I spent my movie nights this week with Duelle and Noirot. I discovered Jacques Rivette far too late as his movies have until recently been mostly not available. This is changing, thankfully! I’d saved Duelle and Noirot for over a year because I knew they would be spectacular and I wanted to look forward to them for…

After meeting Heston’s wife, Janet Leigh up there in the picture, Orson Welles’ character mumbles “she doesn’t look Mexican either.”

I spent my movie nights this week on Touch of Evil and His Day of Glory. Touch of Evil I should have enjoyed more than I did, but I couldn’t get past Charlton Heston as a Mexican! I suppose the world should be grateful he didn’t do an accent, but the boot-polish covering (most of) his face was distraction enough.

I hadn’t planned it as a Christmas movie! It was just a strange coincidence that the main part of the story takes place over Christmas. I hadn’t planned it for Halloween either, although you’re right it is also a good Halloween story, particularly for the Goya masqued ball.

That’s monstrous! The only reason I still love Christmas is because I limit it to two months.  On the 1st of January all the decorations come down whether I like it or not.

I finished off Halloween month with Warning Shadows. This was one of the most interesting looking and engaging movies I’ve seen in a very long time. Not really a horror movie, as it turned out, but sadistic and shadowy and strange enough to qualify for Halloween. And it did feature two actors from Nosferatu!

Happy Halloween, Mw!  Are you dressing up this year as a Dracula or as a Frankenstein?

This week for Halloween I watched two of the Abbott and Costello monster movies. Abbott & Costello meet The Mummy is no more or less than what is promised by its title. I fell asleep and missed about ten minutes near the end. It might have been the same few minutes I slept through the last time I watched it. I…

Student of Prague did seem Faustian except in this instance it doesn’t seem what the devil bought was the student’s soul. Unless his soul is a jerk! I suppose the moral of this story is something about the danger of releasing our dreadful inner selves. My dreadful inner self would eat all the Froot Loops before I got…

I have grown this week fond of wasps. I don’t know where they’re coming from, I suspect they have a nest somewhere deep in the woodpile at the back of the house. It has become routine these last two weeks for me to end each day ferrying wasps out the door. Surely they should be able to make their way back to their…

For the second week of Halloween I watched The Man Who Laughs and Dr. Renault’s Secret.

I should say I never actually saw a single bee, I just heard angry buzzing from a dark corner after I moved something aside. I assumed it was bees because I’m regularly rescuing bees that get into the house. But just this morning I found an exhausted wasp pressed helplessly against a window. Perhaps its one that…

I think there’s a very good chance they’d have had the operation fail, or even had the girl die during the operation, had the movie been made a few years earlier before the Production Code forced horror movies to tamp down on the ghoulishness.  In this one instance, I am glad for the Code!

Coincidences continue to confound my movie nights. To begin Halloween Month I chose two movies with impeccable horror credentials that I had not seen before: Mad Love and The Body Snatcher. Spoilers ahead! Both movies featured at their centre a villain with some sympathetic qualities, a doctor in each case of…

I organised my Archie digests this week. They take up six feet of shelf space! You’d think seeing them all together in a great mass like this would shame me from ever buying another one. But during an existential crisis at the grocery checkout only an Archie or a Kinder Egg can restore meaning to the world. And I’m…

He called himself an unbeliever on many occasions. But I don’t think he could be called an atheist as we use the term today. His work is always very Christian in spirit and he was upset by the erosion of Christianity along with the general disintegration of the old rural Italian culture. And as a Marxist, he made a…

He should have stuck with Matthew. I suppose Salo could have been titled The Apocalypse of John as a metaphorical sequel to Matthew’s Gospel. Matthew is a warning, and John’s Apocalypse is the consequence of a warning ignored. The music in Matthew during the slaughter of the innocents sequence might even be the same…

This was a Pasolini week. In Comizi d’amore Pasolini questions Italians young and old, north and south, urban and rural, on their attitudes toward s-e-x. I found the movie less interesting in its questions and answers than as a travelogue of Italy in the early 60s. From what I understand this is to some extent the…

Here I am shivering and you’re letting all that delicious heat go to waste! What I wouldn’t give for a little place in Death Valley. I can do without the B.O. that comes with intense heat, no doubt about that. Not my own B.O. obviously, I never warm up enough to get B.O.

I similarly have lived in colder places, but always in warmer houses!