Monthly Archives: January 2021

Friday Night At The Home Drive-In: Attack of the Robots / Cartes sur table (1966)

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I became interested in Jess Franco while studying film at university. That may be a sentence that’s never been written before. Let me explain… I did not study Jess Franco, or his films, at university.  I’m quite sure that none of my professors would have considered Jess Franco’s films to be worthy of study. They may have been wrong about that, but that’s beside the point. Franco was not taught alongside Fellini, Truffaut, Antonioni, and Scorsese. However, I did write a major essay for one of my classes that focussed on the Women In Prison genre – not exactly a typical FIlm Studies topic, either, but that’s what attracted me to it – and that’s how I became aware of Jess Franco and his strange oeuvre.

The story of my relationship with the Women In Prison genre is one I will have to save for another day. Suffice it to say that I randomly rented a Jess Franco movie called Hellhole Women (1981), and then later read about it in what would become one of my favourite books, Video Trash & Treasures Volume II by L.A. Morse. It was, in fact, part of a mini section called Jess’s Jungle Frolics. The overarching chapter was called HOT CAGES, NAKED CHAINS: A Cell Block of Women Behind Bars. One of my fellow film students, and a connoisseur of cinematic trash, had recommended that I buy the book and read this chapter when he found out my major essay was about the WIP genre.

In the mini-section, Morse first reviews Women In Cell Bloc 9 (1978), noting that it contains “what is probably the only all nude jailbreak on film”. Then, in his review of Hellhole Women, Morse says:

“While it must have been a challenge to top the all nude jailbreak, old Jess was not daunted, and here provides us with an all topless prison camp — inmates, guards, and dragon-lady warden included.”

When my friend Ian and I first watched Hellhole Women, we recognized it as a crazy, over-the-top sleaze fest that had a lot of camp humour value. We did not know anything about the makers of the film. Thanks to L.A. Morse, I now knew that the genius behind it was Jess Franco, and that he had made other must see cinematic atrocities. In fact, Morse would comment throughout the book every time that Jess Franco was involved in a movie. Admittedly, the comments were most often negative. Morse was not a fan of Franco. He would say things like “old Jess has reached the point where he can effortlessly make nudity and violence seem boring.” But I was intrigued. And the worse the review, the more I wanted to see the movie. I started to rent, and later buy, any movie that I came across that had the name Jess Franco on it (or Jesús Franco as he is sometimes called). Some of them were, by any normal means of evaluation, bad – but there was always something interesting about them. And some of them were downright delightful. One of my favourite surprise discoveries was Kiss Me Monster (1969).

Those were the days of VHS and no internet, so unearthing a rare Franco film did not happen very often. He made over 200 hundred movies in his lifetime, and to this day I still haven’t seen anywhere near all of them. With the right online connections, it’s not as hard to locate the movies now – but it’s also not as special. I haven’t made it a mission to relentlessly download or stream every title in his filmography. I’m old school, so I still get excited when I find a physical copy of one of his movies – and if it’s a reasonable enough deal, I buy it. Of course, if I’m really lucky, someone will give me a nice edition of one of his films on DVD or Blu-ray for my birthday (or some other event for which gifts are appropriate). This is how I came to be the owner of a nice, shiny new Blu-ray of Attack of the Robots AKA Cartes sur table (1966).

This is an early Jess Franco movie, and as such, does not contain the kind of over-the-top sleaze that a movie like Hellhole Women does. However, it does contain a lot of the elements that Franco would remain obsessed with over the course of his 60 (!) year career as a filmmaker. There are scenes in nightclubs, featuring sexy dancers. There are women in chains. Franco appears in the film, as he often did. And this is the first of seven films that Franco made about a private detective character named Al Pereira. In this one, Pereira is played by Eddie Constantine, who was famous for playing a hard-hitting private detective named Lemmy Caution in a series of films. His portrayal of Al Pereira in Attack of the Robots could be seen as more comedic send up of his image from the Lemmy Caution films. Or maybe it was just simple exploitation of a well known actor in a similar role. Who knows? Whatever the case, Constantine is great in this movie – and it’s a shame that it’s the only time he ever got to play Al Pereira. The next time Pereira was seen, he was played by Howard Vernon in Les ebranlées in 1972. 

