Category: movies

The Pit and the Pendulum: You Need Vincent Price Each October

On By Ryan HarveyIn movies

pitpendulum3

Although Peter Cushing is my favorite horror movie actor—because Peter Cushing is my favorite actor, period—I bow to the popular wisdom that no performer better fits Halloween season than Mr. Vincent Price, whose elegance of evil combined with the reassurance of an old friend is the right flavor of fun n’ fright that marks the best of October.

When I first wrote about The Pit and the Pendulum, it was for the release of the first Vincent Price Blu-ray set. We’ve since had a second one, making it easier to indulge in the glories of Price during Halloween.

Continue reading “The Pit and the Pendulum: You Need Vincent Price Each October” →

Hammer Country Concludes

On By Ryan HarveyIn movies
4b995923e7f69e42f18609d7277c9770
John Carson in The Plague of the Zombies

The end of another October crammed with articles about horror films from Britain’s great beast of the genre, Hammer Film Productions. Like last year, I did a Hammer horror-post-a week for Black Gate. This month’s selections:

As I did last October, I mixed up the periods and the qualities of the movies and saved the best for the last slot: The Plague of the Zombies is underseen for such a great film in this horror subgenre. Thankfully, there’s a North American Blu-ray coming from Shout! Factory in January. Two of the films are from Terence Fisher, Hammer’s great horror practitioner, but The Phantom of the Opera and The Man Who Could Cheat Death are among his weakest. Apologies for that, Terence, but I did two of your best last year. Hands of the Ripper is, hands down, (sorry) my favorite of Hammer’s 1970s output. I think I’ve watched it every October since I bought the Blu-ray.

I’m not sure yet if I’ll do Hammer October again next year. I still haven’t run out of titles, but I may do the Hammer Frankenstein movies as an article series once I finish my John Carpenter retrospective, and that will more than fill up the Hammer bill for the year.

The Black Cat ‘34 Is the Black Cat Movie You’re Looking For

On By Ryan HarveyIn movies
black-cat-1934

I teased you with the movie version of The Black Cat that you weren’t looking for, the 1941 semi-comedy and barely entertaining one from Universal. But no teasing this time. Universal’s 1934 movie The Black Cat is a stone-cold, brutal classic of early horror cinema—and it features the first and best pairing of legends Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi.

The first Universal horror cycle had already used Poe for material with a loose adaptation of Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1932, which starred Bela Lugosi as a mad doctor with a killer ape. Director Robert Florey, who was originally slated to helm Frankenstein (along with Lugosi as the monster), gave Murders in the Rue Morgue plenty of expressionist visual flair, but it’s only a tiny scratch compared what Austrian director Edgar G. Ulmer pulls off in The Black Cat.

Continue reading “The Black Cat ‘34 Is the Black Cat Movie You’re Looking For” →

Thoughts on the 2018 Halloween

On By Ryan HarveyIn movies

halloween_review_2018_jamie_lee_curtis
I’m a feverish John Carpenter fan, and I’ve spent the last two years going through his filmography at Black Gate. But I am not a Halloween fan—the Halloween franchise, that is. I love Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween, although it wouldn’t make my top five of his films. (Serious competition at the peak of that pyramid.) I don’t have much interest or patience for the many sequels/reboots/remakes done over the past four decades. Except for Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the one sequel without the iconic masked killer. That movie is so weird and baffling, yet also so infused with the spirit of the holiday (more so than the original), that it has a special place in the season for me. It’s by no means good, but Carpenter was still involved and it’s not just another slasher.

Despite my apathy for the Halloween franchise, I was looking forward to Halloween ’18, the third movie to just call itself Halloween and yet another timeline reboot. Like Halloween H20, the twentieth-anniversary installment, this fortieth-anniversary installment is poised as a direct sequel to the earliest films. However, Halloween ’18 goes H20 one better, since it also ignores Halloween II (1981), the movie that started the trend of over-complicating the franchise and its main figure, the masked killer known as “The Shape.” (Or, boringly, Michael Myers. I’m not calling him that. He’s always the Shape to me.)

Continue reading “Thoughts on the 2018 Halloween” →

Night of the Lepus, The Killer Bunny Flick

On By Ryan HarveyIn movies
night-of-the-lepus


Happy October! I’m resurrecting horror movie articles from my old blog and revamping them. This article is reworked from a 2011 post, and it seemed appropriate since Red Letter Media recently covered this movie on their “Best of the Worst” program.

I’ll disclose the Star Trek trivia for this movie up-front: Night of the Lepus stars both Paul Fix and DeForest Kelley. Paul Fix played the Enterprise’s Dr. Mark Piper in the second pilot for the original series, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and DeForest Kelley replaced him as Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy for the rest of the run. Two Enterprise doctors in one movie! And they share scenes together! And none of them are interesting!

I should love Night of the Lepus. I should adore it. But it won’t let me. It won’t let me laugh at it. It won’t let me admire it. It won’t entertain me on any level. A Western-set monster flick from the ‘70s about titantic flesh-eating rabbits failing to entertain me. I’m thankful Tremors exists, because it gives me the same movie—but good.

I lay many of the faults of Night of the Lepus, aka “The Giant Killer Bunnies Movie,” to when it was made. The timing for this type of picture was off. The movie falls between two eras when it might have made for a fun creature feature. If produced in the 1950s among the slew of rampaging giant mutant films, it would have had a solid cast of B-actors, handsome lab-coated scientists arguing with gun-happy military types, and perhaps some cool stop-motion animation effects. If produced in the late ‘70s, it would have been a nutty Jaws ripoff with loony hicks carrying too much firepower, a corrupt sheriff, an environmental scientist screaming about how they’ve got to stop these rabbits before they destroy the world, and a bloodthirsty hunter wanting to mount one of those humongous hares over his mantle.

Continue reading “Night of the Lepus, The Killer Bunny Flick” →