Dawn Of The Dead (2004)

Dawn of the Dead is one of my favorite films of all time.  I loved the original which I saw when it first came out in 1978.  The film was supposed to be no one under 17 admitted period, but my mom took me and at 14 I was hooked on Romero’s film.  A few years later the WV Library Commission purchased a 16mm copy for their film library.  I checked it out and was surprised to find a lot of footage that I hadn’t seen before.  I liked this version much better than the original and I spent a huge amount of time trying to track down a copy on VHS.  When the movie came out on DVD, it was released in two versions by Anchor Bay.  I kept trying to figure out which version was the longer one before I bought a copy.  I was also disappointed that the disc was a “flipper” where half the movie is one side of the disc and the rest is on the other side of the disc.  While I debated which one to buy, both discs went out of print.  I eventually bought a couple German edition DVDs before Anchor Bay released the Divimax edition.  They then followed that up with a wonderful box set that contained three different versions of the film.  I purchased both of those.  I also picked up a copy of the original Anchor Bay edition and over the holidays I ordered yet another edition.  That means I have 6 copies of the original Dawn of the Dead (assuming we count the box set as 1 instead of 3).

In 2004 Universal released a remake of Dawn of the Dead.  I missed it on its initial run, but as luck would have it, I was working in Beckley and the film was playing at the $1 theater.  I paid for my ticket and was very impressed.  When the DVD came out, I bought the Widescreen Unrated Director’s Cut with the cardboard slipcover.  This was followed by the R rated version in Full Screen from Wills.  Then I went looking on eBay.  I got the region 2 edition from England, the limited 2 disc version that was released with a bonus disc when the DVD was first released in some locations, and several editions that may be official Asian releases, but may be bootlegs.  I especially love one version I got that lists the rating as PG-13.  It’s almost as good as the copy of American Pie 2 that I got where the box makes the movie sound like a political uprising instead of a teen sex comedy.  The last copy of Dawn of the Dead (2004) I added to my collection was one in Spanish that I found at Big Lots for $3.  That brings my total copies of the remake to 8.

As much as I love the original, I think I love the remake equally well.  I love the cast.  I especially love the cameos by some of the original guys from Dawn; Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, and Tom Savini.  Zack Snyder pulled off a rare feat by making such a wonderful film.  When I heard that he was doing Watchmen, I felt sure he would do the movie proud.  I was not let down there either.

Dawn of the Dead is just as exciting watching it for the fourth or fifth time as it was the very first time.  I have to give it 4 stars.  As further proof of my fan love for this movie in both of its incarnations, after my wife and I had been married for about a year and a half, I got a vacation.  We decided to go to Monroeville, PA so that I could visit the Dawn of the Dead shopping mall.  The wife was 7 months pregnant.  I had a cold.  We had no map, but had gotten vague directions from a map that was on the side of a trashcan at her parents’ house.  We were driving a white car in fog that was so thick that truckers were pulling over.  We stopping at a rest area right inside Pennsylvania, and I found a better map.  A short time later we saw the sign “Now entering Monroeville”.  The wife looked at me and asked, “Now, do you think you’ll be able to find the shopping mall?”  No sooner had the words left her mouth than a sign appeared exclaiming, “Entrance Monroeville Shopping Mall”.  I looked back at her and said, “Yeah, I think I can handle it.”

Sinbad Legend Of The Seven Seas

I was a huge fan of Ray Harryhausen growing up.  My mom took me to see Valley of Gwangi at the Alban Theater and I loved it.  Later she took me to the Virginian to catch The Golden Voyage of Sinbad.  I got to see that one again with my sister and her kids when we all went to the drive-in and saw it on a double bill with Big Jake.  I remember waiting patiently to see The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts.  There were several misses before the stars aligned and I got to see them.  I loved every one of them and Sinbad became my childhood hero.

When I heard that Dreamworks was doing an animated Sinbad film, I was a little disappointed.  Sinbad needed to be made with live actors and stop motion animated monsters.  Sinbad wasn’t a cartoon with a funny dog sidekick and a woman in his crew.  Eventually I warmed to the idea that the movie might be entertaining, so I started looking for the DVD.  The problem with animated movies on used DVDs is that they are usually in pretty rough shape.  Another problem is that most copies you find used or otherwise are Full Screen.  I finally ran across a copy at one of the pawn shops, but it appeared to be a bootleg.  I collect bootlegs if they’re decently made so I purchased it and added it to the collection.  Then a few weeks ago Big Lots got the movie in for $5.  That’s more than I normally pay for a movie at Big Lots, but it was in Widescreen, so I added it to my stack.

