A Creepy Quartet

I have yet again dipped my toe in the vast sea of old school horror cinema.

The funny thing is, some of these old films can be quite good, even though they really are pretty bad. I know that makes little sense, but some of them have a certain quality to them that comes from a mixture of passion and ingenuity. I don't want to sound all hipstery and “everything used to be better”, but they couldn't rely on cheap digital effects and overly dark scenes, back then. Something many modern films have in abundance. And don't get me started on shaky-cam...

Anyway, first up is The Haunted Palace (1963), by Roger Corman, starring the inimitable Vincent Price. It's essentially The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, by H.P. Lovecraft, but toned down. The film was billed as one of Corman's Poe movies, but the only Poe in it is a poem. It's pretty standard fare for the time, that is gothic, overly dramatic and all shot in a studio.

I saw it back in the 80's and didn't care for it, but now, I found it has a wonderful old charm about it. If you're into 60's velvet and paint style horror, do give it a watch.

Next up is Psychomania a.k.a. The Death Wheelers (1973). Here we have a gang of bored young people, who get their kicks driving their bikes fast and harassing the townsfolk. Their leader Tom, finds a way to come back from the dead and when he actually succeeds, he urges his gang to follow suit. For some reason you are indestructible if you return from the grave like this. Then stuff happens.

What makes this film worth mentioning, is that they aren't zombies or vampires, or anything like that. The movie does it's own thing and I like that. All things considered, I can't recommend this. Sure, there are worse films out there, but also so many that are better.

Dr.Terror's House of Horrors (1965) looks and feels like a Hammer Production, but it is in fact not. It's produced by Amicus Productions, who made several anthology films like this. A group of men share a train carriage, and have their fortunes told, leading into their own segments. It felt like a prototype for better films of it's kind that came later. The stories vary in quality from lousy to passable, but what makes this movie stand out is the cast; Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Donald Sutherland are the most famous, but almost everyone is a famous face in British cinema. It's also the only film I can recall where Christopher Lee is terrified. All in all an okay movie, but not that good.

Finally, we get to Terror Train (1980). This is the best film on the list by far. A group of graduating college students partying on a train get killed off, one by one. The killers takes the costumes of his latest victims as he stalks them on the train. It's for the most part pretty standard fare, but a few things need mentioning. First of all, it stars David Copperfield in one of his only movie roles. Second, the mood and the setting is really good. Third, and we are heading into spoiler territory here, the film pretty much tells you who the killer is from the start. Yeah, they try to make you doubt it, but it's super obvious. Finally, again minor spoiler, the main star is none other than Jamie Lee Curtis. She had starred in and survived Halloween only two years earlier, and not once did I get the feeling that she was in real danger. I mean, come on, if Michael Myers couldn't kill her, how is this third rate slasher supposed to?

That's it for this time. If you don't want to watch any of the films mentioned above, there are plenty of others to choose from. So until next time, have a great week!

Documentaries and the Flu

Hello there,

In case the title confused you, I'm not talking about documentaries about the flu, but the fact that I have the flu and I've been watching documentaries.

As a consequence of sitting here, filled to the brim with phlegm, I have nothing else for you than to link a couple of really interesting documentaries I watched yesterday.
The first is about Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Lord of Propaganda, based on his diaries. I found it a pretty interesting look into his life.
The second is about Doctor Morell, Hitler's personal physician. it goes over all the insanely illegal (today) drugs he pumped into Hitler on a daily basis.

So, if you're in the mood for a bit of History, have at it. I'm going back to coughing a lot.

Until next time, have a great week!

Goebbels: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bic0m3P3a6I
Morell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpStk3N1dSU

The Fifth Cord

Today we're diving back into the world of the Italian cinema of the 70's. A film recommended to me by a friend called The Fifth Cord (1971).

The Fifth Cord is a Giallo, which is Italian for yellow. The Giallo genre are thrillers, sometimes spilling into horror, and possibly with an erotic slant. The name is derived from post fascist era Italian paperback novels of this genre, which had yellow covers. The classic Giallo has a killer with black leather gloves, stalking and killing a bunch of pretty women. Lurid entertainment in other words.

The Fifth Cord is a murder mystery, pure and simple. Well, not that simple as the plot is actually really good. In hindsight, I should have figured out who the killer was, but I was nowhere close. As a Giallo, it's interesting as some but not all, victims are beautiful women. Some victims are men as well.

Plot wise we have the protagonist, Andrea Bild (Franco Nero), a reporter with a drinking problem who tries to figure out who the killer is. The police suspects that it could be him, but it's pretty obvious that it isn't. That's not a spoiler BTW, it's super obvious. The killer keeps on killing, and leaves a glove with fingers removed as a calling card. Every consecutive murder has one more finger removed than the last, leading the police to believe that there will be five murders in total. This is where the title comes from, by the way. I don't get the cord bit either, but the original title is Giornata nera per l'ariete, which translates to Black day for the ram. Go figure.

The cinematography is exceptional, it really is. I could go on gushing about the composition in certain scenes, but just take my word for it.

The music is by none less than Ennio Morricone himself, so that's another feather in the cap. Though it should be said that the intro music will make your ears bleed. It is absolutely ghastly. Once you get past that, it's a fine film.

