Producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus managed to get an unforgettable cast for Sword Of The Valiant. They got Sean Connery, Trevor Howard, Peter Cushing, and John Rhys-Davies. And Miles O’Keeffe. Well, I did say the cast was unforgettable.
Archive for March, 2015
Nuts of the round table
Mar 30
OK, running more than a little bit late for the “Quelle horreur!” round table, but…well…some French excuse. I don’t know. Anyway, I’ve finally pulled my act together and completed my entry.
Eyes Without a Face/Les yeux sans visage
“With a few exceptions scattered throughout the past hundred years or so of feature filmmaking, the French never really embraced the horror film. Instead, the French response was cinema fantastique. Certainly it had elements of horror, sometimes more overt than others, but more traditionally recognizable characteristics of horror were mixed into a dreamy mist that also included romance, science fiction, mystery, and melodrama all spun with a disregard for logical narrative structure and progression in favor of a dreamlike (or nightmare) quality. Of the many films that make up the body of cinema fantastique, few have developed an enduring reputation, good and bad, quite like that of Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage, aka Eyes without a Face.
Keith Allison is the chief Bacchanologist at Teleport City.
…although not as much of either as I anticipated, I’m sad to say:
Lust for Vengeance (2001), in which a bunch of skeezy Brooklynites occasionally take time out from their busy schedules of snorting, screwing, and toking to get killed by a black-gloved psycho in a motorcycle helmet…
Repligator (1997), in which there supposedly is a reason why an experimental teleportation machine turns everyone who uses it into a sex-crazed female were-alligator, but it wouldn’t be worth your time or mine for me to try explaining it…
Sexsquatch: The Legend of Blood Stool Creek (2012), in which you have no one to blame but yourself if you watch a movie called that…
and…
Stripperland (2011), which amazingly diverges early and often from its stated business of being Zombieland with boobies, and turns out not to be nearly as witless or indefensible as I was expecting.
Dead funny
Mar 20
Had the distributor of the hilarious Over Her Dead Body not gone bankrupt – resulting in the movie being dumped straight to video – the movie would more likely than not have a strong cult following today.
The animated movie Edison & Leo is the first feature length stop motion animated movie to come out of Canada. Based on the results, it will be a llloooonnngggg time before Canada makes the next one.
99 Yellow Balloons?
Mar 1
… or, the House is a Lonely Hunter.
House of Last Things (2013)
I have no idea what to make of this movie. Either it’s a satire working on so high a level it went wa-a-ay over my head, or it’s The Room 2: Haunted Room. What starts as a fairly intriguing, technically-excellent story of interwoven fates soon skips a couple of grooves and tries to make itself a “meaningful” horror movie. Trouble is, the film-makers are even more ham-fisted with their attempts at symbolism than they are doing straight horror.
But… was this intentional? Were they trying to match form and substance, in a movie about the deadening effect of Suburbia? Maybe you can tell me…
Will Laughlin is the Braineater.