So we started Friday morning. Sandy had bought a bunch of Tod Slaughter films, and we watched his version of Sweeny Todd. Slaughter was a stage villain who specialized in extremely creaky melodramas and eventually brought his act to the cinema (mostly because of tax breaks for British productions) and continued to delightfully play to the cheap seats. Imagine Lionel Atwill on PCP. I had seen some of his films earlier, but they were entirely more fun with a crowd, Everyone thought so, and Slaughter continued to play throughout the weekend.
Then we watched the first two Mexican Nostradamus the Vampire movies (we never got back to the final two). The “films” were abridged versions of a serial / tv series, and thus highly episodic. Nostradamus, as played by German Robles, was obsessed with making the world acknowledge the powers of his storied ancestor. Hilariously, the scientists he fought privately did admit their foe was a supernatural being–it was kind of hard to get around it–but refused to publicly declare it because they didn’t want to hand their enemy a win. SCIENCE! These were the K. Gordon Murray versions and then hilariously dubbed.
