Star (Amanda Stenberg) in shattering “The Hate You Give”
by Sam Juliano
Another Halloween is upon us and with it legions of trick or treaters descending on our chilly suburban streets in wearing that outlandish garb we wait all year to see. It is a time that makes the most ildellible memories and it is over far too fast. Unless you are in the path of Mischief Night revelers you should accumulate happy memories and even if you do attract a few eggs or flour socks, it is all in good fun. At least I think so. The unspeakable act in Pittsburg leaves up all shocked to our cores, which on the political scenes it is all about a climate of hate. There will be one more Monday Morning Diary before the November 6th elections, so I’ll address expectation on that next week. It also seems our friend Stephen Mullen will be pleased as punch as the Boston Red Sox are nearing another World Series title. Congrats to the Bosox!
Jamie Uhler is nearing completion of another fantastic Horror Fest and this week we have two extraordinary capsules on a bonafide Universal classic, an eclectic gem and an Australian masterpiece.
The family and I were busy on the children’s book front this past week, meeting Brian Selznick, Tomie DePaola and new author Caron Levis. Lucille, the three boys and I met up with famed author-illustrator and Caldecott Medal winner Brian Selznick early this evening at Books of Wonder where a Harry Potter event was staged. Selznick was to be joined with artist and Caldecott Honor winner Mary Grandpre, who drew the original Harry Potter covers, but she was ill and had to cancel. The three boys including Danny holding “The Invention of Hugo Cabret” are pictured with Selznick. We were thrilled to meet and chat with towering children’s literature icon Tomie dePaola this evening at Manhattan’s Books of Wonder. DePaola, whose Caldecott Honor winning “Strega Nona” is one of the most beloved picture books of all-time, spoke to a class and signed books (including his newest work “Quiet”) for those in attendance. Danny, Jeremy and I are pictured with dePaola.
A weekend rainstorm didn’t derail author Caron Levis as she continued her October bookstore appearances, today presented her bonafide Caldecott contender “Stop That Yawn” one of the year’s most magnificent picture books, with the sublime and delightful art by LeUyen Pham. Levis is shown suppressing a yawn with Lucille this morning at The Book Mark in Brooklyn.
Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (C. Barton… 1948) horror comedy (Jamie Uhler)
It was probably the release of the first two Evil Dead movies that gave most Horror fans the urge to so openly consider comedy intentional in the Horror genre, what with their stated intention to use the aesthetic of the Three Stooges to mine laughs. Previously the attempts were always in spoof—Carry On Screaming! (1966) being perhaps the most famous, and best example—rarely inducing actual scares when laughs were being had as it poked fun at the low hanging fruit of the sometimes gloriously camp Hammer films. It was the most unlikely of guys, Don Knotts, who had perhaps the spookiest funny film, made coincidentally in the same year, 1966, when he hit with The Ghost and Mr. Chicken, a film I like a lot. But Evil Deadbirthed, or helped birth, the Splatterstick idea, where outlandish over-the-top gore, was as funny as any joke or comedic performance (because let’s be honest, Ash isn’t that funny in those films). Since then, most Horror Comedies have essentially followed this central conceit; sight gags on dismemberments or oozing, volcanic blood spurts. From Shaun of the Dead to Cemetery Man to the best in my opinion, Peter Jackson’s Braindead (aka Dead Alive), they all, in their own way up the ante while also tying closely to those early Sam Raimi works. But, this all amounts to the history of laughing at murder and mayhem to being within the last 35 years or so, when in fact, one of the earliest examples, if not the earliest, is still easily the high water mark to these eyes (and funny bone) in the field.
