The Maws, the Merrier

 It's All Hallow's Eve, 2025, and time for more members of the local Lantern Corps to give us a grin!

This year's models have no real Jet Jr input - a fact he discovered late into play we he entered the kitchen as I was finishing off the second pumpkin asking which one was 'his'. "Neither" I replied. "Ohh - so is it this one?" he indicated the old school looking one. "No, that's your cousin's" And indeed it is, my first commissioned lantern, based it turns out on Eerie from a few years back, but with some slight modification (he's had his eyes done) Given the choice of grim or ginning, sawtooth or peggy tooth, Jr's cousin went for the more traditional, and so here is un-named Birthday Pumpkin for tomorrow night's party:

Of course, I did have to do one for myself, and so Gulper here is the result, going for cartoonish and a little bit Jamie Hewlett, a little bit Mike Mignola. Also pretty okay.

Not much more to note as I'm really getting the hang of doing these things quickly and safely (but boy do we have a lot of pumpkin pulp to use now). I did this watching Larry Blamire's very silly Dark and Stormy Night, and then listening to  bit of Paul McGann reading the novelisation of the Doctor Who TV Movie which, fact fans, had its encore showing on Halloween night 1996 here in NZ. That's nearly thirty years ago now - blimey!

Happy Halloween, folks!

The Price of Pop: Halloween Challenge Night 16

 

I am twelve, and like most people I know my age, I am crazy about Michael Jackson's new album. 'Billie jean' is an absolute banger, 'Beat It' a badger of very hot properties. The whole things sounds brilliant and is probably the first album I ever buy that I listen to, absorbing as much of the backing instruments and their interplay as I can to try and work it all out. It was a fool's errand, and I may as well have tried to pull apart Jackson's insane dance moves for all the good it (and that!) did me. But the best was yet to come. Tonight, for Halloween, I'm revisiting the next big thing to come off Jackson's unassailable album: 

Michael Jackson's 'Thriller' (John Landis, 1983)

The production is a film and cult media geek's dream: Landis was not long off the set of The Twilight Zone, bringing Rick Baker in tow for makeup - both had worked together of course on An American Werewolf in London, the only movie of Landis' that Jackson had seen, although  it was enough to get him on the line. Rounding out the interstitial music was Elmer Bernstein, also a past collaborator with Landis on Werewolf as well as Animal House, and soon to be providing the original score for Ghostbusters. And then of course Vincent Price, who doesn't seem to have been on set, but whose presence is essential in the song and for the extended reawakened dead scenes. The short film itself is an honest homage to the old form - Jackson loved the tradition of movie shorts, so wanted to bring them back, the story takes place in a Fifties'/ Sixties opening, and later zombies storm a creepy abandoned house, shuffling and moaning in a visual recreation of Night of the Living Dead. Finally there's the cinema itself, location of the movie within a movie opener, and tellingly festooned with posters of Price's - and Landis' past works. Much of this I know - but not all. And for the first time seeing it on TV, the same night as all of those other kids I know, I have no idea what's coming next. But it's brilliant.

Forty-three years on, and it's still a great diversion, even if you have to squint your brain at the history of some of its principal players. The direction is nice, the sound and lighting terrific and the colours in particular are fantastic - I'm a sucker for Eighties zombies with their parchment skin, deep-set eyes and angular features. get them dancing the way Jacko did and it's a vision. Plus, I can swear that one of them is a reference to Tor Johnson. In y opinion Jackson peaked here - he never looked as good, cast such a shadow, or electrified the screen. Thriller is a miniature treat, from gas-strapped prologue to that memorable final spin with its cat-eyed hero that would stay in my young mind for days afterward. Truly, noone could resist this Thriller.

Halloweenometer. As loath as I am to go straight down the zombie route, this has graveyards, a full moon, a spooky house and a werewolf. It's pretty much made for Halloween.

Companion Piece. The audio for Vincent 'One Take' Price's additions (complete with third, unused verse) is here. But why no add in another of Landis and Baker's great collaborations from the time - courtesy of a future Ghostbuster, naturally. I rewatched this again for a laugh and still jumped, crying out, knowing what was coming. And laughed at my silliness. By jeepers it's a good scene!

Buy Before You Die - Halloween advertising across three decades: Halloween Challenge Night 15

A lot of my idea of what Halloween is come naturally from US sources – the Child Life journals picked up from our town library, the odd TV programme, and in later years that recentday Bible of Americana, ET the Extraterrestrial. The latter I really took to, especially as it included a pretty hefty – if dubious – nod to the Dungeons & Dragons phenomenon, but the Halloween aspect is key to the story. The disguise our titular alien wears, Elliot’s skeleton makeup, a cornfield bursting with golden promise, the great Star wars vuisual gag in the Trick or Treating scene (which to my astonishment seemed to take place in near full daylight – most ujnlike the dark autumn evenings I’d grown up thinking were a staple. They were like us after all!). Oh, and a trail of candy with which to trick the cosmic critter in the first place. 

