A WORD TO THE WISE: BUY THIS!

A Jean Arthur box set might be easily overlooked by the casual horror fan, but a closer look reveals that two of the films contained in Sony/TCM's JEAN ARTHUR DRAMA COLLECTION ($39.99) were directed by Lambert Hillyer (DRACULA'S DAUGHTER), while the other two are the work of Roy William Neill (FRANKENSTEIN MEETS THE WOLF MAN) and Erle C. Kenton (ISLAND OF LOST SOULS, HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN). Tonight, I watched the first film in the set -- Neill's WHIRLPOOL (1934, review forthcoming on my Pause. Rewind. Obsess. blog) -- and it's fantastic. Now I'm excited about cozying up with the other three. It's a TCM website exclusive from Sony.

First Look: VIDEO WATCHDOG #168!

Read all about it... here.

Inspiring Posters: De Seta's IL FANTASMA DI SOHO

This is the striking original Enrico De Seta artwork commissioned for the due-foglia poster for Il fantasma di Soho, the Italian release of THE PHANTOM OF SOHO, a.k.a. the German krimi Das Phantom von Soho (1964). Though I don't find the sketchy execution of the work quite as ideal as much of De Seta's other poster art, I still find it to be an uncommonly haunting image and wonder from where it came in the artist's fevered imagination. It doesn't capture the atmosphere of Franz-Josef Gottlieb's highly visual, black-and-white film, nor its masked menace, a skull-faced killer wearing what appear to be glittery oven mitts, but the model is clearly based on cast member Helga Sommerfeld, who plays an employee at the Club Zanzibar.

What this image does recall, curiously enough, is the exhilarating horror of a film made almost 15 years later: the first murder in Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA (1977), when the disembodied demonic arms emerge from darkness to repeatedly plunge a long knife into the chest of ballet student Pat Hingle (Eva Axén). It would not be unreasonable to suspect that Argento, as a young man devoted to the Edgar Wallace/Bryan Edgar Wallace krimis, would have made a point of seeing this picture and spend some time in the lobby admiring and absorbing this image, enabling him to subconsciously exceed its brilliance onscreen more than a decade later.

You can get a rough idea of how De Seta's artwork was adapted to poster form in this photo, originally posted by Daniel N on the AVI Maniacs boards. I bet it sold tickets and, it goes without saying, it would never get past the severe limitations that control film advertising today.

DARK SHADOWS' Jonathan Frid (1924-2012)

It was such a full day. A group of our contributors and I spent the day e-mailing one another about DARK SHADOWS, preparing a Round Table Discussion of the classic Dan Curtis series (1966-71) which we intend to accompany VIDEO WATCHDOG 169's coverage of MPI's lavish new box set of the Original Complete Series. Today was the second day of our RTD and the day it caught fire, generating no less than 79 e-mails from a team of seven.

As our furious flurry wound down, I went downstairs to watch another six episodes of DARK SHADOWS, continuing a viewing schedule I've been keeping since late January/early February, during which time I've watched close to 300 episodes. I recently completed the original Barnabas story arc, the one that begins with Willie Loomis releasing him from his coffin in 1966 and ends with Ben Stokes placing the chains and locks on the coffin in 1795, because Barnabas' father couldn't bear to fire a silver bullet into his broken heart to end his deathless torment. There is no other tragedy in the history of horror entertainment that begins to approach it; it is less than 25% of the entire series, but to approach it requires the resolve and fortitude of a mountain climber. It is a journey worth the taking.

But I digress... after I could not bring myself to watch another episode, I came back upstairs, got online, processed a few more late-arriving emails about DARK SHADOWS, then got on Facebook, where I updated my cover photo with a picture of Jonathan Frid sitting next to a graffiti image of his best-loved character, taken from the pages of an old issue of 16 SPECTACULAR... and then the news came, posted by his co-star, his Josette, Kathryn Leigh Scott.

Jonathan Frid died last week, on Friday, April 13, at the age of 87. The news was just released this evening, most likely to protect the privacy of his loved ones.

It means staying up all night, but I need to eulogize him. He's been at the center of my consciousness this entire year -- I got a Kindle Fire for Christmas and discovered that it was ideal for viewing Netflix episodes of DARK SHADOWS at bedtime; that's how I saw a good number of my first 160 episodes before the MPI box set arrived. I've written a great deal already for the Round Table, as have others, and I feel sure that the correspondence we'll share tomorrow has every chance of exceeding what we produced today, if we can put our hearts into it. I say this because anyone who writes something sizeable about any subject does so because they want it to endure, and it's upsetting to have the centerpiece of our fête taken away from us before the icing is on, before the blue candles are lit. We had hopes that he would see it.

I need to eulogize him, as I say, but though I have seen hundreds of DARK SHADOWS episodes, I am all too aware that I have seen only a fraction of the Barnabas Collins he portrayed in totality. This fraction, those 250+ episodes, comprise the most three-dimensional vampire in the history of filmed entertainment. We know him both after and before he was cursed. No matter what evil he commits, we fully understand what motivates him; if we cannot sympathize, we cannot help but empathize. We walk beside him as we do with no other monster, because there is real depth and duration in the relationship.

