24.-28. A multi-film catch-up
Having finally written up that long post about Nosferatu, I now want to plough through as many of the other films I've seen since then as possible, before they all get entirely forgotten. Some are ones I tweeted about at the time, so I'm handling those by copying and pasting the tweets here. Others are another new phenomenon - films I've watched with Joel. To be honest, there are some films we've nominally 'watched' together which I'm not including here at all, because we just weren't really paying attention to the screen half the time. But there are a few which we legitimately watched right through, plus one which he lent me to watch properly on my own afterwards. I don't have any notes from the time on any of them, but I may as well get down what I remember, just as a record that I saw them really.
24. Vampyr (1932), dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, seen 25 May 2022
I saw this one at Home Manchester, so it's not a Cellar Club screening, but nonetheless I tweeted about it on the train on the way home. With no other notes and at this distance in time, I think those tweets will have to stand as my main response to it. I have written about it here before: LJ / DW.
Original tweet-along thread
Individual tweets:
Just heading home from a lovely evening with @HickeyWriter and a friend at @HOME_mcr. We saw the 90th anniversary restoration of Vampyr complete with an introduction by @XAldanaReyes - and Xavier, since you asked us to report back, I think the censored scenes _were_ restored.
Certainly, I don't remember Marguerite Chopin transforming into a skeleton after she was staked from previous viewings, and we got a lot of shots of the doctor dying in the mill. I'm not sure it's previously been clear to me that that was murder rather than an accident either.
But that last bit might just be my bad memory!
Other things which struck me - the carriage driver who arrives back at the manor dead at the reins must surely have been inspired by the Captain of the Demeter in Dracula. But no-one seems very bothered about trying to find out how he died or doing anything about it!
Some devices, like the woman speaking to Allan Gray from an upstairs window before letting him into the inn, his bedroom door key turning from the outside, and the idea that victims of vampires crave blood yet are repelled by their own desires resurface in Hammer Dracula films.
Doesn't necessarily mean they got there via direct inspiration, though. There are plenty of other common sources.
I was struck by the reference to Marguerite Chopin being blamed for a previous spate of murders 25 years earlier, because I'm giving a talk myself tomorrow night which will cover similar motifs in some other vampire films. Most recently, Dracula: the Original Living Vampire! 🤣
Although I shouldn't really expect a surreal film about dreams to make sense, it's nigglingly unsatisfying to me that when Allan Gray has his out-of-body experience, his dream self seems to hide in a cellar yet seeing an image of himself in the coffin and never re-emerge from it.
I'd have preferred it if Dreyer had somehow shown him merging into his own body in the coffin, so that he could then wake up and re-merge into his real body when the coffin is put down next to it. I just don't like thinking of his dream self forever trapped in the cellar!
Finally, this anniversary restoration is nicely done and definitely worth seeing. The scenes which are meant to be crisp and clear (rather than in soft focus) are much sharper than I remember - though they're bound to seem clearer on a big screen anyway.
The equivalent is true for the sound track too. It has some oddities, like sounds or music suddenly stopping and restarting, but I think those are largely intentional. All in all a superb film which was 100% worth the trip to Manchester.
