Welcome To Our Nightmare III: Terror, Wooley... and TAKOMA!

Wow. I read your full review. Thanks for finding the words that I could not. I've been wrestling with the thought that maybe I was too hard on this movie but after reading your review and hearing so many of my feelings crystallize, I realize I was being too soft.

(I'll have more to say over in your thread where the full review is but I gotta run out to see Sierra Hull for an hour or so.)

I would have given it a right after watching it, but it's dropped a bit in my regard as some time has passed. Unfortunately, what stuck with me was mostly the annoying stuff, and only Lilly's haunting, vacant stare really remained of the good.

I've watched the 2nd and 3rd episodes of Dragula, and I'll write them up later. But for now I must preserve this gem of an interview:

"So I guess chickens really can fly. Quack quack---or, wait, whatever sound they make. Girl, I don't know what they say! I'm not a botanist!".

And hopefully by tomorrow it will be down to 2 1/2.


Some movies are so bad it can take days to fully sink in.

Jeez, I'd forgotten, in the Damien Leone discussion, that All Hallow's Eve doesn't just end with all the gendered brutality against women, it actually starts with it too. I'd forgotten that the first segment, drooled over by the boy-child in the wrap-around, features a pregnant woman having her womb cut open and her baby taken from her but is immediately followed by a rape of the other woman in the segment. But no, I totally see the argument that he doesn't have issues with women.

Bro, I was there! Wish I'd known.
Hope you stayed for the encore.

No shit?!
No, I didn't I was tuckered out. But I've actually been playing octave mandolin for a couple years so I got a real treat there.

Ah, encore was a Dead song. Muddy River?

Black Muddy River?! Dammit.

I'll watch it on Nugs tomorrow. Not the same as being there but as close as I'll be able to get. I'll probably get to see my bald spot in most of the show, I was pretty far front and center.

I was literally front and center. You were no doubt right behind me. We suck.

Seriously, that's terrible.

From my youngest days I always gravitated toward the spooky and the macabre. Even before I had gone off to school for the first time. And, sitting at home, then and as I grew up, on Saturday mornings, the Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour was a highlight of the week.
Certain individual cartoons became iconic to me. And this is one of them.


If Warner Bros. will let me, I will put one or two more in here before we're done.
(I know the cartoons are usually Cap's thing, but this one is so basic and fundamental that I figured it would not be one he would post.)

ooooooooh I didn't know WB was posting Looney Tunes on Youtube now. Nice. They were always getting removed in the past. I'll need to update the links on my thread accordingly.

__________________
Captain's Log
My Collection

Yeah, I don't know how long before that will disappear from the post but might as well enjoy it while it lasts.

About misogyny via Terrifier...


I think it's fair enough to call the movie itself misogynistic, or at the very least, certain scenes as catering to the inherent misogyny in so much of this kind of horror.


I just don't get extending this to the filmmaker themselves, and what their beliefs are, and whether they are good or bad people, for pretty obvious reasons.


Now, also obviously, sometimes the filmmakers actually are misogynists. For example, there is ample evidence that Alfred Hitchcock was probably one. But, in the case of him, even when the artist himself has obvious issues with women, and even when he directed a scene that is arguably ground zero of targeting female sexuality and the vulnerability of their naked bodies with violence (the shower scene in Psycho), most hardly will bother to bring any outrage up in the context of that film. At least not anymore. Maybe it's old hat now and we have already long accepted the stains it has put in the fabric of cinema and so it hardly needs repeating. Or maybe the violence in that film is now much too quaint for anyone to really raise an eyebrow anymore. But it does seem to me that specifically getting angry at the artist for playing with these tropes, and pushing these boundaries, really is just a way for us to deflect responsibility for watching these kinds of things as some kind of entertainment in the first place. Maybe even an instinctive need for us to quickly distance ourselves from these kind of extremely violent movies when we watch them because maybe, just maybe, many of us already suspect that there might just be something weird and perverse and maybe even slightly wrong about watching any kind of movie that peddles this kind of violence (even when it has the sheen of cinematic dignity like a Psycho or Halloween now has).


I don't know. I guess I'm just not into pointing an accusing finger at the most recent culprit that steps over our newly drawn lines of what is considered an acceptable amount of misogynistic content. I think it let's us too easily off the hook if we start calling into question the motives and even the humanity of a director for doing these kinds of things in their films, especially when we don't bother questioning our own participation on how it got to this point.

They better let you!

(Hopefully they're too busy licking their wounds after their latest movie became the biggest bomb of the year to really pay much attention to what's going on in their YouTube).

Wilfred Glendon is a world-famous botanist (sigh, I've been reading a lot lately about when Scientists were celebrities and I kinda wanna cry) who finds himself in remotest Tibet, where even the regional sherpas will not take him, in search of the rarest flower in the World. He finds it but something else finds him and, in the ensuing melee, Professor Glendon is bitten.
Upon his celebrated return to England he is visited by the mysterious Dr. Yogami who warns him that he is doomed to become something and that only the flower, activated by the full moon, can save him and those he loves.

