July: SAT 7/1 6:30 AM: The Mummy ('32) 7:45 AM: Island of Lost Souls ('33): Adaptation of The Island of Dr. Moreau. SAT 7/8 8:00 PM: Bride of Frankenstein ('35) SUN 7/9 2:15 AM: The Invisible Man ('33) WED 7/12 7:45 AM: Hamlet ('48): There's a ghost in it, okay? Not a lot of genre pickings so far this month. THU 7/13 6:15 AM: Mad Love ('35): Peter Lorre adaptation of "Hands of Orlac" story. 10:00 AM: The Seventh Victim ('43): Val Lewton satanism thriller. 11:15 AM: The Sorcerers ('67): Boris Karloff as mind-controlling hypnotist. 12:45 PM: The Brain that Wouldn't Die ('62): Scientist keeps disembodied head alive. 2:15 PM: Horror Hotel ('60): AKA The City of the Dead, British witchcraft thriller set in America, with Christopher Lee and a British cast doing American accents. From the same director as the original Kolchak movie The Night Stalker and Gene Roddenberry's Genesis II pilot movie. 6:30 PM: The Terror ('63): Roger Corman haunted-castle film with Karloff and Jack Nicholson. 8:00 PM: Lost Horizon ('37): Frank Capra's film about Shangri-La, with Ronald Colman and Jane Wyatt. Full-length restored edition, albeit with several scenes in audio only, combined with publicity stills. SAT 7/15 Noon: Angels in the Outfield ('51): Original version of fantasy-comedy about angels helping a baseball team cheat, or something. 6:00 PM: Five Million Years to Earth ('68): AKA Quatermass and the Pit. MON 7/17 2:15 AM: A Touch of Zen ('71): Originally Xiá Nǚ (Hero Woman), a classic Taiwanese wuxia film cited as an influence on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. TUE 7/18 6:00 AM: Vampyr ('32): Early vampire film, obviously. 7:15 AM: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde ('20): Silent John Barrymore version. 8:30 AM: The Wasp Woman ('60) 9:45 AM: The Wolf Man ('41) 11:00 AM: The Reptile ('66): British horror film about a curse and a snake monster. 12:45 PM: The Green Slime ('69) 2:30 PM: The Picture of Dorian Gray ('45) 4:30 PM: From Beyond the Grave ('73): Amicus horror anthology framed by Peter Cushing as the proprietor of a shop of magical antiques. With Donald Pleasance and David Warner. 6:15 PM: Stephen King's Cat's Eye ('85): Another horror anthology, with Drew Barrymore and James Woods. WED 7/19 12:15 PM: The Most Dangerous Game ('32) THU 7/20 6:00 PM: Brainstorm ('83): Douglas Trumbull's virtual-reality thriller with Christopher Walken. Natalie Wood's last film. WED 7/26 6:15 AM: The Body Snatcher ('45): Last Lugosi/Karloff teamup, directed by Robert Wise. 1:00 PM: Cat People ('42) 2:30 PM: House of Wax ('53) 4:15 PM: The Curse of the Cat People ('44) 5:30 PM: House on Haunted Hill ('58) THU 7/27 3:00 AM: The Birds ('63) FRI 7/28 4:15 AM: The Story of Mankind ('57): Irwin Allen's schlocky historical-fantasy epic. SAT 7/29 6:15 PM: Them! ('54) SUN 7/30 2:00 AM: The Hidden ('87): Alien-parasite thriller with Kyle MacLachlan. 3:45 AM: Deadly Friend ('86): I remember reading about this one in Starlog back in the day. Originally meant as a dark love story from Wes Craven (called just Friend), test audiences disapproved because they expected a gorefest like Craven's other films, so the studio made Craven add a bunch of violent scenes, pretty much losing the point of the story in the process.
Thanks as usual. Let me add that Curse of the Cat People is also directed by Robert Wise, his first directorial credit, I believe. And I remember liking Deadly Friend back in the day--and at least one jaw-dropping shock scene. Haven't seen it since '86, though.
So, A Touch of Zen is magnificent. Time well spent. The influence on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is clear. Roy Chiao in his supporting role is really quite memorable. The ending shots involving the sunrise are spectacular, moving, and spiritual. I don't know whether any influence in fact occurred, but it's hard for me to imagine that the sunrise shots had no influence on the famous shots in Kung Fu of Kwai Chang coming out of the sun. *** SPOILERS follow *** Abbot Hui-yuan (Roy Chiao) standing up as the sun rises behind him, so that the sun keeps the position of the halo, is quite exciting on multiple levels. It's fairly straightforward to see it as a metaphor of the Buddha rising up from meditation from under the Bodhi Tree only after achieving enlightenment. But it also raises the question of: what next? What will the abbot do when the sun has risen further and his feet can no longer stay in contact with the ground while keeping the sun in the position of the halo? Will the abbot fly? Or is that when his life expires? Gravity-defying acrobatics aside, with gold having flowed from the abbot's wound instead of blood, it's fairly obviously fantasy, as SF/F, at least in that aspect.
