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 Bobo 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!