DYLAN ME SOFTLY WITH HIS SONG

Belated takes on three December releases I've just recently caught up with, prepping for my 2024 Top Ten list: 

Still in theaters:

A Complete Unknown--Directed by the always-reliable James Mangold, this biopic covers Bob Dylan's breakthrough. We see the arrival of the young prodigy (Timothée Chalamet) in the Village, his pilgrimage to a New Jersey hospital to meet the terminally ill Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy), attended there by Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), who becomes Dylan's mentor and champion, his relationships with Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning) and Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), his rise to stardom, through to his notorious electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

I love Dylan. I saw him perform, sharing the bill with the Grateful Dead and Tom Petty, at Rich Stadium in Buffalo, New York in 1986; it's high on the list of the best live shows I've ever been to. And "Like a Rolling Stone," from which this film's title is drawn, may be my favorite song; I've often wondered if it shouldn't be our new national anthem. I'm wondering that especially hard this week.

All that said, I'm not remotely enough of a Dylan worshipper or historian to feel proprietary toward him, or to say how accurate this film is or isn't. All I can say is that I enjoyed it. It's full of good acting, rich period detail and, of course, great music.

Chalamet, for whom I've never previously been able to work up much enthusiasm, gives us a human being as opposed to the bad Dylan impression that any of us can do. Dylan has long been reputed, even by his friends and admirers, to be an asshole--a dazzlingly talented asshole, a funny asshole, an influential asshole, but an asshole nonetheless.

The movie doesn't shirk this; the opinion is stated overtly by a character, and Dylan doesn't disagree. But as with most assholes, he isn't just an asshole, and Chalamet makes it possible not only to accept and admire him, but to like him. Also, he sings for him. And Norton sings for Seeger, and Barbaro sings for Baez, and Boyd Holbrook sings for Johnny Cash, and none of them, to my ear, embarrass themselves.

Despite Chalamet's excellence, Norton's performance as Seeger is the real standout here. Even though by the end Seeger is shoved, fairly or not, almost into the role of antagonist, Norton gets across Seeger's tirelessly disarming, near-saintly sweetness, and beneath it, the depth of his passion for music, and for America.

Now streaming:

Queer--The agonies of not quite fully requited love bleed out of Daniel Craig's old-shoe face in this adaptation of my second-favorite William S. Burroughs book (after Junky), first published in 1985 but written decades earlier. The setting is Mexico City in the '50s, where Craig's "William Lee " is a dissolute expat, drinking too much and engaging in one night stands with local pretty boys.

William is smitten when he gets a load of Allerton (Drew Starkey), a beautiful young American Navy vet. He eventually gets the guy into bed, and later talks him into traveling to Ecuador with him in search of yagé, a hallucinogenic plant he believes will give him telepathic powers (he's already restarted his heroin habit at this point). But Allerton is just along for the ride, literally and emotionally.

Craig is outstanding; the nakedness of his pain is hard to watch at times. And the movie, directed by Luca Guadagnino of Challengers from a script by Justin Kuritzkes, starts off very well. But as it dives deeper into drug-fueled visions (some of them reminded me of those in Ken Russell's 1980 Altered States), it loses dramatic momentum. It's visually arresting, but Guadagnino finds no equivalent to the charge that Burroughs generates in the best riffing passages of his prose.

Also, meaning no moral judgement--I hardly could judge, given my own relationship to junk food--I've never been able to find the glamor that so many filmmakers seem to find in drug addiction. Maybe I would if I understood it first-hand, but if so, I'll pass.

Now streaming, and still playing in the Valley at this writing at Harkins Shea:

A Real Pain--Close friends in their youths, 40-something cousins Dave and Benji have a more complicated relationship now. The quiet, mild-mannered Dave (Jesse Eisenberg) is a successful New York digital ad salesman, while Benji (Kieran Culkin), though cheerful and charismatic, is unemployed, troubled, seemingly directionless, and given to delivering his nervy opinions at distressingly inappropriate times and volumes.