Very slim pickings for August (in fact, there's actually a Slim Pickens marathon on the 28th): WED 8/2 Noon: Panic in Year Zero ('62): Ray Milland's post-nuclear survivalist tract. THU 8/3 7:45 AM: The Monster ('25): Silent horror comedy with Lon Chaney Sr. as a mad doctor. 8:00 PM: The Phantom of the Opera ('25): More silent Chaney. SAT 8/5 11:30 AM: Brigadoon ('54) MON 8/7 6:00 AM: Between Two Worlds ('44): Luxury liner to the afterlife. THU 8/10 4:00 AM: The Dunwich Horror ('70): Roger Corman-produced Lovecraft adaptation with Dean Stockwell and Ed Begley, Sr. FRI 8/18 Noon: The Time Machine ('60) 8:00 PM: The Birds ('63) WED 8/30 10:00 AM: Village of the Damned ('61)
Slim pickings indeed, although plenty of classics represented. I may tape the 1925 version of THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA since my DVD is currently in storage. Thanks for doing this again. But how do I mention Richard Matheson this time?
September: FRI 9/1 6:15 PM: The Incredible Mr. Limpet ('64): Don Knotts as cartoon fish, yada yada. SAT 9/2 - SUN 9/3: A "Rogue Computers" marathon, sadly not including Colossus: The Forbin Project. 8:00 PM: 2001: A Space Odyssey ('68) 10:45 PM: Westworld ('73) 12:30 AM: Demon Seed ('77) 2:15 AM: Scanners ('81): Are there any rogue computers in this? 4:15 AM: Them! ('54): I know there aren't any rogue computers in this one. MON 9/4 8:00 PM: The Nutty Professor ('63): Jerry Lewis riff on Jekyll & Hyde. THU 9/7 1:00 AM: On a Clear Day You Can See Forever ('70): I've heard of this Barbra Streisand musical, but I never knew it was a fantasy, based on the premise of reincarnation and past-life regression. As far as I can tell, it treats past lives as real, so on the list it goes. SUN 9/10 2:00 AM: Belladonna of Sadness ('73): That arty, sexually explicit Japanese animated film TCM showed once before, based on a European legend about witches. I couldn't get through it the first time. 3:30 AM: Fantastic Planet ('73): Surreal French animation from Rene Laloux. TUE 9/12: A few Disney fantasies. 12:15 AM: Lonesome Ghosts ('37): Mickey Mouse ghostbusting short. 12:30 AM: Blackbeard's Ghost ('68): Self-explanatory, with Peter Ustinov and Dean Jones. 2:30 AM: Freaky Friday ('76): Teenage Jodie Foster swaps bodies with her mother. I think I read the novelization of this as a kid... SUN 9/17 2:30 AM: The Awakening ('80): Charlton Heston in an adaptation of Bram Stoker's mummy novel. 4:30 AM: Blood from the Mummy's Tomb ('71): Hammer Films' earlier adaptation of the same novel, starring Andrew Kier. I'll never get why TCM likes to show things like this in reverse order. By coincidence, this is its director's last film, while The Awakening was its director's first feature film. There's also an actor with small parts in both, Ahmed Osman. TUE 9/19 7:30 AM: Dead Men Walk ('43): A doctor is preyed upon by his dead, vampiric evil twin. Both twins are played by George Zucco, who'd played an excellent Professor Moriarty in Basil Rathbone's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes four years earlier (as well as a Nazi spy in Sherlock Holmes in Washington later in '43). Also features Dwight Frye (Dracula's Renfield and Frankenstein's Fritz). 11:00 AM: The Corsican Brothers ('41): Another twin movie (the day's theme), based on the Alexandre Dumas tale which I count as fantasy because it uses the idea of a psychic link between twins. FRI 9/22: Daytime marathon of angel, ghost, and witch comedy-fantasies. 7:30 AM: Angel on My Shoulder ('46): Paul Muni as dead gangster sent back to Earth by the Devil (Claude Rains). 9:30 AM: Angels in the Outfield ('51): Angels help a bad baseball team cheat. Which raises a ton of moral questions. 1:15 PM: Blithe Spirit ('45): Noel Coward comedy about couple haunted by ghost of husband's first wife. 3:00 PM: Topper ('37): Classic comedy about a man who talks to ghosts. 4:45 PM: Topper Returns ('41): Actually the second sequel. 6:30 PM: I Married a Witch ('42): Proto-Bewitched comedy. SAT 9/23 6:00 AM: Zombies on Broadway ('45): Horror comedy with Brown and Carney (RKO's attempt to copy Abbott and Costello) searching for... okay... a real zombie to appear in a nightclub act. Bela Lugosi plays the mad zombie maker. 3:45 PM: The Omega Man ('71): Loose Charlton Heston adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. SUN 9/24 3:45 AM: Rattlers ('76): Another entry in the "normal animals mysteriously run amok and attack in swarms" horror genre, this time with rattlesnakes. TUE 9/26: Daytime marathon of space/sci-fi films, all TCM standards. 