Spoof movies are generally a hit and miss proposition. Unfortunately, the Mel Brooks comedy, Dracula: Dead and Loving It is more of a miss than it is a hit.
Leslie Nielsen, who had become one of the prime spoof movie stars with his work in Airplane and Police Squad, starred as the iconic vampire Count Dracula. The film itself does a parody of the original 1931 Dracula with Bela Legosi.
The film starred Peter MacNicol as Renfield, Steven Weber as Jonathan Harker, Amy Yasbeck as Mina Seward, Lysette Anthony as Lucy, Harvey Korman as Dr. Seward, and Mel Brooks himself as Professor Van Helsing.
The comedic cast was strong. I was particularly a fan of Harvey Korman and Peter MacNicol, who played their characters with a massive gusto, framing every laugh that they could wring out of the script. A scene between the pair where MacNicol kept eating insect is one of the film’s highlights.
There was also some great dancing scenes between Dracula and Mina. The choreography of those scenes were some top notch work and Leslie Nielsen’s stunt double was amazing.
However, most of the jokes fell flat or were so low grade humor that they were only funny to some. I understand that humor is truly subjective, so if you found most of the film funny, I am glad for you.
I prefer Leslie Nielsen in other spoof films, but I will say he made a decent Dracula. He played everything straight and that made the balance off.
Dracula: Dead and Loving It was not horrible, but it was not that funny either.
It is Peacocktober on Peacock right now and I found a horror movie that I had not seen before while looking through the streaming service’s list. It was 1980’s Prom Night and that will be the next movie in the DailyView binge.
What a load of crap this was.
Prom Night did feature Jamie Lee Curtis as Kimberly Hammond, a girl whose sister was killed several years before in an accident. We saw the incident occur and, like much of the movie, it made no sense. Four kids were playing a warped version of hide and seek in an abandoned convent, where the seeker pretended to be the killer. However, when Kim’s sister Robin showed up, all four of the kids turned on her and chased her around. It led to Robin falling from a window and dying. The four kids promised to never speak of the accident again.
The four kids grew up and were preparing for prom when someone began stalking them and started killing them off.
The writing on this was just terrible. The dialogue was bad. The mystery was poorly constructed. There was only one or maybe two people the killer could possibly be, but when we saw the masked figure, it really limited the choices.
One major problem with Prom Night for me was that I was rooting for the masked killer. The little kids who tormented Robin and left her for dead were so unlikable that I wanted to see them all pay for their selfishness and their cruelty. When they were near adults, they were not any less obnoxious than they were as youths.
Then, some of this was laugh out loud funny instead of scary. I nearly busted a gut in the scene at the prom just before the Prom King was going to be announced.
There were no characters developed at all. Leslie Nielson was here as Kim’s father, but his role was so underwhelming that he felt like a waste. Antoinette Bower was used even less than Nielson was. I hope they got a nice payday out of it.
Prom Night was a sad rip off of Carrie and was a terrible movie. I did not like anything in this one.
Based loosely on the H.P. Lovecraft 1922 serial novelette, “Herbert West- Re-Animator”, Re-Animator is a classic horror/comedy from the mid-1980s that is full of gore and bizarre horror that was directed by Stuart Gordon.
Mad scientists always seems to be mucking around with life and death and it never turns out well.
Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) arrived in New England after a horrific incident in Switzerland. He has an experiment that he is continuing which will attempt to reanimate dead tissue. West recruits Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) into joining his project. Cain’s fiancé Megan (Barbara Crampton) was the daughter of the Dean of the college they were working at and offered some unexpected advantages.
When Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale) discovered the results of West’s serum, used to reanimate corpses, he went to blackmail West into giving up his research. Dr. Hill did not quite see what was going to happen as he wound up carrying his own decapitated head.
The movie is wild and shockingly gory. The story itself is simplistic and straight forward. Mad scientists never work out well. However, it is clear that all of the doctors/scientists involved here have motives that are not exactly what is best for the patients. None of the victims come back better than before they died. It turns into a horrible monster movie with zombie-like creature all over the place.
I could see how this could become a fast cult classic. It has that late night crowd feel to it. I’m not sure 100% why, but I was getting a Rocky Horror Picture Show vibe to this.
This is one of the most successful adaptations of any of H.P. Lovecraft’s works. It was followed by several sequels and a rebooted film.
Todays DailyView is heading all the way back to 1932 for a horror/comedy featuring the iconic Boris Karloff, hot off of his work as Frankenstein’s Monster. In fact, the film ran a disclaimer telling the audience that the actor was indeed Karloff, to avoid any debates. It was an odd disclaimer, but kicked off the film on a strange note.
The movie tells the story of a group of travelers who had to take shelter in an old mansion in the mountains because of a terrific storm. The house was inhabited by the Femm family, though it was not give immediately. The family Femm was hiding some dark secrets, including the strange butler Morgan (Boris Karloff) and his potentially dangerous behaviors.
Soon, the ensemble realized that there was more to be concerned about than just Morgan as the Femm family curse was revealed to the group.
The film had a great deal of tone that created a lot of suspense. The eeriness of the Femm family kept everyone uneasy and uncertain about what they were trying to do.
The cast of the film included such notable actors as Melvyn Douglas, Charles Loughton, Gloria Stuart, Lilian Bond, Brember Wills, Raymond Massey, Eva Moore, Ernest Thesiger, and Elspeth Dudgeon.
The film is fun to watch and has some enjoyable moments. It is definitely a 1930s film. I liked watching this.
