Well, I wasn't that fond of either The Wolf Man or Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. I just don't find Lon Chaney, Jr. all that charismatic. The Wolf Man makeup is kind of goofy-looking, and TWM had kind of a weak climax. As for FMTWM, it had a rather lame excuse for having Talbot seek out Dr. Frankenstein, and played rather fast and loose with both monsters' backstories and mythologies. Retconning the Wolf Man so that he changed when the moonlight touched him was silly -- couldn't he just stay in a windowless room? And though it was nominally a sequel to The Ghost of Frankenstein, it did the usual thing of completely changing the geography and design of the location -- Ludwig Frankenstein's walled estate from The Ghost of Frankenstein is suddenly a castle on a craggy mountainside. And the dialogue tended to lump Ludwig (referred to only as "Dr. Frankenstein") together with his father Henry, who actually created the monster; the only person who acknowledged them as two different individuals was his daughter Elsa. Plus it's weird the way they rearrange actors in these films. Lionel Atwill is in his third consecutive Frankenstein film in his third consecutive role. Bela Lugosi has gone from playing Ygor in TGOF to Bela the werewolf in TWM to the Monster here. And conversely, the returning character of Elsa has been recast from Evelyn Ankers to Ilona Massey and gained a Hungarian accent in the process, perhaps because Ankers also played Talbot's love interest in The Wolf Man. But Patrick Knowles, who played Talbot's romantic rival in that film, is now the substitute mad doctor in this film. So they're casting returning actors in different roles and different actors in returning roles. And to think -- people today get confused when Alfre Woodard isn't playing the same character in Luke Cage that she played in Captain America: Civil War. Come to think of it, the Godzilla/kaiju franchise from Toho had a similar approach -- using the same actors in movie after movie, often in equivalent roles, but changing their character names each time. However, they didn't seem to do the reverse, recasting a returning character (other than the kaiju themselves). On those rare occasions when a character did return, it was always the same actor.
So, That was odd. I had DVR'd Christopher Lee's Horror Hotel. I finally decided to watch it today. Started it up, Bill Mankowitz does his intro about the film, then the movie starts - City of the Dead. For a moment I thought there had been some mistake until It got about 5 minutes in and Lee appeared.
Horror Hotel is the US title of The City of the Dead, apparently. Well, House of Frankenstein is a mess. Boris Karloff as Frankenstein-groupie mad scientist Dr. Neimann and J. Carroll Naish as his hunchbacked friend randomly escape from prison, have a brief adventure with John Carradine's Dracula that wraps up in maybe 15-20 minutes, and then wander into a totally different movie involving the Wolf Man (Chaney) and Frankenstein's Monster (Glenn Strange). And while the previous film's events happened in Visaria, this film retcons them to have taken place in the hamlet of Frankenstein where the first three films were set, and then has Visaria be the mad scientist's hometown over 120 kilometers away. Then it's mostly a Wolf Man movie for a while, and then Frankie Monster gets one brief action scene before randomly dooming himself and the mad scientist. Also, why was Dr. Neimann so convinced that Talbot's lycanthropy was a property of his brain -- that transplanting his brain into another's body would make that man a werewolf and leave the new brain in Talbot's body free of the condition? I'd think that since the condition/curse was caused by a bite, it would be more associated with the body than the brain. Plus the script sometimes seems to forget that the brain is the seat of identity, implying that Talbot and the other guy would still be themselves after Talbot's brain had been transplanted. Well, at least the Dracula part featured a really lovely leading lady, Anne Gwynne (who was Chris Pine's grandmother!). Plus it had 3-time Marx Brothers co-star Sig Ruman, and Lionel Atwill in his fourth consecutive Frankenstein movie, once again playing a new character (though he's come full circle to play an inspector again). One thing that struck me about this film was that it seemed to involve some tropes that were later picked up in the Hammer versions of these characters: in the case of Dracula, there's the easy resurrection when the stake is removed from the heart (even with a similar effect of flesh building up around the skeleton) and the tendency to take revenge on men by hypnotically seducing their daughters, and in the case of Frankenstein (or his wannabe fanboy Neimann), there's the emphasis on brain transplants and the hunchbacked assistant who wants to be put into a more attractive body (something which was done more successfully -- relatively -- in Hammer's second Frankenstein film).
