Suppose you wanted to do the soundtrack for a horror film: What would you use to score it? Synthesizer? Computer?
Or how about commissioning a custom instrument to make eerie, unnerving sound?
Behold The Apprehension Engine!
The Witch is one of the films Mark Korven has scored, and I just noticed that it seems to have gotten pretty cheap as of late…
I just picked up The Vincent Price Collection from Shout Factory on Blu-Ray and had a chance to watch The Abominable Dr. Phibes for the first time, a movie that’s now just shy of a half a century old.
It’s less a straight horror film that a black comedy Grand Guignol take on a Jacobean revenge drama, in which organist/inventor/theologian Phibes (Vincent Price, wearing disguises to hide his horrible disfigurement and speaking through mechanical aids) and (never explained) beautiful female assistant Vulnavia (Virginia North) venture from their elaborate Art Deco lair (complete with a raising and lowering organ for Phibes to play, along with an animatronic jazz band) to carry out a series of revenge murders based on Biblical plagues on a team of doctors lead by Dr. Vesalius (old pro Joseph Cotton), who Phibe feels botched his late wife’s surgery. Victims are dispatched by bats (who actually look quite adorable), rats, a particularly nasty mechanical frog mask, and (in the case of British comic actor legend Terry Thomas) having their blood drained.
Police, as usual, are always one step behind the fiendishly clever Phibes.
The film it most reminds me of is near-contemporary Suspiria, in that both are completely nutso, color-drenched horror films of hallucinatory intensity. The art direction by Bernard Reeves is so striking, and so integral to the success of the film, that it’s quite surprising he never did another full-length film.
I actually tracked Reeves down and asked why that was:
Thank you for your enquiry, yes I am the same Bernard Reeves that Art Directed the film Abominable Dr. Phibes.
I did very few films in my life, basically due to the fact I was Production Designer for TV commercials and travelled abroad a lot.
These days he’s best know for his motorsports art.
Phibe’s lair is so vivid that it does a great job of making you forget the usual American International Pictures cheapness in the rest of the film. Another fascinating aspect is that while it’s set in 1925, the design of both Phibe’s lair and of Dr. Vesalius’ house is less straight Art Deco than a version re-imagined through the prism of mod London, with bright colors, wall mirrors and anachronistic red plexiglass panels on Phibe’s organ.
And you can easily imagine Diana Rigg modeling some of Vulnavia’s very sexy fashions in The Avengers.
Speaking of which, Director Robert Fuest (who directed several post-Rigg episodes of same) keeps things moving along at a steady clip, so it never drags over its 94 minutes. It’s not really scary, but it does hold your attention throughout. It’s not as good as Suspiria, manly because nothing matches the crazy intensity of latter film’s first murder, and because we root for Jessica Harper’s protagonist in a way we can’t for Price’s twisted antihero.
Some have talked about The Abominable Dr. Phibes as an example of camp, and while aspects lend themselves to that, distance and the sheer vivid weirdness of the film has given it the feel of an intense fever dream.
Still worth a look.
The trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune just dropped:
Let’s do a checklist of encouraging signs that they’re going to actually follow the book:
And it even a has a cover of Pink Floyd’s “Eclipse,” a nod to Jodorowsky’s planned but never-filmed version of Dune, which was to include music by Pink Floyd and Magma.
Only things missing: No Spacer Guild, and no Feyd-Rautha, which makes sense, since they’re only adapting the first half of the novel.
This one is still scheduled for December 18.
Mood: Cautious optimism.
Legendary film score composer Ennio Morricone has died at age 91. The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, John Carpenter’s The Thing and The Hateful Eight all had scores by him, among the 500+(!) he composed.
Here’s probably my favorite piece by him, from his soundtrack to Once Upon A Time In The West:
I came across these interviews of Mike Nelson and Kevin Murphy from Mystery Science Theater 3000. These were evidently an extra on Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders from Volume 5 of the Rhino boxed sets (and presumably on the Shout! Factory reissue). Talks about the early days of the show and some of the films too awful for them to riff.
