A Monkey on Your Back

"I was in New York on business about four years ago. I was walking back to my hotel after visiting my people at New American Library when I saw a guy selling wind-up monkeys on the street. There was a platoon of them standing on a gray blanket he'd spread on the sidewalk at the corner of Fifth and Forty-fourth, all grinning and bending and clapping their cymbals. They looked really scary to me, and I spent the rest of the walk back to the hotel wondering why. I decided they reminded me of the lady with the shears . . . the one who cuts everyone's thread one day. So keeping that in mind, I wrote the story, most of it longhand, in a hotel room."
--Stephen King, "Story Note on 'The Monkey,'" Skeleton Crew, 1985

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The new film version of The Monkey (2025) is a bit of a departure for director Osgood Perkins. It has a grotesque sense of humor that I didn't know he had and an instinct for the grand guignol that is new to his films. Ordinarily, his films are mood pieces that trade on atmosphere and menace more than plot, but this one is a cartoon. It shares with the Stephen King story its central idea of a wind-up monkey that causes death when it's wound up to action. In the story, the monkey has a pair of cymbals. In the movie they've changed it to a drum for reasons of copyright (they did not want to run afoul of Disney and their army of lawyers). It's a minor change. It also takes from the story its central characters, two brothers who find the monkey in childhood and realize its power. Apart from that, this is a film that ranges far afield of King's story, which is nothing new to the author. "Based on" is too strong a credit for what this takes from King. "Suggested by" might have been more apt. That doesn't mean that it's bad. Just different.

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Stupid Cupid

Christopher Landon is having a ball these days making pop horror movie mash-ups. His new film Heart Eyes (2025), which he wrote and produced for director Josh Ruben, follows the Happy Death Day movies (mashing the slasher film with Groundhog Day) and Freaky (mashing the slasher film with Freaky Friday). Heart Eyes is a slasher film for lovers, a film that eviscerates the rom com and winds up being surprisingly romantic anyway. But emphasis on the word "eviscerate," because this is a film that uses the full scope of what a hard R-Rating allows.

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Horror 101: The Psycho Legacy and the Politics of Images

I was on Dr. AC's podcast again this week, talking about Psycho (1960) and its progeny. I had a particular ax to grind with the politics of the film's images, but the conversation ranged all over. I am particularly fond of Psycho III among the sequels, and do not hate the remake, even if it is pointless.

Enjoy.

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No Strings Attached

I've got no strings
So I have fun
I'm not tied up to anyone
They've got strings
But you can see
There are no strings on me!
--"I've Got No Strings,"
lyrics by Leigh Harline, Pinocchio (1940)

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Note: here there be spoilers. You have been warned.

One of my favorite types of movies is the sub-genre of the crime film where a bunch of characters try to pull off something shady and everything starts to unravel once some element or other goes wrong. Bonus points if the criminals involved are all dumbasses who compound every mistake with wrong decisions. These films are often hilarious. I was not expecting such a film when I sat down for Companion (2025, directed by Drew Hancock). There's a lot of noise surrounding this film about how even its poster is a spoiler, but I caught wise to the obvious spoilers early on. Any savvy viewer will recognize this film's essential nature early on. It's a variant on The Stepford Wives. What happens when a Stepford Wife wakes up to her situation? Got it. But the crime story? Oh, THAT was a surprise. And now I'm spoiling it for you. Cheers, mate.

This is also another film about the singularity along the lines of Her or Ex Machina. Like the AI protagonists in both of those movies, this film's Iris (Sophie Thatcher) has a legitimate beef with the humans who made her. If you are interested in the philosophical dimensions of AI, you are directed to those other two films, because this one is purely pulp entertainment. What philosophy there is is entirely accidental and bound up with the sub-genre rather than with any intentionality on the part of the filmmakers. Mind you, it is in the nature of genre to unconsciously marinate in what's in the culture around it and feed that culture back in the subtext, and that's what happens here. Plus, it has the vitality of pulp fiction. It's an easy watch, which is maybe the best way to smuggle ideas to an audience.

