cinema history class: hell of the living dead (1980)

The session: The Dead are Alive!
Keith shows us four Italian ripoffs of Dawn of the Dead 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 1: Hell of the Living Dead (1980)
Directed by Bruno Mattei

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Completely unfamiliar.

Plot Synopsis:
When an accident at a chemical research facility in Papua New Guinea releases a mysterious toxic gas, the dead begin returning to life as flesh-eating zombies. A television news crew investigating the outbreak joins forces with a team of commandos sent to the region. Together, they travel through the jungle, encountering increasingly gruesome scenes of carnage as the infection spreads. As they struggle to survive, they discover that the disaster may be connected to a sinister international effort to address overpopulation.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
There's a lot wrong with this movie. A LOT.

The plot is bizarre, the storytelling is messy, and some of the proceedings are downright silly. There are moments when the movie is ugly, and not necessarily in the way a horror movie is supposed to be ugly. And the whole thing feels like it was cobbled together from pieces of other movies.

The influences are pretty obvious. There's more than a little Cannibal Holocaust in here, along with a generous helping of Apocalypse Now. And, of course, the obligatory George Romero zombie influences. It's almost as though the filmmakers watched a bunch of movies they liked and decided to make all of them at once.

And then there's the stock footage. Lots and lots of stock footage. I understand the desire to establish an exotic jungle setting without actually having to film everything in an exotic jungle. But did we really need all those shots of birds? What was the point? Were the birds somehow involved in the zombie outbreak? Were they conducting surveillance? Did somebody get a terrific deal on a reel of bird footage and decide they were damn well going to use every frame?

Another problem is the storytelling. It reminded me of something that bothers me about a lot of modern action movies. Within any given scene, it's usually perfectly clear what's happening. You know who the characters are, what they're trying to accomplish, and what's standing in their way. But how one scene connects to the next, or how all the scenes fit together into a coherent story, is another matter entirely. The individual pieces make sense. The movie doesn't always.

And the ending? Let's just say I don't think anyone is going to be terribly surprised by how things turn out.

So why did I give this movie a relatively high rating?

Because somewhere in the second half, I noticed something strange.

I was watching another scene in which a group of living people was desperately trying to escape a bunch of zombies. I was still bothered by the movie's incoherence, its silliness, and its general messiness. But I was also completely absorbed in what was happening. I wanted to know how these people were going to get out of this particular predicament. I was on edge. I was genuinely interested in what happened next.

Somehow, despite everything the movie was doing wrong, it had grabbed me.

And that's not nothing.

I should also give credit to the makeup effects, which are excellent. The zombies look appropriately revolting, and there's some genuinely impressive gruesomeness on display.

Ultimately, Hell of the Living Dead is a badly assembled, frequently ridiculous, sometimes irritating movie. But it's also a movie that managed to hold my attention and generate real suspense, even while I was mentally cataloging its many shortcomings.

I can't call it a good movie. But I can't dismiss it as a bad one, either.

Sometimes a movie doesn't have to make much sense to work. Sometimes it just has to make you want to see what happens next.

And, against considerable odds, this one did.

And the strangest thing of all? Joe...Joe, of all people, gave it a 5!

imdb can't keep me out forever

My acting career continues to advance at a breathtaking pace.

On October 13, I’ll finally get to see Lost 9, a new short film by Lindley Farley in which I have a small role. We’ll be screening it at a bar in the East Village. Lindley tells me the finished film will run about 15–20 minutes. If you’re interested in coming, DM me for details.

I don’t want to give away much of the plot, other than to say that it’s about a New York cop who loses his gun.

Lindley has made a bunch of shorts, as well as the feature The Bulls’ Night Out and The Fez Belcher Show, a web series. I was also an extra in his short Infer Red last year. I was officially listed in the credits as one of two "subway gawkers." 

This is only the latest chapter in my distinguished screen career.

My film debut came in the 1999 indie film Auditions, where I was credited as “Man in Bar.” I was indeed a man in a bar. I was also barely visible. If you knew exactly when and where to look, and squinted, you could see me. Despite receiving an actual credit, I did not make it onto IMDb.

Twenty years later, I appeared in the straight-to-video film Being. I was not credited, but this time I was clearly visible, as one of a group of frightened townspeople gathered to hear what the preacher, played by Lance Henriksen, had to say.

I didn’t make IMDb for that one either.

There is a much better story about how I wound up in Being. After my father-in-law died, we were selling his kitchen table. The guy who bought it turned out to be one of the producers of the movie, who was running around acquiring props and other things they needed for the shoot. One thing led to another, and I wound up as an extra. In fact, I wrote about that experience here.

