Eaten Alive - 1977

I correctly guessed the year, motherfyucker.  MuthAFYUCKA!  Someone needs to start a viral whatever where they now spell it that way.

I have myself a Tobe Hooper marathon now, adding on to Spontaneous Combustion.  It ends here though, cause honestly I'm not super interested in continuing it.  I might watch Night Terrors or I might not, we will see.

This was Tobe Hooper's follow up to Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  How is it, in all this time, no one has made a rip on Texas Chainsaw Massacre called Taxes Chainsaw Massacre, and it's about doing your taxes at the last minute in April?  Fuck yo.  Comedic gold right there.  Well, I was sort of wrong, Cracked did an article about it, and wtf I'll link it, why not.  Here.

Robert Englund and Neville Brand star in this backwoods horror thingy about a guy who has a shitty motel out in the woods.  It's obviously not the most popular place, but people trickle in, and one by one they fall victim to either the hotel keeper himself (Neville Brand as Judd) or to the crocodiles he has in a small swamp right by the hotel.  Robert Englund is a weirdo local guy who knows Judd and knows what's going on, and is sort of in on it.

This one mimics some of the things that made Texas Chainsaw good, while dropping some of the other things.  The psychotic characters are back, and everyone in this is overdoing it, with the exception of Robert Englund.  William Finley as Roy is especially awful, and Neville Brand walks a line between decent and awful.  The women are all annoying as well, and their nudity is often exploitative feeling and not done well.

Gone is the jarring, cool camera work from Texas Chainsaw, and gone is the cool music and grittiness of that film.  Instead, this was all filmed in a really minimal, uninterested style, and it feels like every movie ever made.  The lighting, not to pick on a minor thing, also sucks.  There would have been ways to make this all seem creepier, but instead it's just averagely dark, and stuff like the crocodiles thus don't come off well.  Points for having a real crocodile though.

There was some behind the scenes drama going on with Hooper and the film producers, and we can possibly blame studio interruption.  Whatever the reason, it's still watchable, but it's unnecessary, and definitely not for everyone.  I'll give it 2 stars.

Frankenstein's Daughter - 1958

Frankenstein had quite a family.  If you look enough, you'll find he had a well known bride, he had a son, and he has a daughter in this movie.  It's of course known of his many conflicts, whether it's meeting Abbot and Costello, or fighting giant monsters in Japan, or involved in the conflicts of Dracula and the Wolfman.  The guy gets around.

Frankenstein's Daughter is a incredibly amazing movie.  Oh wait.  I forgot I was talking about Frankenstein's Daughter for a minute there.  No, this movie isn't that great.  It's one of these like, the fuck do you expect from this, you know?

Turns out my work has blocked my option to view my blog.  Apparently they have caught on to the fact that blogs can contain nudity or generally, stuff which is not work necessary, so they have put a block onto blogspot viewing, but oddly, not blogspot writing.  Does this spell the premature death for my blog?  I can only imagine, if my future does go the way I expect it to go, that soon enough this blog will end anyways.

This blog started born out of my desire to write regularly.  First, I thought I had to lot to say about music, and I started Strange Music Spotlight.  Turns out I had nothing real to write about, and soon enough I wanted to write more.  Well, movies should have been obvious to me all along.  It gave me a reason to watch stuff I'd always wanted to see, such as my first review Killdozer.  It also gave a document as to some of the more forgettable things I'd seen.  But honestly, if I end up having slow ass internet, or if I get busy, or if I just try to watch less movies, this blog is stopping.  And it does seem to look like all of these things might happen soon enough.

This isn't necessarily the last entry, and I will probably do a boxset like retrospective of every movie in this blog, giving awards and memories and such.  Sometimes, writing a blog would be the most exciting thing about a day, and sometimes rereading my past reviews gave me great joy.  I even turned it into an actual published review thing, as shown on Morbidly Beautiful  (I was soon thereafter no longer on the site, cause I don't want to pay attention to their stupid facebook posts).  Fuck you facebook, I'm not capitalizing you.

Frankenstein's Daughter had some bad makeup, a love story very indicative of the time in which it was made.  It had a pseudo sexual line something like "Pretty soon I won't be leaving for the night.  That's right, we're engaged."  I wish one of these movies from the 50's just had the line "I think me and the wife are going to experiment with anal sex"  I'd fucking kill myself.  With joy.

