OK, so Texas and the 20th (!) T-Fest. Along with 15 T(ween)-Fests. I haven’t missed one yet.
I arrived at DFW airport, and the arriving Mary and Jamie were extremely kind enogh to drive me to Sandy’s house. Sandy and family have decamped to Utah since the last Fest, although they returned to Dallas for this one. As such, Sandy’s voluminous video holdings were unavailable, expect for YouTube and other streaming options. Chad Richard and I largely filled in the gap, bringing many films, and we got a lot of movie watching done over the next week.
We opened on Friday with 1933’s The Ghoul, which has a very nice print on Amazon Prime. Boris Karloff is a dying professor in an Old Dark House obsessed with immortality, and there’s a McGuffin mystical Egyptian rind which various parties are after. Even aside from Karloff there’s a great cast: Sir Cedric Hardwicke, Ralph Richardson and the always wonderful Ernest Thesinger. The print on Amazon is really good because the lighting is always dark and gloomy; with a less sharp print the image would be muddy and unwatchable. HIghest recommendation, this one is really fun. If you watch it on Amazon, make sure to like it too. Again, let the algorithm know people are looking for stuff like this.
The scene at the top was the obvious inspiration to the scene in Hammer’s The Mummy where Christopher Lee smashed through a barred window to murder a guy.