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A First-Person Haunting

Director Steven Soderbergh "retired" from movies in 2013, more than a decade ago at this point. Since then, he has continued to make movies in spite of himself. Some of these he has made for streaming (Kimi, High Flying Bird) and some for theatrical release (Logan Lucky, Unsane, Magic Mike's Last Dance). What his post-retirement films have in common is a questing curiosity about the process of filmmaking and a formal daring that wouldn't fly in his more commercial films from the turn of the century. He shot Unsane on an iPhone, for example, while Kimi is an update of sorts of Rear Window for the internet age. I am pretty sure that if Soderbergh wanted to command the kinds of budgets that have funded Martin Scorsese or Steven Spielberg in this era, he could probably do it (particularly if the word "Ocean's" is involved), but he just hasn't wanted the bother. His films have gone back to the basics, back to the kinds of films he made at the outset of his career. No big crews. He shoots and edits them himself. In his current film, Presence (2025), he goes even further than that. The camera's point of view is an actual character in the film. The conceit here is that Presence is a ghost story shot in the first person from the point of view of the ghost. If that sounds like a variant of the so-called "found footage" film, you might be justified in thinking that, but Soderbergh is smarter than that. This is more akin to the puzzle movies that M. Night Shyamalan used to make.

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The Grant Mystique: She Done Him Wrong (1933)

Mae West claimed all her life that she had discovered Cary Grant. "He had only done a few screen tests" before she plucked him from obscurity, according to her. This is untrue, of course. She Done Him Wrong (1932, directed by Lowell Sherman) was Grant's eighth feature film. Grant was second billed in She Done Him Wrong after West herself, though even that wasn't his highest billing to that date (Grant had been top billed in Hot Saturday, the film that immediately precedes She Done Him Wrong in Grant's filmography). She may not have discovered him, but West sure knew a star in the making when she saw one. A diamond in the rough, as it were, and if Mae West knew one thing, it was diamonds. She Done Him Wrong was West's own first film, but she was already notorious for her plays in New York, some of which had been shut down by the blue noses for obscenity and race mixing. She Done Him Wrong was based on West's Diamond Lil, a play so infamous that the minders of the production code insisted that the title couldn't be used or even referred to by incorporating the word "diamond." Although She Done Him Wrong is a pre-Code film, it highlights the inaccuracy of that category. There already WAS a production code, signed onto by all of the major studios, enacted in 1930, on top of a list of "dos and don'ts and be carefuls" formulated in 1927. Although the code was widely ignored by the studios from 1930 to 1934, the arbiters of the code could and did occasionally flex enough muscle to get their way. She Done Him Wrong wasn't the only film to change its title and other elements due to the strictures of the Code pre-1934. William Faulkner's novel, Sanctuary, was so notorious that film productions were barred from using that title, too, and discouraged from adapting the book at all. Hence, the 1933 film version became The Story of Temple Drake and many of the details of the story were judiciously changed as a means of filing off the serial numbers. She Done Him Wrong follows a similar strategy. "Diamond Lil" becomes "Lady Lou," but they weren't fooling anyone.

What this film meant for Grant was a high profile role in a film that would be talked about by everyone. Indeed, the film was a gigantic hit and was nominated for the "Best Production" Oscar (aka: Best Picture), which it lost to Cavalcade, a film you've probably never seen if you've heard of it at all. It was Grant's first brush with the kind of success that would become customary for productions in which he starred. Although he would labor in thankless roles for Paramount for another three years, this film undoubtedly gave him a leg up for when he decided to forge his own path to stardom. It was a hint that he might be bankable, though no one should mistake this movie as a "Cary Grant" movie. West brooked no rivals for the spotlight.

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The Tameness of a Wolf

"He's mad that trusts in the tameness of a wolf,
a horse's health, a boy's love, or a whore's oath."
--William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act III, Scene VI,

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Leigh Whannell's new re-imagining of The Wolf Man loses the definite article at the start and a lot more besides as Wolf Man (2025), a film that has good ideas that it fails to execute to the best of its ability. It's a film that looks at the elements of the werewolf myth and ditches most of the mythology. It drops the silver bullet and the moon and the invulnerability. It keeps the transformation and the contagion at its core, though, things that could be explained away as disease.  In doing so, it discovers the kernel of a body horror movie on the Cronenberg model. It bears more than a passing resemblance to The Fly, with a salting of the generational trauma of The Brood, but with neither of those films' instinct for violating taboos. The most galling thing about it is that Whannell is certainly capable of rising to the challenge. His version of The Invisible Man can stand in the company of Cronenberg's best horror movies unashamed. But this? This is the kind of film that Blumhouse releases in January (Blumhouse is this film's production company). It's not as bad as something like Night Swim, but it's nothing you'll remember once it's out of theaters.

