A movie a day

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Argument: Movies based on video games don't have to suck.

Evidence: Silent Hill (2006)

This movie is about half an hour too long and the plot is so damn convoluted that I'm not sure I understood even half of it, but it's good enough for me to recommend it over just about any other modern horror movie. The Mist is better, but Silent Hill is a very good movie overall, far better than Saw, Resident Evil, Hostel, The Devil's Rejects, and the overrated Dawn of the Dead remake. (I haven't seen the remakes of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror, Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, or Halloween, but I think it's safe to assume that they're awful.) The acting is good, it's well directed, it's visually brilliant, and it manages to be genuinely creepy and disturbing. How many horror movies these days offer that?

I actually watched Silent Hill with my brother about a month ago. Fun movie with some ridiculously over the top scenes.

How many movies have you got to go? Or does it never end? If you're looking for horror type films I recommend [rec] and it's sequel. It's in Spanish or something but I thought it was pretty well done.

It got almost too over the top for me at the climax, but it never quite went over the edge. The quiet, ambiguous ending made up for any problems like that.



I don't have a set number of movies to watch, or a definitive list. I just set out to watch at least one movie every day, and there's really no criteria. I can watch comedy, horror, drama, documentaries, sappy chick flicks, even porno if it has a story, anything that qualifies as a movie. (I've already bent my rules a couple of times. One was a 45-minute documentary, and another was a two-part episode of a TV show.) I could stop doing this tomorrow or I could keep going for a decade.

I've heard good things about [REC], but right now I'm sick to death of "caught on camera" horror films, and I'm not really setting out to watch horror films specifically. I'm basically just choosing films at random here.

Son of Frankenstein (1939)

Now this is more like it. I hated Bride of Frankenstein, but Son of Frankenstein is even better than the first movie. It's much more stylish and energetic. The cast is awesome. Dr. Frankenstein's son is Basil Rathbone, who's one of those actors who could read the phone book and make it sound brilliant. The nosy policeman is Lionel Atwill (who later showed up as Professor Moriarty in one of Rathbone's Sherlock Holmes films), and Ygor is Béla Lugosi. They're all great. Best of all, there's no misguided attempt to turn the movie into a wacky comedy, so it doesn't embarrass itself like Bride of Frankenstein does. Boris Karloff's monster stays silent and threatening instead of laughing and saying things like "Alone bad! Friend good!" My favorite Frankenstein film is probably Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), but Son of Frankenstein is a close second.

And with that, I've finished Week 2. To recap:

September 8-14: A Scanner Darkly (2006), The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), The Hound of the Baskervilles (2002), A Scanner Darkly (2006), The Tomb of Dracula (1980), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1988), The Masks of Death (1984), The Many Faces of Sherlock Holmes (1985), Frankenstein (1931), Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Silent Hill (2006), Son of Frankenstein (1939)

Bring on Week 3. I can't stop now.

Last edited by Jory on 14 Sep 2011, 11:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Fair enough. I didn't bother to read through all your posts, so I just looked at the last few and noticed a few horror ones.

For a caught on camera film I thought [rec] was very well done, but I haven't seen that many of them. On the topic of Silent Hill, I heard they're making a sequel. A new group of people wind up trapped, but the main character from the first movie will be there too. In my opinion she was the weakest part of the film. Her acting was extremely bad.

Week 3 begins. I hope I can manage to watch at least one movie this week that doesn't involve Dracula, Frankenstein, or Sherlock Holmes, but they're such cheesy fun.

The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)

"Your father was Frankenstein, but your mother was the lightning!"

This movie doesn't f**k around. Frankenstein movies typically end with an angry mob storming the castle, but The Ghost of Frankenstein starts with one. And they don't just set fire to it, they blow it up with dynamite. The monster is resurrected within the first five minutes, and the movie never slows down from there. Boris Karloff was replaced by Lon Chaney, and I doubt anyone even noticed. Observation: Dr. Frankenstein's son was played by Basil Rathbone in Son of Frankenstein, and his other son is played by Cedric Hardwicke in The Ghost of Frankenstein. Rathbone was famous for playing Sherlock Holmes, and Hardwicke's son Edward was famous for playing Dr. Watson.

The Copper Beeches (1912)

I'm still looking for a good Sherlock Holmes film made before the 1939 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, which is the earliest good Holmes film that I've seen. The search will continue, because this 20-minute short is a failure. In the short story, we're there with Holmes as he solves the mystery. In this movie, Holmes doesn't show up until the halfway point, and he solves it after we've already seen exactly what happened – who did it, why, and how. This is a problem with a lot of the early Holmes films that I've seen, and I can't understand it. It's like placing the big explanation from Psycho at the beginning instead of at the end. Also, there's no dialogue (it's acted out in pantomime) so almost nothing of what makes Holmes a great character comes across. It would be impossible to understand what's so good about the literature simply by watching this movie. Some editing could fix this, so that the first half becomes a flashback later on, and some title cards with some Holmes dialogue could be added, but in its present form, the movie doesn't work.

