Categories
Mixtapes Music

Halloween Stuff Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 – mixtapes

Stuff #1 Mixtape
The Maxell XL II 90, my tape of choice

Some time ago I unearthed a plushy Denon cassette tape case containing a few of my old 90’s mixtapes. I named all of them “Stuff Vol. x” for ease of organization. They were mismatched collections of my music of the moment. New or old, it really didn’t matter. I don’t ever recall compiling a themed playlist and I certainly didn’t find any in my old tapes. I didn’t believe in sonic constraints. From those tapes I created Spotify playlists to recreate the contents. You can find these “Mixtape Project” posts here, here, and here.

We music lovers of a certain age romanticize mixtapes. Sure, now we have unlimited access to music and can craft complex 100-track playlists in a wink and a nod because of our massive digital media collections. And that’s considered progress, but it’s removed the scrutiny and intent involved in making a 45- or 60-minute mixtape. Mixtapes were a labor of love.

I made all mine on a Kenwood stack system with a 5-CD changer plus extra tray. A Christmas present from my parents in the year 1991. The repetitive queuing and the corresponding play/record pressing on the tape deck. It would take hours to perfect one of these tapes, never mind the preparation and selection before the recording even began. I even used some of my dad’s records to add a scratchy, retro feel through a couple of vinyl-based recordings. I miss it, so I’m going to resurrect Stuff with a new weekly bl-g series. Each week, I’ll use some variety of prompt to create a new mixtape.

Thus I give you my first new offering, a mixtape of Halloween-inspired favorites new and old (but mostly old). If you’re back in the mixtape business, I’d love to see some of your creations. I’ll post links to fellow mixtapers in the posts. And if you created a Halloween mix of your own, post a link in the comments!

 

halloween stuff volume 1 mixtape

Halloween Stuff Vol. 1

 

 

halloween stuff vol. 2

Halloween Stuff Vol. 2

 

Categories
31 Days of Horror Cinema

31 Days of Horror: The Unknown

the unknown 1927 31 days of horror

31+ Days of Horror. 33 Horror Movies. 33 Reviews. Hooptober Challenges and Bonus Tasks.
View my 2016 Cinema Shame/Hoop-Tober Watch Pile Shame-a-thon Statement here.

Nature of Shame:
Didn’t-think-I’d-seen-it-but-I’d-totally-seen-it Shame

Hoop-tober Challenge Checklist:
Decade – 1920’s
Silent


 

The Advance Word: It was on the DVR and Joan Crawford.

#17. The Unknown (1927)

the unknown 1927 lobby card

I’d planned to rewatch Jean Epstein’s La chute de la maison Usher for the “silent movie” requirement of the Hoop-Tober 3.0 Challenge but one night I was in bed, skimming the DVR for a movie to watch and I found that I’d set this to record from TCM. I often watch silent or foreign movies in bed at night because I can keep the volume down so not to disturb Mrs. 30Hz — who actually likes going to sleep at a relatively reasonable hour. The Unknown checked off a couple of CinemaShame/Hoop-Tober challenge boxes so I ran with it. I actually don’t own any unwatched silent horror films. Hurray for small victories.

Oh, hey, by the way… you’ve seen this movie before, knucklehead.

This brand of shame turned out to be something entirely different. I have a weird vault-like memory for recalling exactly when and where and with whom I first saw a movie. I assume this vault is taking up space that could have been helpful during high school trigonometry or that Java class I almost failed in college. The Unknown, true to title, escaped cataloging.

the unknown 1927 joan crawford

One should remember Lon Chaney throwing knives at 22-year-old gypsy Joan Crawford with his toes. Even once the trace memory kicked in, I kept watching. I couldn’t look away. Lon Chaney’s performance in The Unknown is haunting. ‘The Man of a Thousand Faces” created a pitiable villain of disarming obsession and enviable passion.

Chaney plays Alonzo, a double-thumbed murderer hiding among circus “freaks” by pretending he has no arms. He falls in love with the gypsy girl Estrellita. Estrellita, however, is also coveted by Malabar the Strong Man. She cowers at his musclebound touch and laments the men that always want to touch her.  Malabar’s not a bad guy; he’s just a broheim that’s clumsy with affection. Meanwhile, Alonzo waxes Estrellita’s father when he uncovers Alonzo’s true identity. Estrellita turns to Alonzo for comfort, the man without arms and without groping paws. She repeatedly talks about how amazing it would be to love a man without hands.

