Screen Screed: Thoughts on Movies From a Lifelong Eater of Cinema

      Swamp Thing       Based on a DC Comics character, Swamp Thing (1982), directed by Wes Craven, uses the science experiment gone wrong idea to propel its story.  Adrienne Barbeau, impressive not only physically but also performance-wise, plays replacement scientist Alice Cable, one of several curiously named people in this entertaining creature feature shot in a South Carolina cypress swamp.      Ray Wise (Leland Palmer in Twin Peaks ) is Dr. Alec Holland, a plant enthusiast researching the effects of a serum resembling flat Mountain Dew.  He works with his sister in a sealed laboratory located in a small ghost town flooded long ago.  With the confidence of a practiced ladies' man, Alec Holland flirts with Alice Cable but to no avail.  She's a bit grossed out by the swamp, the bugs, the heat, the calf-deep water hiding God knows what.  Alec Holland, by contrast, rhapsodizes about the same environment.  Hi...

     Fish People      "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."                                                                          H.P. Lovecraft      "Dagon" (1919) and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (1936) by Lovecraft (1890 - 1937) provide the inspiration for Stuart Gordon's 2001 horror film, Dagon , a blending of humor, weirdness, and ickiness, working well due to a quickly unfolding premise and atmosphere characterized by relentless rain and a setting made terrible by villagers worshipping an ancient sea god, Dagon.      Many years before the present of the story, the village of Imboco, suffering from lack of the formerly abundant fishing that brought prosperi...

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      Adult DC      Director Zack Snyder's preferred cut of Watchmen (2009), a DC Universe movie with an alternate world history timeline, taking place in 1985 with lots of flashbacks to the 1940s when a previous bunch of Watchmen battled evil, left me wondering often who these characters are and why I should care about them.      I didn't expect to feel this way about this movie, such a praised work, a favorite of one of my relatives.  What it has going for it is an original look, a premise depicting a 1980s America run still by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, surely a nightmare scenario by itself.  The film seems ambiguous in its showing of America as a relatively innocent country, when in fact Vietnam was the idea of American politicians and intelligence men.  The desire on the part of the CIA to corner the market on Southeast Asia heroin is not a subtlety this film addresses.  In fact, Nixon sends to Southeast A...

      The Scariest Prop in the Movies       The Screaming Skull (1958), directed by and starring Alex Nicol, is a loose remake of Rebecca , directed by Hitchcock, from the Daphne du Maurier novel.  Eric Whitlock, played by John Hudson, is the kind of father figure-type husband who says to his wife, "I forbid it," and other controlling directives.  Jenni Whitlock (Peggy Webber) is new to Eric's house out in the country, a big white place with long columns, a big property, a cement-enclosed pond with lily pads and frogs, and a worker, Mickey (Alex Nicol), missing some brain matter, but intensely loyal to the late Mrs. Whitlock, whose body, nothing creepy about this at all, is buried on the property under a trimmed lawn by a marker shaped like a squat white obelisk.      For some reason, Mickey has Mrs. Whitlock's skull.  He dug it up, I guess.  He uses it to terrify the mentally fragile new Mrs. Whitlock.  In Reb...

     Berlin Alexanderplatz      In West Germany in the 1970s a theatrical film director could easily switch back and forth to making TV movies, also.  Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic thirteen part plus feature film length epilogue, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) aired on German television and was somehow released theatrically in a small number of venues in the U.S.  Maybe audiences went to it over a few days, in installments?  In any case, I recall Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel, Chicago film critics with their own TV show, giving it their almost trademarked, "Thumbs Up!"      Ebert or Siskel mentioned how the long format of the fifteen hour thirty-one minute movie allowed the viewer to roll along with a big story full of many subtleties.      Having watched the film myself--it took me about three weeks to watch it--I can attest firsthand to the raw power of the film, starting with its protagonist actor, Günter La...

      Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders      Rick Morales, director of TV and cinematic animated movies, made this film in 2016, a year before star Adam West (Bruce Wayne/Batman) died.  Batman, Robin, Commissioner Gordon, Catwoman, and the rest, exist in a seemingly pre-twenty-first century milieu.  Batman's car, a 1955 Lincoln Futura concept vehicle, is seventy-one years old in our 2016 viewing eyes, but somehow it still looks futuristic, comic book style.  Batman's power supplies run on nuclear energy.  As a wealthy man, a billionaire probably, Bruce Wayne, unmarried with just one servant, a ward and the ward's aunt to support, has mega-money to spend on crime-fighting supplies.  He also makes donations to charities, supporting Gotham City arts.  A diva visiting from Italy is likely to be introduced to bachelor Wayne and his always present "youthful ward," read catamite , Dick Grayson.      In this anima...