Barnabas was also the first romantic vampire. A lot was written by Hollywood publicity mills in the 1930s about Bela Lugosi's sex appeal, about his brand of vampirism being "the strangest love ever known," but his Count Dracula was portrayed without emotion. To borrow one of Lugosi's great lines from THE RAVEN (1935), Frid's portrayal of Barnabas -- with his serrated bat-wing bangs, oval onyx ring and wolf's head cane -- was that of a monster "with the taint of human emotions." As the series' storyline veered from its REBECCA origins to one closer to VERTIGO, Barnabas recovered from the primal trauma of seeing his beloved Josette fall to her death from Widow's Hill by trying in vain to recast other women in her irretrievable image. When series creator Dan Curtis made DRACULA with Jack Palance, he imposed a similarly romantic storyline on Bram Stoker's novel, and this subsequently inspired Francis Ford Coppola's take on BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA and, more recently, the TWILIGHT series.

Frid created this character in a medium he could scarcely have expected to last: live on videotape, a medium networks were known to erase and reuse. Fortunately, nearly all 1225 episodes of DARK SHADOWS survive in some form or other. In them, given the nature of the medium (which was in essence live theater), you will see Jonathan Frid forget his lines, look for the teleprompter, and fumble his dialogue into amusing Yodaisms, but you will also see hundreds of episodes in which he thrills you, breaks your heart, or chills your blood.

A Canadian stage actor prior to his hiring, specializing in Shakespeare plays and English drawing room comedies, Jonathan Frid brought to DARK SHADOWS a gentlemanly, Old World sensibility that made his portrayal elementally convincing. When Barnabas first arrived in Collinsport, he carried the ancient past with him in a doting attention to language, an appreciation, shall we say, of the niceties. Introduced to governess "Vicky" Winters, who then gave her fuller name of Victoria, he expressed courteous shock that anyone should address such an attractive young woman with any lesser name.

Frid was 42 when he won the role -- about the same age as Boris Karloff when he came down the west coast from Canada, where he had been driving trucks, to win the role of the Monster in James Whale's FRANKENSTEIN (1931). As with Karloff, it was late enough in Frid's life and career for him to appreciate the good fortune it represented, not only to him but to his hard-working fellow cast members. But during his daytime tenure, he also tasted enough of fame to know that it wasn't what made him happiest. After the show's run, a period which also encompassed the feature film HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS (1970), he returned to the stage for the most part, and made the occasional film, like Oliver Stone's Canada-made directorial debut SEIZURE (1974).

Frid and several other cast alumni travelled to London last year, where they filmed cameos for Tim Burton's forthcoming DARK SHADOWS feature. Kathryn Leigh Scott documents the experience in illustrated detail in her new book (co-authored with Jim Pierson) DARK SHADOWS: RETURN TO COLLINWOOD, which includes a Foreword by Jonathan Frid. Last year, he also participated in an audiobook project, DARK SHADOWS: THE NIGHT WHISPERS, which recently won the Rondo Award for Best Horror CD.

In what now amounts to his final public gesture, Frid personally signed 2500 cards that were included in MPI Home Video's coffin-shaped box set DARK SHADOWS THE COMPLETE ORIGINAL SERIES, a 133-disc limited edition set that sold out well in advance of its street date. It is the most handsome DVD box set I've ever seen, but -- the next time I reach for a new set of discs -- it's going to be bittersweet to have to open Jonathan's coffin to fetch it! (For those of you who missed obtaining one of your own, an unnumbered, unsigned second edition is being released later this summer.)

There will be much more to say in the pages of VIDEO WATCHDOG 169. For now, join me in extending our fondest farewell to a genuine horror icon.

The Olympic Swimmer from Planet Ummo

Michael Rennie (right) goes to work on Paul Naschy in ASSIGNMENT TERROR.

Saw an episode of THE PATTY DUKE SHOW this evening called "The Girl From N.E.P.H.E.W." in which Patty's family play host to a debonair guest who works for INTERPOL, whom Patty assumes to be a secret agent. This fellow was played by an actor named Murray Rose, whose distinctive voice sounded weirdly familiar to me. About halfway through the show, I realized where I'd heard him before....

He dubbed Michael Rennie in the Paul Naschy monster rally ASSIGNMENT TERROR (Los monstruos del terror, 1969)!

Rose's IMDb page doesn't show too many screen credits, but his Wikipedia page offers some interesting revelations about the man whose voice issued commands to the Werewolf, the Mummy and, of course, the Faranksellen Monster. However, it won't tell you anything about his dubbing career.

A Rose for Natalie Perrey (1929-2012)

We are now already nearly four months into 2012 and much of my past year has been spent in deep contemplation of -- one might say in communion with -- the late Jean Rollin. In the course of studying, enjoying and empathizing with his films, I have come to a better appreciation of the fact that his films, however personal they were, were not simply the work of one man, but of a special group of people who were somehow consecrated to his dreams, who encircled him like the participants in a great séànce and helped conjure his fantasies into being on celluloid.

Foremost among these remarkable people was the lovely lady pictured at the left, Natalie Perrey, who passed away sometime today of undisclosed causes, just one month after her 83rd birthday. The news reached me like a ripple in the pond of communication: I was informed by her friend Daniel Gouyette, who had known and adored Natalie since they worked together on DRACULA'S FIANCÉE (1999); he received the news from titles designer Jean-Noël Delamarre, a ripple nearer the center, who had worked on films with her even before Rollin entered their mutual picture, since the short film BARTLEBY (1970). He was "Nat"'s companion for many years.

