Halloween Classics: Generations

It's Halloween, kids!  The day we've all been waiting for!  In culmination of this writing project (whew!), it's time to stop messing around with Dum-Dums and get into some Milky Ways -- 3 classics from 3 generations, each viewed in a different context.

FILM:


Poltergeist - 1982
Written by Steven Spielberg  Michael Grais & Mark Victor
Directed by Tobe Hooper

I don't think I'd seen Poltergeist since I was a kid, but it's pretty ubiquitous when it comes to lists of best haunting & ghost stories, so I thought it was time to take a look at it again.

In brief; "typical" white American suburban family complete with 2.5 kids and dog is living the dream of the 80s in a homogenous Southern California housing development.  Actually, it's the same homogenous Southern California housing development used for Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (filmed concurrently), which I think makes an interesting statement about homogenous American suburbs in itself.  One suburb is all suburbs and all suburbs are the same.  It's even more telling that these are desirable places from which to escape difference.  Scary.

So much for "in brief," but as I was saying, white-bread family in indistinct house (the film even points this out, so I don't think I'm totally off-base here) starts to experience strange and unusual occurrences, largely centered around youngest daughter Carol Anne.  First she's talking to the TV (more on this later), then chairs are moving around the kitchen, then -- BAM! -- the creepy tree is devouring son Robbie, seemingly as a distraction for sucking Carol Anne into a closet vortex.  It really seemed to escalate rather quickly then settle into a much slower arc of investigation and exposition before unleashing even bigger spooky effects.

Now, even as a kid, I remember being a little skeptical about the effects.  There are a few big ones that just don't make sense to me from a haunting perspective, and don't hold up from a technical standpoint.  For example, I don't see the point of a big, giant zombie head popping out of the closet, and it just looks like a big ol' model to me.  There's a spectral door guardian late in the movie about which I feel much the same only more so, and it uses a film layering technique that I never found convincing.  that being said, there are still a lot of practical effects that hold up better than the optical effects, and there's even one particular optical effect that I still find particularly chilling.

While I may see the effects as uneven and outdated in places, I was really surprised by how well the story itself holds up, outside of certain pacing issues.  Like I said, it seems to escalate rather quickly, then drag in the middle before jamming on the gas again toward the end.  I think it would be much creepier building slowly, going as far as to suggest that the para-psychologist and crew might be brought in BEFORE Carol Anne's disappearance and shuffling a couple of the other spooky set-pieces.  There are times after her disappearance where the family seems to forget to be as upset as they should be.  Nevertheless, it's a very solid haunting tale that plays strongly on parental fears and concerns about the kinds of worries about home and hearth that drive people to the suburbs in the first place.

Indeed, subtext was what I found most fascinating as an adult viewer with little chance of being surprised by a familiar story.  Where director Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre could be seen as a metaphor for America's culture wars, Poltergeist very strongly depicts an environment in which the counter-culture has surrendered to raise them up a passel o' young'uns.  Mom still likes a toke before bed, but Dad can't be bothered to roll a joint anymore, he's so engrossed in TV and a Reagan biography.  This is the same Dad who discovers that he's been selling a community built on top of a field of graves.

Consumerism is a strong, but passively expressed theme.  The product is all.  The dead of the past and the children of the future are both subject to consumption.  Pave over the dead, and bury children in commercialism.  Son Robbie is surrounded by Star Wars merchandise and the commercial ephemera of other pop cultural media.  Carol Anne is consumed by the pre-fab house, her voice trapped inside the television.  The final image in the film is not merely funny, but telling, as Dad pushes the television out of the hotel room.  It's not merely ironic, but symbolic of the control from which he's freeing himself and his family.

Poltergeist didn't work for me in all the same ways that it did when I was a kid, but much to my surprise, it worked for me in some brand new ways.  I understand that they're remaking it next year (heedless consumption of the past again), and it's my default setting to be skeptical of such things, but there's definitely a core there that could certainly be relevant again, and depending on the creative choices made, potentially better executed.  With a little reining in and refocusing, it could be a crisp and haunting tale.

Rosemary's Baby - 1968
Written & Directed by Roman Polanski
from the Novel by Ira Levin

This was my first time watching what many consider one of the scariest movies ever.  I guess it makes a difference when you see it.  Yeah, this is one that's going to get me banned from the clubhouse.