Nonetheless, Dave adores him, and the two travel together from New York to Poland on a legacy left them by their mutually adored grandmother, who survived the Holocaust. They join a "Holocaust tour" led by a non-Jewish Brit (Will Sharpe), starting at Warsaw and working their way toward Lublin, where the cousins will break away to visit the grandmother's home. They smoke weed with each other and interact with the other oddballs on the tour, among them Jennifer Grey as a divorcee and Kurt Egyiawan as a Rwandan who survived the genocide in his country before converting to Judaism.

Written and directed by Eisenberg, this modest movie is genuinely original--very funny, very poignant, very believable, painfully uncomfortable to watch at times but ultimately a gem. Culkin is terrific, but  Eisenberg is no less so in his less showy role; his love and worry for his cousin, and his protective mortification at his behavior, make up the pain at the dramatic core of A Real Pain.

You can also check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of Nickel Boys and the Universal/Blumhouse "reboot" Wolf Man.

THE BEAR MINIMUM

In theaters this weekend:

Five Nights at Freddy's--The Freddy's in question is Freddy Fazbear's, a defunct and long-shuttered pizza joint and game arcade of the Chuck E. Cheese or Peter Piper sort. Our down-on-his-luck hero Mike (Josh Hutcherson) accepts a job as a third-shift security guard there. Before long, he finds that the gone-to-seed animatronic animal characters featured in the place may still have some murderous life in them.

This chiller is based on a popular 2014 video game that has given rise to a series of sequel games, novels and other spin-offs. I've never played the games or read the books, so I can't remotely say if the movie is faithful to its source material, or if it should be.

On its own terms, it's okay at best. Like Cocaine Bear from earlier this year, it has a nice '80s throwback flavor in its look, editing and music. Director Emma Tammi manages a few amusingly staged sequences, and Freddy and the other animal characters, products of Jim Henson's Creature Shop, have the repellent horror of deliberate, calculated cuteness gone decrepit. They're legitimate additions to the stable of Universal Monsters.

But the script, by several hands including Tammi and game creator Scott Cawthon, feels overcomplicated. The premise, right down to the title, would seem to suggest a simple approach: A guy stuck in a bummer job, alone in a creepy setting, finds things getting creepier and creepier and more and more perilous every night, until at last he knows he's not imagining it; the cartoony animal robots really are trying to kill him. Five acts of rising tension.

Instead, Mike is given flashbacks concerning a family tragedy which he's still trying to solve via dream therapy--which means sleeping on the job--as well as a little sister (Piper Rubio) he's trying to keep custody of. This backstory is genuinely poignant and disturbing, to the point that it makes the overt spookhouse horror stuff seem trivial and unfrightening. It's like a Goosebumps movie was mixed with a grim Dateline NBC episode.

The smallish cast is capable; Rubio is a sweet presence as the sister and Matthew Lillard gets some laughs as the guy who offers Mike the job. It should be said that the former child and teen actor Hutcherson (from the Hunger Games flicks and The Kids Are All Right) shows impressive chops in this grown-up lead. He brings Mike an understated but believable aura of lifelong anguish. For me, again, he was too potent for the fun, silly shocker that this should have been.

I WANT A NEW BUG

Opening in theaters this weekend:

Renfield--The wild-eyed, insect-gobbling toady to the Vampire Prince became a horror icon in his own right more than ninety years ago, when the great Dwight Frye unleashed his unforgettable giggle in Universal's original Dracula. It's a little surprising that he hasn't been given his own movie vehicle sooner.

But while Nicholas Hoult, who plays the title role in this horror spoof from Universal, briefly gets to do a respectable imitation of Frye's deranged laugh (hrrrr, hrrrr, hrrrrrrr....), he otherwise plays R. M. Renfield without mania, as a modest, mild-mannered, good-hearted fellow. He's also an action hero; munching bugs gives him superhuman strength and martial arts skills and recuperative powers.

