The Mummy (1959)

Year 10, Day 279 - 10/6/18 - Movie #3,071

BEFORE: So here's how Turner Classic Movies screwed me up once again - they went and made "The Mummy" their Monster of the Month for October 2018, and I was already scheduled to watch three movies named "The Mummy" - so this meant that maybe I should replace the plan I had in place with one that would incorporate more mummy movies into it, only I couldn't do that, because they don't start airing them until October 7, and some won't air until October 21 or 28.  And I couldn't abandon my mummy films completely, because they were my link back to old-time classic horror films - so now I have to watch two of them now before moving on to werewolves and vampires, and I'll have to tape the rest and try to work them in next year.

I suppose I should look at the bright side, this frees me up to continue with my linking, and I've got enough time to knock off the Hammer Films they aired last year, including a big Dracula-themed chain, before I go off on vacation.  But I'm always playing catch-up, which makes me feel like I'll never catch up.  I realize they have to pick a Monster that has enough films made about it to fill up four weekends of programming, so might I suggest Godzilla for next year?  Maybe then I can record all those films I watched on "Creature Feature" on local Boston TV when I was a kid.  That might be worthwhile.

As it stands, I had to drop one of my planned Mummy films, the original one from 1932, with Boris Karloff as the mummy, but that worked out well because I recently recorded "The Comedy of Terrors" with Karloff in it, so I'm keeping some linking possibilities open by pushing that mummy film into October 2019.  I've already changed the rules by allowing myself to link between characters in addition to actors, but I think linking between mummy films even stretches that rule a bit - I mean, each mummy has a different name, or at least they did when they were alive, I maybe shouldn't treat all mummies like they're the same character, even if they all sort of act the same, shuffling around slowly and sneaking up behind living people to choke them.  I almost feel like I'm objectifying mummies by thinking that they're all the same, but that's crazy, right?

THE PLOT: In 1895, British archaeologists find and open the tomb of Egyptian Princess Ananka with nefarious consequences.

AFTER: This is the first of eight horror films on my list from Hammer Films, a company that set out in the 1950's to update the monsters from the classic Universal films, which was possible since the old horror novels were in the public domain, but they were still wary of lawsuits from Universal, but of course, that doesn't quite explain why many of the plot elements in the Hammer movies resemble the ones from those older films.  Hey, I guess they were all just pulling from the same playbook - in the 1950's there was apparently only so much you could do with a vampire or a mummy film, if you pushed the story elements too far in a weird new direction, then the public wouldn't know what was going on.  These days you can make Dracula run a hotel or make Frankenstein's monster a secret agent, or even put Henry Jekyll in charge of paranormal investigations, like that's not a HUGE conflict of interest...

But in 1958, fans just wanted your basic Mummy movie, it seems.  Archaeologists find a tomb, they read a scroll out loud, as if heiroglyphics were some kind of ancient rebus or something, and pretty soon there's a tall guy in 4,000-year old bandages stalking the countryside.  Really, is the Tom Cruise movie all that different from this one, at the end of the day?  OK, so the special effects got MUCH better in the last 60 years, but that's just window dressing.  Get the main character into the tomb, get the sarcophagus out, and don't bother to explain how burying someone alive can allow them to live after 4 millennia with no food, water or air.  Jesus, it's a plot hole so big you could drive a truck through it.

Or in this case, a carriage - because this is set back in 1895, when a horse-drawn carriage is used to bring the Mummy in a box from place to place.  And the carriage-driver makes the mistake of driving RIGHT past the asylum, where the old archaeologist, Stephen Banning, has been recovering for the last umpteen years.  But when the Mummy's carriage rolls by his window, he breaks the window and yells at the carriage-drivers, but this only causes them to drive FASTER past the asylum.  This gives the carriage just enough speed so that when it hits a bump, the box with the Mummy bounces right off into the swamp.  It's a very unlikely series of events, and it's hard to say what caused what to happen - it's like if a cop pulled a guy over for speeding, and his excuse was that he had to get home quickly, to avoid all the police speed traps.  And before the beer made him too drunk.

Just then, Mehemet turns up at the scene - he's the guy who warned the archaeologists three years before to NOT disturb the tomb of Princess Ananka, because all those who disturb the tomb will die.  Umm, dude, everyone's going to die, someday, so this threat sounds not very threatening.  But then it's revealed that he was shipping the Mummy to his house up on the hill (seems he's done all right in the last three years, moved out of Egypt, bought some real estate, good for him!) and he would have had the Mummy up and working by now, if only some idiots hadn't driven too fast and dropped him in the swamp.  Oh, well, no matter, he reads from the Scroll of Life and Kharis, the Mummy, rises from the swamp, only now his white bandages are all muddy and grey.  Great, now in addition to being undead, he's got to worry about getting a bacterial infection from the swamp water.  I'm guessing mummies don't smell too good in the first place, but some kind of infection or malaria is probably going to make that worse.

It's bad enough that he approaches his victims at the speed of about 1 mile an hour, and now they'll be able to smell him coming, too.  So it's a wonder that he ever catches up with anybody in time to strangle them to death, but he manages.  Mehemet intends to use mummy Kharis to get revenge on everyone who broke into the tomb earlier in the film, which kind of makes his threat a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Either he doesn't realize that these really old archaeologists are pretty close to dying of natural causes anyway (these guys just aren't buying any green bananas), or he just doesn't want to wait that long.

John Banning, the son of the archaeologist who conveniently had a broken leg back when his father broke into the tomb (look, if you don't want to go in the family archaeology business, just TELL your father, maybe he'll understand...) then notices that his wife, Isobel, somehow bears an uncanny resemblance to Princess Ananka from 4,000 years ago.  (It's like they're played by the same actress, or something, to save money...)  How he stumbles upon this fact, I'm not sure - it's not like there are photos of Princess Ananka.  Did he get this from the hieroglyphics? Either way, when she lets her hair hang down, she finds that she's got enough of a resemblance to an Egyptian princess to control the mummy, and get him to switch sides, sort of.  But still he wants to drag her back to the swamp with him, so he must have taken love advice from the old Gill-Man.  Dude, that's not cool - even monsters need to get consent these days, and carrying off unconscious women is a big no-no.