Obviously, if you're not a fan of films like these, you wont' like it, but if your cinematic omnivore, or you want something a little bit different, go for it.

As an aside, I just learned that the father of the modern zombie movie, George A. Romero has passed on. There are countless films, shows, comics and games that wouldn't be what they are without his original work. Rest in Piece and all that.

Until we see each other next, have a great week!

Rogue One

So, I finally got around to watching the latest Star Wars movie, Rogue One. (2016)

Yeah yeah, I'm a year late, but better late than never. So this is what I thought of the film. I'll skip spoilers as much as possible, but treat this as mild spoiler territory, just in case.

In a nutshell the story is this: a group of rebels attack an imperial base to retrieve the plans to the original Death Star. Sure, there's a lot more to it than this, but that's the really important bit. Rogue One is set a few days before A New Hope (1977) and goes almost right into it.

Much like Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Rogue One is a very pretty movie. The effects are gorgeous, and really solid. The acting is good, solid work all around. The music is wonderful, even though it's not by John Williams. Fun fact: some scenes are unused shots from Episode IV: A New Hope, and some outfits were recycled from the original trilogy. This is smart as it gives a subconscious connection to the original trilogy.

Speaking of the original trilogy, Governor Tarkin has a prominent spot in Rogue One, but as you may know, the original actor - Peter Cushing - died in 1994 so they couldn't really use him. They could have used another actor like say, Charles Dance, but instead they digitized Cushing's face onto an actor. For being computer graphics spliced into a live action film, they did a marvelous job. It is a tricky job to say the least, but they got very close to pulling it off. They also tried it with another character but that looked really awful. Mixed success there.

The script is mostly good, but they couldn't resist putting in scenes paralleling the original trilogy. You'll recognize them when you see them, and I wish they hadn't bothered. Also, some scenes are needlessly dark which makes it hard to see things, but they weren't too many.

My biggest complaints about the movie are as follows:

• A ship jumps to Hyperspace way too close to a planet, something that goes against deeply established Star Wars lore.
• They manage to communicate long distance while in Hyperspace. This would be impossible as the signal would have to travel faster than the ship.
• If you push an object in space that's bigger than you, it takes considerable energy, and if that object rams into another thing, that thing should move, not break. Also, the energy originally needed, would at the very least double, but apparently the laws of physics are very different when you're far far away...

These things are small, and you may think that they are excessively petty and ultra nerdy. And yeah, maybe they are, but fixing them would have been so easy, and it seems so sloppy to leave them like they are.

I could go on nitpicking, but I won't. The other things I could complain about are more or less a matter of taste, so I'll leave it to you to decide.

At the end of the day, Rogue One is an entertaining film, and I had a good time watching it. If you like Star Wars, there's no reason not to watch this film.

Other fun trivia: this is the first and (so far) only Star Wars movie without the yellow text scrawl in the beginning, as well as the only film in the franchise that never mentions the name Skywalker.

I'll stop ranting here, and until next time, have a great week!

Kathy Rain

One of the games I picked up on Steam during the Summer Sale (still going as I write this) is a game I've wanted to play for about a year: Kathy Rain.

Kathy Rain is a Point & Click adventure game in the style popular in the 80's and 90's. It runs in the style of Gabriel Knight, King's Quest, The Secret of Monkey Island etc.

What's important to note is that although Kathy Rain looks and feels like a 90's game, it's made in 2016. This is important, as the game is a lot more player friendly than it's older cousins used to be. For one, there's no Moon Logic around. For another, you can't get stuck by using an item in the wrong place. The game, or rather the protagonist, Kathy, tells you if there's no point in asking a person about a particular subject or showing them an item. So there's none of that annoying repetitious “That means nothing to me,” spam that older games often had. So over all, it's a very comfortable and easy to use game. And there's no, what's known as pixel bitching, hunting for one pixel on the screen to find a clue in order to proceed.

That's not to say that it's a cake walk. Like all games in this style, there are lots of puzzles, some are really easy, others are fairly hard. I'm no expert at puzzle solving, but I managed to solve most of them pretty easily. A couple took some time, and I had to look up the solution to one. This one puzzle is the closest thing Kathy Rain has to Moon Logic, but even so, it's nowhere as bad as the old games.

The game is set in 1995, and follows our heroine, the eponymous Kathy Rain, a tough journalist-to-be biker. She heads back to her childhood town to discover what her grandfather was up to and to deal with some stuff from her past. This is the kind of story that could be explained naturally or it could be supernatural, ultimately it's up to you. I think the supernatural fits the narrative a bit better. Kathy is a fearless, snarky kind of person, which have annoyed some gamers, but I didn't mind. I think the game adequately explains her personality, and demonstrates that her attitude is more of a coping mechanism than a defect of character.

It took me about eight hours to finish the game, which I think is a decent length as it makes it easier to keep the whole story in mind. The narrative is pretty focused, but it doesn't railroad you either. There are humorous elements, sad moments, creepy happenings and more. I got a Twin Peaks vibe from it, but it's definitely its own thing.

Bottom line: Kathy Rain is an amazing game. I always liked the genre, but couldn't get past the borderline impossible puzzles and unintuitive gameplay. Kathy Rain is absolutely worth it, if you're even slightly curious about the genre of Point & Click adventures.

Until we meet again, have a great week!