His decades of servitude have made him reflective as well; he's come to entertain the possibility that he might just be in a toxic relationship with his boss. He's started attending a support group for people in a similar boat, both to explore his own emotional needs and to scout for victims--the abusers that people at the meetings describe--to serve as food to his convalescing sanguinary master.

The film is set in modern-day New Orleans, where Renfield has brought the charred remains of Dracula after the duo's last tangle with fearless vampire killers. The Count isn't looking well, but he's still able to bully and shame his poor lackey into submission, and he's a little more menacingly intact every time we see him. Then when Renfield comes to the attention of both a local crime family and of a New Orleans cop (Awkwafina) with an angry grudge against the gangsters, he must decide whose priorities he will focus on, Drac's or his own.

Directed by Chris McKay from a script by Ryan Ridley and a story by Robert Kirkman, Renfield is very silly and often heavy-handed. It's extremely gory, but like this February's Cocaine Bear, the gore is played strictly for laughs and lacks any true shock; it's too insubstantial to pack much punch even as a gross-out. The satirical points about modern self-help culture and pop psychology are trenchant enough, but they've pretty much exhausted themselves before the film is half over.

That said, Renfield is colorful, fast-moving and full of comedic invention, and Hoult is charming and easy to root for. Awkwafina pushes pretty hard, as she has in almost all her movies except The Farewell, but she also gets across an honest fury and grief, and when she lets herself connect with Hoult she lightens up agreeably. Shohreh Agdashloo has a gleefully sinister glint in her eyes as the queen of the crime family, Ben Schwartz is properly loath-able as her imbecilic son, and the support group offers some fine character players.

The movie would carry a lot less weight, however, without its other Nick. Growling through a mouth full of pointy teeth, seething with grievance at his reduced circumstances and unable to maintain the air of grand menace he's trying for, Nicholas Cage offers probably the goofiest parody version of Drac since George Hamilton in Love at First Bite back in 1979. Unlike Hamilton's, however, Cage's Count isn't meant to be lovable. Cage sinks his fangs into the role, and taps a rich vein of malignant narcissism.

DOES A BEAR SNORT IN THE WOODS?

Opening in theaters this weekend...

Cocaine Bear--This shocker has at least as much right to claim "true story" status for itself as Fargo or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. There really was a Cocaine Bear: back in 1985, an American black bear was found dead in the Chattahoochee National Forest in northern Georgia, just south of the Tennessee line. The poor creature had OD'd, having ingested more than 30 kilos of cocaine, valued at tens of millions of dollars.

The stuff had been dropped from an airplane by a smuggler who then died himself in a parachuting mishap. The unfortunate ursine, dubbed "Pablo Eskobear," was stuffed by a taxidermist and ended up on display in a shopping mall in Kentucky, where it reportedly still stands.

The movie, directed by Elizabeth Banks from a script by Jimmy Warden, is set in 1985 and uses some real place names and at least one real person's name (the smuggler's). But it's still a load of gleeful b.s., a highly entertaining sick joke. Unlike the real animal, the movie's bear--arguably the newest addition to the stable of Universal Monsters--turns into a drug-crazed spree killer, mauling and dismembering hikers and park personnel, as well as the drug traffickers that enter the forest in search of the lost product.

Cocaine Bear is as violent and gory as any big-studio movie you're likely to see. But it isn't scary, and isn't meant to be; the splatter is played entirely for gruesomely slapstick laughs. Indeed, the exuberance with which the blood and brains and guts fly is the central recurring and escalating gag.

Except for a single mom (Keri Russell), searching the woods for her daughter and the daughter's friend, most of the major characters are scoundrels or cretins or both, though not necessarily unlikable scoundrels and cretins. All of them are broadly played caricatures, so Banks invites us to leave our empathy at the door, take a cathartic break from compassion and hoot at the horrors which befall them. I indulged, and so did the audience with which I saw the film.