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Said the Spider to the Fly...

The prologue of Sting (2024, directed by Kiah Roche-Turner) is a concise and entirely satisfying little short story in which a woman suffering from dementia hears alarming things from her air vents and calls an exterminator. When the exterminator arrives, he's pissed to discover another exterminator's truck parked in front of the woman's building. He reads the woman the riot act when she answers the door. Then he gets to work, only to discover that he's not at all prepared for what he finds in her vents. The end of the story has a wicked whip of the tale. It reminds me a bit of short stories by Robert Bloch or John Collier or Ray Bradbury, or of E. C. Comics (who tended to loot their stories from writers like Bloch or Collier or Bradbury). It's a poisoned bon bon, a cookie full of cyanide. A tasty warm-up act, if you will. The rest of Sting isn't up to the level of its prologue, alas, but the prologue provides enough good will to carry an audience through the film. Or, at least, it carried me through to the end.

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Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't

The Damned (2024, directed by Thordur Palsson) is a film that shows the widening influence of Robert Eggers on cinema. Elements of all of Eggers's films can be spotted in this film, including the visual design of his recent version of Nosferatu. This is a film that dwells in cold and shadow, making extensive use of its bleak Iceland-in-winter location. One could see Anya Taylor-Joy in the lead in this film rather than Odessa Young, but Young is fine in the part of a woman running a remote fishing station in the 19th century. The screenplay is less disciplined than Eggers, though, including an ending that leaves the audience with questions. The rest? Claustrophobic and chilly, a crucible where close company in isolation fails to prevent anyone from going mad. Superstition runs roughshod over otherwise rational people.

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Needles and Pins

The Girl with the Needle (2024, directed by Magnus von Horn) is a film so relentlessly grim that a home viewer might opt out of it before it is too far done. Indeed, the crux of its true crime origins doesn't even come into the picture until the film is half over. An interested audience should seek it out in theaters if it opens nearby, if only to concentrate their attention. I had no such luck. Given the state of the world at this moment in time, I considered whether or not I wanted to see things through to the bitter end. I stuck it out. The film has a point. It has several, in fact. It's a meditation on the precarious lot of women in societies past and present. True. And as such it is very much a film for this moment in time. It's also an interrogation into what true monstrosity entails. It could be mistaken for social realism in its early going before it veers into a full blown Gothic. But then an alert viewer may remember that it gives the audience a warning of its true intentions before the credits even appear, when it projects faces on top of faces in shifting distortions that make monsters of ordinary humans.

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Revisiting Horror 101: Onibaba and Kwaidan

My friend Aaron Christensen had me on his vid cast again this month to talk about two landmarks of Japanese horror cinema, Onibaba and Kwaidan. I've written about Onibaba before, as Aaron mentions on the show. It's a pretty good episode, if I do say so myself.

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The Grant Mystique: Suzy (1936)

During the years-long production of Howard Hughes's World War I epic, Hell's Angels, Hughes shot 250 feet of aviation footage for every foot of that footage used in the finished film. His aerial unit shot a LOT of aviation footage. Hughes's particular genius was finding ways to make money--a skill that eventually made him the richest man in the world. It should come as no surprise, then, that the extra footage he shot became a lucrative side-hustle. The World War I dogfights filmed for Hell's Angels show up in dozens of films throughout the 1930s without ever duplicating the footage Hughes actually used. Suzy (1936, directed by George Fitzmaurice), a spy drama set in the early part of the war, is one of the films that makes use of this largess. It also makes use of one of Hell's Angels's major stars in leading lady Jean Harlow, whose time on the stage would run out of road only a short time afterward. If given the choice between Harlow in this film and Harlow in Hell's Angels, an interested viewer should definitely choose the latter. That's none of my concern here, though. She's fine in Suzy, a film built specifically for her, but it's not a film with the same ambition. Her performance was influenced by her declining health--partially the result of multiple studio-enforced abortions--that limited her endurance on set and resulted in a longer than usual production schedule.