The Wolf Man (1941)

For me, when it comes to classic monsters, there's Dracula, Frankenstein, Godzilla, and then everyone else. I'm not nearly as interested in the Wolf Man or the Mummy or the Invisible Man or the Creature from the Black Lagoon or Barbra Streisand. But even if I had loved werewolves, I can't imagine myself ever liking this movie. It's not as embarrassingly terrible as Bride of Frankenstein, but it's far more boring. The only reason I watched it was so that I can understand what's going on when I watch Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man later, but now I feel like that wasn't necessary since nothing happens in it. It's 70 minutes long and it feels like three hours. It takes 45 minutes for Lon Chaney to turn into a werewolf, and when it finally happens, all you get are a couple of scenes of him running around the woods in a way that I guess was supposed to be terrifying. He kills a gravedigger then his father beats him to death with a cane. The end. It's not the worst of the Universal monster movies, but it's got absolutely nothing on movies like Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, or even The Ghost of Frankenstein. This is no classic.

Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)

Or rather, Frankenstein's monster meets the Wolf Man.

And indeed he does. But they're friends throughout most of the film and don't actually fight until the last five minutes, after some a**hole gives Frankenstein's monster super strength and the monster turns evil for no reason at all. Maybe getting super strength causes him to remember that Ygor's brain was put into his body in The Ghost of Frankenstein, but the rest of the movie seems to ignore that entirely. Not many movies have a hero whose goal is to commit suicide, but in this one, the Wolf Man wants to die so that he'll stop turning into a werewolf and killing people. It's silly as hell and it cheats us out of a good fight between the two monsters, but it improves on The Wolf Man by not taking 40 minutes to get to the action and it manages to be pretty entertaining. Dennis Hoey, who played Inspector Lestrade in the 1940s Sherlock Holmes films, plays basically the same character here. I kept expecting Basil Rathbone to show up and say, "Ah, Lestrade! Your idiocy knows no bounds." Rathbone should have been here. He would have made the movie a lot better.

The 13th Warrior (1999)

It's the story of Beowulf, but the supernatural stuff from the poem has a realistic basis here. For example, the monster Grendel is a tribe of savage people called the "wendol" who wear bearskins and live more like animals than humans, and the fire-breathing dragon is the wendol on horseback throwing torches. Beowulf is named Buliwyf in the movie, and it's apparently pronounced "Bulvai." Every time someone says his name, it ends up sounding like "Bullfight." Anyway, despite the changes made to the story, it plays out pretty much like every other version of Beowulf. King Hrothgar and his people are plagued by monsters and he sends for help, and Bullfight and his Viking buddies show up and tell the monsters to piss off in their own special Viking way (violently slaughtering them). In this version, they're joined by an Arab traveler played by... Antonio Banderas? Sure, why not.

This is easily the best Beowulf film that I've seen. It's not poorly acted like the Christopher Lambert and Ray Winstone versions and it's not dreadfully boring like the Gerard Butler version. (I would rather listen to a gothic high school student reciting poetry than watch that movie again.) And there's plenty of bad-ass action. Not surprising, considering it came from the director of Predator, Die Hard, and That Other Die Hard with Sam Jackson. One nice touch about the movie is that Bullfight and his friends are speaking Icelandic in the beginning, but as Antonio Banderas spends more time with them and learns their language, they start speaking English so the audience can understand them as well.

Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century (1999-2001)
Episodes:
"The Fall and Rise of Sherlock Holmes"
"The Hounds of the Baskervilles"
"The Adventure of the Six Napoleons"

Yes, I'm counting this as a movie. Piss off.

It's only a matter of time before we see Sherlock Holmes in the Hood. Until then, we'll have to be satisfied with this cartoon where Holmes wakes up in the future and there's a Watson who's a robot and other silly BS like that.

I wanted to hate this show, and I thought I was going to when I saw Holmes walking around a colony on the moon wearing that ridiculous hat that everyone associates with him. But it turns out to be a pretty clever updating of the original stories, with Holmes solving mysteries by pointing out that sound can't travel through the vacuum of space, stealing a cast of a fingerprint on a piece of tape to get through a scanner, and noticing that a space suit was torn to shreds after it had been taken off rather than before. The voice acting sucks and the opening theme song is so bad that I wouldn't be surprised if it was written by Shania Twain, but I can forgive a lot when the writing turns out to be this good.