The table made the movie too. A couple has sex against it. But, sadly, the table also did not make IMDb.

Last year came Infer Red, and now Lost 9, where I have finally achieved the next great milestone in my acting career: Lines.

Only a couple of them, near the end of the movie, but actual lines.

Filming my little scene was also an education. There are three of us talking, and the finished scene will probably last only a couple of minutes. I naively figured we would go in, have the conversation in front of the camera, and that would pretty much be that.

Nope.

We did the conversation over and over and over again while Lindley shot it from different angles: close-ups of each of us, wider shots, different perspectives and everything in between. I assume the finished scene will be assembled from bits and pieces of all those takes.

Which, of course, is how movies are made. I knew that intellectually. It was something different to actually participate in it and see how much filming goes into producing a couple of minutes of finished conversation.

I was also around for the filming of a bar scene early in the movie. The very top of my head is visible in that scene if you know where to look. Fortunately, it is not recognizable as the top of my head, because having me visibly appear as two different people in the same 15-minute movie would probably raise questions that the plot isn't prepared to answer.

But the most fun I had on Lost 9 may have been helping Lindley shoot a car-chase sequence.

I’m not in the chase, but I did a surprising amount to help make it happen. I scouted around looking for a dumpster that Lindley needed in one sequence. I drove with a camera mounted on the hood of my car. I drove while Lindley filmed out the back. I rode in Lindley’s car shining a light on the driver. I drove parallel to other cars involved in the chase.

At first, Lindley would explain five shots we were going to do and how they would all fit together.

I would listen carefully.

Then I would have absolutely no idea what he was talking about.

Eventually we developed a much better system. Lindley would tell me one thing we needed to do. We would do it. Then he would tell me the next thing. We would do that.

That worked much better.

And afterward, it was fascinating to see the edited footage and realize how all these little pieces — which often didn't make much sense to me while we were shooting them — came together into something that actually looked like a car chase. Lindley had a vision, but I couldn't see it (until I could).

That may have been the most interesting part of the whole experience: getting a tiny glimpse of how a movie gets constructed. You shoot little fragments from different angles, sometimes in an order that doesn't mean much to anyone except the filmmaker, and eventually those fragments become a scene.

Lindley has also told me he’s going to give me an associate producer credit for my contributions to the film.

So, after 27 years in show business, my résumé now includes Man in Bar, and uncredited ccared townsperson, subway gawker, a character who actually speaks, and Associate Producer.

IMDb cannot hold out forever.

cinema history class: dracula vs. frankenstein (1971)

The session: Freaky Frankenstein's
Keith shows us four oddball interpretations of the Frankenstein story 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 4: Dracula vs. Frankenstein (1971)
Directed by Al Adamson

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Completely unfamiliar.

Plot Synopsis:
A descendant of Dr. Frankenstein runs a creepy seaside attraction while secretly conducting experiments with the help of his grotesque assistant. When Dracula brings him the original Frankenstein monster and proposes an alliance, the monster is revived—eventually leading to the promised showdown between Dracula and Frankenstein’s creation.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
Dracula vs. Frankenstein is an incoherent mess.

And apparently, there was a good reason for that. This feels like a movie made by people who weren’t entirely sure what movie they were making while they were making it. The whole production has that cobbled-together quality: scenes and ideas thrown at the screen in the hope that eventually they might add up to a movie. They don’t.

The dialogue is terrible. The acting is very bad. The story wanders around seemingly at random. Even Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster—the two guys whose names are right there in the title—sometimes seem like they wandered in from some other movie.

I did get a kick out of the cop, who struck me as some weird low-budget version of Harry Morgan in Naked City. And I have to admit that the midget landing on the axe was funny. I’m not entirely convinced it was supposed to be as funny as I found it, but at this point you take your entertainment where you can get it.

Which brings me to the only circumstances under which I can really recommend Dracula vs. Frankenstein: get together with a bunch of friends, get drunk, and make fun of it. Under those conditions, this could actually be a pretty good time. As a movie, though? No.

And then there was Joe.

Joe gave this piece of shit a 10.

I don't understand it.

This was much worse than the last two things we watched, neither of which Joe gave a 10. So apparently those movies somehow failed to meet the exacting standards that Dracula vs. Frankenstein satisfied.

I have spent some time trying to understand Joe's rating system. I shall spend no more.

cinema history class: frankenstein and the monster from hell (1974)

The session: Freaky Frankenstein's
Keith shows us four oddball interpretations of the Frankenstein story 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 1: Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1974)
Directed by Terence Fisher

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Completely unfamiliar.

