THUGGERY AT THE TEMPLE OF THE GOLDEN ARCHES

I went out for my day off walk and weekly Filet O'Fish sandwich at the McDonald's on 9th Street here in the Slope, and it was during the hours when the place is mostly occupied by seniors and assorted retirees. This relatively quiet time is preferred because it is usually free of the kids who swarm the place when the nearby middle school, and said kids invariably act like loud, abusive fools and assholes when they storm the place. Unfortunately, the day's after school antic s started a bit early, as three obnoxious ghetto crotch fruit teamed up to verbally abuse and threaten an old Latino man who was struggling to remain upright with a cane. I have no idea what sparked the confrontation, but the kids were absolutely horrible, hurling a torrent of profanity and daring the old man to start something when they were apparently the ones who kicked things off, and of course the littlest one, a kid with ridiculous-looking beaded dreads, had the biggest mouth. The old man did his best to stand his ground but it became clear that the situation was about to escalate into junior-level violence, and it was at that point that at least ten senior Latinas and black women stood up and voiced their displeasure at the teens' treatment of the old guy while also warning him not to physically engage with the kids, because he would likely be the one arrested when the police showed up.

I'm guessing the kids were not used to anyone challenging them when they acted up in public, as they were momentarily shocked by the show of resistance, but they mostly ignored the women and continued to harass the old dude. Seeing the boys' refusal to cut that shit out, the women left where they were sitting and advanced on the young thugs, their intent to take none of their shit clearly expressed by their body language and outraged words. If there's one thing that young males of color know and fully understand, it's that they do NOT want to fuck with elder black and/or Latin females, as those women do NOT play. They will beat you senseless, then once they have you on the ground, they will shuck down your pants and spank you bare-assed in public, and you would be lucky if they did not draw blood in the process. And cops of color also understand that shit, and if it's old ladies administering a well-earned beatdown, they tend to turn a blind eye. (I have personally witnessed this happen several times during my quarter-century in the Slope.)

The boys, while still hurling abuse at the coffin dodger, were herded out of the McDonald's and onto 9th Street, and once they were outside most of the women returned to their seats, with the exceptions of two very pissed-off Latinas, one of whom had her beefy fists balled up and ready for deployment throughout the entire sorry incident. The boys, pretending to ignore the Latinas, hung around within range of the McDonald's entrance, waiting for the old man to come out, a move apparently anticipated by the still-standing Latinas. Once outside, the ruckus began anew, but this time the Latinas were there front and center, and they soon drove the boys off.

It would have been easy enough for that cadre of badassed, attitude and righteous indignation-fueled crones to have reduced those boys to chutney, but no one would have come out of it looking or feeling particularly good. In a cosmos filled with moment-to-moment indignities and injustice, this was but one such minor incident on any given day in the Big Apple. (If I had my way, I would have those little shits relegated to the Ludivico technique posthaste.)

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2022 - Day 6: THE MAGICIAN (1926)

A pagan orgy and a come-on from a dancing faun. Surprisingly, not a Manhattan disco during the 1970's.

So, I sat through THE MAGICIAN ages ago and intended to cover it in an earlier round of these essays, but I just couldn't work up the energy to really sit down and write much about it because, at nearly 100 years old, it mostly has not aged well and it engenders no sentiment from the horror fandom community as a beloved antique. I'd wanted to see the film since I was eight years old, when I first read about it in a book on the history of horror films on a plane to Spain during a family trip, and now that I've seen it I don't think it was worth the wait. 

 

Aleister Crowley...uh, I mean Olliver Haddo (Paul Wegener)
 

It starts out quite well, telling the story of Olliver Haddo (Paul Wegener, an imposing German actor now best remembered as the iconic take on the Golem), a Crowley-esque Parisian medical student/would-be sorcerer  who needs the heart blood of a maiden (read "virgin," because that specification is made very clear in the script) for an experiment that will supposedly allow him to alchemically create life in his lab. He sets his sights on a betrothed young sculptress and even shows her then-provocative pre-Code visions of ancient pagan rituals in which a pretty much naked faun, alluded to be Pan himself (dancer Hubert "Jay" Stowitts), participates and gets down with the nubile revelers. 