Very belatedly working through the DVR... Horror of Dracula started it all and the first half is decent but the second half was a bit dull. Better than the thoroughly dull Fu Manchu movies which tones down the exoticism and luridness one (or at least I) expects from such titles. Didn't really care for the later Hammer Drac films but Scars of Dracula was a fun entry starring a vampire bat, oh and Christopher Lee. Someone really loved that huge vampire bat and its flapping wings that don't at all look attached to wires. Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell is psychedelic Japanese weirdness with a plane in some hellish dimension or something. Lots of people losing their shit to some alien force that possesses their body. I don't know that it's good but it's plenty trippy. I've seen bits of Earth vs Flying Saucers but never watched the movie itself. I was surprised how decent the talking head technobabble was in addition to the fine FX work (Harryhausen, I believe). Solid film for the era. I watched Satellite in the Sky just to see Miss Moneypenny in a big role. It was interesting in those days they couldn't think of a good reason to get in orbit except to do bomb tests. This is another one I couldn't make it all the way through as it was just too stodgy and drab. EDIT: Wrapped up the Hammer Lee movies with Dracula A.D. 1972 starring Lee, Cushing and Stephanie Beacham's cleavage. Every bit as dated as the title suggests I thought this campy movie was easier to watch than some of the Dracula movies even if probably not as objective good. I liked Cushing's battle with Johnny Alucard as well as the nicely done fiery demise of the big bad himself. Don't watch if you have low tolerance for hippies but do watch if you've always wanted to see a Dracula movie with a funky soundtrack.
I have a high tolerance for Hippies. In fact, I miss them terribly. The best Fu Manchu movie was Mask of Fu Manchu from 1932. Myrna Loy and Boris Karloff. It doesn't get any better than that.
I watched The Most Dangerous Game today. The film was famously shot simultaneously with King Kong by the same crew, and yes, I did recognize some of the jungle locations from King Kong. Plus it has two of the leads from KK, Fay Wray and Robert Armstrong. Now I'm wondering if somebody could do a mashup video that puts together scenes from both movies and makes it look like a single story. Like, say, cut it so that when Zaroff says he's found a new, more dangerous kind of animal to hunt, it looks like he's talking about Kong instead of humans. (I Googled to see if somebody had already done that -- no luck.) The acting was really broad here, and it reminded me that I'm no fan of the acting in Kong either. Joel McCrea as the male lead was too one-note to convey any semblance of the shock or grief his character was supposed to be feeling after the shipwreck. And Leslie Banks's Count Zaroff reminded me strongly of Vito Scotti's mad scientist Boris Balinkoff from two episodes of Gilligan's Island, enough so that I wonder if he was the actual template. (Although Gilligan did a different episode that was a riff on this movie, with Rory Calhoun as the villain.)
I liked the Spanish language version of Dracula better visually myself. Now to teleport Javier Bardem back in time for the lead role. He really needs to do audiobook reading of Borges--and--when a bit older--to play JLB.