I decided to finally give the animated Sinbad a viewing, so I popped it in the DVD player and was pleasantly surprised.  The movie was actually quite good both as an animated film and as a Sinbad movie.  Sinbad Legend of the Seven Seas concerns Sinbad’s quest to retrieve the Book of Peace from Eris the goddess of chaos.  Sinbad (Brad Pitt) is accompanied by Marina (Catherine Zeta-Jones) the soon to be wife of Sinbad’s old childhood friend Proteus (Joseph Fiennes).  It seems Sinbad has been framed for the theft of the book and the only way he can be saved is for Proteus to take his place until Sinbad can rescue the book.  Eris (Michelle Pfeiffer) throws several CGI monsters in his path, but eventually he ends up in Tartarus with the book in his sights.

The difference in the 2-D animation of Sinbad and crew and the 3-D CGI animation of the monsters makes it look similar to the old Harryhausen films where the stop motion monsters looked different from the real people.  I thought it was a nice little touch.  The voice work is all fantastic in the movie as well.  Pfeiffer sounds particularly perfect as Eris. 

Supposedly the original plan was to make seven Sinbad movies with each telling of a different voyage, however, when the grosses came in on The Road to El Dorado, the studio dropped those plans and Sinbad only made the one voyage.  It’s really too bad.  I would still love to see a sequel.  Of course I would also still love to see Ray Harryhausen’s long forgotten planned follow-up to Clash of the Titans, Sinbad on Mars.  I give Sinbad Legend of the Seven Seas 4 stars.

Twilight Of The Dark Master

On a recent trip to Wills I noticed that someone had apparently turned loose of their anime collection.  I picked up the Samurai 7 and Gantz box sets, and I bought several single disc anime DVDs as well.  Most of them were part of a series like Gungrave or Heat Guy J, but there was one stand alone disc titled Twilight of the Dark Master.  The DVD had a stark pencil and ink drawn cover with just slight application of streaks of red.  I wanted something relatively short to watch, so I decided to give Twilight of the Dark Master a spin.

Twilight of the Dark Master features some amazing animation work.  Visually the film reminds me of a mix of anime and Heavy Metal.  I really wanted to like this movie because it looked so cool.  The biggest problem I had to achieving that however was the story.  Twilight of the Dark Master is the story of a war between demons and the guardians, but of course humans are also caught up in the mix.  A girl and her boyfriend share a romantic evening as the film opens, but then something happens.  The scene uses quick cut anime style, so we’re not entirely certain what happens, but the girl is seen laying on the floor and the boy is gone.  Soon police are tracking down something that turns out to be a huge demon creature.

The movie continues with the demon being captured and held at a nightclub where it is fed young women.  The girl begins to hunt the demon, and the police are trying to track it down as well.  By about 15 minutes in I was so confused that I wasn’t sure who was what or why they were doing what they were doing.  I decided to just enjoy the animation. 

Twilight of the Dark Master is not an anime for kids.  There is language, nudity and graphic violence.  The demon devours two topless girls who sneak off from pleasuring the club owner to try and find something to steal.  They find the demon and get torn to pieces.  It’s possible my problems with understanding this movie could be cultural or they could be cleared up with a second or third viewing.  Since the film is supposed to be based on a manga, reading the source material might help as well.  For right now, I’ll just say I was disappointed.  I loved the look of the movie, but I wish I could have been more interested in the storyline.  I give Twilight of the Dark Master 2 1/4 stars.

Bottom Feeder

Bottom Feeder had one of those DVD covers that just screamed “bad horror movie”.  It features a rat-like creature with one of its clawed hands covering a woman’s mouth preventing her from screaming.  The creature is covered in slimy looking red blood.  The box exclaims that the film is unrated.  Just because a film doesn’t have a rating, doesn’t mean it’s any more graphic or terrifying than an R rated movie.  It may simply mean that the film went straight to video (or the SciFi/Syfy Channel).

Bottom Feeder concerns a maintenance crew led by Tom Sizemore who supplements his salary by scavenging and selling goods obtained from an abandoned hospital.  Unbeknownst to the maintenance crew, a rich business man has been using the same basement tunnels to test an experimental healing drug which has had the unfortunate side effect of turning its first patient into a half man/half rat hybrid creature.  The result is pure monster movie cheese. 

