My Side of the Mountain (1969)

You know the kid who was hitchhiking with his grandfather and got picked up by mass murderers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith in In Cold Blood (1967)? The same kid stars in this movie about a child who runs away from home to live alone in the woods. My teacher read the novel to the class when I was in the fourth grade. I guess there was some suspense where he does some rock climbing alone so the slightest fall could mean slow agonizing death. Human life was dirt cheap in those days and schools thought nothing of encouraging that sort of thing. 

Nature is horrible, just horrible. He was safer in In Cold Blood getting picked up by murderers. In this movie, the kid is befriended by two wildly irresponsible adults who know he's living out there but don't call the police.

But it's stupid to be bothered by the unwise actions a fictional Canadian child. I doubt any kids did things like this because they watched the movie or had the book forcibly read to them. There were, however, two morons who found In Cold Blood inspirational, so they murdered a couple who were walking on the beach in Oregon.

The little fellow in this movie, Ted Eccles, had a long list of credits. Just a year later, he played a victim of Ma Barker's gang in Bloody Mama. He went on to work as a director and executive producer and to work in movie advertising. 

With Theodore Bickel, Tudi Wiggins, and Paul Hebert.

The Prowler (1981)

Now I'm ashamed of that stuff I wrote before, that slasher movies weren't that bad, that the non-murder scenes tended to be sort of relaxed and laid back. I watched a YouTube video listing horror movies of the '80's that critics just couldn't appreciate at the time, and this was one of them. It was on Tubi so I turned it on.

I guess the gore effects were impressive if you're impressed by that sort of thing, but the movie in general wasn't much. A fellow came home from World War Two and killed his former girlfriend who broke up with him by mail. Thirty-five years later, his old uniform still fits. He starts murdering college kids using a bayonet and a pitchfork. With Lawrence Tierney. Farley Granger appears briefly. Gore effects by Tom Savini. 

Directed by Joseph Zito (Friday the Thirteenth: The Final Chapter, Missing in Action, Invasion, USA).

Kiefer Sutherland and Timothy Busfield

I wondered what was wrong with Kiefer Sutherland arrested for assaulting an Uber driver. He was released on $50 thousand bail. Now they're reporting that the driver ignored Sutherland's repeated requests that he stop and let him out. So, yeah, I'm probably on Sutherland's side now. Cops are investigating whether there was a language barrier between them.

Then there's Timothy Busfield. He was only arrested a week ago but his wife, Melissa Gilbert, is reportedly losing friends for not instantly denouncing him. He was accused of inappropriately touching a couple of child actors. The two boys were twins who played the same character in a TV show on which Busfield was executive producer and director of several episodes.

Busfield was being held in jail before trial, but his attorneys went back to the judge and pointed out that the child actors' father was a disbarred attorney who pleaded guilty to defrauding 1,500 homeowners of millions of dollars, their mother was overheard vowing revenge on Busfield after the little fellows were replaced by another actor and a camera operator heard the parents telling the kids to hug adults on the set including Busfield. Warner Bros. ordered an independent investigation of the allegations and found no corroborating evidence.

The judge ordered Busfield released from jail. He can leave the state, go back to New York where he has a home apparently. He just needs to show up for the trial and not be around children without supervision.

Brit pleads for shorter movies

A British critic interviewed on the BBC railed against increasing movie running times. She said she sat in the audience thinking like an editor, noting what stuff could have been shortened or cut out completely. The interviewer suggested that movies were getting longer to compete with streaming video, but she blamed directors. They have too much power and make movies longer and longer out of some ego thing. She longed for days when studios kept them under control.

The critic A.S. Hamrah's review of The Irishman in 2019 noted that the movie was three and a half hours long. Hamrah has a morbid hatred for television of any kind. He saw the Scorsese movie in a theater and said he'd have been happy to sit there watching for a couple more hours. He said that it was people watching it on Netflix who complained that it was too long. He thought it was because admirers of streaming video were used to watching things in 45 minute chunks. 

I say give them what they want. Make forty-five minute movies, save a fortune and give other people a chance. You could make two or three times as many movies. And watch two or three times as many.

There's a channel on broadcast TV that kept showing old 1950's dramas and westerns like Trackdown, Have Gun Will Travel, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and others, and they were great, all half hour shows, originally 25 minutes not counting commercials. I think now they've been cut down to 22 minutes. That seems extremely short for anything but a sit-com, but I didn't find myself wishing they had dragged on for another half hour. 