Here we get comedy duo Bud Abbott and Lou Costello playing their established personas; Bud is the straight man Chick—though he gets dozens of sly, quick bursts of clever lines to work with, while Lou is Wilber, a lovably childish scaredy-cat who is dating Dr. Sandra Mornay (the beautifully exotic Lenore Aubert), who apparently loves him for his ‘brains’. It’s all a set up of course, when packages arrive for McDougal’s House of Horrors wax museum containing the coffin of Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi wonderfully reprising the role), the hibernating Frankenstein’s monster and our working stiffs have to deliver them (they’re railway clerks), they inadvertently help spring both to life setting in motion the central plot of Dracula and Dr. Mornay wanting to insert Wilber’s brain into Frankenstein’s monster so that he can forever be Dracula’s loyal manservant. The swiftness of the plot, how it perfectly articulates every character and action in a plausible way while clipping along with literally no fat on the edges speaks to the now mostly lost craft of story-telling in the classic Hollywood style. By the time Lon Chaney Jr. appears as Larry Talbot/The Wolf Man—his performance is perhaps the best, most touching work in his whole career, and his inclusion drives so much of the action so it’s central—we’re clipping along beautifully (his flying ’tackle’ of a bat at the end in full Wolf Man garb is downright hilarious). Of course, the laughs keep coming, feverishly now, each scene nearly a mini-setup comedy short, often with a spooky edge to never undermine the genre and Monsters it so clearly loves. Jason Voorhees, long a clear manifestation built around much of Frankenstein Monster’s mythology, gets an ending here that the Friday the 13th series would borrow liberally from for several of its middle films, specifically Part VI: Jason Lives (1986). There a fire around the dock in the lake created from poured gasoline temps and burns the monster, similar to the manic closing on display here. Really, everyone gets a funny offing—while I earlier spoke of the greatness of the ‘bat tackle’, perhaps my favorite is Dr. Sandra Mornay’s. She’s unceremoniously picked up by Frankenstein’s monster, lifted overhead and chucked through a glass skylight. It’s the death of a tertiary, nothing character usually, but here one for one of the top billed performers. But it’s funny, and we’re thrilled that that’s is all that matters to this gem.
I’ve long loved the film, it’s usually the first choice out of my mouth when people ask me where they should start a young child in the Horror genre. Haven’t not seen it in my 30’s, hell even late 20’s I realize it was probably around 15 years since the last viewing, and I respect and understand cinema more, so I’m more than happy saying this is easily one of the 50 greatest Horror films ever made. I was totally bowled over last night, forever wishing that I had cinephile parents that put this one on for me as I munched Captain Crunch on a lazy saturday morning in 1989. Oh well, my parents were great nonetheless. I got to it eventually.
Man-Made Monster (G. Waggner… 1941) sci-fi horror
Ah, why do we do the Horror-a-thons? Probably to eventually find stuff like this. Cheaply made, with a, at the time, nothing actor, the son of a Horror legend. It had tight script, the finished product doesn’t even stretch an hour—the average block of time we get episodes of Bones and the like filled with now (I don’t disparage Bones, I loved Emily Deschanel myself). It’s not that obscure of a film I suppose, it does have Lon Chaney Jr. like I said, and Lionel Atwill, two actors Horror hounds will scour about for. Then, it’s the first real picture from the man who would eventually be rewarded with the job to helm The Wolf Man later in the year, if the project could be called such. But, it must be said, in the annuals of Universal Horror masterworks, Man-Made Monster is not in the first 10 or even 20 films you’d probably utter (or hear uttered). I’m here to say we probably should.
It’s easily the best work I’ve ever seen Lon Chaney Jr. do, his laughable, small town yokel everyman virtually built to his off-beat, goofily doughy charm. He’s Dan McCormick here, a carnival showman whose act was electrocuting himself and showing how his body was nearly immune to its effects. When he’s the only survivor of a tragic crash where a bus careens into an electric pole, local scientists seek his services in attempt to run a serious of tests to see what makes his make up different (you recall M. Night Shyamalan’s Unbreakable within this reading). Of course, Dr. Paul Rigas (Atwill) has other ideas, he feels the dullards of our populace could be trained via electric current to become more productive and controllable masses. Soon, he’s got Dan hooked on the juice, looking something like a dopesick fiend when he hasn’t been jacked up with current. But, his tests keep expanding and eventually he produces a lab-derived super hero (again, Unbreakable), a being with enough electricity that they are super powerful and able to electrocute anyone they touch. The military and fascist overtones are obvious, as are the dependency ones, as the film careens into its final act. If such a being kills, and the only way a State can remedy their behavior is via the electric chair (an act that will make him again, very, very powerful) what could happen?
Made on a shoestring budget—reportedly the cheapest film Universal made in 1941 was this—the glow effects on a vibrating Lon Chaney Jr. are nothing short of mesmerizing, and the script tremendous. The insertion of a newspaper man evokes the stylish charm of a screwball thriller, driven home into Horror with the demented mad scientist overtones. I realize I’ve never seen The Invisible Ray (1936), the Karloff vehicle that this borrows from in concept supposedly, and based on my affections here and with Karloff, I’ll be making sure to see that one quickly. A real gem of a find with this one. Wonderful.
