Showing posts with label horror movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label horror movies. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
"Here, kitty, kitty": when taxidermy goes terribly wrong
I don't know how I stumble onto these things. What was I looking for? Not THIS. Not this "what-is-it", unidentifiable: maybe an otter with the mumps.
There is a whole art form out there - in fact, you may have seen some of it in old museums (reminding me of Dylan Thomas and his "museum that should have been in a museum"). In those days, "lifelike" expressions mattered more than anatomical accuracy, often with truly hideous results.
There are sooooooooooooooooooo many of these photos out now, probably due to a Facebook page called Taxidermy Gone Wrong. Now it has mushroomed like amanita, blossomed like a patch of lethal bacteria on a petri dish. Bad taxidermy: it's everywhere!
I think Norman Bates was the gold standard of taxidermy, posing his owls and other predatory birds in such realistic ways that it made your scalp prickle. One pictures him sitting there with his little needle and thread, and that stuffing that my mother used to call "cott'n batt'n". And, of course, scissors and a knife
Killing and gutting the birds doesn't bear thinking about.
But bad taxidermy (not the meticulous kind Norman practiced in the Bates Motel) is now a kind of found art. There are lots of cutesy poses where squirrels fire six-guns and rats pose as the Pope, but I'm not too fond of them because they're obviously supposed to be kitschy and bad. Some of these examples look like earnest attempts, which only adds to their horror. Pets are the worst. Did someone actually pay for this, to have Fido or Fluffy rendered Satanic for all time?
Somebody must have had the thought, somewhere, sometime, that this was a good way to stuff a dead pet. It may have been someone's idea of human-looking eyes. Fine, if your favorite human is a raving lunatic! That second one looks like he had one too many caramel macchiattos at Starbuck's.
As with the Royal Family, some of these cats should have been strangled at birth. With their deranged expression and eyes set too close together, they're obviously as inbred as the Hapsburgs. In fact, the puma (above) looks like he's about to go marry his favorite niece.
Oh Lor', oh Lor'. . . a polar bear with a hangover, a prehistoric Muppet, a tubular moose. . . Did this taxidermist ever SEE a moose, did he have any idea what one looked like?
. The shrivelled, sunken, dessicated, dusty, shabby, moth-eaten, mummified look of
bad taxidermy is awful enough without these demonic leers.
Taxidermy slippers! These were either made from the world's biggest moles,
or meant to fit a Chinese woman in the 17th century.
Another "what-is-it?". Don't know what happened to its nose.
My personal favorite. It's easy to see how it died, but. . .
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
Order The Glass Character from:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Barnes & Noble
Thistledown Press
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
Squick-Fest: weird and creepy Halloween gifs
Everybody's talkin' at me. . .
Speechless
"Did you run out of kleenex again, Morgus?"
"No, Master. I'm trying to solve the crossword puzzle with my nose."
(Do you think they know I'm gay?)
"I dropped my flute down the sewer. Again."
A strange medieval dance called the Playing Card Shuffle.
The horror couple of all time:
Elsa Lanchester as Bride of Frankenstein and
Charles Laughton as Quasimodo,
who first uttered these immortal words:
"Hand over the Sour Patch Kids, or I'll egg your windows!"
Visit Margaret's Amazon Author Page!
Sunday, October 28, 2012
EWWWWW, look at his face! (or, Polka for Oskar Homolka)
Not quite Halloween yet, but I just can't wait. This is one of my fave movie moments. It's in one of those cheapie William Castle horror films, in which he comes on-screen at the beginning and rhapsodizes about his own movie and how petrifying it is. Supposedly the audience was allowed to vote on the ending, thumbs-up or thumbs-down, deciding the fate of poor Mr. Lockjaw. Only one ending was filmed, so this was obviously just a typical Castle piece of theatre.
I shouldn't give it all away, but the essence of this macabre little tale is that Mr. Sardonicus unearths his father's rotting corpse to steal a winning lottery ticket out of his moth-eaten old pocket. The horror of seeing his father grinning away like Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera causes him to develop a hideous, intractible facial paralysis. In fact he personifies that old Wet Willie classic, Keep On Smilin':
Well you say you got the blues,
Got holes in both of your shoes,
Feelin' alone and confused,
You got to keep on smilin', keep on smilin'
Yeah, you're about to go insane,
Cause your woman's playing games
And she says that you're to blame,
You got to keep on smilin', keep on smilin'
At least they got that insane part right.