The title character, generated through some reasonably seamless combination of virtual and practical effects, has a guileless personality that contrasts with the bloody mayhem. Indeed, you're more likely to feel for the blameless beast than for most of the humans.

The cast is nonetheless excellent, even if most of them are not employing ten percent of their talent. I've long thought that Russell is one of the more underrated and underutilized lead actresses now in movies. I also don't understand why Alden Ehrenreich hasn't become a bigger deal; he's comically muddled yet sympathetic as an elaborately bereaved drug operative. So is O'Shea Jackson as his weary partner, Aaron Holliday as a dimwit would-be mugger they encounter, and Isiah Whitlock, Jr. as a cranky detective.

The film was one of the last in which the late Ray Liotta appeared. He's in his usual strong form as Ehrenreich's father, the heartless local boss of the drug dealers. It's not a rich enough role to be a worthy swansong, but it's a good performance, and the film is dedicated to him. The great Margo Martindale nails every line and facial expression as a hard-up park ranger trying to get the attention of a naturalist (Jesse Tyler Ferguson). Maybe the best of all are Brooklyn Prince and Christian Convery as the two kids, who get across a genuine affection behind their mild, familiar ragging and posing and their dares of each other. They, along with Russell, offer us somebody to unambiguously root for.

Banks has a lot of fun evoking '80s-movie atmosphere, not only with the costumes and cars and posters and overheard pop songs but with her direction. From the full opening credit sequence to the leisurely camera movement to the driving synthesizer score by Mark Mothersbaugh, the film is as much a throwback to the decade in which it's set as last year's Top Gun: Maverick, and the response to both of those films suggests that maybe today's audiences wouldn't object to a return to that style.

PRO AND CONQUISTADOR

Out now from the folks at The Film Detective:

Giant From the Unknown--The title character of this 1958 shocker is Vargas, an enormous, hulking, centuries-old Spanish conquistador who comes back from the dead. Played by former prizefighter Buddy Baer in a grotesque make-up by Universal master Jack Pierce, Vargas terrorizes the folks around California's Big Bear Lake.

This late-show perennial was the first, and probably the best, of the low-budget features made around that time by a Hawaiian-born TV commercial director named Richard Cunha; others include Frankenstein's Daughter, She Demons and Missile to the Moon. It's not a great movie by a long shot, but it has some capable vets in the cast, notably Bob Steele as the prickly sheriff and the redoubtable Morris Ankrum as the archaeologist, and it uses the atmospheric locations well.

Many of us have a soft spot for this absurd little programmer, and this blu-ray release, referred to as a "Deluxe Edition," really is sort of deluxe. Along with a fine new transfer, the disc is packed with special features, including the jolly but obsessively detailed commentary of historian Tom Weaver, who tells us about everything from some rather sad, sordid background on Buddy Baer to a link between the film and the 1957 Kentucky Derby.

Weaver also frequently turns the chatter over to guests, ranging from Larry Blamire of The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra to the late director Cunha himself, in pre-recorded interviews. There's a second commentary track featuring Gary Crutcher, the young actor whose character was whimsically named "Charlie Brown" in the film, and there are documentary shorts about Crutcher and Steele.

Admittedly a bit of overkill for a film on this scale, but fans will find it a giant deal.

MONSTER MASHUP

Happy Halloween!

This year my attire pays tribute...

...to Frankenstein's Bloody Terror, the 1971 American version of the 1968 Spanish horror movie more properly called La Marca del Hombre Lobo (Mark of the Wolfman)...

...the first of the many films written by and starring Jacinto Molina, aka Paul Naschy, as tortured werewolf Waldemar Daninsky. The American title is a notorious cheat; the story includes two werewolves and two vampires but zero Frankenstein monsters. Supposedly the U.S. distributor Sam Sherman had promised somebody a Frankenstein picture, and when that fell through he pasted on an animated prologue explaining that this was what happened when the Frankenstein family was cursed with lycanthropy (as writer Ed Naha put it back in the '70s: "Peeeeeyooooo.").

