Schizoid (1980)

Were these old slasher movies really that bad? The death toll was pretty low compared with other, far more respectable movies. How many people were killed in The Grapes of Wrath? How many people in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World would have not survived in real life? I'm not sure how to calculate how objectionable a movie is.

Members of Klaus Kinski's therapy group are being murdered by a mysterious figure who stabs them to death with scissors. I assumed Kinski was doing it because look at him, but he played a wealthy psychiatrist and the killer drove a Mazda GLC.

 

A 1980 Golan-Globus production, made one year after Kinski starred in Nosferatu, two years before Fitzcarraldo. 

There's a scene where a white woman makes no attempt to conceal her hysterical fear of a Black man in an elevator. In fairness, he WAS chewing gum and wearing sunglasses. The woman was later terrified of a janitor played by Christopher Lloyd.

With Joe Regalbuto of Murphy Brown.

 

Free with Amazon Prime.

The Black Cat (1934)

Edgar Ulmer directed The Black Cat for Universal in 1934. It was a huge hit and it should have moved him up to making big budget movies, but it turned out he was sleeping with the wife of the studio head's nephew, so that put a damper on his career and he went to work in the poverty row studios.

I'd never seen The Black Cat, but with all the terrible 1930's B movies I've watched---horror movies without horror, science fiction without science, thrillers without thrills, westerns that were just idiotic---I thought, how good could this thing be? 

I did finally watch it and it was beautiful, just brilliant. Set in Europe about men traumatized by World War One. 

The movie Ed Wood brought up the rivalry between Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. The Black Cat made it clear that Lugosi was the better man.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

Pressure Point (1962)

 

Sidney Poitier plays a prison psychiatrist during World War Two. He treats Bobby Darin who plays a Nazi who's been convicted of sedition.

You remember The Boys From Brazil? It took the view that Hitler's problem was that he was spoiled by his doting step-father/uncle. In this one, Poitier discovers that Darin became a Nazi because of his horrible drunken abusive father. His mother wasn't abusive but she was no picnic.

Barry Gordon plays Darin as a child. This was just a year after the little fellow played Jack Benny as a kid on his show. I hope the guy playing his father wasn't really hitting him. In one scene, the father, a butcher by trade, menaces his son with a large cow's liver which he shoves in his face.

Extreme racism has never been classified as a mental illness simply because it's so common. There are so many Nazis and people who may as well be Nazis, it's hard to imagine that they're all former abused children. Some of them seemed to have perfectly nice families who publicly disowned them after they revealed themselves to be Nazis in the press.

And, I won't give it away, but things don't go all that well in this movie, either.

Available on the Criterion Channel.

A Matter of WHO (UK, 1961)

I thought it would be something for the pandemic. A flight makes an emergency landing in London. An American oil company executive on board is gravely ill with smallpox, it turns out. Terry-Thomas plays an investigator for the World Health Organization who tracks down the infection. 

The movie has a crooked oil deal subplot. Terry-Thomas is an eccentric who speeds through London traffic in a then-30-year-old Austin 7. I watched it with my mother who had a neighbor in the 1930's who drove one, but she didn't recognize it.

This may show my ignorance, but the only actors I recognized were Terry-Thomas and Honor Blackman who went on to play Pussy Galore in Goldfinger.

You know who the villain is the instant they say his name. They stole a thing from The Third Man except it was in a cable car in Switzerland rather than a giant Ferris wheel in Vienna.  It has a scene where they put on masks before going into an infected house which seems perfectly natural now. Early on, Terry-Thomas demonstrates how close you have to stand to someone to spread the disease through casual conversation.

It wasn't great. A comedy that wasn't funny with at least a couple of deaths from a horrible disease.  Available on Pub-D-Hub.

Happy Valley (2014)

 I probably said all this before, but it's been a few years if I have.

There was the president of an east coast university who resigned in disgrace after being arrested for making obscene phone calls from his office. He kept calling a woman who advertised her services as a babysitter, so a wealthy university president targeted a woman without a permanent job. But students at the university rallied for him to stay. Just because he was an obscene phone caller, it didn't mean he shouldn't continue at his job. It's not like he was a flasher.

There was kind of an extreme case near here. A high school teacher working in a small town came up with an elaborate plan to murder his wife's boyfriend. He showed up at the guy's door but the victim easily fought him off. The teacher fled leaving behind his backpack full of murder supplies and a to-do list. He was suspended from his job while awaiting trial. The students circulated a petition calling for him to be allowed to teach. They had taken their civics lessons to heart. He hadn't been convicted. Who knows, maybe he DIDN'T do it!

 

I myself have seen anarchist university students launch a wave of vandalism and protest in defense of the university president who seemed like kind of a jerk. He was rude to members of the student government and groveled at the feet of a billionaire because he donated money to the university. He was fired by the state board of higher education. There was nothing to recommend this guy to any anarchist. I can't imagine Communists acting like this.