25. Crucible of Terror (1971), dir. Ted Hooker, broadcast 27 May 2022
Original tweet-along thread
Individual tweets:
It's Friday night, and time to check in to the #CellarClub. I've never seen this evening's main feature before, but the Wikipedia entry suggests it is a genuinely gruelling psychological horror. I'm certainly up for some Michael Gough, anyway. #TheFilmCrowd
I will most certainly be staying up to watch The Many Faces of Christopher Lee to mark #ChristopherLee100 too! He remains my favourite of all actors, the only one for whom I've ever made even a remotely systematic attempt to watch all of his films. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
I mean, don't get me wrong, I am absolutely miles from completion on that task! I think I've watched c. 75-80 of Christopher Lee's films to date. But that would be the entire oeuvre of many actors. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
Good opening credit sequence. A nicely-subdued background of music and visuals, suddenly punctuated by the sharp snip of the pruning shears. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
Also nicely establishing how fastidious Gough's character is, how much he likes to think of himself as in control of his domains. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
This sequence with the black cat and the smoking potions is very Sabrina the Teenage Witch! #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
This is really good visually so far. Interesting angles, shadows, use of close crops and shots in which we can't see Gough's face in particular, so that he seems remote and we feel like we're peering into scenes not intended to be viewed. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
Ah, of course, that's where I recognise the daughter from! She is the young woman from the couple in Death Line: https://imdb.com/name/nm0348698/ #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
The son of the family is Michael Gough's real-life son, Simon Gough, and he and Sharon Gurney (the daughter) are married and indeed already were when this film was made. https://simongough.co.uk/about.php #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
Christ, that was indeed brutal and upsetting - as much for the portrayals of the mother and brother's reactions as the daughter's screams. They've seen the same more than once before. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
[This was in relation to Gough's character whipping his daughter to punish her for disobedience.]
Sharon Gurney (the daughter) doing a very good job with her body language her of conveying that it is still painful for her to walk after the violence of the previous night. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
The use of silence in this film is very effective too. The incidental music is sparingly used. It means every little domestic sound as people move around the house is loaded with tension. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
These scenes now showing a very capable use of the whole sound spectrum. The oppressively-loud music, its sudden absence, the awkward silence while the mother gathered the courage to speak, and now the shouting as it all comes out. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
Those flashbacks are extremely disturbing. There has clearly been a long history of really horrible things happening in this family. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
Again, the lack of dialogue makes these scenes of the mother and daughter getting Gough into the bed so much more compelling than they would be if they were talking about it. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
Oh, the colours of this dream-sequence! Or hallucination, I'm not really sure which. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
It's not just that he's gone. The covers on the bed have been changed. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
This film is just so accomplished. Loved the remote street lights in the darkness, the tension at the petrol station, the car wheels spinning in the dirt road up to this old quarry, the whipping sound of the wind. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
The emphasis on how physically difficult the whole process has been for the two women is I think critical. We're basically being shown that they are unequal to the task of throwing off the father's malign influence. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
Even after they actively decided to murder him and acted on their intention, they can't actually free themselves from him. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
I think it's deliberate that both of the dream sequences and the scarf the mother has been constantly wearing around her neck are in suffragette colours - white, purple and green. She's fighting for her emancipation, but she can't get free. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
Oh my - his return was bad enough, but the way the wife just completely faded out of existence at the end was on another level! And the cycle repeats with the snip of another rose. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
An absolutely incredible movie which probably deserves a second watch. It won't be a comfortable experience, but there was a huge amount going on there which I'd love to see again now I know where it is going. Very glad I saw this. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
26. Vlad (2003), dir. Michael D. Sellers
'Watched' with / borrowed from Joel. It's an extremely bad film about Vlad-as-Dracula, and we both knew that, but I've wanted to see it for ages anyway, and he had it on DVD! The plot doesn't make a huge amount of sense, despite large amounts of expository dialogue, but broadly speaking, four PhD students who want to write their theses on Vlad the Impaler are taken into the Carpathian mountains by by Billy Zane. While they are there, Vlad is reawakened via the power of an Order of the Dragon medallion which one of them has, and generally unleashes hell. They do a long and unnecessary trek through the forest to Poenari, a location which you can in fact drive to, I guess in order to construct it as remote and inaccessible, and because a long journey into the weird and unknown is a staple of Gothic narratives. A medieval English lady called Ilona is also somehow summoned into the present, even though she then has pretty much nothing to do except provide a love-object for one of the students, Justin, who speaks medieval English. Guy Siner, aka Lieutenant Gruber from 'Allo 'Allo, is in it, giving one of the better performances in the movie - and when that is who you have for your heavy-weight acting, it's possibly a problem. And one of the students, Alexa, turns out to be Vlad's reincarnated wife, a trope which I hate more every time I see it. Joel and I lasted about five minutes when we tried to watch this movie together, and I struggled to pay attention to it even on my own. But at least I have seen it now, and that means I'll never have to do so again!