In brief (I promise this time), Rosemary & Guy, a young couple (Mia Farrow & John Cassavetes) move into a new apartment in New York.  The building has long been connected with brutal and scandalous rumors.  Shortly after moving in, they hear spooky chanting from the apartment next door.  The first neighbor they meet is a young woman recovering from drug addiction with the help of the elderly couple next door.  She's soon dead of an apparent suicide, but Rosemary's not so sure.  After that, Minnie & Roman (Ruth Gordon & Sidney Blackmer) the friendly-to-the-point-of-overbearing neighbor couple begins to ingratiate and insinuate themselves into Rosemary & Guy's lives.  Guy, an actor, gets a plum role when the man cast suddenly goes blind.  Rosemary gets pregnant and Minnie takes over her life, sending her to her doctor friend and feeding her drinks with homegrown herbs.  The pregnancy progresses with difficulty, and Rosemary's fear and paranoia grows.  When her friend Hutch falls suddenly ill, eventually dying and leaving her a book about witchcraft, her fears find a name.

The thing that struck me most upon watching the film was seeing where so many other films had come from, like The Exorcist or The Bible.  Like those, its pace drags, it's poorly aged in the context of later works and you kind of have to ignore a lot to be all that scared by it.  Also like The Bible, its gender attitudes should offend the modern viewer.

It doesn't help that the characters are unbearable.  Most of them have an excuse for it what with the Satan worship and all, but even our protagonist, Rosemary, is weak and pathetic even when she's fighting for her life (or rather, her baby's life, and there's the rub).  Maybe it's just the helpless paranoia, maybe it's the era's ideas of women, or maybe it's just that Mia Farrow whines so consistently that intergalactically notorious cry-baby Luke Skywalker starts to look like Dirty Harry.  Nah, it's not just that.  The end felt like a tremendous letdown after all her previous efforts and while I absolutely wanted to go open the jugulars of every one of the Satanists, they were about as menacing as canasta night down at the senior center.

And that's my biggest issue here.  I just didn't find it that scary, or really that engaging.  There's the structure of a tense thriller, but the tedious pace allows the tension to dissolve before our very eyes.  Like I mentioned up front, I think it depends on when in one's life one first sees the movie.  By this stage in my life I've simply seen too many movies.  I've learned how they're built from film makers who learned from Polanski.  I've seen the ways that subsequent movies have developed and expanded upon its elements.  Maybe it's similar to the way that hard bop makes it hard for me to appreciate the more predictable structures of ragtime.

Whatever it is, the time for Rosemary's Baby has passed for me, in more ways than one.

The Descent - 2005
Written & Directed by Neil Marshall

British film, The Descent is hands-down one of the best horror movies of the modern era.  To a certain extent, it's almost two great horror movies.  The full measure of its greatness, however, is subject to which version of the film you see, and whether you prefer an earned outcome or an obligatory horror twist.  More about THAT at the end.

The Descent distinguishes itself among horror films in a number of ways.  First of all, the core cast is entirely women, and not any candy-ass prom queen women either.  These six women are adventure sports enthusiasts and know how how adrenaline feels.  The first scene shows several of them on a white water rafting expedition, with central figure Sarah's (Shauna McDonald) husband and daughter meeting them at the end.  These girls rule.

Moments later, Sarah and her family are in a terrible accident on the road with Sarah the only survivor.

A year later, she's still recovering from the loss, but determined to forge ahead so they get the band back together (with a new addition) and the six women head off for a bit of spelunking in the Appalachians. Unbeknownst to the rest of the group, their self-involved limit-pushing friend Juno (the one who previously shared meaningful glances/averted gazes with Sarah's late husband) has led them not to the well-known intermediate cave to which they believed they were going, but to a completely uncharted cave.

The first half of the film is like its own movie.  Once the women descend into the cave, the only way out is through.  The exploration and natural dangers of their situation are remarkably tense, with the question of what will happen when the rest of the group realizes Juno's selfish folly weighing foremost in our minds.  Claustrophobia reigns as they crawl through narrow passages.  We feel the weight of the earth threatening to crush them.  Once the gain a fuller grasp of their situation, the tension ratchets higher.  A deep crevasse must be traversed.  Even as we feel their sinews stretched and muscles strained, we're captured by the mystery of "If this cave is undiscovered, where did that funky old piton come from?"  I could have totally watched an entire movie about them just struggling to survive this dangerous cave amid growing character tension.