6:45 AM: From the Earth to the Moon ('58): Jules Verne adaptation directed by War of the Worlds' Byron Haskin, with Joseph Cotten and George Sanders. Also features Henry Daniell, making this the second film on the list to star an actor who played Professor Moriarty opposite Basil Rathbone (in The Woman in Green in 1945). 8:30 AM: World Without End ('55): Astronauts time-warped into post-apocalyptic future. With Hugh Marlowe and Rod Taylor. 10:00 AM: The Cosmic Monster ('58): British giant-bug movie that I remember being rather dire. 11:15 AM: The Green Slime ('69): Japanese/Italian classic about fungus monsters invading a space station. 1:00 PM: Five Million Years to Earth ('68): AKA Quatermass and the Pit, the most beloved Quatermass film, with Andrew Kier as the professor. 2:45 PM: Forbidden Planet ('56): 'Nuff said. 4:30 PM: Queen of Outer Space ('58): Space babes on Venus, including Zsa Zsa Gabor. 6:00 PM: 2010: The Year We Make Contact ('84): Peter Hyams directs Roy Scheider, Helen Mirren, and John Lithgow in the 2001 sequel. SAT 9/30 10:30 AM: The Mystery of the Wax Museum ('33): Casablanca's Michael Curtiz directs the wax-museum murder-spree film that would later be remade as Vincent Price's House of Wax. With Fay Wray and Lionel Atwill, completing the set of actors who played Moriarty in the Rathbone films (in 1943's Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon).
Thanks as always for posting. An interesting line-up this month. For the record, On A Clear Day definitely counts since the plot treats both reincarnation and telepathy as real. I remember being underwhelmed by The Awakening, when I saw it for the first and only time back in 1980, but it will be interesting to revisit it 37 years later. I have a soft spot for the Stoker novel, "The Jewel of Seven Stars," which I actually talked Tor into reprinting several years ago.
I decided to finally watch Hammer's Blood from the Mummy's Tomb. I can't say I particularly enjoyed it, except for the opportunity to ogle Valerie Leon, which the film certainly encouraged viewers to do. The opening minutes are incredibly slow-paced, spending forever looking at starscapes even after the credits, which would've been more comprehensible if they'd kept Stoker's original title. The rest of the story isn't paced much faster. And it's hard to know who, if anyone, we're supposed to root for. Margaret is either the victim or the villain or both, her father Professor Quatermass is unconscious for half the movie and in a vague moral position for the rest (really, is he pro-Tera or anti-Tera?), her boyfriend's kind of a jerk, and her doctor is Aubrey Morris doing that Aubrey Morris thing where he's at once endearing and vaguely creepy. Corbeck is obviously a villain from the start, but unfortunately James Villiers was going for an "implicitly gay men are evil" vibe and camping it up rather blatantly. Another thing that's aged badly is the rather ghastly portrayal of mental illness and its treatment. I'm sure we weren't supposed to empathize with the abusive asylum guards, but still, to have the mentally ill reduced to screaming and gibbering voices behind locked cell doors was highly unpleasant. I guess as far as the mummy genre goes, it's pretty distinctive, at least, dispensing with the usual wrappings (except for the final gag) and shambling undead and going more for a spiritual-possession angle. Indeed, I guess you could say that this particular mummy being a notably unwrapped female was one of the movie's main selling points. But I didn't think the scenes of supernatural violence and people having their throats slashed/ripped out by unseen forces or inanimate statues were all that effective. Greg, do you recall how similar the movie's plot is to the book's?
Yes--but in some ways an accurate description of what a mad AI might really be like--aside from the fake biology at the end. The idea of a prosthetic arm atop an electric wheel-chair as a waldo for a mainframe brain--that's spot on--I would think.
Yes, the waldo was interesting and formidable once it picked up the laser, obviously. It's convenient that the house just happened to have everything that Proteus IV needed for all its super-advanced science. The cuboctahedron that could unfold in anticipation of Rubik's Snake (a different shape when solved) was the most visually interesting aspect of the film for me, as inexplicable as it was (I suppose that was sorta the point).