Halloween in America, the young Simian concluded, must be an awesome thing indeed. Subsequent encounters with States-born classmates and friends have tempered that somewhat – and of course, Hollywood will glam these things up, but for further evidence this evening I took to everyone’s prime source of facts, YouTube, to see how Halloween was interpreted on the domestic tube in the 70s, 80s and 90s. How did it go?



As a goodie bag? A bit mixed, to be honest. I have takeaways. Some hard candy, some soft centres, some saccharine offerings of dubious origin, indeed. The 70s are a particular revelation, marking the first technicolour video decade of regional channels promoting local fare on a budget. Yep, Halloween costumes looked very… economical. Thin, plastic half masks, tamer choices of raggedy Annes or hoboes (a VERY popular and DIY-friendly choice from that time, it seems), and some sound mixing and which has not survived the ravages of time and early VHS technology. It was a bit underwhelming, and the ever-present cereal ads of Count Chocula and his frightful brethren, not to mention the long-forgotten pretenders to the McDonalds/Burger King etc throne looked a bit forlorn. 

Ten years later the dayglo decade became a little more adult-friendly with face paints and a promise of dancing and snagging your intended with the right costume… not a lot of spookiness here, really. By the 90s it was more of the same. The technology had improved, but the whole things had a rushed, improvised aspect to it, maybe because of the hodgepodge of corporate and Mom/Pop franchises vying for that sweet sweet Halloween dollar.

 Halloweenometer. The question I found myself asking was “does it get me in the mood?” Kind of. “Does it give me a good idea of what Halloween may have been like back in the day?” Well, maybe it did  - and possibly despite itself. Try it out and see what you think!

Postscript: In the interests of weird science I did compare thins to UK Horror-themed ads of the same time. Beer ads, Hamlet cigars… illicit ice lollies. It’s a contrast, but as much as  I had fun with them, they weren’t real Halloween fare. Good, though.

Seasonal Bargains of the Witch: Halloween Challenge Night 14

 So far so much straying from Halloween itself. So tonight, Matthew, I've returned to the Sates, to a slightly more modern time for the movie that it's in: Halloween 3 

 Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982, not John Carpenter and not Nigel Neale so stop asking)

Ah, the dreaded threequel. Nigel Neale wrote this, you know. Then had his name taken off it. Tom Atkins is in it – a sure sign of quality with his horror pedigree (The Fog! Monster Squad! Night of the Creeps!) I’d heard this was at best a guilty pleasure, and had nothing to do with the tale of Michael Myers. Was it right? And did it not?

Yes, reader, for if you’ve not dived into the backstory of this movie to date, both are respectively kind of right, and very much on the money. The idea, apparently, was to have Halloween-adjacent and not necessarily linked stories going forward in this franchise, leaving the tale of poor beleaguered Laurie Strode and less-fortunate souls behind to allow the films to spread their batlike wings and take off. Reader, they didn’t.

This is… fine. A take of sinister advertising, mind-controlled kids, electronic puppetry and dubious Halloween masks, it’s cosmetically on point. But its also a bit confused, fumbles the alleged Celtic connections in a way that many many modern horrors do, and the final product is a real mixed goody bag. Charismatic leads, sure – but I missed the Shape of a proper bogeyman. The movie straddles uneasily the slashy Seventies with the more visceral, technological Eighties. Freddy Krueger was mere months away, and ready to reinvent the form. This could only suffer by comparison.

Halloweenometer. Well, it says it on the tin, and the VHS wrapping is very enticing. PLUS I have feelings about serial killers stealing the season from the spooks and ghouls. But I was a bit stratchy watching this one. On theme, but maybe not on point. 

Pumpkinwatch: We're back on familiar ground, and there's plenty to choose from here, including a new fangled digital title sequence! But it's the masks we've come for, so feast your peeps:

The Whicker, Man: Halloween Challenge Night 13

The UK horror experience fascinates me. For something as homegrown and ready-loaded with a ready arsenal of classic, gothic literature and a hefty output of the Hammer and Amicus Studios in the 60s and 70s, it feels as though British horror often gets overlooked in favour of its glitzier, more camera-ready US cousin, with its Universal Monsters, serial killers, Munsters and Addamses. There’s a charisma to American horror that’s sometimes lacking in the older, colder, damper, camper British version. And yet, consumers of the form overlook Britshock at their peril, because beyond the celebrated works of Stoker, Shelley, Cushing and Lee there’s an intriguing domestic oeuvre in UK horror that has a taste all of its own. A rare vintage, redolent of wet post War Victorian townhouses, urban cemeteries, canals, shadows, Scream comics, House of Hammer series, and guilty tattered paperback dreadfuls passed under school desks by day, to be consumed in secret after sunset.

