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TCM Genre movies schedule...

JD said:
Does TCM ever show any of the Godzillas or Gameras?
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They've shown a few Godzilla movies from time to time, as well as Mothra and Rodan. There was a time a few years ago when they showed the original Gojira and those two uncut and in Japanese, and that started me off on my quest to watch the whole Godzilla canon, as chronicled on my blog.

I don't think they show any Gamera films, though, although ShoutFactoryTV has all the Showa-era Gamera films available for streaming, in Japanese with subtitles. (They used to have the superb Gamera trilogy from the '90s, but they seem to have dropped it.)
 
Christopher said:
Good news -- TCM did show The X from Outer Space last night, despite my recording of it still being labeled The Outer Space Connection on my DVR. I haven't watched it yet, though.

I did watch Hammer's The Curse of Frankenstein last night and The Revenge of Frankenstein this morning. I've seen the former before, but not the latter as far as I know. The Hammer films go a different route from Universal by focusing on Victor Frankenstein as the recurring character rather than the monster. Although Victor was a rather villainous character in the first film, killing one person for his work and letting his creature kill his mistress for purely personal reasons. In the sequel, he's presented somewhat more sympathetically, which is a bit odd. Aside from being complicit in the murder of the priest to cover up his own escape, he doesn't do anything deliberately murderous this time, and the deaths that occur are the result of misfortune rather than malice. I guess we could assume he's reformed and been trying to redeem himself, but that isn't addressed.

It's interesting, though, that neither film really portrays Frankenstein's work itself as a failure or a menace. The "creatures" become killers due to brain damage as a result of other characters' actions, and there's nothing to refute Frankenstein's claim that they would've turned out perfectly if the procedure had been allowed to play out as intended; indeed, the ending of Revenge seems to prove it conclusively. (Although it didn't explain how Frankenstein was able to create a new body that duplicated his original's face and voice so perfectly. Indeed, doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of faking his death?)
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Cushing's Frankenstein is not interested in redeeming himself. He's an anti-hero, with some admirable qualities, but amoral and ruthless at his core. On the one hand, you can't help sympathizing with the way his genius is constantly being thwarted by angry villagers and close-minded authorities and such, and he can be witty and charming when he wants to be, but he'll choose his experiments over any ethical considerations every time. And the fact that the Baron can be both appealing AND appalling is the engine that powers Hammer's interpretation of the character.

And,honestly, he brings his accidents on himself .Frankenstein's fatal flaw is that he never thinks of his creations as people but as experiments. He's not interested in making sure they're well cared for or happy or safe; he doesn't care about their welfare or feelings at all. Which means they usually end up abused and damaged and violent, because he's not really paying attention to them as individuals.

Granted, he's seldom responsible for the abuse himself, but things invariably go bad because he doesn't take very good care of his creations.

"Wait. I left it locked up in a lab, looked after by shady or irresponsible assistants, and never bothered to wonder how it was feeling . .. and somehow everything went to hell again? Why does this keep happening?"
 
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^That may be clearer once I've seen more of the series, but just where the first two are concerned, there does seem to be a difference. The first film makes a point of establishing Victor as a nasty piece of work in many ways. Not only is he coldly obsessed with his experiment to the point of being willing to commit murder for it, but he cheats on his fiancee with his maid, and then ruthlessly allows the maid -- who's pregnant with his child -- to be murdered just to protect his own reputation. But in the sequel, while he does start out with a homicide, after that he's portrayed as a basically benevolent, or at worst neutral, figure who's guilty of benign neglect at worst.

Look at the scene early on in Revenge where Victor is examining the young woman at her mother's behest. Given what a lech he was portrayed to be in the first film, I thought we were going to see a scene of him using the "examination" as an excuse to take sexual advantage of the young woman. Instead, it turned out that her mother was implicitly throwing her at him as a marriage prospect, but he was completely uninterested. So they cleaned up that aspect of his character too.
 