I'm posting the October schedule a bit early because someone else has already done most of it for me. Emily Madriga of Thought Catalog lists all of TCM's October horror movies at the link below: https://thoughtcatalog.com/emily-madriga/2017/09/here-are-all-the-horror/ I'm very grateful to Madriga for posting that list, because it saves me a hell of a lot of typing. She even uses nearly the same format I use here! I don't feel I should copy and paste the whole thing, though. Just follow the link for the schedule. What I will do is list the remaining, non-horror genre movies for October that the Thought Catalog piece doesn't cover, which is still a fair amount, though less than a quarter of what I otherwise would've had to list: SUN 10/1 2:00 AM: Eraserhead ('77): David Lynch surrealism. FRI 10/6 2:00 AM: Time Bandits ('81) SAT 10/7 7:30 AM: Gabriel Over the White House ('33): TCM's getting a lot of use out of this one. WED 10/11-THU 10/12: George Pal marathon. 8:00 PM: The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal (85): Documentary. 10:00 PM: The Puppetoon Movie ('87): Compilation of Pal's 1930s-40s replacement-animation Puppetoon shorts, with frame segments featuring Gumby and Pokey. 11:30 PM: Destination Moon ('50) 1:00 AM: The Time Machine ('60) 3:00 AM: Atlantis, the Lost Continent ('60) THU 10/12-FRI 10/13: Pal marathon day 2. 8:00 PM: Tom Thumb ('58) 10:00 PM: The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm ('62) 12:30 AM: 7 Faces of Dr. Lao ('64) 2:30 AM: Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze ('75): The last film Pal produced, directed by Michael Anderson. 4:30 AM: The Puppetoon Movie again. SAT 10/14 2:30 AM: King Solomon's Mines ('50) MON 10/16 6:15 AM: The Snow Devils ('65): Italian alien-invader movie originally titled La morte viene dal pianeta Aytin, which I think means Death Comes from Planet Aytin. Co-written by Bill Finger, the true creator of Batman. 8:00 AM: The Ice Pirates ('84) 9:45 AM: Brainstorm ('83) 11:45 AM: The Power ('68): This telekinetic-murderer SF movie from Byron Haskin is on the horror list for its first showing on the 12th (at the end of the first George Pal marathon, since he produced it), but not for this showing, so it makes both lists. 1:45 PM: Satellite in the Sky ('56) 3:15 PM: Battle Beneath the Earth ('67): Red-scare spy action with Kerwin Matthews battling Chinese troops burrowing underground to attack the US from below. 5:00 PM: Indestructible Man ('56): I would've called this one horror -- Lon Chaney as a resurrected murderer taking revenge. 6:15 PM: The Ultimate Warrior ('75): Post-apocalypse with Yul Brynner, Max von Sydow. THU 10/19 12:15 PM: King Solomon's Mines ('37): The earlier, more faithful adaptation of the H. Rider Haggard novel, with Cedric Hardwicke and, impressively, Paul Robeson. THU 10/26-FRI 10/27: "70's Future Shock" [sic] marathon -- all dystopian or post-apocalyptic. 8:00 PM: The Omega Man ('71) 10:00 PM: Logan's Run ('75) 12:15 AM: THX 1138 ('71) 2:00 AM: A Clockwork Orange ('71) 4:30 AM: Soylent Green ('73) MON 10/30 10:30 PM: Back to the Future ('85)
Well, I recorded Dead Men Walk, the movie where George Zucco plays good and evil identical twins. I was curious because Zucco impressed me as the villains in two of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies (Moriarty in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and a Nazi spy ring leader in Sherlock Holmes in Washington). But I couldn't get more than a few minutes into the movie, since it has far lower picture and sound quality than most of the things TCM shows. The sound was so poor and warbly that I could barely make out the dialogue. And what little I did see suggested that the story would be pretty cheesy anyway. I'm surprised they'd show something in such poor condition.
Thanks for posting the list and providing the link, Christopher. I've waited years to see the Billy the Kid Vs. Dracula -- ever since Joe R. Lansdale mentioned it in an introduction to a Weird West collection. Excited to finally lay eyes on it. The Snow Devils should be interesting for the Bill Finger connection alone. Echoing Mr. Adventure: TCM will be giving my DVR a workout this October.
I haven't seen it ages, but I remember being very disappointed in it. Here's the thing: The Phantom of the Opera, as a story, has two big scenes: the unmasking at the organ and the bit where the Phantom drops the chandelier on the audience. Without getting too spoilery, the Hammer version botches both of those scenes . . . which still kinda boggles my mind. Imagine doing Ben-Hur, but screwing up the chariot race scene. "Okay, instead of a whole big chariot race in the Colosseum, suppose Ben-Hur needs to get to Rome in a hurry so he has to race down a dusty road in a speeding chariot? That will be cheaper, but just as exciting, right?"