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The All Things HORROR thread~!


J.T.

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Of course, Frankenstein is perhaps the greatest entry in the brilliant Universal run where they practically invented talking horror pictures, so it's not like it's a fair fight anyway. (If it weren't for King Kong and maybe Island of Lost Souls, the original Frankenstein would easily get my vote for the best horror film of the 1930s.) Universal Frank vs Hammer Frank may not be Mike Tyson versus Glass Joe, but it's at least Mr. Sandman versus Don Flamenco.

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Has anyone seen the Spanish language Dracula Universal shot concurrently with Browning's? I've always been curious about it.

Yep, and it's a fascinating comparison. The guy who plays Dracula just doesn't have Lugosi's intensity, even though he's doing the exact same stuff on the exact same sets; and their Renfield chews even MORE scenery than Dwight Frye did. But in every other department, the Spanish version is a better picture. They pick up and move the camera, so that you don't constantly get the feeling that you're watching a filmed stage play like in the English version. And the women's costumes actually showed cleavage, which is something the straitlaced Victorian atmosphere kinda needed.
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Also, Jingus is wrong. Bride of Frankenstein is the crown jewel of the Universal Monster movies.

Hell, as far as I'm concerned, it's the crown jewel of Universal Studios and their one hundred year history.

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From what I remember the Spanish Dracula smokes it. The English version has three good things and those are the three good actors spoken of by Jingus. Horror of Dracula stomps both of them into the dirt though, IMO. 

 

Curse vs. OG Frank might be way closer to Mike vs. Glass Joe than you think. At least Mike vs. Bald Bull*. And though I haven't seen it in forever, Bride is indeed supposed to be the crowning jewel. Nothing beats that ending. 

 

* Note: I am referencing the NES game because I had no idea there is other Punch-Outs and had to look it up. Shows how much of a gamer I am.

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Lee's Dracula suffered from a lack of screentime and dialogue. He was the snarling red-eyed monster, briefly glimpsed and rarely spoken. Hell, I think one of the movies has him with ZERO lines; which is an incredibly stupid way to misuse Christopher Lee, whose voice is his very best quality.

 

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1975).  Lee is on record as stating that he hated all of Dracula's lines in that movie because he felt that the dialogue was corny and stupid. He threatened to quit the picture, but the director kept Lee on board by reducing his lines to zero.

 

Dracula had an extensive speaking part..  Lee just flat out refused to say one single word.

 

Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein are about as perfect of a pair of movies as you can get.  They totally smashes any Hammer version of Frankenstein.

 

Lee IMO was a slightly better Dracula than Lugosi, but Universal's Dracula is a far superior Dracula movie than anything Hammer put on screen.

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Lee's Dracula suffered from a lack of screentime and dialogue. He was the snarling red-eyed monster, briefly glimpsed and rarely spoken. Hell, I think one of the movies has him with ZERO lines; which is an incredibly stupid way to misuse Christopher Lee, whose voice is his very best quality.

So the story there goes that Lee wanted to quit, but was talked into doing one more by the producers guilting him about the jobs that would be lost. When Lee read the script though, he said the dialogue was terrible and refused to speak a word of it. It was decided a mute Christopher Lee is better than no Christopher Lee and there you have it.

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Dueling replies, damn, y'all are on point.

I know the story anyway, and I've always thought: uh, is it THAT hard to come up with speakable dialogue? "Geez, Chris, if you hate our lines so much, how about you just write your own stuff?" I take it as another knock against Hammer that they'd rather waste Lee in a non-speaking role rather than go to the effort to somehow write a few decent lines.

As for Frankenstein vs Bride; I just prefer the original picture. Bride feels overstuffed, and suffers from body-count padding and too much comic relief. And I like my monster mute, I felt like it kinda took away from his character when he could talk. And I think the first film had moments that the sequel never topped, like the poetry of the scene where the monster looks up worshipfully to the light; or in the final showdown in the windmill, when he and Victor are glaring at each other through the meshing clockwork of the mill's gears. It's meant to be scary, in a way that the sequel never quite touches. And yeah I know this goes right against my usual grain, since a bigger-and-better-and-funnier sequel is something I'm usually quite partial to (Aliens, Evil Dead 2, etc). I just think that the original Frankenstein got the purity of the horror form much better than its jokey self-aware sequel.

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TheNightBringsCharlie.jpg

 

Does anybody remember this old piece of shit? I remember it being pretty entertaining when I was a kid and man is that a great cover and title. Is it on Netflix by any chance? I guess it got a DVD release from some company called Twisted Images that I am having difficulty finding info about.

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Since we were talking about it before, Dracula Has Risen From The Grave is on TCM right now (Prince was right before; HORROR EXPRESS~ is after) and it's a blast. Really fun, cheeky characters, gorgeous women, a cool beer hall scene with absurd drinking game, and the Count dies a seriously awesome death, maybe the best in the series.