William Castle is notorious for sensational special effects, not in his movies but in the theatres in which they were shown. In fact, he was known to wire some of the seats (though not every seat, so the electrocuted people would think they were going crazy). I don't think he invented Smell-O-Rama however. Mr. Sardonicus is plain creepy and I remember watching it late at night in the '60s with my brother. Good thing he was there. When Mr. S's deathly grimace was finally revealed, I remember we both went "ohhhhhhh" in a groaning kind of way, then laughed ourselves silly. Later Arthur referred to Mr. S. and his "winning smile".
I posted this one at least once before, but hey, it's worth a repeat at this festive time of year. Halloween is a huge business now (what with all the vampire/zombie/other supernaturally-themed movies that are popular as never before), though when my kids were young there were all sorts of solemn newspaper editorials that predicted Halloween would soon be phased out for being too old-fashioned and too dangerous (razor blades in apples, etc., which turned out to be an urban myth). I think everyone assumed it was true. What a weird custom anyway, putting on costumes and running all over the neighborhood in the dark. When you think about it, which no one does because people generally don't think, it's a big waste of time for a bagful of neon Gummi Worms.
But it's one of the few remnants we have left of ancient rituals in which people scare the giblets out of each other. Why not bring back human sacrifice while we're at it? But then you don't get candy.
This is one of those rare YouTube videos which is actually in the public domain and therefore can be watched whole. I've posted the link below. I don't know how they do this exactly, because everyone says YouTube has a 10-minute bandwidth limit or something. Maybe time stretches to include this bizarre little tale.
Oh, and - as Krull, the sinister squint-eyed "assistant", we have the incomparable Oskar Homolka. A scarier man never existed on film. I promised I'd never mention Oscar Levant again, but I lied: I'm still making my way through the labyrinthine ways of his bizarre mind (speaking of horror) in his bio A Talent for Genius. Levant was a gifted composer with a penchant for whimsy who wrote a piece called Overture 1912, a. k. a. Polka for Oskar Homolka.
Not everyone has a polka named after him. In fact, I can't think of anyone else.
Watch it here - but don't come alone!
(A big P. S.! I just found out, while digging around for info about Mr. Sardonicus, that William Castle was - incredibly - the producer behind Rosemary's Baby, another viscerally creepy classic. About a year ago I tried to find trailers, clips, ANYTHING about the movie on YouTube and came up completely empty. It squicked me out because after the one time I saw it in about 1970, it never came on TV again. I mean never, because I am sure with my relentless bloodhound's nose I would have sniffed it out. It's simply never shown, and I don't know why. I also don't know why the one time it was on TV was so close to the release date.
But there it was, gone.
I finally had to scare up a used DVD. One of the great horror classics of all time wasn't in print any more. I watched it and had that same gut-squirming feeling I remembered from 1970, which did not become full-blown until "the reveal" - another genuinely terrifying moment in horror movies - which is not a reveal at all, but a reaction. Mia Farrow does it all with her face.
I've never seen anything like it, before or since, and though there are now a few YouTube tidbits from the movie, I can't find this scene. When your sweet little newborn baby turns out to be the spawn of Satan, it's apparently just a little but upsetting. The whole disappearance thing is just weird. Castle, the P. T. Barnum of horror, kept claiming there was a Rosemary's Baby curse, that everyone connected with the film dropped dead or something (not true, although Mia had that thing with Woody and John Cassavetes became a falling-down drunk).
But why hasn't it been on TV, and why can't I find anything else on it? Rights or something? It's the inverse of sex: everybody talks about it but nobody has it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=6QLZoV40Ez0&feature=endscreen
Monday, October 31, 2011
Monster Chiller Horror Theatre!
This lacks in technical quality (turn up the sound a bit), but is pure nostalgia and a reminder of how good these guys were, especially together. We miss you, John!
Sunday, October 30, 2011
The worst PMS in recorded history
Ah, Carrie! Carrie, my girl. I think she may have been (in part) the inspiration for Mallory, the protagonist of my second novel (Turnstone Press, 2005):
http://www.amazon.com/Mallory-Margaret-Gunning/dp/0888013116/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1319991041&sr=1-1
(Buy it today!)
Except that this gal really knows how to get her revenge.