The poster above claims that it's "ONE OF THE BEST HORROR MOVIES YOU WILL EVER SEE!" Not so much; the story is twisty, not in a good way. Still, it has that luridly creepy yet elegant atmosphere that European horror flicks do so well, and I kind of enjoyed re-watching it this week.

More familiarly, tonight the redoubtable Svengoolie is showing a childhood favorite of Naschy's, Universal's Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man...

...with Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney, Jr., respectively, in the title roles. It's arguably the first movie to exploit the "shared universe" concept later used by Star Wars, Star Trek, DC, Marvel, etc etc.

MAIL PRIVILEGE

In honor of the Post Office, and especially, this past week, of Mr. Bannon's new acquaintances in the Postal Inspection Service, let's remember the 1936 Universal picture Postal Inspector...

...with Ricardo Cortez as the two-fisted Postal Service man and Bela Lugosi as the shady nightclub owner he's after. You can watch it in its full less-than-an-hour-long glory here.

The British producer Alex Gordon said that when he was a kid and he and his film buff friends heard about Lugosi in Dracula, Murders in the Rue Morgue, etc, and were desperate to see him, Postal Inspector was their first chance, being the first of Lugosi's films to pass the British censor.

In recognition of the "zombie cicadas" we've been ominously hearing about in recent weeks...

...Dockyard Press has re-published my short story "Cicada Summer" online.

I SURE DIDN'T SEE THAT ONE COMING

Check out my reviews, online at Phoenix Magazine, of the new Universal-Blumhouse version of The Invisible Man…

…and the 1940 crime programmer Marked Men...

...filmed in Tempe, which shows this Wednesday, March 4, at Tempe History Museum.

The great Brazilian horror star Jose Mojica Marins—aka Ze do Caixao, aka, to his small but devoted cult of English-speaking fans of which I am a proud member, Coffin Joe—has departed this realm of reality, at the age of 83. 

Just recently I was delighted to meet a young Brazilian Lyft driver in Seattle who knew of Coffin Joe (and was astounded that I did). Here and here are some things I've written about him. RIP, you sick and twisted and perversely endearing genius.

On behalf of The Day Gig, I had the honor this week of addressing the Boulder City Sunrise Rotary of Boulder City, Nevada…

…after which I was given a behind-the-scenes tour of Hoover Dam Mercantile. I’m not great with heights, but it’s undeniably a majestic place...

Also, I saw bighorn sheep in the wild for the first time, if memory serves. And I made this pal at a Sinclair station in Boulder City…

BORIS BY BASIL

Halloween is next Tuesday, so...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...it seems like this week's honoree should be one of the all-time classics. So how about...

...Karloff's Frankenstein Monster, in this masterly, iconic rendition from the recently late and much-lamented Famous Monsters of Filmland cover artist Basil Gogos.

Happy (and safe) All Hallows' Eve everybody!

SHE'S WITH THE BANDAGE

Opening this week:

The Mummy—After the usual Universal logo at the start of this movie, we're shown a second, spooky logo informing us that it's part of the "Dark Universe." This seems to be the studio's attempt to start its own franchise-crossing brand in the style of DC or Marvel, drawing on its peerless stable of iconic monsters.

This is fair enough, considering that, with its multi-monster free-for-alls of the '40s like Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and House of Dracula, Universal was overlapping its properties before anyone else. There are fun possibilities in the "Dark Universe" notion, but it's off to an inauspicious start with this first salvo, no less than the fourth film to go by the title The Mummy.

While last week's big opening involved a female superhero, this week's has a female monster, Ahmanet (Sofia Boutella), a lethal Egyptian princess who made a deal with Set for power, committed a bunch of murders, and got mummified and buried alive, far from Egypt, for her trouble. Centuries later, two fortune hunters (Tom Cruise and Jake Johnson) from the U.S. military and an English archaeologist (Annabelle Wallis) find her tomb in Iraq, and, like any self-respecting cultural imperialists, promptly schlep her sarcophagus to England. The desiccated deadly damsel is of course awakened, and starts causing trouble, with the idea of making Cruise her Set-possesed consort.

