Is Fritz Lang the greatest director nobody talks about (maybe it’s just in the States.) Arthur had never seen M–kids today–which might be Lang’s masterpiece. I’m sure I’d put it in my top 20 films ever list. Anyway, you can never watch that one too much, so give it another look sometime.
Next we watched the hilarious The Visitor with John Huston, an Italian aliens among us film. No monsters that I recall but it was great goofy fun.
I remember nearly nothing about The Eve of Ivan Kupalo, a 1968 ART film that seems like a movie made by an extremely pretentious and inept film student who grew up watching The Monkees and decided to make an *ahem* adaptation of a Gogol story. Good grief. Frankly my brain just turned off during this and I remember nearly nothing about it. Maybe the Devil was in it?
Finally there were a few monsters in Malatesta’s Carnival of Blood (above), a film that started as an arty but potentially interesting horror film but which quickly goes off the rails and goes complete Film School. Never go complete Film School, son. The Visitor didn’t make a lick of sense in a fun way, Eve of Ivan Kupalo didn’t make a lick of sense in a not fun way, and this was just too many movies in a row that didn’t make a lick of sense.
By then we were desperate for something grounded, and I hadn’t have a chance to show the very good Walter Hill car chase movie The Driver. Then we watched Leonard Nimoy as a laughably inept killer on Columbo, and that was Sunday.