 

Pan (Hubert "Jay" Stowitts) plays and cavorts for the revelers.

That stuff is great, but then the magician kidnaps the woman and from that point it's like some totally different screenwriter took over and reduced the second half of the movie to a rote, unremarkable, thoroughly predictable matinee bill-filler. The shift in tone and story quality during the second half is astonishing, and I found myself speed-searching through most of the last fifteen minutes, missing no dialogue since it's a silent film.

Still want to bother with it?

 

Poster from the original Argentinian release. (I went with this because all of the available poster images from the American release are beyond boring.)

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2022 - Day 5: THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932)

Hospitality... NOT.

I finally got around to watching  THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932), one of the Universal classics that I had somehow missed during my formative years, and I have ti say that I do not think it has aged well. That's a shame, because it had a great director in James Whale and a game cast featuring Boris Karloff, Ernest Thesiger — immortalized as Dr. Pretorius in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN, a mad scientist so mad that he comes off as quite sane — and Charles Laughton, while the whole look and feel of the film fairly drips with eerie gothic atmosphere. Unfortunately it suffers from the staginess of many films made just out of the silent era, and in fact the film looks and feels like a silent and plays about the same with the sound off and subtitles on.

It's an early attempt at blending horror and comedy in which five innocents are forced to take shelter for the night in the titular location due to impassable rains, the roads flooding, and collapsing hillsides blocking the roads. Once within the old dark house, our travelers meet a creepy family that is quite obviously insane, and the rest of the running time features the quintet being menaced in assorted uninteresting ways. I expected more edgy material from a pre-Code James Whale film, but the only items of such note were Karloff's mute and hulking alcoholic butler's clearly "ungentlemanly" intentions toward the heroine, and sugar daddy Laughton's character's relationship with his platonic chorus girl girlfriend letting those in the audience with a knowledge of such things read their arrangement as likely being a beard for his homosexuality.

For a horror comedy, the film is neither all that funny or all that scary. It's just atmosphere with little else to recommend it. Or at least that is how I absorbed it. Your mileage may vary, especially if you are a fellow classic Universal enthusiast. And to be 100% blunt, I fell asleep on it halfway through, eventually returning ti it a few hours later. I could have skipped it altogether.

Poster from the original theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2022 - Day 4: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2022)

 Here we go again...

After the success of the most recent HALLOWEEN sequels comes this latest unnecessary attempt at reviving the TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE franchise. All it is is more of the same in the guise of a quasi-sequel, which makes little sense because if it follows fifty years after the original, which is the stated case, Leatherface would be well into his seventies. But whatever...

 

The setup is that this is a direct sequel to the 1974 masterpiece, retconning all of the subsequent sequels out of existence. The original film happened, and now Leatherface (Mark Burnham) lives in seclusion with an ancient lady who serves as his surrogate mother. This iteration of Leatherface bears little behavioral resemblance to the original, in that he is no longer a terrified, infantile man-child who mostly acted out of childlike fear. Now he's an indestructible murderous juggernaut of the Jason Voorhees stripe, a creative decision that reduces the once-unique bogeyman to another in the immeasurably long line of cookie cutter slashers.

