Recent Viewings, Part 2

[M.10rda]

M.10rda - where did you watch that? youtube?

I believe I DL'd EERIE/UNCANNY TALES from Youtube. The quasi-remake from 1932 is also on Youtube!

EERIE TALES aka THE LIVING DEAD aka UNCANNY TALES aka UNHEIMLICHE GESCHICHTEN (1932):
Writer/director Richard Oswald gives 1919's "Uncanny Tales" another go, remaking two of the shorts from the original - Poe's ubiquitous "Chat Noir" and RLStephenson's "Suicide Club" - and adding two new ones, Poe's "Doctor Tarr" and an anonymous thing about a wax museum. Unfortunately, Oswald has none of the original (and exceptional) leads from the earlier film. What he does have is sync dialogue and Paul Wegener, best known as "The Golem"! And, more importantly, he's got a very fresh take on the idea of an "anthology": instead of a bunch of unrelated stories framed by a loose linking sequence, the four stories or (perhaps more appropriately) chapters of the new EERIE TALES all occur consecutively and involve the same two main characters. So - y'know - it becomes almost a "regular" narrative!       And I dug it!

The film begins w/ Wegener as some kind of eccentric inventor who gets cheesed off at his wife and her pet kitty, and you know the rest. (Good news for animal lovers: NO harm whatsoever comes to the cat in this version, besides of course the loss of its owner.) A do-gooder journalist happens to be passing Wegener's house during the grisly deed, tries to investigate, and eventually the cops join him... at no point does this Poe adaptation end... instead, Wegener flees culpability, runs into a closed wax museum, the journalist follows, and - voila, Chapter Two!

That one's quick, but the next one (based on "Doctor Tarr") is long, elaborate, and - really great. Wegener next seeks figurative asylum in a literal asylum, and again his pursuer pursues. Some weird stuff is afoot in that asylum, however, and it puts one of the leads in danger while giving the other a bit of an advantage. The best moments in this E/UT are in this third chapter. The acting by the denizens of the asylum is terrific and there are many very weird, awkward, over-the-top bizarre, and (yes) "eerie" bits - a couple times Oswald legitimately achieves a Lynchian quality of the unheimliche!

At last, the journalist's pursuit of the homicidal scientist reaches a climax in the "Suicide Club" chapter. Oswald really builds this one out from the shorter version in the '19 film, providing more characterization for the members of the club (with, again, more strong acting) and much better FX. The resolution lacks a bit of the punch of the original's, but that's a small quibble. More significantly I really miss Conrad Veidt and his incredible emotive face, but Wegener (who looks like the most nightmarish possible offspring of a union between Jack Palance and Harvey Keitel) is a compellingly ghoulish bad guy. The dude who plays the journalist isn't great though he does nice work in the asylum scenes. I really love the idea of an anthology where each story follows the previous, and Oswald pulls it off well. It makes one think what Tarantino and friends could've accomplished if they'd taken FOUR ROOMS remotely seriously. Good on Oswald for trying something novel (and succeeding) instead of just taking the money and doing a shot-for-shot w/ sound!

4/5
The film is often known as THE LIVING DEAD, for some reason. (There are no living dead in the film.)

[Rev. Powell]

THE ACTOR (2025): An 1950s actor loses his memory after being struck in the head by a jealous husband, and winds up in a small Ohio town trying to puzzle out his own identity. This is a stylized and dreamy movie whose vintage theatricality, together with some Kafkaesque twists, create an effective sense of disorientation--but the script neither resolves the tension nor suggests a relatable symbolic reading, and on the whole, it's a missed opportunity that fails to lead anywhere meaningful. 2.5/5.

[M.10rda]

THE LAST WARNING (1928):
First let me say that I played the Phantom of the Opera thirty-some years ago (sans makeup!    ) so I've had a lifelong relationship with and affinity for the character and his story. I like the 1926 movie and acknowledge it's got two perfect/iconic moments: Christine unmasking the Phantom at his organ and then his appearance as the "Red Death" at the masquerade. But I gotta' admit, the last time I watched the film in its entirety (yeah, over a decade ago) I was a little... underwhelmed with it in toto. It's fine. Maybe I should revisit it again but I seem to remember it pretty clearly. (I currently feel identically about o.g. DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN, for the record...)

So for those of you who might feel similarly to me or who perhaps have just watched o.g. PHANTOM too many times and need sorbet for your palate, I give you THE LAST WARNING from 1928. It's a theatre company in a huge old theater and their production stops dead in the middle of a performance one night - along with the leading man. When efforts are made to jump-start the production, threatening letters arrive and then weird accidents start happening. The leading lady looks uncannily like Sheryl Lee and the new producer looks like a grumpy Gerald Ford. And of course there's a shadowy figure dashing from shadow to shadow, and when glimpsed up close he's got a hideous pulpy skull... okay, there is little novel or surprising about LAST WARNING's script, least of all its final reveal. No direct spoilers, however there's only one silent-era actor I recognized in this large cast, and for most of the film he plays a trivial role.  Yeah, that old trope.

LAST WARNING was directed by Paul Leni (of WAXWORK, MAN WHO LAUGHED, and CAT AND THE CANARY) and produced with Carl Laemmle's money. Laemmle quite clearly wanted a similar picture to cash in on PHANTOM and somehow managed to find a novel with a nearly identical premise (heck, maybe written to cash in on Gaston Leroux's original novel!). There's no reason to expect LAST WARNING would be anything more than a cheap knock-off... but whoah, Laemmle sure had a lot of money to throw around, and whoah, Leni was good and inspired to put every penny of that money onscreen. LAST WARNING isn't the best directed silent film I've ever seen (it ain't PASSION OF JEANNE D'ARC or THE GOLD RUSH, surely, or even EERIE/UNCANNY TALES '19) but it is perhaps the slickest and most modern silent film I've ever seen.

In other words, in terms of cinematography and editing and crisp clear storytelling, it's much closer to a good solid thriller from the 70s or 80s than it is to most films from the 1920s... and in fact its leagues beyond most static, stagey, moribund films from the 30s and 40s. Most specifically, Leni executes a whole bunch of camera movements that range from impressive & lovely to almost unbelievable. There are some crazy shots, including one during the climax, that can only have been executed w/ a smaller 16mm camera and then blown up to 35mm... 'cause otherwise... they violate 1928 laws of filmmaking physics!   

There's also a suspenseful montage right before the climax that obviously predates Hitchcock or Welles and, though fairly brief, really makes me think DePalma was directly inspired by Leni's work here when he orchestrated famous sequences from CARRIE and SISTERS and so on. Actually, the climactic mayhem w/ the masked Phantom-ish stalker leaping and climbing around the theater certainly seems like a more clear precedent to PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE than o.g. PHANTOM OTOPERA...

4/5
I do think both Todd Browning and James Whale were good (not really great) directors - but I really wish Paul Leni had gotten a crack at the early 30s Universal monster pics.......