NITPICK POINT: When they first enter the tomb of Ananka, you might think that the place would be very dark, after all there's no light source in a 4,000-year old tomb that would still be burning.  Logically their lanterns should be the only thing providing any light in that room, but because it's a film set, the place is all lit up, so we can conveniently see the beautiful Egyptian relics, the sarcophagus and all of the hieroglyphs.  Come on, now...

NITPICK POINT #2: Kharis got into trouble for trying to bring Ananka back to life, because eternal life was apparently something the Egyptians could accomplish, but still it was forbidden.  Why spend so much time learning how to accomplish this, only to forbid it?  And if was forbidden magic, why spend time learning about it in the first place.  Then, they punish the guy who tried to grant eternal life by giving him eternal life?  But I thought that was forbidden.  This system of punishment is even more ironic than the one we have today, when in some states murder is punished by execution.  Or did someone in ancient Egypt just have a sense for the ultra-ironic?

Starring Peter Cushing (last seen in "Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed"), Christopher Lee (last seen in "The Curse of Frankenstein"), Yvonne Furneaux, Eddie Byrne (last seen in "The Scapegoat"), Felix Aylmer (last seen in "Henry V"), Raymond Huntley, George Pastell (last seen in "From Russia With Love"), Michael Ripper (last seen in "The Revenge of Frankenstein"), George Woodbridge (ditto), Gerald Lawson (ditto), John Stuart (ditto), Harold Goodwin (also last seen in "Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed"), Denis Shaw, Willoughby Gray (last seen in "A View to a Kill"), David Browning, Frank Sieman, Stanley Meadows (last seen in "The Ipcress File"), Frank Singuineau (last seen in "Dr. No").

RATING: 4 out of 10 broken windows

The Mummy (2017)

Year 10, Day 278 - 10/5/18 - Movie #3,070

BEFORE: Before I get to tonight's film, I want to mention that I found out today that an ex-employer of mine passed away, the man who put Claymation on the map as an animation art form - Will Vinton.  Though I didn't work for him directly, I worked for over 20 years in the office of his studio's NY sales rep, so in a way he was kind of my boss's boss for a long time.  I got to travel to Portland, Oregon twice for various sales meetings and conferences, and worked at a lot of promotional events in NYC that were designed to publicize Will Vinton Studios, or maybe some were just parties for ad agency people that helped to increase their awareness of the studio or of clay animation in general, so for a long time we had common goals, at least.  If you can remember the California Raisins, or the Domino's Noid, or when the m&m's commercials switched over to CGI candy characters, those all came out of WVS.

At some point Will brought in a board of directors to run things when he decided to semi-retire, and then the board (led by Phil Knight of Nike) decided to retire him the rest of the way, forcing him out of his own studio.  There's a lesson to be learned there, I think - but the studio changed its name to Laika and went on to make animated features like "The Corpse Bride", "Coraline", "Paranorman" and "The Boxtrolls" after they showed him the door, so who's to say that corporate decision didn't make some sense in the end?  Anyway, I'd bump into Will Vinton from time to time on the San Diego Comic-Con showroom floor, and he always remembered me and made time for a chat.  I'm sorry to see him go, he was a real legend (not a contradiction) in the animation world.

What does this have to do with Halloween?  Well, two things, besides the annual Halloween events our company used to throw to promote the studios we represented.  One time, I think in 2002, we threw a party at Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, because someone at Vinton Studios had made a short stop-motion film called "Dia de Los Muertos" about the Mexican Day of the Dead festivities, and we rented a big bus to take creatives from the NYC agencies out to this cemetery in Brooklyn, where we screened the film for them in a little chapel, plus we had catered snacks.  It was a fun October event, and this was YEARS before any major studio made films like "The Book of Life" or "Coco" based on that holiday.  The night came to an end, the creatives got back on the bus, and I loaded up the van with the supplies to take back to the office, and went to drive back to my condo in Brooklyn, which was only about 10 blocks away.  Only the cemetery gate was locked at the exit I was told to use, and for a while it looked like I'd be spending a long night in a cemetery, but eventually my boss tracked down a groundskeeper and sent him to unlock the gate so I could leave.  Whew...

Another promotion we did was to get a van load of pumpkins delivered to the office, I mean we had a whole room full of pumpkins in our cramped office, and they got messengered out to various agency personnel, along with carving kits, to see who could make the best jack-o-lanterns.  Bear in mind this was only a few years after the Unabomber targeted some ad agencies, and here we were, sending little knives and saws to people's offices, and I was sure we'd get in some kind of trouble.  Worse, we sent some pumpkins and carving kits through the MAIL to ad agencies up and down the East Coast, and again, I was sure that sending sharp objects by mail, along with perishable fruit (yes, a pumpkin is a fruit) would have raised some alarm bells.  Nope, it seems nothing that bad happened, unless someone was on vacation that week and came back later to a box filled with a rotting pumpkin.

We did a lot of crazy stuff like that over 20 years, those are just two that stick out in my memory.  We delivered so many pumpkins that year that even now, years later, I can't bring myself to buy a pumpkin, let alone carve one.  I get the shakes just thinking about it - no thanks, I did my time.  I've still got PTSD (pumpkin-traumatic shipping disorder).

Javier Botet carries over again from "It".

THE PLOT: An ancient Egyptian princess is awakened from her crypt beneath the desert, bringing with her malevolence grown over millennia, and terrors that defy human comprehension.

AFTER: I got really lucky that the five biggest, most action-packed recent horror films that I wanted to see, and that were available to me, all linked together rather neatly.  But now my luck runs out, it was bound to eventually.  I could have gone from "Crimson Peak" to "The Mummy" to "It" and then to "The Dark Tower", which shared an actor with "It", but I think that would have been a dead end, so to speak.  That doesn't link to any other horror film on my list, so instead I have to go from THIS mummy-based film to another one, in a lateral move that I'll explain tomorrow.  Either way, it means that my linking's getting more and more difficult, and eventually I'll have to give it up as a device for choosing the next film.

These days it seems having a hit movie just isn't enough, every company wants to turn their movie properties into a franchise.  Blame Marvel/Disney, who wasn't satisfied with just making one Hulk and one Iron Man movie, they asked, "How do we turn this into 20 more movies?" and everyone else tried to follow suit.  So "Kong: Skull Island" is an example of this, they tried to shoehorn Kong into the Godzilla-verse, so they can make more movies in the future where all the giant monsters fight each other.  And so there's an attempt here also, to connect this "Mummy" plot to a larger monster-filled world that could go on to contain new versions of Frankenstein's monster, Dracula, the Wolfman and so on.

