stories. I find that it is one of his most underrated ones. However, this version takes The Black Cat and mishmashes it up with The Cask of Amontillado. Those two stories do share a few similarities and this one works reasonably well together. Starring Peter Lorre as Montresor, Vincent Price as Fortunato, and Joyce Jameson as Annabel (perhaps after Annabel Lee?), The Black Cat tells the story of the drunkard Montresor who wants nothing more than to have his wife give him money to fund his nights of drinking.

When one of those nights introduced him to Fortunato, the wine tasting gentleman assisted the drunken Montresor home where he met Annabel. They began an affair on nights when Montresor would head out to do his drinking.

This story employs a more comedic tone, and Peter Lorre gives a solid comedic performance. However, I believe that the comedic aspect robs both of the two stories of their depth of emotion. Both stories end with someone being bricked up inside a wall, one of Poe’s favorite means of disposing of bodies. I was hoping that the film would maintain the wonderfully ironic twist at the end of the story of The Black Cat, and, to my pleasure, it did so. I thought this one improved as it went along, but truthfully, you did not need to combine the two stories into one.

Part Three: “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”

I was unfamiliar with this Poe story, but it was the one that seemed to work the best with the time allotted. Price this time played M. Valdemar, a man dying of a painful disease. He had made a deal with a hypnotist Carmichael (Basil Rathbone of Sherlock Holmes fame) to allow him to hypnotize him to take away the pain. Then when the moment of death would come, M. Valdemar agreed to let him use his hypnosis to see how long they could put off his death.

Valdemar’s wife, Helene (Debra Paget, and another famed Poe female name) was horrified by the deal, but she could do nothing to prevent it. What turned into a horror show was when Valdemar’s body died, Carmichael was able to keep control of him and Valdemar was communicating with him from the afterlife. Carmichael refused to let control of him go no matter how much they begged him.

Seeing Vincent Price in the bed during this time was creepy as can be and the story was brought to a satisfactory conclusion. This was the best of the three tales in my opinion. The Black Cat suffered from my knowledge of the two stories and the Morella felt too short and missing some important information.

These were clearly low budget films with high class talent. There was one really great, one okay and one lacking of the three tales of terror, but they were all well worth the watch. Go read some Edgar Allan Poe.

DailyView: Day 158, Movie 239

Found footage films are inconsistent. Some are really well done and others are just silly. With the success of The Blair Witch Project and the Paranormal Activity franchise, found footage became a big deal, especially in the horror genre. Recently, there have been fewer found footage films, which is a good thing because it was really becoming stale. However, the 2018 film Butterfly Kisses took the subgenre to another level.

Director Gavin York (Seth Adam Kallich) discovered a box full of tapes from a student film school project by Sophia Crane (Rachel Armiger) and her friend and cameraman Feldman (Reed DeLisle). They had been recording a local urban legend, The Peeping Tom, for a documentary. Gavin sets out to prove that the tapes were real, leading him to become lost in his project as nobody believed what he was saying. He was accused of creating a hoax.

This movie does an amazing job of blending the two stories together, from Sophia and Feldman in the past and the present with Gavin. The two stories work extremely well with each other.

The Peeping Tom is a cool design and the film uses the character in a proper manner. It does not over use the images of the creature and it keeps us wondering about what it is. In fact, there is a doubt from the movie whether or not the original tapes are real or were they just a pair of students who needed to make a splash.

Like many great found footage film, there were some times where I thought this might be a real story. When the director of The Blair Witch Project, Eduardo Sanchez, showed up it really crossed the real world with the fantasy. I knew this was not a true story, but with all of these people playing themselves in the film, it kept that little doubt inside.

Butterfly Kisses proves that the found footage subgenre is still alive. You just have to have a smart story with effective use of the footage that will create a mood. This movie does that in spades.

DailyView: Day 157, Movie 238

Jean-Claude Van Damme leads a tournament called Kumite, the ultimate martial arts tournament. He was a military man Frank Dux who wanted to compete in the Kumite in honor of his master. The military did not want Dux competing because of the danger involved as many times there had been fights to the death.

The martial arts in the film are excellent, albeit repetitive. The acting…not so much. The characters are underdeveloped and not worth the time.

There are a bunch of montages throughout the film.

I don’t really want to say much more about this one. The acting was terrible and the action solid, but repetitive.

Jean-Claude Van Damme fought well. The ending fight with former champion Chong Li (Bolo Yeung) was well done, but Chong Li was a real dirty fighter, which makes one wonder where the respect in this tournament was.

Bloodsport is a weak movie overall.