Bottom Feeder reminded me slightly of Revenge of the Rats.  Not so much because of the rat connection, but because it too is more enjoyable than it should be.  This is the kind of movie you stumble across late at night and spend months trying to find out the name of it.  Okay, in the old days it took months to find out the title of a movie like this.  These days the IMDB makes it pretty darn simple to find out in a few minutes.  Never the less, Bottom Feeder is a film you have likely never heard of, but that makes a great party movie.  The fight between the rat man and the karate expert is worth the $3 I paid for this DVD.

Bottom Feeder gets a solid 2 1/4 in my book.

The Mummy’s Tomb

The Mummy’s Tomb was the third Universal mummy movie and the second to concern Kharis and the Banning expedition.  This time Lon Chaney Jr. took over the role of Kharis and the action is moved to the USA.  Kharis and a high priest are moved to America where they can take vengeance upon the remaining members of the Banning expedition from The Mummy’s Hand as well as their families.  Kharis begins his revenge by killing Steve Banning the leader of the expedition, once more played by Dick Foran.  He moves on to Steve’s sister and Babe Jenson, who conveniently returns to town when he hears about Banning’s death.  Once more the high priest in charge of Kharis falls in love with a woman and kidnaps her.  This time it is the fiance of Banning’s son, John Banning (John Hubbard).

I definitely recall seeing The Mummy’s Hand as a child, because I remember the ending with Kharis trapped on the balcony of a burning house.  For some reason I always remembered it as a Sorority House.  For the record, it is not.  I really enjoyed watching The Mummy’s Tomb again.  It almost made me want to rewatch The Mummy’s Ghost and The Mummy’s Curse just to finally see all five films in the proper order.

I give The Mummy’s Tomb 3 stars.  It was a lot of fun, even if it was a bit repetitive and relied on lots of flashbacks (i.e. stock footage from The Mummy’s Hand).

The Mummy’s Hand

Having worked through the entire Universal Monsters box set, I decided to continue on with the first of the sequels to The Mummy.  After the initial release of the classic Universal Monsters DVD box set, the next round of movies were released on double feature DVDs.  I purchased all of them upon initial release and was very happy that I had when they quickly went out of print.  My biggest disappointment was that no additional double feature DVD releases were planned to finish out the classic Universal Monsters collection.

I had already reviewed the Werewolf of London and She-Wolf of London DVD as well as The Mummy’s Ghost and The Mummy’s Curse DVD, so finishing out the mummy movies made perfect sense.  Surprisingly, I also soon found that I may not have previously seen The Mummy’s Hand.  The Mummy’s Hand starts the series of Kharis films with cowboy actor Tom Tyler stepping into the mummy’s bandages this outing.  When I was a kid, for some reason I always assumed that Tom Tyler would have followed Lon Chaney Jr in the role, not the other way around.  So since The Mummy’s Hand had no Lon Chaney Jr. and probably the worst title in the entire series, it was not one of the films that I obsessed about seeing.  And while most of the mummy movies with Kharis have very similar plots, this was the only one to take place in Egypt and it featured the only mummy death scene that didn’t look familiar to me.

The Mummy’s Hand is much better than I had expected it to be without a Chaney mummy.  I enjoyed it quite a bit including the buddy comedy between Dick Foran’s Steve Banning and Wallace Ford’s Babe Jenson.  The Mummy’s Hand did a great job setting up the future sequels.  I give it 3 1/2 stars.

The Wolf Man (1941)

The Wolf Man was the film that made Lon Chaney Jr. my hero as a kid.  I saw The Wolf Man on Chiller and thought it was fantastic.  The makeup effects looked amazing to a kid.  Of course the actual wolf man makeup was worn extremely well by Chaney in all of his appearances as Lawrence Talbot, and in a departure from having various actors take over for other actors in the monster roles, only Lon Chaney Jr. played Larry Talbot, the Wolf Man, in all of his Universal appearances until the recent remake made long after Chaney’s death.

When I was going through my old VHS tapes recently, I actually found an old Chiller Theater presentation of The Wolf Man from the early 1980s.  This was long past the time of Seymour hosting the program by way of syndication, but it was still quite a thrill.  My daughter had never seen the original The Wolf Man, but she had seen the recent remake.  We settled in and watched the original.

I still think The Wolf Man is one of the better, action filled Universal monster movies.  I also think the Wolf Man, and werewolves in general, make for the scariest monsters.  Frankenstein’s monster and the Mummy both moved incredibly slow, and while the Creature was fast in the water, on dry land he didn’t move quite as fast.  Dracula never bothered me, I guess, because I had never seen Dracula.  But the Wolf Man was fast.  If you started to get away, he could always drop to all fours and overtake you with ease.  He was also the most bestial of the monsters with the least bit of humanity left behind.  The Wolf Man wanted to rip your throat out and tear your guts out and eat you.  Frankenstein and the Mummy would choke you and then leave you for dead.  There was no open casket funeral after a werewolf attack. 

