Jinnistan wrote:

There's probably some dipshit executive right now stuck in a chagrin over the neglected franchise potential of Freaks.  Out of all of the classic 1930s horror films, how come that particular film never earned any sequels or remakes?   

Rock wrote:

She Freak is sort of a Freaks remake. I liked it a lot, but you’ll need a high tolerance for the carnival footage that pads the runtime.

There's also the DTV unofficial remake Freakshow from 2007 but it's pretty universally reviled.
I figured Freaks was gathering dust because of its status as a controversial box–office disaster, PR disaster, and the only movie ever pulled from theaters by MGM, re–released with an X rating 30 years later, re–branded as a cult classic, and I would imagine, currently deemed too risky for the major–league studios to touch, since any sequel or remake would almost inevitably invite public backlash for the very same reasons the original did in 1932. Maybe some brave independent could take it on. Peter Soby, maybe? Apparently MGM would rather remake Roadhouse. 

Freaks got a Criterion release last year, but still no sign of https://birthmoviesdeath.com/2014/10/03/the-unseen-freaks">the lost 26 minutes that got cut from the original. 
And you know what, god dammit? I'm leaving that fucking internet gobbledygook just as it is because I've deleted and re–created this post twice already because of that one fucking link and it still looks fine in the composition window and then looks like that pile of shit in preview, so, fuckit. It stays. It's a link to a web archive of an article specifically about those 26 minutes of Freaks that got cut after being deemed too shocking. Spoiler: Hercules gets castrated.  
Well, at least one can still enjoy the comic adaptation from the 1990s:

It probably is, but it spends more time getting you to identify with the villain.

It’s on Tubi if you wanna give it a look.

Jinnistan wrote:

I might as well write-up some rewatches as well, especially for films that I don't believe I've spent much time writing about.




I don't know if this is the only film that features both of the frequently confused Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton or not, but it is the go-to answer to the question (a helpful hub for 7 degrees/Kevin Bacon games).  The fact of the actors' unlikely doppleganger adds some extra psychedelic whimsy to this film, which is an excellent low-budget thriller about a brain surgeon (Pullman) who may have figured out the key to unlocking the human subconscious, recruited by his corporate buddy (Paxton) to help retrive essential research information from the mind of a company scientist (Bud Cort) who has suffered a psychotic breakdown.  But soon, all hell breaks loose and Pullman begins to lose track of reality and dream, and suspects that the corporation has set him up in order to steal his surgical breakthrough.

This film has no formal relation to the Stuart Gordan's Lovecraft films, even though this film does name check the "Miskatonic Universty".  It makes a complimentary comparison, as Brain Dead sits very well alongside Gordan's similar low-budget but highly imaginative sci-fi/horror and should prove pleasing to those fans.  Pullman is goofily naive, and Paxton is unctuously ruthless.  And Bud Cort is just enjoying being a freak.  In other words, this is one of the very best cult classics of its era.

8.5/10
 

Yeah, had a good time with this one. Nice to see both Bills tearing it up together.

All things considered, since it's a foregone conclusion that it would be impossible to match the spontaneous burst of creativity of the original, it should suffice that this sequel does manage to avoid the lazy fan service callbacks of other recent resurrected sequels of late, finding ways to expand on new ideas which are not insulting to the original premise.  That sounds like a short sell, but the new additions - including lots of fun work from Willem Dafoe, Monica Bellucci, Danny DeVito and Justin Theroux - keeps it interesting, even if the newly introduced mother-daughter stress between Winona Ryder and Jenna Ortega seems forced in exactly the opposite way as Ryder and Catherine O'Hara in the first film.  As for O'Hara, the worst to be said is that it's now difficult to separate her Delia from the nearly identical character of Moira Rose from Schitt's Creek.  (Fans of that show do get a possibly unintentional reference to The Crows Have Eyes II.)  And poor Jeffery Jones is sorta there, "in spirit".

Keaton himself is older and crustier, still fun but some of his spunk has dulled.  Arguably, he's not in the film nearly enough, and arguably maybe one of the handful of subplots should have been dropped to develop the others (I understand there were several drafts of this script), but chaos suits the vibe.  It's also a slightly depressing realization that "Day-O" was less old in 1988 than the '70s soul featured here in 2024, so like Keaton we're all a little crustier these days.

7.5/10
 

I think I liked the last one a lot more than you did, but agree there isn’t much urgency to it. I just liked the vacation vibes and softcore stuff. And Barbara Magnolfi has her charms.

The others I won’t go to bat for, but I enjoyed them enough. lol at the Bogart impersonator

Jinnistan wrote:

Rock wrote:

And Barbara Magnolfi has her charms.

It's funny you picked the only actress who didn't get naked.

That’s because I’m not a superficial man. I love her for her wisdom, for knowing that names that start with the letter S… are the names of snakes!

Also her permascowl and jawline really do it for me lol

(Although I was certainly intrigued by Danila Trebbi’s proportions.)

Rosalba is good in Lady Frankenstein. Captain Terror is also a fan, he was one of two people who recommended it to me.

Yeah, Mimsy’s great, love her nervous energy. Autopsy has that hideous death museum scene, but I liked it enough. I trust you’ve seen Perfume of the Lady in Black?

Last edited by Rock (10/23/2024 6:43 pm)

Rock wrote:

That’s because I’m not a superficial man.

It's not about skin, though.  It's about soul.

Rock wrote:

Rosalba is good in Lady Frankenstein. Captain Terror is also a fan, he was one of two people who recommended it to me.

