Sober Horror Fan

Day 174 of Sobriety.     So, this one really has me scratching my head—I just don’t know what to make of Twixt at all. It's a 2011 film written, directed, and produced by Francis Ford Coppola. It features a few big names, notably (for me) Val Kilmer in the lead role and Tom Waits providing some voice-over narration. But, confoundingly, given its credentials, it’s pretty damned awful.     Its Stephen King-esque plot revolves around a struggling (alcoholic) horror writer who visits a small US town on a book signing tour and discovers that the town has a strange dark secret involving child murderers and ghosts.     On paper, this should have been great, but watching it, it's actually hard to believe that it was really made by the director responsible for towering classics like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. It seems to have been shot very cheaply on video. It looks completely flat, the music is uninspired, the frequent dream sequences look like a self-pro...

Day 44 of Sobriety.  Cry of the Banshee is one of a handful of Vincent Price films directed by Gordon Hessler that include The Oblong Box (1969), which I also watched recently. Like The Oblong Box , Cry of the Banshee  purports to be based on an Edgar Allen Poe story, a claim that is apparently completely spurious. It certainly doesn’t resemble any Poe stories that I have read. It has been on my radar for a while, though, as it is usually included in the wider cannon of British “folk horror” films. I had no idea what to expect going into this film: it’s regarded as folk horror. the title refers to a banshee, I’d heard that there is a werewolf in it, and it claims to be a Poe story. I couldn’t really fit all of those elements together cohesively in my mind to generate any kind of expectation. As it turned out, the film itself is also rather muddled. Apparently this is due to some extensive and hasty re-writing of the script at the behest of the director. First thi...

Day 26 of Sobriety. The Tomb of Ligeia is the last movie in what is generally referred to as Roger Corman’s “Poe Cycle” of films based (often very loosely) on the works of Edgar Allen Poe. If I am right there are eight such films, nine if you include the non-Corman directed, but very similar in style, The Oblong Box (1969). The Tomb of Ligeia is the sixth of the series that I have watched (or re-watched) recently, and although I greatly enjoyed it, quality wise I would place it in the lower ranks of those films in comparison to works like The Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), and House of Usher (1960). Actually, although I still have a few films in the series to watch, I doubt any of them will reach the quality of those films, which I think are superb. In any case The Tomb of Ligeia still has a lot going for it. It has Vincent Price, of course, for a start, although I understand that he was not Corman's first choice for the part, having b...

Day 9 of Sobriety This could be described as the entry in Roger Corman’s Edgar Allen Poe cycle of films that wasn’t actually directed by Roger Corman. Perhaps that is why I found a little lackluster compared to the other films that I have seen in the cycle (so far House of Usher , The Pit and the Pendulum , The Haunted Palace , and The Masque of the Red Death —and most of the other titles are waiting on my shelf). But having said that, the actual director, Gordon Hessler, has made a fair number of good films, including The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974), and (ahem) Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park (1978). He also directed another Vincent Price film, Cry of the Banshee (1970), which I haven’t seen yet, but am looking forward to.   Apparently Hessler stepped in to replace Michael Reeves (of Witchfinder General fame) when Reeves became unavailable due to illness. I wonder what The Oblong Box would have been like if it had been directed by Reeves? We’ll never know. ...