Christopher said:
They've shown a few Godzilla movies from time to time, as well as Mothra and Rodan. There was a time a few years ago when they showed the original Gojira and those two uncut and in Japanese, and that started me off on my quest to watch the whole Godzilla canon, as chronicled on my blog.

I don't think they show any Gamera films, though, although ShoutFactoryTV has all the Showa-era Gamera films available for streaming, in Japanese with subtitles. (They used to have the superb Gamera trilogy from the '90s, but they seem to have dropped it.)
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I found my self in an annoying situation with the '90s Gamera trilogy. I stumbled across them on ShotTV just a few months after I had bought the trilogy Blu-Ray 3 pack at Wal-Mart. Luckily I only spent about $8 on it, or I'd have been really pissed,
 
Christopher said:
^That may be clearer once I've seen more of the series, but just where the first two are concerned, there does seem to be a difference. The first film makes a point of establishing Victor as a nasty piece of work in many ways. Not only is he coldly obsessed with his experiment to the point of being willing to commit murder for it, but he cheats on his fiancee with his maid, and then ruthlessly allows the maid -- who's pregnant with his child -- to be murdered just to protect his own reputation. But in the sequel, while he does start out with a homicide, after that he's portrayed as a basically benevolent, or at worst neutral, figure who's guilty of benign neglect at worst.

Look at the scene early on in Revenge where Victor is examining the young woman at her mother's behest. Given what a lech he was portrayed to be in the first film, I thought we were going to see a scene of him using the "examination" as an excuse to take sexual advantage of the young woman. Instead, it turned out that her mother was implicitly throwing her at him as a marriage prospect, but he was completely uninterested. So they cleaned up that aspect of his character too.
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As the series progresses, there's a continuing tension between his more sympathetic side (and Cushing's inherent charm) and his ruthless obsession with proving his theories at all costs. Just wait until we get to the last few movies in the series!

He's not a villain in the sense that he wants to take over the world or get revenge on his enemies, but he's essentially amoral. Even in REVENGE, as I recall,he treats his new creation like a lab rat and is only interested in studying him as an experiment. He never asks what his creations want--and is always surprised when they don't just stay where they are and let him run experiments on them.

Granted, there's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy here: the more he has to resort to criminal methods and associates to get what he wants, the more things tend to get . . . unsavory. And he wouldn't have to lock his creations away in dark little holes if he didn't have to keep his experiments a deep-dark secret.
 
Greg Cox said:
He's not a villain in the sense that he wants to take over the world or get revenge on his enemies, but he's essentially amoral.
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Which is my point. In the first film, he's portrayed as more actively villainous, in his private life as well as his work. Yes, Paul tries to defend him to others as merely being blinded by his scientific obsession, but the subplot with the maid has nothing to do with his experiments. It's just there to show that he has a nastier, more cruel and selfish side than even Paul recognizes. So if he's just amoral in later films, then that's a change.
 
Christopher said:
Which is my point. In the first film, he's portrayed as more actively villainous, in his private life as well as his work. Yes, Paul tries to defend him to others as merely being blinded by his scientific obsession, but the subplot with the maid has nothing to do with his experiments. It's just there to show that he has a nastier, more cruel and selfish side than even Paul recognizes. So if he's just amoral in later films, then that's a change.
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Well, wait until you see the later films, where he's not above murder and blackmail to achieve his ends, and even rapes a young woman at one point. (Although, as I understand it, that scene was added in reshoots and is rather jarring in context.) There's a reason some of the later movies are titled THE EVIL OF FRANKENSTEIN and FRANKENSTEIN MUST BE DESTROYED. :)

And by the time you get to the final movie, FRANKENSTEIN AND THE MONSTER FROM EVIL, he's pretty much insane.
 