Late in the month to be doing my first black and white. A bit of serendipity in that the night had gotten late but I wanted to get one more in so the idea of watching an older movie that might be 80 minutes or less was appealing. The Old Dark House was about to get watched and then I thought about White Zombie and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein… but then suddenly I thought of Werewolf Of London, which I used to profess as a favorite but actually haven’t watched for over a decade.
I’ve always felt this was the preferable werewolf movie. It is the original werewolf movie, the first full-length feature film made about werewolves. And there's a lot to like about it.
The first thing, probably, about any werewolf movie is... well, how's the werwolf and how are the transformations? I will set your mind at ease, the Werewolf Of London, especially considering this is seven years before The Wolf Man and is the first movie to try and pull it off, acquits itself quite well.



That's a pretty good-lookin' werewolf for 1935 and I would say I actually like the design a little better than the Chaney Jr. version. And I will blaspheme here for a moment, I know the transformation in The Wolf Man is the classic but if I'm being honest I always find it a bit too quaint. The first transformation here is done very cleverly where Wilfred walks past a colonnade with the camera and he on opposite sides of the columns and each time he emerges from behind the next column, he is more werewolf. It's nice, trust me. Or watch it.
I always thought Henry Hull did a great job in this as Glendon/The Werewolf. Just really liked the more athletic and lithe and quick way he moved when he was the werewolf as compared to Chaney's heavy, smashy movement. It seemed like Hull put some time and preparation into his movement in the way Christopher Lee did for Horror Of Dracula. He's sort of twitchy and leapy and whatnot, doesn't look like how a human moves.



While the movie slows down between its opener and the first transformation, I really do like the action in this one a lot and its short run-time does make it mostly action. Once poor Wilfred gets to transforming and killing, the movie skates right along. Quite a bit of humor in this as well, as was common at the time in movies like Doctor X and The Vampire Bat, with the two old innkeepers being downright hilarious. But make no mistake, this is really werewolfery as another tragic case here, but before The Wolfman. In a poignant ending,

Yeah, I think, re-reading my notes and thinking it over, that Werewolf Of London is really pantheon-level werewolfery and will remain in my top tier of werewolf films.


I'm gonna leave this next part not spoiler-tagged because I think it's an interesting general point, but if you're sensitive to spoilers, read at your own risk:

Post script - This is, as far as I know, the first movie to introduce the idea of a "zombie apocalypse", though in this case, it's a werewolf apocalypse. The lore established here, again pre-Wolf Man, is that, as Wilfred explains, if he keeps biting people, and then they keep biting people, the end is nigh. This isn't "a werewolf bites somebody and either kills them or oh no they become a werewolf", this is the Werewolf Apocalypse.

More on this in a subsequent post,

I absolutely agree with the spirit of your point. I guess my point to myself is, Jesus, is every kill-scene this guy makes gonna be about gendered or sexual assault of a woman? Comprising, in just his first two films, the slashing open of a pregnant woman's uterus, the gang-rape of the only other woman in the segment in front of the still-hanging corpse of the uterus woman, "slut" and "****" being carved into a woman's skin (that did nothing we've seen to "deserve" any of that), the bisecting of a woman with a saw beginning by sawing vertically through her vagina, while her female friend is forced to watch, and the cutting off and wearing of another woman's breasts.
And if the answer is "yes" do I wanna see any more from this person and, honestly, what the f*ck is wrong with this guy.
That's all.

On a lighter and more pleasant note, at least from a Horror perspective, here is the quick-math on the Werewolf Apocalypse first introduced in 1935 in...


Again, to me, this idea that we wouldn't really see again that much until Invasion Of The Body Snatchers and then Stephen King writes 'Salem's Lot and then there's Return Of The Living Dead and before we know it every third show and movie is about the idea of this global spread of monsterism, well, it seems awfully groundbreaking in 1935.
If Wilford kills 1 or 2 people a night each of the three nights of the full moon, then there are as many as 7 werewolves hitting the streets on the next month. Which means as many 54 werewolves the following month, 324 werewolves the following month, nearly 2,000 werewolves the next, and at the 6 month mark you have nearly 12,000 werewolves in London. At 9 months, it’s 2.5 million werewolves. At a year you’re at half a billion werewolves running around the Earth. Which means somewhere between the 9th and 10th month, the entire population of England would be werewolves.
Imagine what it would be like to still be human, coming up on the 11th full moon, knowing that literally a third of the population of whatever country you live in are monsters and they’re all coming out again tonight. And the odds you are going to be next are like 66%. You literally know that two out of every three people you see, the people who have survived this long, will be hunting you next month, if you survive.
And then it will be over.

Agree with all thoughts regarding Werewolf of London. Absolutely no qualms about admitting that I like it more than Chaney's. Makeup/transformation/Hull/story: all great. Valerie Hobson is great too.

(Letterboxd says I haven't watched it in 7 years. Unacceptable!)