I go on – and could easily continue to, but suffice it to say, British horror – even in the early decades of my long life, is a broad church, as evidenced by Alan Whicker’s exploration of the British Horror psyche here, on the cusp of a new era of visual nasties...

 Whicker’s World: A Handful of Horrors: I Don’t Like My Monsters to have Oedipus Complexes (1968)

This is once over lightly stuff, but intriguing for its scattershot skimming of what makes for British horror in the day – horror magazines, low budget schlockers, a distracted interview with scream queen Barbara Shelley, an earnest but wired Screaming Lord Sutch, Christopher Lee, Terry Nation and his Dalek creations, and our oh-so-lampoonable host drifting through Highgate Cemetery, pursued by a Yeti. It’s all good, it’s all valid, it’s all there – bumping its ugly bits together in a mash-mash stitched-together way. Reminiscent of… I don’t know what.

Horror essentially defies codification, which is part of its character and an essential element of its perennial appeal, so a single episode doco is never going to do it justice – even if geographically contained. Heck, subsequent documentary series have covered literature and film and still not scratched the surface, but that just means that there’s more to discover, to experience, to appreciate and argue over.

YouTube option:



Halloweenometer: Your mileage may vary, as it should. Trust me, it’s better that way.

Companion Piece: I nearly did Lord Sutch's 'Jack the Ripper', but opted for something a little more catchy and... comic. Here's the Damned!

Liverpool...of BLOOD! Halloween Challenge Night 12

 Giddy from the one-two punch of an all-American Disney Halloween double feature, I’ve crossed the Atlantic to see how those Brit brats did Halloween in the distant past of the 1970s (ouch)

Well, not Halloween specifically, but there are monsters, kids, horror movies, tricks, costumes and nighttime shenanigans; so let’s have a look at Play For Today’s ‘Vampires’ as recommended by that Scarred For Life Basefook page…

 Play for Today: Vampires (1979)

Hmm. Visceral. There’s a bit more going on in this than I’d thought, with latchkey youngsters, dead teachers and men taking clandestine meetings in municipal cemeteries during daylight hours, but what an interesting wee piece!

The precis: A huddle of overimaginative boys (with one seriously impressionable member) after a night in getting Hammered (The Scars of Dracula, to be exact) take the notion that a tall, cloaked man they’ve seem in the local boneyard is a vampire. One of the boys, the impressionable one, buys some joke shop fangs and turns his anorak into a Dracula-wrap, and things kind of escalate from there. But not how you might think. Perhaps befitting Play for Today, it’s a bit more domestic and social commentary than fantastic in its scope – and yet, if indeed I did set out to try to find the mindset of scar-crossed tykes in the era of Whoopee and Monster Fun comics, I think I found it, alongside a cautionary depiction of life in inner Liverpool in the dying days of the Seventies, comprehensive schooling, dour Christianity and broken homes.

Halloweenometer: As mentioned, not really Halloweeny, but then Halloween wasn’t really a thing in the UK in the Seventies, even when Hammer Films were still a TV convention and your local joke shop had a reliably creepy staffer more than ready to impress you with his theories on the supernatural. Still, mostly harmless fun, and not without its charms. Pretty good! :[

Riding Home for Samhain: Halloween Challenge Night 11

So far, with some exceptional evenings attended by Mrs Simian (plus movie night at the Black Lagoon!) Halloween has been a somewhat solitary project, undertaken in the spare room while the rest of study and tamer televisual flair continues around me. But this night was different because I had Jet Jr in tow and a yen to return to the Disney Well.

We’d been here before, this month, with Something Wicked This Way Comes, but spurred on with the animated success of Trick or Treat I elected to go further back this time, both in studio time and in literary sources. Uncle Walt did the honours, guiding us through a bespoke animated and… worthy version of the author’s life – for it was quite a life, and the feature wasn’t quite to length. The author was Washington Irving, and the story?  The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. A delayed production, and initially paired oddly with a Wind in the Willows adaptation, this 33-minute short (plus 14-minute biography!) is worth checking out on its own for the season.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1949, adapted from the short story by Washington Irving)

So. Much. Disney. DNA in this one! There’s music and songs, an avuncular voiceover (by the Bingmeister Crosby hisself), caricature of the characters, and a loose version of events - but faithful enough to the source material that it doesn’t go the way of Tim Burton’s version or, indeed, the TV series. The first twenty minutes or so go by well enough, being an introduction to our long-shanked, beak-nosed, chinless and twitchy ‘hero’ (the designers very much drawing on the waterbird for Crane’s profile) and his interest in lining his pockets the fair Katrina Van Tassel – plus his rivalry with town braggart and prankster Brom Bones.

