I Just Watched...

[Allhallowsday]

DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN (1972) I revisited this at TCM late last night. It still stinks.

[Swithin]

The Fall of the House of Usher (2023)

I had read good reports of Netflix's eight-part miniseries and looked forward to watching it. The beginning of the first episode is promising, when Roderick and Madeleine Usher are kids. There is quite a lot of innuendo about the relationship between their mother and a neighbor. The creepy meeting of grown Roderick with the U.S. Assistant D.A. is also well done. Then, it goes downhill, with the many Usher kids obsessing about who is in the will, etc., although we learn early on that all of Roderick's kids have been murdered. There are a lot of flashbacks.

As soon as a certain character appears, I suspected that she was going to be the "survivor" at the end of the series. I checked the plot synopses and found that I was right. So I stopped watching, having seen barely one episode.

There is some cleverness in the script, which updates the Usher story with obvious parallels to the Sackler family of opioid scandal renown. That's actually an interesting idea. Perhaps I should have watched the rest of the series.


The very contemporary Usher family

The Fall of the House of Usher has been adapted countless times in many art forms. My favorite is still the film that terrified me as a child, when I saw it on Shock-O-Rama: Ivan Barnett's 1950 film, which introduced me to this terrifying character who gave me nightmares:



The 1950 film has a creepy, brooding atmosphere that exceeds the campiness of the later Corman version.

[Detective Jim McLeod]

Double Confession (1950) Youtube-4/10

A man (Derek Farr) admits he killed his wife but tries to frame the wife's lover (William Hartnell).

I viewed this since it was a Peter Lorre film I never saw. The copy on Youtube is very good. However, despite the intriguing plot, it is often dull and plods along for it's short running time (81 min) making it seem longer. Lorre plays Hartnell's murderous henchman, he could have brought some menace to the part but seems so bored with it he doesn't even try. There is an OK twist ending if you can last that long. For Lorre completists only.

[Masha]

Zombies of the Stratosphere (1952)

Martians wish to explode an H-Bomb to throw Earth out of its orbit. They enlist criminals to aid them in buying uranium and smuggling in parts for the bomb.

Note: There are no zombies in this movie. The local Earth-protection authorities call the Martians that even although they are nearly human. Their main traits are arrogance, aggressiveness and wearing swamp-creature costumes sans the mask and flippers. The fact that they can stay underwater for a long time is the sole method of differentiating them from humans.

This was a: Republic serial. The budget extended to having a few halfway decent props and even some nearly-believable special effects. The cinematography is flat and uninspired except for the moonlit scene wherein the intoxicated nun and the kidnapped penguin square off with baseball bats. There are several shots repeated throughout the episodes but I believe that is standard with all serials of the era.

A matter of interest to me is that this is a very early role for: Leonard Nimoy. He has few lines but he does a fairly nice death scene.

This movie/series is fun if you sufficiently suspend your sense of disbelief, forget all the CGI which you have ever seen and want a bit of mindless drama.


5.8/11

This is available for viewing for free with commercials on: TubiTV.

[jamesjazzguitar]

Perry Mason viewing: Marie Windsor in The Case of the Daring Decoy! Also a young but already balding Jack Weston. The Case of the Screaming Woman has the unlikely trio of Josephine Hutchinson, Marian Seldes, and Ruta Lee. Marian Seldes plays a cutthroat newspaper columnist called Mary K Davis and is always referred to as "Mary K," which has a different resonance for us now.

I was watching Tales of Wells Fargo which featured Beverly Garland and Gunsmoke that featured Ruta Lee. I get these two gals confused sometimes so I google them and discovered Lee, born in 1935, was 9 years younger than Garland (born 1926), and Lee is still with us. (Garland passed in 2008).

Wow, Lee is younger than my mom (born 1933), and that surprised me (and made me feel old ha ha).

[laffite]

Irritable bowel syndrome. Oh, that’s rotten. There’s nothing worse than that except a toothache. Trapped gas is just unacceptable. Headaches aren’t no fun, especially those serious ones that cripple you, you get down on the floor and flop around. But they go away. Trapped gas will stay trapped for what seems like forever. Now, it is well known that you can only feel one pain at a time, it is a gift that God bestowed on us back in the beginning, you fall down and break your hip and your toothache and trapped gas are a thing of the past.

