Monster of the Day

Hmmm. I'm intrigued, but am I 15 cents intrigued?

The watch party last Friday featured Bride and the Beast, most famous (among a certain elite demographic) for having been scripted by Ed Wood Jr. If not directed by him, which no doubt helped in making it fairly competent technically. It also, sadly, lacks the rich, convoluted baroqueness of Wood's usual dialog. However, in…

After Cat and the Canary Sandy busted out the first episode of the latest Russian version of Sherlock Holmes, which proved to be quite fun. It's period (and one of the few shows where things especially in the slum areas look realistically filthy). It's about as faithful as, say, the Cumberbatch Holmes, by which…

So Sunday, no monsters. We had such a blast with the Tod Slaughter movie on Friday that we started with a few more of those, Crimes at the Dark House and Murder in the Red Barn. Just bottled fun. Then we watch the first 15 minutes of Treasure of the Four Crowns, which is…

We ended Friday night, the eve of T-Fest 18 (already covered) with another foreign vampire film. This was one of China's uniformly marvelous hopping vampire films, Mr. Vampire 4. You just cannot go wrong with that series, merging horror, comedy, martial arts, a soupcon of romance and lots and lots of fascinating Chinese sorcery.…

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…

  OK, so we ran down the actual T-Fest line-up. However, we watch a lot of stuff off hours as well. A nod to Chad R, T-Fest's official historian and secretary for keeping track of everything. The first film we watched, on Thursday night before the Fest, was the shot on video Each Time…

Japan has released a big screen Shin Godzilla movie. I don't think it's as grim as Shin Godzilla, but it shouldn't be in any case. Fathom events (check their website) will be showing for one night each the dubbed and subbed versions in January for those interested.

We wrapped out with our traditional (at least in the ballpark of a) T-Rex movie, with Harryhausen's classic Valley of Gwangi. This was the last classic we hadn't gotten around to after 18 years. I'm starting to think maybe we should find a new theme for the capper once we hit out 21st Fest.…

So weirdly I myself showed Conquest because it looked goofy (it was made during that period when Italian sword and sorcery films were incorporating Star Wars-y stuff, like the Wookies above, ala the Lou Ferrigno Hercules movies) and I had just bought a heavily discounted copy of the Blu Ray. The film still looks…