Nothing to say beyond irrelevant stuff unrelated to the movie, which I will give 1.5 stars.

Spontaneous Combustion - 1990

Tobe Hooper made quite an impact with his giant smash hit Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  That should be pretty obvious, as it was a film that we still look to these days with reverence and brings shock to us.  But what else did Tobe Hooper do?  I myself am not too familiar with him filmography.  Looking at IMDb, I have seen roughly half of his movies, and most of them I'd say were pretty good.

That's my opinion of course, and I can see why he fell of the map in terms of popular appeal.  It's plain as day to me that he was going for, and achieved, an almost B-movie appeal.  He delved into areas like camp and under-represented genre tropes such as schlock and remakes.  Reading through his filmography, I wonder if it was his intention to bring horror back to it's 50's and 60's roots, except slightly updated to a 80's and 90's audience.

Tobe Hooper is one of the only directors to make a good early Stephen King movie (The Mangler), a remake of a 50's alien flick (Invaders from Mars), a nude vampire exploitation (Lifeforce), and a straight up horror comedy attempt with Texas Chainsaw Massacre II.  Poltergeist and Texas Chainsaw Massacre are perhaps his only "success stories" in the terms of broad mainstream appeal, and I wonder exactly if he was one of the only true "horror directors" of all time, given that almost everything he ever did was within the realm of horror.

Horror went through quite a change in the early 90's and I'd be hard pressed to come up with a truly great movie horror movie from the early 90's.  The Silence of the Lambs is perhaps the only one I can think of even after some internet research.  It was well known that this was a shitty time in horror, and greats from Wes Craven to Tobe Hooper had some real shitshows coming out at that time.

Spontaneous Combustion was a film I'd wanted to see for a while.  It was even on "my list" for a while, and I saw it came to Amazon Instant.  I dialed it in at work and got paid roughly $60 to watch it if you think about it.  Which, I did think about it.

Spontaneous Combustion was not bad.  It demonstrates a lot of what I've been saying in the review so far.  It hearkens back to yesteryear in horror by having a atom bomb origin and parts of a 50's horror aesthetic in the film, but it clashes those perfectly with wacky 80's-ness, such as a fucking neon tube telephone.

What you have is Brad Dourif as a child of the atomic age, and he keeps on having people around him spontaneously go up in flames.  It's becoming a real common thing, while in the meantime he's suffering migraines and his doctor is concerned about his always high temperature.  He's got special powers to cause flames, as soon enough seen, and pretty soon the real story of his birth and the government testing that led to it become clear.  In the meantime, the flames begin to overtake him, and the people around him have to try and survive.

I liked this just fine.  It had some minor parts that were a bit unclear or didn't make sense, but overall this was fine.  I don't have a lot to say about it beyond that, but fuck it at least you got a decent Tobe Hooper write up out of all of this.

Stranger from Venus - 1954

I've been in a weird mood lately.  This blog has become more a document of my mental state, which leads towards the movies I want to watch.  And, occasionally I am feeling introspective and good, when I'll watch something like The Conversation.  Sometimes I will feel peaceful and low energy, which leads to something like Stranger from Venus.

Stranger from Venus is a extremely digestible average alien-driven drama movie from the 50's.  It's got decent actors and a premise we've seen before, in fact this movie even got in trouble for being thematically similar to The Day the Earth Stood Still.

The Stranger in this is a alien from Venus.  He lands on Earth and we see a surprisingly well shot interaction of him talking to humans while not revealing his face.  When he does reveal his face, he looks normal, but he has no heartbeat, and soon enough his master plan becomes unveiled, he is there to tell the humans that more of his race are coming, and they're coming because they must stop human from their use of atomic weapons.

Yes, this is an average anti-nuclear film, in the extremely popular movement at the time.  The bomb had dropped a while ago and now just about everything being made was firmly against the idea of another bomb.  You know, nowadays one might see an anti-war movie or a pro-war movie.  How come it is I've never come across a 50's film that was pro-nuclear?

Anyways, this is fine.  There's little to say about it.  It's mostly dialogue, there's a romance subplot, there's a good realistic portrait painted of human characters at times.  But all in all, it's completely forgettable and even if you try to think of things to talk about in your blog entry you write on a Wednesday morning, like me, you won't be able to think of anything to say.
2 stars.