But to do that, the films have to be good enough to make the fans want to step back into that universe, again and again.  And so they threw Tom Cruise at the mummy this time instead of Brendan Fraser, and added another classic movie monster character that could serve as the connection to the larger monster-verse in the future.  Hint, he's a Doctor and his character also appeared in "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen", another film that could have (should have?) had at least one sequel.  Really, they didn't even have to use the same characters, there were comic book sequels to that story that featured James Bond, the Martians from "The War of the Worlds" and more - letting that franchise just die on the vine seems like a huge waste.

The problem here is that this storyline just wasn't all that great, so future plans to expand this monster-verse seem to be on hold.  Getting killed at the box office by "Wonder Woman" didn't help, I'm sure.  Putting together some stunts that would be more at home in a "Mission: Impossible" film, along with giving Tom Cruise's character the ability to come back from the dead several times, which seems straight out of "Edge of Tomorrow", made this feel like a film cobbled-together from pieces of other films and franchises.  Then they wrapped up those dead, stale ideas in a bunch of bandages and waited for this movie to resurrect itself into a hit, and instead it just came D.O.A.

It's not ALL bad, though - I like the idea of having a female Mummy villain, I haven't seen that before, and it did lead to a more interesting take on the character.  You can't have a male monster these days, anyway, shuffling around and grabbing women, kissing them and then killing them.  That's so very un-P.C. given the last year's headlines.  Ah, but send a female mummy out to ravage the world of men, and now maybe you're talking about some empowerment.  OK, maybe she's evil but at least she's empowered.  She wants to bring back Set, the Egyptian god of the dead, and to do that, she's got to kill Cruise's Nick Morton with a special blade that has a special stone in the handle. Because there are rules for this sort of thing.  Morton, on the other hand, watched his best friend become a thrall for Ahmanet (the Mummy) and things didn't work out so well for him.

So after they find Ahmanet's sarcophagus buried in Iraq (which is a bit of a weird place for an Egyptian mummy to be found) they bring it back to London, which would only be a problem if THAT'S where the sword and the stone are.  Whoopsie.  In a typical movie coincidence, an underground tomb was recently discovered in London, containing the holy men who swore to keep the stone out of the wrong hands.  Shocker, that didn't really work out either.  After a plane crash that Ahmanet survives (because she's already dead, or something) and Morton somehow does, too, it's a race across town to get the stone before Ahmanet can absorb enough souls to heal her body back from its withered state.

But there are still a lot of unanswered questions here, like how did Ahmanet survive all those centuries, with no food or water, buried in a sarcophagus.  Did her hate or desire for revenge keep her alive?  They show in the flashbacks how she was mummified alive, but how is that even possible?  The Egyptians took out a pharaoh's organs when they mummified him, and put those in jars, so by technical definition, if somebody was somehow still alive when they started the process, that person wouldn't still be alive when they were done.  There's more to "mummification" then just tossing somebody in a sarcophagus and closing it.

Also starring Tom Cruise (last seen in "History of the Eagles"), Sofia Boutella (last seen in "Kingsman: The Golden Circle"), Annabelle Wallis (last seen in "The Brothers Grimsby"), Jake Johnson (last seen in "Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates"), Courtney B. Vance (last heard in "Isle of Dogs"), Russell Crowe (last seen in "A Good Year"), Marwan Kenzari (last seen in "Murder on the Orient Express"), Selva Rasalingam (last seen in "Risen"), Neil Maskell.

RATING: 5 out of 10 zombie minions

It (2017)

Year 10, Day 277 - 10/4/18 - Movie #3,069

BEFORE: In July of 2017, I was in San Diego for Comic-Con, and on my second night there, which would have been the first full day of the convention, I stepped out after the convention had closed - this was after taking a tour of the items owned by Carrie Fisher that were being auctioned off, because it's always good to kill a little time on the way out, so that the crowds dissipate a bit.  You see, when everyone gets out of the Con at the same time, the nerds head over to get something to eat in the Gaslamp District, usually all at the same time.  So I tried to kill some time before I had dinner, to help cut down on the wait time - I hung out across the street from the Convention Center for a while, taking photos of some people in costume, then made my way over to a parking lot near Petco Park, where I'd seen food trucks serving in previous years.

On my way there, as I walked along Harbor Drive, there were various large displays for films like "Kong: Skull Island", because the big Hollywood production companies have figured out that renting some space across the street is cheaper than getting a booth inside the Convention Center, and it also allows for more freedom regarding the size of the display.  I'm sure that putting a giant ape skull inside would have cost an arm and a leg-bone, but outdoors in a rented space in a park, it works much better.

Before I got to the food truck to enjoy some delicious German and Polish sausages, I spotted a kid wearing a yellow rain slicker, with the hood up over his face, shuffling along and carrying a red balloon (as seen in the poster image below).  Now, to anyone familiar with the work of Stephen King, that immediately calls to mind the young Georgie from the "It" novel, so the creep factor was really high.  But still, what was this?  Was this just some fan of horror novels, dressing up like Georgie?  Was it just a kid in a raincoat?  Because it hardly ever rains in San Diego in July, so that didn't make sense.  Two blocks later, another kid in a yellow raincoat with a red balloon - or was it the same one?  Was Pennywise following me?

It turned out to be a very clever marketing campaign - the film's promoters had hired a bunch of Asian men, all of them on the short side, to walk around the very popular nightlife district, where thousands of nerds would be dining and partying, to dress like Georgie and not make eye contact.  I saw one fan approach one of the Georgies, I think to ask for a picture, and the man in the yellow slicker gave him a promo card with the film's information and release date.  For a very small investment, they sure got people talking about the film, and probably creeped out a bunch of people too.  I saw a couple cosplayers dressed like Pennywise at the con, too - my first reaction is usually to make sure that other people can see him, too.

Javier Botet carries over from "Crimson Peak".  And I go from a horror movie that put me to sleep to one that will probably keep me awake tonight...

