Endless Nights...

So, gang - I'm still hard at work looking for just the right movie for our next BIG EPISODE. Although I do think I've hit on what we may show for our Anniversary Special. In keeping with the nature of the traditionally-styled "Anniversary Show", we here at Madblood Manorette (or is it "Mansionette" - it seems to change at will) will be in a reminiscing mood - inviting our audience along on a strange and spooooky trip through some of the many high-points of this past year on The Son of Madlood. Ah - the fun! Ah - the nostalgia! Remember that time Igor couldn't stop bleeding on the 'There Will Be Mad-Blood" Episode? Of course you do! And, since re-living so many of these acme moments will most likely take up a huge chunk of our running time, I was thinking of showing something short for this one - something not feature length. I mis-remembered the length of The Demon Lover (aka Demon Tower aka Coven aka Demon Master) - it felt very short.. I guess it's just the thinness of the story that allows it to take up less space in my brain. It seemed like a good fit: throwing a party/raising a Demon.. a little kung-fu.. sounds like anniversary material to me. But, alas - it turns out to be a whopping 83-ish minutes so we'll have to save that one for another time. Plus - it's hard to imagine watching it without the augmentation of the fabulous Demon Lover Diary making-of-documentary.

So - time constraints led me to checking into the Masters of Horror series that I had shied away from until now - I just had such a hard time with those DVD covers and how they all just looked like cheap doo-doo:

Just... not good looking, kids.

But- I finally listened to Igor and gave The Screwfly Solution a chance despite it having all the earmarks of disaster: Jason Priestly and Elliot Gould? Not exactly horror-dudes.. Joe Dante? When since The Howling has anything of his been SCARY? Well not until now - because I found this to be completely scarifying. On the surface it doesn't sound like much: a virus is turning the male population into religiously-fanatical killers of women and scientists Gould and Priestly do the race-against-time trying to stop it. Priestly's wife and daughter go on-the-run in an attempt to escape the break-down of society. As sci-fi it could have been ho-hum but, instead, Dante pulls the focus from the science and why-for of it all and zeroes in on the horror: the ugliness and brutality of blind rage on a grand scale. And, by tapping it into the real horror of violence against women it all becomes shiveringly unsettling.

It's a hard one to watch - and whereas most of Dante's work (including this series' Homecoming) has too much of an over-abundance of humor and goofiness to be that horrific - in this one any traces of humor that are there in the beginning are quickly drained out as the situation escalates and becomes more desperate and dire. It's a disturbing vision and with an aspect of sadness surprising for a piece in this genre of t.v.-series-horror. There's a lot touched on and hinted at: domestic violence, sublimated gender-fears, eco-horror - it feels big enough to have been a feature but this hour-long running time keeps the momentum at such a pitch that it only adds to the feeling of dread and scares.

Unfortunately - my liking this one has awoken a desire to see MORE of these badly-box-arted shows and, so far - it hasn't payed off as well as this.. Too much - looks, feels, sounds, acts like television and short-films. There's a few I'm looking to sink my worn teeth into still...

So - that could be the one for the Anniversary Episode, kids.. now - just gotta get it together for the Not The Anniversary Episode Episode.. Maybe it'll be The Funhouse.. I'm going to re-watch Hatchet For The Honeymoon (as a PRE-Anniversary theme? It works, right?) and more.. Possibly looking for something with a theatrical/traveling show/vaudeville backdrop.. Any suggestions, kids?

One more thing, gang - starting REAL SOON: Your faithful servant, I, the Son of Madblood - will start writing about each previous-Episode film that we've seen in the order we saw them in..

First up in the "reviews" section will be:


Uh-oh.. I left the Bunsen Burner on - better go turn that off...

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.