Screen cap from Australian masterwork, “Wake in Fright” reviewed by Jamie Uhler as part of 2018 Horror Fest.
Wake in Fright (T. Kotcheff… 1971) psychological horror
It’s hard to imagine a film less within usual Horror parameters that is nonetheless as truly scary as Wake in Fright is. I’d seen it previously, but was only imbued by its brilliance partially, perhaps I was in a state myself too similar to our hero here at the time, seeing something rather mundane about it all. Of course, Uniform, the great New York band released a grinding LP last year named in Wake in Fright’s honor, so it put the film back squarely on my radar.
What a difference a recalibration makes. While I surely recognized a masterpiece previously, upon watching now, I see a remarkably sensitive film of observation, quite a feat when you realize just how intense it all is as it enters its second and third acts. The first is rather humdrum; school teacher John Grant leaves his post in tiny Tiboonda to enjoy a Christmas Holiday in Sydney with his girlfriend. He has a stop over in Bundanyabba, also know as ‘The Yabba’, a small desolate town full of mawkish, eccentric locals, where he is set to catch his flight out the next day. He misses the flight, as he spends the night getting shit faced and losing all his money in a simplistic game of pure chance involving two coins tossed in the air (you bet on heads or tails). He’d been hoping to buy his way out of ‘servitude’, a 1000 dollar financial bound imposed on teachers in Australia at the time. From there his descent worsens, he must rely on strangers for cash, and all they can seemingly offer is more and more booze, which he begins swilling continuously. He meets up with the intellectually minded, but severe alcoholic Doc (the great Donald Pleasence), who expounds his radical lifestyle and takes him into the outback with a pair of real masculine yobs to hunt a kangaroo and partake in other assorted acts of toxic masculinity. The kangaroo scene is generally the films calling card now—it uses footage from a real kangaroo hunt, so what we’re seeing is very much real and intense, but it’s when the sequence continues to a nearby, desolate watering hole that I recall most vividly. The men, with John nearly passing out, fight each other and Doc begins trashing the place. It’s all such a clear statement on hedonism and destruction—of property, of the self (mental and physical), of nature—that you’re shaken to your core. It’s Horror from Man, not ‘of the Man’ or ‘to the Man’, i.e. the usual avenues of the Horror film, so that when John decides to flee the party the next day and eventually attempt to get fully free via the barrel end of a gun, you understand his motives completely.
With such a daring, high wire tightrope of a performance you’d assume that Kotcheff went on to have a sparkling career as a Director. While a quick glance at his filmography would point more in the direction that he slowly became something of a hired gun, still occasionally making interesting works in otherwise decidedly low-genre restrictions. He did Rambo: First Blood (1982), a daring work that’s such gripping entertainment that you forget just how problematic it’d be within today’s climate. Weekend at Bernie’s (1989) obviously jumps out too, it’s such a breathtakingly dumb film you begin to understand the truly corrosive nature of Hollywood’s allure to otherwise idiosyncratic artists. Everyone needs to eat sometime, and eventually they’ll take a paycheck if they stick around long enough. Of course you look deeper and realize everyone needs to drink too, and while gallons of beer are chugged in Wake in Fright, his BBC work, Edna, the Inebriate Woman (1971), is certainly one of the definitive edicts on drinking on film (Lost Weekend’s here too of course) and one of the greatest works of the small screen to these eyes. He also did The Desperate Hours (1967) for TV, and Two Gentleman Sharing (1969) a pair of claustrophobic, but
scathing works of enclosed spaces. Those three, with Wake in Fright are more than enough for anyone. Total masterpiece.
Lucille and I saw one film in theaters this week but it was unforgettable:
As timely as any film can be George Tillman Jr.’s “The Hate You Give,” a ferocious and shattering work about police brutality, raw emotions reaching the boiling point and lead character metamorphosis takes it place among the very best films of 2018 -perhaps even at poll position at this point- and it leaves you gutted, infuriated and moved to your core. Unfortunately I have not read the acclaimed young adult novel it was based on, but on its own terms this is an American masterwork. Amanda Sternberg as Star and Russell Hornsby as her father give Oscar worthy performances. Lucille and I saw the film last night in Edgewater.
The Hate You Give ***** (Saturday night) Edgewater multiplex