This was a consequential film for co-star Cary Grant, who was loaned to MGM for this film against his will to replace Clark Gable. This is absolutely a Gable part, but not a Cary Grant part. Grant came away from the experience hating his part even after it had been extensively rewritten for him at his own request and with his own participation. He hated the lack of control he had over his own career, a lack that had landed him in this particular film in the first place. He hated the finished product. He hated that he was still third-billed after making twenty-five previous films and climbing the cast list to the brink of superstardom. His contract with Paramount, who had loaned him out as a punishment, would run out at the end of 1936. Paramount would loan him out again for his next film after Suzy and then he made one further film for Paramount after that. Then Grant vowed never to sign another exclusive contract again. He would choose his own roles. He would choose his own collaborators. He would have the power to say "no" to projects he didn't like. He also resolved to develop his own brand as a movie star, partly as a defense against more roles like the one he plays in Suzy. He would develop a "persona," if you will, and with that persona, he became the very model of a Hollywood movie star. This is one of the last films in the actor's portfolio in which the persona of "Cary Grant" is mostly still in its infancy. Grant's role here is the most unlikable character he ever played and Grant was absolutely correct when he complained that he had been miscast. But then, he's not the lead, which is a gross waste of available resources. I wonder how this film would have played if Grant and Franchot Tone--who was billed over Grant as the romantic lead--had switched roles. A big "if."

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Whose Woods These Are I Think I Know

One of the least heralded tropes in the horror toolbox is the idea of wrong geometry, the idea that the shape of the world is just a little off. It's a trope that finds expression in that meme that presents people with obsessive compulsive disorder with an 89 degree angle. The idea of wrong geometry gets a work out in stories like The Haunting of Hill House, where walls are upright and doors are sensibly shut, or At the Mountains of Madness, where the city of the Great Race of Yith defies Euclidean notions of dimension and sanity. It's an effective trope because when it's done well, it's profoundly disorienting. Wrong geometry--specifically wrong geography--is at the heart of Lovely, Dark, and Deep (2023, directed by Teresa Sutherland), in which being lost in the woods is a gateway to more cosmic horrors.

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Slouching Toward Bethlehem

I don't think more than five minutes had elapsed at the start of Immaculate (2024, directed by Michael Mohan) before I started thinking about the Magdalene laundries and residential schools. What goes on in the convent depicted in this film is not so far outside the actions of the actual Roman Catholic Church that the film can be dismissed as mere exploitation. Don't get me wrong, it IS exploitation, but that's beside the point. It has such theological and ideological axes to grind that it was bound to find Evangelical Christians and devout Catholics and right wing trolls of all sorts squawking when the film reached its end. This film hasn't got time for their bullshit. It has a particular shape of reality it wants to express and it uses bludgeons to present it. It's crude, but it's brutally effective.

Note: there are spoilers here.

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Once Upon a Time

I did a podcast a while back discussing Kier-la Janisse's massive folk horror documentary, Woodland's Dark and Days Bewitched, in which one of the panelists (not me) suggested that the parameters of what constitutes "folk horror" might be too broad to be useful. His suggestion was that all horror is folk horror or none of it is. I've been thinking about this idea lately because there's another big folk horror box set on the horizon and because I remembered something after the podcast that's been preying on my mind. There's a section in Stephen King's Danse Macabre in which the author plays a game with the reader. He asserts that all good horror movies are folk tales of a sort or another and suggests describing the plots of well-known horror movies beginning with the classic opener: "Once upon a time." He offers twenty examples. Here's one: "Once upon a time, three babysitters went out on Halloween night. Only one of them was alive come All Saint's day." And another: "Once upon a time there were two children, very much like Hansel and Gretel, in fact, and when their father died, their mommy married a wicked man who pretended to be good. This wicked man had LOVE tattooed on the fingers of one hand and HATE tattooed on the fingers of the other." One more: "Once upon a time, there was a sad girl who picked up men in bars, because when they came home with her she didn't feel so sad. Except one night, she picked up a man wearing a mask. Underneath the mask he was the boogeyman." You get the picture. Thinking about these kinds of framings, I'm inclined to think that all horror is folk horror. It's all folklore and fairy tales. Some movies lean into that idea harder than others. Hard enough that "folk horror" seems like a subgenre when maybe it's not. But then, maybe it is.*