Anyway, a group of incredibly annoying internet social influencers breeze into an abandoned Texas town with the intent to sell its properties to wealthy young city-slickers. One of the houses they want to sell is where Leatherface and his mama, the sole residents of the ghost town, reside, with Leatherface basically being a mentally-challenged senior citizen whom no one knows savagely decimated a van full of 20-something half a century ago. The influencers discover the pair while snooping around their house, which was presumed deserted, and tell the old lady that she and her special needs charge have to leave, no ifs, ands, or buts, unless the old lady can produce a deed of ownership. When she cannot produce a deed, the old lady works herself into a state that triggers a heart attack, and she soon dies in the ambulance on the way to a hospital. Leatherface is next to her when she expires, and once she's gone the monster within him awakens. What follows is super-graphic charnel house cinema with nothing on its mind other than placing chainsaw fodder in Leatherface's path. Oh, and Sally Hardesty, the ultra-traumatized final girl from the 1974 film is back (recast due to Marilyn Burns having passed away in 2014), and she has spent the last 48 years searching for the killer of her brother and her friends. A final reckoning is imminent.

Other than delivering on the gore and violence (which unfortunately relies more on CGI than practical effects), this new TEXAS CHAINSAW is about as by-the-numbers as a slasher film can be, and if it had come out during the '80's heyday of the sub-genre, it would only be distinguished from the legion of like films by its famous title. The characters are nearly all annoying, so we have a cast that I actively wanted to see die horribly from the moment they arrived in town, and in that I was not disappointed. Leatherface fucking goes to town on all and sundry, and if that is all that you came for, you will be satisfied. It just would have been nice if all of the carnage had been a part of a narrative that was in any way scary or suspenseful. The only thing of note is a great bit where Leatherface kills about a score of people who are trapped on a charter bus. If I had seen this in a theater, I guarantee you that the audience would have gone apeshit berserk during that sequence. (Too bad Brooklyn's Court Street Stadium 12 recently went under. The audiences there were hilarious during films of this ilk.)

 

When you live in New York City and regularly take the MTA buses, this sort of this is just another day. In a deserted town in bumfuck Texas, not so much.

 

If you come to it with low expectations, TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE 2022 a passable way to kill 83 minutes and it is gory as fuck, but there is zero suspense and at no point is it actually scary. It also clearly sets itself up for a sequel, despite Leatherface somehow surviving two back-to-back shotgun blasts to the chest at point blank range. Leatherface is a normal human, not Jason Vorhees, so that was just idiotic. 

 

Lastly, it also rips off elements of the HALLOWEEN reboot from a couple of years back, namely having Sally Hardesty still be alive and seeking vengeance/closure, just like Jamie Lee Curtis in the last two HALLOWEEN flicks. I’ve certainly seen worse, but this is basically just another rote bloodbath in a series that should have been put out to pasture after the second installment.

 

Promotional image for the Netflix release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2022 - Day 3: HANDS OF THE RIPPER (1971)

 

The Ripper stalks again (sort of).

Possession of the mind is a terrible thing/It's a transformation with an urge to kill 

-The Misfits

Some fifteen years after Jack the Ripper's reign of hideous terror, Anna (Angharad Rees), the Ripper's daughter, who as a child witnessed the Ripper murder her mother, has fallen into the unsavory care of an older woman who uses the now-teenage girl as part of her phony seance racket. The poor girl is also pimped out to sleazy upper-class "gentlemen," the old lady charging a high price for the leave to take what the clients are promised is the girl's virginity. (The scam is that once a gentleman has handed over the cash to have his way with the girl, the old woman interrupts the proceedings, claiming the girl is not right in the head, and the gentlemen callers have little choice but to leave or have their governmental positions jeopardized. That said, it is implied that Anna has seen many such callers, and was likely "deflowered" years previous.) The seance scheme is rumbled by the disbelieving Dr. Pritchard (Eric Porter, memorable as the ship captain in 1968's unintentionally ludicrous THE LOST CONTINENT), who's a devotee to the new methods of Sigmund Freud, and he takes Anna into his care after Anna suffers what is at first believed to be a psychotic break that prompts the girl to murder the old woman who exploited her. Installing Anna at his home, the doctor endeavors to find the root of the girl's problems and cure her, but what he did not count on was Anna not being psychotic. No, the poor girl is possessed by the spirit of her murderous sire, and she's a ticking time bomb that can be set off by certain triggers. By the time the story reaches its climax, three people are dead, one maimed and possibly dead, and one run through with a sabre, and the whole affair is rather bleak with only one way out...

