"THE TINGLER"........SCREAM FOR YOUR LIVES! IT'S IN THE THEATRE!

"The Tingler"  (1959)   Other than Alfred Hitchcock and William Castle, we can't think of any other producer-directors who so gloried in such entertaining self-promotion........

                     The big difference, of course......their films. Hitchcock made real movies. For Castle, the movies themselves were a necessary afterthought......something to slap together that roughly corresponded to whatever hoopla the posters promised.......

                     Which is why, when Castle stunned everyone by obtaining the film rights to "Rosemary's Baby", no one in their right mind would ever let him direct it.......

                     But for now, let's warmly return to the Golden Age Of Castle, the late 50's to early 60's when he perfected the art of coupling his rickety, barely-filmed horrors with riotous promotional stunts that would make P.T.Barnum beam down from heaven and shout "Yessssss!"

                     Once again armed with world-class hambone Vincent Price, Castle's follow-up to "House On Haunted Hill"  boasts an even more primal, ridiculous premise.......

                    Price plays a pathologist who discovers that when in the throes of fear, our bodies internally materialize a gruesome centipede like creature.......the "Tingler".  The Tingler then goes about its business, crushing our spinal column until we scare it off (or dissolve it) by screaming our heads off.

                    So lots of people get to scream their heads off.

                     Even Price has a go at exercising his lungs after he.....we kid you not......drops acid to scare himself silly so he can create his very own spine-huggin' Tingler. Science marches on.

                     More madness abounds, including a pathetic deaf-mute woman frightened to death by a tub of richly red blood in her bathroom....(in the middle of a black-and-white movie, no less).

                    All of this lunacy is merely a warm-up to Castle's grand finale which has the Tingler run rampant through a crowded movie theatre........(and that sequence served as the cue for actual participating theatres to activate electric buzzers that Castle installed under selected seats......thereby making the film the first official shocker to literally shock its audience....)

                     Academics might think of Castle's films as Jurassic-era attempts a interactive cinema......we prefer to think of "The Tingler" as its maker envisioned it.......the movie equivalent of a tub of greasy boardwalk fries.....slathered with ketchup.....(or a surefire carnival attraction to separate the rubes from their cash)...... the pleasure's guilty......but it's all ours. 3 stars (***)......pop it in and don't forget to scream like crazy.......

"I WANT TO SEE YA IN A KIA!!" ......THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF LOCAL TV ADS....

              Not too long ago, the BQ cavorted in the suburbs of Philadelphia.......which, in the jargon of TV advertising, is considered a 'Major Market'......

              That means that the rates and fees to advertise on the Philadelphia stations were way way beyond the practical budgets of local merchants.........but it wasn't always that way.......

               Now that we enjoy the coastal splendors of Delmarva (the catch-all locale for Delaware, Maryland and Virginia).......we discovered, to both our delight and misery, that the local TV stations were overstuffed with local merchant ads of every variety and craziness........

                When watching TV down here, we time travel back to the glorious 1950's......when local TV was awash with yammering used car salesman, furniture store owners hawking their recliners, restaurants of every cuisine on earth tempting us with close-ups of their best dishes still frying up in the pan........

                  Some it's funny, some of it's excruciating.........but in a strange way, it's all entertaining.......

                  How can you not love the local exterminator who treats you to the sight of a crudely animated termite colony......with the lowly soldier termites carrying their giant, engorged Queen like Cleopatra on a barge......

                  How can you resist the Auto Mall guys out on the highway.........sometimes dressing up as doctors, exclaiming "I'm a CAR.....diologist!"

                   And in the course of these mini-dramas, you get to meet their kids and extended families......who usually get to stand together as group and wave at you.....

                   Ah, the kids. How the local TV hucksters cherish their offspring.  And they want you to realize how damn cute their kids look while beating the drums for used cars, window treatments, real estate and tractor rentals........

