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justforbooks · 3 years

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Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist science-fiction drama film directed by Fritz Lang. Written by Thea von Harbou in collaboration with Lang, it stars Gustav Fröhlich, Alfred Abel, Rudolf Klein-Rogge,and Brigitte Helm. Erich Pommer produced it in the Babelsberg Studios for Universum Film A.G. (UFA). The silent film is regarded as a pioneering science-fiction movie, being among the first feature-length movies of that genre. Filming took place over 17 months in 1925–26 at a cost of more than five million Reichsmarks.

Made in Germany during the Weimar period, Metropolis is set in a futuristic urban dystopia and follows the attempts of Freder, the wealthy son of the city master, and Maria, a saintly figure to the workers, to overcome the vast gulf separating the classes in their city and bring the workers together with Joh Fredersen, the city master. The film's message is encompassed in the final inter-title: "The Mediator Between the Head and the Hands Must Be the Heart".

Metropolis met a mixed reception upon release. Critics found it visually beautiful and powerful – the film's art direction by Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut, and Karl Vollbrecht draws influence from Bauhaus, Cubist, and Futurist design, along with touches of the Gothic in the scenes in the catacombs, the cathedral and Rotwang's house – and lauded its complex special effects, but accused its story of being naive. H. G. Wells described the film as "silly", and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls the story "trite" and its politics "ludicrously simplistic". The film's alleged Communist message was also criticized.

The film's extensive running time also came in for criticism, and Metropolis was cut substantially after its German premiere, with a large portion of Lang's original footage removed. Many attempts have been made since the 1970s to restore the film. In 1984, Italian music producer Giorgio Moroder released a truncated version with a soundtrack by rock artists including Freddie Mercury, Loverboy, and Adam Ant. In 2001, a new reconstruction of Metropolis was shown at the Berlin Film Festival. In 2008, a damaged print of Lang's original cut of the film was found in a museum in Argentina. After a long restoration process that required additional materials provided by a print from New Zealand, the film was 95% restored and shown on large screens in Berlin and Frankfurt simultaneously on 12 February 2010.

Metropolis is now widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential films ever made, ranking 35th in Sight & Sound's 2012 critics' poll. In 2001 the film was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World Register, the first film thus distinguished.

Metropolis was distributed by Parufamet, a company formed in December 1925 by the American film studios Paramount Pictures and Metro Goldwyn Mayer to loan $4 million (US) to UFA. The film had its world premiere at the UFA-Palast am Zoo in Berlin on 10 January 1927, where the audience, including a critic from the Berliner Morgenpost, reacted to several of the film's most spectacular scenes with "spontaneous applause". However, others have suggested the premiere was met with muted applause interspersed with boos and hisses.

At the time of its German premiere, Metropolis had a length of 4,189 metres, which is approximately 153 minutes at 24 frames per second (fps). UFA's distribution deal with Paramount and MGM "entitled [them] to make any change [to films produced by UFA] they found appropriate to ensure profitability". Considering that Metropolis was too long and unwieldy, Parufamet commissioned American playwright Channing Pollock to write a simpler version of the film that could be assembled using the existing material. Pollock shortened the film dramatically, altered its inter-titles and removed all references to the character of Hel, because the name sounded too similar to the English word Hell, thereby removing Rotwang's original motivation for creating his robot. Pollock said about the original film that it was "symbolism run such riot that people who saw it couldn't tell what the picture was about. ... I have given it my meaning." Lang's response to the re-editing of the film was to say "I love films, so I shall never go to America. Their experts have slashed my best film, Metropolis, so cruelly that I dare not see it while I am in England." The Hel storyline would be partially restored in Giorgio Moroder's 1984 version, and subsequent versions completely restored it.

In Pollock's cut, the film ran for 3,170 metres, or approximately 116 minutes—although a contemporary review in Variety of a showing in Los Angeles gave the running time as 107 minutes, and another source lists it at 105 minutes. This version of Metropolis premiered in the United States in March 1927, and was released, in a slightly different and longer version (128 minutes) in the United Kingdom around the same time with different title cards.

Alfred Hugenberg, a German nationalist businessman, cancelled UFA's debt to Paramount and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer after taking charge of the company in April 1927, and chose to halt distribution in German cinemas of Metropolis in its original form. Hugenberg had the film cut down to a length of 3,241 metres (about 118 minutes), broadly along the lines of Pollock's edit, removing the film's perceived "inappropriate" communist subtext and religious imagery. Hugenberg's cut of the film was released in German cinemas in August 1927. Later, after demands for more cuts by Nazi censors, UFA distributed a still shorter version of the film (2,530 metres, 91 minutes) in 1936, and an English version of this cut was archived in the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) film library in the 1930s. It was this version which was the basis of all versions of Metropolis until the recent restorations. In 1986 it was recopied and returned to Germany to be the basis of the 1987 Munich Archive restoration.

