Secchan's Corner: 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.