Quite by accident, we discovered a few months back that Turner Classic Movies plays a block of horror movies on late Friday night: three or so great flicks guaranteed to be entertaining, though likely not for the original reasons the makers intended. :) We also manage to forget about it every week, then suddenly remember just in time, to our great joy.
Do yourself a favor, and check it out next week!
Last night’s lineup was particularly good, with a spate of B-movie god Roger Corman’s “best” work.
A Bucket of Blood (1959) IMDB. Wikipedia. allmovie.
Gone, Daddy-o! Awesome faux-beatnik trappings on this low-budget classic, and so funny. As will be evident later in the evening, the title doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the contents of the movie, as I don’t really recall any blood. Lots of clay, though.
Highlights:
- “Beat poet” Maxwell H. Brock’s recitations and general attitude — we should all be so in love with ourselves and our work. :)
- A super-young Bert Convy as an “undercover” policeman, though (as Denyse called it) he looked pretty darn square.
- Artist’s model name-dropping Henry Miller.
The Terror (1963) IMDB. Wikipedia. allmovie.
Unfortunately I slept through this one, but Denyse says it was probably the worst acting Jack Nicholson has ever done. It’s in the public domain, which is great, so I may check it out after all by download over at the Internet Archive — The Terror.
The description: “A young officer in Napoleon’s army pursues a mysterious woman to the castle of an elderly Baron where he discovers that she is the pawn of an old witch bent on driving the Baron to suicide.” The officer is Nicholson, and the Baron is Boris Karloff. How could it miss?
The Beast With A Million Eyes (1955) IMDB. allmovie.
Two words come to mind with this movie: Oy vey. But let’s cover the good stuff:
- Location shots at a date farm in Indio, California, plus lots of shots of desert landscape, enabling you to see what the Coachella Valley looked like before it was taken over by stucco and golf courses.
- Again — no beast to speak of, and no where near a million eyes.
- The beast with a million feet of stock footage! Lots and lots of stock footage! Did I mention the stock footage?!!
- Also, the oft-times inappropriate stock music score, of the “We got this music for free, so we’re going to use the hell out of it!” method.
- Chester Conklin in a comic-relief role as a bumbling farmer. As you’ll see in his IMDB entry, Chester had a long career going back to 1913, with nearly 300 movies to his credit, including as a Keystone Kop.
- This is a movie ripe for the MST3K treatment, which we did for ourselves last night with gusto.
From the IMDB trivia for the movie:
James H. Nicholson had come up with a tremendous ad and title and pre-sold the movie to exhibitors. Then they made the movie. When the distributors viewed the finished film, they were disappointed because the ads were so much more interesting.
While The City Sleeps (1956) IMDB. Wikipedia. allmovie.
Last but certainly not least came this film-noir drama from director Fritz Lang, with a number of famous folks in it. I wound up watching the last half alone, as Hans went to bed before it started, and Denyse fell asleep in the middle.
Now, maybe it was the juxtaposition from the previous set of movies (and of course, this wasn’t in the horror vein), but I got drawn into the story which, while relatively simplistic, has a number of different threads going on — newspaper drama, serial-killer thriller, romantic amusements, tough guys, and gorgeous women. Good enough to keep me up through the end, which wound up being after 5 AM.
While set in New York, there’s also a great cameo for the LA subway of the time.