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#JUST FOR BOOKS #Metropolis #Fritz Lang

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tilbageidanmark · 2 years

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Movies I watched this week - 47

Fritz Lang X 3:

✳️✳️✳️ MOLOCH! Lang’s spectacular Bauhaus masterpiece Metropolis, the first full-feature science fiction, with a cast of 37,000 extras. Innovative & groundbreaking class-struggle epic, with elaborate Expressionist sets and dystopian 2026 designs. First watch. 9/10.

The Freddie Mercury version.

✳️✳️✳️ M (for Mörder) - Peter Lorre’s breakthrough role as creepy child murderer Hans Beckert, a daring experiment in 1931 Germany. Lang’s first sound film. And so much smoking. Re-watch. 8/10

✳️✳️✳️ Another first watch: Godard’s pretentious 1963 Contempt (Le Mépris) with Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli and Fritz Lang disappointed me greatly. In spite of him narrating the opening credits (Creative!) and Georges Delerue’s music, I found it cutesy & affected, a work of a young man pretending to deal with the grown-up issue of a marriage disintegrating. 2/10

✴️

Another Peter Lorre role as Joel Cairo, with Sydney Greenstreet as Gutman The “Fat Man”, and Humphrey Bogart’s golden baritone voice, in The Maltese Falcon, John Huston’s directorial debut.

...”The stuff that dreams are made of”...

✴️

Eva, a Catalan sci-fi fairy tale about robots with emotional memories. A young researcher wants to use his own life-like robotic daughter as a model for next-generation software. Done in a beautifully-shot snow-covered village. The loving bond between the young researcher and the gorgeous 10 year old girl is nearly incestuous. 5+/10

✴️

Isabelle Huppert X 3 Psychosexual dramas (+ 2 others):

✳️✳️✳️ Continuing through Michael Haneke’s oeuvre: The Piano Teacher. Isabelle Huppert is a lonely & sexually-repressed piano professor who starts a sado-masochistic relationship with a young student. She is introduced as an elitist Schumann / Schubert purist, but eventually she ‘descends’ into raw pornography, self-abuse and degradation. Explicit & hard to watch, it fits with the tropes of the conservative-looking teacher who harbors uncontrollable erotic urges. Based on a controversial novel by Austrian Nobel Prize winner Elfriede Jelinek. 7/10.

✳️✳️✳️ In Paul Verhoeven's 2016 Elle, Huppert plays another mature woman who wants her sexual needs fulfilled her way. It seems like a (somehow inferior) version of Haneke’s film. A businesswoman is being raped, and takes control of her response to it. It’s empowering but it also strokes manipulative male-fantasy tones. 5/10.

✳️✳️✳️ She must have had a long period when she kept playing similar sexy French roles. My mother (Ma Mère) is another transgressive film about a promiscuous, depraved mother who sleeps with her 17-year-old son. It’s a senseless & joyless story of uninhibited orgies, incest, sado-masochism and dysfunction. 2/10

✳️✳️✳️ Huppert played also a strong & independent working woman in Claude Chabrol’s Story of Women. It’s a straight feminist tale, until the tragic end, when it takes a dark turn. Based on a true story of the last woman to be guillotined in German occupied France for performing abortions. Young Huppert was beautifully captivating in this role. 8+/10.

✳️✳️ Finally, Claire's Camera, a different Korean film about a random meeting between a friendly Isabelle Huppert who likes to take photos and a pretty Korean film assistant who got fired suddenly and without an explanation. 70 lovely minutes of unglamorous walks in the narrow streets of Cannes. “The only way to change things is to look at them again very slowly"... 8/10.

The discovery of the week! I’m so glad that Cataz has a bunch of Sang-soo Hong and Kim Min-hee movies which I’m going to dive into!

✴️

Another Claire - Éric Rohmer‘s 1970 Claire’s Knee, the fifth of his Six “Moral” Tales. Seductive & subtle & charming and oh so French story of an older diplomat smitten with two sisters, both teenagers, and his endless meditations on the nature of the male “desire”.

✴️

Spencer is a fictionalized account of the traumatizing Christmas weekend in which the suffering Princess Diane decided to leave the Royal family. Somehow “different” from straight British monarchy-porn. Kristin Stewart and Timothy Spall were good.

✴️

Sophia Loren X 3:

✳️✳️✳️ An unlikely relationship between a 12-year-old Senegalese orphan and 86 year old former prostitute and Jewish Holocaust survivor in The Life Ahead. A new version of 1977 Madame Rosa. Featuring the old city of Bari, Italy.

✳️✳️✳️ 2 lonely people meet in Ettore Scola’s A Special Day, on May 4, 1938, the day Hitler visits Mussolini in Rome. That was the day when housewife and mom to 6 Sophia Loren asked gay radiomen Marcello Mastroianni to help her catch her escaped myna bird. All done in sepia tones.

Re-watch. 7+/10.

✳️✳️✳️ De Sica’s Marriage Italian Style. Another of the 14 films that starred Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni: The putana and the rich man from Napoli, who wouldn’t marry her, even after 20 years relationship.

