Tag: scary movies

Sci-Fi Classic, ‘The Thing’ (1951)

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The Thing (1951) - Rotten Tomatoes

Welcome to Nooze-free Sunday! It’s also on the verge of being reader-free: where did everybody go?

So yesterday we watched The Thing (from Another World), the original film classic from 1951. The date’s important: by 1951, “flying saucers” could still be called “flying discs” and hadn’t yet morphed into a whole cultural industry. Astoundingly enough, this movie does a superb job of conveying the menace of the unknown. It has stood up very well indeed to the passage of 70 years, outlasting and outperforming scores of modern UFO-themed movies.

You do have to laugh off some evolutionary palaver, and accept the premise that intelligent vegetable life on a planet far, far away can produce a being that looks like James Arness.

But never mind all that! There are the guys standing around, trying to figure out how to get the flying saucer out of the ice at the North Pole, and skipping blithely ahead into horrible danger. This is suspenseful. I admit it creeped me out. Someone should’ve been there to cry, “Wait, wait, please wait! Are we sure this is a good idea?” Not that anyone would listen.

Well, it turns out not to be a good idea. Meanwhile, the general back in Anchorage keeps transmitting orders that are always two steps behind the ongoing disaster. Typical!

The Thing (not to be confused with Joe Biden’s description of the Declaration of Independence) is an unpretentious, solid, classic science fiction/horror movie–just the ticket for a dreary grey day in the middle of the winter.

Memory Lane: Coming Home from the Scary Movie

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Time Machine, The (1960) | Nostalgia Central

Morlocks! I knew they had to be around here somewhere!

I’m 11 years old, The Time Machine is playing at the old Forum Theater, it’s Friday night–and by some miracle, my folks let me go to see the movie. I walked there with my friend Jimmy, from down the street. He’s 12.

Okay, we’ve seen the movie, time to walk home. We could’ve gone via Main Street, but I guess we were feeling kind of grown-up and adventurous so we went by way of the back streets instead. There was nowhere near as much street lighting then as there is now.

It didn’t take us long to get the creeps. The Morlocks, the baddies in the movie… what if there were Morlocks hiding in the darkness, getting ready to jump out on us? We picked up the pace a little. We laughed nervously at our fanciful idea–I mean, come on, really! That didn’t make the Morlocks go away. Happily, we made it home before they attacked us. Dawdling Morlocks.

I wonder if kids even have this experience anymore. All it did for us was to enhance the movie experience and provide me with a pleasant memory. I wonder about the state of their imaginations.

Gee, for some reason the daily nooze this month makes me think of Morlocks… a lot…

Four Movies for Fun

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Night Tide (1961) - IMDb

I can’t help it: I love movies that don’t have a prayer of being true. I love monster movies. I get a kick out of a good ghost story. And somehow these movies always seem at their best in the fall.

Here are four of my favorite films along these lines, all of them available somewhere on the Internet. Try Youtube first, then amazon. These are sure to brighten any October weekend.

*Night Tide, starring a brand-new Dennis Hopper. How often do you get to see a scary movie about a mermaid? Despite American International’s trademark cheesy special effects, this movie does contain moments of real eeriness and beguiling fantasy. You’ll be surprised by how un-awful it is.

*The Crawling Eye. A monster movie set in the Swiss Alps–how cool is that? I once nagged my wife to watching it with me–in truth, she hates monster movies–and she had to admit it wasn’t bad. (As you can see, I have set the bar a little low. But “not that bad” is a real achievement for most of these films.) Hey, the crawling eye creeping out of the icy fog–ooooh! That’s scary, boys and girls!

*Zacherley’s Horrible Horror–here we leave “not that bad” behind and plunge into the world of “oh, good grief!” Zacherley, who was surely the greatest horror movie host ever, has assembled a dazzling array of trailers for hopelessly bad films, interrupted by his own weird humor. You don’t want to miss The Alligator People!

*The Uninvited–I’ll throw in a genuinely good one, just to show you my heart’s in the right place–not in a jar on Robert Bloch’s desk. Starring Ray Milland, The Uninvited is one of the all-time best ghost movies, and seasoned with enough humor to keep you from hiding under the sheets. It’s got everything–and all without a second of gore, profanity, or fornication.

Well, there you have it–four October movie treats. Let me know how you like ’em.

A Very Good Scary Movie

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The Innkeepers ~ Trailer - YouTube

Some of us love ghost stories. I love them because they blow out the cobwebs and then they’re over–they don’t just go on and on and on, like socialism or the Drag Queen Story Hour. When the story’s over, it’s over. It won’t be there tomorrow.

The Innkeepers, from 2011, gave us some honest frights when we watched it last night. Real goosebumps. They did it without gory slasher schiff; in fact, the scariest parts of the movie were not scenes in which you actually saw something scary, but those scenes that made you anticipate seeing something really awful. That’s not an easy effect to achieve.

Sara Paxton and Pat Healy play Claire and Luke, the two young caretakers of the Yankee Peddlar Hotel, which is about to go out of business and therefor has only a couple of guests. To stave off boredom, Claire and Luke investigate a tradition that the hotel is haunted. That turns out to be a really bad idea.

Kelly McGillis is there as a formerly famous actress who’s now a New Age guru. Claire should have taken her advice. Then again, I’m not a psychic and I’d say “Don’t go down into the cellar,” too. You don’t need to be a psychic to see that things at the old hotel are getting very pear-shaped very fast.

I think I can promise that The Innkeepers will give you a few good jolts. The acting is superb and the sets are captivating. And it’ll make you forget all about the nooze for 90 minutes or so.

For a Pleasant Little Scare: ‘A Warning to the Curious’

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M. R. James wrote the best ghost stories ever, and one of those gems is A Warning to the Curious. This was made into a short film (50 minutes long) some years ago and currently available on Youtube.

How good an idea is it to dig up an ancient artifact supposedly protected by a supernatural guardian? Even outside of an M.R. James story, probably not. A Warning to the Curious is about what happens to an amateur archaeologist who ignores the warning.

The thing that makes this little movie go is its spectacular photography and ominous-looking locations. If you were looking for ghosts anywhere, these places would be where you’d find them. Flat fens where it’s hard to tell where the beach ends and the water begins, stone buildings that look like they grew out of the landscape a thousand years ago, a train station smack in the middle of nowhere–sit and look. You won’t see places like those every day.

We watched in this afternoon, to take our minds off stressful things, and it does do that. It does it very well.