Then it gets worse... so much worse.  They discover a chamber filled with ancient paintings a la Lascaux, depicting wild beasts and a mountain with two exits, so there's hope... until the creatures attack.

The second half of the movie turns the survival horror up to eleven.  Like many things in The Descent, it skips the exposition and allows us to figure out what's really going on, and evidently what is going on is that an evolutionary spur of subhumans have developed in this cavern; savage, sightless creatures.  Panic splinters the team and each individual or cluster is responsible for their own survival.

This part of the movie is deeply frightening and highly brutal.  There is gore, but not for gore's sake.  At all bloody junctures, my thought was "Well yeah, of course that's how it would be."  The sensation of fear is so electric that, when one of the most shocking deaths I've ever seen in a horror movie occurs, it makes perfect sense.  In fact, all of the deaths are completely reasonable in the context of the story, not merely a variety of ways that the creators thought up to devastate a human body for the amusement of blood-thirsty viewers.

Throughout this, Sarah demonstrates a thoughtful and powerful commitment to survival.  I mention this because it's highly relevant to the meaning of the alternate endings.

The Descent is original, well acted, cleverly written and freakin' beautifully shot.  Marshall has packed it with iconic frames, which, as others have pointed out, are cribbed from other imagery in such way as to indicate that he has learned his lesson and knows what he's doing.  The element of fear here is virtually unparalleled.  It's like a "Best of" compilation of different sense of primal fear, all assembled into one magnificent package.  It's tense, mistrustful, creepy, startling, shocking, horrific, gruesome, thrilling, terrifying and more.  It's damn near perfect.

...unless you see the wrong ending.

There are two versions of The Descent, and as far as I'm aware the only difference is the end.  One is the American Theatrical Release (AKA the R-rated version) and the other is alternately referenced as the British, Director's Cut or Unrated version.  I personally believe that the Theatrical version is "correct" and rescued the film from a foolish impulse on Marshall's part which completely undermines the story and betrays its entire meaning.  I will discuss this in greater detail below, but I don't recommend that discussion for people who haven't seen the movie.  I already feel badly enough for how much I've already said.  In his (rave) review of The Descent, Roger Ebert implored viewers not to let anyone talk to them about the movie until they'd seen it for themselves.  Bear in mind, it was the Theatrical release he was reviewing.

SPOILY-SPOILY-OHH-SO-SPOILY-SPOILER ALERT!!!

Seriously, don't read this unless you've seen the movie.  No, not even if you can't help your compulsive little self.  Just walk away.  You have been warned.  You're only ruining it for yourself.

Last warning.  Do not enter.

Okay...

In the American Theatrical Release, Sarah escapes from the cave, makes her way to the trucks and races away from there like a bat out of a fairly literal Hell.  Fade to black.  Credits.

In the British Release, she races away from there like a bat out of a fairly literal Hell, then pulls over to cry, gets startled by a passing semi truck, vomits... and suddenly sees Juno next to her in the truck.  Screaming, she awakens back in the cave and imagines her daughter there with a birthday cake as the creatures close in on her from all sides.  This is some bullshit.

First of all, the American version is very clearly edited in a slap-dash way and loses some nice moments.  Where she pulls over to cry and vomit; those are earned moments.  The first time I saw The Descent, I saw the Unrated or Director's Cut, and I was bawling.  When she vomited, I spoke back to the television in sympathy.  But once Juno appears and she wakes up in the cave -- again, some bullshit.

And here's why.

Sarah EARNED that escape.  We see how hard she fights every step of the way.  There is NO indication that she has any "lay down and die" in her.  Yes, once or twice she does imagine her daughter prior to the bullshit ending, but those visions occur at times when she needs to be spurred on, when she needs that little extra help to bring her focus back to moving forward and surviving.  It's COMPLETELY contradictory for her to fight as hard as she did only to up and decide to be a crazy quitter in the end.  Moreover, and perhaps most significantly, if her true desire was to lay down and die to rejoin her daughter, I don't believe that it's literarily or psychologically realistic that she would dream/hallucinate such a thorough escape.  She survived the loss, she survived the cave, she was reborn from the earth as a force unto herself.

