What have you been watching?

[samdawson]

I would recommend Heretic. Three strong leads, and Hugh Grant is unmissable, as good as he was in A Very English Scandal, which is very, very good indeed. At first it looks like it is going to be a classic of psychological horror, up there with, say, Diabolique, and then it goes all grand guignol (you'll know the moment it happens, when someone arrives looking like they've escaped from Ringu). Yet right at the end it pulls it back somehow through the development of one character and the quality of writing. Grant pulls off the same trick as Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs of leaving you knowing they're deeply dangerous, but you still feel you could have an interesting discussion with them.

[PeterC]

I can’t agree about The Heretic. It begins as a gripping psychological war of words but degenerates in its final third into a rather silly slasher pic.

[helrunar]

I enjoyed viewing the original Mexican release print of the 1961 film, El Mundo de los Vampiros (World of the Vampires) on a Cinema Mexicano youtube channel. The movie was in Spanish, but there's a utility on youtube that allows one to prompt computer-generated English subtitles. Superior visual and audio quality particularly compared to a US television edit (from the factory of the infamous K. Gordon Murray) that's uploaded elsewhere on the tube. 

The aesthetic seems inspired by 1950s horror comics, while the atmospheric black and white photography evokes the Gothic world of 1940s Universal and Poverty-Row cinema. Guillermo Murray as the accursed, vengeance-driven Count Sergio Subotai, a worshipper of the Demon Astaroth, controls his horde of rubber bat-mask wearing vampire cultists, attended by a bevy of luxuriously coiffed and jeweled brides, deliriously pumping dissonant chords out of a vast organ whose pipes are comprised of skulls and human bones. The scenario doesn't make much sense but the florid melodramatics are compellingly pulpy and lurid.

I had a really great time with it.

Hel.

[andydecker]

Nov 13, 2024 4:24:13 GMT helrunar said:

I enjoyed viewing the original Mexican release print of the 1961 film, El Mundo de los Vampiros (World of the Vampires) on a Cinema Mexicano youtube channel. Hel.

Reminds me of Hellboy in Mexiko which is about vampires and wrestlers. Fun story with great artwork by the late Richard Corben.