A Movie a Day 3D: 2D Edition

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Cthulhu (2007)

This seems to be the most polarizing adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's writing. If you read a dozen reviews, six of them will call it one of the best Lovecraft movies and the other six will call it a steaming pile of vomit. I'm in the first camp. The actors are terrific, there are some very well-directed horror scenes that manage to be genuinely creepy, it's very well written, and it's got the most beautiful cinematography I've ever seen in a low-budget movie.

But, you see, the protagonist is gay, and his sexuality is actually important to the plot. I guess that's just too much for some people. Seriously, read some of the reviews on Amazon or the Internet Movie Database if you want to see what kind of venom-spewing hatred some people are willing to direct at a movie that subjects them to a few images of two men kissing and touching each other. But for those with minds a little more open than that, I would recommend Cthulhu over just about any other recent popular horror movie.

Beyond Re-Animator (2003)

I wasn't even planning on watching this today. I missed the first 15 or so minutes when I first saw it, and I just wanted to catch up on that part, turn the movie off, and then watch something else. But the fact that I kept watching to the end should give you an idea of how entertaining these movies are. This one isn't as good as the original Re-Animator, but it's much better than Bride of Re-Animator. A few years ago they announced a Re-Animator TV series with a young cast, but I'm glad that they seem to have canceled it because this stuff wouldn't work without the brilliant insanity of Jeffrey Combs. He's the life of these movies, much more than the gory effects and over the top sense of humor. When it comes to horror comedy, you guys can have Shaun of the Dead. I'll take a Re-Animator movie any day.

The Raven (1935)

How do you make a movie based on a four-page poem? You don't. The 1963 version of The Raven was a comedy about wizards fighting over magic abilities or some silly horses**t like that, with the poem forming the basis of the opening couple of minutes. This version is about a doctor obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe who converts his basement into a torture chamber. There's some comic relief, but it's mostly played straight. Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff make it worth a watch, but it's no classic. It's only 61 minutes long, and I probably would have started to lose my patience if it had been any longer.

And that's Week 2. Recap: Bride of Re-Animator (1990), Necronomicon (1993), The Call of Cthulhu (2005) , Versus (2000), Cthulhu (2007), Beyond Re-Animator (2003), The Raven (1935)

The Black Cat (1934)

There's a bizarre little movie from 1934 that you've probably never heard of called Maniac. The story involves a mad doctor who re-animates corpses with disastrous results. It's notable for several reasons. First, it's f**king awful, one of those movies so hilariously bad that you have to see it to believe it. Second, the plot and tone make it sort of an early version of Re-Animator, and I have trouble believing that the filmmakers were not familiar with H. P. Lovecraft's original story.

Third, it's a trashy exploitation movie that features girls running around in their underwear and full nudity in a few shots, and the filmmakers got away with it by claiming that Maniac was an educational film. At completely random moments, the action will stop and text describing various mental disorders will scroll on the screen, and then it's back to the titties. It's the cinematic equivalent of a bar that serves noodles so it'll technically be classified as a restaurant so teenagers can get in.

But the reason I bring up Maniac here is that it features a few scenes from Edgar Allan Poe's story "The Black Cat," which makes it a more faithful adaptation of the story than the film that I'm reviewing today. The poster says "Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat" and the title screen claims that the film was "suggested by" the story, but I suspect that the title is the only part of the story that the screenwriter actually read, because the main character killing a black cat is literally the only similarity.

It's not a bad flick, though. Most of these old Universal horror films aren't nearly as good as critics claim they are (some of them, like Dracula, are downright awful) but they're usually a decent way to spend 70 minutes. The script is, as usual, a bunch of BS that makes no sense if you think about it for more than three seconds, but it's well-directed and Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi are always fun to watch, even if they're not particularly gifted actors. Without people like them, I doubt that any of these movies would be worth watching at all.

The Black Cat (1941)

This movie sucks. It's part soap opera, part murder mystery, and part comedy. The soap opera part is just as bad as soap operas always are, the murdery mystery part sucks because nobody takes it seriously, and the comedy is just painful.

One guy is allergic to cats, and it's supposed to be hilarious that he keeps coughing around them. At one point someone describes Basil Rathbone's character by saying, "He thinks he's Sherlock Holmes." Hardy har har. Note to filmmakers past, present, and future: if you feel the need to add wacky comedy music to a scene to let the audience know that what they're watching is funny, then it's not funny.

Rathbone is the only reason I didn't turn the movie off after ten minutes. He could read from the phone book and make it sound brilliant, but he just made me wish that I was watching one of his Holmes movies instead. Bela Lugosi's here again but he doesn't get to do anything. Neither of them is enough to distract from the awful comedy. The worst Three Stooges movie I've seen was better than this.

The Black Cat (2007)

The last two movies I watched were called The Black Cat and claimed to have been based on the Edgar Allan Poe story, but neither of them had a damn thing to do with it. This one has more in common with it than just the title, but it's not an exact adaptation. Instead, Poe himself is the main character and the idea is that the events of his story were inspired by what he goes through here.