The other ending simply doesn't add up.  It has the stink of obligatory "gotcha" all over it.  There's a common attitude among horror fans and evidently among directors that "happy" endings are inherently invalid, that they somehow diminish the film's commitment to horror if you don't walk away from it feeling completely hopeless.  Now, I'm certainly someone who likes a happy ending, but what I like most is an earned and appropriate ending that faithfully concludes the narrative arc with a sense of closure that is consistent with story and character.  The daughter-with-a-birthday-cake ending doesn't do that.  The Cake is a Lie.

It's been suggested by some individuals (clearly desperate to validate this cheap, bullshit ending) that Sarah was hallucinating a lot sooner, and that she may have even been the one who killed her friends and imagined the creatures.  Yeah; no.  The film just doesn't make the case for that, even if the director is willing to allow for it.  You don't just get to pull "It was all in her head" out of your ass without supporting it.  By that logic, you could slap 30 seconds onto the end of ANY movie to change its meaning.  SHRIEK!  And then Leia wakes up and she's still in that cell on the Death Star and she's really just a prostitute.  SHRIEK!  And then Rose has a flash of consciousness as she sinks beneath the waves and realizes that she steered the ship into the iceberg and Jack was just a passenger who pushed her into the water in the name of justice.  SHRIEK!  And then Anne Frank wakes up at home in Canton, Ohio and realizes there wasn't a war, she's not even Jewish, and Hitler is just the name of the neighbor's mean old Rottweiler.

Sarah lives.  The End.

The Monster Mash-Ups - Part 1: the 1940s & 50s

FILM & TELEVISION:

If there's anything better than a monster, it's more monsters, right?

Yeah, you'd think so, wouldn't you?  Well, it's a good thing you're pretty.

Big monster dust-ups are some of the best-worst things in film history.  The idea is almost always thrilling, but sadly the execution of the idea is frequently disappointing, if not outright craptacular.  They seem to be at their best when they're part of a fresh universe created from whole cloth, rather than a catch-all for recycled and/or public domain properties.  Since they're so often thrown together as a quick and easy cash-in, they bear all the loving craftsmanship that typically accompanies the term "quick and easy cash-in."

And yet... and yet there is just something undeniably exciting about the things that go bump in the dark bumping into each other.  How will it change their dynamic?  Do multiple monsters mean more monster screen-time?  Who would win in a fight?

I don't mind telling you; my criteria here is kind of vague.  At first I was just looking at the Universal Monster crossovers, or anything that co-opted the public domain origins of those characters.  Universal Pictures had big, big hits with the now classic Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolf Man, but also the Creature from the Black Lagoon, the Invisible Man, Dr Jekyl & Mr Hyde, Phantom of the Opera, the Mummy, This Island Earth and of course all manner of sequels and other horror movies.  Other filmmakers grew up with these movies running on TV, and would later pay tribute to them and/or exploit them in their own work.  While I don't want to just throw in everything that has more than one kind of monster in it, I do want the ones that feel like they are, for better or worse, tapping into that lineage.

I also have many of Godzilla's bigger throw-downs.  Some of them do, in fact, cross over with other characters, and the series has had such longevity in its own right that they do kind of feed on that same thrill of recurrence and magnification.  I think the experience of reading this article will convey to you the continuity of excitement that comes from having a house full of monsters.

And so, please enjoy... the Monster Mash-Ups.

Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man - 1943
Written by Kurt Siodmak
Directed by Roy William Neill

Featuring: The Wolf Man & Frankenstein's Monster

This is where it all began.

The now legendary 1931 Frankenstein had spawned three sequels including the equally legendary Bride of Frankenstein.  1941's The Wolf Man had also been a big hit for Universal, and its screenwriter jokingly pitched the producer the idea of bringing them together, which almost backfired on him, and where would we be now?

The film really belongs to Lon Chaney's Wolf Man far more than it does Frankenstein.  As a fairly direct sequel, it opens with Lawrence Talbot (Chaney) escaping from his crypt and going on the road to find relief from his curse.  The Wolf Man has always been kind of the runner-up to Dracula and Frankenstein, but he's really the most interesting character of the three.  Frankenstein's monster is misunderstood, and Dracula is just plain bad, but Talbot is tormented, and it gives him the strongest motivations of the lot.  Talbot seeks out the old gypsy woman who understands his condition, and together they journey to find the brilliant scientist who has been doing earth-shattering work in the subject of life and death; Dr. Frankenstein.  Once they get to Frankenstein's village, however, they discover that he has been killed... and stir up the fear and loathing of the villagers.  Searching the ruins of Castle Frankenstein for clues about the late doctor's work, he discovers the monster frozen in ice.  Once thawed, the monster guides him to Dr. Frankenstein's hidden cache of notes, but his personal diary is still missing, which leads Talbot to enlist the aid of his heir, the lovely Baroness Elsa Frankenstein in the hopes that she still has his diary.