It's the final ten minutes which really shine – rejected at a community dance, Crane sets off home on his horse Gunpowder, only to encounter the local bogeyman, the Headless Horseman during his travels home and to the safety of a covered bridge, the barrier which keeps the Horseman in. It’s a masterclass of classic cel animation, the design elements are there in spades, and the whole sequence itself meticulously choreographed with plenty of tension occasionally undercut by slapstick through the hapless hero. Junior and I laughed out loud several times and in all, good clean Disney spooky fun was there. The set-up may be a little long in the tale, but the resolution makes it worth it.

Halloweenometer. A classic, very much worthy of its reputation. Catch a nice clean print if you can, and buckle up for a good, safe, but chilling ride. Recommended – and would do well with Trick or Treat!

Pumpkinwatch: It's part of the story, so...

Bad Duck! Halloween Challenge Night 10

 When I was a youngster the Simian house was not awash with the comic form. We had, it would be fair to describe, an ‘assortment’ of juvenile reading material beyond an admittedly not bad selection of classic literature courtesy of the Children’s Library collection. But beyond the Robinson Cruesoes and Robin Hoods, your graphic narrative examples were lean pickings: some Disney Time magazines, the odd pickup from a church fair, the obligatory Phantom one-off, and a random assortment of Gold Key Comics, offering such variety as Tarzan, Star Trek, and Disney Characters. It was the latter that held most of my interest – particularly the Donald Ducks and Goofies, two of what I still regard as the heavy lifters of Uncle Walt’s menagerie.

One particular favourite of the Double D's was Trick or Treat, in which The Don met his comeuppance via the agent of Chaotic Good, Witch Hazel which he behaves like an absolute rotter to his becostumed, door-knocking nephews. It’s a great story, told with economy and illustrated by the reliable Carl Barks, and I treasured that issue. We lost it in a reliable Mum Purge in time, of course, but the memory lingered long after.

Recent gob smacking discovery was mine then when I found the ORIGINAL ANIMATION on Disney Plus – complete with jaunty song (which sounded quite unlike the simple mute rhyme in the comic version). It was a thrilling find, matching my memory of the strip so very closely it was as though it had come to life. The reality of course is the reverse – the comic was the adaptation, and even expanded the story – so, maybe a mission then to find a copy…

Donald Duck 'Trick or Treat' (1952)

Trick or Treat in either form is marvelous. The Big D in all his adult mischief and self-righteous rage is the perfect foil and victim because of his unscrupulous trickery to poor Huey, Louie and Dewey, and his apoplectic frustration at being bewitched, bothered and bamboozled by Hazel and her broomstick Beelzebub still had me cackling when I revisited it this evening. A masterpiece, with all of the Halloween trimmings, including some great and memorable detail: the Duck abode having (presumably for one night only) an empty wheatfield within reach to convey the harvest season, the reliable silent abetting of Beelzebub, and the weird but on point rendering of a Junior Duck’s eyes as black spots when dressed as a ghost (he never takes it off – is it makeup?)

So yes, here is possibly THE Disney Halloween joint – ten minutes of your time definitely not wasted, and a vintage Halloween in a catchy wee morsel. Sure, Lonesome Ghosts has the big Three animated characters predicting Ghostbusters years before, and the even older Mickey and the Haunted House is creepy in its own way, but Trick or Treat has the right balance. I’ll be revisiting it again next Halloween, I’m sure.

Halloweenometer: A perfect score!  

… but is there anything from the House of Mouse that could match it…?

Pumpkinwatch: A real beauty - animated and everything!

I Don't Think I'm Ready For This Giallo: Halloween Challenge Night 9

 I watched a giallo tonight. I didn't like it at all.

Much better!

Familial Haunts No 2 : Halloween Challenge Night 8

 Tonight’s scar is actually one of Mrs Simian’s. Who knew that Little House on the Prairie had such a resource of spooky stories to draw from? Well, it did. The Waltons had a Ouija board story, sure, but Little House had allegedly haunted houses ('Haunted House')  a werewolf ('The Werewolf of Walnut Grove'), and it had this – 'The Monster of Walnut Grove', which was not a monster, but the allegedly murderous Mr Oleson the village shopkeeper and patriarch of the snobbish Oleson family and their seriously weird children (I told you snobbish shopkeepers were required in these stories!)

