Monster of the Day

It's an old English tradition to tell ghost stories on Christmas. Hence the lyric in The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, "There'll be scary ghost stories, and tales of the glories..." M.R. James would generally write a ghost story for Christmas every year, eventually cementing his reputation as the greatest author of them.…

We followed Zontar with the less well know (oddly), The Black Zoo. It's about (duh) a murderous zookeeper, and it's one of Herman Cohen's English films. So if guessed that the murderous zookeeper was played to icy perfection by Michael Gough, and that his character has a troubled teen character he keeps under his…

Sunday is always a good / bad day. The good part; more movies! (And, this time, breakfast at Waffle House!) The bad part, people start leaving right quick. We opened the day with another "classic," Zontar Thing from Venus. Beulah has nothing to worry about, that's for sure.

We ended with our usual Tween-Fest Texas movie. This year's entry was 1983's Play Dead, which was shot in Corpus Christie. This has been hanging around my Blu Ray shelves for a while now, courtesy of one of Vinegar Syndrome's sales. Yvonne DeCarlo (!) plays a woman who's a witch or Satanist of something,…

So after returning from dinner (barbecue, yum...the brisket!), we started the evening slate of movies. Sandy, again with his collection packed up in Utah, made only two requests this time around: Curse of the Faceless Man, watched that morning, and the Czech 1983 stop animated film The Pied Piper. Luckily, this was available for…

When Mondo Macabre releases a new film, I pay attention. When it's a crazy Indonesian action flick, I crack open the wallet. (Although, really, it's not that hard to get me to open that.) I had watched the first five minutes of 1981's The Warrior and, upon seeing a bad dummy made of rubber,…

OK, it took forever, but I finally mastered at least showing YouTube videos on Discord for our watch parties. The secret? You can't use the Discord app (??), you have to use the website. The only downside is that once you're in there it takes up the full screen so you can't get to…

Next up was The Black Room (1935), a gothic suspenser revolving around a family curse / prophecy. It stars the great Boris Karloff in a marvelous twin role (literally)--or a triple role, depending on how you look at it. Needless to say, he carries it all off with aplomb. Even better, the running time…