FOLLOW-UP TO: "It" (1990) (Movie #666)

THE PLOT: In the summer of 1989, a group of bullied kids band together to destroy a shapeshifting monster, which disguises itself as a clown and preys on the children of Derry, their small Maine town.

AFTER: What's really a shame here is that some people probably watched this film and thought, "Oh, this is such a rip-off of "Stranger Things".  While of course there are some similarities - a bunch of teen boys and one girl who ride bikes, play video-games and are the ONLY ones in their town to be aware of the evil presence that plagues it - it's time for the casual fans to do some research, and realize that the Netflix mini-series was made in homage to Stephen King's stories, such as "It" - combined with a good dose of Spielberg films like "E.T." and "Poltergeist".  Yet I'm sure comparisons have no doubt been made, aided by the fact that one of the teen actors from "Stranger Things" appears here as a member of the "Losers Club".

Of course, before the 2017 version there was the 1990 miniseries - which was not perfect, not by anyone's measuring - for starters, it was made for TV, so Pennywise could only be sort of "I'm going to eat you..." scary, not like this R-rated film, which could be more "Oh God, he's EATING me!" scary.  It was also a huge mistake in the miniseries to start the story in the present, when the characters were adults - this not only clued the audience in that the kids would survive their first encounter with It, and have the chance to grow up, but it also forced the first episode to feature about 45 minutes of the Losers Club calling each other on the phone, so they'll agree that "we have to go back..."  But people talking on the phone doesn't really make for exciting television.

Still, the miniseries got some things right - we got to see that a teenage Seth Green would grow up to look like an adult Harry Anderson, and that any random black kid would grow up to look like Tim Reid.  Also, even a chubby kid could grow up to look as good as John Ritter, that was there to give kids like me some hope.

Starting the film back in the past (depicted as 1960 in the mini-series, 1988 in this film version) makes much more sense - because this way casual viewers not familiar with the story might not be sure that all of these kids are going to survive.  There's a large enough cast, after all, that a kid or two could sacrifice himself to give the others a better chance of victory as they face off against this shape-shifting parasitic demon that seems to feed off of their fears.  And who has more fears than a young kid or a teenager?  There's the fear of not fitting in or being accepted, the fear of getting bullied or picked on, the fear of getting smothered by overprotective parents, the fear of failing at school or sports, or even the fear of "wasting" one's summer vacation.  Throw those on top of the very basic fears - fear of the dark, fear of fire, fear of spiders, fear of tight spaces, fear of open spaces, and yes, the very rational fear of clowns.

Hey, don't blame me, blame the clowns who are way too in-your-face most of the time, with their gaudy make-up and their squirting flowers and giant shoes.  Jesus, clowns, could you be more needy when it comes to attention?  Do you HAVE to dress up in bright colors and go on stage and fall down and act silly?  What kind of a warped person would want to do this?  Then, of course, you've got your John Wayne Gacy-type serial killers, and your average pedophiles and molesters who are trying to attract the attention of children - blame those people for the bad reputation that clowns have, not me.

Of course, it's hard to beat Tim Curry, who appeared as Pennywise in the 1990 mini-series, as an evil riff on the sort of typical Barnum & Bailey clown, a "Bozo" gone bad.  Of course, before we had the modern circus clown archetype, there were the "fool" characters in theater, like in the Comedia dell'Arte, which probably came from Shakespearean fool or jester characters before that.  The British harlequinade theater developed the clown as the foil for the harlequin character, and if you examine Pennywise's costumes in this 2017 version, they seem to hearken back to the British pantomime clowns of the 19th century.  This makes some sense, especially if Pennywise had been hanging around in Derry during the 1800's, and maybe happened to kidnap a stray circus clown, then based his look on that fellow, because it seemed to attract more kids.  Pennywise probably would not have been nearly as successful terrorizing the children of Derry if he'd adopted the "sad tramp" look of an Emmett Kelly-style clown...but the appearance in Eddie's nightmare visions of the diseased, infected hobo seemed like maybe a shout-out to this stereotype.

Derry, of course, then becomes a sort of "Bermuda Triangle" for missing kids, with 6 times the national average of kids listed as "missing" on milk cartons, or there's some kind of mass child-killing event every 27 years or so in the town's history.  You'd think that some librarian or town council would do the math before a group of 6 teens, so what's up with the adults in Derry?  Do they just not care, or are they not aware, or does Pennywise's psychic energy just connect better with the younger minds?  I'm not an expert on the novel's storyline, but perhaps by the time people become adults, they've already faced down a number of their fears, or they no longer apply?

The Losers Club gets NO help from the adults - would the cops even believe them about the clown that travels through the sewers?  The police just aren't equipped to handle "drain monsters", I don't think there's even a code for that, if you told them a few gallons of blood just spurted out of the sink drain, they'd probably tell you to call a plumber.  Or they'd write the whole thing off as a prank.  It's also possible that Pennywise has managed to hypnotize all of the adults in town, so they can't see him or any of his works, leaving him free to prey on all of the delicious children.

But the moral here is an oldie but a goodie - believers have to band together to defeat the evil power.  This works on bullies, monsters, recurring sexual harassers and even elected officials (some of whom qualify as "all of the above"...).   And if you're a teen who's currently being bullied, you now have a NEW way to fight back - just find out where your bully lives, and tie a red balloon to his mailbox.  Umm, just make sure he's seen this movie first, and then you're golden.

There will be a sequel, "It: Chapter Two" out next year, and some of the casting choices for playing these children as adults are quite inspired.  But I think that script might have a few hurdles to face, just because children are so much easier to scare, they're more prone to fear.  How the heck is Pennywise going to scare them as adults?  Will they be shown nightmares of male pattern baldness, or statements from their banks showing that they're not properly funding their retirement accounts?  Maybe their nightmares will be their kids telling them that they've been accepted into an Ivy League school, with a massive tuition bill?  Or maybe just go with the tried and true, scare them with medical diagnoses of hypertension, plaque psoriasis and diabetic nerve pain?  I admit there are many possibilities here, but none of them seem very cinematic.  I guess we'll all find out next year.