                    The kids, for their part, dutifully stand before the cameras, reciting the ad copy with all the dramatic force of Arnold Shwarzenegger's first line readings in 'Conan The Barbarian'.  (To be fair, some of the kids become raging hams, tearing through their dad's commercials as if auditioning for the next Disney Channel comedy....)

                   Only the local attorneys make any attempt at dignity......staying in their suits and ties as they promise you big payoffs for that tumble you took in the supermarket parking lot........

                    But they're no fun at all......we much prefer our current personal favorite, a local dentist who'll whip your crooked teeth into aligned submission without forcing you to take out a second mortgage......an emaciated, aging little guy wearing a hawaiian shirt underneath his white smock, he resembles a mug shot of a serial killer who everyone mistook as a "quiet man...."

                    We kid these local ads......but here's the funny thing.......with the daily news evenly divided up between horrific weather and equally horrific politics......we're taking entertainment value from the unlikely source.....our neighborhood merchants, whose amateur night-school pageantv-variety show unfolds every night before our weary eyes.

                    Keep on sellin' guys.......death to the Termite Queen.

WEEKEND MADNESS WRAPUP.....SPECIAL 'SUPERHERO MAGA HAT' EDITION......

Kanye leaves Baby Orange almost speechless........ At long last.....the Mad Emperor Of Trumpsylvania finds a Court Jester.......but the Emperor With No Mind realizes that he's picked a Jester who's his virtual twin.......a narcissistic psychotic cut off from all reality, except the random chaos that swirls inside his head......

Kanye claims wearing the MAGA hat makes him feel like a Superhero.......in truth, Kanye,it makes you look more like the evil house slave played by Samuel Jackson in "Django Unchained"

Melania thinks she's one of the most bullied people in the world..........In other news, weather satellites circling the globe detecting massive seismic shifts in the atmosphere from the sheer amount of convulsive laughter heard around the world.......

Don Jr. trashes Saudi journalist who's most likely tortured and murdered by the Saudis......what this parasitic worm doesn't yet realize......how many prisoners in Federal jails currently dream of having him for their personal boy-toy bunkmate.......patience, boys, patience.......Robert Mueller may make your dreams come true......

"THE FACE OF FU MANCHU"......THE ORIGINAL CRAZY RICH ASIAN.......

The Face Of Fu Manchu (1965)    Remember the year here.......1965.......Leading roles for Asians ended up played by British actors with their eyes pulled into a slant.........(and usually,as does Christopher Lee in this film,  Brits didn't  attempt that grating, fake sing-song Chinese accent that Hollywood movies favored. They preferred to play their Asian characters as if they all graduated from Oxford.......)

                  Viewing this movie from a distance, that is, accepting it as an ancient artifact from a long gone age, you can embrace its silliness and throw an eye-rolling smirk at its casual racism.

                     Guilty pleasures don't come any guiltier than this........

                     You can almost think of it as a 1920's Bond film. Christopher Lee's Fu Manchu isn't much different from Joseph Wiseman's Dr. No. (The big exception: without access to rockets and radiation, Fu Manchu's world domination plot becomes more organic in nature......turning a rare Tibetan plant into a population-killing lethal gas....)

                     And also on board are international babes destined, in a few short years, to appear as femme fatales in "You Only Live Twice".......Tsai Chin as Fu Manchu's evil daughter and Karin Dor as a damsel in distress, forever popping her big brown eyes at the rampant villainy around her.

                      Director Don Sharp, to his eternal credit, takes this nonsense seriously.(no "Batman TV-type camp on display).......which somehow makes it all the more funny. Nigel Green and Howard Marion Crawford make  a perfect pair of imitation Holmes 'N Watson foils for Fu Manchu..........muttering stuff about "the Yellow Peril" and wrongly profiling innocent Asian tourists, much in the same way white U.S. cops harass blacks for being black.....

