Watching old, old movies part 13

I'm going through this list, and here are my previous entries.

37. Pit and the Pendulum (1961)
Based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe starring Vincent Price. I don't even know what to say about this movie except that I really liked it. It's the classic Poe story of love, despair and madness and how one can lead to the other. My modern ass immediately starts to pick through the mental aspects of the characters. How Nicholas probably suffered from PTSD from experiencing what he did as a child and how that affects him as an adult. And how his experiences with his wife and her death makes his mind split on itself and create a dual personality. It's all really interesting stuff and the storytelling is superb. On a silly note; I really don't mind seeing Vincent Price run around in tights. In hindsight I would've loved a haunted house that was actually haunted or if it turned out there were vampires, but the way this story unfolded was so intimitely Poe that I can't be anything but pleased with it. One of the better movies on the list.

38. The Plague of the Zombies (1966)
This movie was a b**** to find online and it was so not worth it. It makes no sense storywise and it even made me laugh out loud several times because of pure ridiculousness. The continuity is a mess and the characters make no sense and the acting is stale and stiff. I'm hoping that this movie only has the rating it has on IMDB because it helped shape the zombie genre and not because people think there's anything good about it. Because if there is I thoroughly missed it. So an old doctor and his daughter receives a letter from a previous pupil and they go down to Cornwall to visit him and his wife. The pupil writes the doctor because a lot of people have died lately from an unknown illness and he'd like his previous teacher's insight. As soon as the doctor and his daughter gets to the town the whole story is a mess. There's a pack of fox hunters who for some reason rides right through a funeral procession because the daughter told them she saw the fox run that way, without any regard for the funeral. Wut? They arrive at the house and it's immediately frickin obvious that something's wrong with the wife, but nobody notices. Wut? The wife then decides to go wandering in the night and is killed by a zombie, who turns out to be the guy that got buried in the beginning. So the doctor and his pupil decides to do a little gravedigging only to find the grave is empty. Surprise! Suspicion somehow falls on the rich guy and his pack of fox hunters who abduct and attack the doctor's daughter and then lets her go for no reason, only to have the rich guy visit her later and get hold of her blood. And she lets him in just like that. Wut? The doctor somehow draws the conclusion that it's due to black magic and conveniently finds that the vicar has a book about voodoo. Wut? He reads that one book and decides that it's all due to voodoo and that the rich guy is to blame because he has *gasp* travelled. Wut? The wife awakens and threatens to kill the pupil and the doctor, but the doctor swiftly cuts off her head with a spade. Wut? The zombies awake en masse and the doctor breaks into the rich guy's home to find evidence, which he does and then sets the whole place on fire. Wut, why? They then find out that the rich guy uses the zombies as workers in his mine, because apparantly they aren't dangerous to him. Wut? The fire then somehow spreads into the mine and the zombies start to attack the rich guy once their coffins catch fire. Wut, weren't the coffins still in the earth on the graveyard? As the mine collapses in the fire all is well and the movie ends. Wut? I was in disbelief for most of this movie. 

39. The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
Another Poe story adaptation starring Vincent Price. While I have really enjoyed the other Poe story adaptations on the list so far; this one kept disappointing me until the last 30 minutes. It was unusual to see Vincent Price playing the obviously and outright bad guy, since in every other film I've seen him he's played a gentle but twisted person who the world takes for a very bad ride resulting in destroying his morality. But in this one he was just a depraved person from the start. The heroine is so very pretty but awfully dumb. The original Poe story tells of a prince who is really into extravaganza and likes to flaunt his wealth, but for some reason the movie makers involved a Satanist plot that adds absolutely nothing and that there's literally no point of having. Both the story and the movie are morality plays, but it's a version that's been done to death in everything from fairytales and Disney to modern thrillers. The Poe story is good, but the movie doesn't own it. The Red Death comes to the nearby village and kills everyone within days, The remaining villagers go to the castle to beg prince Prospero for aid, who naturally tells the guards to shoot the remaining villages but the Red Death has already spread to the castle. As the illness spreads Prospero gets a visit from literal Death and has a conversation with him about gods and faith, which ends in Prospero trying to outrun his fate and yet he, too, falls victim to the Red Death. 

It's Price. It's Poe. And I was hoping for greatness. Instead I got disappointment. Or this movie just hits a bit too close to home this year.

I'm thirty

So there we go. I'm thirty years old and I can't believe it. I've left my twenties behind, although I still feel like I haven't changed since I was twenty-five. 

