Recent Viewings, Part 2

[FatFreddysCat]

"Madman" (1982)
As the staff of a summer camp prepare to close the place down for the winter, they make the fatal mistake of mocking local legend "Madman Marz." This somehow summons the maniac, who starts whackin' away at them with an axe.
This competently made, though totally unoriginal slasher flick is one of the better "Friday The 13th" knock-offs of the era.

[M.10rda]

Lester - I was joking, I like PIRANHA and JAWS et al just fine. (Avoid NOTGRIZZLY though!)
DrWhom - Did Mikey Madison earn her Oscar?
FFC - MADMAN is great.
This next movie is... okay?

EL HOMBRE SIN NOSTRO aka THE MAN WITHOUT A FACE (1950):
This is a Mexican serial killer "thriller" or perhaps more "suspense mystery" with a handsome dollop of German Expressionism and surrealism as well as an indigestible overserving of psychanalysis. A reputedly brilliant homicide detective who looks like a sleepy and underfed Pedro Pascal can't manage to identify and catch a vicious lady-slasher, so he consults the expertise of his therapist buddy, who looks like what would happen if you overinflated Mandy Patinkin with helium. What follows is a long, talky, talky series of counseling sessions and melodramatic flashbacks and then, finally, after one has nearly forgotten that a slasher is supposedly on the loose slashing victims, a long-deferred and utterly anti-climactic ending. You can probably already predict the twist from my brief synopsis above, but if you can't somehow, my friend Sigmund Freud would be happy to explain to you how Detective Pascal's mother is entirely to blame for the murders. 

Besides my conviction that explicit psychoanalysis takes all the fun out of movies, EL HOMBRE SIN NOSTRO is worth mentioning for its spectacular B+W dream sequences, where the Detective roams a nightmarish landscape ala Salvador Dali and is haunted by a cool-looking killer (that may well have inspired Madonna's disguise in Beatty's DICK TRACY). These sequences are quite unlike much else you'd see in movies of or prior to 1950, so at least you could FF through the rest of the movie to enjoy those.

3/5
And I know everyone loves PSYCHO but if nothing else EL HOMBRE SIN NOSTRO demonstrates it was mostly done before (sans drag).

[Senor Citizen]

Trick 'r Treat (2007)

This was so good movie. I love it.
It has real atmosphere, like good halloween-movie should have. 82 minute running time makes me want more but rather too short than too long.

Sam is true horror icon.

[Dr. Whom]

DrWhom - Did Mikey Madison earn her Oscar?

Hard to say. Of the other candidates, I only saw The Substance. The themes in Anora are of course a lot more Oscar-friendly than The Substance. The fact remains that Mikey Madison really carries the movie, while The Substance is more of a double act. So in that sense, yes.

[Rev. Powell]

DrWhom - Did Mikey Madison earn her Oscar?

Hard to say. Of the other candidates, I only saw The Substance. The themes in Anora are of course a lot more Oscar-friendly than The Substance. The fact remains that Mikey Madison really carries the movie, while The Substance is more of a double act. So in that sense, yes.

I voted for Demi but Mikey won our critic's group, too.

[lester1/2jr]

The Masque of the Red Death (1964) - I was way into this movie when I was like 12. In retrospect, it was probably because of the overt devil worship stuff and also the idea that it was Edgar Allen Poe, a fancy big name author, and I actually understood it. Seeing it again, I think it is my favorite Vincent Price performance, which is saying something as he was in 10,000 movies.

The most memorable aspect is the garish technicolor colors of the whole thing. An a***ole prince guy entertains himself by being a tyrant to the local villagers and also murdering people in his demented Caligula type castle situation. What can be done? Well, nature has a plan...

This is pretty high post for Roger Corman. Some of the less crucial sort of scenes were a little draggy and at certain times it felt like they were kind of wandering from one side of the castle to the other, but there was a lot of memorable stuff too.

4.5 /5 very cool and different

[Rev. Powell]

SOUL TO SQUEEZE (2025): A troubled young man undergoes an experimental procedure that locks him inside a house where thoughts in his subconscious become real. Ambitious low-budget psychological pseudo-surreal movie that is a little padded with unnecessary incidents and ideas; would have worked better as a short. 2.5/5.