In any event, that big folk horror box looming on the horizon includes two films by Juraj Herz, a director probably best known for The Cremator. The one that caught my eye was the 1978 version of Beauty and the Beast (Panna a netvor, or "The Monster and the Virgin," as the copy I have translates it). This is a film I've had for a long, long time on a gray market VHS sent to me by a pen pal. It's been sitting unwatched in a drawer for decades. Its appearance on the list of films on the next edition of All the Haunts Be Ours prompted me to see if I still had it and if it was still playable. I did and it was. I was a fool to wait so long. It's good. It's very good.

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Veterans of the Psychic Wars

Although The Fury (1978, directed by Brian De Palma) is the director's dumbest film--which is saying something--it has its compensations. Prime among them is the director's film sense, which is entirely separate from the story on screen. De Palma knows where to put the camera and when to move it. He uses slow motion and sound (or the lack thereof) to impart a sleek maximalist commercial veneer to the film. He also knows how to be cruel to the audience, like he's in some parasocial BDSM relationship with them. The Fury is also a mini-summary of his career at that moment. It's a psychic thriller a la Carrie, a paranoia thriller like Sisters (complete with sinister experiments at shadowy institutes), and it's a conspiracy film that anticipates Blow Out. It even has that wonky sense of absurdist anti-establishment humor from his earliest films. Then it blows it all up in one of the biggest what the fuck climaxes in film.

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Just After Sunset

It never occurred to me that Jerusalem's Lot was a sundown town until two of the central characters in the story were racebent. If you don't know what a sundown town is, it's a town where it was illegal to be out on the streets after sundown if one belonged to a despised minority. This was traditionally directed at African Americans, but other not-white peoples have fallen prey to this as well. It is perhaps too much to ask that the new version of Salem's Lot (2024, directed by Gary Dauberman) actually do something with this idea. They almost get it. So close. But, alas, no. The way race is completely ignored in a film set in Maine in 1975 is conspicuous. There aren't a lot of black people in Maine. But this is off in the woods. 'Salem's Lot is a different kind of sundown town, a fact elided by Gordon Lightfoot's "Sundown" on the soundtrack. A little on the nose maybe, but not wrong.

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The Krell Laboratories Podcast: The Substance (2024)

I'm kicking off this year's October Horror Movie Challenge with a conversation with my friend, Donna K, about The Substance (2024, directed by Coralie Fargeat).

30 films (or more) to go.

My total progress:
New to me films: 1
Total films: 1

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Netflix Roulette: The Conference (2023)

It's been a while since I spun the Netflix Roulette wheel. Back in the day, it was a good way to generate ideas for blogging. The downside is the amount of sheer crap Netflix has traditionally packed onto its platform. My will to write anything has been at a low ebb this summer, so I gave it a spin this week. Imagine my surprise when it landed on The Conference (2023, directed by Patrik Eklund), a film I watched last year and which greatly exceeded my admittedly low expectations for it. I neglected to write about it last year. It's a mistake I'll rectify right here.

The Conference is one of those films that makes me question whether it's the slasher film that I dislike or if it's the incompetence of most slasher films I dislike. The Conference is a wickedly smart, mercilessly creative bloodbath that weaves a few wrinkles into the fabric of the slasher formula that result in something that's more than just a bunch of elaborate gore scenes. Fans of elaborate gore scenes should not despair, however. It has those, too. It has those in great abundance. The Conference is not blazingly original. The idea of a slasher rampaging through a group of co-workers on a team-building retreat is at least as old as Severance (2006) and probably much older. This story construction removes the slasher movie from its usual moral universe where punishment is dispensed for the moral transgressions disapproved of by puritans and other assorted blue-noses. It places it instead in an even more political/economic context at the other end of the spectrum. This is the kind of wish fantasy in which the entitled rich assholes get the most gruesome death scenes rather than the sluttiest teenagers because predatory capitalism and its attendant corruption must be punished. In a film at least. I'm not so naive as to believe something like this would happen in our own world. In our own world, the bad sleep well. In any event, The Conference adds some flavor of its own to this kind of fantasy, but it is still very much a film in which feckless characters are picked off one by one by a lunatic with a flair for elaborate murders. What matters here, if you'll pardon the pun, is the execution...