Also starring Jaeden Lieberher (last seen in "The Book of Henry"), Bill Skarsgard (last seen in "Atomic Blonde"), Sophia Lillis, Jeremy Ray Taylor, (last seen in "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip") Finn Wolfhard, Wyatt Oleff (last seen in "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2"), Chosen Jacobs, Jack Dylan Grazer, Nicholas Hamilton, Jackson Robert Scott, Owen Teague, Logan Thompson, Jake Sim, Tatum Lee, Stephen Bogaert (last seen in "X-Men: Apocalypse"), Molly Atkinson, Geoffrey Pounsett (last seen in "Total Recall" (2012)), Pip Dwyer, Stuart Hughes, Steven Williams (last seen in "22 Jump Street"), Ari Cohen (last seen in "Maps to the Stars"), Joe Bostick (last seen in "Lars and the Real Girl"), Elizabeth Saunders (last seen in "Amelia"), Megan Charpentier (last seen in "The Shack").

RATING: 6 out of 10 rows of teeth

Crimson Peak

Year 10, Day 276 - 10/3/18 - Movie #3,068

BEFORE: I didn't even realize, when I was putting this chain together, that this was also a Guillermo Del Toro film.  So it makes sense that he would use the same actors again and again, only he didn't - only Doug Jones carries over from "The Shape of Water" as a mo-cap actor, but that counts.

THE PLOT: In the aftermath of a family tragedy, an aspiring author is torn between love for her childhood friend and the temptation of a mysterious outsider.  Trying to escape the ghosts of her past, she is swept away to a house that breathes, bleeds - and remembers.

AFTER: It's ghosts a-plenty tonight as we follow the story of Edith, a young girl in 1887 Buffalo, NY, whose mother dies - and then comes back to visit her as a ghost, telling her to "beware of Crimson Peak".  Which would have been very helpful, if she'd only explained what Crimson Peak was. 

Fast-forward 14 years to 1901, when Edith is a young heiress who passes the time writing ghost stories - since she has some first-hand experience.  She gets romanced by Sir Thomas Sharpe, who comes to town looking for investors for his new invention, basically a grain elevator re-modeled to help in the mining industry, especially with clay - because it's not commonly discussed now, but apparently it was a big problem back at the turn of the century, people had tons and tons of clay that all needed to be moved 10 feet to the right, and that was a huge undertaking.  Edith's father refuses to invest in his new-fangled clay-moving machine, I think because of how many people with shovels and wheelbarrows that it would have put out of work.  Even back then, people were worried about automation taking away their jobs, I guess.

Edith's father makes a deal with Sharpe and his sister, Lucille, which seems to involve them leaving town immediately, and if they do he won't share the information he has on them, which you just know has to be bad, right?  But before they leave Edith's father has an accident, where he slips in the bathroom and hits his head on the sink four or five times, which basically caves in his skull.  Geez, you hate to see accidents like that. More people should invest in those non-slip decals to cover their slippery bathroom surfaces.

This prompts Edith to marry Thomas, and move with him back to the U.K., where he and his sister live in Allerdale Hall, which somehow is even more haunted by ghosts than the place where Edith used to live, and is situated on top of (wouldn't cha know it...) a red clay mine.  Ah, so that's why Thomas is so keen on inventing something that moves clay to somewhere else, he's just plain sick of looking at all of it 24/7.  Even a short conveyor belt that moves it to another place 10 feet away would be a miracle invention to him, but it's no wonder he can't find any investors - I'm betting he's the only person in the world with this problem.  It would be like me inventing a machine that alphabetizes my comic books and moves them to my storage space, that would be a big help to me but I doubt anyone else would be interested in such a machine.

Anyway, the red clay affects everything in the house, like it gets everywhere and even manages to make the running water look red, like blood red.  Geez, that would be creepy if you didn't know that it was just clay.  It is just clay, right?  Before long, Edith gets messages from a whole new bunch of ghosts, which is kind of good news because I bet she was really sick of only talking to her mother's ghosts.  It really was time for her to travel and expand her horizons, find out what some other ghosts have to say, that is when they're not ruining a game of fetch or sneaking around just outside one's field of vision.  That's really quite rude, and so is crawling along the floor, leaving a blood trail, when they know full well that it's the servants' day off.

Oh, and about this time, Edith finds out that because of the way the red clay seeps up through the snow, the estate is commonly known as "Crimson Peak".  Damn, now where did she hear that name before?  Was that the place that her mother's ghost warned her about?  Oh, well, I'm sure that's not important, it'll come to her in due time.  Edith's very busy, trying to figure out why her husband won't consummate their marriage, and why she feels worse after every cup of Lucille's tea.  Something just doesn't seem right here, maybe she just needs to stop and think about it, maybe over another cup of tea.  Yes, so much tea to be consumed, that'll clear things up. 

Maybe she wouldn't need to drink so much tea if there weren't a giant HOLE in the estate's roof, causing it to snow inside the house.  That can't be good for anyone's health or demeanor, so I'm thinking maybe get someone to fix the roof?  Just putting that out there.  Fix the roof first, then maybe go to work on your little inventions and your automated tin toys.  This leads me to a NITPICK POINT, regarding all of the moths and butterflies that are inexplicably all over the house - how do they possibly survive the cold air in a house where it snows indoors?

It's up to Edith's old boyfriend Alan to travel all the way from America and arrive JUST in time to set things straight at Crimson Peak.  And then there's the most tired trope of all, Edith finally writes a successful novel, based on her experiences talking to the ghosts, both old and new.  I just hate hate HATE when the movie I'm watching becomes somebody's novel (or worse, the screenplay for the movie I'm watching, ugh, can we please stop using this narrative crutch to end stories?). 

Generally, this feels like somebody strung together a bunch of plot points that they'd seen in other horror movies, hoping that they'd all come together to form some new kind of coherent narrative, only they just don't ever seem to all congeal together.  Maybe I missed something - because I did fall asleep about 30 minutes in, and that's a really bad sign for a horror film.

Also starring Mia Wasikowska (last seen in "Alice Through the Looking Glass"), Tom Hiddleston (last seen in "Kong: Skull Island"), Jessica Chastain (last seen in "The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them"), Charlie Hunnam (last seen in "Pacific Rim"), Jim Beaver (last seen in "The Life of David Gale"), Burn Gorman (last seen in "Jimi: All Is by My Side"), Jonathan Hyde (last seen in "The Prince and the Pauper"), Bruce Gray (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2"), Alec Stockwell (ditto), Emily Coutts, Brigitte Robinson, Leslie Hope (last seen in "Dragonfly"), Sofia Wells, Joanna Douglas, Bill Lake (last seen in "Kodachrome"), Javier Botet (last seen in "The Revenant").