[M.10rda]

IF I SHOULD DIE BEFORE I WAKE (1952):
This was produced at the same time as (and was supposed to be part of an anthology with) NEVER OPEN THE DOOR, the very nicely shot and directed yet unbearably bleak mother-neglecting and cat-harming flick I mostly FF'd through a couple weeks back. As I recognize that everyone possesses their own set of potential triggers, I'll provide a content warning here for IF I SHOULD DIE...: it's entirely focused on a pederast abducting, "abusing", and murdering or attempting to murder pubescent girls (and one boy)... pretty rough for 1952. Somehow that won't make me take a pass on a movie (while hurting a cat probably will) and I have no rationale to offer for that perspective, but if that's your trigger, be forewarned.

Lucio is in the Argentinian equivalent of 6th or 7th grade and behaves quite credibly like many young boys around that age. Sometimes he's a complete idiot and a jerk, other times he behaves with surprising self-awareness and wisdom. He teases the young girls in his class in ways that aren't cool but he also shows sincere curiosity in what they're up to and listens to them when they tell him about it. (He also defends them from potentially more toxic tween bullies.) Unfortunately, paying such close attention to a couple of these girls means he becomes acutely aware of a likely explanation for their abrupt disappearances, and that jeopardizes his safety as well.

IISDBIW has one shortcoming in common with NOTW, and that's an overreliance on lengthy hyperbolic dialogue when images and just a few lines might well suffice. (I have been accused of the same fault!  ) Director Carlos Hugo Christensen creates the same rigorous choreography and stylistic shots as seen in the partner film, but he also stages two fantasy sequences that are every bit as surreal as the ones in EL HOMBRE SIN NOSTRO (1950) yet even wilder and freakier - those alone are worth the price of admission (free on YT, I think)!  Generally this flick made me think of Stephen King's canon of stories where children and adolescents encounter Evil. It's got a similar tone and similar veracity to its youthful protagonist. The climax is pretty intense and the whole film is a modest investment of only 67 minutes I think it pays off.

3.5/5

[M.10rda]

THE BOWERY BOYS MEET THE MONSTERS (1954):
By 1954, Bowery "Boys" Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall had been playing some essentially identical variation of the "boys" or "kids" or "little tough guys" for sixteen years. This is only about half as long as the "South Park" characters have been in the 3rd & 4th grade, but those guys are cartoons and Leo & Huntz are human beings, at least nominally. Google's AI tells me that the entire expanded Bowery/Dead End/East Side/Little Tough universe comprises 175 films      but as this comes from AI who knows if it's true  but even if AI overshot by 300% the number remains staggering. (It would appear, based on Tarantino's recent book of film "criticism", that he has seen them all, possibly repeatedly, and holds strong opinions about their varying quality... which of course he does, but really, what the heck is that guy's deal and does he ever take a break to get laid?)

I digress. I have only seen a meager three films from the canon: the o.g. ANGELS WITH DIRTY FACES (obv), 1942's SPOOKS RUN WILD (where the Boys meet Bela Lugosi, so natch!), and this one... and unless I learn that they shared the screen with Bela twice, I'm happy to tap out of the cycle right here, thanks. That isn't to say I posted this review in the wrong section, just to say that I acknowledge many online criticisms related to the Boys' long-in-the-tooth comedy shtick growing tiresome by the time one watches, say, four Gorcey/Hall pictures. I did laugh out loud once and otherwise was mildly diverted, sitting complacently in the zombified headspace of the eight-year old child at whom these films were presumably aimed. People accuse ...MEET THE MONSTERS of essentially being a double-episode of "The Addams Family" or "The Munsters" and they're not wrong.

For the record, though, both of those shows debuted ten years after this movie. (The butler in this film is "Lurch", except a little livelier.) TBBMTM also boasts a sexy goth vampire woman several years before Vampira was a thing; a man-eating plant six years before the original LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS; a homicidal nice little old lady who looks and acts exactly like Elsa Lanchester would soon look and act (and would continue looking and acting onscreen for the next 25+ years) yet  they beat Elsa to the punch a little; and Leo & Huntz (and the Lurch-like butler) beat Mel Brooks to the "Walk this way" gag by a full two decades. None of this is to claim that TBBMTM is "original", just to say (from a historical perspective) it does feel oddly ahead of its curve!

There's also a seven-foot tall killer robot, a man in a terrific gorilla suit    , and Huntz transforming into a Mr. Hyde-like mutant maniac via a visual effect that isn't nearly the worst onscreen monster transformation in a film before 1954 or since. The five actors who play the "human"-looking "monsters" are a hoot and the guy in the gorilla costume does a rousing job as well. (It's hard to evaluate the robot's performance.)

3/5
The above-average Bela horror flick BOWERY AT MIDNIGHT features no Bowery "Boys" but it does have Leo's dad Bernard Gorcey (who also co-stars here) in a supporting role.