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No Evil Angel

"Love is familiar. Love is a devil. There is no evil angel but Love."--William Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost, Act I, Scene II

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Oz Perkins's new film, Longlegs (2024) is on brand for the director. It's a film that's chock full of enigmatic and alarming images and an airless and oppressive mood. It finds the director moving away from the kinds of aimless but atmospheric films of his early career and toward more conventional idioms. Part of this is the structure of the serial killer procedural, which imposes on Perkins an actual plot whether he likes it or not (I rather think he does not). Part of it might be maturity. In any event, it's the first of the director's movies that invites comparisons to other films. You may hear it compared to The Silence of the Lambs or Seven, but Perkins has too singular a vision to allow any such comparisons to gain any traction. Whatever his influences may be, he has completely subsumed them into his own cinematic anima.

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One Damned Thing After Another

You don't have to squint very hard to see the provenance of Cold Blows the Wind (2023, directed by Eric Williford). It's part Shock Suspense Stories from the old E. C. Comics, part Pet Sematary, part H. P. Lovecraft, and part Creepshow II (thanks for the ride, lady!). Mix well. Pour. I don't mean any of this as criticism. Genres tend to remix a common pool of elements and horror movies are particularly prone to this. That's how genres form in the first place. Some filmmakers do it better. Some do it worse. Sometimes, the swipes show. Sometimes they don't. In the case of Cold Blows the Wind, whenever this film borrows something, the filmmakers leave the knife.

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Wait Until Your Father Gets Home

An audience's response to The Vourdalak (2023, directed by Adrien Beau) will hinge entirely on how it reacts to the title character, presented in the film as an elaborate puppet. Perhaps it's better to call it a puppeted practical effect? I don't know. Its closest cinematic relatives are The Crypt Keeper from the old Tales from the Crypt series, and Death in Jim Henson's The Storyteller, the episode that combines the soldier and the devils story with "Godfather Death" from Grimm's Fairy Tales. This effect isn't necessarily a deal breaker. It's a good puppet, and creepy as hell, but it might break the movie's spell if an audience doesn't believe it. Other films have overcome similar effects, even some well-known ones. Otherwise, this is an art house horror movie that's more related to Eastern European horror movies like Viy or Valerie and Her Week of Wonders than it is to a western special effects-driven horror movie. It has a touch of Jean Rollin's Gothic sensibility, too. It is a far cry from this century's extreme horror movies from France, though it's not shy about the cruelty and blood in its source text.

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The Grant Mystique: In Name Only (1939)

If Cary Grant was the king of the screwball comedy, then the queen was Carole Lombard. Grant and Lombard appeared in the same film three times before Lombard's untimely death in 1942, but none of those films was a comedy. In Sinners in the Sun, Grant had no more than five or six minutes of screen time in total opposite Lombard. In The Eagle and the Hawk, they never shared the screen at all. The only true co-starring vehicle they made together was In Name Only (1939, directed by John Cromwell), a romantic drama. It is ironic that Grant's most famous comedy co-stars--Irene Dunne and Katherine Hepburn--were primarily known as dramatic actresses, while the greatest female comedienne of the age made only dramas with him. This teaming of Lombard and Grant might not have happened at all if Katherine Hepburn hadn't been tagged as "box office poison" in the press after the failures of Bringing Up Baby and Holiday (among other films). Hepburn had subsequently been released from her contract with RKO. It is conceivable that his trio of early films with Hepburn delayed or inhibited Grant's ascent to superstardom. None of them was a financial success in spite of the classic status accorded them years after the fact. In any event, Hepburn was out and Lombard was in. Lombard herself was taking a break from comedies. Her other film from 1939 was Made for Each Other opposite James Stewart, another weepie directed by John Cromwell. It had been a financial disaster. Lombard's life at the time paralleled the plot of In Name Only. She was biding her time until Clark Gable could divorce his wife and she could marry him. Gable, for his part, was off making Gone With the Wind. Her career at the time was also eerily similar to Grant's. Like Grant, she had been contracted to Paramount during her early career, a contract that she finished in 1938. Like Grant, she had chosen to become a free agent when that contract expired. Like Grant, she wasn't starring in comedies in 1939 (Grant's other two films that year, Only Angels Have Wings and Gunga Din, were nominally adventure stories). For both actors, In Name Only was something of a crossroads. Grant had already had a couple of big hits after he left Paramount, though he had had some disappointments, too. He hadn't had a major hit in a serious drama, though. Lombard hadn't yet had her own hit after leaving Paramount and it remained to be seen if she could carry a serious drama. In Name Only turned out to be a film both of them needed. It was moderately successful.