27. The Monster Club (1981), dir. Roy Ward Baker
Watched with Joel, this isn't strictly an Amicus film, but it was produced by Milton Subotsky and uses their classic portfolio format. In the linking narrative, author R. Chetwynd-Hayes is bitten by a vampire played by Vincent Price, and then taken to a night-club where a series of musical acts play and the vampire teaches him about the various supernatural creatures which then form the subjects of the three stories - all based on Chetwynd-Hayes' actual work. The first, 'The Shadmock' is essentially a tragic love story, and turned out to contain within it a statue of a faun which features in Hammer's Dracula, Christopher Lee's Ghost Stories for Christmas, and countless other films which HammerGothic has catalogued.
The second is about a family of vampires, whose young son goes to school and is bullied there. One nice detail which Joel pointed out is that there's a scene in which the kids are all jumping over a puddle on the school playing-field, but the vampire boy can't do it, because of course it is a body of water. And the third, which is probably the most visually compelling, sees a film director visit and become trapped in a remote village which proves to be full of ghouls hungry for human flesh. It has a nice bleak ending, which underlines the theme of being trapped without access to help that the whole story was about, before Price wraps things up with a little speech about humans being the true monsters. Understatedly charming all round.
28. Detroit Rock City (1999), dir. Adam Rifkin
Also watched with Joel after an evening spent browsing through my extremely sketchy LP collection! As it contains rather a lot of Kiss, this seemed like the logical next step. I've had the DVD for 20+ years now, but don't think I've really watched it since I first got it all that time ago. It's great, though. Set in 1978, it's basically a coming-of-age story about four teenage boys who are massive Kiss fans, and desperate to see them play in Detroit. The road there is rocky, and paved with unsympathetic conservative parents, con-merchants, dumb mistakes, love interests etc, but of course they do eventually make it. I wouldn't say it's a particularly profound or life-changing film, but it's well-constructed, kinda charming, and obviously has a great soundtrack - including the disco songs as well as the Kiss!
OK, that's five done, which I think is enough for one evening. There's currently another five in the queue, which I hope to cover as soon as possible, and then I'll be up to date again. 😊
24. Vampyr (1932), dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer, seen 25 May 2022
I saw this one at Home Manchester, so it's not a Cellar Club screening, but nonetheless I tweeted about it on the train on the way home. With no other notes and at this distance in time, I think those tweets will have to stand as my main response to it. I have written about it here before: LJ / DW.
Original tweet-along thread
Individual tweets:
Just heading home from a lovely evening with @HickeyWriter and a friend at @HOME_mcr. We saw the 90th anniversary restoration of Vampyr complete with an introduction by @XAldanaReyes - and Xavier, since you asked us to report back, I think the censored scenes _were_ restored.
Certainly, I don't remember Marguerite Chopin transforming into a skeleton after she was staked from previous viewings, and we got a lot of shots of the doctor dying in the mill. I'm not sure it's previously been clear to me that that was murder rather than an accident either.
But that last bit might just be my bad memory!
Other things which struck me - the carriage driver who arrives back at the manor dead at the reins must surely have been inspired by the Captain of the Demeter in Dracula. But no-one seems very bothered about trying to find out how he died or doing anything about it!
Some devices, like the woman speaking to Allan Gray from an upstairs window before letting him into the inn, his bedroom door key turning from the outside, and the idea that victims of vampires crave blood yet are repelled by their own desires resurface in Hammer Dracula films.
Doesn't necessarily mean they got there via direct inspiration, though. There are plenty of other common sources.
I was struck by the reference to Marguerite Chopin being blamed for a previous spate of murders 25 years earlier, because I'm giving a talk myself tomorrow night which will cover similar motifs in some other vampire films. Most recently, Dracula: the Original Living Vampire! 🤣
Although I shouldn't really expect a surreal film about dreams to make sense, it's nigglingly unsatisfying to me that when Allan Gray has his out-of-body experience, his dream self seems to hide in a cellar yet seeing an image of himself in the coffin and never re-emerge from it.