There were 1950's AIP horror movies I watched on TV in the middle of the night in the '70s. I was in junior high school. Watched such movies as The Day the World Ended and Attack of the Crab Monsters, and I never noticed how short they were, only an hour long. In the '50's, they'd release them as double features so you'd get two hours of movie if you paid to see them in a theater.

But now, after years and years of being shamed for watching TV, people like Hamrah want me to feel like an idiot for not wanting to sit on a couch for four hours watching people murder each other.

I've wondered what the natural running time for a movie is, how long they would be if they didn't have to make it worth your while to go to a theater. Movies were fairly short before they had to compete with radio and TV. B movies were short because they were intended as the second feature in a double feature.

The intertitles in silent movies were often narration rather than dialogue which allowed them to move quickly. They could explain people's motives without ponderous character development. This "show don't tell" nonsense is killing us.

The Whisperer in Darkness (2011) H.P. Lovecraft

Presented by the H.P Lovecraft Historical Socierty. I've never read anything by Lovecraft and have just a vague impression of his work, but this movie was praised for being true to its source material. In black & white, set in the '30's. 

Albert Wilmarth (Matt Foyer), a professor of folklore studies, travels to the backwoods of Vermont to meet a farmer who's convinced that his place is being visited in the night by intelligent crab-like creatures. 

In one scene, we see the difficulty serious academics can have debating crackpots. Wilmarth appears on radio debating Charles Fort (Andrew Leman) and doesn't do well.

The movie looked beautiful and captured how disturbing the country can be to city people, out there with no police, ambulance service or witnesses. 

Free on Tubi. Available on Prime Video and Hoopla. 

Blown Away (1993)

I've been watching anti-Corey Feldman videos on YouTube for some reason. I think I knew who Feldman was since he was eight or ten. Saw him on America Tonight and a syndicated sitcom called Madame's Place. Later, he was one of the kids on a Little League team on an episode of Cheers. Saw him in Gremlins. He became a teen idol of sorts later and got worse and worse as an adult. 

Anyway, it inspired me to turn on Blown Away, free on Tubi, a made-for-HBO movie. Rich girl thinks her father murdered her late mother and wants Corey Haim to help kill him. More a sex movie than a murder movie. I found Corey Haim's rather graphic sex scenes disturbing after the alleged abuse he suffered not that many years earlier. Feldman plays his degenerate brother.

This was made three years before Never Too Late in which Haim appeared with Cloris Leachman. Reportedly, Leachman told him that his smile was cute but he was using it too much and that he should practice keeping his mouth closed. I've only seen him in a couple of things. I watched a few minutes of License to Drive and he was always breathing through his mouth. I assumed he thought it was cute. Blown Away was ostensibly a thriller so he didn't smile much and I was pleasantly surprised at how much he breathed through his nose.

Gus Van Sant's Psycho (1998)

I had just seen an episode of Homicide in which Wallace Shawn played an arthouse theater owner who poisoned an obnoxious patron who kept shouting spoilers to old movies. He shouted out the ending to Casablanca and alerted people to the shower scene in Psycho. They said he was ruining the movies for everyone, like people who go to those things didn't already know every plot twist. There was a theater that showed Citizen Kane and offered a prize to anyone who could correctly guess what "Rosebud" was. Of course, every single person got it.

So doing a scene-for-scene remake of Psycho in 1998 wasn't going to transform the old, outdated Hitchcock movie into something fresh and new. 

But, obviously, Gus Van Sant did this as an experiment. At least he said he did.

Hitchcock himself made Psycho as an experiment to see if he could make a movie using the crew from his TV show, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It was a low budget movie, but Van Sant remade it with a large budget. Even if the remake had been good, what would it prove?

In fairness, though, is any movie really necessary?

Some parts weren't as bad as I thought they'd be, but I kept comparing it to the original. I don't know what I would have thought if I had never seen the original, but it wasn't an improvement.

Norman Bates was bigger than Marion Crane's boyfriend in this one, and Marion's sister actually gives him a hand when he's fighting with Norman at the end, didn't just stand there like Vera Miles.

I might have paid to see it in a theater if I'd known Chad Everett and Rance Howard were in it.

Available on The Criterion Channel.