Attack of the Robots is a delightfully fun movie. It’s a post James Bond spy spoof that contains elements of science fiction, as a mad scientist finds a way to essentially turn people into robots if they have Type O blood. It’s beautifully shot and feels like a lush production compared to some of Franco’s later films. Sure, it’s light on sleaze and violence, but it’s played for laughs and for the most part it gets them. If you’re in the mood for  something light and fun, with the kind of stylistic flourishes that only a filmmaker like Jess Franco could provide, Attack of the Robots might just be the kind of #NotQuiteClassicCinema that you’re looking for. It’s not too far removed from another Franco film I wrote about a while back, Dr. Orloff’s Monster AKA The Mistresses of Dr. Jekyll (1964). That one is more of a monster movie, and less of a comedy, but it’s also an early, more restrained version of Franco. Each of them, in their own way, make for a mighty fine #FridayNightAtTheHomeDriveIn.

Friday Night At The Home Drive-In: Willie Dynamite (1974)

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I have a lot of Blaxploitation films in my collection. I discovered the genre, without even knowing it was a genre, at a fairly young age. I’m honestly not sure which movie would have been the first Blaxploitation movie that I ever saw. Some possible contenders might be Three the Hard Way (1974), Penitentiary (1979), Black Caesar (1973) and Shaft (1971),

Shaft is a funny one, because I have a distinct memory of watching it on TV when I was very young, and losing interest in it part way through. Basically, I thought it was boring. For years, I believed that this was my experience of Shaft and I avoided watching it again. Finally, when I gave it another shot, I realized that it could not have been the movie that had bored me all those years ago. For one thing, I loved it. But more to the point, I did not recognize a single moment in it. I decided that it must have been one of the sequels that I had seen all those years ago. But when I watched Shaft’s Big Score! (1972) and Shaft in Africa (1973), they were even less like the movie in my memory. To this day, I don’t know how to explain it. I watched some movie that I was pretty convinced was Shaft when I was a kid. What could it have been? I hope to figure it out one day.

In a funny way, the very first Blaxploitation film I saw was actually Live and Let Die (1973). I was a huge James Bond films growing up, and I watched all of the movies, multiple times, whenever they came on TV. This was, of course, before VCRs. Had I been able to tape stuff, I’m sure I would have seen all of the Bond films many more times. As it was, I saw Live and Let Die (1973) several times growing up, and it was one of my favourites. Of course, I had never heard the term Blaxploitation, and I didn’t think of the characters in the movie as black or white. They were just characters. It wasn’t until many years later that I heard someone suggest that Live and Let Die was hugely influenced by the (at the time) very popular Blaxploitation genre. This surprised me, but I thought about it and realized that a person could almost see the movie as being part of it.

Somewhere throughout my early days of TV movie watching, I recall seeing Willie Dynamite (1974) listed in the TV Scene (our local newspaper’s TV guide). In fact, I recall noticing it being on more than once. It was a strange title, so it stuck out to me. I may have even stumbled upon an actual broadcast one night, flipping the channel and finding myself in the middle of a strange looking movie that I didn’t recognize. I opened the TV Scene to find out what I was looking at, and Willie Dynamite was the answer. I’ve never liked starting movies in the middle, so I didn’t stick around and watch it. But the brief glimpses I got made me realize that It was something that I should definitely see sometime. Unfortunately, it was usually on very late at night, and I had no way to tape it (yet). So, I didn’t wind up seeing the movie until quite a few years later, on VHS. 

The thing that remember most from that first viewing, is the theme song, “Willie D.” (written by Gilbert Moses,the film’s director, & J.J. Johnson). Like a lot of the best #Blaxploitation films, the songs on the soundtrack tend to comment on the action of the movie. “Willie D.” is what I might call a perfect character song, describing the titular character of this movie:

Seven women in the palm of his hand,
Willie D.,
Got a woman for every man,
Willie D..
It’s magic the way he runs his game,
Never treating two girls the same,
Selling fantasies,
’bout what you please,
It’s no different from any other industry…

