I Just Watched...

[Masha]

Vampire Hookers (1978)


Two sailors on shore leave for the first time in a new port discover ladyboys and a cemetery crypt with unexpected features.

I believe that the only thing holding this movie back from being a campy comedy classic is the unfunny script, horrible direction and total lack of acting talent.

Watching this movie taught me that I have a foible which I had not previously expected: I am unable to suspend disbelief when vampires have tan lines. ?????

4.8/17

This movie is available for watching for free with commercials on: TubiTV but I would not recommend it.

[txfilmfan]

Vampire Hookers (1978)


Two sailors on shore leave for the first time in a new port discover ladyboys and a cemetery crypt with unexpected features.

I believe that the only thing holding this movie back from being a campy comedy classic is the unfunny script, horrible direction and total lack of acting talent.

Watching this movie taught me that I have a foible which I had not previously expected: I am unable to suspend disbelief when vampires have tan lines. ?????

4.8/17

This movie is available for watching for free with commercials on: TubiTV but I would not recommend it.

Which makes one wonder how this perpetually tanned actor made a believable vampire, supposedly one that eschews daylight.

[Masha]

Which makes one wonder how this perpetually tanned actor made a believable vampire, supposedly one that eschews daylight.

Love at First Bite (1979) is one of my favorite movies! I am sure that he had a uniform shade all over his luscious body.

Vampires possess supernatural attractiveness. That is part of their predatory features as it allows them to mingle with attractive people. This harkens back to the ancient knowledge that healthy people are typically more attractive than unhealthy people. Healthy people have a greater amount of high-quality blood than their sickly kin have.

It is therefore somewhat believable that a vampire may have a deeply tanned body.

Possessing maggot-white breasts, mons pubis and fundament is not attractive in the general sense and so would not be part of vampire's natural shading.

The only explanations for variance in melanin concentration are exceedingly rare conditions/diseases and sunlight/UV exposure. It is beyond reason to assume that a rare metabolic imbalance would affect exactly the same areas on multiple people and only those areas on any of them.

[HoldenIsHere]

So, I noticed that GOSFORD PARK (2002) was playing on that certain cable network.

[things get a little spoilerishy)

I saw this when it came out and LOVED IT, not one to rewatch films, I think this is the first I've seen it in 21 years, but Lord Knows I have been wrong before, I had forgotten quite a lot about it...


even some of the performances and roles that seem weak or superflous at first start to make sense as the film moves on.

This is one of the best films of the 21st century- really, left quite a mark in that it elevated MAGGIE SMITH and most especially HELEN MIRREN to next level status- the latter is one of the BEST EXAMPLES what makes a GREAT SUPPORTING PERFORMANCE- (see also: VIOLA DAVIS in DOUBT) where a performer sits much of the movie out, and then they get THEIR SCENE and DAMN, the CHEW THAT BONE TO THE MARROW and it is AMAZING. She is SO MOVING in this film, with the help of the actress who plays THE COOK whose name I am too lazy to imdb right now and I am sorry.

You've made the followig comment on the TCM message boards before, LHF. I'm not sure why it always surprises me, but it does:
not one to rewatch films

As for GOSFORD PARK, it is a favorite of mine. It is one of my top three Robert Altman movies and is my favorite Altman movie without Shelley Duvall.

Helen Mirren's performance is indeed brilliant, as is Robert Altman's direction of her.

The sweetie and I have been watching the PRIME SUSPECT series (we just finished Series 1) featuring Helen Mirren in her iconic role as Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison, which is probably the role that made her a recognizable name to the mainstream American audience because PRIME SUSPECT was shown on PBS in the US.
This the first time viewing for the sweetie (who is a big fan of the POIROT series).

Jane Tennison practically chain smokes in every series. I was surprised to find out that Helen Mirren is not a smoker in real life.

Jane Tennison: "I want everyone on that route questioned, and that means everyone, I mean, including the neighbor's cat."