Little House on the Prairie 'The Monster of Walnut Grove' (1/11/1976)

The tale itself isn’t exactly what’s promised in the title. Here be spoilers: Little halfpint Laura is out soaping windows on Halloween Eve (yay!) when she thinks she spots Mr Oleson decapitating his wife in her chair with a ceremonial sword. Ho ho! And as Mrs Oleson leaves town before sunrise the next day she’s nowhere to be found and soon every child is buying into the murder story. Things escalate, there’s some great graveyard action by day, a rolling mannequin head down cellar stairs, nightmares with Grimsdike-like ghouls and the same sound library wolf howl track playing every time the script calls for EXT. NIGHT. THE LITTLE HOUSE. It’s a hoot! Actually, there are probably some hoots in there, too.

Halloweenometer: Oh, highly recommended – even if Mrs Simian didn’t feel up to revisiting her scar. Compared to The Waltons, this is the real thing, and a great surprise and delight for me. Incredibly, 'The Monster of Walnut Grove' was my first genuine highlight of the spooky season. And it’s bookended with a Headless Horseman, no less. Brilliant!

No musical companion-piece this time, but check this out for Walnut Grove’s most Spooky Moments and tell me you’re not racing off to fire up the Wayback Machine:




Bonus Pumpkinwatch: near the opening of the episode we get this marvel setting the scene:

So we have a few constants developing for an ideal Halloween viewing: kids are good, Halloween night obviously, and scares more than horror. Let’s see where that gets us from here.

Familial Haunts No. 1 : Halloween Challenge Night 7

I have scars. We all do. Yeah, I have physical scars - gnarly, story-carrying ones about literally crawling over needles and broken glass (I was an unattended little Simian in my formative years), coming a cropper off bikes, even chipping a tooth on a loser's fist in high school... but no, I'm talking REAL scars, psychological ones. 

A departure tonight, then, as my early scar – well, perhaps more of an intrigue, comes courtesy of that eerie, haunting tale of the weird and uncanny, The Waltons. Yes, the most sepia-toned TV series of the 1970s, set in the 1930s, but anchored in the Flared Decade’s fascination with all things country and colonial. We’ll come back to that, but tonight’s episode from Season 7 is one of only two Halloween themed stories, 'The Changeling', and it features a poltergeist. Yes!

The Waltons, s7 ep5 'The Changeling' (26/10/78)

Poltergeists were all the rage in the Seventies for a time, it seemed. 'The Changeling' aired only months after the Enfield Poltergeist (though before Tobe Hooper’s movie, of course), and carries with it the essential contemporaneous theory that this activity was usually centred around a… highly-strung (adolescent) individual – often female. With Enfield you can see the connection (one theory even calls this the “mischievous adolescent” phenomenon), and of course it fits neatly into the story of Elizabeth Walton - twelve years old, just days away from the big one-three. No longer a little girl, not yet one of the grown-ups of the household, she struggles with her place in the homestead. Her brother Jason has a subplot which offers a variation on the innocence/experience struggle, but there’s no paranormal element to his, and it’s as dull as ditchwater.

Elizabeth’s is slightly better fare as the Youngest Walton is beset by flying crockery, a sentient piano and a creepy doll™ which is a raggedy Ann variety – which, trivia fans may know, was the actual doll that the Annabelle doll from the Conjuring movies was based very very loosely on. But back to 'The Changeling'. It’s a curious story, balancing the radio efforts of gauche Jason as a would be on-air agony cousin, and local storekeepers Ike and Cora Godsey (there’s always a snobbish storekeeper in 1970s colonial programmes – we’ll come back to them) and of course the supernatural troubles of our heroine. Hair gets blown back, faces get stuck on ‘bewildered’ for most of the episode, and it’s really only the intervention of Olivia, the Waltling matriarch that provides an explanation (probably a ghost) and a resolution (after things peaked things… stop?) and we’re on our way back to a very Appalachian normaldom.

Halloweenometer? The last ten minutes are probably the best, but the doll is reliably unnerving. On the whole, though, not quite as spooky as intended. It tries, but like our Elizabeth, is maybe stuck between worlds a bit.

Companion piece. It’s hard to find one that’s not exploitative Maybe an Arthur C Clarke bit on Poltergeists, or just sample this snippet from the story. Yeah, that'll do.


Goodnight, John Boy. Sweet Dreaammmssss

Invaders From Mercury: Halloween Challenge Night 6

 

Halloween is a time of spooks and creatures - but it has for a long while also been a time of alien visitors. 

