Son of Classic Horror Films (50s & 60s)

[Abin Surly or ewe sirius Find all posts View Profile Close Abin Surly]

[Space Cop The Dandy Find all posts View Profile Close Space Cop]

So, I finally saw Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) all the way through. Pretty good stuff, though not Harryhausen's best. He always hated the Godzilla series claiming that Gojira ripped off this movie. Now, this movie is an admitted influence on Tsuburaya and others. And certainly the rough look and the scene with the electric fences can be seen as similar. But I don't quite buy that it's a rip-off because:

(1) Harryhausen himself took large elements from other Sci-Fi stories.
(2) The strength of his stuff isn't so much in the originality of story as in the animation.
(3) Gojira was already being kicked around with one script (later rejected) already written when this came out.
(4) Gojira had many influences, primary of which was not Beast but King Kong.

[Abin Surly or ewe sirius Find all posts View Profile Close Abin Surly]

Cool...but keep in mind:

1.) The story was partially-based on a short story by Ray Bradbury.

2.) The "dinosaur wreaking havoc in a modern city" goes back to Ray's mentor Willis O'Brien and his silent film "Lost World".

[Space Cop The Dandy Find all posts View Profile Close Space Cop]

Cool...but keep in mind:

1.) The story was partially-based on a short story by Ray Bradbury...

This DVD had a cool bonus feature of the two Rays together at a talk from a few years ago. It's about 15 minutes of them (mostly Bradbury) detailing their work together and friendship. Pretty cool.

Off the top of my head, I'd probably pick Harryhausen's Ymir as his best creation and the skeleton army of Jason and the Argonauts as his best technical achievement.

[Abin Surly or ewe sirius Find all posts View Profile Close Abin Surly]

I've always loved the Ymir, but I'm afraid this guy would have to get my vote:

[Space Cop The Dandy Find all posts View Profile Close Space Cop]

Darn. It won't come up for me. What did you pick?

[Abin Surly or ewe sirius Find all posts View Profile Close Abin Surly]

Darn. It won't come up for me. What did you pick?

[Space Cop The Dandy Find all posts View Profile Close Space Cop]

From Sinbad, right? Yeah, the Cyclops was a cutey. Also the movie in which he first did a battling skeleton, but just one.

[Abin Surly or ewe sirius Find all posts View Profile Close Abin Surly]

From Sinbad, right? Yeah, the Cyclops was a cutey. Also the movie in which he first did a battling skeleton, but just one.

Well, that was the 'warm-up' for Jason...and the cyclops-dragon battle was pretty awesome.

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Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (1973)

This is actually from the 70s, but as a Hammer sequel, this is the right thread.

The 6th and final Hammer frank movie, this one plays fast and loose with continuity (no surprise from our friends) by bringing Peter Cushing back as Baron Frankenstein himself, who it turns out faked his own death and works at his leisure (by blackmail) at a country insane asylum. A disciple of his (who printed "The Collected Works of Baron Frankenstein"?!?) writings joins up as they assemble a new (simianlike) monster. By '73 Hammer was much more explicit and this flick includes such tasty tidbits as a jar of eyeballs. I liked it quite a lot, mostly because of the cast and the setting (Victorian insane asylums FTW!).









Oh, and this comes from a scene in which the guards punish the young doctor with fire hoses with the other inmates watching. Sadism? Voyeurism? Homo-eroticism? You be the judge.

[Abin Surly or ewe sirius Find all posts View Profile Close Abin Surly]

Sadism? Voyeurism? Homo-eroticism? You be the judge.

Judge not, lest...etc.etc.etc....Don't ask, Don't tell.

I think this is the only Hammer Frankenstein that I haven't seen all the way through. From what I've read, I gather that this wasn't their "Finest Hour".

Nonetheless, I've got it in the Netflix queue....just to be a completist, I guess.

[Space Cop The Dandy Find all posts View Profile Close Space Cop]

If you had it in the Instant queue, it's not there anymore. That's why I watched it when I did.

For sure, it's a low point (though probably better than their sexploitation flix of the same decade), but I liked Shane Briant's performance and I'll watch anything with Cushing.

[Abin Surly or ewe sirius Find all posts View Profile Close Abin Surly]

No, just the regular dvd rental queue.

What in the world did they do to Cushing's hair? Were they intentionally trying to make him look like Quentin Crisp?

[Space Cop The Dandy Find all posts View Profile Close Space Cop]

Not his most masculine coiffure, eh?

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Finally saw the first Blacula (1973). It was fun. There's clear blaxploitation trope here---jive talk, racism, ghetto scenes---but it could be scary,

This is one of the earliest vampire movies I know of (pre-Lost Boys) where the vampires look normal most of the time but change when in hunting mode.



William Marshall is quite a good classic vampire---alternating between dignified and imposing.

Like all blaxploitation movies the film alternates between progressive tearing down of barriers---black heroes and main characters---and truly exploitative stereotypes. For instance, the action gets under way when a gay couple of interior decorators buy and transport Blacula's coffin. When they die, however, all of the cops constantly refer to them as "faggots," at one point even in front of the one man's brother-in-law/friend.