So I finally saw HANDS OF THE RIPPER (1971), one of the remaining Hammer horror films that I had not had the opportunity to encounter over the course of a lifetime as a staunch supporter of the distinct Hammer flavor of horror. It's often overlooked, presumably due to it not featuring any of the classic-style monsters that the company revitalized via color and generous lashings of violence, blood, gore, and female nudity, but once it gets going it's a solid enough little shocker. 

This a more modern-looking Hammer, as it eschews the vivid colors and mist-shrouded and forested Gothic European landscape that so many of the company's classics are defined by, and no Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee is present to distinguish it, but the cast is game and it moves at a decent pace, though it does take almost a half hour before it really gets going. But when it does kick into high gear, hoo-boy, does it deliver. There were two moments of graphic carnage that made me exclaim "WHOA!!!" when each occurred, and it was nice to have such "HOLY SHIT!!!" moments in what could otherwise have passed for a particularly sordid installment of a British period drama. Not a classic, but definitely not deserving of the relative obscurity that it languishes in.

The entire uncut film can be had on YouTube. 

Poster for the American theatrical release.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 20220 - Day 2: HALLOWEEN KILLS (2021)

A distraught Karen Nelson (Judy Greer), daughter of original HALLOWEEN survivor Laurie Strode, faces off against Michael Meyers.  I'll show myself out.

And now we get  HALLOWEEN KILLS, the twelfth in the slasher series that launched the boom over forty years ago. While not the worst of the many HALLOWEEN sequels and re-imaginings (not by a long shot), HALLOWEEN KILLS definitely ranks up there among the stupidest of the lot.

This one takes up right where the previous film ended, with the house of Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) burning while boogeyman Michael Meyers was trapped within, presumed dead (YEAH, RIGHT), but of course the Shape strolls out of the conflagration and resumes his endless and reasonless murder spree, this time with a higher and gorier body count than usual. (At least it wasn't boring.) That's all well and good and exactly what this franchise's audience is there for, but this one, more so than usual, is marked by its characters doing incredibly stupid things. It's tailor-made for the vocal derision of an inner city audience, as people rush headlong into certain death while repetitively exclaiming "Evil dies tonight!" as the fervor of fed-up mob mentality overtakes the entire town of Haddonfield.

My favorite thing about it is the ending, wherein, after cutting a bloody swath through the town, Michael is surrounded by about two dozen members of the community, folks equipped with baseball bats, hockey sticks, assorted bladed implements, and guns, and they proceed to beat the motherfucking shit out of him, culminating in our boy taking several point blank rounds to the body and head. When the dust settles, Michael is finally vanquished...

Again, YEAH, RIGHT.

As Laurie notes that the more he kills the stronger her gets, as he "transcends" to a totally unkillable "essence of evil," Mike pops up off the ground and proceeds to mulch his triumphant slayers in a classic "Surprise, motherfucker!!!" moment, thus setting the stage for the upcoming HALLOWEEN ENDS, which will reportedly allow the 40+year war between Laurie and Michael to reach a long-overdue conclusion.

Again, YEAH, RIGHT.

Jamie Lee Curtis, love her though I do, is too long in the tooth to be regularly having it out with a superhuman boogeyman, plus to say nothing of the whole enterprise now being well past played-out, but as long as these keep putting asses in seats, HALLOWEEN will simply never end. Hell, I would not be at all surprised if in fifty years, avaricious filmmakers dug up Jamie Lee's moldering remains and propped them up in front of the camera for further tangles with Michael. And when they inevitably do, they will have to work extra-hard in order to top HALLOWEEN KILLS for sheer narrative idiocy.

