New stuff at last:
Arrival (2016), in which talking to aliens is a lot harder when you don’t have a Universal Translator and they don’t watch “Galaxy Quest”…
The Crying Woman (1933), in which a native spook ushers in the first era of indigenous horror movie production in Mexico…
The House that Dripped Blood (1971), in which the rent is too damn high, however little the landlord is charging…
Magic (1978), in which dummies don’t have to be animate to scare the crap out of you…
Monster (1953), in which the Brainiac guy vomits the half-digested remains of every fright flick he’s ever seen back onto the screen…
Rogue One (2016), or Star Wars, Episode III.XCV…
Scream (1981), which is not the one you’re thinking of…
and…
The Vampire (1957), which, come to think of it, might also not be the one you’re thinking of.
#1 by Alaric on February 27, 2017 - 11:31 pm
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“If you were a child in the late 1970’s, you might just possibly remember a certain television commercial…”
Actually, that would have been during the time our TV had broken, and my parents had decided to go a few years without one, since they felt that us kids had been spending too much time glued to the screen. I remember the posters in the subway stations, though.
Also, now I really want to watch The Vampire.
#2 by The Rev. on February 28, 2017 - 2:07 am
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Yay, El Santo reviews! I knew you were okay (or at least thought you were, as I’m pretty sure I passed you in the hall at B-Fest) but I’m glad you’re okay enough to post some reviews. Looking forward to reading them.
#3 by KeithA on February 28, 2017 - 8:15 pm
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Digging all the Mexi horror reviews. I’ve been on a kick lately myself.
#4 by lyzard on February 28, 2017 - 9:31 pm
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Do I gather correctly that you’ve been working off Spanish-language prints? I’m disappointed if so: when I saw you’d reviewed The Crying Woman I had a moment of giddy excitement; that’s one I’ve wanted to tackle for ages.
#5 by El Santo on March 1, 2017 - 7:31 am
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The Vampire had subtitles, but for Monster and The Crying Woman it was indeed just straight Spanish. A DVD of Monster with English subtitles does at least exist, however.
#6 by lyzard on February 28, 2017 - 9:42 pm
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The first copy they sent me had a great, big notch taken out of it, almost like someone at the post office had bitten the damn thing. The second copy they sent came snapped neatly in half. The third was structurally intact, but so badly scuffed up on the side with the data on it that only the first 30 minutes or so would play. And the fourth and apparently final copy arrived shattered into about two dozen pieces. I ought to have realized at that point that the gods were trying to tell me something.
THAT is almost a blow-by-blow description of my attempts to see The Amityville Curse! – right down to the inevitable conclusion drawn. I finally not just had to buy a copy, but import an R2 DVD. It was distributed by an English company, but the disc was Scandinavian!
And yet, we never take the hint, do we??
Reading your review of Scream makes me think I saw it on TV decades ago, but under a different title—Ghost Town, or something like that. I’m pretty sure this is it—a film where everyone would have survived if they’d just stayed put, and which has so much trouble thinking of any reason why they wouldn’t that at one point, someone gets up and goes outside for no reason but to be killed?
#7 by Jason Farrell on March 2, 2017 - 9:33 am
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And I was able to obtain the Amityville Curse fairly easily in one of those budget two-packs, paired with a TV movie with David Soul. Of course, that does not exactly narrow it down. Don’t they all feature David Soul?
#8 by Braineater on March 6, 2017 - 8:20 pm
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For me, it seems I am not allowed to own a copy of A Bullet for Sandoval. Some 25 years ago I ordered a letterboxed VHS print from a mail-order company, and they wrote to inform me they no longer carried it. Then I bought a copy in a video store, and the tape was an entirely different movie. I bought it again years later, and this time the tape was blank. I bought it on DVD at a Dollar Store, and the print was so washed out it might as well have been blank — it was a pure white screen with occasional smears of color, like it had been horrifically overexposed. From what little I was able to see, I think it was actually an episode of a TV Western, so the trend continued.
I think I now have a copy in a cheap Western multipack, but I’m afraid to play it. It’s going to turn out to be some brain-melting “Ringu”-type experience, I know it.
#9 by Blake on March 1, 2017 - 9:49 am
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Monster also would’ve worked for this month’s theme. Critically-acclaimed film with Charlize Theron in an Oscar-winning role as a killer prostitute? Or 50s Mexsploitation horror in which the Brainiac guy vomits the half-digested remains of every fright flick he’s ever seen back onto the screen?
#10 by Braineater on March 6, 2017 - 8:21 pm
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My first guess would’ve been, “crappy late-era John Carradine potboiler shot in Latin America”. But I’m a loony.
#11 by AcademicLurker on March 1, 2017 - 1:18 pm
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I saw that commercial for Magic as a child, and it has definitely stayed in my memory for all these years even though I never saw the movie. For the longest time I assumed it was an animated killer dummy movie. I think I only learned that it was a psychological thriller some time in the 00’s.
#12 by The Rev. on March 14, 2017 - 3:25 am
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So, “the other Scream” is also “the other The Outing.” Which is sad, considering that I’ve heard almost nothing good about the killer djinn movie that shares the title; but hey, at least I’ve heard of that one.
I’ll have to look for Magic in the near future. I knew very little about it, other than it being a movie with a ventriloquist’s doll. If I’d known, or remembered, that Anthony Hopkins was in it, I would have made a point to look for it years ago.
#13 by RogerBW on March 15, 2017 - 8:22 am
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Pertwee and Pitt would share a set again, though only briefly, in the Doctor Who serial The Time Monster, May-June 1972. Interesting that the makers of House should have got away with parodying Lee in a film with Lee in it…