✴️

My first Kevin Smith: Clerk, a fawning love-letter documentary about the self-indulgent entrepreneur. I heard of his movies, but I actually never seen a single one of them. 1/10

✴️

Another first for me: "Not a movie, but a Made-For-TV movie”, the brand new South Park: Post Covid - I didn’t expect it to be so insightful, up to date and funny! 6/10

✴️

While waiting for Petite Maman, Céline Sciamma‘s latest, I watched her 2014 coming-of-age Girlhood. Uniquely, it takes place at the banlieue and features black-only disenfranchised 16-yr. old girls as they struggle for self-expression.

✴️

ANOTHER watch (No 4.?) of Anna Kendrick’s A simple Favor. She is just SO cute. Here is her rap car scene.

✴️

Absolutely Anything, Terry Jones last film, released in 2014, a year after he publicly announced that he suffered from a form of dementia, (which eventually killed him). Unfortunately, this movie had absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Also the final film to star Robin Williams. 1/10

- - - - -

(My complete movie list is here)

#movies

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leelooel · 3 years

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Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist science-fiction drama (silence film) directed by Fritz Lang

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memolands · 3 years

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Metropolis - The famous alternative silent film is being shot in Babelsberg

Metropolis – The famous alternative silent film is being shot in Babelsberg

A 1927 German expressionist science-fiction drama film directed by Fritz Lang. Written by Thea von Harbou in collaboration with Lang, it stars Gustav Fröhlich, Alfred Abel, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, and Brigitte Helm. The silent film is regarded as a pioneering science-fiction movie, being among the first feature-length movies of that genre. The film architects Otto Hunte, Erich Kettelhut and Karl…

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#Alfred Abel #Babelsberg Studio #Brigitte Helm #Fritz Lang #Gustav Fröhlich #Marlene Dietrich-Halle #Metropolis film #Rudolf Klein-Rogge #science-fiction drama film #Thea von Harbou

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hybridmomentsfuckyou666-blog · 4 years

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Notes On Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans ( 1927, F. W. Murnau)

by Steve Orth

1. The movie Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans is about a man from the country who has an affair by a sexually liberated woman for the city. The Woman From The City convinces The Man to kill his country wife while on a boat. He's a little hesitant, but then decides that murdering her is a fine idea. But the murder falls apart and The Wife's escape actually leads them to a second honeymoon for the man and his wife. But trouble is still present as they find it quite it difficult to get home safely.

2.1 I felt Murnau did an amazing job of switching the mood on the audience. It went from dark horror to comedy to romance very easily, just like real life! This was achieved by lighting, music, and acting. The boat under duress scene was so well built and suspenseful. The darkness and the cuts to lightning (nature is always teaching lessons!) to the acting, Murnau's choice of having The Man pull out the bundle of sticks, the objects that were instrumental in his forgotten murder plot, in order to save his wife was incredible. Speaking of bundle of sticks. There's an incredible moment in the film where The Man has the bundle of sticks and is approaching the house. The camera stays at a long shot and does a tracking shot of him as he sort of hovers around the house. This is full of shadows from the trees and the distance, the music, and the lighting work together beautifully to create a unique eeriness.

2.2 My favorite scene of the film and favorite moment of sound is when the man and the woman leave the church and are so in love that they walk through traffic and into a dream of their own love. Then they cause a traffic jam, with honking of horns and jeers from the crowd. I found it be very surprising, jarring, and quite hilarious.

2.3 I thought the melodrama, where it really stood out, was at the end where The Man blames The Wife's "death" on The Woman From The City and begins to attack her. This moment in the film was so melodramatic and intense. I thought The Man was so pathetic in his attempt to blame and harm someone, because of his own grief and guilt. I was really upset that he would act that way. A big part of melodrama is the "Emotion versus reason" aspect of the melodrama. I sometimes will get lost in the logic of behavior in a film. "Who would act that way!?" I sometimes yell at my screen.

2.4 A moral phenomenon, I thought the costumes and hair symbolized of the women really shouldn't be seen as devilish, they should be seen as liberated. To be honest, I was a little disappointed when The Wife was at the hair salon and didn't get a makeover. I wanted her to receive that transformation and be liberated from The Man, and yet still have their love. Watching this film in 2018 is completely different than watching it in 1927, where maybe Murnau is saying that the liberated woman will be a man's demise. And in 1927, there were many men who were afraid of the liberated woman. They probably wanted to sleep with them, but they didn't want their sweet wives at home to act this way. We see this male fear of the liberated woman much clearer in later film noir years, as the femme fatale sets her evil plans in motion. This movie predates that femme fatale and predates noir as well, with many of its lighting techniques. Which makes a lot of sense as the Noir filmmakers borrowed a lot from German Expressionist, which Murnau was a part of.

2.5 I don't necessarily agree with the book's Lure Of The City theory. I think the city represented excitement and second chances or a chance to reinvent oneself. I think it actually was a boost of the excitement that The Man and The Wife really needed. And I think they should move to the city after the crazy weekend they had. I do think they have some issues that might want to work out before moving to the city, but ultimately that's where they should end up.

