Jack Pierce With Boris Karloff
Jack Pierce with Boris Karloff
Jack Pierce With Conrad Veidt
Note the large makeup case at the right…
A young Jack Pierce with Conrad Veidt
The Woman in Black (2012)
Zombos Says: Very Good
Hammer Film Production’s return to period supernatural horror is a strongly rendered traditional ghost story set in Britain’s Edwardian time. While not as scary as Robert Wise’s The Haunting, or as surprisingly twisting as John Hough’s The Legend of Hell House, director Jack Watkins conjures cheerless environs, a foreboding decaying mansion, and a pervasive malevolence poised to strike, in this adaptation of Susan Hill’s novel. Most striking are the period sets; I kept fancying Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee would tumble out of a room at any moment with Lee baring his vampire fangs and Cushing crossing two iron candle sticks together.
The oppressive atmosphere of London’s oily, sooty fog, changes to the oppressive dreariness felt when Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) arrives at Crythin Gifford, a small town of frightened adults beset by a vengeful spirit murdering their children. Kipps, a lawyer still grieving from the loss of his wife, with a son to support and a job in jeapardy, is tasked with settling the immense amount of paperwork left behind by the late Mrs. Drablow of Eel Marsh House. The desolate house is only reachable by Nine Lives Causeway, a long stretch of road that, at certain points, becomes submerged under water during high tide. Surrounding the causeway are marshes filled with impassable, dark, viscous muck, and impenetrable fog.
At Eel Marsh House, Kipps finds Victorian stuffed monkeys, dusty tapestries and faded carpeting, creaking floorboards, thick cobwebs, peeling wallpaper, and lots of papers to go through. The phantom sounds of a carriage accident and cries in the fog, as well as seeing a mysterious figure of a woman dressed in black, put him on edge. Tragedy soon follows and the villagers want him to leave, except for Sam Daily (Ciaran Hinds), a wealthy landowner with the only car (a Rolls Royce Silver Ghost) for miles around. Invited to dinner by Daily, Kipps learns that Sam and his wife (Janet McTeer), have lost their son when Mrs. Daily enters an automatic writing trance she says is her son’s way of communicating with her.
Kipps decides to spend the night at Eel Marsh House to finish his business. Sam lends his dog to Kipps for company. The Woman in Black makes sure he and the dog don’t get much sleep. Apparitions, ghostly wet footprints, a very disquieting nursery, and the revealing letters Kipps discovers in a window bench keep his attention, and his wits, alert. The next morning more tragedy strikes, and worse still, Kipps learns his son and nanny are coming to Crythin Gifford and he can’t stop them.
The ending of Watkin’s movie is not the same as the novel, so devout readers of Susan Hill’s work may be surprised. Daniel Radcliffe is superb as Arthur Kipps. The wind-up toy animals, monkees, and clowns in the nursery are quite creepy. The story has an atmosphere Ti West can only dream of. It isn’t in 3D.
And as for Hammer Film Productions, you can rest assured that Hammer Horror is back with a vengeance.
Double Bill Pressbook:
The Brain That Wouldn’t Die
and Invasion of the Star Creatures
I left out a few pages of poster admats. These American International pressbooks usually run around 11" x 14," and have pull-out pages to highlight the various sized posters for each movie. The Brain That Wouldn't Die was another B-movie staple seen on television during the 1960s and 1970s horror hosted and hostless shows.
Documentary Review: Cropsey (2009)
There Are Terrors By Night
Zombos Says: Very Good
We all like to play in the discarded places, the abandoned buildings, the dark forests, pretending the devil is calling for his due, or imagining the dark shadows hide dangerous things that can't reach long enough to catch us. All this play exhilarates us, and let's us experience evils that hold no power over us. We scare ourselves with urban legends and thrice-told folktales of dreaded things, and play even harder to outrace the Boogeymen.