The film's highlights for me:

• Copious bloodshed making up for the story's many deficiencies.
• Judy Greer as Laurie's daughter. I just enjoy Greer in anything.
• The creators not being afraid to have Michael, an implacable boogeyman, kill kids. No one should be safe in such a scenario, especially on a night that's all about masks and scary deviltry.
• Big John and Little John, a really cool gay couple. (It takes a real man to be able to pull off walking around at home in a pirate costume similar to the one sported by Judge Reinhold in FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH and not look like an idiot.)
• Anthony Michael Hall as the grown-up Tommy Doyle. Judging by his face and acting histrionics, I am convinced that Hall is slowly morphing into Malcolm McDowell.
  

Poster from the theatrical release. It's crap like this that makes me lament the days of genuine artistry for movie posters, the days when actual illustrators crafted memorable and haunting imagery to garner audience interest. Now, any shithead with a computer and Photoshop can craft a poster practically overnight, and when it comes to Hollywood cheap and fast will nearly always win out over art.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2022 - Bonus Post: MY PILLARS OF SCHOLARLY KNOWLEDGE

The four books that formed the foundation of my reading on horror movie history during my formative years, all replacements for my original copies.

MONSTERS FROM THE MOVIES was first had as a paperback obtained from a Scholastic book fair when I was in fourth grade, and it was a perfect introductory book on the subject, especially since it opted not to talk down to young readers. (My original copy of that one was ruined when my mother, during her era of serially disrespecting my possessions and either breaking or otherwise ruining them, left a capless Magic Marker on top of the book and the pen bled out its blue ink all over my beloved book, utter soaking the pages and rendering them unreadable. I remember it like it was yesterday.)

AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF THE HORROR FILM was another one that I had as a paperback, while this replacement is a hardcover of its first edition. I do not recall where I got my original copy from, but the book is notable as my first adult-level reading on the genre. It's exhaustive in how comprehensive it is, though it is only current through its 1968 publication date.

A PICTORIAL HISTORY OF HORROR MOVIES is a highly recommended and absolutely gorgeous hardcover coffee table book that is a must-have for all horror movie enthusiasts. Lushly illustrated with a plethora of photos, it's a book that I read to the point of wearing out my two previous copies, so I once again resorted to eBay for another replacement.

Lastly comes HORRORS: FROM SCREEN TO SCREAM — another eBay purchase, as my original fell apart forty years back — which is less of an historical overview and more of an A-Z listing with brief synopses and some criticism thrown in here and there. It's a handy reference guide to horror film up through 1975, and it is loaded with photos. It was a good entry-level book at the time, and it still holds a dear place in my heart.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2022 - Day 1: THE MUNSTERS (2022)

 They're back. Hooray...?

THE MUNSTERS is a fondly-remembered black-and-white TV sitcom that ran for two seasons (1964-1966), just before all network programming made the leap into color, and it has since seen a a number of attempts at revivals, all failures. If you were a kid who grew up in the 1970's and early 1980's, a generation raised on (and sometimes by) old teevee reruns, you are likely very familiar with THE MUNSTERS and its comedic look at the daily life and struggles of of a family of Transylvanian monsters (of the classic Universal horror cycle mold). It was a standard '60's sitcom whose sole distinguishing characteristic that set it apart from its brethren was its monster angle, with competitor (and better series) THE ADDAMS family running at the same time and for just as long, but that show was about the family being very strange and eerie, in some cases undefinable, while the Munster family could have been just any other suburban clan of their era. Nonetheless, THE MUNSTERS holds a dear spot in the hearts and minds of many in my generation, so when it was announced that Munsters uber-fan Rob Zombie would be writing and helming a modernization of the show as a film, there was a good amount of anticipatory buzz surrounding it. Zombie is best known for crafting '70's grindhouse-flavored, ultra-violent/gory, and ultra-profane horror pastiches and remakes that many in the horror fandom community love, but that I remain indifferent to at best, or outright despise at worst. I have not seen all of Rob Zombie's films, but, to me, HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES was a flimsy and derivative attempt at copying the tone and atmosphere of the classic 1974 THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, while THE DEVIL'S REJECTS was just an exercise in shock and offensiveness for the sake of shock and offensiveness. And do not get me started on his appalling and utterly unnecessary remake of the original HALLOWEEN. That said, I am clearly not a fan, thus it was that I had no faith whatsoever that Zombie would deliver a Munsters update that would appeal to me, despite the fact that he wears his love for classic horror in general and the Munsters in particular on his sleeve.