The film works pretty well while it maintains its focus on Talbot/the Wolf Man.  The Frankenstein parts are not as good.  Due to the nature of the character, the monster just isn't that strong of a protagonist.  It's one thing when he's misunderstood, but he doesn't really have a stake in things here and his motivation suffers.  What's more, the character has become more convoluted the further he's gotten from his origins.  And frankly, the make-up is lazy and Bela Lugosi plays him far more campy than Karloff did in the first couple films.  It's by no means a great film, but it has some good parts in it, and it planted a seed of something that would grow and mutate in ways that its creators never could have imagined.

The Return of the Vampire - 1944
See link for writing team
Directed by Lew Landers

Yikes!  This one almost got away from me!

It stars Bela Lugosi as a vampire who is not Dracula, but Armand Tesla.  He went and got himself staked in 1918, but the German bombing of England during WWII knocked the stake out of his heart and he reconstituted to seek vengeance upon the people he was trying to kill in the first place.  Jerk.  What makes this a Monster Mash-Up is that his faithful manservant is a mild-mannered werewolf.

I truly wish I could tell you more, but I have, as yet, been unable to see the movie.

House of Frankenstein - 1944
Written by Edward T. Lowe Jr.
Directed by Erle C. Kenton

Featuring: The Wolf Man, Dracula & Frankenstein's Monster

A direct sequel to Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, House of Frankenstein has precious little Frankenstein in it, but it does bring a bit of Dracula into the equation.  No, the Wolf Man is the lead monster again, although the movie truly belongs to Dr. Niemann (Boris Karloff), a criminal scientist obsessed with continuing Frankenstein's work.  Having escaped from prison, he and fellow inmate/hunchbacked sidekick "friend Daniel" go undercover in the assumed identity of a -- ahem -- recently deceased sideshow operator offering a cabinet of terrors.  It just so happens that his skeleton of Dracula actually IS the skeleton of Dracula, and once Niemann removes the stake from its ribs, the vampire reconstitutes in a jiffy (although as a gray haired and mustachioed John Carradine rather than Bela Lugosi, who somehow got scooped out of TWO roles he'd played in this film).  Dracula helps Niemann settle a few old scores, then promptly gets himself dusted by the rising sun.

Niemann and Daniel, meanwhile, investigate the ruins of Castle Frankenstein, discovering both the Monster and the Wolf Man frozen in the subterranean ice cavern.  Talbot springs back to shape right away and gets back to a bust schedule of brooding.  This is, of course, like an aphrodisiac to the gypsy dancing girl upon whom Daniel's eye had fallen.  The Monster, however, remains unconscious and in poor condition.  Talbot leads Niemann to Frankenstein's diary, and they all set off for Niemann's castle to get down on some mad science.  The Monster remains unconscious until the dramatic climax, but everyone else is in conflict, each with their incompatible agendas, and let us not forget the villagers.  Villagers always have a burr up their butt about something, don't they?

House of Frankenstein keeps things going and ramps them up from Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.  The performances are stronger, thanks largely to Karloff's Niemann, J. Carrol Naish as Daniel and the bubbly gypsy girl Ilonka played by Elena Verdugo.  There's a new actor & makeup job for the Monster, which helps too.  Carradine's Dracula is a disappointment, however, although we don't get much of him.  I suspect that will change in House of Dracula, but then again, judging from the distribution of screen time in House of Frankenstein, he could just appear on a postage stamp licked by the Wolf Man.