And while Martha Reeves belts out these lyrics on the soundtrack, we see the credits play overtop images of seven beautiful women walking into a hotel lobby full of middle aged conventioneers. It doesn’t take genius to figure out that these are working women looking to connect with some lonely, out of town men with money. And those men clearly like what they see. The mini scenes that ensue are mainly played for laughs, and between the music, the lyrics, and the comedic action, the opening sequence is a pure delight. We also see images of Willie D. himself, in a fancy hat and shades, driving in his fancy car with personalized plates that say “DYNAMITE”. He pulls over and gets out of the car, revealing his whole outfit for the first time – and it is a fashion statement that must be seen to be believed. Willie D. is the epitome of the stereotypical pimp – at least how he is portrayed in 1970s pop culture. Whether or not he is a reflection of reality, past or present, is beside the point. He is a larger than life character with a larger than life theme song. And by the time the music ends, we feel that we know exactly who he is, and I, for one, felt like I’d already had my money’s worth. This movie was awesome…

Watching Willie Dynamite for what must have been the third time last #FridayNightAtTheHomeDriveIn, I was struck by how much more serious-minded the movie is than many of it’s brethren. This may seem like an odd thing to say, considering that Willie Dynamite contains plenty of funny bits, both intentional and unintentional, but the movie manages to tell a rather serious story while making us laugh. It is over-the-top with its fashions and attitudes, but it is not particularly exploitative. It’s about pimps and prostitutes, but it does not contain any nudity. The main character, Willie D., is played by Roscoe Orman who most us know as Gordon on Sesame Street. He is quite convincing as Willie D., showing a completely different side of himself. Diana Sands plays Cora, a social worker (and ex-prostitute) who makes it her mission to destroy Willie – or does she? In the final act of the movie, characters make unexpected choices that resonate with real human emotion. Put simply, the movie gets better. The characters become more real, and what could have been a stereotypical, by the numbers ending becomes something so much more powerful. 

I hate spoilers, so I’ll stop there and hope that I haven’t already said too much. I should note that Diana Sands, who is excellent in this movie, died of leiomyosarcoma in 1973 – presumably before this movie was released. She was only 39.

Gilbert Moses was a theatre director, and co-founded the Free Southern Theater company which, according to Wikipedie, was “an important pioneer of African-American theatre” in 1963. Willie Dynamite was his first film. He went on to direct a lot of television. He died in 1995 at age 52.

Willie Dynamite (1974) is a #NotQuiteClassicCinema classic that probably gets less respect than it should. It’s too bad that Gilbert Moses didn’t give us any other films like it. The closest he came was The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh (1979), which a friend of mine once told me was the first film his father took him to see in the theatre. Strange choice, but certainly unforgettable. I wish I had seen Willie Dynamite on TV all those years ago. It probably would have blown my mind. 

Friday Night At The Home Drive-In: Stop Me Before I Kill! (1960)

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Stop Me Before I Kill! (1960) is not a movie that I was in any way familiar with before I watched it last week. I acquired it as part of a Hammer Films Collection on DVD. I had heard of, if not seen, all of the other films in the five movie set. One of them, Scream of Fear (1961), is among my absolute favourite Hammer Films, and I wrote about it in a previous blog post.

Stop Me Before I Kill! is not a typical Hammer Horror movie. In fact, it is more like an attempt at Alfred Hitchcock style psychological suspense. I couldn’t help but think of Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945) as I watched this film. Both films involve a psychiatrist helping an amnesiac to recover his memory. In Hitchcock’s film, the patient is a man accused of murder. In Stop Me Before I Kill! it is a man who has a strange impulse to commit a murder (by strangling his wife). Stop Me Before I Kill! was apparently based on a novel called The Full Treatment by Ronald Scott Thorn, which was published in 1959.

The cast of Stop Me Before I Kill! is very good, but not a typical Hammer Films cast. There are no regulars like Peter Cushing or Christopher Lee. In fact, when I first looked at the title and the names of the stars (Claude Dauphin, Diane Cilento, Ronald Lewis), I wondered if this movie really was a Hammer Film – or just something that Hammer had picked up fro distribution (the way Troma picked up Dario Argento’s The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) for instance). I honestly don’t know what its production history was, but Hammer Film Production is one of the companies listed in the credits. 

Stop Me Before I Kill! is a film that seems to fit in among the other black and white horror/thrillers that Hammer made after Psycho (1960) and perhaps Diabolique (1955), This film is partly set in France, and features a French star (Claude Dauphin), so one can’t help but think of Diabolique. Some other examples of Hammer’s foray into the black and white thriller world include: Maniac (1963), Paranoiac (1963), Nightmare (1964) and my aforementioned favourite Scream of Fear (1961). 