Sooooo... 

I watched Zombie's 2022 take on the Munsters on Netflix and nodded off three times before I was even twenty minutes into it, so I backed up to where I left off before I began to crash. I eventually managed to watch it through, solely for the purpose of writing about for this year's round of essays, and if not for this project's sake I would have turned it off and gotten on to what passes for my life.

 

 There's no actual plot structure to speak of, so what we get is three acts of incidents that eventually come together to tell the stories of:

• Herman Munster's creation (for those who don't know, he's Frankenstein's monster, only as a lovable goofball) and rise as Transylvania's hot new rock star/standup comedian
• Lily, the lonely vampire daughter of Count Dracula, looking for love and falling hard for Herman, who reciprocates her feelings
• The Count's immediate snobbish hatred of Herman and his efforts to find (or create) someone that he deems as more suitable for his daughter
• Lily's shady brother Lester and his dealings with a vengeful Romani woman to whom he owes money
• The courtship of Lily and Herman, conveyed by a dating montage (which, cheesy though it absolutely is, is quite sweet)
• Lester tricking Herman into signing away the deed to Dracula's castle, thus facilitating the family's move to Hollywood, and their purchasing of the familiar spooky house at 1313 Mockingbird Lane

All of those elements coalesce (sort of) into a dull, overlong mess that has the look and feel of a cheap '90's Nickelodeon kid's show. (It even sort of looks like it was shot on video, which was not the case.) When the film reached the point where Herman is created, I just wanted it to be over, but that was only around 25 minutes into a 110-minute feature. 

In more detail than the bulleted list, the main focus of the narrative is on the love story, while what would normally be the central conflict gets relegated to a barely-there sub-plot that the characters never really have to strive to overcome. What happens is Lily's werewolf brother, Lester — played by a black actor who portrays him as a shiftless hustler who hits up his relatives for money and gets in trouble with shady schemes, plus he's seen as a drunkard who occasionally talks in a "blaccent;" I was not amused — owes big money to a vengeful Romani elder (who was briefly married to the Count ages ago), who only agrees to let him live if he can get Count Dracula to turn over the deed to his castle to her so she can turn the place into a casino. The Count pretty much tells Lester to fuck off when he suggests selling to the crone, so instead Lester tricks Herman into signing away the property. In most other stories, the protagonists would face the eviction as an impetus for beating the old woman at her own game and getting their home back, but in the bad writing hands of Rob Zombie they put up no fight whatsoever and instead move to Hollywood, where they take up residence in the familiar spooky house at 1313 Mockingbird Lane. And when they get to California, after buying the home they are flat broke, so Herman gets his job with some undertakers (instead of his hoped for gig as a Hollywood hunk). Then, before Herman even has his first day on the job, Lester shows up after winning a fortune in Vegas, of which he gives Herman a cut for his part is granting the gypsy the castle, thereby saving Lester's life. The Munsters are now rich, and then the film very abruptly ends, like there was another reel that someone forgot to include in the finished film.

None of this is funny in the least, and what attempts are made at comedy fall flat as the bits go on for far too long. (Lily's date with NOSFERATU's Count Orlock was interminable.) Its visual palette is garish and distracting, which was apparently intentional, though takes me right out of the story. (It would have been more visually effective in black-and-white.) Until the story shifts to California during the last fifteen minutes, everything looks like a Universal horror back lot if designed as Pee-Wee's Playhouse or as faux Tim Burton aesthetics.

