Monster of the Day #3492

Updated on October 23, 2023 By Ken Begg 12 Comments

Halloween on the horizon! What are your plans? I’m seeing the musical Little Shop of Horrors on the big screen this week, and on Halloween night (although only because that’s the subtitled showing on the biggest screen) I’ll be seeing Spirited Away. ‘Also my old library crew will be resuming our annual Halloween party, so I’ll be picking a couple of movies for that. And, of course, more stuff on home video.

We watched Gamera the Giant Monster for last Friday’s Watch Party. What a well-mounted film! I really liked the scale of the sets and the moody black and white photography. Also flame-spinning Gamera is super-cool and never, ever used enough.

Those Gamera movies have been on Prime for a while and who knows when they’ll be leaving the service? Got it in, though. We’ve also watched Gamera Super Monster and Gamera vs Gyaos before. Next Watch Party a week from Friday.

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  • To be trifle persnickety, we haven’t seen Gamera Super Monster yet. We have seen Gamera vs. Guiron, however.

    As to the movie itself, man, is it nice. Silly in a good way and really never boring. Toshio, however, is a waste.

  • Rock Baker

    Unsure of my workload come the day in question, so I’ve already screened a few of my standards so I’ll have room should I pick up more work near that day. Friday was INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS and STRANGE INVADERS (nice touch that the ‘monster’ theme seems most influenced by Ronald Stein’s 50’s scores). Saturday was a double bill of HALLOWEEN III and THE BEAST WITHIN, Yesterday I fit in the Chipmunks special TRICK OR TREASON.

    I really like HALLOWEEN III, which as the producers note is a ‘pod’ movie rather than a ‘knife’ movie like the first two, and I’ve always enjoyed a good ‘pod’ movie. Kinda wish I could selectively erase my memory, though. It’s a mystery, and I’ve seen it enough times that I know the plot pretty good by now.

    A shame the great experiment failed at the box office, but I gotta admit HALLOWEEN 4 is a pretty strong entry, with a terrific ending. And, will wonders never cease, actually intelligent characters? When the posse finds the girls and know that Meyers is inside the school building, they actually use some logic by saying the priority is to get the girls to the clinic and leave the psycho to the police! I’ll likely try to fit this one in sometime before the 31st, though as close to that day as possible is reserved for ERNEST SCARED STUPID and SPACED INVADERS…

  • 🐻 bgbear_rnh

    Tibby!

  • Eric Hinkle

    Right now I’m watching one of my old Halloween favorites, Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein. It’s still one of the greats and I’ll always love the dialogue: “Tonight, when the moon rises, I will become a wolf.” “You and 20 million other guys.”

    Also got to see The Last Man on Earth earlier on the Movies! channel, which always shows some fine films for Halloween.

  • Petoht

    I sometimes like to imagine the alternate Earth where Carpenter’s plan had carried the day, and every year we got an unconnected horror movie under the Halloween banner. A yearly anthology would have been amazing.

    C’est la vie.

  • Took a post cruise day off to theoretically get my life back together and plan my Hallowversary party which is Saturday whether I’m ready or not, and instead played Hooky (Look, I have literally the world’s lamest case of the WuFlu consisting of, um, a mildly runny nose? That totally gets me off doing anything, right? I mean Jamie had a cough for a whole DAY!).

    So I watched a string of Horror Comedies starting with There’s Nothing Out There, which is basically a more meta Scream on a tiny budget 5 years earlier. I was reasonably entertained and there were definitely a few laugh out loud moments (Where did that spring-loaded cat come from) and plenty of the sort of fanservice that was already dying out by ’91, when it was made. I was more impressed when I looked it up later and saw that it was written and directed by a 20 year old who had written the first draft of the screen play in high school. I mean, it isn’t great art, but certainly more passable than a lot of low budget direct-to-video fare and appears professional. Certainly better than THINGS. Wait, there are venereal diseases better than THINGS.

    Then I switched to Old Dark House fare with, well, The Old Dark House (1932). I’d seen the pretty awful Hammer remake (Tom Poston? As the romantic lead?), but oddly hadn’t watched the original. Funny that by 1932, those tropes were already seen as dated and ripe for satire. Also that the setup was lifted pretty much wholesale for the RHPS. Always a bit odd seeing Gloria Stuart at the start of her career rather than her brief but more famous turn at the end.

    Finished up with The House of Long Shadows, which was much better than I expected considering it was both a Cannon non-action film and a bit of a gimmick film. It helps that the gimmick in question was getting Cushing, Lee, Price, and Carradine all into the same horror movie and all are consummate professionals, even in what is essentially an Amicus film with the serial numbers filed off. This one proves that the Old Dark House tropes were lame even earlier than the above, since the novel it was based on, 7 Keys to Baldpate was published in 1913 and was even then a satire of the melodramas of the previous decades and was written by the author of the original Charlie Chan novels.

  • By the way, I watched every one on Tubi. By damn, that’s the best of the free streaming services, They have such a broad remit and are producing great documentaries (many on genre film) for the channel. I saw today that they are starting to put out some original movies as well, although I haven’t watched any yet. Also its algorithms are so much better than either Prime or Netflix that most of the stuff on my recommended list is, get this, actually stuff I want to see.

    Yes, they have commercials, and often at odd break points, but fewer and shorter ones than many of the competitors.

  • Beckoning Chasm

    I watched my blu-ray of “Screamers,” the Peter Weller flick. I maintain that it’s one of the most intelligent and thoughtful science fiction films of the 30 years, and what a shame it was that it died at the box office. To the extent that I was surprised that there was a blu-ray available…which looks pretty great, by the way.

  • Ken_Begg

    Hmmm….you may be right. Maybe we watched that at Basement Fest.

  • The Rev.

    I was going to say, if you watched Super Monster at a watch party it must’ve been one of the couple I missed. We did definitely watch it at Basement Fest because you were delighted with my grumpiness about it.

  • The Rev.

    There’s Nothing Out There is a bit of a minor gem that I tracked down years ago when (I think) Stomp Tokyo gave it a fairly favorable review. Would probably be a good choice for a future Fest. Has some good gags in it, and I loved the critter.

    I’ll make a note to watch The House of Long Shadows since I really haven’t been doing much season-appropriate viewing (admittedly my weekends this month have been surprisingly busy).

  • I watched because the Good Bad Flicks guy gave it a favorable mention on one of his recent videos on Forgotten Movies. He liked it enough that he plans a full video on it by the end of the year.