I was not the other one.  Neri is mesmerizing as always, but that cheap-ass Frankenstein make-up is the most ludicrous looking foam latex this side of Beast of the Yellow Night.  I think they might have left the little price sticker on the back of the neck.  Maybe they tried to remove it and just scratched it up.

Rock wrote:

I trust you’ve seen Perfume of the Lady in Black?

Sure.  Just recently, I included it in the 1974 thread, and earlier in this thread I mentioned that it should have been included in the AV Club Best Horror of 1974 list.  (That list was only 15 films, because they're too stupid to know how to count to 20.)

Omg, Grave of the Vampire was written by David Chase (The Sopranos).  Not just that, he adapted it from his novel!  Good fucking grief.

Rock wrote:

I guess William Smith started as a child actor? His filmography goes back to the '40s. I thought he was pretty good in Fast Company.

William Smith was a talented enough actor, he could convincingly swing from wounded hero to scary heavy.  He was like a slightly more handsome Jack Palance.  He just had either really bad luck or poor taste, and possibly bad management.  It doesn't help that he has one of the most anonymous names in Hollywood (his real rame, but still, spice it up, man).  He never got "the role", either in film or TV, which could have elevated him to success, and he seemed content to wade in similarly anonymous direct-to-video fare for the rest of his career.

Rock wrote:

I liked that Rosalba's plan was to make another Frankenstein to kill the first one.

I think there was some frankenfucking involved in the plan too.

I guess this is my last batch of this year's first-watches.  I think that In Fabric was the only major one from my list that I didn't get to, although I'll definitely watch it in the next few days.




I've gotten to two of these before, Footprints and Identikit, and I found them both to be very dreamy giallos, not especially scary enough to be real horror, but solid psychological studies with great cinematography.

So this year, I wanted to finish it up with the other two films, neither of which being Italian, rather British and Polish respectively.  Let's see what Severin's serving up.




This was something.  Pretty apt summary from avant-garde artist Penny Slinger (who appears nude on stilts), the film "isn’t a work to love, it is a work to admire, to puzzle through and to wrestle with".  And like most aggressively symbolic, earnestly abstract and stubbornly bizarre films in the underground canon, this could also be taken as a warning for anyone unwilling to submit to its pretenses.  Thankfully, I do not suffer from conventional expectations.

And these kinds of films are far more important in the execution than the concepts, so I don't mind that it's hardly the first film which takes a feminist critique of pleasure and shame, decorated by two trunks overstuffed with symbols which are labeled "religion" and "patriarchy" respectively.  For example, and for comparison, the film Successive Slidings of Pleasure is a peer which covers similar territory, even using the central setting metaphor of institutional confinement (the "church" and the "asylum"), and while that film also attempted to go self-awarely surreal, it's far less successful than what is accomplished here in Underneath.  Much of this is the sheer amateur audacity of the experimentation, which is never "weird for weird's sake", but provocative when crude and sublime when sloppy.  And, while I understand that most 'normies' like to assume that anything out of the ordinary has to be a product of high-quality psychedelics, well...I don't know what to tell you....this film just happened to have obviously been made on an enviable amount of transcendental substances.  Also, I think my enjoyment of the film (which was not due to said substances) improved somewhat when I began interpreting the setting as not being a derelict psychiatric hospital but rather a squatting commune for a deranged cult.  This interpretation is almost certainly incorrect, it just worked for me.  And it also fits in with the original name of writer/director Jane Arden's stage work "A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets and Witches".  (I think the film's stage origins are also maybe why I was getting a strong Marat/Sade vibe throughout.)

For a coup de grace, the film climaxes with what appears to be a particularly lysergic Les Blank-esque wedding reception in Wales, which as far as I can tell is almost entirely unstaged documentary footage, with a wild blend of naked children, country crooners, gypsy hippies, I'm guessing a Carny or two.  Then we get a final encore of "church/patriarchy" symbolism when the patients/cultists show up for a crucifixion and a bonfire, stilts and cymbals and what may or may not have been an exorcism.  All in all, it looked like it was a lovely night, at least for the actors who could handle their dose.

9/10




I Like Bats (which I guess is the literal translation) is a 1985 Polish film which definitely seems like it would be a horror film, and is deceptively creepy for the first few minutes.  But the film is more like a strange farce, weird in that very Polish way of straight-faced surrealism.  The film is about a young woman (an excellent and supremely sexy Katarzyna Walter), who may or may not be a vampire, who seeks to woo a handsome psychiatrist, who may or may not be gay, and who runs a psychiatric institute where she may or may not be able to find a cure to either her vampirism or her possible delusion of such.

Although the film isn't really scary, it is very sexy, and quite clever and oddball enough to be a lot of fun.

8.5/10


And one last thing I might as well throw in here...




I guess this film, Dagger Eyes in English, is sometimes listed as "horror".  It could have been a kind of Jack the Ripper-esque slasher with prostitutes thing, but the 1983 film is really more a plot about a Soviet assassin, who has to kill a bunch of prostitutes in order to find a cigarette lighter containing secret microfilm which another agent left lying around on a John call.  None of this really matters, because it's still all staged around the beats of prostitute-slashing, and the cop who's supposed to be the "hero" is just an asshole anyway.  Basically the only draw is Carole Bouquet, playing a strong, sensual and independent call girl who's caught up in all of this as well as the local dickhead pimp trying to break her balls.  Bouquet is compelling enough to keep you invested to the end, but eventually, none of this is very memorable or exciting.

6.5/10