I mentioned earlier that the Creature was my favorite Universal monster, and Frankenstein’s monster was the favorite of my older nephew.  If I recall correctly, my younger nephew’s favorite was the Wolf Man. 

The Wolf Man gets 4 stars from me, and my daughter enjoyed it as well.

The Invisible Man (1933)

Unlike Dracula and The Mummy, I had seen The Invisible Man as a kid, despite it being one of the less famous Universal monsters.  In fact it wasn’t until just a few years ago that an Aurora style Invisible Man model kit was made.  Back in the day, you weren’t a real credible monster unless you had an Aurora model kit.

The Invisible Man is based on the novel by H. G. Wells.  It concerns a scientist that discovers a formula for invisibility that has a nasty side effect of also driving him insane.  The effects in this film are amazing especially considering the time in which they were filmed.  I think I probably enjoyed and appreciated this film more now than I did when I first saw it.  Claude Raines as the scientist turned invisible murderer is very good.  His performance is delivered more from his voice and inflection than a physical presence.

One additional treat for me during this viewing was watching a very young Gloria Stuart as the love interest.  Having been unaware of Ms. Stuart until seeing Titanic, it was a pleasant surprise to see her in such a classic film looking so young and lovely.

My daughter also seemed to enjoy The Invisible Man as we continued through the Universal Monsters box set.  I give the film 4 stars.

The Mummy (1932)

Of the classic Universal Monster movies, The Mummy was another of the ones I had never seen.  Most of the time when Chiller played a mummy movie, they chose one of the Lon Chaney Kharis movies.  The original mummy was Imhotep played by Boris Karloff.  I had seen many pictures of Karloff’s mummy, but had never actually sat down and watched the movie.  I was actually surprised at how little of the film the mummy is actually in.  Don’t get me wrong.  Karloff is in quite a bit of the film, but most of it is Karloff as a regenerated Ardath Bey, not a bandage covered mummy.

The Mummy concerns an expedition that accidentally brings back to life Karloff’s Imhotep by reading a sacred scroll.  The mummy steals the scroll and departs after driving one of the archaeologists into madness.  A few years later another expedition arrives and Karloff in his guise as Ardath Bey uses them to unearth the tomb of his beloved princess.  He then plans to use the scroll to bring his princess back to life in the body of a young woman.

The Mummy is a good movie, but for a monster fan, it is a little disappointing to get so little mummy action.  The mummy make-up looks fantastic, but it is just on-screen for too short of an amount of time.  The Mummy gets 3 3/4 stars for skimping on the mummy.

Dracula (1931)

Chiller Theater used to air a good chunk of the classic Universal Monster movies when I was a kid.  There were a few of them that I never did see aired.  Dracula was one of those.  I remember watching Son of Dracula and House of Dracula, I believe, but the original with Bela Lugosi never seemed to air.  Now it’s possible it aired and I simply missed it, but in those pre-home video days, I was usually extremely careful about any chance to catch one of the classic horror movies.  The fact that I hadn’t seen Dracula before made it especially nice to sit down with my daughter to watch it as we worked our way through my Universal Monsters box set.

Dracula was the first of the classic 1930’s horror movies and like Frankenstein which was released the same year, many things that we take for granted these days were not there yet, most notably a musical soundtrack.  These days we just accept that a movie will have themes and all types of incidental music playing throughout.  The films of the early 1930s, however, were just slightly removed from the silent film era and the idea of scoring a movie wouldn’t come along for a few more years.  A Phillip Glass score was added to the film in the late 1990s by Universal to try and make the film more modern, but my daughter and I decided to watch it the way it was originally presented.

Another item that was absent from the original that most people would swear to being in the film was Dracula’s fangs.  Lugosi performed the role completely fangless.  It was not until later films that vampire fangs were first witnessed.  I first learned of this fact as a child reading Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine and was surprised by it then.

Dracula is inarguably a horror classic, and Lugosi’s performance is an iconic one as well.  Dracula is another 4 star classic in my opinion.  Not only is it a wonderful, atmospheric film, it has armadillos in it.  I love armadillos.  In the words of Robert Preston’s character in Blake Edwards’ S.O.B., “Make an armadillo happy, and the world is your oyster.”