So, I don't know. Maybe the idiocy of sports fandom wasn't entirely to blame for the Penn State riots. No one working in any educational setting should be flattered when their students come to their defense. 

I was wide awake in the middle of the night. I thought I could turn on the TV and put myself to sleep. I turned on the HBO movie Paterno, but realized it wasn't going to be about a money-grubbing football coach covering up child molestation so as not to jeopardize his multi-million dollar income. So I turned on this documentary instead. Happy Valley. 

Turned out I had seen it before. It didn't focus on the riots. It didn't show violent drunks shouting their love for "Joe Pa", but it did show some belligerent adults. They had made a pilgrimage to Penn State to take pictures of themselves with a statue of "Joe Pa". They were outraged that a pensioner who was anti-child molestation stood with a sign protesting its presence. They shout abuse at him. A woman tries to shove him aside then her cretinous husband lumbers over and threatens him for attacking his wife. A really dumb-looking one stomps over like he's going to attack him then tears up his sign in a fit of rage.

The movie focuses on Sandusky's adopted son. He was ten years old when Sandusky got a court order taking him away from his mother who fought to keep him. A court ordered him to move in with the child molester. He was separated from his family, then, years later, when he reported that he was molested, the ghastly Sandusky clan shunned him.

Horrible neighbor may be a film major

A completely different person who has nothing to do with them.

I drove up and parked in front of my house. One of the loud neighbors next door---one of the rich bastards from California whose parents bought the house for them to live in while they went to the university which means they'll be there for years without hope of them moving out---was outside walking around with a steadycam with a large SLR. 

Maybe he's a film major. He obviously has rich parents. There aren't film schools in California?

Those people are assholes. They can't go out in their yard without setting up speakers outside to blare their terrible music. I'm not the only one they're annoying, but I'm the only one who yells at them to turn it off. 

I waited until he stopped filming because I didn't want to be captured on video. I thought for a moment that it was too bad I kept yelling at them and calling the police because now I can't converse pleasantly with them about what they're doing. Then I thought, no, I don't want to talk to them. To hell with them.

The Homecoming (1973)

The Criterion Channel is featuring the work of Nobel laureate Harold Pinter. This was a play filmed with the original cast as it appeared on stage about a degenerate family in North London.

A retired father, his brother who works as a chauffeur and his two sons, one a pimp, the other trying to be a boxer, live together in a house the two older men inherited from their mother. A third son, a philosophy professor working at a university in California, returns unannounced with his new wife who the others meet for the first time. 

Turns out the apple doesn't fall far from the tree even if it does have a PhD. The wife is a surprisingly good sport.

Paul Rogers, Ian Holm, Cyril Cusack, Terence Rigby, Michael Jayston and Vivian Merchant. That's the full cast.

It was great. It was brilliant. And it might make a good double feature with Ride the High Country. You'll see why.

Stay back from people who look like this

Trump campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski has COVID-19 and was probably contagious when these pictures were taken a week ago.

He doesn't look like someone named Corey.

Election (1999)

I was sitting in a restaurant years ago, alone, reading a newspaper. It was the Portland paper, not the local news. A high school teacher had written a letter to the editor. She defended her school's decision to kick a kid out for publishing an underground newspaper because the paper revealed that one of the teachers was sleeping with a student.

The woman's letter didn't make sense. She argued that the teacher would be denied a fair trial if high school kids knew about his crimes, like they were potential jurors. 

But the point here is that teachers will often defend any act of depravity as long as it's committed by another teacher against a student.

Election (1999) stars Matthew Broderick as a conniving high school teacher who blames student body presidential candidate Reese Witherspoon for another teacher getting fired for molesting her.

Come to think of it, I was slightly acquainted with a guy in high school. I don't remember who he was. But he said he once ran for student council. I didn't witness this, but he said there was an event where all the candidates had a few minutes to address the school. He stepped up to the microphone and mumbled some jokes. My impression was that he didn't say anything coherent. He said that after the event, he laughed when the principal told him he might have to suspend him. That sort of thing happened in the movie, too.

And, by the way, when I started high school, the student body president spoke to the in-coming students. He started with a joke. He said how happy he was that all of his friends were there to support him-- "I see both of you are here."

That got a laugh. I laughed. Then I remembered that I only had two actual friends myself. Was I really so unpopular?

Lifetime, Hallmark channels back in action

 

I feel like signing up for the Lifetime Movie Channel again. They were awful. I could watch them with little feeling of inferiority.

Apparently these movies are back in production. Read the whole story here from Connecticut:

https://www.theday.com/article/20201101/ENT09/201109988

Synthetic Cinema International, the Rocky Hill-based film company, is usually flat-out busy making movies for, say, Hallmark or Lifetime — and is usually shooting those projects in Connecticut.