Turning thirty in 2020 absolutely sucked. I managed to get two weeks off from work which I had originally planned to use to celebrate. One weekend with friends, one weekend with family and maybe a staycation of two days in a city close by that I haven't really visited before. None of that happened because just as November started the second wave of covid kicked off for real and everything shut down again and multiple new restrictions and rules were put in place. I should've had my birthday in August or something when things were almost normal. 

Instead we celebrated at home. We watched a movie, had some snacks and cake and a fancy dinner, and then we played some games. I also got to celebrate a little bit with Toni's family since his older sister and one of his nieces have their birthdays in the same week as I do. 

I've heard a lot of talk from friends that your 30s are pretty much like your 20s. Time to find out if that's true. I enjoyed my 20s and I'm hoping I'll get to enjoy my 30s as well even if the start was crappy and unlike any other year I've seen. 

I made a Spotify playlist in the honour of my big day :P

The Haunting of Bly Manor

After the absolute amazing thing that was the first season I was really looking forward to the second season. Or should I say second anthology? 

As soon as the first episode started with the nanny's interview with the uncle I thought it all seemed very familiar. And that feeling lingered until I got to the scene where the nanny asks to get out of the car to walk the last part up to the house and she meets Flora by the lake. That's when it clicked. The novel that this anthology is based on is also the base for one of the old-timey movies I've watched: The Innocents from 1961. With that out of the way I could sit back and enjoy what was to come.

Except this anthology proved thoroughly underwhelming. Hill House had creepier ghosts, creepier house, and was overall a lot creepier. Bly Manor had the creepy kids that soon stopped being creepy and ended up being repetitive. The ghosts weren't creepy, just sad, and the characters had pretty boring backstories.

I was pretty intrigued by the ghost that followed the nanny around to begin with, but then he just up and left when she asked him to? Hadn't she tried that before?!?!?

The conclusion of the series was pretty neat and clever and I enjoyed seeing all the pieces come together, but the road to get there was... tiresome. 

Watching old, old movies part 12

I'm going through this list, and here are my previous entries.

34. The City of the Dead (1960)
I really enjoyed this movie. It was more of a thriller than a horror movie, featuring a very young Christopher Lee (young to the point where it took me half the movie before I recognised him). The movie opens on a village in New England in 1692 where a witch is about to be burned at the stake, as that happens she curses the village and everyone in it. Fast-forward to modern day and we're at college where history professor Alan Driscoll is giving a lecture on historic witchcraft in New England. One of the students wishes to make her final paper something special and tells her professor that she'd like to go stay in an old, rural New England village and dig through the history of the place. The professor sends her to Whitewood, where he says he knows some people, and from there the young woman gets entangled in real-life witchcraft. The movie was chilling and thrilling, and really holds up to today. Except of course the weird close-ups of staring faces that happened several times in the movie. I think they were supposed to be chilling, but they came off as ridiculous. All in all, one of my favourites on the list so far.

35. Mill of the Stone Women (1960)
Original title: Il mulino delle donne di pietra. To someone who finds dubbing to be jarring, Italian movies from this period are very hard to watch. This is because they used international actors, allowing them to speak the lines in their own languages while filming, and then recorded the sound elsewhere and just put it over the film. The Italian movies I've watched so far have had two versions: one with English sound and one with Italian sound. La maschera del demonio (Black Sunday) was good enough that it almost didn't matter, but this movie was jarring from end to finish. The plot was weak and the voice acting was absolutely terrible. I dislike the whole notion of "I met you two seconds ago but I love you and I want to marry you and spend my whole life with you" and the first half of this movie centers around that idea. In the second half it abruptly turns into a game of resurrection and murder and conquering death. It's like it made a complete turnaround from a silly romantic drama to a paranormal murder-mystery. The storytelling was janky and disjointed and I feel like they could've gone two different directions with the story, but chose the one that made the least sense. Turning it into a straight-up haunted house movie probably would've been better than the mess this is.