I watched it for the second time a couple of weeks ago, and this time it struck me not so much as a horror or suspense film as a comedy. A very black one, to be sure. From the first time we see the "popular girl" Amy Irving plotting to humiliate Carrie and pound her into the ground, we know some awful vengeance is brewing. Carrie is already "making things happen". When the bucket of blood lands on her and her eyes turn to stone, we know we're in for a real treat.
I'll SHOW those people. And I won't even need to commit suicide to do it (too often, the tragic result of extreme bullying). Her eyes fly open into that blank wallpaper stare, her fragile little body becomes as menacing as a space alien's, and she Walks Among Us, wreaking havoc at every step.
This is the ultimate revenge fantasy for every high school nerd who ever suffered humiliation at the hands of the social powerbrokers. She even burns a whole lot of people to death and blows up John Travolta (always a cherished fantasy of mine), but not before rolling his car about seventeen times.
Toying with them, she is. What she does to her mother is even more excruciatingly funny, and she ends up like that saint in the painting, what's his name anyway, with all the barbs and arrows in him. But what I like is that little screech, like something out of Psycho, every time she unleashes another lethal projectile.
This movie is based on a story by Stephen King that he supposedly dumped in the garbage during a moment of frustration. It reminds me of the story of J. K. Rowling writing Harry Potter on a napkin in Starbucks while living on welfare. In other words, it didn't happen, but it SHOULD HAVE because it will give all unpublished writers a sort of hopeless hope.
There's a sequel called The Rage: Carrie 2. Don't bother. It istars a completely unknown actress with no charisma whatsoever (and who remained that way), unlike Spacek who went on to do Coal Miner's Daughter (won an Oscar for it, I believe) and a multitude of other things. Her acting chops are obvious here, as she appears to be ignoring everyone. She inhabits another level of reality, the level of Get Those High School Bitches and Bastards And Annihilate Them For What they Did To Me.
Watch this, it's a hoot, and it's just in time for Halloween.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1896300693/qid%3D1064537730/sr%3D11-1/ref%3Dsr_11_1/103-6792065-9634225
(Look at this, too, then buy one, or two.)
Saturday, October 29, 2011
The scariest thing you've EVER SEEN!!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BynOanQSj94
NOTE: this video wouldn't embed, but the link to YouTube should work. Really, this half-minute kind of sums up the whole thing.
I guarantee you, this is the scariest, creepiest, most Godawful thing you've ever seen in a movie. As with so many horror classics (like Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby, which scared the giblets out of me), I watched this as a kid sleeping in the den on the pullout bed. This was a special treat and only allowed on non-school nights, which was great, because all the best creature-feature films were shown on Friday night.
I am sure I watched this with my older brother Arthur providing running commentary. We both burst into a sort of terrified "auuuuuugggghhhhhh" (not "ewwwwwwww": it hadn't been invented yet) at the "reveal", which only lasts a fraction of a second.
Mr. Sardonicus is probably William Castle's creepiest film. He was the master of horror schlock, and in this one he came on at the start and said the audience could choose between two endings.: "thumbs up" (Sardonicus lives!), or "thumbs down" (bye-bye, smiley face!) Only one ending was made, of course.
When we first meet Mr. Sardonicus he's living in the standard spooky old castle wearing an eerie-looking mask. I remember a sultry woman with a heaving bosom (hey, do you think I remember the whole thing after 46 years?), and a horrible scene in which some sort of Igor-esque servant (played by Oscar Homolka: with a name like that, what else could you be but an Igor?) carries a covered bowl into a room. The door closes and we hear Godawful sucking sounds.
Later on the story leaks out: Mr. Sardonicus use-da be a regular sorta guy, but his Dad won a lottery and was mistakenly buried with the money. Well, Mr. S. was thrifty and decided to dig the old man up. On seeing the decaying, reeking corpse crawling with maggots, his face spazzed into the "winning smile" you see here, and, just as Mama warned us, it froze that way.
He looks like a dead fox or something, just bloody sickening! You can have your Paranormal Activity 3, your endless Halloweens, even your parade of "Stephen King's. . . " (Carrie, Thinner, Pet Sematary, etc. etc. etc.) This nanosecond has to be one of the greatest, most disturbing moments in horror.
What I particularly like about this clip is that you can hear someone reacting in the background with an "auggghhhhhhhhhh." (Some things never change.) Watch it, yes - but don't watch it alone.
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