-The Night Stalker (1972): 6/10

-The Night Strangler (1973): 6.5/10





A pair of early-1970s made-for-TV movies that anticipated a television sensation of the 90s. 1972's The Night Stalker stars Darren McGavin as Carl Kolchak, a lackadaisical reporter (always clad in his trademark straw fedora) who chances upon a major scoop when young, attractive women start turning up dead on the Vegas Strip, with savage bite marks on their necks and bodies drained of blood...blood that's nowhere to be found at the crime scenes. Yep, a vampire (Barry Atwater) is loose in Sin City, and it's up to Kolchak to convince the police of the danger and - if he cannot - man up and put an end to his sanguinary reign of terror himself.

Produced by Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis and scripted by Richard Matheson (from an unpublished story by Jeff Rice), The Night Stalker is well-produced by the standards of telefilms of the early 70s, and McGavin makes for a likably rumpled protagonist, but it's pretty tame by today's standards (some great vintage Las Vegas location footage, though). But it was impressive enough in its day to become a ratings smash, and a quickie sequel, the following year's The Night Strangler. Kolchak was run out of town at the end of the previous movie, the police and mayor wanting nothing to do with the publication of his wild supernatural tale, and now he's working a new journalistic gig in Seattle, Washington, where a new series of murders of young women starts up, this time the work of a man (Richard Anderson) who has created a serum that will keep him eternally young...provided he can kill six women every 21 years to procure the blood needed for a fresh batch.

In some ways more enjoyable than the first (and another great early-70s time capsule of Seattle), yet a ridgid narrative formula had already been set in stone, and would get run into the ground in the short-lived television series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which would run for a single season in 1974-75 before vanishing from the airwaves...but not before offering a major inspiration for a young Chris Carter, who would use the show as a springboard for the creation of his 1990s ratings favorite The X-Files (The Night Strangler, in particular, would essentially get remade as the season-one episode "Squeeze"). neither film is especially great, but both offer up nostalgically cheesy early-70s TV atmosphere, and McGavin gives the proceedings a nicely world-weary edge.

-The Mothman Prophecies (2002): 9/10



Underrated supernatural creeper about John Klein (Richard Gere), a reporter for the Washington post whose younger wife Mary (Debra Messing) catches a glimpse of a red-eyed, winged figure during a nighttime drive and gets into a nasty crack-up...one that reveals an inoperable tumor in her brain. She dies, leaving John bereaved, and two years later, on a jaunt from D.C. to Richmond, Virginia on an assignment, he inexplicably finds himself in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, hundreds of miles off-course. John has no idea how he got there, nor why, when his car breaks down in the middle of the night and he knocks on the door of a nearby farmhouse for assistance, the man inside, Gordon Smallwood (Will Patton), pulls a shotgun on him, claiming that John has shown up on his forch in the wee hours for the last two nights in a row. Local police officer Connie Mills (Laura Linney, decked out in Frances McDormand Fargo garb) arrives to defuse the situation, and John finds himself embroiled in a mystery that has been sweeping the town in recent months, sightings of a mysterious "Mothman" who eyewitness testimony reveals to resemble the sketchy drawings his late wife scribbled obsessively in a notebook in the weeks leading to her death. Now fully invested in the strange events, John elicits to hang around, even as he starts to receive mysterious calls from "Indrid Cold", and starts seeing portents and omens of encroaching disaster. Are these authentic precognitive flashes, and can John decipher the array of clues and prevent some grave tragedy from coming?

Directed by Mark Pellington, and scripted by Richard Hatem from a novel by John Keel (one inspired by true-life events that occured in Point Pleasant in the late 1960s), The Mothman Prophecies is a movie that has little in terms of overt scares or violence, and yet its suffused with a directionless sense of mounting dread that's hard to describe, yet remarkable to experience. Utilizing hovering, voyeuristic camerawork, dense sound design and a score by "Tomandandy", director Pellington (who also provides the droning, processed voice of "Indrid Cold") generates a haunting, compelling mood, one enlivened by the skillful performances. of the entire cast. Gere has rarely been better, carefully charting his character's gradual descent from rationality to the brink of madness, and he's nicely matched by his Primal Fear co-star Linney, who wants to keep the inexplicable events around her within the parameters of sanity, but finds it harder and harder. Patton is especially superb as Smallwood, displaying an aching sense of a good man slowly coming unglued under the pressure of strange visions he cannot process or put together in any logical sense. All of the film's puzzle pieces finally snap together in a bravura finale, one that finally gives the visceral jolts absent from the proceeding events while still leaving the audience room to interpret What It All Meant. A really superb supernatural chiller, one that was great twenty years(!) ago and has weathered the past two decades surprisingly well. If you haven't seen it, check it out...you won't regret it.

