jetpack_monkey_ljarchive

Title: Dracula Has Risen from the Dance Floor
Song: Dragonette - Fixin to Thrill
Source: Hammer Dracula
Length: 4:00
Warnings: Metaphorical sexual violence. Violence. Blood.

Summary: If Drac is a DJ, death is a dance floor, blood is the rhythm, your screams are the music.

Password: vampires

Dragonetteula from Jetpack Monkey on Vimeo.

Download MP4

Notes: This vid uses at least one clip from every Hammer film that features either Christopher Lee's Dracula or Peter Cushing's Van Helsing. I've been meaning for years to do a companion piece to Don't Stop Me Now, my Hammer Frankenstein vid. One day in IRC, joyo raised the challenge: more vidders should be making vids to Dragonette songs. I popped into Rdio and the first song that came up started with this dark, minor key dirge that sounded similar to but distinct from James Bernard's score for 1958's Horror of Dracula. And thus, Fixin to Thrill became my vidsong.

My vidding process on this one was a bit different. I literally just pulled every clip I liked down onto the timeline. My hope was to create a visual melange based on the qualities of the footage divorced from the narrative context. My multi-source vids tend to collapse the narratives of multiple sources into one meta-narrative and I wanted to break away from that a bit. Unfortunately, my brain is just organized the way it's organized, and the end result is once again a meta-narrative. Sorry if you wanted something new from me, folks.

The one major issue I ran into while making this vid is that my fannish devotion to the source began decades before my personal social justice awakening. The dubcon/noncon subtext of the films turned me off a bit. Ultimately, I decided to turn into the skid and acknowledge the problematic nature (even if I was doing so in the midst of a vid that was supposed to be dancey fun).

I don't even remember everyone who looked at the vid ahead of time. I really must keep better notes. I know that thirdblindmouse took a gander, for which I am grateful.

From elipie : Ramble on about your favorite Universal monster.

For sheer power an emotional resonance, nothing beats the Frankenstein Monster as played by Boris Karloff in the 1931 film Frankenstein (and to a lesser extent in Bride of Frankenstein and a much lesser extent in Son of Frankenstein). Anyone arguing that monster acting is somehow less than "regular" acting should immediately review the scene where we meet the Monster for the first time. Karloff, under heavy makeup, uses awkward, stilted-but-not-stiff movements to evoke the otherness of this hapless being.  Then, in one of my favorite movie moments, Doctor Frankenstein opens a slat in the roof and lets the sunlight pour in. The Monster, who in his brief time on Earth has only known the darkness of the lab and its dungeon, reaches up, stretching for the light, his eyes full of confusion and wonder. And just as soon as he finds something hopeful in his life, the doctor closes the slat, his experiment moving on. And Karloff's hands go out in this helpless, pleading gesture and I. just. fucking. break.

Karloff's performance throughout really captures the soul of the Monster, an Other born into a world that didn't want him and that he didn't ask for. It's a 75-minute commitment that I suggest you make. Now. I'll wait.

While I do love Bride of Frankenstein, I think it loses some of the Monster's pathos for a number of reasons. The movie is played much more strongly for comedy, for one thing. The Monster also spends a good chunk of the film playing henchman for Dr. Pretorious, which becomes his go-to role for the next several films, serving one human master after another, until he becomes a pawn to be left off the play board until the end of the movie by the time House of Frankenstein rolls around in 1944. Of course, Karloff exited the role after 1939's Son of Frankenstein, an excellent film that, unfortunately, reduces the Monster's role to boogeyman at the beck and call of Bela Lugosi's Ygor. Don't get me wrong, I love their dynamic and Lugosi kills it in that movie, but it's clear that they've burned through all of their interesting ideas for the characterization and development of the Monster.

If I had to pick a Universal monster that absolutely did it for me in all of the films in which it appeared, it would have to be The Wolf Man/Larry Talbot. But that's an essay for another day.

Cheating again, but I figure that a horror experience is kind of the same as a horror movie? 

Anyway, elipie and I went out to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Hollywood last night. It's a good idea when you're going to one of these things to bring a close friend who you don't see as often as you'd like. You're going to spend a lot of time in lines, so it's a great opportunity to catch up or just philosophize (or yammer endless movie trivia if you're me).

We only ended up going through three of the mazes -- the Evil Dead, the Terror Tram, and Universal Monsters Remix, because lines. We also didn't get to the Bill and Ted stage show. Next year, I swear. We did go on the Jurassic Park and Mummy rides, though, both of which are consistently fun. Eli got soaked on Jurassic Park.

