A low budget film from 1961 deals with an airplane that began climbing for no apparent reason. The controls were not in the pilot’s control and the passengers began losing consciousness from a lack of oxygen.
Coincidentally (or was it?), the airplane contained nuclear physicist, a rocket expert, and a mathematical genius who were on their way to Washington D.C. for a special meeting about a revolutionary new weapon.
Turned out the plane was being pulled into a fourth dimension by future beings who were never born because of the weapon that was to be created by the three of them. They were to be put on trial for their destructive crimes.
The film starred Craig Hill, Paula Raymond, and Dayton Lummis as our three defendants of the future.
The film did feel sort of preachy near the end as it was a film against the proliferation of nuclear weaponry from the 1960s, playing on the fears of the nation at the times. The story was more interesting during the mystery, before we knew what was happening to the plane. The resolution of the fourth dimension was quick and lacked any real development.
Overall, the film was fine, but I am not sure it will be memorable moving forward.
Any movie that has a line in it, when referencing a spot on a Craig Kilborn talk show, “It’s Scott Baio. He shouldn’t be going after Carrottop anyway” tells you everything you need to know about it.
This film featured Christina Ricci and Jesse Eisenberg as siblings who are in a car wreck with another woman. That woman winds up being torn apart by a werewolf, which also scratched them, infecting them with the mark of the beast.
Jesse Eisenberg starts to show signs of being a werewolf and does his best Michael J. Fox imitation to show off his skills as a wrestler. There is also a gay storyline involving Milo Ventimiglia that is very early 2000s.
The story is stupid. The characters are boring. The dialogue is laughable. And they have a bunch of D level cameos for no apparent reason.
The CGI is terrible, and that is not a good thing when you have werewolves running around as your main antagonists.
It had a werewolf flip the bird to Christina Ricci, who was trying to insult the werewolf by saying it had a boney butt.
It had a werewolf dog.
It was directed by Wes Craven who may have to give his “Master of Horror” nickname back.
Cursed was atrocious. Really a terrible movie. And it had Scott Baio.
I have started watching the Netflix series Squid Game that has been creating such a buzz across the streaming platform and throughout pop culture. I had come to it later than most, but I am engaged at the moment after the first three episodes. However, there still needs to be time allotted to continue the DailyView, and I came up with the perfect film to go right along with Squid Game.
Battle Royale is a 2000 Japanese action/thriller/horror film that would be one of the major influences on the Hunger Games franchise and Squid Game. An entire 9th grade class is taken to a deserted island and given supplies and some form of a weapon. Their goal? They have three days to kill everyone in the class, leaving one surviving teen. If they do not participate or fail to kill everyone else, collars that have been placed around their necks will explode, killing anyone who had survived.
Let me start off with one of the drawbacks to this film. The acting is not great. There is so much over-the-top melodrama that it can be shaky. However, I think part of that is intended, to show the reactions of the kids to this unbelievable circumstances. There is no doubt that there are plenty of 9th graders who would respond exactly like this in the same situations.
The film feels to me to be a analogy to teenage life and the troubles that engulf that age of child, only at a much heightened and elevated level of violence. There is no doubt that kids this age overreact to many things during their lives and this film brings that reaction to the forefront.
Tatsuya Fujiwara was our lead protagonist in the film as Shuya Nanahara. Nanahara was a strong character who did not immediately embrace the violence that many of his classmates did. He was looking for another way to solve the problem than just being the final surviving student. He was with the beautiful Noriko (Aki Maeda), whom he promised that he would protect. His best friend, the troubled Nobu (Yukihiro Kotani ) was killed at the beginning of the film by their former teacher Kitano (Takeshi Kitano), who Nobu had stabbed with a knife a few years earlier.
Takeshi Kitano was one of the most successful Japanese stars at the time, including being a game show host, which allowed him to use those skills in this role. Kitano was the most complex of the characters in this film, bringing a level of sadness and understanding to the antagonist despite being a horrid person in the very beginning. Kitano was one of the biggest draws in the cast.
Battle Royale has been an amazingly influential film, inspiring several movies and TV shows since its release in 2000. Quentin Tarantino said the movie was one of the best movies of the last few decades and said it was a personal favorite. It is ultra violent and controversial for its topics, yet it lives on as an influence for many other projects.
Continuing on the DailyView, today is a 1945 horror/drama film that was based on a novel written in 1890 by Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray.
I was originally introduced to the character of Dorian Gray through the comic book/movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and I will say that the idea of the character and his aging portrait was one that certainly exceeded the time of Oscar Wilde. Where he came up with such a novel and intriguing concept is fascinating.