Writing about Rollin has pulled me closer into the orbits of these people, close enough that I can feel a sense of personal loss. Thanks to Daniel, Natalie and I were able to exchange little salutations of mutual appreciation, like this sweet photo of the two of them, which Daniel sent after they read my Rollin essay for the booklet included with the first round of Redemption Blu-rays. (Look closely and you will see in Daniel's hand Natalie's keepsake of Rollin, the Iron Rose itself.) Or the photo further down, which shows Natalie and Daniel posing with the then-current issue of VIDEO WATCHDOG. These were dear to receive then, and they are all the more precious now.

Daniel and I spoke on the telephone last week and he finished our long talk by urging me to come to Paris "while it's still here -- not while you're still here," he clarified, "but while this Paris is still here." I knew what he meant and, already, much too suddenly, that Paris is no more. A diminished Paris now stands in its place because this lady is gone. I am not just speaking of someone who worked on some horror movies, but of a great facilitator of the art of her time, someone who was a member of the French Resistance at the age of 12, someone who spent the two weeks prior to her last birthday in a hospital because she was mugged and fought back. As Daniel told me while relaying the incomprehensible news of her passing, "She fought against injustices all her life. She was so different from the people who were just hanging around... She was special." He also stresses to me that she wasn't to be mourned; she wouldn't want that. So I am thinking of all the news she has to share with Jean.

Daniel's interviews with Natalie can be found on the Redemption Blu-rays of THE NUDE VAMPIRE, THE IRON ROSE and LIPS OF BLOOD, and she will be back with more stories to tell in the next batch.

Natalie began working in films in the late 1960s, after raising a family. (The French actress Cyrille Gaudin, who played the title role in DRACULA'S FIANCÉE under the name Cyrille Isté, is her daughter.) She started out as a costumer on Jean-Pierre Bastid's Hallucinations Sadiques (1969), moved up to script supervisor on Bastid's short BARTLEBY and then served as a production assistant on Rollin's THE NUDE VAMPIRE, in the course of which she was recruited to act. An attractive woman of 40, she was asked to play a little old woman in the film's penultimate scene, and was somehow able to then inhabit a role she would still be playing in Rollin's La Nuit des Horloges almost a half-century later. She worked with many different directors -- Bastid of course, Jean-Pierre Mocky, Jean-François Davy, Pierre Unia, Gérard Vernier, Claude Mulot and others -- but her devotion to Rollin was unique.

She was a production assistant on THE SHIVER OF THE VAMPIRES, then she advanced to script supervisor and assistant director on many other films while also playing important, typically maternal roles. She is the woman who lays flowers on the grave of the two lovers in THE IRON ROSE, the protagonist's mother in LIPS OF BLOOD, the mother in NIGHT OF THE HUNTED, the schoolteacher in THE TWO VAMPIRE ORPHANS, the sorceress in DRACULA'S FIANCÉE, and she is one of the principal characters in La Nuit des Horloges, serving as a kind of pallbearer for Rollin himself. The IMDb lists 21 different acting roles under her name, and it is by no means a complete list. And in addition to playing these roles, she was assisting with costumes, securing locations, organizing the shoots, distracting graveyard attendants with bottles of wine. She was the perfect example of the kind of person who seldom receives acknowledgement from writers and historians, but without whom the movies could not exist -- because dreamers can't do much of anything by themselves. Those of us who love Rollin's films feel indebted to him, but he surely felt indebted to her. She was the backbone and sometimes the very sinew of his filmography.

Natalie's most visible accomplishments were not necessarily her most notable. She also had two original screenplays produced, both erotic in nature: Rollin's FLY ME THE FRENCH WAY with Joëlle Coeur, and Didier Philippe Gérard's s Les Hôstesses du sexe with Karine Gambier. In 1977, she became a film editor with Jean-Pierre Mocky's Le roi des bricoleurs and she continued to work in this capacity until her final editorial job in 2007.

What Natalie Perrey's passing brings to mind is that what was true of the places in Rollin's films at the time he made them -- that they belonged to the past, being torn down in some cases almost as soon as he filmed them -- is becoming true of the people and faces in them. To think of Natalie speaking to camera about the absent director in La Nuit des Horloges will doubtless become doubly poignant now that she shares his mysterious absence. With her death, Rollin's life's work takes its intended next step away from the status of fantasy toward becoming not so indistinguishable from the former realities that reside in our memory. Like a bubble within a bubble, or as Edgar Allan Poe described it, while writing about a beach we might now call "Rollinesque"...

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

In order of their appearance, the above photographs are the copyrighted property of Grégory Pons, Véronique D. Travers, Véronique D. Travers and Daniel Gouyette, and appear here with their kind permission.

First Look: VIDEO WATCHDOG #167

For more details and select preview pages, visit our Coming Soon page here.

VW Rondo Nominated Articles Now Online for Free Viewing!

To all those who are voting for the 2011 Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards...

We'd like to encourage you to vote for VIDEO WATCHDOG's nominees in the Best Article, Best Interview and Best Cover categories. To help you make a more informed judgment, we are making our nominees visible online until the Rondo voting ends, at 12:00am midnight on April 1. You can find links to the pertinent pieces by following this link.

The articles are presented the way they look in the magazine, only one page at a time, and should be readable on all computers, iPads, Kindles, etc. without the use of Flash.

If you've already voted, bear in mind that you are allowed to reconsider your votes in any category until the close of voting. These special links will remain available till the voting ends, so enjoy... and feel free to spread the word.