I'd have preferred it if Dreyer had somehow shown him merging into his own body in the coffin, so that he could then wake up and re-merge into his real body when the coffin is put down next to it. I just don't like thinking of his dream self forever trapped in the cellar!
Finally, this anniversary restoration is nicely done and definitely worth seeing. The scenes which are meant to be crisp and clear (rather than in soft focus) are much sharper than I remember - though they're bound to seem clearer on a big screen anyway.
The equivalent is true for the sound track too. It has some oddities, like sounds or music suddenly stopping and restarting, but I think those are largely intentional. All in all a superb film which was 100% worth the trip to Manchester.
25. Crucible of Terror (1971), dir. Ted Hooker, broadcast 27 May 2022
Original tweet-along thread
Individual tweets:
It's Friday night, and time to check in to the #CellarClub. I've never seen this evening's main feature before, but the Wikipedia entry suggests it is a genuinely gruelling psychological horror. I'm certainly up for some Michael Gough, anyway. #TheFilmCrowd
I will most certainly be staying up to watch The Many Faces of Christopher Lee to mark #ChristopherLee100 too! He remains my favourite of all actors, the only one for whom I've ever made even a remotely systematic attempt to watch all of his films. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
I mean, don't get me wrong, I am absolutely miles from completion on that task! I think I've watched c. 75-80 of Christopher Lee's films to date. But that would be the entire oeuvre of many actors. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
Good opening credit sequence. A nicely-subdued background of music and visuals, suddenly punctuated by the sharp snip of the pruning shears. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
Also nicely establishing how fastidious Gough's character is, how much he likes to think of himself as in control of his domains. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
This sequence with the black cat and the smoking potions is very Sabrina the Teenage Witch! #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
This is really good visually so far. Interesting angles, shadows, use of close crops and shots in which we can't see Gough's face in particular, so that he seems remote and we feel like we're peering into scenes not intended to be viewed. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
Ah, of course, that's where I recognise the daughter from! She is the young woman from the couple in Death Line: https://imdb.com/name/nm0348698/ #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
The son of the family is Michael Gough's real-life son, Simon Gough, and he and Sharon Gurney (the daughter) are married and indeed already were when this film was made. https://simongough.co.uk/about.php #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
Christ, that was indeed brutal and upsetting - as much for the portrayals of the mother and brother's reactions as the daughter's screams. They've seen the same more than once before. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
[This was in relation to Gough's character whipping his daughter to punish her for disobedience.]
Sharon Gurney (the daughter) doing a very good job with her body language her of conveying that it is still painful for her to walk after the violence of the previous night. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
The use of silence in this film is very effective too. The incidental music is sparingly used. It means every little domestic sound as people move around the house is loaded with tension. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
These scenes now showing a very capable use of the whole sound spectrum. The oppressively-loud music, its sudden absence, the awkward silence while the mother gathered the courage to speak, and now the shouting as it all comes out. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
Those flashbacks are extremely disturbing. There has clearly been a long history of really horrible things happening in this family. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
Again, the lack of dialogue makes these scenes of the mother and daughter getting Gough into the bed so much more compelling than they would be if they were talking about it. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
Oh, the colours of this dream-sequence! Or hallucination, I'm not really sure which. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
It's not just that he's gone. The covers on the bed have been changed. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
This film is just so accomplished. Loved the remote street lights in the darkness, the tension at the petrol station, the car wheels spinning in the dirt road up to this old quarry, the whipping sound of the wind. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
The emphasis on how physically difficult the whole process has been for the two women is I think critical. We're basically being shown that they are unequal to the task of throwing off the father's malign influence. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