                         The Green-Crawford dynamic duo is ably assisted by West German leading man Joachim Fuchsberger.....who looks like a chunkier George Clooney and engages Fu Manchu's army of Dacoit stranglers in endless, old fashioned fisticuffs.......(mostly accomplished by a stuntman who's not anywhere even close in appearance to Fuchsberger)

                       Great cheesy sequences abound........Lee uses his poison gas to wipe out an entire British coastal village.....(a scene that closely resembles a sequence in that same year's American thriller, "The Satan Bug").......the wonderful lionheart of Great Britain, James Robertson Justice, gets the film's best line, yelling "You can't leave the museum littered with dead Chinese!".........and considering the rock-bottom budget, the film does an amazing job of recreating 1920's England. (Though no one seems to populate it except the occasional constable and Lee's ever busy stranglers...)

                      A vital BQ consumer warning, though.........if you plan to indulge in a Christopher Lee Fu Manchu movie, we recommend this one only.........of the four sequels, the next one "Brides of Fu Manchu" dredges up some amount of cheesy fun, but the subsequent films devolve into crummy, unwatchable junk, directed by Jess Franco, the Ed Wood Jr. of Europe.......fair warning.

                       A movie like this requires a special place in your heart.....(the equivalent of the attic where you store old corny junk you don't want to let go of, but you know you should.)  Ridiculous and politically incorrect in the extreme, we'll stick "The Face Of Fu Manchu"  up on the dusty shelves of our Guilty Pleasure attic, with 3 so-bad-it's-good  stars (***)........

"THE HURRICANE HEIST".........GONE WITH THE WIND....(AND MAYBE NOT SO SILLY AFTER ALL)

The Hurricane Heist (2018)    How's this for irony...........the ongoing catastrophe of global warming is starting to generate storms that now come closer and closer to the idiotically apocalyptic CGI storms in movies........

               Have you seen the footage of Hurricane Michael tearing through the Florida panhandle?  That ain't CGI, folks........

                Yes, "Hurricane Heist" is a  stupid, throwaway movie that blew out of theaters and everyone's memories within days of its opening..........a connect-the-dots, boilerplate mixture of the well worn "Die Hard" formula mixed in with the Weather Porn tropes of "Geostorm" and "The Day After Tomorrow".

                  But watching this movie back to back with a real rampaging hurricane gave us the genuine whim-whams......

                  You get a sense of how screwed we all are when the real storms start to resemble the pumped up fakery of Hollywood.  We were struck by how many of the film's scenes duplicated the actual new footage we watched later.
 
                   The massive platoons of CGI artists naturally work overtime to dial it up to 11........they make the rim of their hurricane's Eye a nightmarish entity that looks like an oncoming H-Bomb blast.
You're tempted to ridicule this effect, chuckle at how silly it appears..........but then stop and think.....

                   How silly is it, really?  How long before the Mother Earth we've screwed up beyond all measure finally vomits up a storm that does carry the same destructive force of an H-Bomb?

                   After watching the news, seems to us we're not that far off.  The on-the-spot weather reporters didn't even have to resort to their usual over-hyped phony dramatics......they finally stumbled into a storm whose power eclipsed their usual Academy Award performances.

                   Meanwhile, the fake President and his GOP minions (you remember, the guys who, once upon a time, functioned as congressmen and senators) don't believe in global warming.  They think it's a hoax.  They can afford it........they'll be dead and buried while younger generations might have to use water-bikes to reach their schools that float on pontoons......

                   Oh right....the movie itself. Dumb, dumb, dumb.....with the cheese factor as extreme as the weather depicted. (In case you didn't know from where the filmmakers took their inspiration, the opening scenes are a virtual carbon copy of the first minutes of "Twister")     But if you groove on junk like this (and in the right mood, we do), it's action packed enough, with a pace that's.......dare we say it.....breezy.

                  "The Hurricane Heist", stupid and mechanical in its characterizations and plotting, still manages to come uncomfortably close to the real world......weather-wise. 2 stars (**).....the screenwriters here might have accomplished more here than just breaking wind.......

"HOLD THE DARK"......EVERYTHING BUT THE WOLVES YAPPIN' AT HIS HEELS.......

Hold The Dark (2018)   Until we came across this one, we thought the last word in blood-drenched Alaskan Noir was "Wind River" with Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen.......

                 Hardly. "Hold The Dark" makes "Wind River" look like "Mamma Mia 2"..........

                 We're right back in the remote, frozen landscapes that have left the inhabitants not only drained of warmth, but of any traces of humanity.

                  The author of a book on wolves (Jeffrey Wright) responds to the plea of a young woman (Riley Keogh) who begs him to find the wolf pack who carried off her little boy.  This gruesome event happened while Keogh's battle hardened U.S. Army husband (Alexander Skarsgard) was deployed in Afghanistan, stoically blowing away insurgents......among other people.......

                  We shouldn't go any further than this in the plot description, since the film fairly revels in its eye-popping twists and sudden, surprising bursts of spectacular violence......

                  The gloom and dread hang heavy in this ongoing nightmare........and even though the dialogue is startling in its pretentiousness and not anywhere close to how real people speak, we got a kick out it anyway..........it sounds like the overheated crap you'd read in a first novel by some pompous twit freshly armed with an MFA in Creative Writing.

                  The film maintains its effective dark mood until it completely flies off the rails in its obsessive-compulsive love affair with gunfire and splatter.  About halfway through, the film stops in its tracks to enjoy an endless, sustained  Tarantino-Sam Peckinpah-worthy gun battle...…..as if the director's attempting to work out his own personal issues in the middle of his movie.

                   And then the film lurches on to its utterly depraved strange finish, with Wright rasping out his lines as if he's in the throes of terminal throat cancer and Skarsgard glowering through a trail of senseless carnage in his wake.

                   (Now you can understand why we borrowed the title of this post from that killer line in "All About Eve".....in which Thelma Ritter cracks wise about Anne Baxter's melodramatic backstory....)

                   We guess we'd call it watchable...…..but then again, so is a terrible traffic accident you'd slow down to take a guilty gander at...…..2 gory stars (**)……..from that cold, cold climate that gave you Sarah Palin...….

"EMMA IN THE NIGHT".......GONE GIRLS ON THE RUN.......

Emma In The Night by Wendy Walker (2017)   Every author of a multiple-twist 'Gone Girl' knockoff faces the same challenge........

             Since half or more of your book ends up described by the inevitable UR (Unreliable Narrator)......you've got to find a way to make it riveting and entertaining for a reader to plow their way through the swamp of the UR's lies.

              Author Walker forgot that simple rule.  Yes, the plot's studded with explosive twists, but she forces a reader to endure a slow march across the UR's lengthy internal ramblings. Really slow.

              Slow enough to make you wonder if the payoff twists make it worth your while to wade through the verbiage. Bluntly.....this book will do a better job of lulling you to sleep at night instead of keeping you up to see what happens next.

               Teenage sisters Cass and Emma drop out of sight for three years after escaping their toxic family. This domestic mountain of misery includes an equally loathsome stepfather and stepson......and worst of all, their sociopath mother, who's the center of all monstrous evil in this story.

               Only one of the girls, Cass, returns........and brings with her a grotesque, fantastic story of how the girls were first aided but then imprisoned by a weird married couple on an island off the coast of Maine. On this hellish little rock, a pregnant Emma gave birth, only to have the sinister husband and wife seize the baby for their very own.

               Of course there's way, way more than meets the eye here.......and that's as much we could talk about without entering spoiler territory.

                All the twists are decently disturbing, but "Emma In The Night" just takes too damn long to unravel them all. So sorry, the best we can do for this one: 2 stars (**). If you can't resist this kind of book, then have at it, by all means........but don't say we didn't warn you how much it'll test your patience.........