Lastly, I want to just note how wonderful I thought this film was. It was one that I had on my list of films I've wanted to see for a long time and it did not disappoint. I also think would be fun to talk about is that the idea that Melodrama is itself a genre. Or is it a style element that we see in films of all kinds? Is any moment in a film or show where there's weeping or when a lover gets scorned simply a melodramatic moment? So a science fiction films like E.T. or Independence Day or Star Wars can contain melodramatic moments, but that doesn't necessarily make them Melodramatic films. If we were to define a melodramatic film, if it is a genre film, what are the elements that we would need to see? I'd say romance is an important part of melodrama. I think non-realistic acting is also part of it, as realism leads to drama, not the over-the-top melodrama. I don't feel that there's any room for subtlety in melodrama.

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elcinelateleymickyandonie · 5 years

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Metropolis (1927) German expressionist science-fiction drama film directed by Fritz Lang.

#metropolis #classicfilm #elcinelateleymickyandonie #fritzlang

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spacerascal1 · 6 years

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“Metropolis is a 1927 German expressionist science-fiction drama film directed by Fritz Lang. Written by Thea von Harbou, with collaboration from Lang himself,[5][6] it starred Gustav Fröhlich, Alfred Abel, Rudolf Klein-Rogge and Brigitte Helm. Erich Pommer produced it in the Babelsberg Studios for Universum Film A.G. (Ufa). The silent film is regarded as a pioneering work of the science-fiction genre in movies, being among the first feature-length movies of the genre.” — Wikipedia

#scifimovies #scifi #sci fi #silent films

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aion-rsa · 4 years

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Best Horror Movies Streaming on HBO Max

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Editor’s Note: This post is updated monthly. Bookmark this page and come back every month to see the new horror movies on HBO Max.

What ever would we do without horror?

So much of our day to day life is built around logic and known, verifiable facts, and for some, the rest of the time must be supplemented with comforting reassurances that everything is going to be alright. Well if the last year has taught us anything… that’s not the case. Perhaps this is why horror hounds know the best way to face abstract fears is to confront them head on… and preferably with a screen in the way.

So, with Halloween around the corner, we figured it’s time to get in touch with our illogical, terrified animal brain. That’s where horror and horror movies in particular come in. Gathered here are the best horror movies on HBO Max for your scaring needs.

Alien

“In space, no one can hear you scream,” the tagline for Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi/horror epic promised. Well maybe they should have screened this thing in space because I’m sure all that audiences in theaters did was scream.

Alien has since evolved into a heady, science fiction franchise that has stretched out for decades. The original film, however, is a small-scale, terrifyingly claustrophobic thriller.

Altered States

What if you could tap into the vast swaths of the brain you never use? What if you did and didn’t like what we found? And what if it was an absolute psychedelic rush of a cinematic experience?

All three questions are answered in their own way during Ken Russell’s Altered States, a wild sci-fi thriller. In the film, William Hurt stars as a psychologist who begins experimenting with taking hallucinatory drugs while in a sensory depravation tank.

Yes, he manages to expand his consciousness; he also begins to expand his physical body as it transforms beneath his skin. Or does it? Well that’s yet another good question…

An American Werewolf in London

Arguably the definitive werewolf movie, John Landis’ 1981 horror masterpiece has the single greatest on-screen lycanthropic transformation in movie history… and that’s only one of its appeals.

Peppered with loving references to the werewolf movies that came before it and a few legitimate laughs to go along with the scares, An American Werewolf in London is remarkably knowing and self-aware, without ever flirting with parody.

Not enough can be said about Rick Baker’s practical effects, which extend beyond the aforementioned on-screen transformation and into one of the most gruesome depictions of a werewolf attack aftermath you’re ever likely to see. A classic of the era, it still can get under the skin whenever Griffin Dunne’s mutilated corpse rises from the grave to warn his friend to “beware the moon.”

New Line Cinema

Blade II

Perhaps Guillermo del Toro‘s schlockiest movie, there’s still great fun to be had by all in Blade II. As a sequel to the 1998 vampire actioner that starred Wesley Snipes as the titular “daywalker,” Blade II builds on the lore of the first film and its secret underground society of bloodsuckers who Blade must do battle with.

However, del Toro heightens both the Gothic lunacy of it all, as well as the horror quotient. Truly there are few sights as gross in vampire lore as Luke Goss’ Nomak, a new type of monster whose face opens like a flower, revealing a gaping hole of fangs and tongue…

The Brood

I bet you never thought placenta could look so tasty, but when Samantha Eggar’s Nola Carveth licks her newborn clean you’ll be craving sloppy seconds within the hour. She brings feline intuition to female troubles. We get it. Having a new baby can be scary. Having a brood is terrifying. Feminine power is the most horrifying of all for male directors used to being in control.

