Movies

Come, Cicily, let us go to our room, and pile the furniture in front of the door.
–from The Cat and the Canary: A Melodrama in Three Acts.

John Willard’s 1922 horror/melodrama/dark comedy has been adapted to film multiple times. The two 1930 versions, The Cat Creeps! and La Voluntad del muerto (A Spanish-language version filmed at night on the same sets, in the manner of the contemporaneous Dracula movies) have both been lost¹, the 1960 TV version (an episode of the short-lived anthology series, The Dow Hour of Great Mysteries) is little-seen now, and I can find even less on the 1961 Swedish adaptation, Katten och kanariefågeln.

Our Halloween Day reviews (based on those votes cast) will address the three most famous adaptations, starting with the hugely influential 1927 version. Along with Lon Chaney’s famous films, this movie led to Universal’s domination of the horror genre during Hollywood’s Golden Age, and, incidentally, shaped comic-book history.

Happy Halloween!

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The second surviving adaptation of The Cat and the Canary casts Bob Hope and plays the story, already a horror/comedy, almost entirely for laughs.

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–An asylum for the criminally insane. We’re just up the road.
–Oh. Well, that’s convenient.

Our third adaptation of The Cat and the Canary brings us to England in the 1930s. While it pushes some implications of the source material a little further than past versions, it aims squarely at being a dark comedy, with the emphasis on laughs. There’s not much else you can do with conventions and tropes the source mocked back in the 1920s.

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A Beltane festival takes place at the summer solstice¹, as American visitors get predictably much more involved in a pagan festival than they were expecting.  This movie receives lots of glowing reviews, which this will not be.  Did you enjoy The VVitch?  Hereditary? Then this movie is for you!  If not, a re-watch of The Wicker Man might please you More…

Zombies!

This is a subtitled Japanese movie, and I went into this movie almost entirely blind.  Jeremy of the SinCast had recommended it, only giving me the detail that it begins as your classic low budget horror movie, where we learn that the director has actually summoned real zombies, and your typical slasher ensues.  The gimmick is that it is entirely being shot in one take, and the third of the movie is entirely one shot.  Credits roll, and the movie changes into a movie about the movie being made, and gets much better.  While the One Cut movie is a zombie movie, the real movie is about making a movie and much less about horror.  We even get to see what was happening at the beginning and More…

Some Chinese restaurant with a comedy club up top of it just off-campus agreed to host the Black Mass.

In 2013, some activists formed the Satanic Temple in order to challenge violations of the separation of Church and State in the United States. They bought Halloween robes, hired an actor to play their leader, “Lucien Greaves,” and made a demonic statue which they carted from state to state and demanded be placed beside government-building monuments of the Ten Commandments. They made some salient political points and had a lot of fun.

Then things turned a little more serious.

This weekend, a documentary about these events becomes the second entry in our 2019 October Countdown.

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Our first review for 2019’s October Countdown involves a film that’s not quite horror—though it does feature suspense, a few frights, and a title character whom many would consider a monster.

Certainly, Joker seems suited to its October release date.

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The leaves brighten and brown and fall to the ground and the footsteps of costumed kids and masquerading party-goers crunch over them as they head for haunted happenings.

Time once again for our annual October Countdown, five seasonal shockers, one for each October weekend and one for Halloween Night. This year’s lunatic line-up includes midsommar horrors, a big-screen supervillain, a devilish documentary, and Japanese zombies, all from 2019.

For the final night, however, we dig into the past and review…. Well, that’s going to be up to you! Read on, my beastly Bureau-crats, and decide what past goody we’ll be picking or panning from the Halloween basket.

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James Gray’s hard SF movie has been playing to generally strong reviews– and an uneven box office. It depicts a nearish-future astronaut on a quest to a lost station, out among the solar system’s gas giants.

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