36. Dead of Night (1945)

When I started watching this movie I really wasn't sure at first, but it turned into one of the best films on this list. It starts with a man arriving at an old farm house where a bunch of people are having tea. The man is an architect who's been called down to a friend of a friend to do a reconstruction job over the weekend. The other people are old friends. The architect arrives and is immediately frazzled and when he explains that he's having a major case of déjà vu despite never having been there or seen these people before, but everything that's happening is part of a recurring nightmare that he's been having, the whole group starts to offer up their own tales of the supernatural. The first story "The Hearse Driver" didn't do anything for me. The second one "Christmas Story" was a classic tale of a girl who stumbles upon a ghost of a boy in an old house. Creepy, but predictable. The third story was "The Haunted Mirror", which was also a classic tale of a haunted object affecting the person using it. It was a classic, but this story is when my interest was piqued. Unfortunately, the fourth one "Golfing Story" was pretty dumb and my interest was lost and I started scrolling through my phone and only listening to the movie. Then came the last story called "The Ventriloquist's Dummy". Anyone who knows me knows that dolls creep me out, especially those kinds of dummies. So to me this story was creepy from the get-go. It turned into a classic tale of a possessed doll compelling a person to do its bidding. I know how these stories usually go, but this one had a very simple but also very elegant twist at the end that I really enjoyed. That last story was absolutely the highlight of the movie. After all of the stories are told, the scenario unfolds exactly like the architect's dream predicted, and although the sudden change of pace in the movie's storytelling at first seems kind of jarring, the end of the movie offers a completely unexpected twist (for my part) and I really enjoyed seeing the whole thing unfold. Definitely one of the most enjoyable movies on the list. 

The Umbrella Academy season 2

Can we all agree that Five is the best? Good. 

Moving on to the spoilers.

We both loved the first season, so when the second season dropped we were both really keen to get started on it. As much as we liked the show and the characters the plot this season seemed weaker. We both figured out pretty early that Vanya would be the catalyst again. The apocalypse didn't follow them. Vanya is the apocalypse no matter where and when she goes.

I really appreciated Klaus this season and seeing him trying to come to terms with his lovelife and the heartbreak that followed meeting his boyfriend and having him not know Klaus because they haven't met yet from his perspective. 

That ending promises a really interesting third season.

Ten years since Japan

It's been 10½ years since I was in Japan and I somehow can't believe it. I really believed that I'd find my way back there before a decade had passed. But life got in the way and here we are ten years later and I've been nowhere near Asia in that time. 

Going to Japan was my big coming-of-age adventure. I was 19 years old and I left for Tokyo in the last days of February 2010. 

The first day of March was my first day of class and the first half of March was spent just getting the hang of things and getting to know the classmates and going on adventures with them. I still remember the first morning I squeezed myself onto one of the metro trains in rush hour traffic. I've never experienced another rush hour like the one in Tokyo anywhere ever again. The sheer amount of people was daunting, almost terrifying, but unlike other places there was as little pushing and discomfort as possible because people subconsciously knew how to take up as little room as possible and how to stay out of each other's way as much as possible. The Tokyo rush hour is a great machinery working very smoothly. No other country can compare. 

March was when we went on several afternoon adventures and weekend day-trips. I especially remember when we took a trip to Kawagoe. It was also when two of us went on a weekend trip to Kyoto via Shinkansen. And it was the time for hanami. So much hanami. 

April was the time of Tokyo Tower, Odaiba, FujiQ and Disneyland. There was always something going on. Somewhere to go, something to see. Food to experience. Karaoke and purikura and Sweets Paradise and melon soda. 

I started off May in Seoul. During Japan's Golden Week when we had time off school I took a little sidetrip to Seoul, just three days. I figured that Korea and Japan would be similar enough. Kind of like Sweden and Germany or something like that. But Korea was like a whole 'nother world. I took the time to visit an aquarium, some historical sights, and I also took a trip up to Namsan, the mountain close-by the city.

May and June was when the activity tapered out. We still did things together, but it was less sightseeing and more hanging out in familiar spots. One highlight of May was the wedding of our host family's daughter. And I also really loved the exploration of Meiji Jingu Shrine that I did on my own one weekend, which coincided with the first time I dared to traverese the shockingly crowded Takeshita Doori on my own. 

I was only in Japan for two weeks of June. June was mostly a lot of dinners with friends I had made during my almost four months in Tokyo. But it was also the month when we discovered Shakey's pizza and had a great laugh about it. 

For months after I returned to Sweden I missed Japan. I would dream about Tokyo every night and the stillness of my hometown was seemingly driving me insane. Imagine going from one of the biggest bustling cities in the world to living on the edge of a village with farmland across the road? The silence was deafening, the stillness crushing. Going back to uni definitely helped me adjust back to life in smalltown Sweden, but I've never stopped missing Japan. Which is why this guy is great: