When Women Had Tails

Just took a chance on Thale (2012), knowing pretty much nothing about it. In fact, I was tempted to just send it back unwatched - just wasn't feeling it. It turned out pretty great - an odd Norwegian folk-horror.

It starts with a tape playing, with an old man saying soothing things to his "good girl", interspersed with screams. Then we meet our protagonists, Leo and Elvis. They are both in hazmat gear. Leo is cleaning up a lot of blood in a forest cabin, Elvis is puking his guts out. Turns out Leo runs a company that cleans up messy death scenes, and Elvis is helping out. Without saying much, they show us their characters - Leo is stolid and steady, Elvis is a bit of a fuck-up.

So when Leo finds a hidden cellar, he is the one who calls for rest of the crew, and Elvis is the one that starts poking around. He finds a lot of canned goods, a bathtub full of milky fluid and some very grimy scientific equipment, including the tape recorder that we probably heard at the top. Against Leo's advice, Elvis plays some of the tape - it seems to be the notes of a scientist of some kind. 

Then a woman surfaces from the bath - a young, naked woman. Now Leo really wants to get some backup. The woman, Thale (played by singer/dancer/actor Silje Reinamo), is cold and hungry, and seemingly feral. When Leo goes out to the truck to get her some food, we see (although he doesn't), some strange creatures, like naked women with tales, flitting through the woods.

This all unfolds rather slowly until the last act, when a mad scientist and his paramilitary show up to reclaim Thale.

I'll cut to the chase here - I don't know how this played in Norway, but Thale turns out to be a hulder, a Norwegian folk creature that looks like a woman with a tail. This is only mentioned at the very end of the movie - and of course, I've never heard of a hulder. Did most Norwegians get this right away?

This is a rather sweet movie. Although it seems like the man on the recordings was perhaps torturing Thale, it turns out he was protecting her - or at least trying. Leo and Elvis are just guys, but they only want to help the poor naked girl. And Reinamo as Thale is very lovely and seems worthy of protection. There is some horror at the end, and the grimy basement has a very serial-killer vibe, but it's just a vibe.  The movie is also quite short (under 80 minutes), which fits the slight story. 

Morbin', Morbin', Morbin'

 We finally got on the Morb Bus, and streamed Morbius (2022). It was partly so we could listen to the podcast takedowns, but mostly because I watch comic book movies - all of them.

It starts with a helicopter landing on a remote mountain, and Jared Leto as Dr. Morbius hobbling to a cae entrance. He has a rare blood disease that makes him weak and weedy, and needs to study vampire bats to find a cure. As he cuts his palm to get some blood-bait, a swarm of bats fly out of the cage - and we go back 25 years.

At a small hospital in Greece, a young Morbius meets a young Milo - played by Matt Smith later in the movie. These kids bond over their disease. Morbius even saves Milo's life by jury-rigging a fix for his medical gizmo. This established Morbius as a genius, and kindly doctor Jared Harris sends him to America to study medicine.

Back in the present, we see Leto getting the Nobel prize for inventing artificial blue blood. What we don't see, but are told about, is that he told them to fuck off, for some reason - maybe he's just a maverick. We do see him working with his lab assistant/romantic interest (?) Adria Arjona. We also get to meet Milo, now a grown-up Matt Smith, who is a rich, dissolute cynic, still crippled by his disease, now with Harris as his personal physician/ineffective conscience. Milo agrees to help fund Morbius' research, which is illegal and unethical, so it will be done on a Russian freighter outside the 12-mile limit. 

He takes the cure just as the crew decides to come down to the lab and maybe get rapey with Arjona. So it's a good thing that it works, but maybe it works too well. It gives him super-strength, speed, an ugly bat-nosed face, and a thirst for blood. 

Now Morbius is on the run. He can subsist on blue blood for a while, but it loses effectiveness. But he meets with Smith, who realizes that he is cured and wants a little himself. When Leto won't give it to him, but also won't explain the drawbacks, he steals a dose. So now Smith is another vampire, but not so ethical. 

So there you go. On the surface, this isn't a terrible movie. It's got some problems - for instance, there are too many scenes that happen off camera. Maybe they want the viewer to fill in the gaps, but why do they leave out so many fun scenes? Maybe because the action scenes aren't actually that great. Morbius zooms around leaving a trail of purple powder that may just be "trails", or nanobots (?) or just particle-based CGI. Another issue may be Leto's low-affect performance. This worked for Benedict Cumberbatch in the Dr. Strange movies,  but Leto may not have the charisma to pull it off.

But I've got to say, I didn't hate this! It's not my fave, but down around the lesser Hulk movies. Maybe above Wolverine: Origins. But what to I know? I like the Fantastic Four/Silver Surfer movies.

Queen of the Night

Dead of Night (1945)/Queen of Spades (1949) is another disc we didn't get from Netflix - we took this out of the library. If you go to the link, you will see what library we frequent. I am doxxed! We have already seen Queen of Spades, an excellent movie, but we didn't have time to re-watch. But Dead of Night was new.

It begins with Mervyn Johns driving up to an old English farmhouse. His host meets him at the door and gives us some exposition. He has invited Johns, an architect, to the place to discuss putting up an addition. Johns is invited into a cozy living room and introduced to the other guests. But he already knows them. He explains that he has a recurring dream or nightmare. He always forgets most of it, but now he sees the house and guests and remembers them all from his dream. He even says that a penniless brunette will arrive - and indeed, brunette Renee Gad shows up and asks her husband to pay the taxi fare - she "hasn't got a penny."

One of the guests is a psychologist, Frederick Valk. He is skeptical, and offers prosaic explanations. Then each of the guests tells a story of the supernatural that happened to them or a friend. So this is anthology horror, with five stories plus the frame tale.

The stories are all different, some longer, some shorter. The styles and indeed the directors are different, with Basil Dearden doing the frame and the first story, with Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, and Robert Hamer doing the others. 

One is about a premonition of death, another about a children's game of Sardines where a girl finds a ghost child. One is about a world seen in a mirror. One is basically comic, about two golfers played by Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford. These were the two Englishmen in The Lady Vanishes who are only interested in the cricket scores. 

The last one, told by the doctor, is the most famous, a story about a ventriloquists dummy who wants to replace his ventriloquist. This isn't the first or last movie with this plot, but it's very well done.

In between these stories, Johns is getting more upset, vaguely remembering that something awful is going to happen - that he is going to kill someone. After the final story, he snaps, and finds himself in a series of hallucinations based on the stories he has heard. Then, SPOILER, he wakes up. It was a dream - the dream. He's driving out to that farmhouse to see about putting in an addition. He has already forgotten what the dream was about, but...

We found this to be excellent all around. The pacing was great, with longer and shorter stories with different tones keeping it fresh. The way the frame story worked out - again, not the first or last movie like this, but so well executed. Also, what other movie uses a dream for a time loop?

Double 13

 Here's another pair for Octoberween: 13 Frightened Girls (1963)/13 Ghosts (1960), both directed by schlockmeister William Castle.

13 Frightened Girls really doesn't live up to its title. It stars Kathy Dunn and 12 other girls as students at a girls' school for the daughters of diplomats in England. Dunn is American, the others are from all over, including the USSR and Red China. On holiday, Dunn goes first to visit Murray Hamilton, an intelligence operator she is infatuated with. Since she is only 16, he just has to try to keep her hands off of him. Anyway, he has a girlfriend, another agent nicknamed Soldier, played by Joyce Taylor. 

Dunn overhears that her father the ambassador is going to send Hamilton home is he can't find out who is behind the student unrest in South America. To protect his job, and keep him in London, Dunn decides to solve this for him. Since she loves gossiping with her fellow international students and going to embassy parties, she solves this one pretty quickly. 

Soon, she is solving all sorts of espionage cases, sending the results in anonymous letters signed "Kitten". Of course, the other countries find out about Kitten and soon everyone is looking for her.

Dunn is basically playing a dimestore Hayley Mills in this, and maybe has the chops to pull it off. The script isn't even too bad, but you can see Castle wasn't happy with it. He adds a cat toss for no reason and the final fight, where all the 13 girls (not frightened at all) join in, is just lame slapstick. Aside from the WTF factor, this was not a great watch.

13 Ghosts was much better. It starts with an intro from William Castle himself, explaining the glasses handed out at the theater. If you want to see the ghosts, look through the red filter. If you don't want to see the ghosts, look through the blue. 

Paleontologist Charles Herbert is broke - the company has just repossessed all his furniture, leaving him, his wife Rosemary DeCamp, teen daughter and young son eating dinner on the floor. But lawyer Martin Milner shows up to let them know that rich eccentric uncle Plato Zorba has died and left them a furnished mansion. The catch is that they must live in it, not sell it, and that it comes with a collection of 12 ghosts. 

They don't run into a ghost right away - just a witch, Margaret Hamilton. She's now the housekeeper, who wants to stay on without pay. She was a partner in ghost collecting with uncle Plato. Castle really hammers on the Hamilton = witch "joke".

Herbert finds an odd pair of glasses, and when things get weird, he puts them on. At this point, the black-and-white movie becomes blue-tinted with red-tinted ghosts. Like the audience using the right filter, he can see the ghosts with the glasses on. These ghosts are a mixed lot: a headless lion-tamer and his lion, a dancing skeleton, and cook continually murdering his wife, and so on. 