Remembering David Jones (1945-2012)

This picture of actor/musician David Jones and I -- "my two favorite guys" -- was taken by Donna backstage at the Monkees concert here at Cincinnati's Aronoff Center last June 25. The news of his passing this morning hit me very personally because I've always known that I might someday have to break this news to Donna, who's loved him since 1966. She's hurting, of course, but she is taking it well and feeling fortunate for all the times we were able to meet him. She didn't expect that he, the youngest of the group and seemingly the one in most robust health (he was a horseman who rode every opportunity he had), would be the first of the Monkees to go.

We first met at a 1994 performance of GREASE in which he appeared with Brooke Shields and Sally Struthers; I pointed him out to Donna, talking with some audience members near the stage before the show began, and I watched her go down and have her long dreamed-of moment with him. I saw her speak to him, get his attention, and she said something to him that made him step forward and envelop her in his arms like it was absolutely the right thing he needed to hear at that moment. Then he walked her back up the aisle to our seats -- "you walked me down the aisle, and he walked me up the aisle" she likes to say -- and we met and he gave Donna a pre-signed photo he carried in his breast pocket and said he hoped we would enjoy the show. We did.

Since then we've met again several times, and Donna interviewed him by telephone for THE CINCINNATI POST, a dream assignment offered to her by our friends Wayne and Jan Perry. As Donna told me, a sudden heart attack was the best way for him to go -- he went in his sleep, suffered no inconveniences of old age nor long debilitating illnesses, and he continued performing and meeting his public right up to the end. I know that he had remarried to Jessica, a very young Cuban flamenco dancer, just a few years ago; he'd written and published his autobiography; he had seen his back catalogue of music with The Monkees reissued in impressively thorough and annotated sets from Rhino (thank you, Andrew Sandoval); and he was working toward a dream of building a combination theater and memorabilia museum in his adopted home town of Beavertown, PA.

Davy was incontestably the heart and soul of The Monkees, though one might argue that Micky had the more versatile voice, that Peter was the best musician, or that Mike the best songwriter. He's the one they can't do Monkees reunions without. No one is saying this yet, because it's hard enough just to lose him, but I suspect that David's passing will mean probably the end of The Monkees as well. Mike's not going back on the road in that format, and Peter and Micky as a performing duo would seem like bookends without a book. Of course, they'll all continue to play Monkees songs live, as will young and old garage bands all over the world.

There are several pics I've taken of Donna over the years with her beloved idol, including the one below, but the one I've posted above is the only one of the two of us together. We gave him a copy of our HEAD coverage on that occasion, and he signed my copy of Rhino's magnificent HEAD box set. In my experience, David -- as he referred to himself and as was his prefered billing -- was a very nice man, the most generous of all the Monkees to his fans, always the last man standing there to sign autographs. God bless him for always going that extra mile, and for making my little wife's spirit soar for all these years.

Franco's Muse: Lina Romay (1954-2012)

Tragic news has emerged today from Spain, where actor Antonio Mayans -- her co-star in dozens of films -- formally announced the February 15 death of Lina Romay, the actress and filmmaker best-known as the wife and longtime creative partner of Spanish director Jesús "Jess" Franco. A cancer victim, she was only 57 years old.

Born Rosa María Almirall Martínez in June 1954, Lina Romay -- renamed after the retired former singer with Xavier Cugat's band, who died a couple of years ago -- entered the world of cinema in a brief appearance in Jess Franco's film THE EROTIC RITES OF FRANKENSTEIN (1972) as a gypsy girl, which appears in only the Spanish variant of the picture. She came to Franco's attention as the art student girlfriend of his stills photographer Ramón Ardid, but it soon became apparent to both Jess and Lina that they were personally and creatively inseparable. Their attraction ended Franco's marriage to his script girl Nicole Guettard, who disappeared from his filmography circa 1974, returned briefly circa 1980, and died in 1996. For Franco's part, having found it difficult to reassemble himself following the 1970 accidental death of his most promising actress Soledad Miranda, he claimed to sense a reincarnation of Soledad in Lina, and she -- who never met her predecessor -- claimed to sense her presence watching over them at times, as if from within.

Her first starring role for Franco was 1973's FEMALE VAMPIRE, which exists in no fewer than three distinct variants: mainstream, erotic and hardcore. A self-proclaimed exhibitionist, Lina had no problem with performing hardcore straight or lesbian acts onscreen, and she was adamant offscreen that these were things she did in character, not as herself. The IMDb lists 118 different films to her credit, but this is hardly a complete accounting. Her filmography swells to a still larger number if we take into account the variants that exist of numerous Franco films; she also worked on rare occasions for other directors, including Carlos Aured, Erwin C. Dietrich and Andreas Bethmann. During the 1980s period when she and Franco were earning their incomes from pornographic films, she sometimes worked under the secondary pseudonyms Candy (or Candice) Coster and Lulu Laverne, accepting directorial credit for some of them.

