Recent Posts

• December 13, 2024

  Trouble Every Day

  Oh it’s a cannibalism sex disease. This was on my list of supposedly extreme horror movies that I’ve somehow missed over the years (the last one of these was Possession, which was incredible).

• December 08, 2024

  Bride of Frankenstein (1935)

  Breaking my miniature streak of watching movies from 1951, 1941 and 1931, but I guess that wasn’t going to last too long anyway, due to when films were invented. Both Frankenstein and Bride of were due to leave the Criterion Channel at the end of the month (and both are very manageable about 1hr 15 minutes long) so we rolled straight into this one.

• December 06, 2024

  Frankenstein (1931)

  Hard to separate this from the sheer cultural ubiquity of it. Ever seen someone on a screen shouting, it’s alive! It’s alive! Here it is. A village carrying flaming torches to go see off a monster? A hunchback assistant doing his master’s bidding? Yep, that’s from here too. The big, flat-headed, bolts-in-neck monster lumbering around? You got it.

• December 04, 2024

  The Lady Eve (1941)

  My second Preston Sturges movie after Sullivan’s Travels. Not sure what I was expecting, but it probably wasn’t quite such an insane revenge/marriage trap. I think my failing, as a viewer, was not realising very early on that Henry Fonda is supposed to be cinema’s biggest sap. He’s a big handsome dummy, heir to a beer fortune (sorry, ale, even if he’s not very good at actually knowing the difference). He’s been up the Amazon for a year, as he says verbatim several times, and is now going on a cruise back to the US. On the same cruise is Barbara Stanwyck (also my second of her movies, after Double Indemnity) who is a part of a card hustling team with her dad and some other dude who doesn’t do very much. She gives us a fun intro, looking into her mirror describing all the other ladies trying to get Fonda’s attention, until she trips him up and gets it for herself.

• December 01, 2024

  Strangers on a Train (1951)

  Newly armed with a Criterion Channel subscription for the year, it’s back to the Hitchcock mines. I’ve seen most of the big hits (including Notorious twice without realising until a bit into the second time) but the guy made a lot of movies. Strangers on a Train has a killer premise, what if two people had a murder they wanted done, with no connection to each other, and they decided to swap murders to leave behind no connection and no motive. The only risk really is that one of the people doesn’t actually want to do it, and the other is such a remorseless psycho that he basically does it same day.