David Cronenberg takes couples therapy one step too far in his 1979 psychological body-horror film, The Brood. When it came out critics called it reprehensible trash, but it is the writer-director’s most traditional horror story. Oliver Reed plays with mental illness like Bill Sikes played with the kids as Hal Raglan, the psychotherapist treating the ex-wife of Frank Carveth (Art Hindle). The film starts slow, unfolding its drama through cuts and bruises.

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Cronenberg unintentionally modifies the body of the Kramer vs. Kramer story in The Brood, but the murderous munchkins at the external womb of the film want a little more than undercooked French toast.

Carnival of Souls

Carnival of Souls may be the most unlikely of chillers to appear in the Criterion Collection. Hailing from the great state of Kansas and helmed by commercial director Herk Harvey, who was looking for his big break in features, there is something hand-crafted about the whole affair. There’s also something unmistakably eerie.

The story is fairly basic campfire boilerplate, following a woman (Candace Hilligoss) who survives a car crash but is then haunted by the sound of music and visions of the ghoulish dead–beckoning her toward a decrepit carnival abandoned some years earlier–and the acting can leave something to be desired. But the dreadful dreamlike atmosphere is irresistible.

With a strong sense of fatalism and inescapable doom, the film takes an almost melodic and disinterested gait as it stalks its heroine to her inevitable end, presenting images of the walking dead that linger in the mind long after the credits roll.

The Conjuring 2

Making an effective, truly spooky mainstream horror film is hard enough. But The Conjuring franchise really nailed things out of the gate with a sequel that is every bit as fun and terrifying as the original.

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Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga return as paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren in The Conjuring 2. This time the Warrens head to Great Britain to attend to the Hodgson family, dealing with some poltergeist problems in their Enfield home. The source of the Enfield haunting’s activity contains some of the most disturbing and terrifying visuals in the entire Conjuring franchise and helped to set up a (sadly pretty bad) spinoff sequel in The Nun.

Doctor Sleep

Let’s be up front about this: Doctor Sleep is not The Shining. For some that fact will make this sequel’s existence unforgivable. Yet there is a stoic beauty and creepy despair just waiting to be experienced by those willing to accept Doctor Sleep on its own terms.

Directed by one of the genre’s modern masters, Mike Flanagan, the movie had the unenviable task of combining one of King’s most disappointing texts with the opposing sensibilities of Stanley Kubrick’s singular The Shining adaptation.

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And yet, the result is an effective thriller about lifelong regrets and trauma personified by the ghostly specters of the Overlook Hotel. But they’re far from the only horrors here. Rebecca Ferguson is absolutely chilling as the smiling villain Rose the Hat, and the scene where she and other literal energy vampires descend upon young Jacob Tremblay is the stuff of nightmares. Genuinely, it’s a scene you won’t forget, for better or worse….

Eraserhead

“In Heaven, everything is fine,” sings the Lady in the Radiator in Eraserhead. “You’ve got your good things, and I’ve got mine.”

You may get something short of paradise, but the insular world David Lynch created for his 1977 experimental existential horror film is a land of mundane wonders, commonplace mysteries, and extremely awkward dinner conversations. Lynch’s first feature film is surrealistic, expressionistic, and musically comic. The minor key score and jarring black and white images bring half-lives to the industrial backdrop and exquisite squalor. At its heart though, Eraserhead is poignant, sad, and ultimately relatable on a universal level.

Jack Nance’s Henry Spencer is the spiky-haired everyman. He works hard at his job, cares deeply for his deformed, mutant child, and is desperate to please his extended family. Lynch lays a comedy of manners in a rude, crude city. The film is an assault on the senses, and it might take a little while for the viewer’s brains to adjust to the images on the screen; it is a different reality, and not an entirely inviting one, but stick with it. Once you’re in with the in-laws, you’re home free. When you make it to the end, you can tell your friends you watched all of Eraserhead. When they ask you what it’s about, you can tell them you saw it.

Eyes Without a Face

“I’ve done so much wrong to perform this miracle,” Doctor Génessier (Pierre Brasseur) confesses in the 1960 horror film Eyes Without a Face. But he says it in French, making it all so much more poignant, allowing it to underscore everything director and co-writer Georges Franju did right. We feel for the respectable plastic surgeon forced to do monstrous things. But the monster behind the title character is his young daughter Christiane (Édith Scob). She spends the majority of the film behind a mask, even more featureless than the unpainted plastic Captain Kirk kid’s costume Michael Myers wore in Halloween. The first time we see her face though, the shock wears off quickly and we are more moved than terrified.

Like Val Lewton films, the horror comes from the desolate black-and-white atmosphere, shrouding the claustrophobic suspense in German Expressionism. Maurice Jarre’s score evokes a Gothic carnival as much as a mad scientist’s laboratory. After his daughter’s face is hideously disfigured in an accident, Dr. Génessier becomes obsessed with trying to restore it. We aren’t shown much, until we’re shown too much. We see his heterograft surgical procedure in real time. A woman’s face is slowly flayed from the muscle. The graphic scenes pack more of a visceral shock after all the encroaching dread.