No other woman gave quite as much of herself to the fantastic cinema as Lina Romay. The sprawling filmography of Jess Franco can be divided, unevenly and much in her favor, between the films he made Before Lina and With Lina; she became so synonymous with his work, as its focus and behind-the-scenes facilitator, that an After Lina period seems frankly unimaginable. As Franco's muse, Lina inspired as many as 150 or more films, and in many of them she withheld nothing of herself from his voracious camera -- body or soul. Theirs was an ideal meeting of exhibitionist and voyeur, both giving generously to one another in one of cinema's most provocative love stories. As the years passed, Lina changed and her body changed, but it never mattered to Franco, who continued to star her and film her as if she were the most desirable woman on earth. This is not to say that Franco's adoration of her was blind; on the contrary, Lina became a skilled actress under his tutelage, acquitting herself admirably not only as vampire women and nymphomaniacs, but in roles requiring the deft touch of a light comedienne. She could carry a film without dialogue; she could be funny, tragic, insanely desirable, shocking, even embarrassing in ways that left one admiring her bravery. On the two occasions when she ended a film by screaming -- LORNA... THE EXORCIST (1974) and MACUMBA SEXUAL (1980) -- she showed she could chill the blood like no one else, on the strength of her performance alone.

In Brian Horrorwitz's ANTENA CRIMINAL, a documentary about the filming of BLIND TARGET (2000, one of their lesser pictures), a candid illustration of their 40-year union emerges as Franco loses his temper when a scene continually goes wrong. He scolds a young actress and upsets himself to the point where he had to leave the set and sit down for a smoke in another room. Horrorwitz's camera holds on his attempt to recompose himself, and we see Lina find him, lean into him and stroke his head calmingly. It is the most privileged glimpse of their private selves we have, unless we count Lina's unbilled presence on the evening in February 2009 when Franco's career was rewarded with the Goya Award. During this presentation, Lina wheeled her husband onstage to generous applause, held his microphone as he accepted the honor, and bowed to kiss his head. The moment becomes even more poignant if we realize that, though they had been lovers and collaborators for 35 years, on the evening of this life achievement recognition they were technically newlyweds.

I never met Lina, but I always imagined we would meet someday. It is unthinkable to me that Jess, now in his early 80s, has survived her. On the occasions I've written to him, it was Lina who responded to me on his behalf, and she was always very sweet and appreciative. I last heard from her on April 28 of last year, when she and Jess responded to my enthusiastic VIDEO WATCHDOG review of Mondo Macabro's LORNA... THE EXORCIST: "Dear Tim, We are very much touched by your opinion of Lorna. Not a lot of people understood the film ("another Jess Franco sex film"). Thank you. Take care, Jess & Lina."

Those who admire the work of Jess Franco cannot help but become deeply involved in it, which means that, in the course of our exploration, we end up seeing more of Lina than we see of any other actress -- seeing more of her, and seeing more OF her -- so the news of her premature death strikes us in an uncommonly personal place. As the incarnate center of a filmography I take very personally, I had and will always have a great affection for her. Anything I have ever heard or learned about her -- including the only extensive interview she ever granted, to Kevin Collins for his booklet THE LINA ROMAY FILE: THE INTIMATE CONFESSIONS OF AN EXHIBITIONIST -- only confirmed what her work onscreen led me to suspect. I remember Kevin telling me that, at the time he recorded the interview, he asked Lina to sign something and she responded "Me?" She had starred in at least 100 films and no one before Kevin had ever asked Lina Romay for her autograph. This changed as she and Jess subsequently flew to different points around the world, including America, to make various convention appearances.

Jess Franco and Lina Romay were more than a team; they were an indivisible creative force for roughly 40 years. My heart goes out to my favorite living director at this time of most terrible loss -- to him, to me, to us, to cinema.

VIDEO WATCHDOG Nominated for 8 Rondo Awards!

The ballots for the 10th Annual Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Awards were made public tonight, and we're proud to announce that VIDEO WATCHDOG and its contributors have been nominated for eight (8) Rondo Awards in five (5) different categories this year! Our nominations are...

Best Magazine of 2011

Best Article:

• 'The Green Slime Are Coming! The Green Slime Are Here!' by Bill Cooke, VIDEO WATCHDOG #162. An 'old school' Watchdog comparison of the film's U.S. and Japanese versions.

• 'Scouting the Singularity,' by Thomas A. Foster, VIDEO WATCHDOG #165. How dreams of a tech leap forward for mankind has been supplanted by films of apocalyptic hysteria.

Best Interview:

• Tanya Constantine: 'My Father, Eddie Constantine,' by Tim Lucas, VIDEO WATCHDOG #163. A daughter reveals the man behind Lemmy Caution in this wide-ranging talk.

• Mimsy Farmer: 'The Mimsy Farmer Experience,' by Mark F. Berry. VIDEO WATCHDOG #162. Extensive talk with star of dragstrip films, Four Flies on Grey Velvet and more.
• June Lockhart: 'On She-Wolf of London,' by Tom Weaver, VIDEO WATCHDOG #160. Actress looks back on one of her earliest roles with laughter and some chagrin.
Best Cover:

• VIDEO WATCHDOG 163 by Charlie Largent

Best Blog of 2011:

• Video WatchBlog   Scaled back, but Tim Lucas' musings are still worth the wait.

To see the lists of other nominees and to cast your vote by e-mail, including write-in votes for some of the most coveted categories, visit the Rondo Awards webpage here.

Anthony Fremont's Last Laugh

I'm not listing the episodic television I watch on my new Pause. Rewind. Obsess. blog, but I just finished enjoying my latest viewing of the classic TWILIGHT ZONE episode "It's A Good Life" from Season 3, followed by a listen to Bill Mumy's fun commentary. I think it's the very best (and subtlest) of Rod Serling's many tyrant-themed TZ episodes, and I was especially pleased to be reminded of the brilliant end credits image, which Mumy himself failed to mention or notice. It's a shot of the much-mentioned cornfield we never see in the episode itself, which ends the program on the chilling note that, no matter how much we may have liked meeting little Anthony Fremont, he must have decided he didn't care for us very much... and wished us all away.