Greg Cox said:
He's not a villain in the sense that he wants to take over the world or get revenge on his enemies, but he's essentially amoral. Even in REVENGE, as I recall,he treats his new creation like a lab rat and is only interested in studying him as an experiment. He never asks what his creations want--and is always surprised when they don't just stay where they are and let him run experiments on them.

Granted, there's a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy here: the more he has to resort to criminal methods and associates to get what he wants, the more things tend to get . . . unsavory. And he wouldn't have to lock his creations away in dark little holes if he didn't have to keep his experiments a deep-dark secret.
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I enjoyed Cushing's take--he's not Colin Clive's troubled / wanting to play God Henry Frankenstein, the "I'm thoughtful until I'm not" cut-out "mad scientist" Ludwig (Ghost of Frankenstein), helpful then suddenly ambitious Dr. Mannering (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man) or any of the other Universal gang of doctors. Cushing is single minded and predatory to all except himself, all for the cause of proving his "genius" he believes no one understands.
 
JD said:
Does TCM ever show any of the Godzillas or Gameras?
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TCM has shown both the original 'Gojira' (with subtitles) and the re-edited (with Raymond Burr added) for U.S. audiences version 'Godzilla King of the Monsters" -- but I don't think they've ever shown Gamera or any of the later Godzilla films to date.
 
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Yeah, TCM's presented the "Raymond Burr inserted" version, many, many times. But as far as I can recall, it has aired the original Gojira with Japanese dialog and English subtitles only once. I kept that airing stored on my DVR until I found a double pack DVD at Wal*Mart containing both versions. At that point, I purged the DVR recording to make room for other programming.
 
Out of morbid curiosity, I watched that Walter Huston film Gabriel Over the White House last night. It really was basically a pro-dictatorship propaganda piece, very heavyhanded and corny in its earnestness, but rather chilling too. There are elements of it that seem dystopian -- a president suffering a head injury and suddenly becoming driven and ruthless, imposing martial law, organizing the unemployed into an "Army of Constructions" under military discipline, establishing an anti-racketeering "Federal Police" that was nothing less than a military force operating on US soil, and threatening the other nations of the world into repaying their debts to the US by demonstrating the military superiority of his air force. And yet it's all presented as a necessary, implicitly divinely inspired means to eradicate poverty and crime and war, and it's absurd how easily the presidictator cows everyone into doing things his way with just a few hard-hitting speeches, and how implicitly successful it all is, with no hint of negative consequences except to the racketeers and to the corrupt fat-cat straw men that all the other members of the US government are portrayed as. The president dies at the end, once he's essentially intimidated all the nations of the world into a global peace agreement, so I guess the implication is that it was a Cincinnatus-like temporary dictatorship and that democracy will return now that things have been fixed, but that's as deeply unrealistic as the rest of the film.

The fact that the film was even made, though, helps to illustrate why dictators and autocrats can come to power. When people are desperate, they're drawn to the idea of easy, immediate solutions, even if it means setting aside basic principles -- or ignoring all the facts and rational argument for why those solutions would never work or would be worse than the problems they address. I think I have a pretty good idea why TCM chose to show this film three weeks before the presidential election.
 
Reminder: TCM is a having a Dracula marathon tonight, showing the first six (!) Hammer DRACULA movies in a row tonight. Starring Christopher Lee as the Count, of course. The films are being shown in order, starting with HORROR OF DRACULA and ending with DRACULA A.D. 1972.

They're skipping over my favorite, BRIDES OF DRACULA, but I can forgive that since Lee skipped that one, too. Also missing is his final DRACULA movie, THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA, but that may be just as well . . . ..
 
Well, last night they showed Frankenstein Created Woman and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed -- probably the two best titles in the series (certainly more poetic than the three The Noun of Frankenstein titles preceding them). I was surprised at first that they skipped the third film, The Evil of Frankenstein, but apparently it's a semi-reimagining that doesn't fit the continuity of the others and goes for more of a Universal-style version of the Monster story.