[Lorna]

** you know, now that I think about it – I rewatch movies much more than I give myself credit for- although I will admit, I naturally gravitate towards new things are things I haven’t seen, or being kind of a “completist” about things – but yeah, many films deserve a rewatch.

[Andree]

That Paula Zahn, she ain't moving on. Commercials are killers. Most ad breaks seem to run for 4 or 5 minutes
at a time. Yikes. ID is a mixed bag. Some good shows and some shows that are worthless. I watch the former
and skip the latter. Seems to work.

I hadn't seen Gosford Park in at least five years. A cheat sheet would have really come in handy to
keep all the characters, upstairs and down, straight. Is that Lord Horseface's daughter, step-daughter, or niece?
It's especially hard to keep with the secondary characters who have the least screen time. But overall it's
an entertaining flick. Maybe they should have brought Alfred Hitchcock in as a guest, since Ivor Novello
starred in The Lodger. Being a personal servant must have been one of the most humiliating jobs of
the time. Being ordered about by some aristo jackass. One hates to say that someone deserved killing,
but Sir Bill comes pretty close with his factory girls. Very disgusting piece of work.

[txfilmfan]

Watched Tea and Sympathy for the first time in decades. Brave in its day and dated, I suppose, but the bullying aspect still stands up and is still all too relevant these days. At any rate, as I was scanning the credits, I noticed Norma Crane's name listed. For whatever reason, I had never made the connection that the actress portraying this woman in Tea and Sympathy...



...is the same actress who portrayed Golde in Fiddler on the Roof..



I did not recognize her while watching Tea and Sympathy.

[Swithin]

Watched Tea and Sympathy for the first time in decades. Brave in its day and dated, I suppose, but the bullying aspect still stands up and is still all too relevant these days. At any rate, as I was scanning the credits, I noticed Norma Crane's name listed. For whatever reason, I had never made the connection that the actress portraying this woman in Tea and Sympathy...

...is the same actress who portrayed Golde in Fiddler on the Roof..

I did not recognize her while watching Tea and Sympathy.

Interesting! As you may know, txfilmfan, the actress who played Golda on Broadway also played this memorable character in Gypsy on Broadway:


Maria Karnilova (center) as Tessie Tura


Maria Karnilova as Golde

[Lorna]

Yes Mother, WORK that BABUSHKA!!!!!

[Lorna]

Just thinking out loud, but if PAULINE KAEL had lived to see GOSFORD PARK, it would have killed her, but in a good way.

Just a massive joygasm stroke during the end credits.

[CinemaInternational]

Sorry that I've been offline again for a few days. For now, it is going to be a little hard to get out and about to come online to speak to you all, but hopefully the home internet will end up happening.

Anyway, I was positively baffled by The Triplets of Belleville (2003) this afternoon. I definitely recall the title, because at a tender age, I paid a lot of attention to the Animated Feature nominees, and I wondered at the time what this PG-13 rated foreign film was. Well, now I know. It is a deliberately grotesque concoction, applying equal parts Jacques Tati, dark comedy, and noir, with very little dialogue. I can't say I really liked it, although the later sequences have some panache to them. Most of the time, its just dry and staggeringly weird, with ugly animation. I don't recall being this baffled by a film since seeing an ambulance flying in the sky and Faye Dunaway and Johnny Depp making love in bizarre expandable underwear for two in Arizona Dream (1993). I guess this animated film will have an audience (2003 movie critics flipped for iy), but I'm not really sure what most will make of it.