 The standout in the cast is Daniel Roebuck as Count Dracula, who, unlike in the original show, is never once called "Grandpa," presumably because this is an origin story and Eddie, the werewolf son of Herman and Lily, is not in the movie. (My bet is that they were saving him and cousin Marilyn for a sequel that will likely never happen.) Roebuck nails Al Lewis's take on the original Grandpa, basically Dracula as an old Jewish man, but he adds his own personal flair to give the character some extra undead life. I have enjoyed Roebuck since his memorable turn ad Biscuit in Penelope Spheeris's DUDES (1987), and I always welcome him whenever he turns up.

Jeff Daniel Phillips essays Herman, and he has the thankless task of doing so from withing the towering shadow of Fred Gwynne. Say what you want for the original series, but Gwynne's Herman is indelible and iconic, truly one of the classic characters from 1960's television, so doing an impression of that performance would have come off as merely an imitation. Instead, the 2022 Herman is given the brain and personality of a bad Transylvanian standup comedian (who was devoured by an irate heckler), hence him cracking an endless series of dad jokes. Phillips gives it his all and can at times capture the childlike charm of Herman, but overall I just feel he was miscast. Gwynne's Herman was childlike and goofy, but he was also imposing due to Gwynne's height and basso voice. Though bulked up via costuming, Phillips still somehow managed to look a tad underfed as Herman (not his fault), and his voice, though occasionally capturing some of the original Herman's tones, is too off-puttingly high-pitched to be emanating from a hulking man-made monster. Perhaps that was meant to a funny disconnect between body and voice, but it just does not work.

 

And I get that she's the director's wife and he loves her and all, but Rob seriously needs to stop placing Sherri Moon Zombie in prominent roles in his films. The bottom line is that she simply cannot act, never could, and his serial infliction of her upon the audience borders on a hate crime. Her Lily has no discernible personality, so how are we supposed to fall in love with her along with Herman?

We also get a number of minor characters played by faces familiar to horror and sci-fi fans, including Cassandra Peterson, aka Elvira, as a Californian real estate agent, 

 

  

 

Catherine Schell, fresh out of retirement and best remembered for her role in MOON ZERO TWO (1969) and as the alien shapeshifter Maya on SPACE: 1999, as the vengeful Romani elder,

 

 and Sylvester McCoy, the Seventh Doctor on DOCTOR WHO, as the Count's servant, Igor, who late in the film gets transformed into a bat (as per the old show). 

 

Plus a ton of creatures of the night in Transylvania, which is framed as more or less a nation comprised mostly of monsters. I could get with that as a comedy on its own, but, alas, budget restrictions required the monster makeups and costumes to look like they came straight from a local Spirit Halloween mall store. Worst offender: Uncle Gilbert, a holdover from the old TV show who is one of Lily's relatives and also used to star as the Creature from the Black Lagoon in those 1950's movies. 

 

 

 Lily's Uncle Gilbert.

 

His costume consists of an immobile mask and slip-on Creature hands, and I swear I have seen better replications of the Gill-Man at Halloween parades over the years. 

 

 

I assume it was supposed to be funny and campy but, speaking as a Creature fan, it just made me sad to see him reduced to looking like something out of a 1960's DOCTOR WHO serial. In fact, DOCTOR WHO's Sea Devils from 1972 outstrip Uncle Gilbert by light years, and they happened fifty years ago! 

A Sea Devil and the Third Doctor (1972). It may have been an immobile mask, but at least some effort was put into it, unlike what was done with Uncle Gilbert.

I was always an Addams Family guy when it came to the great Munsters/Addams fan divide over the TV shows, so I have no great love for THE MUNSTERS. I always felt it took an idea with great potential and did nothing with it other than "monsters live a mundane early '60's sitcom family life," so I had no emotional/nostalgic investment in this film. With that said, this movie's origin story for how Herman and Lily met and fell in love offered nothing to get me invested in the characters, despite familiarity with their 1964 templates, and it doesn't even feature all of the main characters. As previously noted, there's no Eddie or Marilyn, presumably with them being saved for a sequel that is guaranteed never to happen, though we do get Spot the dragon as a pup.