House of Dracula - 1945
Written by Edward T. Lowe Jr.
Directed by Erle C. Kenton

Featuring: The Wolf Man, Dracula and a glimpse of Frankenstein's Monster

The third and final Universal monster crossover vamps (no pun intended) on the same component parts that made up the first two.  The central character is, once again, really the scientist that ties them all together.  Dr. Edelmann is initially contacted by Dracula, who for reasons not explained, managed to get himself reconstituted in the years since the events in House of Frankenstein.  Dracula claims to wish to be freed from his curse, although it isn't really clear whether this is his true purpose, of if he's merely trying to get over with Edelmann's buxom blonde nurse.  Edelmann tells him that he'll need some time to prepare the treatment, so Dracula disappears until the middle of the movie.  Meanwhile, Lawrence "Wolf Man" Talbot shows up, also in inexplicably good health and looking for a cure.  Unwilling to face another full moon as the wolf, Talbot throws himself into the ocean, but washes into a cave in the cliff face.  When Edelmann goes down to find him, they discover a mud flow carrying the skeleton of House of Frankenstein's Dr. Niemann and the unconscious Monster.  So HIS whereabouts are explained, but it's a pretty dopey and unlikely scenario.  Edelmann is less unhinged and obsessed than the previous films' doctors, but even he feels the strong temptation to revive Frankenstein's creation.

Dracula drops by around that time to seduce the nurse and Edelmann decides he'd better up the dosage, which for some reason involves a transfusion of his own blood... which has to be direct... and he has to be unconscious for it.  Go fig.  During the transfusion, Dracula wakes up and reverses the flow, then leaves.  Edelmann finds Dracula's coffin and opens it to sunlight, and that's the last of THAT plot thread.  Unfortunately, the transfusion begins to transform Edelmann into a vampire and his decision-making skills take a nosedive.

Frankenstein's Monster isn't revived until literally the last 2 minutes of the film.  Talbot may have gotten his happy ending.  This time out, the hunchback is Edelmann's cute brunette nurse.  And the creepiest critter of the lot is a sallow faced villager.  Given that House of Dracula is a fairly nonsensical remix of the same elements from the first two, it's probably just as well that Universal didn't build any more Houses.  They were out of ideas.

Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein - 1948
see link for writing team
Directed by Charles Barton

Featuring: Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, the Wolf Man & the Invisible Man

The first of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello's "Meet" movies is also their most jam-packed.  It features Bela Lugosi as Dracula, Lon Chaney as the Wolf Man, and Glenn Strange as Frankenstein's Monster.  Lugosi and Chaney, of course, originated those roles, and Strange played the Monster in both of the "House" movies.  Obviously, it's a pretty silly movie concerning a couple of schlubby baggage handlers who just happen to receive shipment of Dracula's coffin and Frankenstein's corpse, but I'll let you in on a little secret -- it's at least as good as the straight-faced trio of crossovers that preceded it.  In fact, depending on what you value in the films, I could easily say that it's much better.  The story is cornball, but so were all the others, and A&C do it with so much humor that less time is wasted on overwrought drama.  Moreover, the monsters have WAY more screen time than in any of the other monster mash-ups.  Heck, Frankenstein gets more screen time here than he did in all three of the other crossovers combined.  You really can't overstate value of having Bela back as Dracula either.  John Carradine was... okay, but Bela IS Dracula and vice versa.  When he started putting the hypnotic whammy on Costello, I totally geeked out.  Most of the comedy holds up pretty well, although that depends on the how willing the viewer is to allow it to exist within its own context.  Anyone who complains about Abbot & Costello but admits to laughing at Scary Movie is someone to remove from your friend list.  The only downside to A&CmF is that it created the template for the classic monsters in goofy comedy and wanna-comedy.  The madcap mayhem and chases toward the end really brought Scooby-Doo to mind, and that just shouldn't happen.



Horror and Sci-Fi monster movies really went through a lot of changes in the 1950s.  The classic monsters became passe, and the whole enterprise became a much lower budget, lower respectability business.  Giant radioactive creatures were on the rise, so at first I didn't have anything to represent monster mash-ups in the 50s, but these two just barely squeak through.  Toward the later 50s, England's Hammer Films studio took up the cause of the classic creatures, but with a seriousness that eschewed the camp of crossovers.

How to Make a Monster - 1958
see link for writing team
Directed by Herbert L Strock

Featuring: a teenage werewolf & a teenage Frankenstein's monster

I had heard of I Was a Teenage Werewolf, (largely because it starred Michael Landon and was a Trivial Pursuit question) but I didn't realize that the studio, American International Pictures, had also released I Was a Teenage Frankenstein the same year, much less that the both had a sequel in How to Make a Monster, the following year.

The story revolves around a make-up artist for "American International Studios" who discovers that he's being phased out when the studio he helped to enrich with his monsters has decided to shift their focus to musicals.  He uses his monstrous creations and the power of hypnosis to exact his revenge.  Sounds pretty "meta" if you ask me.

