cinema history class: house of the damned

Session: Get Your Freak On, Week 2
Movie: House of the Damned (1964)
Directed by Maury Dexter

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

Plot:
An architect and his wife visit a spooky old mansion after its last tenant move out. But they find the place is still -- how to put it? -- occupied. Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:
House of the Damned started off very strong. The expository phone call at the beginning had the cadence of a classic film noir, and the whole feel was consistent with that. Then, as we, the viewers, are getting to know the titular house, there are some really nice spooky touches -- the door that creaks open, the unexpected shadow in the foyer, the warning signs on the road.

But the movie never really lives up to its potential. As it progresses, it seems to become duller and duller. Keith has often explained that horror films need to relieve the tension -- there have to be peaks and valleys. Well, this one had too much valley and not enough peak.

And the payoff itself just wasn't enough. The concept behind it -- that a group of sideshow freaks were living in the house, away from the rest of the world -- was reasonably clever. But in presentation it was anticlimactic. The reveal seemed sort of like a Scooby Doo episode on xanax, and that was followed by a scene that bizarrely reminded me of the Jews leaving Anatevka at the end of Fiddler on the Roof.

I really wanted to like this more than I did.

Ratings:

Me: 6

Dave: 8.5

Ethan: 6

Joe: 9.8
Sean:  1 out of 4

Former Boss' Reaction:
To let y'all know, someone who used to be my boss says he will not watch movies made before 1980 -- except for Star Wars. I try to touch base with him about the movies we saw in class, and ask if he'd be interested in seeing them.

His reaction to House of the Damned: "Nope." 

it's zmedsday!! (xxii)

my colleague, steve: rip

Yesterday I found out that a colleague, Steve, had passed away the day before.

Steve was older than me by a few years -- exactly how many, I don't know. Some characterized his age as "60-ish," but I think he was younger than that. Either way, it's too young to die. I didn't know he was sick, though apparently he had been out on short-term disability for some time. Of course, in an environment where many people work from home half the time (or more), it's easy to not notice someone missing -- especially if your work and his rarely connect.

Occasionally at work there'll be spome function where people have to say how long they've been at the company. Sometimes, when someone reveals a tenure that would be considered long in most contexts (e.g., 20 years), I may smirk and say something like "newbie" in a faux-mocking tone. Steve was one of the ones who could call me a newbie.

In my first rotation as a fresh-faced actuarial student, I was in the unit that administered actuarial functions related to our defined benefit business. One task that I had to perform on occasion involved researching participants' transaction histories. These histories determined what benefits they were entitled to. This many years later, I don't remember the details, so I can't explain it better than that. At any rate, I had to go to microfiche files, look up their transactions, copy them down and then perform some calculations in order to determine what category they belonged to. It was a very tedious process and I hated it. Steve usually had the task of checking my work.

On one occasion I took a shortcut. After getting part of a person's history I was able to determine what category he would be in. I could prove mathematically that he couldn't possibly be in any of the other categories. So I stopped searching through the records, wrote up my results and handed it to Steve. He asked about the rest of the transactions. I pointed out that they didn't matter -- no matter what else I would find, the category wouldn't change. He was clearly amused, but he explained to me that the work could get audited, and the auditors would want a complete transactional history. A proof based on a partial history wouldn't cut it even if it was right. That was when I realized that I had left the world of mathematicians.

I never forgot that lesson that Steve taught me, and the patient way he taught it to me.

Rest easy, Steve.

happy tunesday! ("boys in dresses" by suzy saxon and the anglos)

A long time ago I was the music editor of a college newspaper.* One of the perqs of that job was that I got first dibs on the record that were sent to the paper to be reviewed.** In some cases that meant hotly anticipated major-label releases, but other times it meant indie-label releases by unknown acts.