RATING: 4 out of 10 land certificates

The Shape of Water

Year 10, Day 275 - 10/2/18 - Movie #3,067

BEFORE: Oh, I had such ambitious plans for my four days off from movies - for starters, I was going to re-alphabetize a few thousand comic books, to work in 8 longbows full of books into my shelves, after I took four other longbows to my storage space a couple weekends ago.  Well, it didn't happen, for a number of reasons, like having a cold and working on the Oscar qualification paperwork for a short animated film, and now I'll have to wait for the next window of opportunity, which will come in November, after the horror chain and a few more films, but before the Christmas tasks begin. Such is the way of things.

Richard Jenkins carries over from "Kong: Skull Island", where he played a U.S. Senator.  I got really lucky with the linking, because I'd already done an Octavia Spencer chain this year, and three other films with Michael Shannon, too.  There was an obvious way to work this one in there, I could have watched it between ""Fahrenheit 451" with Michael Shannon and "Fruitvale Station" with Octavia Spencer - but then, it seemed to thematically belong here in October rather than July.

So I split this one off from the herd and hoped that another linking opportunity would come along in October.  When it did, I even borrowed an Academy screener from my boss, but there was no need - HBO happened to start running it just about a week before the slot I had set aside for it, so things just have a funny way of working out, don't they?

FOLLOW-UP TO: "Creature From the Black Lagoon" (Movie #2,756), "Revenge of the Creature" (Movie #2,757)

THE PLOT: At a top secret research facility in the 1960s, a lonely janitor forms a unique relationship with an amphibious creature that is being held in captivity.

AFTER: Not many people talk about it, but there was a second sequel to "Creature From the Black Lagoon", in which the Gill-Man, or Gil for short, had spent so much time around humans that he started to shed his scales and began breathing air through some hidden lungs, rather than through his gills.  So the team of scientists tried to integrate him into human society by putting some clothing on him, and giving him a nice little waterfront home, with a picket fence and a token job down at the harbor.  Well, it didn't pan out, because he missed his underwater home, someone blamed him for a murder he didn't commit, and before you know it, he's gone off on another one of his rampages.  I swear to God I am not making this up, you can look it up if you don't believe me, it's called "The Creature Walks Among Us".  It really killed this Gill-Man/Creature franchise, at least until Guillermo Del Toro sort of resurrected the concept with this unauthorized semi-sequel (?) 60 years later.  I only know about this film because I watched both "Creature" films last year, and the host on TCM was talking about it before the movie.

There was always some small measure of sexual innuendo in the franchise - in the first two films, whenever there was an expedition to that remote area of the Amazon - you know, where the Black Lagoon is - they always had one hot 1950's woman with them.  I suppose she was the "Creature Bait", because before long Old Gil would sneak aboard their boat, grab the hot dame in the one-piece swimsuit and drag her underwater to his lair.  Yeah, he kind of didn't understand that she couldn't breathe under water, so she'd usually pass out in the process, but Gil didn't mind.  Gil was kind of grabby and gropey to begin with, and come to think of it, Gil was kind of a creep.  But it was a different time, monsters back then just weren't as enlightened, and nobody thought much about it if Fay Wray passed out in King Kong's arms or Dracula hypnotized women before drinking their blood.  The rules about consent didn't matter to these monsters.  (I hate to judge, but that's what they were, monsters...)

Thankfully, we're living in a (mostly) more enlightened age.  The more modern spin on this Gill-Man is that he's just misunderstood, hopelessly naive, and somewhere there must be a lonely woman who would appreciate his crude advances.  That's what we're shown in Elisa, a mute cleaning woman who works at the secret lab - though you have to wonder how secret the place could be if so many people work there, just on the cleaning staff alone.  This is a side of the government we rarely see, not just the power-hungry military officers and the mad scientists playing god with biology, but the hired help - the cafeteria workers, the payroll accountants, the guys who check cars into the parking lot.  All of these people know where the secret lab is, so how secret can it really be?  The answer is, not very, especially if the Russkies already have a man working on the inside, eager to find out about Gill-Man, or as he's known here, "The Asset".

In a process rife with metaphor, Elisa befriends the strange creature in the lab, and starts bringing him hard-boiled eggs from her lunch.  Eggs symbolize fertility, woman-hood, and giving Gil her eggs means she's giving part of herself, something she's got a limited number of.  And they're hard-boiled from being in hot water, just like herself in those hot, steamy baths she keeps taking while she dreams about amphibious men.  Before long, she's concocted a plan to get Gil out of her dreams and into her bathtub.  With a little help from her friends, she pulls off the job and a Russian strike team gets the blame.  How convenient.  But eggs also symbolize life denied, life unfulfilled, life unfertilized and life consumed.  This is a woman who had dreams, which so far don't seem to have come to fruition.  How many eggs are left, at any given point?

So, she makes a decision, and as you might have heard or guessed, it involves becoming intimate with the Fish-Man.  Hey, it's Gil's lucky day!  Which is what I've always found leads to success with women, most don't like it if you come on too strong or appear desperate in any way, even if you are desperate for some human contact, it's best not to let that show.  All through college I was way too interested in women, and I didn't get anywhere until I started acting like I wasn't - there's a strange irony there.  I only got lucky when I acted like I didn't need to.  Similarly, the Gill-Man is an aloof character here, and that makes him very attractive to Elisa.  He's one cool customer, like deep-sea underwater cool, and that's reflected in the entire color palette of this film, everything's green or blue or some shade of teal, even the cars and the fillings in the pie shop.

Speaking of that, at first I wondered why this woman was so lonely, when she's got a connection with the older man next door.  Why can't she just date HIM?  They seemed to have some sort of platonic bond, and they even went out for pie together, which almost seemed like a date.  Ah, but he only wanted to talk to the guy who served them pie, and that's when I figured it out, because he set off my gaydar.  Heck, he's a graphic artist, he has a bunch of cats, and he watches old movie musicals - if it were the 1970's, he'd probably be in a disco group with a cop, a Native American and a leather-clad biker.