This movie, directed by Alex Kurtzman, starts out really badly. Even setting aside how unsavory it feels to try to make raffish buddy-picture heroes out of archaeological profiteers in present-day Iraq, the attempt to create a jocular rapport between Cruise and Johnson falls embarrassingly flat on its own terms. And the attempt to generate a roguish romantic tension between Cruise and Wallis plays no better. Hope and Crosby and Dorothy Lamour these people aren't; they don't even rise to the level of Dick Foran, Wallace Ford and Peggy Moran in The Mummy's Hand, from Universal in 1940.

I make these comparisons, by which Cruise et al suffer, not to be ungenerous but because almost everything in this expensive, elaborately-produced movie feels like a hyped-up, computer-enhanced version of something from a cheaper, less elaborate, better old movie. One minute you're reminded of Valerie Leon in Blood From the Mummy's Tomb, and the next of the crows from the Omen flicks, and then of the zombie shockers, and then of Renfield's rat army in Dracula, and then of Griffin Dunne's chatty putrefying ghost in An American Werewolf in London, and so on. But this effect doesn't make this Mummy a gripping repurposing of these tropes—it makes you want to go home and watch the movies of which it reminds you.

The Mummy gets a little more engaging, at least for a while, when it gets to England and Ahmanet starts reeling around sucking the life-force out of hapless victims, because it's more of a conventional monster picture. But pretty soon she and Cruise are detained in an underground complex run by a mysterious scientist (Russell Crowe), and more gratuitous plot twists are piled on. Presumably this is in service of establishing the "Dark Universe" mythos for future films, but mostly it just dilutes whatever momentum the story was starting to develop.

None of these complaints would amount to much, of course, if The Mummy could lay claim to any true scariness. But there isn't one scene in which I can recall being drawn into any authentic, atmospheric dread—as with Alien: Covenant a few weeks ago, everything's too virtual, to insubstantial, too lacking in tactility.

It should be said, though, that the closest the movie gets to any genuine chills is in the performance of  Sofia Boutella as the lithe, malignant, slyly smiling Ahmanet. Boutella was probably the best thing about last year's Star Trek: Beyond, and she's definitely the best thing about this movie.

MOUTH TO HAND

Check out the June issue of Phoenix Magazine...

...for my "Four Corners" column on Back-East-style dining this summer for grounded snowbirds. It's on the stands now, or you can read it here.

Universal's new version of The Mummy opens this weekend. The movie shares elements with the 1971 Hammer schocker Blood From the Mummy's Tomb, so...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...let's give the nod to the severed, but still busy, hand from that movie...

...adapted from Bram Stoker's The Jewel of Seven Stars and featuring the not-unfetching Valerie Leon as the resurrected Egyptian princess.

BRIDE SHARE

Happy June everybody! In the month's honor, something bridal seems in order, so...

Monster-of-the-Week: ...here's Divine as the Bride of Frankenstein...

It's a poster, unearthed from the Dewey Webb Collection, of a live Halloween show at the GiftCenter Pavilion in San Francisco back in 1985. Wish I'd been there.

THE COASTER IS CLEAR

RIP to the lovely Margaret Whitton of Major League, The Best of Times and other ‘80s fare, departed too young at 67.

An early Christmas gift from one of my excellent nephews…

Monster-of-the-Week: …is this week’s honoree, Monster-of-the-Week favorite The Gill-Man, seen here in a detail from the classic Albert Kallis poster for Creature From the Black Lagoon…

…on these splendid coasters pleading that my beloved hometown of Erie, PA, be kept weird. Not too tough an assignment, I’m afraid.

AU REVOIR, HATCHET-FACE

RIP to Kim McGuire, who played Hatchet-Face in the John Waters movie Cry-Baby, passed on at 60.

 

By all accounts, beneath the grotesque makeup she was lovely, inside and out.