I'm not sure which version of The War of the Worlds I first encountered. I was probably aware of the book first, and it can't have been long afterward that I became aware of the audio version. Or versions, really, because this was the Seventies and boy, did that decade have a treat for the Marsophile in me. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I first encountered Orson Welles' Mercury Theater adaptation of the H G Wells classic in an A4ish, orange-covered, likely Scholastic Book Club book on monsters and monster movies. Man, I loved that book. It had quizzes, pictures, more facts than my childhood mind could absorb, and it was just the perfect primer for a lifelong interest. Over subsequent years I'd return to the soundtrack of Jeff Wayne's Musical Adaptation (tm)  - and I'd retain an interest in the Welles radio play. Would I ever get to hear it?

Of course I would. On the cover of my first copy of Empire magazine (issue 71, 7 may 1995) a cassette version was sellotaped. And our university library had a scholarly (but possibly since improved and debunked) analysis of the alleged 'panic' that ensued with Welles and his pals' little prank. Two years previously TVNZ had screened The Night That Panicked America, a TV movie event and, well, suffice it to say that any time there's a look back at that night - legend or fact, I'm interested.

By chance or design, this month one of our cable channels played a mor recent documentary - part dramatisation (hmm), enough fact-filling. Despite obsession, Mrs Simian wasn't up on the story behind the infamous evening, so we were in for a nice hour's diversion, with an Oliver Platt narration and some ropey overacting of 'people of the time' (actually actors of our time). 

American Experience: War of the Worlds (PBS Documentary, 2013)

The doco skewed just the right side of an entertaining yarn with a bit of the legend to spice things up. The earlier TV movie had played a little loose with the dramatised anecdotes also, but this newer version had enough to put things in perspective. No Martians to be seen, but plenty of grainy back and white footage, replayed radio broadcast, and some decent talking heads filling in the gaps. It was fine, really. And a reminder that October 30 1938 was also the night that made Halloween a little bit more unearthly for a bemused/panicked audience. You takes your picks. 

For a more in-depth take, here's Slate's debunking of the night, but as I say, the Halloweenometer begs for something a little more creative, so excuse me if I indulge the myth a little more. 

https://slate.com/culture/2013/10/orson-welles-war-of-the-worlds-panic-myth-the-infamous-radio-broadcast-did-not-cause-a-nationwide-hysteria.html

Companion Piece

I didn't get to that, did I? Of course the Jeff Wayne version made an impression on me - as tied in as it was to late night radio playings of the first single - and (although it may be my own mind creating a myth) a late year radio airing around the time of the Kaikoura Lights...

Dark Carnival: Halloween Challenge Night 5

 Time for a ramp-up at last: a movie set at Halloween!

Well, a week before Halloween, to be precise and faithful to its novel origin, but near enough. 

I was absolutely fizzing to read that Disney's adaptation of Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes was finally coming to ratty old Disney+. A decent version of it online has been very hard to find legitimately, and it was that way for many years until sanity prevailed, and this movie joined its twisted early 80s brethren. So I watched it!

Something Wicked This Way Comes (Jack Clayton, 1983)

Disney is a fascinating company, and we'll surely return to them, but for now I'm thinking of that point in the studio's past before the big IP acquisitions, before the superheroes, the star warses, the pixars and even before the new animated classics like The Lion King. I'm talking about Disney's Dark Period(tm). I'm talking The Black Hole, Watcher in the Woods, Return to Oz, The Black Cauldron, and this spooky little moonflower. I'm talking Jason Robards, Jonathan Pryce, PAM GRIER, and a curious decision to make a story previously set in a sometimes 50s a more period piece set presumably pre-Great War . It doesn't ruin anything, and maybe helps sell the film's old world visual aesthetic - although I've always found Bradbury to be a highly visual storyteller, so maybe it's just a point of difference.

So what to say?  It's not the book. The book is sacrosanct. As full of life and mystery as it was when I first read it back in my teens. The cast is great. The cinematography is good, the score is... very James Horner. The production was troubled. It's a blessing we have this at all, so given the odd imperfection, I give it a fair bit of slack. The book is still there, as are my memories of losing myself in that first reading. 

On the Halloweenometer we're getting very close to a great pick. It has the time, the location, and enough retro charm to locate it in a familiar-unfamiliar location. It is utterly American, dark, threatening, but not too dark for family viewing. 

Recommended!

Companion Piece 

We're going local with The Chills (perhaps appropriately named for the spooky season). The late, lamented Martin Phillipps had a few supernatural themed songs in his repertoire, being a fan of the paranormal. 'Ghosts' and the aptly-named 'Dark Carnival' from debut album Brave Words could both be contenders, but for me it's a little more recent, and a deeper cut - a B-Side to 'Male Monster From the Id', complete with Peter Holsapple's REM-ish guitar, and a knowing Bradbury reference in the second line. Marty was a fan of his, too.