Curse (4/10)

Slow-moving Wes Craven effort with Christina Ricci and Jesse Eisenberg as siblings who are attacked by a werewolf, and (of course) must subsequently deal with the changes it brings on, as they attempt to find the creature in hopes of reversing "the curse". Despite its horror-comedy aspirations, Curse isn't scary, and is only occasionally funny.

The first half of this movie is, to put it mildly, a slow-burn -- I might have even turned it off except I'd paid to rent it. Things do start to move in the second half, with more humor, more suspense and action, but it never really rises above the level of an average Tales from the Crypt episode -- and an overlong one at that (the final twenty minutes are particularly tedious). The CGI werewolf isn't very scary-looking either.

The film's only saving grace is Ricci, who is wonderful, and whose performance is enormously sympathetic. She really carries the film.

You're a LOT kinder to Cursed than I would be. I hated it when it dropped. It ended up costing $75 million thanks to the endless reshoots.

Monterey Jack wrote: ↑Fri Oct 21, 2022 11:49 pm You're a LOT kinder to Cursed than I would be. I hated it when it dropped. It ended up costing $75 million thanks to the endless reshoots.

That movie had reshoots and they still couldn't improve it???

Paul MacLean wrote: ↑Fri Oct 21, 2022 11:53 pm
That movie had reshoots and they still couldn't improve it???

Classic case of the Weinsteins meddling endlessly with a movie, and "improving" it into a disaster. Go look it up on Wikipedia. Shameful how they treated Craven considering how much money he generated for them with the Scream movies.

This is the best article on the long, messed up history of that movie:

https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorial ... lm-cursed/

Sad that there was allegedly one version of the movie that was OK... Out of what three? But we never got to see that one!

AndyDursin wrote: ↑Sat Oct 22, 2022 1:12 am https://bloody-disgusting.com/editorial ... lm-cursed/

Wow.

Well it's pretty clear none of those re-shoots helped. The released version isn't a very inventive or unique movie. Remove the A-list cast, and it's nothing more than an exploitation flick. And it's infuriating they replaced Rick Baker's effects with fake-looking (and un-scary) CGI.

I'll never understand Harvey Weinstein's obsession with arbitrary, needless "tinkering". Though maybe he is just one of those people whose M.O. is to be an a**hole to everyone who crosses his path.

-Children Of The Damned (1964): 5/10



Companion piece to the 1960 horror/sci-fi favorite Village Of The Damned (I hesitate to say "sequel", as this movie makes no mention whatsoever to the events of its predecessor, making it essentially a remake) where six children of different nationalities in Britain showcase astonishing, off-the-charts intelligence...not to mention the ability to physically connect with each other and to bend the wills of those around to to suit their whims. They leave their respective foreign consulates and ensconce themselves inside of a decrepit old church, holding one of their aunts (Barbara Ferris) as a quasi-prisoner, as the authorities fret about the children possibly being some new strain of advanced super-humans...ones that may possibly supplant Homo Sapiens as the dominant species on the planet.

A fairly pedestrian riff on the same material as the 1960 film, only one that swaps out the first movie's evocative small-town setting for a generic London backlot and strips the titular children of the platinum locks that made them such a strikingly eerie image. It's not a badly-made movie, but like so many needless horror sequels, it offers nothing more than an adequate replication of the first movie's thrills, only shorn of the novelty that its predecessor had.

-The Bride (1985): 7.5/10



Lavish take on The Bride Of Frankenstein acts like an unofficial sequel, one that postulates might have happened had the woeful Monster (Clancy Brown) created by mad scientist Doctor Frankenstein (Sting!) not perished in the destruction of Frankenstein's lab at the climax of James Whale's 1935 classic. Here, his rejection by his newly-minted would-be finance (Jennifer Beals) only forces the Monster into the countryside, where he makes the acquaintance of a dwarf named Rinaldo (David Rappaport) who christens the Monster "Victor" (as in, "He who must win") and becomes his friend as they make a living working in a circus. Meanwhile Frankenstein has molded and guided the undead Bride (whom he christens "Eva", as in "The first woman") from a feral, childlike state into a beautiful young ingenue he showcases in high society, where she catches the eye of a dashing suitor (a pre-Princess Bride Cary Elwes). But Victor and Eva are psychically linked to each other's physical and emotional states, and Victor is compelled to make his way back to Frankenstein's castle to woo her anew.