Is anyone even reading this crap?

I don't blame you. I wouldn't read it, either.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)

I like how every time someone says the word "murder" in this movie, someone else very dramatically replies, "MURDER?!" Or rather, since they're English, "MUH-DUH?!" I also like how, according to the rules of the movie, kissing someone for the first time means that you agree to marry them. Seriously, the day after meeting her, the romantic male lead kisses the female lead, and the next moment they're talking about how they just agreed to be engaged, and their friends are congratulating them. Is that how it worked back then? Anyway, it's the same story as the other versions: a rich nobleman is found dead and his friends suspect that he was murdered (MURDERED?!) by a mythical demon hound, and Sherlock Holmes drops by to tell everyone how stupid they're being and prove that there's a rational explanation for everything. I should be sick of this movie, since I've seen it twice before and I've since seen several other adaptations of the story, but it's so well-made and the other versions are so stylistically different that it's hard to grow tired of it. I really should watch one of the crappy versions, like the one with William Shatner as the villain. Oh yes, that exists. I'll be very disappointed if I don't see that before I die.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)

Well, I finally did it. I gave up on a movie and stopped watching 25 minutes into it.

Surprisingly, it was Alfred Hitchcock, of all people, who offended me.

I'm not really "with it" on Hitchcock. Before attempting to watch this movie, I had only seen four of his films: Rope, Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, and Psycho. I loved all of them, but I've never seen some of the other famous ones, like Dial M for Murder, Vertigo, North by Northwest, or The Birds. I wanted to watch The Man Who Knew Too Much, but the one on YouTube is the 1934 version with Peter Lorre, not the 1956 version with Jimmy Stewart. But since Hitchcock directed both of them, I figured that it would still be a good way to spend 70 minutes. I was wrong. It's easy to see why Hitchcock wanted to try this movie again, because this version blows like a hurricane.

It didn't take long for me to lose patience with the stupidity of the plot. A man learns a spy secret, his daughter is kidnapped, and the kidnappers tell him that if he tells the government what he knows, his daughter will be killed. So why don't the kidnappers just kill him? I searched Google to find an answer, and the reply was that he was under the protection of the government. But he's only "under protection" in the sense that he meets and talks to someone from the government. At this point in the movie, the kidnappers have already demonstrated that they're very good at shooting people through windows, so they could have taken him out during his first meeting with the man from the government. And even if they couldn't get him through a window, he goes out into the open on the streets! I hope the plot is better in the 1956 version, because this is a load of horses**t.

I'll be back later with whatever I find to make up for the fact that I couldn't bother to finish this movie. Maybe there are some good short films on YouTube.

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1994)
Episode: "The Dying Detective"

It's a TV episode, but it's 50 minutes long. That's longer than some of the "movies" I've watched. And coupled with the 25 minutes I wasted watching The Man Who Knew Too Much, I consider my quota for the day filled. Jeremy Brett is rightly considered the best Sherlock Holmes, but that's only when he's at his best, and he frequently wasn't at his best due to a combination of his wife's death, his bipolar disorder, his heart condition, and the medication he was taking that made him gain weight. This episode is from the final year of the show, so it should be awful, but it manages to be one of the better ones. Brett looks like a corpse but his performance is great, and I like the show's approach to adapting short stories. Instead of expanding the story to fill 50 minutes, it comes up with a long backstory and fits the original story into the last 15 minutes. It's a way to remain faithful to the story while not being a waste of time to those who've already read it.

And that does it for Week 3. I promised myself that this wouldn't just turn into a Sherlock Holmes marathon, but I've got such narrow interests that it was probably inevitable. Anyway, here's the recap: September 15-21: The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), The Copper Beeches (1912), The Wolf Man (1941), Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943), The 13th Warrior (1999), Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century (1999-2001, three episodes), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934, gave up), The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1994, one episode)

Really nice idea. I don't see many movies these days and it is good to read the opinions of someone who seems to have similar tastes to my own.

It's already getting dull. I can never think of anything to watch, so lately I've just been watching old Sherlock Holmes movies and monster movies that I've already seen. And I've been cheating by watching TV episodes instead of movies. I'm building a list, though, of stuff I've never seen, and Week 4 will begin tomorrow with something I've never seen before. It's not a Sherlock Holmes movie or a monster movie, but it does have a reputation for being really horrible. I can only hope. Movies need to be either really good or really bad for me to enjoy them. Movies that are just decent or mediocre are making me want to stop watching them altogether.