2022 A month of Halloween movies -- October 1st

The Bat (1959) [Kanopy]

There's lots of different kinds of nonsense that happens in movies.  Sometimes it's good nonsense, sometimes it's just nonsense.  For example, a movie has an ominously-named serial killer but that fact seems mostly to be in your movie because otherwise the plot is just a thin retread of a second-rate Agatha Christie.  Or a small, secret room doesn't have enough air for one person for five minutes in one scene because oh no and then a few minutes later it can support four people indefinitely while they whisper to each other because plot.

The Bat isn't terrible, it just isn't very good.  Hey, it has Vincent Price and Agnes Moorhead in lead roles, so it's watchable.  It's also public domain, so you can find it lying around anywhere (it may be in your mailbox this very moment), though if you want a better streaming experience, you might try your local library's streaming service (it's def on Kanopy, didn't check Hoopla; it could already be inside your house, running up your phone bill and using all the hot water).  Just don't ask much.  You don't even want to think about whether the point of the final reveal is that _____ was The Bat the entire time or was simply pretending to be Another Bat to throw the blame onto _____ who was The Genuine Article Original Bat Accept No Substitutions.  That way lies.... probably not much, actually.  Forget I said anything, wonder whatever the hell you want to.

"Hair Wolf" (2018) [Crterion]

One of the collections Criterion is offering this month is a batch of Halloween-themed shorts, including this one by Mariama Diallo.  It's a cute little bit of social comedy in which zombie-vampire White people keep showing up at a Black salon to absorb the life-essence of American Black culture and turn the store's customers, employees, and proprietor.

Well-acted, well-written, and a lot of fun.  If I can't come up with terribly much to say it's only because it's 12 minutes long and makes its point fairly quickly and effectively; at that length and getting its point across without overstaying its welcome, I guess it's like a Saturday Night Sketch only shorter, funnier, less ham-fisted, and the actors all memorized their lines before shooting.  It's also hard to find much to say because I can't help feeling like I'm getting super old, and while I'm smart enough to think I understand what the film is trying to say, references to much of anything in the pop culture more recent than the video to Michael Jackson's "Thriller" and a couple of now-timeless horror trope gags went right over my head.

This fact--references to things that happened since 2010 zwooping right past me while I smiled and nodded--doesn't make me angry or even just that sad.  It merely leaves me able to say little more than, "Yeah, this was well-made; you might like it or you might not."

Phantasm (1979/2016) [Kanopy]

There's lots of different kinds of nonsense that happens in movies.  Sometimes it's good nonsense.  Phantasm is a bad dream of a movie, which I actually mean as fairly high praise.  It's a solid piece of work, and unlike The Bat, which is supposed to make sense and doesn't, Phantasm isn't really supposed to make sense in the first place and for the most part succeeds in not doing so.

It's one of the rare examples of a really terrible, cliched, hackneyed twist actually working.  Unlike most movies with a similar final reveal, Phantasm is in the one percent where the reveal happens and you say, "Hm, yeah, actually that checks out."

If you're of a certain age that's too old to understand all the hip cultural references of today's youth, you may well be of the certain age to remember when Don Coscarelli's low-budget fever dream was a video store staple.  Which is why it seems odd that I'd never seen it until now.  I'd absorbed The Tall Man and the flying silver orb of death and knew the movie had something to do with nefarious goings-on at a funeral home.  But I hadn't seen it.

I think I'm glad I waited.  The movie was restored in 2015 because J.J. Abrams (of all people) loves it and reissued in 2016.  So the version you can find streaming on Kanopy (or wherever you do streaming that has it) is a nice-looking version where you can see what's happening in the dark scenes and the brightly-lit scenes have nice detail and contrast.  The special effects hold up reasonably well.  I suspect that the movie was probably nearly-unwatchable on VHS unless you were extremely committed to video nasties and got hooked on the movie's exuberant loopiness.

Coming Attractions

SOTSOGM is a nearly-dead blog and I don't really expect that to change anytime soon.  The fact is that I am tired a lot and busy a bit, and the wild-west days of blogging are mostly done.  These days, blogs are basically expected to be Tumblr (or maybe they're all video blogs on TikTok (remember when I said I was old?)) or well-thought out entries (possibly with footnotes) of the sort you might see on a publisher's or think tank's blog.  It's just a lot of work, and my well has been mostly dry for awhile, sadly.

But I am going to try to watch at least one scary/creepy/thrilling/monster-featuring movie a day this month and I'm going to try to post what I watched here.  No promises.  No guarantees.  No refunds of admission, either.  But we'll see what happens.