Alonzo tries to raise his hand. To say “ME!” ME, PLEASE!” but of course his hands are tied… our at least bound in a corset. To get that close to Estrellita, to embrace Estrellita he’d need to do away with those pesky appendages once and for all.

So he does.

the unknown lon chaney

 

Maybe that doesn’t sound especially unnerving. Maybe that sounds like a bunch of silly silent movie hyperbole… but in the hands of Tod Browning, that silly little slice of hyperbole left me unsettled all over again. I’d forgotten about the amputation. Consider the special brand of obsession that must incite someone to remove body parts. Lon Chaney lays bare every ounce of Alonzo’s emotional anguish and moral ambivalence.

The choice to amputate perfectly good arms, as it does, backfires. When Alonzo returns to the circus, he finds that Estrellita has fallen in love with the hamfisted Malabar and he’s arrived just in time to attend their wedding. Alonzo snaps and plots his final revenge.

 

triple facepalm

The Unknown serves as a direct precursor to Browning’s more famous outing: 1932’s Freaks (which also includes the love triangle between a circus freak, a beauty and a strong man). The thematic reliance upon circus and carnival acts was no happenstance. Browning himself ran away to join the circus at 16. During those early years in show business, he worked a carnival “talker,” performed in his own act billed as the “Living Corpse,” and clowned around with Ringling Brothers. Not until he met D.W. Griffith at a variety theater in New York City, did Tod Browning venture into filmmaking. (He’s an extra in Intolerance, by the way.)

While Freaks is perhaps more unsettling in its own visceral way, The Unknown proves to be the more successful film overall due to Lon Chaney’s singular performance. Contemporary reviews likened the film to “a visit to the dissection room at the hospital.” Undoubtedly, Browning’s film ventures into uncomfortable territory but our modern sensibilities should be sturdier than that of a 1927 cinema critic.

While Browning’s story maintains that same disturbing sense of macabre drama, our 2016 sensibilities will be drawn (and quartered — you’ll understand if you watch the film) to the early notions of gender politics and sexual harassment. The love triangle where the “hot” girl chooses the insensitive “jock” over the “weird” guy remains timeless social dynamism.

And with that I’ll move on to some actual Watch Pile shame. Time is running low, and these movies aren’t watching themselves.

 

the unknown 1927

Final Thoughts:

Joan Crawford at 22 doesn’t come with the crazy eyes. Who knew? (Well, technically I did… because I’d seen this before, but that’s beside the point.)

 

30Hz Movie Rating:

30hzrating4

 

 


lon chaney collection dvdAvailability:
 The Unknown can be found on TCM’s Lon Chaney Collection DVD set. 

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Earlier 2016 31 Days of Horror entries: #1. Vampyros Lesbos / #2. A Chinese Ghost Story / #3. The Haunting of Morella / #4. Delirium (1972) / #5. A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin / #6. She-Wolf of London / #7. Son of Frankenstein / #8. Killerfish / #9. The Bride of Re-Animator / #10. A Bay of Blood / #11. The Seventh Victim / #12. The Fly (1958) / #13. The Fly (1986) / #14. Deep Red / #15. Dracula’s Daughter / #16. Day of the Animals

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Categories
31 Days of Horror Cinema

31 Days of Horror: Day of the Animals

31 days of horror day of the animals

31+ Days of Horror. 33 Horror Movies. 33 Reviews. Hooptober Challenges and Bonus Tasks.
View my 2016 Cinema Shame/Hoop-Tober Watch Pile Shame-a-thon Statement here.

Nature of Shame:
Unwatched Scorpion DVD Blu-ray

Hoop-tober Challenge Checklist:
Decade – 1970’s
Animals Gone Wild


 

The Advance Word: The narrow sub-genre of “conservation horror” offers a narrow bandwidth of thrills. I expect animals to attack people and people to react like idiots.

day of the animalsday of the animals

#16. Day of the Animals (1977)

 

The challenges for El Cinemonster’s Hoop-Tober 3.0 included watching three “Animals Gone Wild” movies. It’s not my favorite genre, but maybe I just haven’t seen the right flicks. Unlike the laundry list of werewolf movies that disappoint me at every turn, I’ve only seen a couple of films belonging to this sub-genre of horror. The Blu-ray.com forum switchboard lit up when Scorpion announced Day of the Animals on Blu-ray. I get sucked into these vortexes of nostalgic appreciation and therefore ordered my own copy.