It's very good, which isn't surprising, considering that it's from the same writer, director, and star of Re-Animator. This may be the best pure acting I've ever seen from Jeffrey Combs. My only complaint is that the goofy tone of the Re-Animator movies sometimes surfaces; someone taking an axe to the head, screaming hysterically, and pulling it out before dying may work there, but it feels out of place here, like a flimsy excuse to show off some gory effects. Still, it's mostly excellent, on par with the version from Tales of Terror with Vincent Price and Peter Lorre.

Sunshine (2007)

Movies these days try so hard to be realistic that it's refreshing to see one with a plot as f*cking ridiculous as Sunshine's. In the film, the sun is dying. In the real world, we would probably realize that there isn't a damn thing we can do about something like that, and start thinking of ways to keep ourselves warm while we wait for all life as we know it to die. In the film, we send a small crew of astronauts to the sun to "restart" it with explosives. I don't think I'm spoiling the film by revealing that this ludicrous plan ends up working.

It's one of those movies where you just have to go with it, because the focus is on the characters and not the plot, and the actors play it completely straight and sell every absurd moment. (I can't tell you how thankful I am to see a movie with a ridiculous plot that doesn't have a single moment in which one of the characters makes a joke about how ridiculous their situation is. That kind of ironic hipster BS is killing movies.) Cillian Murphy, Chris Evans, Michelle Yeoh, Cliff Curtis, and Mark Strong in particular are great, but nobody is bad.

The movie is very well-directed, and my only complaint is that there's some choppy editing at times that makes it difficult to tell exactly what's going on. The director made 28 Days Later five years earlier, and that style apparently hadn't completely worn off yet. But this is nitpicking. Overall, it's excellent. In a world filled with mediocrity like Avatar and garbage like Transformers, I'm thrilled to see science fiction films as good as Sunshine, District 9, and Moon getting made.

The Casebook of Sherlock
Holmes: The Creeping Man (1991)

This should never have been made. Of all the Sherlock Holmes stories that Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, "The Creeping Man" is easily the most ridiculous and probably the last that I would adapt for film. It's silly enough on the page, with descriptions of a man swinging around on the side of a house and making monkey sounds, but seeing it acted out only makes it even more so. I would have at least changed the ending, maybe taking inspiration from Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and making the culprit an actual monkey.

Anyway, it's not bad until the end, and the actors do their best with what they're working with. This was around the time that Jeremy Brett's health started failing and you never knew whether to expect an amazing performance or a terrible one, but luckily it's one of his better ones. A lot of hardcore fans call him the best Holmes ever, and it's hard to argue with that. Too bad his co-stars were rarely as impressive. He owns the show, and it wouldn't have been worth watching without him.

Sherlock Holmes (2009)

Two more days until Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows opens. Time to revisit the last movie, which I haven't seen in over a year.

A lot of people complained about this movie turning Sherlock Holmes into an action hero, but they seem to have been so distracted by the mere presence of action scenes in a Holmes film that they didn't even notice how few of them there are. The real focus is on the characters. The movie feels almost like Goodfellas in the way that witty dialogue is constantly flying back and forth between them, usually so quickly that the film's harshest critics probably didn't even notice it.

The action scenes are certainly attention-getting, but it's beyond me how anyone could dwell on them when the chemistry between Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law is what's really driving the film. I would gladly watch a spin-off in which Holmes and Watson do nothing but argue about whose turn it is to wash the dishes, let alone solve complex mysteries together. It's a shame that they don't make two or three Holmes films every year like Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce did in the 1940s.

I doubt that anyone will care since there hasn't been a single reply to this topic, but I'm ending A Movie a Day 3 early due to issues in the family that require some traveling and visiting. I won't be able to watch crappy exploitation movies every day, at least for another week or so. As usual, if I see a movie and feel like commenting on it, I'll post in one of the "last movie you watched" topics.

The last recap: The Black Cat (1934), The Black Cat (1941), The Black Cat (2007), Sunshine (2007), The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes: The Creeping Man (1991), Sherlock Holmes (2009)

Back from the dead. This topic is too young to die. The family issues that I thought would keep me away for more than a week ended up keeping me away for only one day, and even then I managed to see a movie on the day I was gone. So I'll keep it going, even though I doubt that anyone is even reading this anymore.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)

What the hell is wrong with people? This movie made about half the opening box office gross of Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. Their loss, because it's excellent. It's got a better plot than the first movie, better action scenes, a better villain, better supporting actors, better everything. Well, almost: it's still about 20 minutes too long and the screenwriters still seem to have no idea what to do with the female characters. But these are nitpicks; overall, it's terrific entertainment. It doesn't have quite enough humor for me to call it a comedy, but it's the funniest movie I've seen in years.

