So we closed up Sunday night watching the extremely fun Murder He Says with Fred McMurray. It’s easily the best of the Arsenic and Old Lace competitors I’ve seen (dark comedy requires a deft touch, especially back in the day). City Slicker McMurray goes to the country and runs afoul of a family of homicidal rednecks led by Marjorie Main, ol’ Ma Kettle herself. Really fun.
Monday offered no monsters. We watched the nasty thriller Bloody Brood, way elevated by a young Peter Falk as a thrill killer.
Monday night featured Man in the Cloak, from the ’40s. It featured Joseph Cotton, as, as a title card informs us, a fellow in the 1840s who went on to because famous. The very second Cotton stepped into the light, with his curly hair and little mustache, I said “Edgar Allan Poe.” Chad R responded, “You just solved the film’s central mystery.” I mean, it was really obvious. So obvious that at the end when they were about to zoom into an autograph to solve the whole thing, I said in a stentorian fashion, “SIGNED…ABRAHAM LINCOLN!” Still, the film is quite neat. Everyone is a dick, and man, whoever wrote it had no interesting in whitewashing Poe, who was portrayed as a drunk every single second of the film, as well as a chiseler.
We wrapped up with Who Killed Captain Alex, an insane no-budget action flick from Africa narrated by a guy going comic commentary. It actually worked, and we were all very much entertained.
Tuesday saw the last of us leaving, and we fit a couple of films in. First was the first half of La herencia Valdemar (photo above), a haunted house two-part mini-series with an extensive old timey backstory we see in the first half. An aged Paul Naschy played a butler–really well, I might add–in what I think was his last role. It was pretty good, I’ll have to remember to ask to watch the second half next time. We also watched Tomb of the Werewolf, Naschy’s last werewolf, which again I don’t much remember.
Anyway, thus ended T-Fest 2021. Here’s to the spring fest in 2022!
