Time to get started on my blog post for our 2nd Annual
Halloween Movie Extravaganza. Well-attended on Saturday the 27th, we had all the Usual
Suspects attending (not the movie). For this year’s lineup, I got things rolling with an old Boomer
classic, It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown, always a favorite. And,
I believe we’ve started a new tradition – starting each Halloween Movie-a-Thon
with Charlie and the Gang.
What I didn’t know until I did a bit of research was that
this was the third Peanuts special on TV. First was A Charlie Brown Christmas
(and, it’s a toss-up between the Christmas one and Great Pumpkin as to which
would be my favorite), then, second, Charlie Brown’s All Stars, which I don’t even
remember (Don’t know why I didn’t see it when I was a kid). Then, third, Great
Pumpkin.
We (as did everyone we knew) owned one black-and-white
television back then, so my first memory of watching Great Pumpkin was black-and-white. We celebrated
Halloween on Halloween night, October 31st, the way it’s supposed to
be done. We were an army of sack and pillow case, candy-hunting,
trick-or-treating goblins, witches, devils, and ghosts. Halloween came on a
Monday night that year, 1966, The Year of the Great Pumpkin, and there wasn’t
even any thought of not starting until after it was good and dark. I mean, come
on! That’s when everything lurks.
What I want to know is, when exactly did we pull the teeth from Halloween?
Okay, enough ranting. I could go on boringly about the Death of Halloween,
but let’s continue with the main topic.
We followed Great Pumpkin with a Christopher Lee film from
1966 called Circus of Fear (Psycho-Circus for the U. S. release), though it was
much more a mystery than a horror. I found it a little slow, but it was good to
get a Christopher Lee film in. Based on a novel by Edgar Wallace, who wrote a
series of detective novels, and also created a character called the Green Archer
(who was, perhaps, the inspiration for the Green Arrow?), it dealt with a malevolent
dwarf, a robbery, and murder, and everyone hiding out at the circus. Probably
won’t watch this one again.
Next came a silent film called The Magician (1926) with Paul
Wegener as the title character. Our Classic Horror Film Group saw Mr. Wegener a while back in The Golem.
With those strange, strange eyes, and his enormous size, he looks a lot like a
Golem, although in this film he’s a magician who wants to create life. Only a
slight problem stood in his way. He needed the heart of a virgin, and, whereas
he did find a virgin, seems she wanted to hang on to her heart, as she was using it at the time. There’s a fiancé who
never grew any… gumption… ‘til near the end of the movie. Most of the time he
barely seemed alive, and he suffered from paralyzing indecisiveness pretty much
until the end of the film. Paul Wegener was properly disturbing and commanded any
scene he was in. Loved this film, especially the special
effects.
We then jumped forward to 1964 for an episode of The Outer
Limits long-windedly titled “The Production and Decay of Strange Particles”.
Not one of their better episodes, but it was fun to watch for the
black-and-white moodiness. Featuring a pre-Trek Leonard Nimoy, this episode
dealt with scientists going “…where no one has gone…”, etc., playing around with
nuclear material and, Whoops!, ripping a hole in the space/time continuum, and
letting some uninvited glowing-and-sparking guests through. A lot of the show
dealt with the chief scientist wringing his hands uselessly, saying, “Oh, I
should’ve known better”.
Our final true horror flick, The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967),
was a treat both for those us who saw it way back in the early 70’s, and for
those who were watching it for the first time. I’d forgotten just how fun,
quirky, and magical it was. Directed by, starred in, and co-written by Roman
Polanski, it was, for many of us, our first introduction to vampires. If not
this film, then one of the Christopher Lee Dracs. But, at any rate, this is a
beautifully filmed, surreal movie, that prepared the way for many vampire and
horror films to come.
It was the first I remember any movie using the idea of
vampire hunters; it delivered the horror in a comic fashion, from the full title
(The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck), to
the MGM lion in the opening credits changing into a comic vampire; and, it added
a subtle (and, occasionally, not-so-subtle) sense of eroticism to the vampire
myth.
The frosty-blue, frozen landscapes, the supreme eloquence of
the Count, and the humorously-courageous ancient vampire hunter (who looked a
lot like Albert Einstein) paired with a young, naive, idiotic, and inept
assistant, all blend together perfectly to deliver a true horror-comedy (or
comedy-horror) masterpiece. Oh, and nearly forgot to mention the music, an
eerie warbling of voices that both chilled and made me smile. Krzysztof Komeda
composed the score that seemed an innate part of the movie. He wrote the music
for other Polanski films, including Rosemary’s Baby.
Finally, we wrapped up our evening, all TV-eyed, with an episode of an animated spy-spoof show called Archer. Archer is also the main spy's name, an arrogant, sometimes idiotic, collateral-damage-reeking force of nature, who, actually, is a pretty good agent. It's just that he'll take out half a country in the process of achieving his objective.
And, that's about it for this post.
'til next time... Adios.
