If you want to stay home and watch movies on Halloween but actually getting your hands on the full slate of films on our Six Degrees of Frankenstein marathon seems like too much trouble, consider Turner Classic Movies your back-up. The channel began its 48 Hours of Horror this morning at 6:15 with a showing of Mad Love, the Peter Lorre-starring tale of fatal attraction for which I am a total nerd. Highlights coming up over the next two days include:
For city-dwelling adults without kids, Halloween can be truly frightening. With the pressure on to outdo ones friends, frenemies and total strangers with a costume that strikes the perfect balance between creative, alluring and topical, the average October 31st night out can be a lot like sixth grade, except with the added toxic influence of alcohol and biological clocks. Plus, this year the streets are expected to be full of Sexy and/or Ironic and/or Demonic Sarah Palins. Scary! So why not stay home and watch movies instead? If you’re gonna convince anyone to abandon their plans and spend the night on your couch instead, you’ve got to have a theme and a plan, so we’ve put together an outline for a full night of films, all of which are available on DVD and/or online, based around one of the ultimate icons of classic horror: Frankenstein. We lay it all out after the jump.
Anticipating the worst from Diane English’s new remake of The Women is not just typical low expectations regarding remakes in general. My dread is specifically based on dissatisfaction with remakes and updates of films from the 1930s, arguably the best decade in cinema (it is certainly my favorite). While I may recognize and appreciate some favorable redos, such as DePalma’s Scarface (of which I’ve never really been a fan), Mazursky’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills and the multiple repeats from Hitchcock, I am more often disappointed with attempts to recreate ‘30s classics, even when I approach them with already low standards.
Worst, for me, doesn’t necessarily have to do with the quality of the film alone, especially when related to remakes and updates. The titles and versions I’ve selected are hardly the worst in terms of craft or production value — you’ll note there are no Dracula movies on this list — and a few would almost be acceptable if they were more unique or solitary works.
Cory Doctrow at BoingBoing points to this scanned article from a 1933 issue of Modern Mechanix, which goes inside the Hollywood makeup studio of the era. Much of the story concentrates on how Boris Karloff (as you know, my classic horror movie hearthrob) was made up to look like Frankenstein and The Mummy, but my favorite part is the headline screencapped above.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
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