I have also been spending time watching Season 6 of Falcon Crest. Pity they couldn't have gotten Kim Novak's guest arc to last the whole season (Full admission: I'm a huge fan of Kim Novak period. I feel that she never gave a performance that wasn't fascinating, even if some of her films left something to be desired). As it stands, Novak was in 16 of the 28 episodes of the season, in a plot clearly inspired by Vertigo. (Strange how given that the Hitchcock film wasn't a hit in 1958, that twice afterwards she plays material with hints of it: this and Lylah Clare). Novak plays a woman who witnessed a gangland execution, flees to an ill-fated female friend, and then, in a panic, assumes the woman's identity and looks after her friend is killed in a car explosion meant for her, and ends up getting emotionally entangled in the California wine valley Novak was 53 when she took the part; she looks great and she adds such a gripping mystique to her episodes (not to mention having a bittersweet romantic chemistry with John Saxon ) that the whole season sags after her plotline is over. I did gasp when I saw that one scene showed her standing near San Francisco Bay, right in the exact same location under the bridge that she stood in the 1950s.

[CinemaInternational]

Some notes in relation to Hibi's comment to my post last week, as well as some others made then....

Thanks for the compliment. It comes from years and years of study of movies and television, from a very early age, from early elementary school days onward (maybe before...I was eagerly watching Oscar ceremonies by the age of 4). I wouldn't say it is complete knowledge since I've basically walled myself off from current pop culture, but I love to read about happenings in the business from the 20s through the 90s.

As for my father, it is simply tragic because it all happened so quickly. At this point last year, he was pretty close to normal aside from some bizarre tall tales and an obsession with shopping for furniture, but by this point, he can't keep his head up due to severe arthritis, he is seemingly in a fog, and he's having great difficulty walking. It's scary, and very depressing. I'm an only child, so it's only my mother and I attending to him. Since my mother still works to help pay for the medical bills, I'm with him for most of the day since he came home from a temporary stay at a nursing home. However, I was separated from him yesterday, today, and tomorrow, because he had to go for a two-day appointment to the Cleveland Clinic clear across the state, and I had to stay home and watch the house and take care of the dog, since there was nobody else who could do it. I hope his trip up there was productive and that they will find some way to help him, because he needs it desperately.

Yes, Kate Mulgrew's story is shocking to hear, and I was taken aback at the details when she finally opened up to People magazine about it several years ago (it was during the time she was on the Netflix series Orange is the New Black). No woman should be forced to give up a child and go through what she had to face back in the 1970s with Ryan's Hope. (There was also another story like this around the same time involving a very talented black TV actress named Lynne Moody [who was brilliant in her short run as an ill-fated character on Knots Landing], although in her case, her unwanted decision to put her baby up for adoption in the mid 1960s was due to extreme poverty, not because of ruthless executives. For Moody, it took her nearly 50 years to find her daughter. Ironically, the daughter loved a short-lived sitcom in the 70s called That's My Mama...in which her real mother actually co-starred in)

I'm also glad to see that you aren't a fan of Friends either. The enduring embrace that show has had from the public is baffling, because it is far from special . The two creators of that show seemingly borrowed heavily from a black sitcom called Living Single, but in the process missed that show's snap and sassy attitude. Maybe they should have taken notes on how to write a sitcom from Norman Lear who they briefly worked with in 1992. Lear had hired them as chief writers on a sitcom about a seriously dysfunctional political family called The Powers That Be which premiered in March of that year. The show had a great cast: John Forsythe, Holland Taylor, David Hyde Pierce, Valerie Mulhaffey, Robin Bartlett, Peter MacNicol, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, but NBC axed it just before Bill Clinton's inauguration in January 1993. Perhaps it was just as well; it made Pierce available to do his wonderful turn on Frasier.

And thank you, Lorna for the clip. I'm going to watch it the first chance I get (when I have a strong internet connection), because I definitely need a laugh about now. I'm looking forward to it.

As for true crime shows, I've glanced at a few; some are better than others. I prefer the ones that don't dwell so much on the killers. As for Paula Zahn, I really don't know her, but I do recall that she's not well-liked here. The only thing I can say one way or the other about her is that I was horrified when I found out last year that back in 2010, (the episode is still on demand) she covered a murder case from the early Eighties that happened in this neck of the woods, only about 14 miles from where I am in a town with a population of less than 200. This is a very rural area (the whole county has only about 30,000 people), so it was beyond shocking to see the area's dirty laundry splashed across cable.