But anyway, back to the romance with the Gill-Man.  Elisa's attitude seems to be based on "Don't fear the unknown, embrace it."  Then see if you can bone it.  Yep, in what can only be described as a "reverse Little Mermaid", she gets it on with the fish creature.  This is why some reviews referred to this film as "Whale Rider" or even "Grinding Nemo".  And there is a monster in the movie, only it's not the character you might think - it's the guy who treats women as inferior, and non-human creatures as disposable.

ASIDE: Did sailors really have sex with manatees, back in the day?  The old story I've been told is that some sailors used to believe that sea cows were mermaids, but sea cows aren't exactly very attractive.  Did all of these sailors have bad vision?  Or had it been so long since they'd gotten any action from a human woman, or even seen one, that they would hump just about anything?  I'm not sure if I believe this old wives' tale, or maybe I'm wondering if one sailor was just pranking another, and it led to some bestiality now and then.  Anyway, I don't know how this woman can sleep with a giant Fish-Man in her bathtub, my wife can't seem to sleep when there's a spider on our front porch, that makes her very nervous.

I didn't really care for Del Toro's work before - especially "Pan's Labyrinth", which I didn't get at all.  I also watched the "Hellboy" films, but I can't say I really understood them.  I do read a lot of comics, but not those.  This is probably the most accessible Del Toro film ever made, because in a way it sort of feels like the Coen Brothers taking on the fantasy genre, with an angry Army colonel, a couple of inept Russian spies, and a bunch of other misfits that reside on the fringes of society, sort of like "Burn After Reading" crossed with a monster movie.  Is this REALLY the BEST Picture of 2017?  I'm not sure - so far I've only seen 5 of the 9 films that were nominated.  I've got three of the others on my list now ("Dunkirk", "Darkest Hour" and "Call Me By Your Name") and they just started running the last one, "Phantom Thread" on premium cable, so that will be on my watchlist soon.

Speaking of the Best Picture category, the Academy nixed that silly proposal that would have created a new category, the "Best Most Popular Film" or whatever that was.  Which I predicted would happen, that category would only have sown confusion, and it's better to just stick with one big winner each year.  Besides, "The Shape of Water" did all right, so splitting hairs between what's "best" and what's "popular" made no sense and was never going to fly.

Also starring Sally Hawkins (last seen in "Godzilla" (2014)), Doug Jones (last seen in "Stuck on You"), Michael Shannon (last seen in "Fahrenheit 451"), Octavia Spencer (last seen in "Gifted"), Michael Stuhlbarg (last seen in "The Post"), David Hewlett (last seen in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes"), Nick Searcy (last seen in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri"), Stewart Arnott (last seen in "Robocop"), Nigel Bennett (last seen in "xXx: Return of Xander Cage"), Lauren Lee Smith (last seen in "Trick 'r Treat"), Martin Roach (last seen in "Spotlight"), Allegra Fulton, John Kapelos (last seen in "Guilty as Sin"), Morgan Kelly

RATING: 6 out of 10 time-cards

Kong: Skull Island

Year 10, Day 274 - 10/1/18 - Movie #3,066

BEFORE: So here was my process for sorting out this year's horror films - and it's a reduced month, not a full 31 films because I'm going on vacation three weeks from now, same week as we did last year, because our BBQ Crawl was so successful last year, we're going to start from the same city and head in a different direction.  That left me a maximum of 23 slots, once I subtracted the 8 vacation days.  I isolated the horror films, moved them to a separate document from the main list and then started looking for films that shared cast members.  This gets a little tricky when I try to go by genre, because there might be actors who do horror films all the time, and others who might appear in only one.  But now that I allow myself to link between CHARACTERS in addition to actors, that made things a little easier, since there are only so many movie monsters out there.

Looking at the links, I came up with 22 films that fit together rather nicely, first five recent films that link by actor, and then I'll have to link by character to get back to the older classic horror films.  The goal was to get to the Hammer Films Dracula series that TCM ran last year, and I found a way to link to that, and back out.  Unfortunately it looks like I'll have to rely on indirect links at the end of the month to get back to where I need to be on November 1, but more about that later.  Then TCM announced their "Monster of the Month" for THIS October, and that very nearly threw a monkey-wrench into my plans.

I'll discuss this in more detail in a few days, but if TCM's going to run a bunch of movies with the same character, I want in.  Only I can't get to those films this year, because by the time they finish airing them, October will be nearly over, so even if adding them DID make my linking better (it doesn't) and even if I did want to abandon my plan to clear the Dracula slate of films clean (umm, I don't) then I still couldn't work them in to the 2018 plan, because I need to be mostly done by October 20, and some of the classic films I want to see aren't airing until October 28.  So, by default they have to wait until next year.  My only change was to move one of my Mummy films already on the list to next year too, because it should link both thematically and by actor to some of the films I had to ignore this year.

So here comes (in rough order) monsters, ghosts, demons, mummies, 1 werewolf, a whole bunch of Draculas, then back to ghosts for the ending.  This will leave almost 30 films for next year, and they just don't link to each other very well, so this might be the last time I'm able to link horror movies by actor, we'll just have to see.  I may face the same problem come February if I try to link romance movies together again.

But watching this one to start off October works out well when you consider my last horror film watched in 2017 was the "Godzilla" remake from 2014.  This film comes from the same producers (or so the poster says), and, I'm assuming, also has a giant monster in it, so it's almost like I'm picking up right where I left off last October.  OK, maybe that's a bit of a stretch.

Samuel L. Jackson carries over from "Incredibles 2" for his last film this year - I may not see him again until the next "Avengers" movie, but hey, you never know.  Boy, this was a good run, his second of the year.  He should be high on the wrap-up list of actors with the most appearances at the end of 2018 regulation play.

FOLLOW-UP TO: "King Kong" (2005) (Movie #917)

THE PLOT: A team of scientists explore an uncharted island in the Pacific, venturing into the domain of the mighty Kong, and must fight to escape a primal Eden.

AFTER: I had the opportunity earlier this week to re-watch most of the first three "Jurassic Park" films - one of the premium cable companies is running them, and I've been able to catch them late at night, after the TV show or Netflix comedy special I was watching was over, when I was just looking for something to fall asleep to.  You know, because people being chased by dinosaurs is always super relaxing...well, compared to the work I've been doing all week to qualify a short film for the Oscars, being chased by dinosaurs is kind of like a walk in the park.  OK, maybe a quick sprint in the park.