A New Year, A New Blog

Seeing that my screening diary, conceived as a new discipline, was coinciding with the arrival of a new year, it makes sense to me to spin it off as a new blog. Therefore, just a short time ago, I launched my newest project on Blogger, entitled PAUSE. REWIND. OBSESS. It's my new online screening diary.

Mind you, I'm not abandoning Video WatchBlog, just adding to it; anything I'm inspired to publish online outside the scope of the screening diary will appear here, as usual. I hope you will enjoy it and, if you do, please continue to support VIDEO WATCHDOG and its many fine products.

Happy New Year!

Screening Diary: Wolfie and Roughie

CAPERUCITA Y PULGARCITO CONTRO LOS MONSTRUOS ("Little Red Riding Hood and Tom Thumb vs. the Monsters"): This is the original Spanish version of the film later imported to the US by K. Gordon Murray Productions as LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD AND THE MONSTERS, available for the first time with English subtitles. Following other LRRH sequels, this is both sequel to LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD and 1957's TOM THUMB, as it finds Wolfie (from LRRH) and the Ogre (from TT) imprisoned in the castle of the Witch Queen by their fellow monsters for turning good. (We see them taken to a torture chamber where their feet are tickled.) Red and a slingshot-happy Tom Thumb (restored to full size by the Morning Fairy, which brings out a latent macho swagger), along with lovable Stinky Skunk and a pet dog, coincidentally rescue them when they must go to the Witch's castle to undo the haunting of their village's local water source, which has turned all their townsfolk into monkeys! In addition to the green-skinned Queen out of SNOW WHITE via THE WIZARD OF OZ, the monsters include a Hurricane Fairy (like the one seen in Ptushko's THE SWORD AND THE DRAGON), Two-In-One (half-man, half-monster like the Manster), a robot called "the Alien", Mr. Vampire (dressed in a Carradine-like top hat and cape, with Christopher Lee fangs), Frankenstino, and a pinheaded Boogie Man (amusingly subtitled as "the bugger man"). Stinky actually combats one monster by bending over and gassing him from his posterior, and Tom sings a song boasting that he's so tiny, "even with a magnifying glass, you could not find my hiney." Not unlike a weird conflation of Bert Gordon's THE MAGIC SWORD and THE BOY AND THE PIRATES, with songs. The entertainment value speaks for itself. Viewed on DVD.

THE PICK-UP: Sloppily-made but ambitious and attention-grabbing, this obscure 1968 roughie from R. L. (Lee) Frost first aroused fan interest when an exciting, hard-hitting trailer was included on one of Something Weird's TWISTED SEX trailer compilations. It was considered lost till one last-known surviving print was discovered, with hard Danish subtitles, in an overseas film vault. Two pick-up men are driving over a million dollars in protection money from Vegas to a mob rep in LA, but plead car trouble in order to take in a motel party with two attractive ladies picked up along the way, raising concerns at both ends of their itinerary. A bad idea turns worse when the women handcuff them and abscond with the dough, but are they in it for themselves, or are they working for someone else? The mostly handheld B&W photography is unconcerned with composition, but there are occasional arty touches like cuts to still-photo montages during the more violent moments. The dialogue is no more than you'd expect, the acting barely acceptable, but the sleazy paperback plot is pleasingly elaborate and stocked with twists and plenty of back-stabbing characters, so it plays similarly to Bava's BAY OF BLOOD; even the silly finale is not tonally unlike the surprise postscript of Bava's film. This was anonymously co-produced by David L. Friedman, who actually plays a pivotal role and seems to enjoy his long career's only bed scene with a naked lady. The library cues scoring the film are well-chosen and amount to a distinctive, edgy score. Pretty much the missing link between the 1960s roughies and the more ambitious crime sleaze epitomized by the GINGER films of the early 1970s. Viewed on Something Weird DVD-R.

Last Night's Screening

ENTER THE VOID: I'm coming to this 2009 film a bit too belatedly, I feel; it's now very hard, if not impossible, to think of it as anything but a counterbalance to Terrence Malick's THE TREE OF LIFE. Though akin to toxic eye candy with its increasingly fluorescent necrotic imagery of a gargantuan toy Tokyo, I liked this film to the same extent I found Malick's alternately boring and aggravating, though the void of its title is less indicative of the void of death than of the void of a life devoid of substance and exposure to nature. It's a painful film to watch, but its use of rhyming images is exceptional in its depiction of how events imprint us psychologically; I was particularly impressed when one scene of Paz de la Huerta cutting up vegetables in the kitchen was used a second time to show how something secondary and previously unnoted within that moment had also left its own imprint on the observer. On the other hand, Hitchcock's ROPE-learned maxim that scenes must be cut to become cinema still holds water; it's the cuts or dissolves from one image to another that give this story its meaning. Otherwise, the death motifs and the plays on its title are preposterously foregrounded and the film wastes entirely too much time floating through walls and bouncing from one building to another for the sake of sustaining the main character and POV's spectral fluidity. In one of those intervals, I found myself wondering how this film would have looked had it been made about a late 19th century farmer. All of them died too. Viewed on Netflix.