What am I missing, folks?

day of the animals
I’m unaware if the vultures are killing this woman or the chroma-key technology.

The basic tenent of the sub-genre —  humans are horrible creatures that can’t help but destroy nature and now nature is taking its pound of flesh — makes perfect sense. I see these films as the global warming equivalent of Godzilla (1954). Godzilla came to be in the wake of nuclear fallout. Day of the Animals came to be in the wake of conservation awareness. Who got the short end of the stick here?

City folk go camping, become the prey for mountain lions, bears, vultures, snakes, hawks, etc. Hardly any difference between this and a healthy bit of slashing… except for one main aesthetic issue. Most of Day of the Animals takes place in daylight. And it’s not scary. Okay. It’s not even, like, tense. In fact it’s sooooo not tense that it’s funny, right down to its simple shots of bloodthirsty critters staring off in the distance and absorbing all that excess UV light that’s making them violently aggressive. When Day of the Animals first showcased some vultures staring down with obvious ill intent, I just couldn’t…

Low budget horror films embrace darkness. Darkness provides cheap thrills and masks sparse sets, cheap costumes, crappy gore effects, and so on and so forth. That Day of the Animals takes place predominantly during the day means that these special effects, like matting and forced perspective have nowhere to hide.

Day of the Animals
Hey, girl.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m down with crappy movies. So down. Day of the Animals, however, presents itself straight, no chaser. In fact, at one point, it almost convinced me that its aim was higher than that of the B-/C+ student that giggles at penis jokes in math class. I blame Lalo Schifrin. I don’t get to say that very often because Lalo’s a sonic f’ing master of cinematic jams. Sample “Frances’ Theme” from the Day of the Animals:

A solid score legitimizes bad cinema. If you have someone like Lalo Schifrin scoring your film, you have expectations. The $1.2million budget also suggests expectation. And I’m forced to ask: What’s your ambition, Day of the Animals? Your animal attacks offer high comedy, not suspense. All these humans are terrible. Good riddance. We’re rooting for the animals. Is that the thrill? Animalistic role playing? Are we actually embracing our inner Furry?

The inarguable climax of the movie takes place when shirtless Leslie Nielsen wrestles a bear… with fifteen minutes left in the film. This is the reason to watch Day of the Animals. Something less than 30 seconds of cinema. I know what you’re thinking. “Don’t I need the character development? The turn of events that leads to this moment?”

No. You don’t, so don’t clutter the image with backstory.

You just need to know that a shirtless Leslie Nielsen gets charged by a bear… and he charges back… and then the combatants embrace in a battle to the death. I’m forced to consider whether modern audiences have embraced this film more so than contemporary critics due to the incongruous appearance of Leslie Nielsen as an executive/hiker/rapist/bear brawler. Certainly fans weaned on his later-career comic films would find this sort of absurdity anomalous.

day of the animals leslie nielsen

Final Thoughts:

Progressive 1977 notions of global warming and conservation aside, Day of the Animals succeeds in offering little more than ironic entertainment (that vulture attack, tho!) and the reinforcement of my own personal belief that camping really sucks.

 

30Hz Movie Rating:

30hzrating2

 

LESLIE NIELSEN FIGHTING A BEAR! Rating:

30hzrating5

 

day of the animals blu-rayBlu-ray Verdict: I might keep it as a curiosity, but I feel bad depriving a Day of the Animals lover of their right to own this excellent Blu-ray release.

Availability: Scorpion’s Day of the Animals Blu-ray is Out of Print, but a DVD version remains available.

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Earlier 2016 31 Days of Horror entries: #1. Vampyros Lesbos / #2. A Chinese Ghost Story / #3. The Haunting of Morella / #4. Delirium (1972) / #5. A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin / #6. She-Wolf of London / #7. Son of Frankenstein / #8. Killerfish / #9. The Bride of Re-Animator / #10. A Bay of Blood / #11. The Seventh Victim / #12. The Fly (1958) / #13. The Fly (1986) / #14. Deep Red / #15. Dracula’s Daughter

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