This was the most expensive book I bought this year:
Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. Heinemann, 1962. First edition hardback, an Ex-Library copy with interior pocket removed, rear inner flap previously taped to rear inside cover, with tape stains there and to rear free endpaper, in a Near Fine, first state (16s, flaps untrimmed) dust jacket, with tape stains to rear flap, with a crease across bottom of front flap and a few specks of dirt to front flap, otherwise a very well-protected example of the first state dust jacket; call it a Very Good/Near Fine Ex-Lib copy. Signed by Burgess. A keystone work, and basis of the Stanley Kubrick film. Signed firsts of famous books made into famous films are among the most desirable first editions across a wide range of collectors. This edition also includes the final chapter, where Alex “groweth up” and contemplates leaving behind his antisocial ways for marriage and a family, omitted from most subsequent editions. Pringle, SF 100 36. Locke, A Spectrum of Fantasy, page 48. Locke, Science Fiction First Editions, page 22. Anatomy of Wonder 4, 3-4 1. Magill, Survey of Science Fiction, pages 396-401. Bought off a noted UK SF dealer for £600, making it among the most expensive single volumes I’ve ever purchased, but I’ve never seen a signed copy in a first state dust jacket list for under a grand before.
Sort of like “Inception meets The Matrix, but for time travel.”
More than a bit of a Philip K. Dick vibe…
Before the Kolchak: The Night Stalker TV show came the original TV movie The Night Stalker, which first introduced dogged yet deeply-irritating reporter Carl Kolchak, brilliantly and unforgettably played by Darrin McGavin. Our grizzled, disheveled hero starts listening to his own notes on a tape recorder, about a very strange murder case. We see a Vegas girl get killed by an incredibly powerful man, then cut to an autopsy performed by a pre-M*A*S*H Larry Linville (who would go on to play a Police Captain of The Week Who’s Annoyed With Kolchak’s Shenanigans in the TV series), who discovers that a body has been completely drained of blood. So three minutes in, any viewer is going to figure a vampire is stalking Las Vegas. (And it was obviously filmed in Vegas; everyone looks believably hot and sweaty.) It takes the Vegas police a whole lot longer to figure things out.
Enter our intrepid seersucker-clad hero.
Kolchak is pretty much fully formed the moment he walks into the news office, a smart, cynical, sarcastic reporter with authority issues. You quickly see how he would get on just about anyone’s nerves. (Later he recites all the cities he’s been fired from newspapers in. “Wasn’t it twice in Boston?” his much too young and pretty girlfriend (played by the recently deceased Carol Lynley) asks, to which he holds up three fingers.) He doesn’t think much of being assigned the first murder, but when a second one shows up, also drained of blood, with no tracks leading to her final sandy resting place, he realizes something is up, and tenaciously goes digging into the story, despite staunch opposition from both the police chief (Claude Aikens) and his own editor Tony Vincenzo (Simon Oakland, in a role he’d reprise in The Night Strangler sequel and the TV show).
The plot moves along at a quick pace, police procedural fashion, as it quickly becomes apparent to Kolchak that an actual vampire is killing young women in Las Vegas. The “vampire police procedural” has been done plenty of times since, but this was pretty much the first media instance (though Leslie H. Whitten’s novel The Progeny of the Adder preceded by seven years), and even today, despite the obvious budgetary constraints of a TV movie, it has a compelling intensity to it that later examples have never duplicated.
But McGavin’s Kolchak is what holds the entire thing together. He was a great, underrated actor, and in the scene where the police finally break down and promise to follow his lead and give him the exclusive, he’s so wonderfully, unbearably smug that you know exactly why he keeps getting fired. The movie has a panoply of solid TV character actors, tight direction, and plenty of tension when (inevitably) Kolchak tracks the vampire back to his lair…
We watched a beautiful Kino Lorber Blu Ray, but the movie is also available on YouTube if you want to get a taste:
There are a few extras on the Blu-Ray, including with producer Dan Curtis and director John Llewellyn Moxey, who said it was much easier to get a TV movie made in the early 70s. You had an idea (comedy, drama, horror, whatever), and if someone at the network liked it, you got a greenlight to do it. He said that now there are too many people involved in the process to get anything approved anymore. Wikipedia says that it was made for $450,000 and earned “a 33.2 rating and 48 share,” which is absolutely unheard of for a TV movie in today’s media landscape.
(More thoughts from Dwight.)
If you’re made of money, Bonhams is having a big science fiction movie memorabilia auction today, featuring lots of props and original movie posters.
I’m sure the original Darth Vader costume from The Empire Strikes Back will get a huge amount of attention, but for me the most exciting items are several props from Forbidden Planet, including the original saucer spaceship:
Plus the Krell door lock:
Sadly, I’m not made of money. But if you are, you might barely have time to register…
The only thing these two have in common as that I bought them 50% off the listed price at Half Price Books during their coupon sale.
