davemerrill

Last weekend we rented a bunch of movies and finished watching them last night. One was THE BLACK SLEEP, a 1956 horror movie starring Basil Rathbone, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Jr (as "Mongo"), Akim Tamiroff, Tor Johnson (seen in a photo with hair!!) and a cast of nobodies. It's a Victorian-era period piece about a doctor (Rathbone) who has a secret Indian drug that mimics death, and he's using it to gather warm bodies for his brain surgery experiments so he can get his wife out of a coma. He needs help so he frames a surgeon, fakes his death to cheat the gallows, and is undone when his zombie legion of failed experiments breaks free and wreaks vengenance led by John Carradine, who I believe never turned down a script in his life. Not a bad picture, just overwritten, especially the dialog. Tamiroff does a great Boris Badenov impression, which is a trick since this film came out before Rocky & Bullwinkle.

What really stands out about the DVD is that it was put out by ACC Comics. The trailers include one for their direct-to-video "Nightveil" movie, which is sub-Corn Pone Flicks levels of bad, starring two women in bathing suits who pretend to fight and hurl magical force beams at each other. Also, "The Black Sleep" is bookended by fake horror hosts in an attempt to get some kind of "Elvira" horror host show thing going on. It's embarrassing for everybody involved. Guys, the 1960s are over. The era of Ghoulardi and Zacherly... it was a wonderful time full of magic and wonder, and it's over, and it's not coming back. Come up with something new. Joel Hodgson did, worked out pretty well for him.

Last night we watched LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH, a moody horror flick from 1971 about a recovering mental patient who moves to the country with her husband and their friend and becomes immersed in a mysterious web of horror. It's deliberately paced and not a lot gets explained, but it's a pretty effective creepy flick which manages to evoke that "nameless dread" sensation we all like so much. Plus Zohra Lampert, whom you have never heard of and yet who has an impressive body of stage, film, and TV work, does a great job as nervous, twitchy Jessica. You will spend the entire film wondering where you've seen Barton Heyman from, and now I know it's from "The Exorcist".

From the title you're expecting the movie to be about some kind of elaborate prank or hoax, but no. And that's good, because if they'd tacked on a "Scooby-Doo" ending to wrap everything up nicely, it would have been horrible. It's from 1971 but doesn't have that cheesy hippy-sploitation vibe so many contemporary films have; it's mostly shot on location in a great old house in Connecticut that's still standing, apparently.

HOW YOU KNOW I'M STILL 16 INSIDE: We got a new TV and we watched a bunch of stuff to "try it out" and we put in the Macross movie and wound up watching the whole thing. Anybody want an old TV?