Susan Hayward always was a bit tough, moreso than most leading ladies , but I liked her. She's obviously though one of those stars who isn't quite as familiar to many these days because most of her films were done at 20th Century Fox, and they don't often appear on TCM. Still, she had plenty of career highlights: I Want to Live, I'd Climb the Highest Mountain, I'll Cry Tomorrow, The President's Lady, Ava, and the irresistible purplish melodrama Where Love has Gone, to say nothing of her hilarious part in Valley of the Dolls. I should probably see My Foolish Heart again....

And now some concerning more recent posts....

Yes, its hard to believe that Norma Crane is the same one in both Tea and Sympathy (and the later Penelope, where she is made up to look glamorous) and Fiddler on the Roof, but it should also be noted she was ill when she made Fiddler and passed two years later from cancer. In real life, she was a very good friend to Natalie Wood.

Tea and Sympathy is a very moving film, personally one of my favorite Vincente Minnelli films. Debrorah Kerr especially shines.

I saw Gosford Park illegally. *laughs* It's rated R and I snuck around and watched it alone at 16 without "the parent or adult guardian" . I recall being very impressed by it, especially by Maggie Smith (as usual), but Emily Watson and Kelly MacDonald also made big impressions. Helen Mirren is good in her big scene. The script was wonderful, and Fellowes would end up mining similar territory to fine effect in the series Downton Abbey and The Gilded Age (don't know if you saw this one, Lorna, since its on HBO, but I'm willing to give you a hookup to my Max account so you can watch it if you PM me. It's set in New York society in the 1880s, the sets and costumes are extraordinary, and Christine Baranski gets some really great lines, but the whole cast does well). It remains one of my favorite Altman films.

You mentioned Viola Davis' scene in Doubt. It was indeed electrifying, so much so that Meryl Streep seemed like a KO victim in the scene. No wonder it started her career in earnest. She's a very good actress, perhaps one of only five to seven who have come up in the last 15 years that is always worth watching.

Yes, I noticed that Amazon Prime added commercials, unless you are willing to fork over an additional $4 a month, thus doing the same thing Netflix and Hulu do. It stinks.

Commercials on a whole are irritating because not only do they interrupt a program, but they repeat so much. With many channels, I'm used to them though, so I normally don't quibble..... But there was a channel the other night that nearly drove me crazy with their commercials and one other thing too. It was a channel mostly meant for rock music called AxsTV, and on Saturday night, they aired Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), which is a beautiful, tender, sensitive, and poignant film. But every time they went to a commercial break, they started with an ear-splittingly shrill commecial filled with CGI, that was mood shattering to the film in question. In addition to that indignity, the film was slightly edited, and in a shocking move, one scene didn't just bleep out a few words, they covered them with the blaring loud sound of a DAMN FOGHORN. It felt like an insult to a wonderful film and to Kathleen Turner's extraordinary performance. (Also, watching it again made me realize how beautiful the film looks. I knew the musical score was touching, but the cinematography, production design, and costumes are all superb)

As for rewatching films.... I used to do it a lot with childhood films, and my father typically likes to watch his favorites over and over again (especially Moonstruck). But the vast majority of the films I have seen, I saw alone, and most I only saw once. It wasn't so much because some of them didn't deserve a second viewing (indeed, there are movies that are tremendously impressive that I only saw once, and wouldn't mind if I saw again, and there are also titles I should see again because I missed some things the first time around). It was more the desperate desire to try to go though as much of cinema history as I could. I went through a period where I was gunning through over 6 films a day. I wanted to see as many classics as I could, both the well-known ones and the ones that went by the wayside in the public's memory. I didn't want to leave anything out in studying the 20th century. (As opposed to recent films which I mostly shun). And that probably explains why I went so overkill. I've seen close to 7,800 films by the age of 29. It's an awful lot, and I really don't know what could possibly be left.

[Lorna]

Some notes in relation to Hibi's comment to my post last week, as well as some others made then....