The 'Goon Show: Halloween Challenge Night 4

Saturday night used to be Family Movie Night in the Simian household, a tradition which I've been keen to revive, even if I've sabotaged it somewhat with an ongoing D&D campaign with the lads. Nevertheless, with October almost being a bye month, we gave it a crack and I suggested we go Old School black and white creature feature. The choices? James Whale's Frankenstein, Them! or Creature from the Black Lagoon. Long story short, Junior remembered watching the Whale tale on VHS (indeed!), Mrs S thought giant ants were just too silly a concept (little does she know...), and so the Gill-man won out for a tried and true Monster Movie.

Creature From the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold, 1954) 

I really like Creature, one of the first non-UFO 1950s movies I familiarised myself with a couple of years ago on a greyscale bender. Jack Arnold's direction is great, the leads are engaging, the sets are multi-layered, the story is attractive and the besuited titular terror is a wonderful piece of kit, dry and wet (but especially wet) The rest of the fam took a bit of convincing that yes, the heroine gets a BIT of agency in this story, and gosh, doesn't the underwater filming look like a ballet, et cetera. I think they were surprised about the grim determination of both species to make this a zero-sum game, all the same. And though the ensnagglement of Julia Adams was somewhat inevitable, Junior noted the Monster-Carries-Girl motif from my seemingly doomed movie pastiche project. So, some appreciation for the finer things.

Highly recommended, even without the Halloween trappings - but is it a Halloween watch? I suppose so, given that back in our courting days a Halloween movie might have been something on VHS that was old but unfamiliar (Evil Dead and Donovan's Brain was one very odd double feature in them days, as I recall) This one's a good one. Thought-provoking, dynamic, and a little bit corny (but not TOO corny - at least not at this stage of the series). It may not scream traditional Halloween fare, but after this week's choices it has an innocence, and sense of wonder and some poetic - nay, iconic, scenes and shots that get it over the line. A good Halloween watch - without hewing too close to the tropes. Plenty of time to come for that.

Companion Piece

Something slimy, something skeezy, something dripping with goofy cool. It could only be:

Real Awful: Halloween Challenge Night 3

Tonight we watched some reality TV. I mean a documentary kind of thing. About Amityville, surely THE 1970s haunted house story, and an event that inspired a book, a movie, some more movies (including remakes) and probably launched a whole swag of paranormal documentaries, including this one.

Shock Docs: Amityville Horror House (2020)

Halloweenometer? We didn't finish it. This is the second in a row ! What's going on?

Mrs Simian only had a passing knowledge of the Amityville story (fair enough), and no knowledge of the preceding DeFeo family murders, which this documentary took sometime in setting up as a backdrop to the story. So, it's a true crime story from the outset, with mugshots, confessional tapes, forensic photos - so far, not really Halloweeny. It was lurid, it was at pains to reproduce a grimy, nicotine-coloured version of the Seventies (good!) But we didn't finish it. The real-life murders cast a pall over any promised spooky ookiness, and so we turned to something else instead. Bah.

Now, I'm not opposed to documentaries, and spooky documentaries, and even 70s flavoured documentaries. Gimme some of those Ghost Hunters - brilliant! And to be fair, the modern streamers do produce a shedload of paranormal-adjacent 'reality' content. Most of it is ridiculously hysterical bobbins, but some I find good. I may be alone in really liking the atmospheric and more leisurely Files of the Unexplained (especially the episode on Myrtle Plantation). But this wasn't it.

No score on the Halloweenometer. We really disliked the voyeuristic over the top aspect of this. It's not our Halloween, But I have a good feeling about some stuff coming up, so stick around!

Companion Piece

Not that it deserves company, let's have a haunted house song, this time inspired by The Shining and provided by Ms Bush just one album before The Hounds of Love (ooh - with a sample from Night of the Demon!) Here's the rather bonkers Get Out of My House:

Eey-oorr!!

The Other Side (of the Ditch): Halloween Challenge Night 2

 Welcome back to my nightmare. On the second night of October Mrs Simian and I ventured into the murky depths of some of our free Aussie streamers available through our public library. Beamafilm and Kanopy can be accessed for a limited number of views per month as 'tickets', and offer an interesting range of documentaries, TV series, movies and short form progamming. As you'd expect, there's a heavy Australian bias (as there is in another free channel, Brollie), but that inevitably also means some NZ content gets thrown in, because... our sunburned cousins do me like that.

So tonight's viewing was a documentary, The Darkside. Gorillamydreams is a bigly fan of supernatural reality slop like Finding Bigfoot (they haven't), Expedition X (not ex-enough, frankly), and Scared Stupid. I may have made one of those up. The Darkside is a bit less tongue in cheek, and purports to retell real-life eerie stories with the help of Australian actors (Deborah Mailman, Claudia Karvan, Bryan Brown, Jack Charles, among others) usually straight to camera with some landscapiness thrown in, and sometimes with their own craft helping to interpret things. 

