Pop Culture Petri Dish

Hammer Films --Britain's legendary horror film factory throughout the fifties, sixties, and seventies--pushed the genre into the modern age with swatches of rich color (emphasis on the crimson, of course) and a willingness to push the envelope of content. Suddenly, all of the latent sensuality and shocking violence insinuated in the Golden-Age Universal thrillers of the '30's and '40's was spelled out. One of the key figures in that massive shift, actress and author Ingrid Pitt, died yesterday at the age of 73 . Born in Poland in 1937, Pitt's real life was filled with enough drama to rival any of the movies enriched by her presence. She survived internment in a concentration camp as a child, then was forced to flee communist Berlin as a young woman--on the night of her planned stage debut (the British officer who rescued her eventually became her first husband). A few years later she was discovered by...

If'n you read the last entry, you know I've been a movie-watchin' mole lo, these last three weeks, and it's been quite the adventure. In addition to seeing more movies in theaters in that span than I did in the preceding six months, I was able to freeload my way into the Seattle International Film Festival Opening and Closing Night Galas, where neon-colored cocktails and much shared movie geekery amongst fellow nerds/journalists flowed freely. And I met some talented and fascinating filmmakers, to boot. I saw 28 feature films during the run of SIFF. Almost all of them were good-to-great; only a couple were straight-up disappointments. Enclosed please find my evaluations of everything I saw, along with accompanying ratings. The Extra Man : **1/2 The Fest opening film was a quirky comedy featuring Kevin Kline as a struggling playwright who escorts elderly rich women and takes recently-unemployed Ivy League professor Paul Dano under his wing. Kline's a hoot, as al...

Damn, I love this poster. Just saying. And it does have a bearing on this overdue Petri Dish missive. The last two to three weeks of my life have been spent split between my day job and the glorious rigor that has been covering the Seattle International Film Festival for the SunBreak.com . I've seen a ton of great movies, and better yet, I've been able to interview some of the makers of those films in detail. It's been the most inspiring couple of weeks I've had, writing-and-movie-lust-wise, in awhile; though the writing part's been hard to squeeze in 'twixt dashing madly between theaters, home (sleeping and eating can be quite the nuisance sometimes), and the W Hotel (site of most of the interviews I've conducted). I'm enjoying an actual vacation (or, more likely and aptly, a stay-cation) for the next couple of weeks and plan to use that time to get a lot of creative/writing things up to speed. I'll, of course, be getting the ol' Petri Dish c...

I've got mucho irons in the fire, friends, so the 'Dish may be a bit under-stocked in the coming couple of weeks. HOWEVER! I will be hosting a Movie Night at the Aster Coffee Lounge in scenic Ballard, Washington and have created a Blog to summarily clarify/plug/pimp the blessed event. Feel free to stop by said Weblog  at your leisure and say hello. And try to come out for the shindig! I could be persuaded to pull my T-shirt halfway over my head, then bust out a baaad imitation of Vincent Price in The Pit and The Pendulum . Maybe. But one thing's for sure: I promise to deliver some seriously wiggy stuff...Stay tuned!

As you read this, I'll be relaxing on the Oregon Coast with wife and dog. But Horrorpalooza must go on; hence, the inclusion of this for your Halloween. Rather than break out another review, I thought I'd actually present a scary story. Five years ago, Rita and I vacationed in Romania, and one of the most eerily-inspiring places we visited was Snagov Monastery, an isolated house of worship reputedly housing the actual remains of Vlad the Impaler--the real Dracula. The entire week we visited, the weather was in the mid-seventies and sunny (at the tail end of October, no less)...Except for the day we visited Snagov. Fog enshrouded everything, and a palpable chill cut through the air as we sat in a rowboat and traversed the lake route to the Monastery's location. It was sublimely, fabulously spooky. I've been keeping the fiction writing muscles limber-ish via writing exercises in a Yahoo chat group. The conceit: A sentence is posted, and you have 15 minutes to writ...

