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!

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:

World Warp One!

 Star Warps Day, everyone - and peace and goodwill to all, man.

Now, we All Love Star Warps, but I must confess I'm a bit lazy with my adulation and tend to stick to the OG Seventies threesome. That was until I discovered that there was a PREQUEL TRILOGY shot in the 1950s! "ZOMG!" As that blue robot Zomg always says. 

"Zomg!"

Anyway, where were we? Oh yes, the 1950s.  And I have to tell you, Fifties Star Warps is the BEST. taking us twenty or so years back to when Opie Benobie was young and discovered the origin of Luke Sandhater's father Unkind Sandhater, years before he fell for the Darkside of the Warps and became Dark Vapor. 

"It's coarse and gets everywhere - it's all Opie-One's fault!"

 Fifties Star Warps is great because even though it's a new story with different things, you're never far from the great Warps characters of the future - like Yoder, See-thru Peyote (C-thru PO), and his diminutive robot chum Artie Detour (RTD-tour) - old, but new, but old again. It's quite something. 

"Blibdoolpoolp!"

But it's the new characters that we remember now, like the Emporio's goon, Dark Moll

and lovable gudgeon Jo-Jo Blinks: 

"Me-so good boy!"

Star Warps. The older, the better!