"Fans" of The Son of Madblood get all their up-to-date information here!

...enjoying horror movies since 1968...

Saturday, September 13, 2008

What to show at the next show?

Hey gang, Madblood here - Brain tells me that the future is in the Internet, soooo...
I've been doing some re-watching research for the next show - the NOT the Anniversary Show Show (
that's the Sunday before Halloween). I'm trying to find something suitable that we'll all enjoy.. I guess that's what I'll be doing here on the old blog-thing: talking about not only what's coming up on the next show - but also all the stuff and fluffer behind it.. All the strange goings-on here at Madblood Manorette: the watching horror movies and thinking about horror movies and thinking about watching horror movies.. and writing.. and reading.. reading and writing and 'rithmatic.. and the rhythm method! Please bear with me while I find my rhythm method. It might take me a while to find my Internet-feet..or flippers.. or paws.. We're coming up on our one year anniversary - at about a show a month that makes around... 12 episodes total! Except - we missed one somewhere because the next will be number 10... Musta been a Leap Year or something. A roundown of the year-so-far can be found up here^... But now it's time to pick the feature for the next spine-chilling, hair-raising, scary-fying Episode of... The Son of Madblood! What will it be? I've been doing some research:

Last night was 2 by Tobe:




And I don't care what the people say - I am NOT taking my Eaten Alive poster down from the kitchen wall! I was quite surprised to learn that this is not considered the classic I had always felt it to be. I'm still creeped out by it. I'm always creeped out by it. It's one creepy movie. Families and everybody screaming at each other, a muttering and mumbling maniac, endless screeching sounds and music on the soundtrack.. this thing just pounds into the skull. It's anything but a comfortable movie to watch - and so effective as horror. It's particularly pleasing to see Tobe Hooper - straight from the heights of success with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre - take his new-found bigger budget and, instead of going bigger and opening things up, he goes and makes this tiny weirdo of a termite movie. It's so claustrophobic that it feels like the entire thing was filmed in one closet with everybody really starting to hate being near each other. Sure everything looks fake: the sets, the constant red glow, even the dialogue seems overly ripe.. it almost veers into the realm of avant-garde theater.. or the stuff of nightmares.

The Funhouse rides along more the conventional lines of the kill-off-the-teens type horror but Hooper brings enough imagination and detail to set it apart from the routine slashers that were being made at the time. He devotes alot to the setting of the carnival, it's other-worldliness and strange characters - even just the weirdos milling about in the crowd - and the funhouse, itself, is perfectly atmospheric and nerve-jangling. He also is able to make a little go a long way in creating a slasher-flick scenario with only 4 characters, one of whom you know is going to survive anyway! And yet it still manages to deliver the frights in a somewhat old-fashioned-monster-movie vein. Alot of the chills come from the rantings and ravings of the monster hinted at in the poster - and something that could easily have come off as ridiculous is, instead, what really makes the film succeed. It's a classic monster in the Frankenstein/Wolfman mode: always scary, always dangerous, but also sympathetic; and it's performed so pitch-perfectly that you won't soon forget it.
I wish I had that poster for
The Funhouse -
that is creepy. Ick.

The Funhouse is defiantly in the running for the next show - but I need to keep looking.. and I kinda want to watch Eaten Alive again right now. I'll get more into that one and why it just may be a candidate for my One I Might Have Saved in a sec. Right now I gotta watch something. And Igor needs feeding and Brain needs his bowl cleaned after all that popcorn.. The Son of Madblood's work is never done.

2 comments:

Road Worderer said...

You got my blood all mad that I'm not there for the season premiere! Swallow an eyeball for me.
All the beast,
Theo

I am The Son of Madblood said...

'tis great hearing from such an esteemed (and missed) colleague as yourself, Dr. Theopolis.. Your wishes are taken to heart (the one I'm keeping alive and beating in a special saline solution in the lab).