Even after they actively decided to murder him and acted on their intention, they can't actually free themselves from him. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
I think it's deliberate that both of the dream sequences and the scarf the mother has been constantly wearing around her neck are in suffragette colours - white, purple and green. She's fighting for her emancipation, but she can't get free. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
Oh my - his return was bad enough, but the way the wife just completely faded out of existence at the end was on another level! And the cycle repeats with the snip of another rose. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
An absolutely incredible movie which probably deserves a second watch. It won't be a comfortable experience, but there was a huge amount going on there which I'd love to see again now I know where it is going. Very glad I saw this. #CellarClub #TheFilmCrowd
26. Vlad (2003), dir. Michael D. Sellers
'Watched' with / borrowed from Joel. It's an extremely bad film about Vlad-as-Dracula, and we both knew that, but I've wanted to see it for ages anyway, and he had it on DVD! The plot doesn't make a huge amount of sense, despite large amounts of expository dialogue, but broadly speaking, four PhD students who want to write their theses on Vlad the Impaler are taken into the Carpathian mountains by by Billy Zane. While they are there, Vlad is reawakened via the power of an Order of the Dragon medallion which one of them has, and generally unleashes hell. They do a long and unnecessary trek through the forest to Poenari, a location which you can in fact drive to, I guess in order to construct it as remote and inaccessible, and because a long journey into the weird and unknown is a staple of Gothic narratives. A medieval English lady called Ilona is also somehow summoned into the present, even though she then has pretty much nothing to do except provide a love-object for one of the students, Justin, who speaks medieval English. Guy Siner, aka Lieutenant Gruber from 'Allo 'Allo, is in it, giving one of the better performances in the movie - and when that is who you have for your heavy-weight acting, it's possibly a problem. And one of the students, Alexa, turns out to be Vlad's reincarnated wife, a trope which I hate more every time I see it. Joel and I lasted about five minutes when we tried to watch this movie together, and I struggled to pay attention to it even on my own. But at least I have seen it now, and that means I'll never have to do so again!
27. The Monster Club (1981), dir. Roy Ward Baker
Watched with Joel, this isn't strictly an Amicus film, but it was produced by Milton Subotsky and uses their classic portfolio format. In the linking narrative, author R. Chetwynd-Hayes is bitten by a vampire played by Vincent Price, and then taken to a night-club where a series of musical acts play and the vampire teaches him about the various supernatural creatures which then form the subjects of the three stories - all based on Chetwynd-Hayes' actual work. The first, 'The Shadmock' is essentially a tragic love story, and turned out to contain within it a statue of a faun which features in Hammer's Dracula, Christopher Lee's Ghost Stories for Christmas, and countless other films which HammerGothic has catalogued.
The second is about a family of vampires, whose young son goes to school and is bullied there. One nice detail which Joel pointed out is that there's a scene in which the kids are all jumping over a puddle on the school playing-field, but the vampire boy can't do it, because of course it is a body of water. And the third, which is probably the most visually compelling, sees a film director visit and become trapped in a remote village which proves to be full of ghouls hungry for human flesh. It has a nice bleak ending, which underlines the theme of being trapped without access to help that the whole story was about, before Price wraps things up with a little speech about humans being the true monsters. Understatedly charming all round.
28. Detroit Rock City (1999), dir. Adam Rifkin
Also watched with Joel after an evening spent browsing through my extremely sketchy LP collection! As it contains rather a lot of Kiss, this seemed like the logical next step. I've had the DVD for 20+ years now, but don't think I've really watched it since I first got it all that time ago. It's great, though. Set in 1978, it's basically a coming-of-age story about four teenage boys who are massive Kiss fans, and desperate to see them play in Detroit. The road there is rocky, and paved with unsympathetic conservative parents, con-merchants, dumb mistakes, love interests etc, but of course they do eventually make it. I wouldn't say it's a particularly profound or life-changing film, but it's well-constructed, kinda charming, and obviously has a great soundtrack - including the disco songs as well as the Kiss!
OK, that's five done, which I think is enough for one evening. There's currently another five in the queue, which I hope to cover as soon as possible, and then I'll be up to date again. 😊