There's actually a funny story about that ride. So, the park is split into an upper and lower level. The Jurassic Park ride is on the lower level. Also on the lower level, there were generic monstery things walking about on stilt legs. Eli and I passed them by and got into line for the Jurassic Park ride behind a man and a woman. The woman glanced back, looked at me, and jumped. Then she laughed and turned to her friend/partner/husband/whatever and said, "Oh geez, I thought one of the stilt things followed us here." And then Eli laughed and said, "He's tall, but he's not *that* tall." It was amusing.

I didn't get a lot of joy out of the Evil Dead maze, since it was apparently entirely based on the remake. I was hoping for something along the lines of last year's Texas Chainsaw maze, which paid homage to the entire history of the series (including multiple versions of Leatherface), but nothing I saw really struck me.

The Terror Tram was fun, although I think I would get more out of it if I actually watched The Walking Dead (which is the theme of the maze). You do get to walk past the Bates Motel from Psycho and the crashed plane from War of the Worlds. Eli and I also went and did the Bates house photo op, which I'll post separately under a lock later (or Eli will).

Universal Monsters Remix... sigh. They replaced most of the monsters with either generic looking ones or stuff out of recent vintage horror movies. The Frankenstein lab (my very favorite part of the whole experience) had no actual Frankenstein monster in it, but instead some sort of weirdo creature with an exposed brain. There were a couple Nosferatus running around, which was neat, and the Chucky they had running around was an actual little person, which was disconcerting for those of us with very high fields of vision. However, the section with werewolves was entirely populated with Benecio del Toro-style lycanthropes. All-in-all, I think it's really sad that their one permanent haunted house maze turns its back on the classics during the Halloween season in some sort of weird effort at being hip.

Overall, I had a lot of fun, even if it sounds like I didn't. The atmosphere was great, the lines were non-annoying, and the company was good.

So every few years I watch Stanley Kubrick's version of The Shining, not because I love the film, but precisely because I don't.

It's a much-beloved and highly-regarded horror classic and I've never been able to key into why. I appreciate the technical craftsmanship, but I've always been left with the impression that Kubrick felt like he was above the material. Additionally, I always felt that Jack Nicholson was just hamming his way through the part.

This latest rewatch failed at the 50-minute point for technical reasons -- my HD-DVD player is dying, apparently -- but what I did see left me with a slightly raised estimation of the film. For the first time, I could see Jack Nicholson's performance for what it was -- the picture of a man barely on the edge of civility, frustrated in his writing career, and feeling trapped by his marriage and fatherhood. I still think he's a bit too Jack in places, but you know, there's some bravura work being done if you can move past his usual tics.

The score by Wendy Carlos is creepy as hell and some of the tracking shots definitely add to a sense of unease.

That said, there's still this veneer of artifice over everything. The overabundance of Steadicam shots feels like a child playing with a new toy. The huge cavernous spaces of the Overlook definitely add to the feeling of isolation for the characters, but they also served to isolate me from the proceedings. As the film went on, I started getting an annoyed pang in the back of my neck, so when the disc died... I didn't really put any effort into finding an alternative means of finishing the film.

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.

--

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.

par_avion pointed me in the direction of an Ain't It Cool News post where Harry Knowles talks about one of the formative experiences of his youth -- a collection of classic horror film clips set to music that he bought on 16mm when he was very wee. He also put that video up on Youtube for others to view.


In the comments on the Youtube page, the maker, Cortlandt Hull, left a comment with a little more information. The piece, which had a title card that was cut off in the version Knowles uploaded, is called "Rendezvous" and it debuted at the Famous Monsters of Filmland Convention in 1975. 1975 is also the year that Kandy Fong started doing her thing with Kirk and Spock stills.

Hull had the advantage of having access to the actual films -- probably either 16mm dupes or the 8mm home movie versions released by Castle Films -- but it must have been insanely difficult to put together in any case.

There's a version with the title cards intact but crappier visual quality over here.

I'm afraid I'm no historian when it comes to horror fanworks, so I don't know if this was the first such horror songvid or if there was a tradition that continued from it. I know that Hull made a sequel later.

It's just interesting to see the parallel developments. If horror fandom picked up vidding in the 1970s/1980s, they'd dropped it by the time I came onto the scene (I think -- admittedly I was more of a horror fan than a member of horror fandom). The horror vids that we see today developed out of the tradition and community that came from media/slash fandom and AMVs.

Title: A Quite Serious Thematic Analysis of the Works of David Cronenberg
Source: The films of David Cronenberg
Song: Justin Timberlake feat. Timbaland - SexyBack
Warnings: NSFW nudity. Gun violence with muzzle flash. Strobing lights. Violence, sexualized violence, body trauma, gore... pretty much everything, to be perfectly frank.

Summary: Visceral sexuality in cinema.

Password: shapeofrage

Cronenberg from Jetpack Monkey on Vimeo.

File download: 25.9MB MP4 (right/ctrl-click and "Save link as...")

( Notes below the cut... )