Screenplay Waldemar Young and Philip Wylie, H.G. Wells (novel)
This nearly 100 year old film is primitive yet effective. As is often the case with older films that lack the visual sophistication of modern movies, the screenplay is everything. The most important elements are related through dialogue, not in action. The story is mesmerizing, beginning with shipwrecked man adrift at sea and ending the revolt of pack of wild human-animal hybrids as the extract horrifying revenge on their creator.
This is the second movie in what looks to be a 3 movie series dealing with relationships between women where one is in power, and the other is under her. The first was the Brazilian film Good Manners and the next one will be Greta.
For a movie that is supposed to be about women, however, screenwriters John Knautz and Alexis Kendra created their characters as 2 dimensional objects. Most of the women are vain, selfish and superficial creatures whose prime motivations in life are eating chocolates, getting beauty treatments, shopping, and defining themselves through their relationships with men.
Back in the days before Netflix and mailable DVDs, we used to have to go to the video store to rent VHS cassettes. Luckily, the Putney, Vermont general store had a great video tape collection in the early 1990s! What was especially wonderful, besides their wall of cult favorites, was the full large of foreign movies. Since this was pre-internet days, we didn't have the luxury of looking up titles read about them. All we had was what was on the box and sometimes the boxes lied!
We learned to be wary of movies that were billed as "Triumphs," or "Laughter filled testaments to life!" And the word "Heartwarming" was meant Do not rent this video!" One such South American film, the title escapes me, bore all those labels was about a middle-aged gold digger and her desire to plan to find a sugar daddy so she can leave her husband and ungrateful children. The climax end takes place in a remote in the jungle where the husband and the elderly sugar daddy incapacitate face each ahead of an oncoming flood. The film ends with the woman leaving both men to drown. As she rushes to safety, she comments that someone always cares for stray dogs.
2014 was a great year for New Zealand horror! Two Kiwi films from that year, Gerard Johnstone's first feature length, claustrophobic, comedy/thriller Housebound and the mockumentary vampire film What We Do In The Shadows both figure prominently on Mark Hofmeyer's The Top 21 Horror Films of the 21st Century!
I watched Housebound on Netflix and had a great time with it. The film paces itself well while dissecting the inner workings of a dysfunctional family attempting to reintegrate their prodigal daughter while living in an apparently haunted house. Morgana O'Reilly shows great prowess as Kylie who swings between royally pissed off daughter who is forced to return home and seeming victim of a malevolent force that just wants to help.
I should also mention that it is a screwy-screwball comedy with bumps, jumps, pratfall and plenty of hilarious one-liners!
While lacking any touching or sentimental moments, Housebound packs in plenty of laughs, thrills and genuinely scary moments plus an appropriate amount of gore.
And to top it off, there is this song at the end:
Click here to see the list of movies I am shooting to watch between now and the Halloween. Make sure to check out the original article at Movies, Film and Flix !
Every spring, my old home state of Vermont shuts down for Town Meeting Day. This a day for the populace to practice democracy by directly by debating, discussing and voting on various ordinances. It is a tradition that goes back to the 17th century. On Town Meeting Day in 1999, Vermont Public Radio broadcast a brief interview with author Stephen King about the new mini-series based on his novel Storm of the Century. The timing was no coincidence since the climax of Storm takes place at what is probably one of the saddest Town Meetings in literature. I cannot remember his exact words (and if anyone can find them-you'll earn a place of honor in my heart), King started the interview by saying that there was nothing scarier to him than a group of ordinary citizens gathered together in terrible circumstances. This theme returns time and again in many of his works and their various sized screen adaptations but one of the best is Frank Darabont's 2007 version of King's novella The Mist. Huddled together for survival in a New England grocery store the morning after a storm, this collection of concerned citizens gleefully shed their silly man suits and willfully start biting the heads off their neighbors for the singular pleasure of shitting down their necks almost as soon as the blood from the first victims starts to fly.