It's fun being a fly on the wall at a freakshow. Last night, I visited the Cafe Racer in Seattle's University District. On display were several great pieces of art--all inspired by old-school freakshow banners and posters--and a tassel of convivial and scary folks. 'Twas one hell of a great way to spend Halloween Eve Eve.

I've always been a night owl. It takes next to nothing for me to stay up longer and later than most normal mortals, and on weekends or days off I'll routinely stay awake until 2 or 3 in the a.m. Writing during that time can be, in a strange way, fun. Sometimes, being up that late just turns you into a tired and punchy oaf the next day. But other times, drifting in that twilit state between consciousness and narcotic slumber stimulates great things. It's as if, when you're on that fine line, it opens up a door to untold wonders, beauties, nightmares, and imaginings. That twilit time means so much to me that when I see a movie that truly, deeply captures it--that drowsily-heady point where dreams and wakefulness dance so closely that you can't tell them apart--I fall for it like a frilly-shirted poet gazing at some alabaster-skinned Edwardian muse. Cemetery Man is one of those movies. Francesco Dellamorte (Rupert Everett) works as a caretaker at Buffalora Ce...

British filmmaker Neil Marshall's only directed three movies so far, but on the strength of the two I've seen, I'm willing to go out on a limb and proclaim him one of the most promising guys working in the horror genre today. His inaugural features, 2002's Dog Soldiers and 2005's The Descent , do their jobs so well that they transcend the genre. Marshall's concise, lean style involves setting up a pretty basic fits-in-one-sentence synopsis, then turbo-charging it with clever, compact writing and solid characterizations. Seems simple enough, until you consider how few modern horror filmmakers actually get past the 'fits-in-one-sentence' part. Dog Soldiers' conceit? A squad of British soldiers on a routine training mission in the Scottish wilds are besieged by a pack of lycanthropes, then they barricade themselves in a deserted cottage. So, yeah, it's basically a classic World War II action opus with we...

Everyone associates Peter Gabriel with the jaunty pop of "Sledgehammer" and "Big Time." But right after he left prog-rockers Genesis, he put out three musically-innovative records that incorporated pop melodies with tribal percussion and atmospheric scariness. "Intruder," from Gabriel's self-titled 1980 release, always chilled the living pants offa me. With it's pounding drums, tribal chants, atonal shards of guitar, and spastic xylophone break, the song always sounded like it belonged in a horror movie. This brief entry for today is a cop-out of sorts--sorry, all--but revisiting this horrific piece of music was almost as good as watching a horror movie. Almost. Stay tuned for more scary in the next couple of days...

A couple of weeks ago I reviewed The Exorcism of Emily Rose --a classy, tasteful treatment of possible demonic possession populated with A-list Oscar nominees and shot with polish and care. Respectful and respectable as it was, it kinda left me a little cold. Tonight I viewed Abby , a cheap  Exorcist rip-off from 1974. It's lustily potty-mouthed, silly as hell, moves like a chicken with its ass on fire, and doesn't give a hang as to how respectable it is. Guess which one I liked better. Abby 's backstory reflects almost as much drama and silliness as the movie itself...Almost. When The Exorcist became a massive box office hit back in 1973, it unleashed a slew of filmic imitations both here and abroad. It seemed like damn near everywhere you turned, local theaters and drive-ins were overflowing with heretofore innocent women vomitting pea soup thanks to the influence of some pesky demon-of-the-week. This proliferation of demonic-po...