Plot Synopsis:
Imprisoned for conducting illegal experiments, a young surgeon discovers that Baron Frankenstein is secretly continuing his work inside the prison. He becomes Frankenstein’s assistant in an attempt to create a new man from the body parts of several inmates—with predictably disastrous results.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
I liked this one quite a bit more than I expected to. Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell isn't really the kind of movie I generally go for, but it's a good movie, and visually it's terrific. Hammer certainly knew how to make a period horror movie look good.

Keith's friend Chris Gullo was our guest presenter for this one, and he was particularly well suited to the assignment: he literally wrote the book on Peter Cushing—or at least a book on Peter Cushing, the biography In All Sincerity... Peter Cushing. So we had an actual Cushing expert in the room.

Once again, though, I have questions about the Frankenstein pedigree. The monster doesn't look anything like the Frankenstein monster that exists in my head—the Boris Karloff/Herman Munster/Franken Berry version that has become the iconic image of Frankenstein. Ethan pointed out that this is hardly unprecedented: the monster in Edison's 1910 Frankenstein didn't look anything like Karloff either. Fair enough. Apparently Frankenstein monsters have always been free to do their own thing.

Peter Cushing is great as Baron Frankenstein. This was the final Hammer Frankenstein film and Cushing's sixth and last appearance as the Baron, which made having Chris present it especially appropriate. And Cushing's Frankenstein is quite the workaholic. Put the man in prison, give him access to a few corpses and some surgical equipment, and apparently he just can't resist getting a little work done.

The surgery scenes looked surprisingly good, too. The whole production has that wonderfully elaborate Hammer look, and even when what's happening is grotesque, it looks good being grotesque.

But my favorite bit may have been the asylum patients at the end. The extras playing them were having an absolute blast acting completely loony. That looked like a great day to be an extra: "What's my motivation?" "You're insane. Go nuts." I could have done that.

So, yes, much better than I expected. A good movie, great visuals, Peter Cushing doing what Peter Cushing does, and enough Frankenstein-adjacent mad science to keep things moving even if the monster isn't going to be mistaken for Franken Berry.

And apparently Joe has decided to abandon his longstanding commitment to giving everything a 10. For the second week in a row, he went with something in the nine-point-somethings.

I don't know what is happening anymore.

It hurts my brain.

cinema history class: frankenstein conquers the world (1965)

The session: Freaky Frankenstein's
Keith shows us four oddball interpretations of the Frankenstein story 

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL.

Week 1: Frankenstein Conquers the World (1965)
Directed by Ishiro Honda

My Level of Prior Knowledge:
Completely unfamiliar.

Plot Synopsis:
A young American scientist in postwar Japan becomes entangled in an experiment involving a strange, radiation-mutated giant—created from the heart of Frankenstein’s monster—who ultimately battles a monstrous subterranean creature threatening the countryside.

Reaction and Other Folderol:
Boy, was this stupid. But I generally feel that way about the Japanese monster movies.

Frankenstein Conquers the World has one of those plots that sounds like it was created by people taking turns adding sentences without being allowed to hear what the previous person said.

Near the end of World War II, the Germans somehow get possession of the still-living heart of Frankenstein’s monster and ship it to Japan for safekeeping. Because apparently, with the Third Reich collapsing around them, somebody decided that relocating Frankenstein’s heart was a military priority.

Then Hiroshima happens.

Years later, the heart has somehow led to a strange feral boy who keeps growing until he becomes a giant Frankenstein. Or something like that. I’m not going to pretend I followed all of it. The movie was surprisingly hard to follow for something this stupid.

Eventually Frankenstein has to fight Baragon, a giant burrowing monster who looks less like a terrifying prehistoric beast than a demented reptile puppy. I kept expecting someone to throw a stick and have him bound happily after it.

The movie was sometimes amusing, although I’m not entirely sure how often that was intentional. And the climactic monster fight was actually pretty good—but that was pretty much standard equipment for Japanese monster movies of the period. Whatever else was going on, eventually two guys in rubber suits were going to beat the hell out of each other while destroying miniature buildings, and the filmmakers knew how to deliver that.

There was also a little something different about this presentation. Keith brought in his friend—and film expert—Joe Cascio as our guest presenter. That meant Keith actually rated the movie, something he doesn’t do when he’s the one presenting.

And, just to avoid confusion, Joe Cascio is not our regular Joe—the Joe whose movie-rating philosophy can generally be summarized as “Why are there numbers below 10?”

Our Joe, inexplicably, decided to deviate from his usual “everything is a ten!” position this time.

Apparently Frankenstein Conquers the World accomplished something I would have thought impossible: it broke Joe.

Anyway, Frankenstein Conquers the World was stupid, confusing, occasionally amusing, and featured a giant demented reptile puppy.

In other words, it definitely lived up to the billing for this month.