December schedule, with about the expected amount of A Christmas Carol adaptations: THU 12/1: It's a sword-and-sandal marathon with some titles we've seen recently. 6:00 AM: Damon and Pythias ('62): Guy Williams in an Italian/American co-production based on the Greek myth. 7:45 AM: Hercules, Samson & Ulysses ('63) 9:15 AM: The Colossus of Rhodes ('61) 11:30 AM: Captain Sindbad ('63): Williams again. 1:00 PM: Atlas ('61) Roger Corman's sword-and-sandal knockoff, starring Star Trek's Apollo, Michael Forest, as the title character. 2:30 PM: Atlantis, The Lost Continent ('60) 4:15 PM: She ('65): Hammer's H. Rider Haggard adaptation with Ursula Andress and Peter Cushing. 6:15 PM: The Vengeance of She ('68): Ungrammatically titled and poorly received sequel to the previous, bringing back male lead John Richardson. FRI 12/2 3:00 PM: Noah's Ark ('28): This sounds odd... Casablanca's Michael Curtiz directs a semi-silent, semi-talkie film paralleling the biblical Flood myth with a World War I story, with the cast playing dual roles in the ancient and modern stories. SAT 12/3 2:00 PM: Mighty Joe Young ('49): Harryhausen's big ape. 6:00 PM: 2010 ('84): Peter Hyams's adaptation of the Arthur C. Clarke sequel. SUN 12/4 9:30 AM: A Carol for Another Christmas ('64): Rod Serling's pro-UN update of Dickens again. FRI 12/9 2:00 PM: The Mask of Fu Manchu ('32): Boris Karloff's sole turn in the title role. Considered both the best-made and the most racist of the '30s Fu Manchu films, garnering protests from the Chinese government when it came out. SAT 12/10 12:30 AM: Thirteen Women ('32): Borderline-genre suspense film that also sounds a bit racist: Myrna Loy playing a half-Asian woman (which Loy was decidedly not) who uses hypnotic powers to take revenge on fellow sorority girls who ostracized her. 8:00 PM: King Kong ('33): The film that inspired Ray Harryhausen's career... 10:00 PM: Clash of the Titans ('81): ...followed by the final feature film of Harryhausen's career. SUN 12/11 12:15 AM: One Million Years B.C. ('66): Harryhausen dinosaurs and Raquel Welch. 2:15 AM: Death Watch ('80): Originally La mort en direct, a French SF film that sounds like a more morbid The Truman Show, about a future society where death from disease is rare and a dying woman's final days are turned into a reality show without her consent. With Harvey Keitel, Harry Dean Stanton, Max von Sydow, and Doctor Who's William Russell. 4:15 AM: The Sorcerers ('67): Boris Karloff as a scientist whose hypnotic invention is co-opted for mind control. 8:45 AM: Scrooge ('35) WED 12/14 6:30 PM: King of the Zombies ('41): Horror-comedy involving a mad scientist raising the dead to serve the Axis. SAT 12/17 2:00 PM: Monkey Business ('52): Not the Marx Brothers film, but Howard Hawks's screwball comedy about a youth serum regressing people to juvenile behavior. Starring Archibald Leach, Virginia McMath, and Norma Jeane Mortenson -- better known as Cary Grant, Ginger Rogers, and Marilyn Monroe, respectively. (Did anyone use their real name in Hollywood back then?) SUN 12/18 9:00 AM: A Christmas Carol ('38) 8:00 PM: Scrooge ('70) TUE 12/20 2:30 AM: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari ('20) THU 12/22 12:45 AM: A pair of Disney animated shorts, Ugly Duckling ('39) and The Tortoise and the Hare ('35). 11:30 PM: A Christmas Carol ('51) FRI 12/23 1:15 AM: Babes in Toyland ('34): Laurel & Hardy fantasy based on the Victor Herbert operetta. SAT 12/24 10:15 AM: Scrooge ('70) SUN 12/25 4:00 AM: Bell, Book and Candle ('58) MON 12/26-TUE 12/27: Odd scheduling -- the night after Xmas features a post-apocalyptic marathon. 8:00 PM: The Omega Man ('71): Charlton Heston version of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. 10:00 PM: The World, The Flesh, and The Devil ('59) 11:45 PM: On the Beach ('59) 2:15 AM: Five ('51): Apparently the first filmic depiction of an atomic post-apocalypse. Guess how many survivors are in it. Not only written, produced, and directed by Arch Oboler, but filmed at his house (a Frank Lloyd Wright creation). 4:15 AM: No Blade of Grass ('70): This one's a crop blight/famine apocalypse rather than nuclear. Directed by Cornel Wilde. WED 12/28 11:00 PM: The Man Who Could Work Miracles ('36): Comedy based on H.G. Wells fantasy. THU 12/29 12:30 AM: Topper ('37) FRI 12/30 9:15 AM: The Time Machine ('60) SAT 12/31 6:15 PM: The Day the Earth Stood Still ('51)
^ Thanks as ever for posting this. Trivia: Death Watch is based on a novel by SF author D.G. Compton. I've never seen it, but I recall that the late David Hartwell once spoke highly of the movie. So this is Myrna Loy plays Asian month? Since she also plays Fu's deliciously perverse daughter in MASK OF FU MANCHU. And, yes, MASK presents a dilemma. On the one hand, it's great pulp adventure; on the other hand, it's egregiously racist even by the standard of old-timey movies. ("We will kill the white man and take his women!") Whether that's a deal-breaker is up to the individual . ...