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Revisiting Horror 101 with Dr. AC: The Brood

My friend, Aaron Christensen, invited me back on his video podcast to talk about one the horror movies that made the biggest impact on the young version of me: David Cronenberg's 1979 film, The Brood.

Enjoy.

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A Retro Prometheus

Lisa Frankenstein (2024, directed by Zelda Williams). I'm sure the name came first. Surely screenwriter Diablo Cody thought of the play on "Lisa Frank" and tailored a Lisa Frank-inflected Gothic to suit the name? I can't imagine it started with the story. The title is too big a cultural allusion. There are plenty of films where this was the order of operations in their creation, including at least one great one. Cody denies that this is the case. She says that this is just a coincidence, that the genesis of the film is as a distaff reworking of Weird Science. Maybe that's true. I have a suspicious nature. Cody is certainly capable of writing stories of great sophistication. Juno and Young Adult are both layered, complex character studies underneath the hipster dialogue that made their screenwriter famous. That's not this film, alas. This is a ramble-y nostalgia piece. It's so savvy about its time and influences that one can't help but be suspicious about its provenance. It has its pleasures, sure. It's just...if you're not a specific kind of viewer, one raised at the right time and in the right place, one steeped in a specific kind of culture from the late 1980s, then this film is kind of a mess.

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Favorite Stars in B-Movies Blogathon 2024: Graylisted

It is easy in film critic land to ascribe the shape and form of most films to an overriding artistic impulse on the part of the filmmakers, but this is only true in a small number of films. Most films are at the mercy of social and commercial forces that are well outside the control of directors, producers, and even studios. Back in the day, B-films were particularly susceptible to these forces. The function of these movies was to make money, after all, not plumb the depths of the human condition. If they sometimes managed to exist as actual art, it was often entirely accidental. Whatever their artistic aspirations may be, most of the people who do the nuts and bolts work of making a film are there because it's a job. This includes actors, who may appear in films for entirely mercenary reasons. There are plenty of B-movies starring A-list actors or directed by A-list directors who for one reason or another needed a paycheck at the time. It's a cruel twist of fate that Michael Caine couldn't accept his first Oscar in person because he was busy making Jaws 4: The Revenge. Caine got a lovely house out of the deal, or so he says. The commercial and social pressures on the art of movies were especially strong in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when making a living in movies often depended on one's politics.

For example:

In the 1930s and early 1940s, Edward G. Robinson was one of the cinema's biggest stars. He was principally known for playing gangsters, co-equal with James Cagney as an attraction in such roles. He was also able to expand into more varied roles where he played against the tough guy image. There is a wide gulf of difference between Caesar Rico Bandello in Little Caesar and the morally righteous insurance investigator, Keyes, in Double Indemnity or the henpecked and pussy-whipped artist, Chris Cross, in Scarlet Street. He had a broad range, which was often ignored by the studios who cast him. His range was certainly ignored by Warner Brothers where he made his breakthrough films. They cast him in a long succession of gangsters and tough guy parts. When Robinson was entertaining the troops on a USO tour during World War II, he found he got no response from the GIs unless he started his bits with an in-character speech by Rico, Little Caesar himself, before speaking as himself as a strident anti-fascist. The real Robinson was an intellectual, a famed art collector, a lion of the Hollywood Left, and an immigrant Jew. He put his money where his convictions were, too, donating to over 800 left wing and anti-Nazi and anti-fascist organizations in the 1930s. He was among the first big stars to make openly anti-Nazi films, starring in Confessions of a Nazi Spy well before the United States entered the war. After the war, he agitated for racial equality in the workplace and campaigned for civil rights. But no good deed goes unpunished.