What I'm Watching

Though I assume many working critics do, I've never personally kept a list of the films I watch. The FILM COMMENT column about "The Last 10 Films I Saw" always bewilders me: how do they know? do they keep a list? do they just make this stuff up? But it occurs to me now that the information might be useful to me at a later date, as when compiling year's best lists and such, but. I am also tempted to make this resolve because it is the time of year to make resolutions and, frankly, because I need the discipline.

In the time I've become more casual -- indeed, lax -- about this blog, the muscle I formerly used to maintain it has grown flabby and it has begun to affect my approach to writing adversely in other ways. I think it's necessary to embrace a minor commitment like this, if only to make it that much easier to embrace more significant writing commitments. The muscle needs to be ready and prepared. So I'll not only list the films but add some comments about them as well.

I caught a bug over the holidays and am still recovering. Yesterday I didn't feel like doing much other than watching movies, so I actually watched five.

CEREMONY: The first feature written and directed by Max Winkler, the son of actor Henry Winkler, this is a moderately surprising retread of one of the perennial chick flick situations: a former boyfriend crashes the wedding of the girl he never forgot, determined to win her back. In this case, the bride is the formidable Uma Thurman, both taller and older than leading man Michael Angarano. Character is usually the saving grace of such films, and this has some memorable ones and some clever dialogue, but mostly it has the courage to go somewhere other than where the genre has taught us to expect. I liked supporting actress Brooke Bloom particularly, and was impressed by the taste of whoever selected the source music. Viewed randomly on cable.

ONE NIGHT IN THE TROPICS: Abbott & Costello's first feature casts them under their real names as amiable wise guys serving as backup to reformed gangster William Frawley. Their routines seem a bit forceably shoe-horned into a story derived from LOVE INSURANCE, one of the rare non-Charlie Chan novels written by Ohio native Earl Derr Biggers. Top-billed Allan Jones and Nancy Kelly sing, none too memorably, and THE MUMMY'S HAND's Peggy Moran has a number too, which shows singing to be not particularly her forté. Kept daydreaming throughout about how Scorsese might have worked with Costello, given the chance, because he seemed to me like a more docile Joe Pesci in this. Was surprised to discover that the "Sir Walter Raleigh" coat-over-the-puddle gag from A HARD DAY'S NIGHT was stolen from here. Viewed on Universal DVD.

BUCK PRIVATES: Abbott & Costello were the best-reviewed aspect of ONE NIGHT IN THE TROPICS, so they top-lined their second feature and first real movie vehicle. They play two sidewalk tie-selling hustlers who are chased by street cop Nat Pendelton into a movie theater that's doubling as a recruitment center, ushering them into the Army. A much better movie than their first, given additional zest by the Andrews Sisters (who melodicize their way through several numbers, including their signature tune "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy") and some impressively rubber-legged boogie-woogie dancers. Making the Army look like Heaven on earth, with free cigarettes and doughnuts and pretty WACs offering their phone numbers, this became Universal's biggest money-maker to date, which explains why some of its gags were subsequently quoted in Warner Bros. cartoons like "To Duck Or Not To Duck," which reprised some of the boxing gags. Viewed on Universal DVD.

THE SEARCH FOR BRIDEY MURPHY: I've long wanted to see this supposedly influential Paramount release, based on a best-selling real life account of a hypnotist who successfully regressed a friend's wife to a past life in Ireland. Louis Heyward hosts the film in the manner of a TV or radio show, but as the hypnotist rather than himself, walking from a bare set area onto a furnished set to answer a ringing phone that propels the plot into motion. SHADOW OF A DOUBT's Teresa Wright, deliberately muted and deprived of closeups in her early scenes, becomes the unexpected center of attention as the sessions begin. THE THING'S Kenneth Tobey plays her husband. Scripted and directed by Noel Langley (one of the screenwriters of THE WIZARD OF OZ), this is an intriguing experiment in docudrama filmmaking, and one of the earliest screen investigations into untapped areas of the mind; it's most significant success is that it manages to hold one's interest without action, relying almost entirely on Q&A dialogue derived from the original recordings. Viewed on Netflix.

LIMITLESS: I'd not heard of this one before, but I found the premise hard to resist: a blocked writer uses an experimental drug that makes the brain's entire capacity available to the user, allowing him to write a first novel in only four days before sending him off in constant search of newer, more challenging, eventually deadlier frontiers. Bradley Cooper makes a believable protagonist and Robert DeNiro lends third act gravitas as a business tycoon who elicits Cooper's aid in facilitating a corporate merger that would make him a man of unparalleled power and influence. Teeming with interesting, well-cast secondary characters and unexpected snaring incident, it's also refreshing in that it remains true to what's conceptually exhilarating about the drug, teasing the possibility of a dark outcome without finally submitting to it. Directed by Neil Burger, whose THE ILLUSIONIST I admired. Watching this, I was reminded at times of such disparate films as BRAINSTORM, STRANGE DAYS and OLDBOY. Worth seeing. Viewed on Netflix.

My Return to the NaschyCast!

Now available for your listening pleasure is my return visit to Troy Guinn & Rod Barnett's Paul NaschyCast, which you can download from the link at the bottom of Rod's intro here. We recorded our two-hour conversation at the hush-hush Wonderfest reunion last month and discussed (among other films) Carlos Aured's HORROR RISES FROM THE TOMB, Javier Aguirre's HUNCHBACK OF THE MORGUE and Jacinto Molina's THE BEAST AND THE MAGIC SWORD, while also managing to touch on other filmmakers as diverse as Jess Franco and Eric Rohmer. My views on these films were sometimes at odds with my hosts' opinions, so this led to some debate and discussion I believe you'll find interesting.