It had been a LONG time since I'd seen "The Lost World: Jurassic Park II" or "Jurassic Park III: Good God, Why Do People Keep Coming Back Here" so I'd forgotten most of the story beats, and I'd certainly forgotten all of those little shock-filled moments, like when the raptors stand totally still and make the humans think they're dead, or a statue or something and then...PSYCH!  They're alive and they want to eat you!  Hell, I think I last saw J.P. 2 before I started going to San Diego regularly, so I didn't even recognize any of the local landmarks seen in that film the first time - and I've been going to San Diego for the last 14-15 years, so it must have been a while.  This time I watched it and said, "Ooh, I know that trolley stop, there's a drug store right around the corner that I've been to..." and "Hey, that's Cedar St., I stayed at a hotel right near there for maybe three years in a row...". Because when dinosaurs are chasing people around, it's always good to look at the scenery behind them, it helps you get your bearings.

So it's no surprise that "Kong: Skull Island" reminds me of a "Jurassic Park" movie - after all, there's an island, a lot of giant, ancient creatures live there, and basically it's not a great place for people to be, because 99% of the things there want to eat them.  But Skull Island is an important part of the Kong story, and it played a role in the 2005 Peter Jackson re-make of "King Kong", which was set in 1933.  I tried not to learn a lot about this sequel before watching it - like I didn't even know what year it was setin, for that matter, I wasn't even sure it WAS going to be a sequel.  Perhaps this would be a prequel, set in 1920 or so, explaining who first found the island, and how the crew in 1933 knew how to get there. 

But they went a different way with it, the opening sequence is set during the last days of World War II, with American and Japanese fighter pilots crash-landing there, fighting each other until they realize that they share a much larger common enemy.  Then a montage during the opening credits brings us through the events of the 1950's and 60's, stopping in 1973 to deliver the rest of the story.  There are still some pretty big question marks about what the relation of THIS Kong is to the one in the 2005 film, if any.  Of course, with any animal, even an impossibly giant one, there simply must be a way for its species to reproduce, unless it happens to be the last of its kind.  One way or another, the giant ape seen in "King Kong" was just not the last one.  Maybe the one here is his nephew or little brother or something.

But by setting this film in 1973, and including a team of helicopter pilots that are doing that ONE LAST mission before heading back home from Vietnam (oh, that can't be good...) and throwing in some songs we've heard before in those "other" 'Nam-based movies, your mind might make a connection between a particular other movie set in the last days of that war, which also featured a bunch of helicopters, and a team of soldiers headed up-river on a foolhardy mission.  Even the color scheme of the poster seems like a reference to that movie, so I couldn't help but think of this film as (brace yourself, here...) "Ape-ocalypse Now".  Just replace Brando with a giant Kong - actually that doesn't seem like much of a stretch, now does it? - and you've got yourself a movie. 

I was going to make some more jokes about things like "Gorilla" warfare here, but looking back, I did that exact same thing earlier this year, after watching "War for the Planet of the Apes".  Jeez, between that film, this one, "The Legend of Tarzan", it's been a very big year for monkeys.  Let's not forget that King Kong also made a cameo in "Ready Player One" - I've got to remember that again at the end of the year. 

The first Kong film I ever saw was the 1976 version, with Jeff Bridges, Charles Grodin and Jessica Lange, and while the special effects in that one might have been groundbreaking at the time, in retrospect they weren't all they were cracked up to be.  Like, you could tell when Kong was just a guy in a suit, and when he was just a mechanical face and prop hand.  Sure, we've come a long way since then, everything's CGI and mo-cap now, but there's also a "King Kong" Broadway musical coming out, and it looks like they've gone backwards, with giant mechanical faces and prop hands.  Yeah, I think I'll pass.  That 1976 film, while I'm being critical, had some massive problems with scale, like I don't think they ever landed on exactly how big Kong was, and it didn't help that they transported the massive ape inside an even more massive oil tanker, which made him look small.  Huh?  Why would they do that?   Then they made him climb the World Trade Center instead of the Empire State Building (supposedly there were twin mountain peaks on Skull Island - lame) and again, Kong looked small compared to the Twin Towers, another huge mistake.

On the upside, this "Skull Island" film is wall-to-wall action, once they reach the island anyway, inconveniently located behind a permanent storm front, which is apparently a thing, though I'm not sure how that works.  Inside the storm, the weather is great, so it seems like a perfect place to be, unless you count the giant monkey, the giant insects, the stabby giant spiders and the giant lizards with skull heads that will swallow you whole and then spit out your bones.  There are plenty of those "It's right behind me, isn't it?" moments that will creep you out, and other times there won't be any warning at all, so people with heart conditions may want to seek out alternate forms of entertainment.  Extraneous dialogue and character development have to take a back-seat when people are constantly on the defense against all the creepy-crawlies and the giant monsters.

As a bonus there's a hint at the end that future sequels in this franchise may connect with the Godzilla-verse and all the monsters therein, so if there's a particular monster mash-up you've been waiting to see, chances are it's coming on the horizon, if you can stay alive long enough to see it...

Also starring Tom Hiddleston (last seen in "Avengers: Infinity War"), John Goodman (last seen in "Atomic Blonde"), Brie Larson (last seen in "Room"), Jing Tian, Corey Hawkins (last seen in "Non-Stop"), Toby Kebbell (last seen in "Gold"), John Ortiz (last seen in "The Finest Hours"), Jason Mitchell (last seen in "The Disaster Artist"), Shea Whigham (last seen in "Savages"), Thomas Mann (last seen in "Fun Size"), Terry Notary (last seen in "War for the Planet of the Apes"), John C. Reilly (last seen in "The Lobster"), Will Brittain (last seen in "Everybody Wants Some!!"), Eugene Cordero (last seen in "Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates"), Marc Evan Jackson (last seen in "22 Jump Street"), Richard Jenkins (last seen in "North Country"), Miyavi (last seen in "Unbroken"), Robert Taylor (last seen in "Focus"), Allyn Rachel, James M. Connor (last seen in "Horrible Bosses 2"), with a cameo from Dat Phan and the voice of Thomas Middleditch (also last seen in "Fun Size")

RATING: 7 out of 10 Psychovultures