To add to all this, there's supposed to be no money in the bequest, but there does turn out to be a stack of cash hidden somewhere. 

This is a rather fun movie. It is more a comedy than horror, and the thrills are very low-key. We saw the remake, and enjoyed it, but Ms. Spenser, at least, prefers this version. For one thing, the ghosts in the new movie were horrible, but rather generic, with no in-movie backstory (extensive backstories can be found on wikipedia, etc). But the house was a lot cooler in the remake, and the story a little more coherent. The remake also skips the gimmick, which I'd say is a wash. But, there is no Margaret Hamilton in the remake. So the original wins. 

The Eyes Have It

Here's one that we didn't get on DVD from Netflix or watch on streaming. It isn't available easily, so we bought it: Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948).

It starts in media res with a young woman, Gail Russell, about to throw herself off a bridge. But her boyfriend, John Lund, has followed her and manages to prevent her suicide. He offers to take her for a cup of coffee while she complains about all the stars in the sky, looking down at her like eyes.

They get to the restaurant, which turns out to be a very swinging Chinese chop suey joint (a black couple by the jukebox, etc). Edward G. Robinson is waiting for them. He is the one who told Lund where to find Russell. He tells his story.

He started out as a vaudeville mentalist, working with a beautiful assistant who would become Russell's mother, and a pianist who would become her father. In the middle of a phony act (you figure out that the pianist is sending cues in the music), he tells a woman in the audience to head home. Her little boy has found some matches and set his bed on fire. She rushes out and he continues. After the show, he dismisses it as just something that came over him, and it was probably nonsense. But the lady has come back to the theater to thank him for saving her child.

Robinson begins to see more and more visions, and the three start to get rich by acting on them. But he worries that he may be causing the disasters he forsees, and deliberately doesn't warn a newsboy to be careful crossing streets. He is immediately killed by a truck. So that didn't work.

Although he and his assistant are clearly in love, he sees a vision of her dying delivering their child. So he breaks up with her, and tells her to marry the pianist and settle down with a few stock tips. They do, but she still dies, delivering the child who will grow up to be Russell.

Robinson withdraws from the world, taking Angel's Flight to Bunker Hill in LA, and starting a magic novelty mail-order company. But many years later, he has a vision of Russell's father dying in a plane crash. He rushes to her house and crashes a party to beg her to call him and tell him not to fly. But when they do get through, he has already crashed. 

But it gets worse - he looks at Russell and she realizes that he has had a vision about her - her death under a starry sky, in the next few days. That brings us up to the present.

But now John Lund brings the police in. He suspects that Robinson is running a con, trying to get at Russell's money. Detective William Demarest (!) is able to confirm parts of the story, but also discovers that the plane crash was due to sabotage. Maybe Robinson is not the troubled unwilling psychic that he appears.

So this isn't quite a noir, nor quite a horror movie, but it's a little of both. Since Angel's Flight always makes a noir, we have that section. But the inevitability of Robinson's terrible predictions gives it a horror element. Getting William Demarest as a police detective is just icing on the cake. 

Tall and Gothic

I might as well blog the next two together, although they don't have much in common - other than unreliable point of view characters who are mad.

Tall Men (2017) starts with a somewhat twitchy young man bringing a woman upstairs, telling his grandmother that they are studying for a math test. When the lights flicker downstairs, the grandmother runs up and we hear hear scream, "What have you done?"

Later, the man, Dan Crisafulli, is shown getting a. bankruptcy set up by a group of smug condescending lawyers. Back at home, he goes through his junk mail, and after great temptation, throwing out credit card offers. He works in a warehouse with a group of other troubled or challenged people, including a shy young woman who seems to like him. Their boss is a dick who only talks to them through a megaphone.

One day he gets an offer for a credit card that looks too good to be true - and it is. Soon, he's being menaced by shadowy tall men. The police don't seem to believe him, but find enormous footprints. His friends come to his aid, but disappear. And it gets worse. 

Two things about all this. One is that this is more or less a comedy. But the humor is based on Crisafulli being a twitchy, mentally challenged young man and the rest of the world are similarly challenged or smug, arrogant and disdainful of them. Lot of long awkward moments of handsome, in-control men sneering while Crisafulli suffers under their glare. 

The other is that this starts very slowly, and the horror doesn't really kick in for a while. When it does, it might be a little too horrific for the rest of the tone. 

Other than that, this was pretty good - Crisafulli seems like the kind of indie horror (-comedy?) protagonist we've seen played by Anton Yelchin or Daniel Radcliffe. 

Gothika (2003) has a different tone. It starts with Dr. Halle Berry interviewing Penelope Cruz in a psychiatric prison about a murder she committed, possibly in response to a rape - but she can't tell anything about the rape without going off the rails. 