From Dusk Till Dawn

Some movies have such a gonzo left turn between acts that audiences will either go with it or throw their popcorn at the screen in disgust. For most viewers, including us, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn is happily the former. An absolutely wild mash-up of the gangster genre that both filmmakers were redefining in the 1990s and the type of schlocky grindhouse thrills they worshipped at 1970s drive-ins, From Dusk Till Dawn is one of the strangest and most satisfying vampire movies ever made.

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With a story that improbably pairs Tarantino and George Clooney as on screen brothers, the flick recounts how the duo’s notorious Gecko Brothers kidnap a nice Christian family ruled by a doubting pastor (Harvey Keitel) in order to sneak across the Mexican border. But once there, the strip club they choose to spend the night in has the unfortunate gimmick of being run by ancient vampires, including Salma Hayek as the Queen of the Undead. It’s batshit good fun, and a far better tribute to grindhouse cinema than the Grindhouse double-feature the same filmmakers would partner on a decade later.

Godzilla

As the original and by far still the best Godzilla movie ever produced, this 1954 classic (originally titled Gojira), is one of the many great Showa Era classics that the Criterion Collection and HBO Max are making readily available to American audiences. And if you want to watch one that is actually scary, look no further.

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In this original uncut Japanese form, the movie’s genuine dread of nuclear devastation, as well as nightly air raids, less than 10 years since World War II ended in several mushroom clouds, is overwhelming. Tapping into the real cultural anxiety of a nation left marred by the memory of its dead, as well as the recent incident of a fishing crew being contaminated by unannounced hydrogen bomb testing at Bikini Atoll, Godzilla encapsulates terror for the atomic age in a giant lizard. But unlike the sequels there is nothing cuddly or amusing about this original Kaiju with its scarred body and legion of tumors. This is the one Godzilla movie to play it straight, and it still plays today.

The Invisible Man

After years of false starts and failed attempts at resurrecting the classic Universal Monsters, Universal Pictures finally figured out how to make it work: They called Blumhouse Productions.

Yep, Jason Blum’s home for micro-budgeted modern horror worked wonders alongside writer-director Leigh Whannell in updating the classic 1933 James Whale movie, and the H.G. Wells novel on which it is based, for the 21st century.

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How The Invisible Man Channels the Original Tale

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Turning the story of a man who masters invisibility into a horrific experience told from the vantage of the woman trying to escape his toxic violence, The Invisible Man becomes a disquieting allegory for the #MeToo era. It also is a devastating showcase for Elisabeth Moss who is compelling as Cecilia, the abused and gaslighted woman that barely found the will to escape, yet will now have to discover more strength since everyone around her shrugs off the idea of her dead ex coming back as an invisible man…

Lifeforce

Most assuredly a horror movie for a very acquired taste, there are few who would call Tobe Hooper’s career-destroying Lifeforce a good movie. There probably aren’t even many who would call it a fun movie.

But for those with a singular taste for batshit pulp run amok, Lifeforce needs to be seen to be believed: Naked French vampire girls from outer space! Hordes of extras as zombies marauding through downtown London! Lush Henry Mancini music over special effects way outside of Cannon Films’ budget!!! Patrick Stewart as an authority figure possessed by said naked French space vampire, trying to seduce an astronaut via makeout sessions?!

Movies

Tobe Hooper’s Lifeforce: Space Vampires, Comets, and Nudity

By Ryan Lambie

Movies

The Mummy and Lifeforce: The Strange Parallels

By Ryan Lambie

… What is this movie? Why does it exist? We don’t know, but we’re probably more glad it does than the people who made it.

Magic

As much a psychological case study as as a traditional horror movie, for those who like their terror rooted in humanity, Magic may be the creepiest iteration of the “killer doll” subgenre since this is about the man who thinks his dummy is alive. Starring Anthony Hopkins before he was Hannibal, or had a “Sir” in front of his name, Magic is the brain child of William Goldman, who adapted his own novel into this movie before he’d go on to do the same for The Princess Bride (as well as adapt Stephen King’s Misery), but after he’d already written Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Marathon Man.

In the film, Hopkins stars as Corky, a down on his luck ventriloquist who tries to get his life together by tracking down his high school sweetheart (Ann-Margret). She’ll soon probably wish he didn’t bother once she realizes Corky believes his ventriloquist dummy Fats really is magic… and is determined to get him to act on the most heinous of impulses.

The Most Dangerous Game

Before King Kong, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack released The Most Dangerous Game, one of the all-time great pulp movies, based on a short story by Richard Connell. This classic has influenced everything from Predator to The Running Man, The Hunger Games to Ready or Not.

It’s the story of a big game hunter who shipwrecks on a remote island with an eccentric Russian Count who escaped the Bolshevik Revolution (Leslie Banks). The wayward noble now drinks, studies, and charms his apparently frequent array of unannounced guests, including two other survivors from a previous (suspicious) wreck. The film quickly boils down to a mad rich man determined to hunt his guests as prey across the island for the ultimate thrill.