Thank you.

[laffite]

I just watched a couple episodes of Breaking Bad. More to come. Impressed.

Hope this is not off topic.

So, how do you like it so far?

[I Love Melvin]

We also loved the first episode of FELLOW TRAVELERS, which has a great role for Matt Bomer as an aggressive and ruthless closeted gay man, with Jonathan Bailey as the good Catholic boy who falls for him. The action takes place (so far) in 1952 (Joseph McCarthy's search for Communists) and 1986 (AIDS era). The timelines don't work out right for what we see on screen, but we'll see how it works in the context of the whole story. Speaking of what we see on screen: that includes male nudity, including brief frontal, and several scenes of simulated same-sex intercourse. My view is that if gay viewers have by now seen approximately a bazillion scenes of simulated opposite-sex intercourse on screen by now, it won't hurt straight viewers to see this much same-sex activity. Others may not share that view, hence the warning.

As a gay man I appreciate the spirit in which you're watching FELLOW TRAVELERS. They're definitely leading with the sexy so it could potentially go either way in terms of how a general viewership responds to it. It's an important story though, so I'm glad it's being seen and appreciated. I share your feeling that timelines aren't quite intersecting the way they should and there are several significant changes from the storyline in the book which could create other problems. In the book the female most significant to the narrative was his co-worker at the State Department, Mary Johnson, who knew and kept his secrets for many years, and the wife was referred to but had no particular voice of her own. I think Allison Williams is great as the wife and her character seems to be accepting of his "secret", but that's more a modern phenomenon than a mid-century one, so I hope there'll be minimal overlay of such modern attitudes because the 50's mindset is essential to the credibility of the story and to the outcomes the characters face because of it. Also, the character of the black journalist Marcus seems to be a reinvention of a white Irish-American character in the book who had access to events and political conclaves which would have been off-limits to a black man of that era. The novelist (Thomas Mallon) specializes in telling stories about real historical events and people through the eyes of fictional peripheral witnesses, which is how he's telling the story of McCarthy, Cohn and the "Lavender Scare", through the relationship between a fictional gay State Department employee and a senatorial staffer.

[Allhallowsday]

THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943)

[Detective Jim McLeod]

Curse Of The Crimson Altar (1968) TCM-3/10

An antiques dealer searches for his missing brother while in an English country mansion.

This features 3 icons of horror films- Boris Karloff, Christopher Lee and Barbara Steele, however it ranks as one of the worst in all of their careers. The trio don't share any scenes together and Karloff and Lee only have a few minutes in two scenes.
This became infamous when Karloff contracted pneumonia while making it in horrible weather, perhaps leading to his death a year later.
The film was not released in the US until 1970, after Karloff's death. It was retitled The Crimson Cult and marketed as "The Master Of Evil in his last and most shocking role!" This version had the nudity and sex cut out to get a GP rating.

[Fedya]

This version had the nudity and sex cut out to get a GP rating.

To be fair, nobody wanted to see Boris Karloff naked anyway.

[laffite]

I just watched a couple episodes of Breaking Bad. More to come. Impressed.

Hope this is not off topic.

So, how do you like it so far?

It’s quite good. I had a bit of trouble with ‘the kid’ at first but got used to him.

I agree. His story arc is not thrilling.

[Allhallowsday]

WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968 aka THE CONQUEROR WORM) AIP yes! ROGER CORMAN? No! I always ignored this film as I assumed it was like so many of those other VINCENT PRICE movies I don't particularly care for. Nope. Surprisingly violent, good production.



SUSPIRIA (1977) Overrated. Dave Karger, the film did not "change everything". It's just graphic gore... to what point? The gross out?
More violent, and lesser and better films precede it.

[Detective Jim McLeod]

This version had the nudity and sex cut out to get a GP rating.

To be fair, nobody wanted to see Boris Karloff naked anyway.