And so it was with Guilt by Association, the debut album by Suzy axon and the Anglos. I immediately fell in love with the album, likening it to the early new wave music that England's Stiff records had been putting out a few years earlier. As I did with bands that I liked, I kind of latched on, trying to promote them however I could -- probably with more gusto than their place in the pop world merited. Tommy Shaw from Styx is coming to campus? Meh. But Suzy Saxon & the Anglos? I reviewed the album. I arranged to interview the band. When they played in Manhattan I reviewed the show. A few years later, writing for Tower Records' Pulse, I managed to get them to publish a short article previewing the Anglos' next release.

One of the thing I found interesting about the band was their knack for offbeat fundraising. Notably, they sold chocolate bars with their name on them. All of that was the brainchild of their producer, "Mad Dog." I won't post his real name here in case he wants to maintain some anonymity. I have had ome poradic contact with him over the intervening years, so I will email him a link to this post, so if he want to out himself, he can do so in the comments.

Anyway, the band put out two more records -- Scream To Be Heard and A Deal's A Deal. Then a CD called Downtime in Dogtown, which included remixes of some of their early recordings. I guess they broke up after that. In 2001 I got in touch with Suzy when I found a kip on my copy of Scream to Be Heard. he got back to me and promised to send another copy. That was in August, 2001. I never got the copy, but I also never followed up.

At any rate, the two standout tracks on the album were "Get Out of My Stomach" and "Boys in Dresses." I am haring the video of the latter because that's (to my knowledge) the only official video they ever did. Honestly, my favorite recording of theirs was a cover of Cat Stevens' "Wild World." I'm sorry that the audio and video aren't properly synced, but it's the best quality version of this song I could find.
 
*It was called Skyline, FWIW
**Interestingly, there was some dispute over ome of the records that came in. Skyline wasn't the only new paper that year. It and the QC Quad had both risen from the ashes of The Phoenix, which had existed the year before. Packages addressed to Skyline went to Skyline, and packages addressed to The QC Quad went to The QC Quad. But there was some wrangling over what packages that were addressed to The Phoenix. Not that you care...

cinema history class: chained for life

Session: Get Your Freak On, Week 1
Movie: Chained for Life (1952)
Directed by Harry L. Fraser

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

Plot:
Life is turned upside down for conjoined twins, Dorothy and Vivian, when Dorothy decides she needs more than a life chained to her sister. Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:
When Keith started this class more than half a decade ago, the first movie he showed us was Freaks, Tod Browning's seminal 1932 film. Now Keith has decided to devote four classes to Freaks ripoffs. And he started with Chained for Life, a 1952 exploitation flick starring conjoined twins, Daisy and Violet Hilton (who, b the way, had appeared in Freaks) in the roles of conjoined twins, Dorothy and Vivian Hamilton, who are loosely based on them.

Chained is truly an exploitation film, as its advertising relied heavily on the curiosity factor -- seeing conjoined twins in a movie. I find this interesting because there was really no need -- beyond the exploitation factor -- to get true conjoined twins. Identical twins would have done fine. So would two unrelated women who look sufficiently similar (with judicious use of makeup). In fact, Dorothy's dream sequence would have been much easier to produce without the limitations caused by having conjoined twins.

But, hey, I guess producer George Moskov didn't want to cheat his audience.

At any rate, this actually had a pretty strong plot for an exploitation film, and it developed into an interesting legal conundrum. I spent most of the time wondering how the whole thing would play out. I will say that the judge's prologue and epilogue bookends were kind of hokey, but they didn't really harm the film.

The Hilton sisters did not perform well as actors; their deliveries were wooden. When I pointed that out, Keith noted that they never were really actors. They were singers and musicians. So I'm still kind of torn as to whether I think the movie would have worked better with others in those roles. But, as noted, a bug selling point was the use of real oddities and vaudeville performers. The vaudeville acts occupied a bit more of the movie than they should have -- they were, essentially, filler. I kind of liked them, but I would have preferred more story and less variety hour.

Chained isn't any kind of great masterwork, but it is an interesting little flick.

Ratings:

Me: 9

Dave: 9.2

Ethan: 7

Joe: 10
Sean:  2 out of 4