I have, as yet, been unable to view this film.

Plan 9 from Outer Space - 1959
Written & Directed by Edward D Wood Jr

Featuring: grave-robbing aliens, Vampire Girl and ghouls (zombies)

Notorious and uproarious, the badness is most glorious!  Ed Wood's "masterpiece" has been dubbed "the Worst Movie Ever Made."  It's not, but not for lack of trying.  Wood filled a box with his passions, shook it up, and Plan 9 is what came out.

The story isn't completely nonsensical, nor is it completely stupid, but between the two of them, they pretty much keep things covered.  Aliens come to Earth.  The dead rise.  There are some pretty (unintentionally) hilarious scenes, but they don't necessarily add up in any context.  Wood managed to wedge in a number of future cult figures, or perhaps they became cult figures for having been in Plan 9.  TV mentalist Criswell delivers the opening monologue.  Elvira's role model Vampira appears as a "Vampire Girl" despite no real connection to vampires in the film.  Bela Lugosi gets one last posthumous credit via footage that Wood shot with vague intentions and worked into Plan 9.  His character is played in other scenes by an actor holding his cape over his face.  And then there's Swedish wrestler Tor Johnson...  I don't have anything to say about that.  He's just there.

It's been a long time since I saw Plan 9 itself.  I've mostly recovered.  I'm far more willing to watch Tim Burton's Ed Wood.  He captures the experience so well that they blur together in places.  You really get all you need that way, without the impatient discomfort of watching Plan 9 itself.

Continue reading with The Monster Mash-Ups - Part 2: the 1960s!

Ain't No Party Like a Lemmon Party

FILM:

The Apartment - 1960

Written by Billy Wilder & I.A.L. Diamond

Directed by Billy Wilder

If you're anything like me (and God help you if you are), then you grew up familiar with Jack Lemmon as a primarily dramatic actor who slummed it in the "Grumpy Old" movies, and only occasionally remembered that he was Felix Ungar before Tony Randall. If you've made some effort, you'll also know Some Like It Hot. So it's been with no small amount of wonder and delight that I've been "discovering" more of his comedy work from the 60s recently. How To Murder Your Wife and Irma La Douce were among my favorite films viewed last year, and sometime down the road I'll tell you more of the why to that, but Lemmon was a key ingredient in both those pies. In the early-to-mid 60s, he could have walked away with the title "The Next Jerry Lewis." As Lewis' work was becoming more bitter and unkind (see: Hook, Line & Sinker -- or rather don't), Lemmon embodied a similar nebbishy, loosey-goosey enthusiasm and sweetness that Lewis had choked with sour grapes and pickled in scotch. Lemmon seems to have made a conscious effort to keep betting big on himself and his chops, to great success. The Apartment gives him plenty of opportunities to play with a range of emotions, writ both large and small.

Lemmon plays C.C.Baxter, a corporate cog with dreams of ambition. There are two significant locales in the film, and the one that's not the titular apartment is Consolidated Life of New York; an insurance corporation as soulless and impersonal as its acres of cold, sterile office spaces. Baxter is a minnow trying to swim with the sharks, but it's not his head for numbers that has made him popular with various department heads, but his callow willingness to let them use his apartment for liaisons their mistresses. Their casual disregard for him often keeps him waiting in the cold just to go home to his own place, which they have ransacked of booze and cheese crackers. Meanwhile, his landlady and her husband believe him to be an impossible lothario, owing to the ruckuses made by his self-serving bosses.

As shiny, austere and angular as the office is, his apartment is textural, cluttered and curvilinear -- a womb against an uncaring world which he allows to be violated by the same men who make the outside world so uncaring in the first place. Ralph Waldo Emerson said "I find that Americans have no passions, they have appetites." These are those Americans.

Baxter is interested in Miss Kubelik, an elevator operator at Consolidated Life of New York (an interesting name, given the closed atmosphere in which all aspects of one's life are pursued, and upon which all aspects appear dependent). Shirley MacLaine endows her with that jaded hope that no one else could do quite the same. She knows better, but she keeps following her heart into danger. The danger in this case is Mr. Sheldrake, one of the top corporate brass with whom she's had and off-and-on affair. It being "on" again, Sheldrake (played by Fred MacMurray with Romneyesque white-washed sleaze) takes an interest in Baxter, or more specifically, his apartment. The quid pro quo is that Baxter gets his own office while Sheldrake gets a key to the apartment. Baxter, unaware of the identity of the young lady in question, is filled with the confidence of a rising corporate raider, while his flirtations with Miss Kubelik seem to stall-out on the runway, owing to her renewed relations with their mutual employer.

