Obviously I’m proceeding from the assumption that just about ANY song from The Rocky Horror Picture Show qualifies as a Halloween Song. Here we go:
Category Archives: Halloween Season
ROSAURA (1817): NEGLECTED HORROR
ROSAURA (1817) – Written by Friedrich Fouque. Halloween Month 2017 is dying quickly. Here is another neglected story from the late Gothic Horror period. Rosaura has a fairly unique supernatural premise so that alone should have earned it a wider following by now.
No vampires or ghosts or werewolves feature in this tale, but instead a more offbeat kind of supernatural horror. Count von Wildeck packs up his guns and wears his finest clothing for a visit to the castle of Colonel von Haldenbach, whose niece Rosaura he wants to romance.
After an amiable first day of the visit, Count von Wildeck is warned by his host the Colonel to lock himself very securely in his bedroom. The Colonel seems tempted to explain things more clearly to Von Wildeck but is too frightened. Continue reading
Filed under Halloween Season
THE DARK TOWER
This year’s Dark Tower movie was like promising your audience Interview With The Vampire but instead giving them Vampire Hookers starring John Carradine.
How do you screw this up? The first novel in the series was tailor-made for screen success: Mad Max crossed with a Spaghetti Western in a supernatural/ horror version of a post-apocalypse movie.
The real challenge should have come with adapting the subsequent novels in the series, not The Gunslinger. Anyway, here’s a Halloween Month look at Roland Deschain art to help wash away the bad taste.
MORE … Continue reading
Filed under Halloween Season
ZOMBIES OF MONTICELLO (2013)
By reader request here’s my semi-regular Halloween Season blog post Zombies of Monticello, my mock movie review. I first ran this in 2013, but it may not seem as irreverent this year in the wake of the large-scale criticism of Thomas Jefferson.
ZOMBIES OF MONTICELLO (2013) – Halloween month continues at Balladeer’s Blog with this review of cult director Eddie Wozniak’s blood-soaked combination of horror and commentary.
Learn the REAL cause of Thomas Jefferson’s death on July 4th, 1826! On the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence the zombified corpses of all of Jefferson’s dead slaves rise from their graves and besiege him and his extended family in the Jefferson mansion at Monticello!
The pompous hypocrite who penned noble words about freedom and equality while OWNING other human beings tries everything to wipe out the undead legions pressing in on all sides. Continue reading
Filed under Bad and weird movies, Fantastic Movie Reviews, Halloween Season, humor
WEREWOLVES OF LONDON
You knew it was coming at some point! It’s Warren Zevon with a very popular Halloween song.
Filed under Halloween Season, opinion
MONSTER RALLY: BEATRICE THE POISON WOMAN
FOR THE OTHER CREATURES IN THIS MONSTER RALLY CLICK HERE
BEATRICE RAPPACCINI
First Appearance: Rappaccini’s Daughter (1844)
Cryptid Category: Human-plant hybrid.
Lore: Beatrice Rappaccini, also called the Poison Woman, had been experimented on by her mad scientist father since infancy. Some dark rumors even held that the father – Doctor Giacomo Rappaccini – had spawned her from a seed-pod and that his tales of a wife were lies.
Beatrice was so toxic that she was the only one alive who could come into contact with the monstrous and deadly plants in her father’s courtyard garden. The Poison Woman’s beauty drove men wild, tempting many admirers to brave the dangers of her father’s mutated plant life.
The dark beauty’s flesh was a toxic poison and her breath could kill insects, snakes, rats and small children. Dead creatures made the ideal fertilizer for the creations of Beatrice’s father. It was hinted that Beatrice fed on the vermin killed by her breath, just like Venus Flytraps and other carnivorous plant-life. Continue reading
Filed under Halloween Season
CEMETERY MAN (1994)
FOR REVIEWS OF SIMILAR HALLOWEEN MOVIES CLICK HERE
Cemetery Man
CEMETERY MAN (DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE) (1994) – This film is based on stories by Tiziano Sclavi, the man at the center of “Sclavian philosophy” from Italy. Michele Soavi directed and Rupert Everett starred as the hero, Francesco Dellamorte. Dellamorte is the gravedigger and custodian of Buffalora Cemetery, Buffalora being a fictional town supposedly in the north of Italy.
If you ever wondered what the Patrick McGoohan series The Prisoner would have been like if it had been done as a horror story rather than sci-fi then Cemetery Man is the movie for you! The film employs the same Kafkaesque themes that The Prisoner did with heavy overtones of Sartre’s work The Myth of Sisyphus.
The dead buried in Buffalora Cemetery tend to come back to life as killer zombies after seven days. Dellamorte, with minimal help from his rotund and simple-minded assistant Gnaghi (Francois Hadji-Lazaro), destroys the undead monsters. Our hero gets no thanks from the living citizens of Buffalora, however, who treat him like a Village Idiot and spread rumors that he is either impotent or a eunuch. Mysterious benefactors pay Dellamorte well for his thankless job via envelopes of cash that they mail to him. Continue reading
Filed under Halloween Season
STRANGE BREW: HALLOWEEN SONG
Halloween Month is slipping away! Think of this song as being about witch’s brew or the strange brew made by the Gnomes of the Catskills during their one week here on Earth each October.
Filed under Halloween Season, opinion
FRANKENSTEIN’S ARMY (2013)
FRANKENSTEIN’S ARMY (2013) – Halloween Month continues here at Balladeer’s Blog with this odd mish-mash of a film. Frankenstein’s Army is one of those horror movies which is presented as Found Footage for no reason and even though it’s set during World War 2 it’s being filmed in color for no reason at all and it’s being filmed by a Russian film crew for ABSOLUTELY no reason at all.
Okay, to be serious I will admit that having the story told from the perspective of a Russian army unit is a nice novelty. I think most viewers are pleased that they don’t have to endure yet another group of armed American stereotypes fighting a war while bantering with each other.
It’s the closing weeks of the war in the European Theater of Combat and our Soviet soldiers are on a secret mission to extract Dr Victor Frankenstein, the latest mad scientist descendant of that infamous family. Little do they know they’re in for a nightmarish battle against re-animated, refitted and mechanized corpses even stranger than Herbert West’s creations.
Dr Frankenstein has been doing experiments for the Germans, working on those Top Secret “wonder weapons” that Hitler and his propagandists kept reassuring the suffering German civilians about. Stalin wants our heroes to determine the nature of Frankenstein’s creations and take him into custody to continue his work for the blood-soaked Soviet dictator.
You’d think the camera crew would be along to film ONLY Frankenstein’s work but no, they film EVERYTHING, making this yet another Found Footage flick to piss away its pacing with interludes that are as dull as real life. There are some decent renderings of the nearly post-apocalyptic German countryside but the color footage reveals how inauthentic the movie’s Russian and German uniforms are. Continue reading
Filed under Bad and weird movies, Halloween Season
LAYLA: ADD AN H AND MAKE IT A HALLOWEEN SONG
Let’s cheat a little. Take the title of the song Layla, then add an “H” in honor of Halloween to make it LAYLAH as in Aleister Crowley’s work The Book of Lies.
And voila! We can pretend it’s a song dedicated to Leila Waddell (photo at left), the woman who modeled as LAYLAH in The Book of Lies. Halloween Month continues with this VERY contrived musical shoutout. Because let’s face it: Crowley and contrived just GO together.
Filed under Halloween Season, opinion