Berry meets up with Charles S. Dutton, the head of the institute and her husband, along with Robert Downey Jr, another doc who seems to be interested in Berry. Her husband heads home, and she follows a little while later. Downey follows her car a little ways because it's storming and he's a little too involved with her.

On her way home the sheriff tells her a bridge is washed out and directs her to detour. There, she sees a girl in the road, and when she gets out to help, she blacks out.

She wakes up in a cell in the very institute she used to work in. Downey comes in to tell her that she has been unresponsive for days, and that her husband is dead. And it looks like she killed him.

This is a great setup: A psychiatrist imprisoned in her own asylum, accused of murdering the man she loves, her only source of aid is the man who seems to be infatuated with her. There are a few more twists to come, but I think the first two-thirds are better. All throughout, she is plagued by visions of the girl from the road, as well as memories of blood and the words "Not Alone".

So an indie comedy horror and an asylum "gothic". In both cases, the protagonist may be threatened, may be hallucinating, or maybe both. I found both to be only fair, from a film point of view. Ms. Spenser found them both poor from a horror point of view - Tall Men for the too-real horror in the background, Gothika for the too-unreal underlying crimes. I'm not doing great at horror this Octo-boo.

The Day of the Hour

As I mentioned, I have never seen the OG The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). We have corrected that oversight. 

A UFO disturbs the world, then sets down on the Mall in Washington D.C. From the saucer emerges a giant robot and a man, Michael Rennie as Klaatu. He tries to tell the soldiers that surround the saucer about his mission, but is shot by one of them and taken to Walter Reed.

He is met in the hospital by a representative of the President, and says that he has a message to deliver to all the leaders of Earth at the same time. Since neither the US nor Russia will allow the meeting to be held on any ground but theirs, Rennie is stymied. He sneaks out of the hospital to go live among the common people.

In the boarding house where he ends up, he meets a widow, Patricia Neal, and her young son. To allow Neal to go on a date, Rennie volunteers to take the boy for a day. They have a nice outing, and wind up visiting the smartest man in the world. The boy knows about him, because his mother works as a secretary nearby. The smart man isn't in, but Rennie strolls in and fixes some equations on his blackboard.

That night, the genius, played by Sam Jaffe!, invites him back, and they set up a plan to get the world's attention. In a few days time, Klaatu will make all powered machinery stop operating for one hour. That's the hour the Earth stood still.

I liked this a little more than the remake. Although Keanu made an unearthly alien humanoid, Michael Rennie also had a dignified air of otherworldliness. Sam Jaffe made a great Smartest Man in the World - I guess an Einstein figure? Or some other public intellectual? The whole "living among the Earthlings" section was pulled off better here. And we got a better Klaatu Barada Nicto - it was the phrase Neal was to use if Rennie gets shot. It prevents Gort from destroying Earth, and signals for him to get Klaatu and revive him. Pretty important. 

Studying the Blade

We're kicking off Spooktober - our first scary movie is Blade (1998). There are two sequels and a remake coming, so we expect to get a lot out of this. 

It starts with a sexy girl taking a punky guy to a secret dance club, accessed through an abattoir. It's dark, the music is techno, the dancers are sexy, and the guy is a bit lost, but into it. Then blood starts raining from the ceiling, and the dancers grow fangs, and start chewing on his throat. Then appears a dark form in a badass longcoat, leather and armor, sunglasses and a flat-top fade: Wesley Snipes as Blade.

After Blade wipes out most of the vamps, the police come and take one of the survivors, Donal Logue, to the hospital. He recovers and starts to suck the blood from a hemotologist, N'Bushe Wright, but Blade shows up again and scares him off. He takes Wright back to his hideout, where him and his partner, Kris Kristofferson fight vampires. 

Kristofferson is a human, but it turns out that Snipes is a "daywalker", a half-vampire that can withstand sunlight, garlic, etc, but still has the urge to drink blood. He has a serum to suppress it, but it's not working so well. Maybe a hematologist could help?

On the dark side, we find that Logue works for Stephen Dorff, a young vampire who has aspirations to rule the vampire and human worlds. The key is Blade's daywalker blood. 

I'll skip over the plot, which is a little too much for the movie, I think. What we came for was hot techno music, cool martial arts and Wesley Snipes being badass. Although this was a re-watch, I had forgotten Kristofferson being a lovely old curmudgeon. He gets bitten and turned so he has to kill himself. I'd also forgotten Donal Logue (Gotham), who acts as Dorff's sidekick - a goofy Lebowski-esque stoner vampire, who keeps getting his hand cut off. Se we were satisfied. 

My biggest complaint is with the iconic line "Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice skate uphill." What the hell does that even mean?