In 1987, the Boogeyman reached long enough to snatch 12-year-old Jennifer Schweiger into the darkness. She wasn't the first. From the 1970s to the 1980s, six mentally disabled children and one older one went missing. Jennifer would be the only one found, partially visible in a shallow grave, in a place, strangely enough, already searched extensively, in the Staten Island Greenbelt woods surrounding the Willowbrook State School's abandoned and dilapidated buildings. Joshua Zeman and Barbara Brancaccio's investigative documentary, Cropsey, takes us into those discarded places of Willowbrook and the darkness radiating from them into a mystery, at the center of which lies a drifter, Andre Rand. Sometimes the Boogeyman is real.
Through old newspaper clippings, interviews, black and white photographs, and archival news footage, Zeman and Brancaccio begin with Jennifer's disappearance, which leads to Rand, a former orderly at Willowbrook, which leads to his eerie presence at locales where other mentally-disabled children have disappeared over the years.
In videotape of Rand being taken into custody he appears entranced and wild-eyed, like Charles Milles Manson, and drools as he stumbles along in handcuffs. In the hand-written letters he writes from jail to Zeman and Brancaccio, in response to their interview requests, he mentions how "evil sells," his legal concerns, and what's-in-it-for-him in-between the sentences where his thoughts drift into quotations from scripture. It's noted how his handwriting changes through the course of his correspondence. Rand's mother was committed to Pilgrim State Hospital, but the documentary does not delve deeper into Rand's past. It doesn't provide answers, so don't look for them. What it does provide is a sense of how urban legends like Cropsey (the slasher killer at camp, on the road, who lurks nearby) spring up in communities. This horror-veneer makes the documentary appear at first glance like a mockumentary. But as each disappearance is added, and Rand is shown, the reality sets in and you wind up wishing it weren't true.
Zeman and Brancaccio slowly move the camera through the abandoned, graffiti-sprayed buildings, interview the aged detectives, the still grieving families, the defense and prosecution lawyers, and the community without getting in the way of what anyone has to say or feel, then bring us back to the 1970s and 1980s by showing us the historical videos from Channel 7 and Staten Island's local news. There's Geraldo Rivera's investigation of Willowbrook, the shocking videos of neglect, filth, the warehousing of human beings no one else wanted; the trajedy seems to stem from those buildings and what took place there.
Slowly zooming into news articles from various New York and Staten Island newspapers hammers you even more with apparent connections between disappearences . A chilling synchronicity comes when 22-year old Hank Gafforio is seen standing in the background of a news video shot a few years before he went missing; the news video was about Holly Ann Hughes disappearance and its lack of clues. The documetary's morose pace, not cheered by the sombre, horror movie-style background music, lays out the details, the coincidences, the suppositions, and the guesses, but connecting them provides tantalizing questions and a template for creating an urban legend.
Did Rand work alone? If he did, how did Jennifer's body wind up in an area of ground already searched after he was encarcerated? From somebody trying to frame him? Is he guilty of the disappearences? Is he guilty of murder? Did his time as an orderly at Willowbrook unhinge his sanity? Why did he live on the grounds and in the tunnels of Willowbrook State School after it closed? What do the rumors of devil worship and the Farm Colony have to do with the disappearences? Are they just more urban mythmaking by the community's bored teenagers.
Those teenagers show up on a walk-through at night, playfully looking for the boogeyman, leading to a lighter moment as Zeman and Brancaccio prowl around looking for the possible occult activity rumored to be happening in the area. Maybe the urban legends are there to warn us; to tell us some places must be avoided because the Boogeyman lives there. And he's real.
Movie Pressbook: Man Beast (1956)
The "SEE:" promotional gimmick is in high swing on this movie.They missed the SEE: A poorly dressed barefoot woman with an open blouse daring to take on the icy snow . Maybe she thought the Man Beast was a wool blanket.