Movies

The Most Dangerous Game That Never Ends

By David Crow

Culture

Why King Kong Can Never Escape His Past

By David Crow

Man hunting man, man lusting after woman in a queasy pre-Code fashion, this is a primal throwback to adventure yarns of the 19th century, which were still relatively recent in 1932. Shot simultaneously with King Kong, this is 63 brisk minutes of excitement, dread, and delicious overacting. Let the games begin.

Night of the Living Dead

“They’re coming to get you, Barbara!”

The zombie movie that more or less invented our modern understanding of what a zombie movie is, there is little new that can be said about George A. Romero’s original guts and brains classic, Night of the Living Dead. Shot in black and white and on almost no budget, the film reimagined zombies as a horde of ravenous flesh-eaters, as opposed to a lowly servant of the damned and enchanted.

Movies

Night of the Living Dead: The Many Sequels, Remakes, and Spinoffs

By Alex Carter

Games

The George Romero Resident Evil Movie You Never Saw

By David Crow

Still visually striking in black and white, perhaps the key reason to go back to the zombie movie that started it all is due to how tragically potent its central conflict from 1968 remains: When strangers are forced to join forces and barricade in a farmhouse to survive a zombie invasion, the wealthy white businessman is constantly at odds with the young Black man in the group, to the point of drawing weapons…

The Others

Alejandro Amenabar (Open Your Eyes) wrote and directed this elegant ghost story. Nicole Kidman is superb as Grace, who relocates herself and her two small children to a remote country estate in the aftermath of World War II. Their highly structured life — the children are sensitive to sunlight and must stay in darkened rooms — is shattered by mysterious presences in the house.

Amenabar relies on mood, atmosphere and a few well-placed scares to make this an excellent modern-day companion to classics like The Haunting and The Innocents.

Ready or Not

The surprise horror joy of 2019, Ready or Not was a wicked breath of fresh air from the creative team Radio Silence. With a star-making lead turn by Samara Weaving, the movie is essentially a reworking of The Most Dangerous Game where a bride is being hunted by her groom’s entire wedding party on the night of their nuptials.

Movies

Ready or Not Ending Explained

By David Crow

Movies

Best Horror Movies on Amazon Prime Right Now

By Alec Bojalad and 3 others

It’s a nutty premise that has a delicious (and broad) satirical subtext about the indulgences and eccentricities of the rich, as the would-be extended family of Grace (Weaving) is only pursuing her because they’re convinced a grandfather made a deal with the Devil for their wealth–and to keep it they must step on those beneath them every generation. Well step, shoot, stab, and ritualistically sacrifice in this cruelest game of hide and seek ever. Come for the gonzo high-concept and stay for the supremely satisfying ending.

Sisters

One of the scariest things about the 1972 psychological thriller Sisters is the subliminal sounds of bones creaking and muscles readjusting during the slasher scenes. Margot Kidder plays both title characters: conjoined twins, French Canadian model Danielle Breton and asylum-committed Dominique Blanchion, who had been surgically separated. Director Brian De Palma puts the movie together like a feature-long presentation of the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. The camera lingers over bodies, bloodied or pristine, mobile or prone, with fetishistic glee before instilling the crime scenes in the mind’s eye. He allows longtime Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann to assault the ear.

De Palma was inspired by a photograph of Masha and Dasha Krivoshlyapova, Russian conjoined twins with seemingly polarized temperaments. There may be no deeper bond than blood, which the film has plenty of, but the real alter ego comes from splitscreen compositions and an outside intruder. The voyeuristic delight culminates in a surgical dream sequence with freaks, geeks, a giant, and dwarves. Nothing is as it seems and an out-of-order telephone is a triggering reminder.

Vampyr

A nigh silent picture, Vampyr came at a point of transition for its director Carl Th. Dreyer. The Danish filmmaker, who often worked in Germany and France at this time, was making only his second “talkie” when he mounted this vampire opus. That might be why the movie is largely absent of dialogue. The plot, which focuses on a young man journeying to a village that is under the thrall of a vampire, owes much to Bram Stoker’s Dracula as well as F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu from some years earlier.

Yet there horror fans should seek Vampyr out, if for no other reason than the stunning visuals and cinematography. Alternating between German Expressionist influences in its use to shadows to unsettling images crafted in naturalistic light, such as a boatman carrying an ominous scythe, this a a classic of mood and atmosphere. Better still is when they combine, such as when the scythe comes back to bedevil a woman sleeping, trapping us all in her nightmare. Even if its narrative has been told better, before and after, there’s a reason this movie’s iconography lingers nearly a century later.

