DRACULA (1931) - 9.5/10. I will be up-front and admit the following; I am a fan of Bram Stoker's DRACULA (the book...FFC's film is a bastardization of the novel and should have just been called DRACULA). Be that as it may, Browning's 1931 film has much more to do with the stage adaptations of the book than anything else by all accounts, yet I still love it. This was the film that started it all and pretty much influenced every Dracula film that came out after it. I love the sets and the atmosphere; the lack of music in the film lends an unsettling tension to the film as it progresses. Yet this film would have been a footnote in history had it not been for Bela Lugosi's performance which I appreciate more every time I see it. Lugosi' presence is huge; the way he spoke his lines (especially the chilling "What music they make!"), his voice, his eyes, and his charisma dominate the film from start to finish. The film never scared me, but I always felt uncomfortable with Dracula's predatory nature as acted out by Lugosi - how he looms over a bed, how he stood in the hull of the ship on his journey to England and then went out on deck to look at the sailors, all of whom were trapped rats on the ship. Dwight Frye's Renfield's laugh was effectively creepy, and that shot as the camera looks down into the hull to show Renfield's insane grin and lunatic eyes is genius. I am not going to fault the film for its faults or shortcomings...it just doesn't matter to me. Made almost 90 years ago, DRACULA still holds up and delivers the goods.

I am not a big fan of the Spanish version of the film, though Lupita Tovar was quite the cutie! There were aspects of the Spanish version I did enjoy, such as the moving camera shot up the stairs toward Dracula and Dracula's more violent reaction to the cigarette box mirror. But all in all, for me Carlos Villar was not a very effective Dracula, especially when compared to Lugosi. And I found the movie to move at a much slower pace. I much prefer the American version of the film.

AndyDursin wrote: Sun Oct 28, 2018 8:51 pm

Wow. When's he "releasing" it??

I think I'm going to hold off on watching this again until that trickles out...

That's one I'm looking forward to! I kind of wish I hadn't watched the DVD the other night, seeing as this version is coming. I certainly won't be buying the current Blu-ray!

Further on the 1979 version -- looking back at my previous review a few years ago, the film is more impressive to me now than it was then, and I find its effect to be lingering in my mind several days after taking it in.

I admit I do wish that Dracula's disturbing and malicious character (as established in the Transylvania scenes of prior versions) had been better depicted (either with a Transylvania sequence or transplanting those scenes to Carfax Abby). But this adaptation of the film remains outstanding, and more impressively is one of those movies that doesn't seem like "a product of its time". Little if anything in Badham's Dracula feels "70s" -- one could easily be persuaded it was made ten, maybe even 20 years later. In fact the matte paintings and miniatures look better than a lot of effects work from the 1990s! The bat puppet effects also look very convincing (they would be rendered in CGI today, and "look fancier" -- but have less impact).

John Williams' score brings so much to production as well, and provides a good deal of the macabre atmosphere on its own (there are moments in the score are genuinely creepy apart from the movie). While he hasn't worked much in the horror genre, Dracula attests to Williams' abilities as a magnificent évocateur of atmospheric dread and terror.

I also think the film was a victim of bad timing, and harder for audiences to take seriously, having been released just a few weeks after the sophomoric Love At First Bite, and the cancellation of NBC's awful Curse of Dracula series. With the subsequent debut of Werner Herzog's Nosferatu a couple of months later (and the home video boom still years away), the Badham film pretty-much became "just another vampire movie" in the mind of the public.

Even-Stevens…

-Apostle (2018): 9/10

-The Guest (2014): 8/10





A pair of horror gems featuring actor Dan Stevens (a long way from Downton Abbey). In Apostle (currently streaming on Netflix), Stevens portrays Thomas Richardson, a man at the beginning of the 20th century who makes a long, arduous trek to a remote island off the coast of Wales in order to rescue his sister (Elen Rhys) from the clutches of a sinister religious cult. Once there, he finds it’s not just a poisoning of the mind he must rescue his sister from, it goes far deeper than that, a long-festering evil that has taken root in the souls of the cult’s leader (Michael Sheen) and his fiercely loyal followers…one that requires a ritual sacrifice of a most unexpected nature. A true change-of-pace from gifted writer/director/editor Gareth Evans (who made the modern action/martial-arts classic The Raid: Redemption and its equally-great sequel, Bernandal), Apostle is a film brimming with eerie visuals, truly cringe-inducing bursts of violence and a suffocating sense of gradually-escalating dread, leading up to a whopper of a climax. Even though I’ll probably have to chew on some of the film’s subtilties for a while (and the film’s plus-sized 130-minute spread), I think it’s pretty close to an instant-classic of the “creepy religious cult” horror subgenre, and it comes highly recommended.

Meanwhile, 2014’s barely-released The Guest (from the You’re Next team of writer Simon Barret and director/editor Adam Wingard) features Stevens as David Collins, a soldier recently retuned from the Middle East who ingratiates himself into the family of a recently-fallen member of his elite squad, including his parents (Sheila Kelly, Leland Orser), his younger brother (Brendan Myer) and his 20-year-old sister (sexy Maika Monroe, from It Follows) in their small New Mexico hometown. David seems polite and well-mannered at first…but soon there’s a rash of deaths, and David may be manipulating the family’s affections, but to what purpose? Basically a hard-hitting action version of that late-80s/early-90s staple, the “[Blank]-From-Hell” thriller (Fatal Attraction being the most famous and lucrative example), The Guest is a film steeped in the aesthetics of 80’s cinema, from the gleaming chromium “Snoot Films” logo that proceeds it to the John Carpenter title fonts to the throbbing electronic score to the moody Dean Cundey/Adam Greenberg lighting. But there’s glimmers of horror both in David’s ruthless efficiency in realizing his goals and in the cusp-of-Halloween trappings (given a unique slant via the dusty, remote desert locations). Hell, the original Terminator is most often classified as a bland of action and science-fiction, but that’s really an 80s slasher flick to the core, from the ceaselessly robotic antagonist to his climactic confrontation with the “Final Girl”, thus The Guest also fits neatly into that narrow window that has always separated the R-rated action and horror genres. It’s a tense, slick and overlooked film.