This October, the DailyView has been doing a series of horror/thriller movies in honor of the upcoming Halloween. However, most of the films have been little known horror movies from the Shudder channel. Tonight, I pulled up one of the classic horror movies from one of the most iconic writer/director of the genre, Clive Barker. The film, which spawned nine sequels, is called Hellraiser.
Hellraiser introduced into the world of horror monsters the character of Pinhead (Doug Bradley), although that nomenclature would not come into existence until the sequel.
Synopsis from Rotten Tomatoes: “Sexual deviant Frank (Sean Chapman) inadvertently opens a portal to hell when he tinkers with a box he bought while abroad. The act unleashes gruesome beings called Cenobites, who tear Frank’s body apart. When Frank’s brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) and his wife, Julia (Clare Higgins), move into Frank’s old house, they accidentally bring what is left of Frank back to life. Frank then convinces Julia, his one-time lover, to lure men back to the house so he can use their blood to reconstruct himself.“
Although Pinhead would be the breakout character, he does not make too many appearances in Hellraiser. Our main villain is Frank and he is very freaky. When he began to wander around the house preying on the men lured into the trap by Julia, Frank becomes a true monster and is as frightening as any of the Cenobites.
The practical effects of the film are very effective, making it feel even more horrific than it would be with CGI. However, the third act horror-fest is a bit much to take.
I was not impressed with the acting of Hellraiser. Ashley Laurence, who played Larry’s daughter Kirsty, is so over-the-top that you do not buy her fear at all. All her facial expressions and screams did not make me feel fright for her. It nearly elicited laughter.
Certainly, the presence of Frank and the Cenobites are the stand out reasons to watch this movie. I was extremely engaged by these villainous monsters much more than I ever cared about Kristy.
Julia, on the other hand, and Larry were a fascinating pair and did carry their own in Hellraiser. Julia was confused and uncertain about what she was doing, but you could tell that she wanted to keep doing it. She was one of the most rotten characters in the film.
I can see where this movie could go to heights with the Pinhead character and the other Cenobites. Overall, Hellraiser was fine, weak acting, but solid scares and some A+ villains.
The October horror movie extravaganza continues during the DailyView as I returned to Shudder on Amazon Prime for a dark comedy called Prevenge.
Pregnant woman Ruth (Alice Rowe) has been recently widowed in a climbing accident. Carrying on conversations with her unborn baby which verbally pushes her to keep going, Ruth starts a mission of brutal murders against those people she holds responsible for her husband’s death.
The voice of the “baby” was so very creepy, especially when she was compelling Ruth on to continue her vicious slasher mission. I have not been able to find the actress who voiced the baby, but she was very effective (I saw one review that said the baby sounded like Moaning Myrtle from the Harry Potter films).
Alice Rowe wrote, directed and starred in Prevege while she was actually pregnant. In fact, she gave birth during the making of the movie and her actual baby daughter was able to play her on screen child.
Rowe does a tremendous job carrying this film. The dark comedy has a very British humor feel to it, and, there may be a time or two where the tone does not match. However, the feeling of creepiness outweighed any potential tone issues.
This was an entertaining film that was very dark and funny, with a character whose mental issues may be too much to overcome. Shudder has definitely a deep catalogue of engaging horror films.
I am continuing to search through Shudder in this October horror section of the DailyView, and there are just a ton of horror movies that I have never seen. Tonight, I came across a film called The Boy Behind the Door from last year.
Bobby (Lonnie Chavis) and Kevin (Ezra Dewey) were best friends. They would swear to be best friends until the end. Then, the boys are abducted and thrown into the trunk of a car. When they arrive at their destination, Kevin is taken out of the trunk and locked in a room in the isolated house. Bobby is able to get out of the trunk, but he would not leave his friend.
I loved this movie. The two boys did an amazing job in the film. Their friendship is at the very heart of the movie and is so strong that it was the distinct characteristic of these characters.
The debut of filmmakers David Charbonier and Justin Powell, The Boy Behind the Door truly amps up the anxiety and tension of the simple story of an abduction. I found myself yelling at the screen a few times when Bobby or Kevin would do something to survive.
I was so ready to have Kristin Bauer van Straten, one of the kidnappers of the film, get her comeuppance. The film was extremely satisfying in this manner. She brought a lot of menace and viciousness to the role.
The film is well paced and really gets you rooting for these boys to survive their encounter with these evil people. It is a well done horror movie that is totally entertaining.
I knew what kind of movie this was going to be when Julian McMahon’s head rolled out of his casket and it wasn’t supposed to be funny.
Sandra Bullock was Linda Hanson, a wife and mother of two whose life was uprooted when her husband Jim (Julian McMahon) was killed in a car crash. However, the next day, Linda awoke from her sleep to find Jim alive and well. The film then played with time and showed the events of the week out of order as Linda tried to figure out what exactly had happened.
There are so many silly things going on in this movie that it really undercuts the potentially interesting premise. The way the story is told narratively makes the tragic circumstances almost ridiculous. The melodrama here is cranked up to a huge level.
Sandra Bullock overacts like crazy, and, the end of the movie makes no sense. I can’t discuss it without spoiling, but let’s just say that her memory must make everything good.
She blocked out certain things during the week, but many of them are just not important. Her oldest daughter got hurt, but why does she block that out when it does not have anything to do with Jim’s accident. I can understand why she blocks out Jim’s accident, but looking back, she seems far more crazy than she is shown to be.
Best part about this movie is the cool movie poster.
Just a dumb movie that leaves Netflix on Oct. 31st. Not a day too soon.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
EYG- Embrace Your Geekness 