The Darkside (Warwick Thornton, 2013)

The tales in The Darkside are very much Australian stories, with a strong sense of location and history, and told largely from a First Nations perspective, as you would expect from Thornton's body of work (Samson & Delilah being the one I am most familiar with). The stories drift in and out, not linking with one another, nor presenting a throughline, but lingering in places wit some arresting images - a painting of a girl which turns into a landscape, and then back to a girl, stretches of slow camera tracks through dim museum corridors, mist coming in with the tide, and the unflinching stare of the narrators as they tell their stories straight down the barrel. 

So onto the Halloweenometer: I can barely rate this one. We didn't finish it, although I may return. It's eerie, and unsettling in places - but it's not what I'm after for a Halloween watch, and I imagine that Halloween traffic is not what this movie is looking for. The most affecting story - and our checking out point was among those corridors of the Australian National Archive, and the stories of remains of indigenous peoples, inspected, prodded, measured, tested and examined and othered by a white scientists and physicians, reducing them to museum exhibits and dusty remains in indexed boxes.  Genuinely unnerving, confronting and grim. Stories deserving to be told and remembered, but not in this context. 

Hallow, It's Good to be Back. Halloween Challenge Night 1

 BOO! Et cetera. I'm back - and back with a new October Challenge - a Halloween Challenge, no less.

This month, for the whole 31 days, I'm going to watch something Halloween adjacent - and comment on it. Halloween is a special time of the year, and one which I enjoy. But I'm keen to quantify how and why I enjoy it. Everyone's Halloween comes in a different flavour - so what's mine? Something traditional? Something local? Something modern? I'm not sure, so I'm going to ry a few different things and see where it gets me.

Night 1: A Ghost Story (David Lowery, 2017)

I'm goin in coolish to begin with, as despite the above challenge, I'm not really in the mood for anything too morbid or bleak. A friend died recently, and that's changed a few things for the mean-time. 

I first saw A Ghost Story on a plane returning from a work trip over the Tasman. As I recall I really enjoyed it - I think I had the choice of it and Ghostbusters Answer the Call, which was also okay, but maybe not my flavour for air travel. A Ghost Story works because it's  largely free of dialogue and big action. It's a contemplative, surreal piece, and it even gets a bit metaphysical in there. But it's quite cool, as our titular spook (Casey Affleck) explores an afterlife tethered to place (his last home) and lost love (his widowed partner, played by Rooney Mara) until... well, you'll have to see it. Affleck (presumably it's him) spends most of the film beneath a winding sheet, two holes for eyes, accumulating the dirt and detritus of decades of isolation, and though he never utters a word, conveys an afterlife of longing and loss as his empty remaining slowly forms into a cosmic realisation. As I said, it's a bit metaphysical, but it's also soulful, funny, tragic, heartbreaking, and no, it's really not another stab at Truly Madly Deeply. It is recommended, though, if you think you might be up for that sort of thing.

On a Hallowometer it's the minimum of spooky. Sheets with eyeholes can be expressive, inscrutable, and even scary in places. But this isn't a horror film, just an existential one. And if there's one thing First Year into his BA me could tell you way back when, there's nothing scarier than that.

Companion Piece

Even sprits need company, so here's some Northern Soul for this lost one in R Dean Taylor's crackling number - aided and abetted by Holland and Dozier, too. Yes, the Fall's version is a particular favourite also, but Ghost Week demands a hat-tip to the original. So here it is:

 It's Star Warps Day, everyone - look alive!

Now, pretty soon we're going to have a THIRD Star warps movie out, I hear, called Revenge of the Genie ("You're a GENIE, Luke!" - Hagrid) although you may know it by its secret codename while filming, Who Blasted? Probably they'll change that later. 

Anyway, it looks incredible, and I can't wait to see it. In the mean-time, here are some secret photos taken from the set of Who Blasted? featuring some new alien menaces from the Wonkies' twin world Enter. They're called Earwiggs and they look AMAZING.

I don't know who the kid is, but there's a rumour that Hank and Layer have a son (spoilers!) which seems very wrong, but I'm no George Lukers, so I'm sure it'll be fine. Cute kid - I can't wait to see what hijinks he gets up to!

And at long last, here's Jabber! You remember he ordered Hank sent to him in an iceblock, so Bobber Fett did that for him. Cooool. 

Lots more aliens, including some working for the Rivals, like Admirable Actor here:

Finally, everybody comes together to destroy the Dead Star 2 (spoilers) - including the Emporio Palpitating himself. Yikes!

Star Warps 3 - can't wait!