When the pandemic hit in mid-March, Synthetic’s filming came to a sudden halt.

Finally, come June, Synthetic started shooting again, first with a romance filmed primarily in Putnam and Woodstock and then a thriller in towns including East Lyme, New London and Ledyard.

Andrew Gernhard, Synthetic’s co-founder and producer, says that as far as he knows, their romantic drama/comedy “One Royal Holiday” was the first movie to go into production on the East Coast after the pandemic shut everything down. He believes that “Stalker’s Prey 3” was the second movie to be shot in Connecticut after the lockdown, following “One Royal Family.”

While the productions had to follow all the expected COVID safety protocols, one of the other big changes was the necessity of limiting the number of extras.

In “Stalker’s Prey,” they did use some extras — but only about 20 over two or three days. The extras were given COVID tests, had their temperatures taken and were kept away from the main cast and crew.

“One Royal Holiday,” on the other hand, needed more people. There is a big parade, for instance, that might normally feature 200 extras. Instead, Synthetic used green-screen technology.

“We got a bunch of extras, we put them in front of a green screen and shot them, then we had them change and shot them again,” Gernhard says. “We’re going to actually green screen them into different backgrounds and foregrounds.”

*  *  *

Making movies during COVID

“Making a movie is stressful because of all the moving parts,” Gernhard says. “This (COVID) adds, no joke, about 35 percent more stress. The logistics alone are insane. … It’s not fun. You know, (in the end), I don’t feel accomplished, I feel relieved. Because I legitimately have been a stress ball the entire time.”

Gernhard says they were lucky in that the screenplays for both movies “were originally written a little bit tighter and a little bit smaller, and a little more intimate anyway, and we did a slight rewrite to both to make them a little more COVID compliant.”

For instance, they tried not to have too many scenes set in public places.

On set, they adhered to the expected safety protocols: wear a three-ply mask; socially distance; do as much outside as possible and, if things have to be done inside, limit the amount of crew and cast involved. Everyone was tested multiple times a week and mostly stayed at their hotels or inns, tending to restrict themselves in terms of off-hours activities to outdoor pursuits like golf and jogging. 

A ‘Royal’ romance

Synthetic began filming “One Royal Holiday” in June mostly in Putnam and Woodstock, and Gernhard says, “At that point, (those towns) only had, like, 11 cases of COVID. On purpose, I chose that location, never mind that they have beautiful inns there.”

They shot at the Inn at Woodstock Hill and the Mansion at Bald Hill.

“That was our bubble. Our cast and crew and everything was up at these two inns, and that was it,” Gernhard says, adding with a laugh, “It was actually kind of a summer vacation.”

In “One Royal Holiday,” a nurse heading home from work not long before Christmas runs into people who need a place to stay during the oncoming blizzard. She brings them to her father’s inn, and it turns out they are the queen and prince of (the fictional country of) Galwick. As the nurse and the prince fall for each other, he learns to be a better person.

“One Royal Holiday” features a lot of Broadway actors. With Broadway closed for the foreseeable future, these talented but usually busy performers were available. In addition, Synthetic tried to limit travel for the movies because of COVID, and Broadway performers tend to live in or close enough to Connecticut to drive rather than fly to the locations.

“One Royal Holiday” stars Aaron Tveit, who was just nominated for a Tony for his performance in the stage adaptation of “Moulin Rouge!,” and Laura Osnes, who earned Tony nominations in past years for playing Bonnie Parker in “Bonnie and Clyde” and Cinderella in “Cinderella.” “One Royal Holiday” isn’t a musical, but there is some singing.

Trump declares himself the winner

 

I got to see the historic moment on live TV. Trump declared himself the winner and will go to the Supreme Court to stop the vote count. He did what he said he'd do. Stunning but not surprising. Things have gone exactly as predicted.

Garden State (2004)

Acting.

Zach Braff plays an actor in Los Angeles who has apparently refused to speak to his father in New Jersey for some time. When his father calls to inform him that his mother is dead, Braff flies home for her funeral. He hangs around with his quirky friends and with Natalie Portman. 

His father is a psychiatrist. In spite of being alienated from him for years, Braff has continued taking the medication he prescribed for him all this time. It has left him unable to feel emotion which you'd think would be a serious impediment for an actor, but that may have been the point.

I watched a little of it, didn't like it. I googled it and read something explaining why people once liked it but later turned against it and against Braff himself. Something about an anti-hipster backlash. 

I liked it better after reading that and watched the rest. 

Just seemed kind of middling. People enthused over Braff's taste in music when it came out and I guess it was good although music doesn't interest me. He's like Woody Allen going through his record collection for music for his movies.