Frankenstein Created Woman doesn't seem to quite fit prior continuity either, since Victor is openly using his real name, and his hands seem to be crippled for unexplained reasons, requiring the presence of his doddering assistant. It's also an odd sidebar conceptually, essentially a ghost/possession story with a bit of mad science tacked on. Victor makes extraordinary breakthroughs here that are all but ignored in favor of the haunting/revenge story. He apparently scientifically proves the existence of the soul (or at least some incorporeal essence of consciousness), invents a way to capture and preserve it, and oh, incidentally, he invents an impenetrable deflector shield and doesn't even consider its potential applications beyond soul-catching. It's not a bad film, but an odd one that barely feels like a Frankenstein story. (It's also notable as one of the few other screen roles of Susan Denberg from Star Trek: "Mudd's Women," and she's got a far more flattering hairstyle here than she did there. Her voice is dubbed throughout, though, since her Austrian accent was deemed too thick.)

Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed feels more like a continuation of the first two films. Victor is working under an alias again, apparently living in England, where he was at the end of The Revenge of Frankenstein. He's back to working with corpses and brain transplants, his hands are fine, and his search for Dr. Brandt's cryogenic breakthrough seems to contradict his own work with cryogenics in FCW. He's also a lot more cold, murderous, and ruthless here than in FCW, murdering people outright and blackmailing people into helping him (not to mention the gratuitous rape scene that Hammer execs insisted on over the actors' protest, a scene that seems unmotivated and disconnected from the rest of the story). And the movie certainly didn't go in the direction I expected when he decided to put the brain of a madman prone to murderous rages into a new body and then wait for it to heal before curing the madness. I was expecting Brandt to go on a rampage before Victor could cure his Abby-Normal brain. Instead, Brandt turned out to be more the hero of the picture, in a sense. Although I note that his research survived the fire, and might've been discovered by Karl if he survived as well. (I thought I recognized Karl's portrayer, Simon Ward -- turns out he was Kara's father Zor-El in the '84 Supergirl movie.)
 
Christopher said:
. I was surprised at first that they skipped the third film, The Evil of Frankenstein, but apparently it's a semi-reimagining that doesn't fit the continuity of the others and goes for more of a Universal-style version of the Monster story.
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That's a pretty accurate description. If you squint, you can maybe squeeze it into the Hammer sequence, but's very much an attempt to do more of a Universal-style Frankenstein movie.
 
Greg Cox said:
That's a pretty accurate description. If you squint, you can maybe squeeze it into the Hammer sequence, but's very much an attempt to do more of a Universal-style Frankenstein movie.
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It's also the only one of the five Cushing Frankenstein films not directed by Terence Fisher.

Apparently there's also a non-Cushing, non-Fisher Frankenstein film from Hammer called The Horror of Frankenstein which is sort of a parody/remake of The Curse of Frankenstein, with David (Darth Vader) Prowse as the Monster. I doubt TCM will be showing it, since Ben Mankiewicz didn't even acknowledge its existence when talking about the series in the intros.
 
Christopher said:
It's also the only one of the five Cushing Frankenstein films not directed by Terence Fisher.

Apparently there's also a non-Cushing, non-Fisher Frankenstein film from Hammer called The Horror of Frankenstein which is sort of a parody/remake of The Curse of Frankenstein, with David (Darth Vader) Prowse as the Monster. I doubt TCM will be showing it, since Ben Mankiewicz didn't even acknowledge its existence when talking about the series in the intros.
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That one's pretty obscure. I've never seen it, but it doesn't enjoy a good reputation.

Ralph Bates, who plays Victor in that one, was being groomed to be Hammer's next big horror star, but he never really caught on, despite Hammer's best efforts. To be honest, I've never quite understood what the Hammer executives saw in him, but I suspect they wanted a younger, sexier Doctor Frankenstein . ...
 
Any of you guys ever seen The Ice Pirates? I was planning on checking it out when TCM shows it on Wednesday.
 
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