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

      An Amorphous Mass Is Coming To Get You!      John Carpenter's The Fog (1980) underwhelmed me.  Horror films are supposed to be scary.  I haven't seen his most famous film, Halloween (1978), though from what I've seen it's quite a scarefest, with a maniacal masked knife-wielding villain and an atmospheric and relentless musical score by Carpenter himself, plus a great performance by a young Jamie Lee Curtis      My expectations for The Fog spoiled my viewing, I guess.  Having enjoyed Adrienne Barbeau in Swamp Thing (reviewed in this blog) I assumed she would enliven Carpenter's film as she did the swampy movie.  Adrienne Barbeau is a good actress as well as a very good-looking woman with a killer body.  I don't apologize for noticing the hotness of Barbeau, a quality on display, too, in The Fog .      She plays a radio disc jockey putting in long hours at a station located at the pinnacle o...

      The Seventh Victim, a Val Lewton Production      1943, mid-war, Val Lewton continues his series, beginning with Cat People (1942), of low budget black and white horror films that will include I Walked With a Zombie , Curse of the Cat People , and the most sinister one, The   Ghost Ship .      Kirk Douglas in The Bad and the Beautiful plays a director/producer based on Val Lewton.  Kirk makes a popular low budget horror film utilizing shadows and suspense to great effect, kind of like Cat People , right?  Lewton's artistry is not reflected in The Bad and the Beautiful ; Douglas's Lewton is a go-getter, a climber, a man willing to compromise his principles, a fast-liver, the kind of man who'd toss Lana Turner in a swimming pool.       The Seventh Victim (1943), produced by Lewton and directed in a debut by Mark Robson ( The Ghost Ship , Von Ryan's Express , Earthquake ), shows Kim Hunter in her first...

      Slow Seeing      Some years ago I played a trick on my mind, putting my La Dolce Vita DVD in the player, finding a randomly selected spot from which to begin, and then playing it forward at one-sixth speed while listening to music, an immersive experience of sight and sound.      Though I'd seen the film many times, the short section I spent an hour with looked as if the actors and actresses, the extras, the backgrounds, were all swimming in see-through liquid.  Arm movements, fingers gesturing, heads moving, lips pursing, mouths saying Italian words, all resembled a dumb show, reminding me of William S. Burroughs' line, "...fall slow as opal chips through glycerine."  The majestic graceful catlike movements of Anouk Aimée walking towards Marcello Mastroianni in one long (1/6 speed) shot looked to me like the greatest pan of an actress walking across a room I'd ever seen.      To have such big stars to work...

      I Sometimes Want to See Jane Fonda, So...      I didn't watch any movies for a few weeks, but I saw Comes a Horseman (1978), directed by Alan J. Pakula, yesterday, was somewhat impressed by it, although overall it's not a movie exciting me now as I think about it.      This failure has to do with the film's characterization of the villainous antagonist, J.W. Ewing (Jason Robards).  Ewing is a landowner and cattle rancher in 1940s Colorado who's under the thumb of an oilman, Neil Atkinson (George Grizzard), requiring the latter's support to maintain his ranch as long as he submits to oil drilling.  The drilling process first requires surveys and tests of the geological strata beneath the landscape.  It turns out the oil is probably underneath Ella Connors' (Jane Fonda) land, a property she inherited from her deceased father.  She now struggles to work her own cattle ranch with the assistance of family friend Dodge...

      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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