I've got some real goodies in the offing if I may say so, kids, but none are close enough to completion to finish rapidly. Included are retrospectives on everything from a stately Universal classic to one of the best overlooked zombie flicks of the last twenty years. But they're gonna have to wait. The relentlessness of this weekend (Relaxation...Wuzzat?) prohibits me from being able to pour much time into this here entry, so I will openly cop out and give you a visual tour of some horror highlights, courtesy of YouTube... Not totally sold on the charms of The Incredible Melting Man after the rave in this here corner of the Blogosphere? Mayhaps this trailer will convince you... ...And if you're looking to replicate my Parkland Theater experience in microcosm, you should thrill to this trailer for the very entertaining Without Warning, Melting Man's partner in double-feature crime. Enjoy this trailer for The Pit and the Pendulum , a Roger Corman Poe classic...

The arrival of Dario Argento's 1972 giallo Four Flies on Grey Velvet on domestic DVD is kind of a horror-nerd big deal. Legal loopholes had kept it away from legit US issue for a lot of years, and it's one of the few films from his ouevre that I hadn't seen. So how is it? Bottom Line, it's nothing to write home about, but it does offer an intriguing view into the evolution of one of horror's great visual stylists. Rock drummer Roberto (Michael Brandon) is followed for days on end by a gaunt, suspicious-looking bald man. Freaked out and ultimately fed up with the man's presence, Roberto confronts him, and in a struggle the musician accidentally kills the stranger. For some reason, a weird voyeur happens to be on hand taking pictures of Roberto having just committed the crime, and soon incriminating photos and harrassing phone calls commence. Then, people around Roberto begin dying violently. Four Flies opens with a beautifully-shot and creatively-framed ...

I'll say it loud and proud: Uwe Boll, contrary to what every mainstream critic in the country (no, the world...no, the SOLAR SYSTEM) might say, is NOT the worst director in the world...At least not by my criteria. Hollywood routinely excretes movies much worse than Boll's; generic, faceless, focus-grouped-to-death pieces of product slicker than the proverbial duck's ass but utterly bereft of personality. I'll assert that workmanlike hacks like Michael Bay and Brett Ratner deserve way more derision than the notorious German director ever will. This supposition is based on a simple litmus test: Uwe Boll's movies entertain the hell out of me. Are they polished? Nope. Subtle? Uh-uh. Are they fun? Hells, yes. Boll stands out amongst the Bays and Ratners of today not because he makes films for less money, but because he belongs in another era, alongside B-movie directors like Al Adamson and Ed Wood. Like those two filmmakers, the Teutonic titan makes lowbrow mov...

Any horror movie that turns placid natural surroundings into a garden of fetid, horrific menace earns major props from this corner. The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue manages that rare hat trick, and much more. It first surfaced in theaters in 1974 under about a dozen different alternate titles-- Let Sleeping Corpses Lie , Don't Open the Window , Breakfast at Manchester Morgue , and a few others. Such chronic retitling usually signals a stinker, but The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue couldn't be further from it. In this Spanish-Italian co-production, antiques dealer George ( Ray Lovelock ) hops on his motorcycle and departs the tumult of bustling London for some relaxation in the country. En route, his bike's totalled by Edna (Christine Galbo), a young woman likewise heading to the remote countryside to visit her sister. George insinuates his way into her car and insists on her taking him to his new house in the tiny English hamlet of Windemere. They stop near a ...

Every dyed-in-the-wool film buff has their personal cinematic Lost Ark: That indelible movie classic that's haunted them for years, yet somehow evaded release on DVD. For some film obsessives, it's John Huston's The African Queen . Others may bemoan the absence of Nicholas Ray's noir western Johnny Guitar from the domestic digital front (Criterion, incidentally, is supposedly remedying this, soon). Me, I would readily don the fedora and brave Indiana Jones-style perils for the love of... The Incredible Melting Man . In an era when even the most obscure vintage horror schlock makes it to the Digital Age (and when something like, oh, Dracula 3000 can be purchased at any frickin' video store), the absence of this mean-spirited little curio from the DVD pantheon sorta surprises me. It's gruesome, gloriously silly, and features makeup effects by a young Rick Baker--all prime reason for digital immortality. I lamented this gem's absence of a domestic DVD ...