Dorian Gray (Hurd Hatfield) had a portrait painted of him by a well-known artist, Basil Hallward (Lowell Gilmore). Dorian was young and wealthy. However, when he gazed upon the picture painted, he waxed poetically. He wished that he could always remain as young as he was now and that it was the painting that would become old and wrinkled. That wish would come true, complicating Dorian Gray’s life and sending him down the road of sin.
The film included a performance from a young Angela Lansbury as a beautiful singer, Sybil Vane, who was in love with Dorian and killed herself after Dorian sent her a letter breaking off their engagement.
The biggest issue with the movie was that the passage of time was muddled. It was difficult to know how long the time frame was and, since that is an important part of the film, that caused some uncertainty.
Still, the story is well told and the performances are good. Dorian Gray is an excellent villain as our protagonist. He is more than just an evil man, as some perceived him as during the film. He was lost in his life, the pain and isolation that he was facing and the dark word of mouth that he was dealing with in the community.
There is no debating that Dorian Gray did some callous, downright wicked things in his lifetime, but there is more beneath the surface of the character than just that and this is why this story has survived since the 1890s. The film does a good job of laying out this conflict within the main character.
The film is also beautifully shot in black and white and only veering into color once, which was a most disturbing moment of the film.
This is definitely a classic movie that I am glad I had a chance to watch.
Another packed day requires that I dip into the HBO Max collection of Charlie Chaplin for another shorter classic film from the silent master. The picking on HBO Max for Chaplin’s films have become sparse since I have used several during the DailyView. One of the remaining films was The Pilgrim.
Chaplin is an escape convict who has stolen the clothes of a minister to replace his prison attire. At the train station, in an attempt to avoid the police as well as a couple that wants him to marry them, Chaplin randomly boards a train to Devil’s Gulch, Texas. Once there, he is mistaken for a church’s new parson and is immediately whisked away to a service.
There is a tremendous sequence of visual storytelling as Chaplin gives a sermon on David and Goliath that ends in a most unexpected manner. This was one of the most stand out sections of The Pilgrim.
Chaplin encounters an old cell mate of his who threatens to blow his cover. The man steals the church money, and Chaplin intends on retrieving it.
The film featured a song called “I’m Bound for Texas” which Chaplin had written and was sung by Matt Monro.
This would be the final film that Edna Purviance would co-star with Chaplin. She had been a regular in his oeuvre for many years prior to this.
The Pilgrim is another classic silent film from a master of the genre. Chaplin’s slapstick abilities are beyond reproach and his comedy is right on par. The Pilgrim is one of his great works despite being less known than some of his other films.
The DailyView continued this morning with another of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes films that are available on YouTube. This film was the 1943 The Spider Woman.
Basil Rathbone returned as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce resumed his role as Dr. Watson. The great detective became involved in the case of “the pyjama suicides.” A group of men from London began killing themselves at night for no apparent reason. Holmes was not fooled into believing these were suicides. He knew that they were actually murders and he started to investigate the case.
Holmes, who had faked his own death in order to go undercover as the next victim, believed that the murderer was a woman, a female Moriarty. He meets Adrea Spedding (Gale Sondergaard) who uses deadly spiders as her murder weapon.
The mystery was entertaining and the story moved quickly. It incorporated several parts of some classic stories of Holmes author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, including The Sign of Four as well as several short stories.
Rathbone continued to show that he was a wonderful Sherlock Holmes as he carried himself in a perfect manner for the gentleman detective. Nigel Bruce made an excellent Dr. Watson once again, playing the version of the character as more of a bumbling sidekick who still could be effective in his own way. Watson’s expertise in anatomy provided a key detail during the adventure.
Adrea Spedding provided Holmes with a strong antagonist who was very nearly on his level. She was an unlikely adversary for Holmes, but one who showed intelligence nearly on par with Shelock.
This was the 7th of 14 features with Rathbone and Bruce and it was one of the better ones that I have seen so far.
Sleepaway Camp is a teen slasher film set at a summer camp. Shy teen Angela (Felissa Rose) and her protective cousin Ricky (Jonathan Tiersten) are sent to summer camp by their (let’s say) quirky parent. When a killer starts targeting the teenagers at Camp Arawak…well, actually not much happened. The Campers kept playing their games and acting like a bunch of spoiled bullies.
This was a bad choice for me today. I had a bad day at school so the last thing that I wanted was to see a bunch of ill-behaved, downright rotten children acting badly. They were all bullies and mean spirited teenagers, and that was the last thing I wanted to see right now.
However, the acting was really bad. The story was poorly conceived, simply leading toward a twist, shock ending that was as insulting as anything else.
The killer took time to get the first victim too. While we waited, we got to see a bunch of camp activities. We saw some volleyball. We saw some skinny dipping. We saw a bunch of flirting with some of these horrible kids.