After Sheldrake's secretary (and formerly featured flavor-of-the-year) Miss Olsen boozily sheds some light on his modus operandi during the company Christmas party, Miss Kubelik heads to the apartment to swallow a handful of sleeping pills. Meanwhile, Baxter, finally giving up on Kubelik, is about to "get lucky" with the floozy-ish wife of a jockey currently detained by Castro in Cuba. She fits the mold of all the corporately approved mistresses -- blonde, blowsy, and unburdened with an overabundance of brains. They all seemed to speak in that "yeah-yeah, sure-sure" Harley Quinn-y Brooklyn movie accent.

That's where things start happening very quickly. The get to his apartment. He discovers Miss Kubelik unconscious in his bed. He has to get rid of his date, roust the landlady's husband, Dr. Dreyfus to pump Miss Kubelik's stomach (later echoed in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous), keep Miss Kubelik awake long enough to be sure she won't die and chase off an amorous executive who did well at the Christmas party. All of these things are themselves made up of smaller comedy bits. It's kind of an atom smasher for "bits," all swirling together -- all the while never denying that it's still an attempted suicide scene. Though the scene is roughly in the middle of the film, it could easily be considered the climax in the story arc, with all previous scenes leading up to it and all following scenes being an untangling and categorization of the messes they've all made.

I'd like to avoid giving away endings as much as possible, so I'm going to leave off there, plot-wise. The Apartment is an unexpectedly adult comedy. I was going to say "for its time," but thinking about it, it's more mature than comedies in our time -- not just in its dealings with suicide, infidelity, and class warfare (well, we don't call it that when it's just the rich waging it), but in the emotional complexity of two people finding the nerve to really love honestly. There is a lot more going on here than the words they say. So much of the complexity is never spoken of, but shared via a continuum of emotional subtexts. Lemmon is harried and hopeful. He's aware of his struggle to become UNaware of the ways that he debases himself to climb, and finds the top to be the lowest place of all. MacLaine's eyes twinkle from within her dense canopy of eyelashes, that pursed smirk that says "Show me something, bud -- no, really, SHOW me something, please."

Everybody's Got a Hungary Heart

FILM:
The Shop Around the Corner - 1940
Written by Samson Raphaelson (see link for other credits)
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch


The Shop Around The Corner is best known nowadays as the movie that "You've Got Mail" was based on.

HEY WAIT, COME BACK! It's really okay!

While "Mail" has become a modern milestone for exceptional achievements in the saccharine arts, its predecessor delivers the genuine sweetness of vine-ripened fruit. The cast is rich and delicious with endearing performances from a cast that knows when to hurry up, when to slow down, and how to share the feeling of love among the family of employees at Matuschek & Co.

Jimmy Stewart is the head clerk at Matuschek & Co., a variety store in Budapest. He's Jimmy Stewart -- what more do you want? Mr. Matuschek, the store owner, is played by Frank Morgan (who you'll know as the Wizard of Oz) in the really show-stealing performance of the movie. Morgan must be at times arrogant, bumbling, suspicious, delighted, self-conscious, affectionate, furious, brokenhearted, magnanimous and suicidal, and he accomplishes all with such tenderness that you can even feel for him when he's airing the grievances of the capitalist.

There's no big-store-little-store plot thread here. Stewart's unlikely/obvious love interest is Margaret Sullavan, a street-smart gal in search of a job and a better class'a fella. The store owner hires her when she manages to flummox the infuriatingly in-charge Stewart. She's suitably sassy, daffy, snotty and adorable. Naturally she and Stewart get along like peas and catheters.

Other charmers in the cast are the sweetly downtrodden Pitrovich played by Felix Bressart, William Tracy as the delivery boy Pepi who becomes an overnight captain of industry when finally offered the chance to take his first step up the corporate ladder, and even Joseph Schildkraut was engaging as the obsequious proto-douche Vadas.

The character relations within the store define the narrative arc here. While the romance weaves in and out with increasing frequency, it's really the activities in the store, particularly the dynamic between Stewart and Morgan that give the story its momentum and heart.