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A Tangled Web

It takes real effort to make a movie as breathtakingly awful as Madame Web (2024, directed by S. J. Clarkson), a film that can stand with the likes of Catwoman, Batman and Robin, and Superman IV: The Quest for Peace as the nadir of superhero cinema. Given the disjointed nature of its plot, I'm going to assume that what ended up on screen is the product of studio notes rather than any incompetence on the part of its main contributors. Certainly, the actors here are left hanging in the wind, actors being at the mercy of other departments. A bad performance isn't always the fault of the actor. Performances are created and sometimes undermined in the editing room. There's a failure to trust the audience in this film that is striking and conspicuous. You can't miss it. So probably the studio. I'm trying to be generous, here.

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The Grant Mystique: Thirty-Day Princess (1934)

Thirty-Day Princess (1934, directed by Marion Gering) finds Cary Grant fading into the scenery a bit. This isn't the only case of this in his early films, but it's one of the most conspicuous. Grant was wholly unsatisfied with his part in this film and complained about it, prompting Paramount to loan him out to United Artists as punishment. Grant never forgot this. When his contract with Paramount was finished in 1937, he went freelance rather than re-up or sign with another studio. He wouldn't make another film for Paramount for a couple of decades. He held a grudge. Grant wasn't the only contributor unsatisfied with his work, either. This film credits Preston Sturges as one of its writers and, like Grant, he was unhappy with how little of his work ended up on screen. This is the only film on which Sturges and Grant both worked, so it's a missed opportunity.

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Godzilla Is Inside All of Us

It seems absurd at this late date to be rediscovering the depth of metaphor in Ishiro Honda's Godzilla. Godzilla has been an icon of world cinema for seventy years, an embassador for international moviemaking in spite of the derision his films have sometimes received. After years of interpretations have pulled Godzilla out of the realm of metaphor and into the world of monster versus monster wrestling fights, that original nightmare born of the hydrogen bomb has faded into memory, but it hasn't vanished completely. Godzilla's home studio, Toho Pictures, has been leasing Godzilla to American studios for years at this point, and Americans don't have that memory of atomic destruction. They see in Godzilla a franchise to exploit, like good little imperial capitalists. Art isn't even in the equation. When it happens at all, it's purely by accident. Every so often, Toho makes a film of their own to keep their hand in and remind the world who owns Godzilla. On the occasion of Godzilla's seventieth year, they've taken Godzilla back to his roots. The result, Godzilla Minus One (2023, directed by Takashi Yamazaki), is an astonishment, a film that can stand not only with the original film from 1954, but as one of the best fantasy films ever made, full stop. It's certainly one of the best films of 2023. It's the real thing. It's a film with something meaningful to say about history and nation and the human heart in conflict with itself. It's a film that the makers of the American "Monsterverse" films should look at with dismay and shame and envy.

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The Grant Mystique: Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

Arsenic and Old Lace (1944, directed by Frank Capra) is probably the most divisive film in Cary Grant's filmography. It is perennially popular among fans of old movies, among fans of Cary Grant, and among fans of what I can only describe as "cozy horror." Many other viewers, including the actor himself, don't much like it. Grant thought his performance was among his worst. Some viewers don't care for Frank Capra's brand of corny, though I would argue that this is a different kind of corn than the director usually served up. There is a category of viewer who dislikes the film not for what it contains, but for what it left out. Let me explain: Arsenic and Old Lace was a huge success on Broadway. Most of the Broadway cast reprised their roles in the movie version, with the conspicuous exception of Boris Karloff. Karloff played the criminal, Jonathan Brewster, the film's villain. The script mentions Karloff by name in describing Jonathan Brewster. That the role was played by Karloff himself is one of the play's best jokes. Karloff had a financial stake in the play, so rather than abandon the production for a piecework paycheck in the film version, he remained in New York for a more lucrative and extended paycheck. His part in the film was filled with Raymond Massey, but the Boris Karloff joke remains, with Karloff's blessing. The film was shot in 1941 with the stipulation that it couldn't be released until the play closed. The play ran for three years, much to the consternation of Warner Brothers. Karloff backed the right horse.*

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