It did not help that the movie threw a pedophile chef in at the beginning of the film as he had Angela cornered and was going to rape her. That was one of the most uncomfortable scenes that I have seen in any movie.
This was a horrendous movie that I did not enjoy even a little bit. I have to find some good movies for the DailyView as lately we’ve had too many garbage ones.
Earlier this year in the DailyView, I watched the 2006 remake of this movie that starred Nicolas Cage. It was one of the worst films that I have seen during the DailyView. Although it does share some story parts in common, the original 1973 version is considerably different in tone and execution.
Sergeant Neil Howie (Edward Woodward), a puritan police officer, received an anonymous letter begging for help in finding a missing 12-year old girl on the island of Summerisle off the coast of Scotland. When he arrived on the island, Sgt. Howie encountered a group of people preparing for their May Day celebration. Sgt. Howie was obstructed, lied to and misled about the whereabouts or the fate of the girl Rowan,
Howie discovered the grave of Rowan, he had to receive the permission of Lord Summerisle (Christopher Lee) to exhume the casket. Sgt. Howie’s Christian beliefs were at odds with much of what he saw happening on the island, and he felt that it was vitally important to find Rowan before it was too late.
This The Wicker Man is much more about Christianity vs. Paganism than the Nic Cage version.
The 1973 movie made these people on the island feel much more cult-like than the more recent film. The songs that they sang were about as creepy as you are ever going to hear.
While the endings were pretty similar, this version’s ending was a hundred times better, with the fright factor being much higher and making the entire thing serious whereas the Cage version was ridiculous from the start. Watching the island people sway back and forth singing as the Wicker Man burned would have been a frightful surprise if I had not seen the other version already. Even with the knowledge of what was going to happen, The Wicker Man 1973 was so much more effective in creating a mood of fear and uneasiness.
The final shot of the 1973 film is an amazing shot of the sunset and it is simply a beautifully constructed image.
It really is amazing that one of the best British horror movies ever made was remade into one of the worst movies ever made.
Disney has been trying to make their amusement park rides into feature film franchises for years. Their most successful attempt at this was The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. They have had a box office success with their 2021 Jungle Cruise movie with The Rock and Emily Blunt. They had less success with Mission to Mars and Tomorrowland.
One of their most infamous flops was The Haunted Mansion, a 2003 film starring Eddie Murphy. I’ve always enjoyed Eddie Murphy, but the negative reviews and word of mouth of this movie chased me away. After the Muppet Haunted Mansion special last week, I thought that I would give the film a try. It was on Disney +, which makes it easy streaming.
While it is not a very good movie, I don’t think it was as bad as everybody has said. Perhaps it is one of those movies that if you approach it with low expectations, you enjoy it more.
There are moments that are good. The special effects are excellent. Eddie Murphy is pretty good with his hectic performance, although there are several times when his performance was too manic. Wallace Shawn, who played the butler Ezra, is always a delight.
While the story is simplistic and messy, I did think the third act conclusion was pretty decent.
Real estate agent Jim Evers (Eddie Murphy) is a workaholic and, without realizing it, puts his work ahead of his wife Sara (Marsha Thomason), daughter Megan (Aree Davis) and son Michael (Marc John Jefferies). When he tries to make up for his shortcomings by taking his family away for a weekend, Jim sidetracks the trip to check out a potential house he could sell. When his family arrived at the Haunted mansion, they are trapped inside by a terrible storm and discover that the sidetrip was all a set up from the ghosts that exist inside the mansion, attempting to break a long standing curse.
Terence Stamp played the butler Ramsley, one of the spirits that inhabited the mansion. He worked for his master Gracey (Nathaniel Parker), whose wife Elizabeth had died by her own hands years before, leaving him alone and miserable.
Part of the problem was that the film’s story was all over the place and was there simply to get as many special effects into play as they could possible get. Most of the characters were basic and some were one note. Madame Leota (Jennifer Tilly) was a gypsy spirit inside a crystal ball, but that character was one of my least favorite, most annoying parts of the film.
The themes of the movie were muddled and did not work well together. Some were just touched upon while others were pounded on like a sledge hammer. Inconsistencies raged through the entire movie and coincidences were everywhere.
This movie does not have a lot of funny moments, nor does it have a lot of scares. It’s more like a Goonies-type action movie with a bunch of special effects. There is not enough of either comedy or horror to stand out from the other, and it does not blend well . Had the movie embraced either the comedy or the horror more, I think this would have been more successful.
Still, I liked the ending and the rest of the movie was not the worst thing I have seen. It could have been much better, but looking at it with lower expectations helped me like it more.
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.
EYG- Embrace Your Geekness 