Grave Encounters (2011)
Zombos Says: Fair
You can sum up Grave Encounters by saying “the joke’s on them.” ‘Them’ would be the Grave Encounters ghost-hunting team, a band of charlatans bolstering their television show with bought sightings of ghosts and the melodramatics of a pretend psychic (Mackenzie Gray) hamming it up for effect. After five bogus shows, they unexpectedly meet the real deal in the Collingwood Psychiatric Hospital, an abandoned structure harboring a dark past and soon to be discovered irritable inhabitants. Or is there just one joker tricking them, like the evil Emeric Belasco in Hell House?
Initially starting out with the usual furnishings moving ever so slightly and unnoticed, the team experiences more aggressive activity, then physical atacks by a demonic force. This is where the movie breaks down, abandoning the more traditional–and demanding–scares of ghostly fright that rely on subtlety and vagueness for in-your-face phantoms with CGI facial ticks and a building that refuses to let them leave.
If you recall the terrors in House on Haunted Hill (1999), the time trap of The Sick House (2008), and the standard modus operandi seen in Ghost Hunters on the Syfy channel, you already know what to expect. Like 2006’s The Gravedancers, the story loses credibility by pushing its special effects beyond the story’s required contextual belief, then ziplines J-horror-styled attrocites in and out of night-vision camera views, sending the Grave Encounters team screaming and running in all directions, and us watching it all collapse into the standard divide and conquer scenario. The mystery of the open window only tantalizes us with possibilities that never transpire; the room tucked away in the tunnels hints at black magic, but to what purpose? And the force stalking the Grave Encounters team never bothered the solitary caretaker, so why pick on them now?
Even if you aren’t already exhausted by the cheap to produce found footage, point of view, movie schtick, this one would have been better filmed without the handheld shakycam pyrotechnics. It’s a classic story: a group of unbelievers are trapped in a haunted house, teach them a lesson they won’t forget (or survive). It’s also the type of storyline you can fritter away when you overstep the reality-pretense of POV by squeezing it to bridge sub-genres. Grave Encounters starts as a haunting, then veers into demonic stalking, where the rules of engagement require more visual frenzy, setting up a plot contretemps that skewers the more suspenseful, understated unfolding of ghostly phenomenon. Oddly enough, when the sinister force in the hospital exerts its influence over time and space, there is no religious counter within the Grave Encounters team, a fault many horror movies that play the occultism card fail to take into consideration. Atheist or believer, when confronted by demonic activity and the breakdown of natural laws, there’s a natural tendency to become very religious, very fast.
Sean Rogerson as Lance Preston, the team’s leader, self-consciously chews up his role instead of allowing it to digest. White (Juan Riedinger), the tech expert, wears a KICK ME sign early on, so we know he’s going down first. Sasha (Ashleigh Gryzko) is the token screaming female; not much hope for her, either. The camera guy, T.C. (Merwin Mondesir), acts like every other black camera guy character named T.C. is supposed to do–anger, frustration, despair, and done. Mackenzie Gray’s psychic is the only character to play it evenly. He looks like a psychic should look, a little weird, a lot of Hollywood groom. He should have had more to do.
Grave Encounters should have had more for its characters and story to do, too.
Casablanca (1942)
Zombos Says: Classic
Major Strasser: Are you one of those people who cannot imagine the Germans in their beloved Paris?
Rick: It’s not particularly my beloved Paris.
Major Strasser: Can you imagine us in London?
Rick: When you get there, ask me!
Captain Renault: Hmmh! Diplomatist!
Major Strasser: How about New York?
Rick: Well there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade.
If there is one chic-flick movie that’s masculine enough for guys this is it. Casablanca has crisp dialog, characters with so much backstory you get lost in their fullness, and a situation that leaves nobody a winner, but everybody profoundly changed becase of what they lose. There’s romance, bromance, higher ideals to consider, and lost love found again. It’s a story with a shady beginning, a middle of consequence, and an ending that sparks new beginnings. There are more memorable lines uttered in this movie than any other, and humor, pathos, and rousing courage are shown in the face of adversity. And it’s got dirty, lowdown Nazis, to hiss.