I had the honor to play one of the prison guards in that film, who chased Hatchet-Face and Milton (Darren Burrows) through the movie screen showing Creature from the Black Lagoon to a bunch of prisoners in 3-D glasses.

So, in remembrance of McGuire…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week the nod goes to that old fave the Creech, just as he appears before Hatchet-Face bursts through the screen.

I’ll never forget standing for hours behind the movie screen in the Cry-Baby prison location in Jessup, Maryland, watching the clip of the Creature climbing aboard the boat to grab Julie Adams played over and over again, while they worked out the timing of the precise moment when McGuire was to leap through the screen—only three takes were possible, as they only had three screens that had been dried out to burst outward with the proper “starring” effect when jumped through. Something about the repetition of the scene filled me with a weird compassion for the poor Creature and his hopelessly unrequited infatuation.

ELECTRIC BRIDE

Since it’s June, a bridal theme seems in order, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …how about this Bride of Frankenstein doll, I mean action figure, from ReAction Figures that I found recently on a discount table…

Notice that I had to take her “As Is.” You know, for better or worse.

I also like how she seems—not intentionally, I think—to be wearing a pantsuit. Nontraditional chic.

WRAP STAR

In one of his smack-talk riffs in the lead-up to his 1974 “Rumble in the Jungle…”

…the great Muhammad Ali famously dubbed his opponent George Foreman “The Mummy,” for his immobility, and prophesied (accurately) that he, Ali, would be “The Mummy’s Curse” that night (you can hear it about three minutes into this David Frost interview).

So, in Ali’s honor (and Foreman’s, for that matter)…

Monster-of-the-Week: …the nod goes to the Mummy Kharis, aka Lon Chaney, Jr., in 1944’s The Mummy’s Curse…

That’s what made Ali The Champ, I guess. Unlike him, the Mummy always scared the crap out of me...

TUNNEL VISION

This Saturday horror host Svengoolie features the enjoyable 1956 adventure The Mole People...

...in which explorers find a lost underground Mesopotamian civilization served by the bug-eyed, bumpy-skinned, burrowing creatures of the title. So… 

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week’s honoree is any representative of this enslaved class…

If you never seen this Universal effort, it’s worth a look.

FAKE IT 'TIL YOU MAKE IT

Check out my list, on The Robot’s Voice (formerly Topless Robot), of 10 of the greatest movie “monsters” in the Scooby-Doo tradition.

Be forewarned, though: Spoilers galore!

EL VAMPIRO

With Halloween a week out, a classic monster seems in order, so…

Monster-of-the-Week: …let’s give the nod this week to the 1931 Universal Pictures Dracula...but not, this time, the Dracula of the immortal Bela Lugosi, but rather that of Carlos Villarias…

 …who played the Count in the Spanish-language version of the flick shot on the same sets during the same dates as the Lugosi/Tod Browning version, but on the night shift. While Villarias can’t claim quite the grandeur of Lugosi (who he resembled, so that long shots of Lugosi could economically be used in both versions), he’s still very good, as is the film overall, directed by George Melford.

If you've never seen it, I recommend you get out to the TCM-sponsored double feature of both versions playing at 2 and 7 p.m. October 25 at various multiplexes around the country, including several screens here in the Valley and in Tucson. Details here.

The neck that the Villarias Drac understandably wishes to bite belongs, by the way, to the luscious Lupita Tovar, still alive at well over a hundred, and the grandmother of the screenwriting/directing brothers Chris and Paul Weitz.

LEECH THERAPY

RIP to the astoundingly beautiful Coleen Gray, best known for noirs like Kubrick’s The Killing and for the western Red River, passed on this week at 92.

In her honor…

Monster-of-the-Week: …the nod this week goes to the title character in 1960’s The Leech Woman…

…played by Gray, as a vain middle-aged American lady who learns a native African secret for restoring her youthful beauty by leeching away the pineal hormones of men.

 

(amazon)

A minor detail: this results in their deaths.