WHEW. Glad you are okay. My replies in red.

Thanks for the compliment. It comes from years and years of study of movies and television, from a very early age, from early elementary school days onward (maybe before...I was eagerly watching Oscar ceremonies by the age of 4). I wouldn't say it is complete knowledge since I've basically walled myself off from current pop culture, but I love to read about happenings in the business from the 20s through the 90s.

it blows my mind sometimes how much we have in common.

As for my father, it is simply tragic because it all happened so quickly. At this point last year, he was pretty close to normal aside from some bizarre tall tales and an obsession with shopping for furniture, but by this point, he can't keep his head up due to severe arthritis,

OH GOD FORGIVE ME FOR BEING ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO TOSSES OUT MEDICAL ADVICE BUT....my Dad has Rhuematoid (sp?) arthritis and a medication called REMICAID (sp?) and monthly infusions have helped.

For a brief period, my mom talked him into taking THC GUMMIES and OH MY GOD I DON'T KNOW IF THEY HELPED WITH HIS PAINS, BUT HE WAS LIKE 90% LESS OF AN A***HOLE THAN HE USUALLY IS, WHICH COUNTS FOR SOMETHING CAUSE AS MUCH AS I LOVE MY DAD, MY GOD HE'S AN ***HOLE.

There have been discussions of slipping it to him without his knowing. i should probably stop talking before someone reports me.


Yes, Kate Mulgrew's story is shocking to hear, and I was taken aback at the details when she finally opened up to People magazine about it several years ago (it was during the time she was on the Netflix series Orange is the New Black). No woman should be forced to give up a child and go through what she had to face back in the 1970s with Ryan's Hope.

it's WILD what BIG BUSINESS DAYTIME TELEVISION USED TO BE, I mean, its really impossible for most kids today to understand, but it's pone reason why I stay fascinated by the history of SOAPS- both onscreen and behind-the-scenes because IT WAS DRAMA ON SUCH HIGH LEVELS.

I mean "the business" of DAYTIME TV was HUUUUUGE in the 70s and 80s, and a lot of people got chewed up in the wheels on the machine. I've read that producers of one DAYTIME SHOW deliberately got their actors hooked on cocaine


Susan Hayward always was a bit tough, moreso than most leading ladies , but I liked her. I should probably see My Foolish Heart again....


no, you shouldn't. it's not good. she's AWESOME in it though.

And now some concerning more recent posts....

Tea and Sympathy is a very moving film, personally one of my favorite Vincente Minnelli films. Debrorah Kerr especially shines.

and forgive me for being negative Nancy here, but JOHN KERR's performance is, for me, the #1 problem with the film.
i just don't like him AT ALL in ANYTHING. Ever.

I saw Gosford Park illegally. *laughs*

MAGGIE SMITH is coming to break your kneecaps.

Yes, I noticed that Amazon Prime added commercials, unless you are willing to fork over an additional $4 a month, thus doing the same thing Netflix and Hulu do. It stinks.

I hope JEFF BEZOS is immolated on the maiden manned voyage of his stupid dick rockets

[Lorna]

[Hibi]

Hey, hey, Paula. I usually watched her show and tried to disregard her as much as possible.
I haven't watched too many of the Playboy series as I figured they would all have a similar
plot. There are still a few good shows that turn up. People Magazine Investigates often has
interesting stories.

Yes, but I think People is on hiatus now. They had a new 2 parter Monsters In Law show last night. But I'd seen the case before on another show, so I didn't watch.

It could be. I thought I saw an episode last week, but it might have been a rerun. I did watch the two hour
Monsters In Law show. It sounded kind of sleazy, but it was pretty good. I don't recall that specific case. A
whole family of psycho nut jobs, even grandma. Felt sorry for the woman who was killed by grandpa. Another
kook.

I'll catch it on a rerun. The other show was just an hr. so I'm sure this one goes into greater detail. Sometimes those 2 hr shows feel padded, but sometimes they are worth it for the additional info. What a family!