January: SUN 1/1 5:45 PM: The Birds ('63): Part of an all-day Hitchcock marathon, but it's the only one with any SFF elements. WED 1/4 8:00 PM: Heaven Can Wait ('78): Warren Beatty and Buck Henry's adaptation of the play about reincarnation, previously filmed as Here Comes Mr. Jordan in 1941 (and remade in 2001 as Down to Earth starring Chris Rock). SAT 1/7 4:00 AM: A Quiet Place in the Country ('69): Italian thriller/ghost story with Franco Nero and Vanessa Redgrave. SUN 1/8 2:00 PM: Harvey ('50): Jimmy Stewart and his invisible friend. 5:45 PM: Rollerball ('75): Dystopian future-sports movie with James Caan. WED 1/11 6:30 AM: The Invisible Boy ('57): Robbie the Robot's second film, which has much more to do with an evil computer than with the subject of the title. Implied to be a time-travel prequel of sorts to: 8:15 AM: Forbidden Planet ('56): Robbie's debut, of course. 10:00 AM: The Thing From Another World ('51) 11:45 AM: 2001: A Space Odyssey ('68) 2:15 PM: Satellite in the Sky ('56): Mediocre British space epic we've seen here before. 3:45 PM: Countdown ('68): Robert Altman's fictional version of the Moon race. 5:45 PM: The Green Slime ('69) TUE 1/17 3:45 PM: The Adventures of Robin Hood ('38): It's a slow month, so I might as well count this. SUN 1/22 2:45 AM: The Hidden ('87): Alien-parasite horror with Kyle Maclachlan and Claudia Christian. 4:30 AM: The Terminal Man ('74): Adaptation of the Michael Crichton novel about brain-machine interfaces, starring George Segal. 6:15 PM: Sleeper ('73): Woody Allen's cryogenic satire. FRI 1/27 5:45 PM: Between Two Worlds ('44): Luxury liner to the afterlife. SAT 1/28 6:00 AM: World Without End ('55): Time Machine-ish post-apocalypse story we've seen here before. 2:00 PM: Rodan ('56): Toho's first non-Godzilla (and first color) kaiju film. MON 1/30 3:45 PM: The Story of Mankind ('57): Irwin Allen's silly historical epic. One thing I wavered over: On January 2, there's an all-day marathon of hypnosis-themed films. Although most of them no doubt portray hypnosis in a fanciful way (e.g. forcing people to do things against their will), that's more a reflection of popular misconceptions about hypnotism than a deliberate attempt at speculative fiction, so I decided not to count them (since there are quite a lot of them).
Solyent Green was much better this time around than when I saw it decades ago. Glad they ran it; really glad I saw it. And it looked great, I'm assuming it got restored and/or remastered at some point.
Hmm. I've never actually seen the THE HIDDEN, and Claudia Christian is a Tor author these days, so . . ...
The Hidden is a nice change of pace from the usual TCM fare. I'm going to see if I can actually catch The Green Slime this time, I seem to miss it every time it airs.
She's co-writing a fantasy series for Tor. https://www.amazon.com/Wolfs-Empire...=1483218072&sr=1-1&keywords=claudia+christian
^^ Thanks. Have you read it? It doesn't really sound like my cup of tea, but I may get it for the sake of supporting Claudia.