Wes Craven’s New Nightmare

Some do not count Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, the seventh film in the Nightmare on Elm Street saga, as actually part of the series. As a gleefully meta exercise in self-awareness and self-critique, the film shirks off continuing the narrative from the last batch of Freddy Krueger movies, the last of which had the title Freddy’s Dead. Rather writer-director Wes Craven, returning to the series for the first time as director since the original, attempts to wrestle the horror icon back from pop culture. When Craven and actor Robert Englund created Freddy in 1984’s A Nightmare on Elm Street, the fiend was a menacing, demonic child murderer. By 1994, he’d turn into a kid-friendly pop culture personality and huckster.

Movies

Best Modern Horror Movies

By Don Kaye

Movies

Nightmare on Elm Street: Is Dream Warriors the Best Freddy Krueger Movie?

By David Crow

With Englund on board, as well as the original film’s star in Heather Langenkamp, New Nightmare has the knotty concept of being about Langenkamp playing a version of herself: an actress who did a slasher movie 10 years ago and is still in some ways haunted by it. In real life she faced a stalker calling her at all hours of the night; in the movie, it’s Freddy. Or a Demon who’s taken the shape of Freddy… it’s complicated. The movie’s reach may exceed its grasp in terms of artistry, but at the very least Freddy was scary again for one last time. And the film’s ambition in crafting a waking nightmare of movies bleeding into our reality is still impressive.

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vegacityart · 4 years

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k-i-l-l-e-r-b-e-e-6-9 · 2 years

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Max Schreck in Nosferatu (1922)

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selectedcinema · 4 years

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Notes On Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans ( 1927, F. W. Murnau)

by Steve Orth

1. The movie Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans is about a man from the country who has an affair by a sexually liberated woman for the city. The Woman From The City convinces The Man to kill his country wife while on a boat. He’s a little hesitant, but then decides that murdering her is a fine idea. But the murder falls apart and The Wife’s escape actually leads them to a second honeymoon for the man and his wife. But trouble is still present as they find it quite it difficult to get home safely.

2.1 I felt Murnau did an amazing job of switching the mood on the audience. It went from dark horror to comedy to romance very easily, just like real life! This was achieved by lighting, music, and acting. The boat under duress scene was so well built and suspenseful. The darkness and the cuts to lightning (nature is always teaching lessons!) to the acting, Murnau’s choice of having The Man pull out the bundle of sticks, the objects that were instrumental in his forgotten murder plot, in order to save his wife was incredible. Speaking of bundle of sticks. There’s an incredible moment in the film where The Man has the bundle of sticks and is approaching the house. The camera stays at a long shot and does a tracking shot of him as he sort of hovers around the house. This is full of shadows from the trees and the distance, the music, and the lighting work together beautifully to create a unique eeriness.

2.3 I thought the melodrama, where it really stood out, was at the end where The Man blames The Wife’s “death” on The Woman From The City and begins to attack her. This moment in the film was so melodramatic and intense. I thought The Man was so pathetic in his attempt to blame and harm someone, because of his own grief and guilt. I was really upset that he would act that way. A big part of melodrama is the “Emotion versus reason” aspect of the melodrama. I sometimes will get lost in the logic of behavior in a film. “Who would act that way!?” I sometimes yell at my screen.

2.4 A moral phenomenon, I thought the costumes and hair symbolized of the women really shouldn’t be seen as devilish, they should be seen as liberated. To be honest, I was a little disappointed when The Wife was at the hair salon and didn’t get a makeover. I wanted her to receive that transformation and be liberated from The Man, and yet still have their love. Watching this film in 2018 is completely different than watching it in 1927, where maybe Murnau is saying that the liberated woman will be a man’s demise. And in 1927, there were many men who were afraid of the liberated woman. They probably wanted to sleep with them, but they didn’t want their sweet wives at home to act this way. We see this male fear of the liberated woman much clearer in later film noir years, as the femme fatale sets her evil plans in motion. This movie predates that femme fatale and predates noir as well, with many of its lighting techniques. Which makes a lot of sense as the Noir filmmakers borrowed a lot from German Expressionist, which Murnau was a part of.

2.5 I don’t necessarily agree with the book’s Lure Of The City theory. I think the city represented excitement and second chances or a chance to reinvent oneself. I think it actually was a boost of the excitement that The Man and The Wife really needed. And I think they should move to the city after the crazy weekend they had. I do think they have some issues that might want to work out before moving to the city, but ultimately that’s where they should end up.

Lastly, I want to just note how wonderful I thought this film was. It was one that I had on my list of films I’ve wanted to see for a long time and it did not disappoint. I also think would be fun to talk about is that the idea that Melodrama is itself a genre. Or is it a style element that we see in films of all kinds? Is any moment in a film or show where there’s weeping or when a lover gets scorned simply a melodramatic moment? So a science fiction films like E.T. or Independence Day or Star Wars can contain melodramatic moments, but that doesn’t necessarily make them Melodramatic films. If we were to define a melodramatic film, if it is a genre film, what are the elements that we would need to see? I’d say romance is an important part of melodrama. I think non-realistic acting is also part of it, as realism leads to drama, not the over-the-top melodrama. I don’t feel that there’s any room for subtlety in melodrama.

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