John Holmes Motherfucker's Stream Dumplings

Collection 1

1. The Dunwich Horror, 1970

Directed by Daniel Haller

Starring Sandra Dee, Dean Stockwell, Ed Begley

I'm just now beginning to approach the works and legacy of HP Lovecraft, and I'm not finding them to be especially accessible, so anything I have to say may turn out to be wrong.  To me this film appears to be a milestone in the rise Lovecraft rise to his current predominance.  As far as I've been able to find,  The Dunwich Horror may be the earliest film adaption of HPL to be marketed as an adaptation of HPL.  A radio ad for this film was where I first heard the name "H.P. Lovecraft".

Maligned by many for its arch acting and lack of horrific special effects, the film leaves much to the imagination, especially by 21st century horror standards, but if you bring sufficient attention and imagination to the experience, you may be rewarded as I was.

  

2. The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932)

Directed by Charles Brabin and Charles Vidor

Starring Boris Karloff and Myrna Loy

Even in 1932, this film was controversial for its explicit racism against Asians, but Karloff's performance is wonderfully diabolical,  without a crappy fake Chinese accent.   The guiltiest of guilty pleasures!

3. The Salt Babies (2022)

I had a feeling this might be a good stream.    It's a local documentary about a national tragedy that took place in Binghamton General Hospital's maternity ward in 1962, a few years after I was born there.  Five babies died when salt was put in their formula instead of sugar, and the hospital instantly blamed what seemed to be the only woman of color on the nursing staff.    WSKG's "Upstate Documentaries"  are always low-key and exceedingly well researched.  

4. The Frozen Dead (1966)

Like The Dunwich Horror, this seems pretty tame by today's standards of horror, but in 1966, the idea of cruel Nazi experiments on humans was a lot more fresh, and a lot more real.   A young girl is murdered, and her severed head is kept alive on a laboratory table.   She appears as a tormented vision in her friend's dreams.  It's way more emotionally compelling than The Brain that wouldn't die, and gorier, too. 

5.  Evil Dead Rise 2023

How about something a little rougher?   There aren't a lot of ways the Evil Dead franchise could get more horrifying, but one, I suppose, would be if a family of children watched their mom turn into a deadite, and come after them.  "Mommy's with the maggots now."

6.  Renfield  (2023)

Nicolas Cage plays Dracula.  I was powerless to resist. 

 The odd take of Dracula's familiar  Renfield as a codependent who seeks help in a 12 step support group seems goofy at first, but it may actually work here.  It highlights certain aspects of Dracula's character that Cage absolutely nails.  This Dracula is especially evil, in a way that 21st century humans can relate to, and also really funny.  I could have done with a lot less acrobatic fighting, and the conceit of Renfield getting superpowers from eating bugs reminds me of a video game, but Cage's performance covers a lot of sins, and it could cover a lot more if it had to. 

7. Hobo With a Shotgun 2011

Any questions?

8.   Aphrodisiac!   The Sexual Secret of Marijuana 1974

      Motherfucker Cut 2023

A semi-fake documentary, very much in the style of Ed Wood's Glen of Glenda, complete with preachy droning voice over and stock library music.  I've replaced the hard core sex scenes with a horror compilation I found on the internet archive, and some of it came out pretty funny.  Lots of nudity remains, including a nude therapy group that appears to be apropos of nothing.

9. Dracula 1931

Scored by Philip Glass 1999

Tod Browning's Dracula is said to be the first sound horror film, and today it's much maligned for its lack of music, and for its long silences, but, ironically, for most audiences in 1931, silence would have been as new and as novel as sound itself.   Silent movies were never to be shown in silence.  There would always have been someone playing the piano or the organ, and so the long silences in Dracula would have been unsettling.   Browning plays to that, and so does Lugosi.   In the early scenes, Dracula lives with his wives in his crumbling castle, a literal tomb, an unnatural world of silence.  In the novel, Dracula barks out commands to his wives, but Browning has Lugosi warn his wives away from the helpless Renfield with a look and a gesture, they back away without making a sound.    After years of loud music and explosive jump scares, films like A Quiet Place, and Scream 6 (I'm thinking of just one scene), are rediscovering the unsettling power of silence.  

This is to say that the Philip Glass Score doesn't really improve Browning's film, but it's beautiful music (performed by the Kronos Quartet), combined with a beautiful film,  and the scored version of Dracula, while not the ultimate Lugosi-Dracula experience, is nevertheless an experience worth having.

10.  The Seven Minutes, 1971

As far as I know, The Seven Minutes is the only Russ Meyer film based on a novel.  Irving Wallace was a hugely popular novelist in the sixties and seventies, who knew how to create stories that hinge on contemporary controversy.   The Seven Minutes is about a bookseller who is prosecuted for selling a sexually explicit book that is supposed to have incited a rape.    It's a different kind of subject matter for Russ Meyer, but he handles it very much in that quick-cutting spring-loaded Russ Meyer style.