It's nearly Hallowe'en...

I always get too excited about Hallowe'en. I'll share some of my excitement around now.

Here is an animated version of Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Tell-Tale Heart narrated by James Mason. I first saw this on the dvd of Hellboy, where it was in a section titled "Hellboy Recommends" along with some Gerald McBoing-Boing shorts.



Here is a clip of Ken Nordine, of Word Jazz fame, reading Poe's poem "The Conqueror Worm", taken from the great cd Closed on Account of Rabies. Nordine has the best voice imaginable for this poem.



My buddy David Schmidt wrote & directed the fascinating short film The Lovecraft Syndrome, inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. Warning: this one is quite disturbing. It's available to view here on Spike.

Arch Oboler wrote & produced a classic episode of the old-time radio show Lights Out called "The Chicken Heart", rather absurdly about a chicken heart that eats the world. Years later, Bill Cosby did a terrific comedy routine about the effect it had on him as a small child.

Here is the only version of "The Chicken Heart" I could find, much shorter and taken from Oboler's album Drop Dead: An Exercise in Fear.



Here is Cosby's routine, for some reason split into two parts:





Finally, here is one of the scariest things ever: "The Thing on the Fourble Board" from the old-time radio show Quiet, Please. Download the mp3 and then, late at night, on your own, turn out all the lights and settle down to listen to this one. It's old, it's dated.... but it's still scary.

Happy Hallowe'en, everyone!

Movies seen recently

I've seen a few, at the movies and on DVD. Here are some of them.

Enter the Dragon

Bruce Lee's American movie is great fun, although the fight scenes are not as well-staged or well-filmed as the ones in his best complete movie Fist of Fury or in the the footage released from the incomplete original version of Game of Death. Enter the Dragon functions better as an American exploitation movie (poor Jim Kelly doesn't fare as well as he would have in a real blaxploitation movie though). John Saxon is miscast as a kung-fu expert; I would much rather have seen Rod taylor in his role.

But Bruce Lee's charisma saves the day, and although the ending is a straight copy of the superior ending of Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai it still works here.




There Will Be Blood

A bona-fide masterpiece. Daniel Day Lewis is superb, and the movie earns its two and a half hour length. Worthy of an entire post, so it'll get one.



The Haunted Palace

Roger Corman directs Vincent Price from a Charles Beaumont script based on H. P. Lovecraft's longest story, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. It was shoehorned into the Corman/Price Edgar Allan Poe series with a retitling and some brief readings of Poe's titular poem. Great fun, and with the next one will be an entire future post.



The Resurrected

Dan O'Bannon's early '90s adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft's longest story, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, was mangled by its producers in post-production, leading to some obviously-truncated scenes and unnecessary voice-over. What remains takes a while to warm up, but emerges as a superior Lovecraft adaptation in its final act. Chris Sarandon actually tops Price as Charles Ward and, er, another character, and the two movies contrast in a fascinating way. A whole post will soon compare both movies with the original story.



Robocop

An old favourite, this action-packed satire of the Reagan era is still hilarious. Superstar Dutch director Paul Verhoeven's best American movie; packed to the gills with great scenes.



Piranha

John Sayles's first script is far from his best, but director Joe Dante and a great cast (including Kevin McCarthy - who just died aged 96, '60s Italian horror queen Barbara Steele, Sterling Hayden, Paul Bartel, and of course Dick Miller) make it all fun.



Piranha 3D

Hilarious intentional-comedy makes great use of 3D effects, and even of Jerry O'Connell! Big, dumb, silly fun with a great in-joke cameo in the opening scene. Recommended to people who loved Gremlins and Mars Attacks.



I'm sure there were more. I'll remember later. It was a good weekend.