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)

I like how Bela Lugosi is credited in the trailer as "Dracula himself." It's a little more disturbing that the only black guy in the cast is listed as "Janos, The Black One." I'm surprised that nobody calls him a "NEE-grow" in the film. Anyway, it's not much different than the other Edgar Allan Poe movies with Lugosi, The Black Cat and The Raven. It's got a very silly plot that bears almost no resemblance to Poe's story and I doubt it would be worth watching without Lugosi, but he makes it worthwhile. When he's not on-screen, these movies really try my patience. 1930s comic relief has a way of pissing me off, and this one's got plenty of it.

The Raven (1915)

The 1935 film is about a man obsessed with Edgar Allan Poe who turns his basement into a torture chamber. The 1963 film is about wizards fighting over magic abilities. This one's a Poe biopic. Mostly, at least. "The Raven" is acted out at one point, and like the 2007 version of The Black Cat, Poe himself is put into his own story, but this movie wasn't made with anywhere near that film's level of skill. It occasionally gets creative with the visuals, with effects that I'm sure had people in 1915 pooping themselves in amazement, but it's not enough. This is just dull.

Maniac (1934)

Mentioning this bizarre-ass movie a week or so ago in a review made me want to see it again. The plot is total insanity. We meet a mad scientist who wants to experiment on corpses to bring them back to life, his assistant who kills him and assumes his identity, a mental patient who goes on a rampage when he's injected with adrenaline (kidnapping a woman and tearing her clothes off, baring her tits for the camera – this was 1934, mind you), a man who skins cats for a living, women who catfight in their underwear (one of them with a hilariously high-pitched chipmunk voice that makes Jennifer Tilly sound like Barry White), and a cat named Satan who gets his eyeball removed and eaten by the assistant. You haven't lived until you've seen Maniac.

The Oblong Box (1969)

I wasn't planning on watching any more of these bumlicking Edgar Allan Poe movies, but when I see that Vincent Price and Christopher Lee are together in the same film, I have to watch it no matter what it is. And it's not like these movies are even based on Poe; the studio was just slapping the titles of his stories on movies at random. Aside from the presence of an oblong box, this movie has nothing to do with Poe.

But the real crime isn't that the film was advertised "Edgar Allan Poe's The Oblong Box." It's that Price and Lee only have one very brief scene together. It's not like this is Heat or anything, where it's a tense thriller in which the director knows that keeping Pacino and De Niro apart will make their scene something special when they finally meet. It's just a stupid exploitation movie. Until Price and Lee meet, it feels as if footage from two different movies has been edited together.

Oh well. At least they're actually main characters. It's not like Lee's Dracula sequels in which he's resurrected in the last ten minutes and quickly killed. This is a decent enough flick. It's about as well-made as these trashy movies ever got, and Price and Lee are as good as always. It's no classic, though. I was kind of happy when it was over (these things really should be about 75 minutes long, not 96) and I'll probably never have a desire to see it again.

On an unrelated note, some of the movies that I watch for this topic have some kind of Sherlock Holmes connection that I previously knew about, but The Oblong Box has one that I didn't. I would recognize Colin Jeavons anywhere, and he shows up here in a small role. He later played Inspector Lestrade on the Holmes TV series with Jeremy Brett.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon
Barber of Fleet Street (1936)

It's about a barber who kills his customers and steals their money and makes meat pies out of their bodies. It's not a musical like the Johnny Depp version, thank f**king God, but it's so dull that I'm surprised I actually finished it. The Godfather Part II is three times longer than this movie but feels shorter.

Maybe it would have held my attention a little more if it had focused on the killing, if there had been a look into the mind of this whackjob or something about the police trying to solve the cases of all the people who've been disappearing, but instead we get some BS about Todd trying to extort money from an old man and/or marry his daughter, and something is going on with some sailors thousands of miles away that as far as I can tell has nothing to do with anything.

Not that the police would be smart enough to do anything about the disappearances, since nobody in this town of idiots ever seems to suspect that the creepy barber who can't stop talking about throats and razors might have something to do it. And that's not the only stupidity here: Todd is fooled by two very poor disguises, one of them a grown woman he already knows, who's pretending to be a young boy!

Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff could have saved this, but Tod Slaughter can't. The acting is strange: part wooden and part hammy, but all boring. The 12-year-old boy who plays Todd's terrified apprentice is a far better actor than any of the adults. Films like this are why young people don't like watching old black and white movies.

Infernal Affairs II (2003)

Prequel time. Infernal Affairs had brief flashbacks showing us how a crime boss planted a mole inside the police force and the police planted a mole inside the crime boss's syndicate, and then it moved forward several years. Infernal Affairs II takes place in the flashback time. But the biggest difference is that the moles were the main characters in the first film while their bosses were secondary characters, and that's reversed here. Taking two relatively minor characters and fleshing them out like that was a smart move to avoid feelings of repetition.

My only complaint is that the first half is slightly disappointing, not bad at all, but just decent. The second half is where it starts to live up to the first movie. But even if it's not quite as good as Infernal Affairs, it's still far better than most crime dramas out there. It's amazing that they cranked out a sequel this good so quickly – it came out less than a year after the first one. There's a third movie, and it came out just two months after this one! Amazing. If it's this good, it'll be a great trilogy.