Directed by Franc Roddam, The Bride is an extremely handsome production (shot in beautiful Parisian locations by Brian De Palma favorite Stephen H. Burum), one that's more like a tony Merchant/Ivory period drama than the kind of throat-tightening shocker of the Universal pictures of the 1930s and 40s, or the more graphic Hammer productions that ran from the 1950s through the 70s. There's little in terms of overt shocks and violence, and following the obligatory "creation" sequence at the beginning, you'd be hard-pressed to even qualify this as "horror", per se. Sumptuously scored by Maurice Jarre, The Bride is reasonably compelling and literate throughout, and Brown's performance as The Monster/"Victor" is empathetic and effective. Beals is also at the peak of her achingly lovely 80s Flashdance prime, and while her performance has some stilted passages, it's in fitting with a character who is literally learning the ropes of how to become a person. Only Sting seems miscast. While he looks great in his natty period duds (and flowing 80s mullet), he lacks the seething megalomania of Colin Clive in the Universal films, or the disdainful contempt of Peter Cushing in the Hammer movies. Still, provided you accept the movie more as a period romantic drama than an out-and-out thriller, The Bride is a rewarding sit.

-The Machinist (2004): 8/10



Christian Bale plays Trevor Reznik, a young man who works as a machinist in a metal plant who has been suffering from chronic insomnia (he claims to have not slept "For a whole year" to a disbelieving prostitute played by Jennifer Jason Leigh who he frequently visits). He's also become terrifyingly skinny. The reasons for both his insomnia and frightening weight loss are tied into some mysterious incident in his past, but it's the demons that plague him in the present that haunt Trevor, convincing him that there's a conspiracy levied against him by his co-workers who have become increasingly weirded out by his irrational behavior (the fact that one, played by Michael Ironside, loses an arm in an industrial accident that Trevor was potentially responsible for hasn't helped).

Director Brad Anderson and screenwriter Scott Kosar fashion this material into a deep dive into the fracturing psyche on a man wrestling with demons from without and within, and while the culmination of the narrative climaxes in a Big Twist that astute viewers might figure out before the reveal, it's still a strong mood piece, with Bale - that method-actor lunatic - turning himself into a gaunt, hollow-eyed specter that you'd expect to see staggering out of a concentration camp. A marvelous score by Roque Banos sets the tone perfectly, evoking the groaning, motivic building blocks of a vintage bernard Herrmann score, replete with the haunting quaver of an authentic Theremin.

Maurice Jarre was just EN FUEGO as they say in 1985. THE BRIDE, ENEMY MINE, and MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME are three of his very best scores.

I think it says much about Franc Roddam as a director that he detested Jarre's score. Clearly a "studio hire", Jarre gets trashed by him several times in the commentary -- he can't see that the music serves the film and its faults extremely well. I can't imagine that movie without a big, melodic, romantic score, it would've been even worse than it was.

AndyDursin wrote: ↑Sun Oct 23, 2022 9:47 amI can't imagine that movie without a big, melodic, romantic score, it would've been even worse than it was.

It may be the only Frankenstein movie where the monster gets a HAPPY ENDING, so wanting to deny the movie the kind of flowing, old-school Hollywood score that Jarre provided for it is bizarre.

Also, "worse than it was"? I looked up your review of the SF disc from four years back, and you gave it three stars! Seems like you enjoyed it for the most part.

-Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022): 1/10



Same sh!t, different decade. Tobe Hooper's magnificently unnerving 1974 horror classic (one that barely has any gore in it despite its lurid title and reputation) has been sequeled, prequeled and remade so many times, what's the point? No matter who's lurking behind Leatherface's fleshy mask, each new iteration of the material has played to diminishing returns, and this year's Netflix version (which is sold as being - Of course! - as the "real sequel" that ignores all of the "bad ones") is no exception, as a pack of radically unlikable Millennial douchebags descent on a small, abandoned Texas town hoping to turn it into a Hipster hot spot, accidentally incur a fatal seizure in in old woman (Alice Krige) squatting in one of the buildings, and face the wearisome wrath of her feral son, who dons his mom's freshly-skinned face, breaks the old chainsaw out of mothballs (it starts on a dime, even after 40+ years...shouldn't the gas inside have evaporated or turned into sludgy gunk by now?), and gets to slicin' & dicin'. Oh yeah, and Sally Hardesty (Olwen Fouere, subbing for the late Marilyn Burns) - the sole survivor of Leatherface's rampage in the original - is on hand for the same kind of "kick-ass" makeover Jamie Lee Curtis got in the recently concluded Blumhouse Halloween trilogy...yet is discarded as unceremoniously as Amy Irving in the awful The Rage: Carrie 2. There's plenty of hacked-off limbs, spilling entrails and spurts of crimson gore, but the film (incredibly, based on a story by the Evil Dead remake team of Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues) is crude, ugly and witless, and - Of course! - ends with the obligatory sequel setup. Utter garbage.

-The Wolfman (2010): 8/10



Beautiful updating of the classic 1941 horror favorite, with an ideal cast (Benicio Del Toro as Lawrence Talbot, cursed to become a slavering beast at the rising on the next full moon after being savagely mauled on the moors of Cornwall, England, Anthony Hopkins as his distant father, Sir John Talbot, Emily Blunt as Gwen Conliffe, who has asked Lawrence to come home and investigate the death of his brother, and her fiance, Hugo Weaving as Inspector Abberline, sent to investigate a string of gruesome murders in the area), beautiful production values (including super makeup effects by Rick Baker that copped an Oscar and a surging, atmospheric Danny Elfman score) and a surplus of excitingly-staged scenes of violent mayhem (including a rampage by the Wolfman through the streets of period London and a climactic beaut of a fight inside of a burning manor house). Ignored by audiences and critics a dozen years ago, this is a film that stands as one of the very few updates of the classic Universal Monster films of the 1930s and 40s to get the mournful tone just right. It's also enthusiastically R-rated without descending into gratuitous excess, and the cast all play the material with the right note of mournful poeticism (thankfully none of the mood-squashing "humorous" asides that mar so many of today's blockbuster entertainment, comic relief you quickly want to find relief from). It's ultimately not quite a great movie, but it's perfectly suited for atmospheric period chills on a crisp autumn night.

Good call on THE WOLFMAN I've been meaning to drag it out and watch it again. Did you watch the longer version or the theatrical edit?

I'd love to hear how awful Paul Haslinger's replacement score was that they (thankfully) didn't use once they went back to Elfman's. (EDIT - some of it is on the Youtube)

AndyDursin wrote: ↑Sun Oct 23, 2022 9:58 pm Good call on THE WOLFMAN I've been meaning to drag it out and watch it again. Did you watch the longer version or the theatrical edit?

Extended cut. I've never actually watched the theatrical version! I passed on the movie in theaters (to my eventual chagrin), but there's so much good stuff in the additional scenes I'd miss them if I watched the cut-down version. They removed Max Von Sydow's cameo! That is a crime. I also watched it with my older brother and my dad, both of whom enjoyed it a lot (dad's a big Anthony Hopkins fan).

I'd love to hear how awful Paul Haslinger's replacement score was that they (thankfully) didn't use once they went back to Elfman's. (EDIT - some of it is on the Youtube)

I'd also like to hear it, just for the sake of morbid curiosity. A bullet dodged, though, and how often does a score get rejected, a new one written and recorded, only for the producers to go back to the original one?

I passed on the movie in theaters (to my eventual chagrin),

WOW.

I know there is a continuity problem or two with the extended version in terms of how the scenes sequence early on, but I don't entirely remember it now...should look up my review at the time.

AndyDursin wrote: ↑Sun Oct 23, 2022 11:37 pm

I passed on the movie in theaters (to my eventual chagrin),

WOW.

I honestly don't know why. Probably the inexplicably low Rotten Tomatoes score (33%! ), and this during a period when I put too much stock in what the overall consensus of a movie was. I wouldn't pass up a movie like that in a theater again. It's astonishing how many genuinely good genre movies have stunningly low RT scores, while an unwatchable piece of sh!t like The Lighthouse got a 90% score.