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The great Festivids redactening has begun!

I'm not actually sure I'll make a vid of the film I saw last night, but I want to leave my options open. Also, it makes writing this post super-easy.

This is just a quick post, because I don't have a lot to say about this one. It's the first of three feature spin-offs from HBO's Tales from the Crypt anthology series, followed quickly by Bordello of Blood and much less quickly by Ritual (which is also somewhat interesting in that it is a remake of I Walked with a Zombie, although I suspect with actual horror*).

Basically, this is a fun, dumb horror-action flick with some gross makeup effects and a delightful performance by Billy Zane as a demonic tempter trying to get his hands on a relic that will bring on the apocalypse. Most of the film is a mix of an amped-up Night of the Living Dead and an amped-down The Evil Dead with some crazy-ass comic-style visuals courtesy of director Ernest R. Dickerson (a fantastic director who mainly does television now). Also in the cast (and uniformly great) are William Sadler, Jada Pinkett Smith, Brenda Bakke, CCH Pounder, Gary Farmer, Thomas Haden Church, and B-movie stalwart Dick Miller.

* I Walked with a Zombie lacks an element necessary to a horror-film-as-horror-film in that, discounting xenophobia, there is at no point any real threat toward any of our protagonists. This isn't revealing the big twist. It's just not there. It's a bunch of people in a mess with some voodoo at the edges.

This is cheating, but I had to go to bed early last night and I'd already watched the haunted house episode of Haven. So, um, yeah. Enjoying my watch through of Haven. Sometimes it's a fun distraction/background noise and sometimes I get really invested... mostly in Duke Crocker. Duke is the best.

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Festivids sign-ups open today! I'll be signing up just as soon as I figure out what I'm requesting/offering.

Pipes lives under the stairs. Pipes is in my room. Pipes is coming for me. Pipes is coming for you. He's here. He's here. We are all of us doomed.

So, basically, the scared the ever-living crap out of me and gave me nightmares. I won't say much more on it, except that if you want a good solid spooky experience, this BBC production from 1992 is an unusual but effective means to that end.

Island of Lost Souls watched via Criterion Blu-ray

In 1956, Paramount Pictures sold the majority of its pre-1948 film library to MCA for quick cash. MCA later merged with Universal, leaving Paramount's early film catalog with that studio. This presented a problem in the question of releasing Paramount's early horror films on DVD, because Universal had its own horror brand that was strongly linked with films that were explicitly produced by that studio. Universal tended to release its horror films in sets or special editions centered around a particular monster. Paramount's horror films were few and tended not to fit in with Universal's marketing/groupings.

At least two of the films, 1932's Island of Lost Souls (adapted from H.G. Wells' "Island of Dr. Moreau") and 1944's The Uninvited (a haunted house tale starring Ray Milland), are bona fide masterpieces, but for a while it looked like they would never see a proper release beyond the existing VHS versions*. In the case of Island of Lost Souls, prospects were particularly bleak, as no original negatives survived -- only some prints that were in less-than-stellar condition.

Thank the cinema deities for Criterion Collection, which licensed both films from Universal for release on both DVD and Blu-ray. Island came out in 2011 and The Uninvited will come out later this month.

I watched this last night after not having seen it for decades and it really holds up. It came in right before enforcement of the Production Code started, so there's a lot of surprising elements, like a quick scene of mad scientist Dr. Moreau (an excellent Charles Laughton) performing surgery on one of his man-animal creations. The ending was just as brutal as I always remembered it being (while being mostly suggested after a tasteful pan away).

There are, unsurprisingly, some major problematic elements. The evolutionary scientist is an unscrupulous madman who casts himself as the god of his creations. There's also a lot of sexism and gender essentialism surrounding the two female characters. One of the underlying themes is "there are things man is not meant to know", but thankfully that's buried under "brutality begets brutality" and "maybe science works best with patience and possibly some control groups" (I may be bringing my own prejudices in here a bit on that last one).

In any case, it's a brilliant, brilliant film, featuring great performances from Laughton as well as Bela Lugosi in a small role as the furry, wide-eyed Sayer of Law. The screenplay is succinct and to the point, while still weaving in the themes I discussed earlier (and a few others). Director Erle C. Kenton works with cinematographer Karl Struss to create some visually dynamic sequences, including some unnerving uses of shadow.

Whatever Criterion did to restore the film works, because it's looking gorgeous. They also put together a rich package of extras. I only had the chance to sample two of them. One is a featurette where Devo's Gerald Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh discuss the influence that Island of Lost Souls had on the underlying philosophy of the band during its formation. The other is Devo's difficult-to-watch-but-impossible-not-to-watch 1976 short film In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution, which features them performing Secret Agent Man and Jocko Homo.

I will post about Night Vale Live separately later on. Probably. I will say that Bobak Ferdowsi was there, sitting across the aisle from our group. That was frickin' awesome.

* Paramount had at least one other horror masterpiece from that era, 1931's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but that is owned by Warner Bros. for complicated reasons.

Watched through Netflix Instant.

Alas and alack, this is not related to the bats**t genius Japanese film Hausu. It is a head-scratcher, but for less awesome reasons.

The story is that a horror author (William Katt) moves back into his childhood home to work on his next book, a memoir of his time in Vietnam. This same house is where his aunt recently committed suicide and where, a few years back, his son went missing. The set-up is for a dark, moody haunted house film that uses the haunting to highlight the author's tragedy.

What happens instead is a series of wacky supernatural vignettes, several of which either seem to call back to The Evil Dead or predict Evil Dead II (released the following year). Interspersed throughout the film are a series of 'Nam flashbacks that only (barely) become relevant at the end of the movie.

There's a number of funny parts in the movie and some great uses of unexpected space (there's a bigger-on-the-inside moment that was very familiar to me as a Doctor Who fan). The mood whiplash, though, was a bit too much to take. I really wish the filmmakers had figured out what they were doing and where they were going with this.