October 2020: Amazon Prime Swarms the Screen With Horror (On Topic)
I get the Amazon Prime streaming service and for this Halloween month of October, they have practically swarmed the screen with literally scores of horror movies -- theatricals, Made for TV movies...A's and B's.
Far too many to view, more than enough to "sample," and some thoughts:
The chintzy horror and SciFi movies that played on Los Angeles TV in the early sixties when I was kid -- and disappeared into total "unavailability" for DECADES -- are all back on Amazon prime. Keep in mind that in 1962 or so, these movies got full page ads in newspapers and in TV Guide, and played Saturday nights in prime time(against network fare) -- they were an important part of the cultural TV diet, mainly for kids, but I expect teens were watching, too.
Two "local independent channels" had these franchises to show these films: Channel 11 had "Chiller Theater" and Channel 9 had "Strange Tales of Science Fiction"(which mainly played SciFi, but occasionally allowed a William Castle movie like Macabre in.)
We're talking movies like The Giant Behemoth, Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Atomic Submarine, The Cyclops, Earth vs The Spider, Attack of the Puppet People...and more.
"Sampling" some of these(most of which were quite dumb) brought back some long buried memories. Like how, in Earth vs the Spider, a giant spider is gassed into unconsciousness and put on display in a high school's auditorium. Rock 'n rollers decide to bring in a band and the kids start dancing and damn -- they wake the spider up! (he wasn't dead, just sleeping.) One cherubic guy in the band keeps playing his bass with his eyes closed until he finally sees the Big Spider coming at him; he escapes in time. A security guard is not so lucky. (They never are.)
Attack of the Crab Monsters has such monsters who manage to eat their human victims and then speak telepathically in the victims' voices to new victims: "Hey, Harry, come over here!" and ZAP...the Crab Monster gets another victim.
"The Crawling Eye" is in a cloud atop a big snowy mountain in Switzerland. As the cloud creeps down the mountain to the town below, it starts killing -- and decapitating -- mountain climbers. Once the town is under siege, it turns out that there are a LOT of crawling eyes. What I remembered as a climax on the order of Mount Rushmore in NXNW THEN turns out to be a bunch of cardboard miniature buildings and crawling eye puppets.
The Amazing Colossal Man is a man who grows giant; Attack of the 50 Foot Woman(not on Amazon Prime right now, but relevant) is a woman.
Anyway, they are all there, and for fleeting moments, its 1962 again.
But the movies on display work their way through the decades:
Hammer Horror films of the 50's through the 70's (A female friend of mine, seeing some of these with me, remarked on how Britisher Terry Thomas in Mad Mad World attacks American men for their infatuation with "bosoms" - she said: didn't that guy ever see a Hammer movie.)
Several British anthology movies of the 70's (The House That Dripped Blood; Asylum) with screenplays by Robert Bloch -- aha, on-topic arrives . I'm glad that Bloch earned a living off of these films, but they aren't particularly good in the plotting -- its as if Hitchcock's Psycho helped elevate Bloch beyond his talent level.
Some "giallos" -- now, the "innocent" b/w kiddie horrors of 1962 yield to some really sick stuff.
Gorgeous women, often nude women, stalked and beaten at length(usually by a killer in a coat and hat) before being killed horribly. One (Black Belly of the Tarantula) had a very young Giancarlo Giannini as the cop hero -- right before he became an "art prestige star" for Lena Wertmuller. Also in the film, several beauties from Bond movies, including Claudine Auger(Thunderball), Barbara Bach(Spy Who Loved Me) and Barbara Bouchet( a cheat; she's in the Casino Royale spoof of 1967, but...a beauty.) One thing I liked about the end of BBOTT was that Giancarlo elects to beat the living hell out of the psycho at the end. Its the beating I always wanted that cowardly woman-killer Bob Rusk to get in Frenzy.
And a couple of TV movies, one bad and forgotten, one good and kind of famous: The bad forgotten one was "How Awful About Allen" with "Anthony Perkins in his first made for TV movie." Its 1970 and Perkins has longer hair than in Psycho a decade earlier, but looks even more handsome. Alas this movie is too cheap , too timid, and too predictable to register in the Perkins canon, and its a reminder that a star(here, Perkins) can't BE a star if the material is no good.
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