Remembering Richard Gordon (1925-2011)

Bela Lugosi with Richard Gordon (left) and Alex Gordon (right), the origins of Monster Kid fandom.

The first film I ever reviewed professionally was HORROR ON SNAPE ISLAND (1971), now better known as TOWER OF EVIL, a Richard Gordon production. When I attended my first convention, FanEx in 1991, Richard Gordon -- to my immense surprise and delight -- was the first friend I made. I bumped into him in the lobby, we started talking about that early CINEFANTASTIQUE review, about our earlier telephone contact when I was seeking to license clips from his films for a documentary that never got made, about his director friend Antony Balch (who fascinated me because of his connection to William S. Burroughs), and the serendipitous fact that the first book I ever published, the "Video Times" paperback YOUR GUIDE TO MOVIE CLASSICS ON TAPES AND DISC in 1985, had been co-written with none other than his older brother, Alex Gordon. Alex and I never met, but we collaborated through the mail.

I had to break off our conversation, engrossing and friendly and exciting as it was, because I needed to help Donna set up Video Watchdog's dealer's room table, but Dick (as he prefered to be addressed), beaming with friendly engagement, happily followed along and we continued talking as he perused issues of the magazine -- to which he promptly subscribed. I haven't done an actual head count, and don't really want to, but I strongly suspect that, in the decade-plus that followed, Dick Gordon wrote more letters to VIDEO WATCHDOG than any other reader. And, except for a couple such letters that may have fallen prey to my sometimes-less-than-professional filing system, every one was published. And proudly so.

One of the many reviewing duties presently in front of me is Tom Weaver's recent book THE HORROR HITS OF RICHARD GORDON, which now turns bittersweet. I am grateful to Tom for compiling that book in time for Dick to see it, but even moreso for being the friend to him that geography and my own disparate ambitions did not allow me to be, keeping him occupied and feeling appreciated and involved in life and film for as long as he did. I once wrote in an editorial what Dick's friendship to me, to Donna and our magazine meant to me, and I fortunately have Tom's memory, written to me, of reading that editorial to Dick and how it moved him and how he asked Tom to read it to him a second time. Thanks to Tom's sharing of that story, I felt a very real connection to Dick that transcended our first and only physical meeting twenty years ago. That's a very sweet memory and, of all the people I've known in this business over the years, it's hard to think of another memory concerning them that's as sweet in quite the same way. When he suffered a grievous personal loss a few years ago, I picked up the phone to share my condolences and we spoke as though no time had passed. I'm a bit of a mystic, and when I think of how this was possible, after nearly twenty years, and all the other criss-crossing that took place in our lives prior to our actual meeting, well, it gives one pause... to wonder, and to appreciate.

As Tom told me earlier today after relating this sad news, when I referred to Dick as the first Monster Kid, "That would be his older brother Alex, but Monster Kid Membership Card #0002 ain't too shabby." Indeed not. In observing Dick's passing, it is less his films that come to my mind and heart than this connection to the origins of Monster Kiddom I was privileged to have by sort of knowing and working with both of the Brothers Gordon. Their earlier example, so bold and enterprising, made it feel less strange and more respectable to do what I do, to love what I love, to be who I am -- and to be doing in middle age what I've been doing since I was a teenager. I am still trying to emulate them to the extent of actually breaking into the business of making films.

He passed away in hospital this afternoon at the age of 85. How serendipitous, how he would have loved knowing, that his last night on Earth would be Hallowe'en!

He'll be missed.

First Look: VIDEO WATCHDOG #165

For a fuller listing of contents and select preview pages, click "Coming Soon" on the Video Watchdog website's main page!

A Bad Week for Beloved Character Actors

Charles Napier (April 12, 1936 - October 5, 2011), the jut-jawed, horse-toothed, all-man actor who starred in numerous Russ Meyer pictures, was featured in several Jonathan Demme films, appeared in the classic STAR TREK episode "The Way to Eden" and, along the way, provided the roars for Lou Ferrigno's THE INCREDIBLE HULK. He was 75.

David Hess (September 19, 1942 - October 8, 2011), actor and musician responsible for writing Pat Boone's "Speedy Gonzales" (under the name David Dante) and for scaring the hell out of 1970s audiences with his uncomfortably real portrayals of psychopaths in Wes Craven's THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, Ruggero Deodato's THE HOUSE AT THE EDGE OF THE PARK and other thrillers. In his last film SMASH CUT (2009), he acted alongside Sasha Grey, Michael Berryman, Herschell Gordon Lewis and THE WIZARD OF GORE's Ray Sager, playing a horror film director in the recursive gore flick hommage. He and Charles Napier acted together in Deodato's BODY COUNT (1987), starring VIDEO WATCHDOG interview subject Mimsy Farmer. He was 69.

Additionally -- or should I say "subtractively" -- this past week also claimed the lives of onar Films founder Bill Barounis, actress/novelist Diane Cilento (THE WICKER MAN), actor George Baker (THE CURSE OF THE FLY, ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE), Pentangle founder/folk guitarist Bert Jansch, pianist Roger Williams (who had hit singles with the themes from AUTUMN LEAVES and BORN FREE in the mid-'50s and '60s) and, of course, Apple Inc. founder Steve Jobs.