Theater of Blood (1972) 3/5
I am a fan of Vincent Price's sometimes campy 1960s horrors and this is among the better ones with it's similarities to the (superior) The Abominable Dr. Phibes. However, the plot runs the risk of becoming slightly tedious when, after the first few victims, most of the viewer's involvement consists of "how will the next one be killed?". Still, enjoyable for fans of Price.

Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1964) 2/5
Horror anthology in the vein of Twice Told Tales or Black Sabbath (though in level of interest, it rarely rises above a Night Gallery episode). Peter Cushing has little to do as Dr. Schreck (Terror) and yes, that is a very young Donald Sutherland as one of the train passengers.
Christopher Lee provides an interesting enough portrayal of an art critic in what turns out to be the most interesting episode of the bunch (in a story that would fit nicely into any Night Gallery episode).

Poltergeist (1982) 3/5
I hadn't seen this in many years but it holds up pretty well. The story is simple and Tobe Hooper seems comfortable directing in the Spielberg vein. Goldsmith's masterful score is icing on the cake. I heard a rumor that there was a "remake" but I never bothered to verify that.

THE FOG (1980)
7.5/10

The new 4K restoration was showing nearby and I went last night. I know I've seen this movie before but all I could remember was Adrienne Barbeau's disc jockey character. I was surprised at ow much I liked it. John Carpenter did an excellent job of creating mood, helped immensely by the cinematography. It was spooky, not too gory, and had likable characters. Great use of music, both the electronic score and the source music coming from KAB 1340 Antonio Bay.

It’s the big day…!

Doopit-DOOPIT, doopit-DOOPIT…



-Green Room (2016): 7/10

-Night Of The Demons (1988): 7/10

-The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993): 11/10







Totally random selection to see out another month’s worth of shocks, shrieks and scares. 2016’s Green Room concerns a small-scale punk rock band (played by Alia Shakwat, Callum Turner, Joe Cole and Anton Yelchin) who take a gig at a remote bar in the Pacific Northwest filled with nasty skinheads, only to witness the aftermath of a murder in the back room, forcing them to hole themselves inside and await rescue (the dead girl’s friend, played by Yelchin’s Fright Night remake co-star Imogen Poots, is also present when they barricade themselves inside) while the bar’s saturnine owner (Patrick Stewart…!) calmly rallies the troops outside and starts arranging for the frightened bandmembers to quietly “disappear”. Written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin, the current Netflix release Hold The Dark), Green Room is a tense, well-shot variation on that old horror/thriller subgenre, the “siege movie”, that offers up plenty of gruesome thrills and taut situations. It’s not quite a great film, but worthy of attention, especially for fans of the late, talented Yelchin.

Night Of The Demons, meanwhile, concerns a pack of late-80’s teens who arrange a Halloween-night party at “Hull House”, a long-abandoned mortuary where they’ll drink, dance, fornicate and, oh yeah, unleash evil spirits that will slowly take over their minds and bodies and set them against each other in increasingly gruesome ways. Night takes about a half-hour to really get rockin’ and rollin’, but once it does, it offers up an adequate collection of in-your-face, gross-out haunted house tropes, with great makeup effects by Steve Johnson. It never achieves the kind of kinetic, Jack-in-the-box relentlessness of any of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead films (which it clearly emulates), but it’s sicko fun nevertheless, capped with a great, dark punchline.

Finally, The Nightmare Before Christmas (celebrating its 25th anniversary this year) remains one of the best Tim Burton films that Tim Burton never directed (it’s actually the work of the gifted Henry Selick, who went on to make James & The Giant Peach and the marvelous Coraline). A charmingly skewed take on those beloved Rankin/Bass holiday specials of yore, in concerns one Jack Skellington (spoken by Chris Sarandon and sung – beautifully -- by composer and songwriter Danny Elfman), the Pumpkin King of “Halloweentown”, a gorgeously gnarled world where it’s Halloween 365 days of the year. And yet Jack grows weary of the same old shocks, so when he discovers an enticing doors carved into a tree in the forest, he opens it and tumbles into the colorful eye-candy paradise of “Christmastown”, where he conspires – with the most noble of intentions – to kidnap “Sandy Claws (Ed Ivory) and allow him to take a vacation day so he can take his place delivering his own conception of delightful Christmas gifts (this crackerjack sequence, with Jack’s deeply-misconceived “presents” running amok, makes me laugh harder and longer than any other in a Burton movie). Beautifully-animated, and set to a series of witty, wistful Elfman songs, Nightmare is the ideal film to say goodbye to one beloved holiday and pass the torch to another, and it remains one of my most cherished Halloween-time perennials. Here’s looking forward to Jack, Sally and the denizens of Halloweentown celebrating another quarter-century’s worth of ghoulish yuletide joy.

The conclusion to my seasonal viewing, the "Halloween" episode of The Andy Griffith Show...

The Haunted House (1963)
A favorite episode of my favorite TV series. Andy, Barney, and Gomer investigate a "haunted" house. This has all the expected trappings, ghostly moans, spirit rappings, secret passages, a floating ax...
Very enjoyable.

Only about a month until It: Chapter 2 drops, and I already have an opening skit in the planning stages for the 2019 Halloween Horror Marathon. Stay tuned, boils and ghouls.