 

I have no idea if this was originally intended for a theatrical release, but if it was, it would have been a major league box office bomb, gone in a week or less, so dumping this onto Netflix for streaming was probably the wisest strategy. Who was this made for? Adults are likely to find it too childish, while kids will have no idea why the fuck their parents sat them down with it. I mean, what kid of the 2020's will get the bit during the courtship montage where Lily and Herman do a karaoke rendition of the 1965 #1 hit "I Got You Babe" while costumed as Sonny and Cher?

 

No, you have not gone mad. This actually happens.
 

Sonny and Cher were on the very last legs of their relevance as a duo act as far back as 1976, so what member of today's audience under the age of fifty will even know who the hell they are? And as for people of my age or older, I cannot speak for the rest of you, but I have had an active hatred of that song as a dreaded earworm since I was in my earliest years, so having it foisted upon me in an already miserable movie was just too much icing on a triple-layer cake of dog shit.

I have not seen all of Rob Zombie's films but of those that I have thus far endured, this ranks as the worst of what I have seen from him. Just awful. I finally finished it after watching it in short bursts that allowed me to tolerate it. It's awful, though I have obviously seen worse, and I cannot in good conscience actually recommend it. The cinema of Ed Wood my be utterly devoid of talent and coherence, but at least I find those films to be entertaining in spite of their utter incompetence, so those I would wholeheartedly recommend. That said, I do want people who are familiar with the original Munsters to see this for the sake of comparison. Just be prepared and have lots of strong libations and other-than-nicotinal smokeables close at hand.

31 DAYS OF HORROR 2022: INTRODUCTION, or DRACULA SUCKS?

 

Christopher Lee as Count Dracula: a standard of excellence trapped in a steadily deteriorating franchise.

Welcome back, dear Cine-Miscreants, for another year's 31 DAYS OF HORROR essays. If you're still with me, you know the drill, as there will be monsters, madmen, hostile aliens, you name it! But first, a statement of intent for some of this year's content.

Okay, here's where I commit horror fan heresy...

So, I finally made my way through all of the Hammer Draculas and, overall, I am not impressed. 

Now that I have seen all of them, the only things I felt they had going for them was Lee and Cushing — provided they were present — and roughly four good entries out of a total of nine films (with one bad one that's fun in spite of its considerably idiocy). If anything, the run is wildly overrated, which may be a reflection of the era in which they were released. And as they go on it's sad to witness, because Lee very obviously didn't want to be involved, but the studio more or less blackmailed him into participating by making it plain that people would lose employment if he didn't play ball. As franchises within a franchise go, the Hammer Frankenstein's are far superior.

I will expand on this in detail with this year's round of essays, so make some popcorn, enjoy your adult libation or illicit smokeable of choice, and have your crucifix, garlic, and a wooden stake close at hand!

A DAY OFF'S DREAM

"The Dream Police, they live inside of my head/the Dream Police, they come to me in my bed..."

It's a day off between dialysis treatments, so though I awoke early and had some breakfast, I bundled up again afterward managed another two hours of blissful sleep, which when added to the night's slumber, added up to nine hours of rest, recovery, and recharge. Anyway, after breakfast I went back to bed, awakened only by a redundant call to confirm tomorrow's 9am car service pickup. (It was redundant because I called them before I made breakfast, just to get it out of the way.) 

 

During my post-brekkie nap, I dreamed it was Black Friday, which I always avoid like the plague, and I was out on the street, staying away from shopping malls and such while they were thronged with crazed consumerist zombies. But when my avoidance of the crowds maddened by lust for deals was noticed, a group of enforcers on motorcycles menaced me and herded me toward a nearby mall whose crowds at the entrance looked like a reversal of the exodus scene from THE TEN COMMANDMENTS. And the riders all looked like the undead satanist biker gang from the movie PSYCHOMANIA (1973).