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Since we were talking about it before, Dracula Has Risen From The Grave is on TCM right now (Prince was right before; HORROR EXPRESS~ is after) and it's a blast. Really fun, cheeky characters, gorgeous women, a cool beer hall scene with absurd drinking game, and the Count dies a seriously awesome death, maybe the best in the series.

 

Well, damn.

 

And yeah, I posted the death scene in the RIP Christopher Lee thread.   Dracula Has Risen From The Grave is my favorite movie in the Hammer Dracula catalogue.

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Watched We Are Still Here last night.  A couple, who recently had their son die in a car crash, move to a new house and begin feeling a presence.  The wife thinks it's the presence of their son.  It is not.  I'm not too well versed in movies that are more than 20 years old, but this definitely had the feel of something from around the 70s or 80s.  There's one particular scene right at the end of the second act/beginning of the third act when things really start to go off the rails where I was thinking "this movie is AMAZING," but there are enough problems in the ensuing mayhem (several moments that are either hurt by the special effects or aren't really earned) that I had to dial back my enthusiasm a bit.  Still very good and well worth watching.

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It's the final one! We swear!

They should have just gone all the way and put a jump scare in the last 15 seconds of the trailer.  I mean, if you're going to troll horror fans, do it right.

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The hell with these dumb suburbanites. I want the gun-toting Mexican gang members back.

 

And I suspect this picture will end with everyone being either dead or presumed so, the kids being possessed and the evil coven still being at large~!

 

Dun. Dun. Dun.

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Another ringing endorsement for We Are Still Here right here. The charcoal demons owe a whole hell of a lot to the leper pirates from The Fog. I really dug these crispy creatures and the charbroiled demises they delivered. Besides the central Fog-inspired antagonists, the shady town bearer of bad tidings reminded me of Joseph Cotten circa Baron Blood.

I really didn’t notice any glaring holes in the FX department but that might have been because I was so giddy for all hell to finally break loose. Probably the issue was the effects were too lazy and/or uninspired with the splatter/fake-looking arterial spray whenever the fire demons were literally ripping through townfolks left and right. Also one of the trailers gave the most memorable kill away. I definitely think the creature design was leaps and bounds better than the gore FX.

The fact that the carnage was so backloaded building up to that killer finale will probably have many bitching about pacing or that they were annoyed by the goofy characters waiting to get to it. Whatever. I actually thought this was a Glass Eye Pix production since Larry Fessenden had a cameo but it's not. So I was kind of prepared for the murderous mayhem to be sparse building up to the finale. Of course considering this was most heavily compared to The House By The Cemetery in all the reviews and hype I've read, if anybody seeing this could actually bare all the boredom in something like that waiting for the next bit of gore to spurt, they shouldn’t be too bothered by this at all. I just loathe that badly dubbed brat Bob to this day; what an annoying little asshole.

Of course, besides the pacing, the other thing that was a total throwback to any Fulci movie is that you kind of have to figure that shit out for yourself as to exactly what was going on with all the supernatural gobbledy-gook about the house demanding a sacrifice every 30 years and so on and so forth. Solid love letter to Fulci; I noticed they even made up the psychic friends’ idiot son’s girlfriend to resemble Catriona MacColl from those films.

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We Are Still Here

I've seen some hype for it. Not interested.

 

a total throwback to any Fulci movie

...I immediately retract my previous statement.

 

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linkz R ded

I caught a recent zomromcom, Life After Beth. It's about a dude whose life has been ruined by the sudden death of his girlfriend... but then he discovers that she's mysteriously been brought back to life, with no memory of what happened. But, naturally, there's signs that she might've Come Back Wrong. Sadly, the movie never seems to have many ideas of what to do with this concept; there's little material here that wasn't covered in Return of the Living Dead 3, let alone all the other zombie-romantic-comedies since then. The exact same shit happens that ALWAYS happens, she gets worse and worse and then suddenly everything goes to hell when a bunch of other zombies show up. However, the film does have a secret weapon: that being, Aubrey Plaza is the zombified girlfriend in question. And she is fuckin' fearless, yo, throwing herself into this performance as if she'd just snorted an entire cocktail of various pharmaceutical powders right before every single take. The supporting cast is way above-average too: somehow the filmmakers were all like "we need a couple of good hands to play the girl's kooky-but-long-suffering parents... get me John C. Reilly and Molly Shannon" and that actually happened. So it's too bad that the script relies on the same old "nobody trusts each other and everyone's always getting into screaming arguments" cliches to fill so much time.

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I really didn’t notice any glaring holes in the FX department but that might have been because I was so giddy for all hell to finally break loose. Probably the issue was the effects were too lazy and/or uninspired with the splatter/fake-looking arterial spray whenever the fire demons were literally ripping through townfolks left and right.

 

I'm always so worried about posting anything that might be considered a spoiler, that I tend to not get into specifics.  What you said there about the arterial spray looking bad, I felt that way about one particular kill.  The other time was when that one guy was getting sucked down into the staircase, but they never really showed him being pulled down, they just (if I'm remembering right) did a series of shots where his body was deeper and deeper into the ground each time.  It came off kind of confusing.  I guess that one was a lack of FX rather than bad FX.

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