On the Friday before Halloween, our traditional Movie Marathon takes place: All the kids who don’t live here anymore come home, and I throw in monster movies until everyone decides to go to bed.
The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) – Roger Corman’s horror-comedy follow-up to A Bucket of Blood (shot on the same sets in two and a half days) gives us another hopeful nerd tempted into a life of murder, another zinger-filled script that takes multiple viewings to fully appreciate, and another role for Dick Miller (not as the star this time, though — he didn’t want to get typecast). Warning: All of the un-colorized versions on Amazon Prime, for free and paid, use the same beat-up print, and the sound suffers even more than the picture. Time to step up, Criterion!
What We Do In the Shadows (2014) – Where have you been all my life? This mockumentary about three vampire flatmates in New Zealand (plus Petyr, but he’s eight thousand years old and doesn’t interact much) is the funniest thing I’ve seen in I don’t know how long. Thanks to my son Alex for suggesting it (technically he “demanded” it, but I’m the boss here).
Tales From the Darkside: The Movie (1990) – I hadn’t seen this one in thirty years, but it still holds up. A Scheherazade-like wraparound story starring Debbie Harry and a ten-year-old Matthew Lawrence (middle of the Lawrence brothers) frames three spooky stories with a whole bunch of familiar faces — I had forgotten that Steve Buscemi had ever been young.
The Blob (1988) – This remake of the 1958 movie is pretty darned good in its own right, even while adding a “government conspiracy” angle. Also, all of the teenagers are more believable than 28-year-old Steve McQueen in the original (sorry, Steve). But I never understood all the movies that cast Kevin Dillion as a teenage tough; he always looked like he was just about to burst into tears.
The Dead Pit (1989) – Yes, I know. The acting can sometimes be profoundly bad (maybe everyone else was trying to make Cheryl Lawton not stand out as particularly unskilled), the script relies on ooky-spooky he’s-there-then-look-away-and-now-he’s-gone plot beats with some sub-Freddy Krueger one-liners shoehorned in, and the entire movie takes place at the insane asylum where the one psychiatrist (no wonder he’s “chief”) and the head nurse apparently live there 24/7. I don’t care. I still enjoy it every time I watch it, and not just because Cheryl Lawson spends half the movie wandering halls barefoot in a cropped undershirt and scanty panties.
Heh; even as recently as in The Death of Stalin (2017), Steve Buscemi played a younger and thinner version of Nikita Krushchev. (Of course, almost anybody in Hollywood would have looked younger and thinner than the gray-haired heavy-set real-life Krushchev.) I think the happy ending to Tales From The Darkside was my favorite part, though: just like the original story of Hansel and Gretel, it’s a pretty horrifying ending when viewed from the witch’s perspective but… well, she had it coming!