I like these black and white horror/thrillers. In a way, they are like the low budget, more realistic flip-side to the somewhat more lavish monster epics involving Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Mummy. They tend to be short and to the point (80 minutes, 81 minutes, 83 minutes, 86 minutes) – and for the most part, they tend to work.

Stop Me Before I Kill! clocks in at 108 minutes! This is a full 28 minutes longer than Paranoiac and 22 minutes longer than Maniac – the longest of the other examples. This might be understandable if Stop Me Before I Kill! was an epic story of some sort. It’s not, really. Spellbound was 111 minutes, so maybe the makers of Stop Me Before I Kill! were taking their cue from that. In any case, it feels a little too long for the amount of story that it is telling.

This is not to say that Stop Me Before I Kill! is not an entertaining movie. I enjoyed it quite a bit. The actors are all good. The story is good, although somewhat predictable. It features great black and white cinematography and has some legitimately suspenseful sequences. It takes a little too long to get where it’s going, but if you are in the mood to relax, it could provide a satisfying #FridayNightAtTheHomeDriveIn. If, however, you are in a hurry for horror, you might want to choose one of the other fine black and white Hammer thrillers.

Stop Me Before I Kill! looks and feels a bit like a actual classic – like an Alfred Hitchcock movie, for instance. The running time seems to imply that it’s going for a more serious, respectable kind of cinema. Herschell Gordon Lewis admitted that he tried to do it with the 117 minute A Taste of Blood (1967). Schlockmeister William Castle famously produced (but was not allowed to direct) the 137 minute Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Was a bid for more mainstream respectability what Hammer, or director Val Guest, had in mind when they made Stop Me Before I Kill!?

I have no idea. But I think it’s fair to say that Stop Me Before I Kill! failed to achieve the classic status of films like Rosemary’s Baby. So did A Taste of Blood for that matter, but that’s another story. And so Stop Me Before I Kill! will have to settle for a place alongside the many other fine examples of #NotQuiteClassicCinema that we can all appreciate and treasure for years to come. 

Friday Night At The Home Drive-In: New Year’s Evil (1980)

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Back in the 1990s, I appeared on a radio show to promote one of the low budget film projects that I was working on at that time. The host asked me if I had seen any good movies lately. For some reason, this question threw me. It’s always a little tricky to think of a good answer to an unexpected question when you’re put on the spot during a live interview. However, I watch at least one movie a day, so surely it should have been easy for me to rattle off a list of seven or ten titles just from the past week. But perhaps it was the inclusion of the word “good” that made me hesitate, and see nothing but visions of dust and tumbleweeds where the memory of my recently watched pile of movies should have been.

The last thing anyone wants on the radio is dead air, so I immediately started to answer the question with some sort of awkward stammering about how it all depended upon a person’s definition of “good”. Thankfully, as I was speaking, one recently watched movie came back to me.

“I just saw New Year’s Evil,” I told him.

The host looked puzzled. “New Year’s Evil…?”

“It’s not a recent movie,” I explained. “It’s an old slasher film from the ’80s. Made after Halloween, so they named it after a holiday – or at least a day in the calendar. Like Friday the 13th or My Bloody Valentine.”

“I haven’t seen it,” the host admitted, “but I know which movie you’re talking about.” He was roughly my age, and a huge fan of ’80s movies, so it wasn’t surprising that he would have heard of it.

“As you know, I’m a fan of slasher films,” I continued, “but I had never seen this one either. Maybe because the books all said it was bad.”

“And was it?” he asked me.

“I actually liked it,” I said, and I’m not sure which one of us was more surprised by that answer.

Truth be told, my expectations for New Year’s Evil (1980) had been pretty low. My most trusted review book, Terror On Tape by James O’Neill, gave the movie one and a half stars and called it “A less than great throwback to those bygone days when no holiday was safe from the makers of mad slasher movies… With bad music, little blood, and a predictable twist ending…” In Video Trash and Treasures, L.A. Morse says “I think there are more music/dance interludes than bodies in this one, which probably says it all…”. I actively avoided watching this movie for the better part of two decades. It was only when I found an old VHS tape in a bargain bin that I decided it was time to finally see what it was all about.

I certainly did not expect to discuss this movie on a live radio show about FIlm.

It was true that I had enjoyed New Year’s Evil much more than I had expected to – perhaps largely due to the very low expectations that I had developed over the years. Most reviewers criticized the film for it’s extensive use of rock band performance footage – and often called the music bad. I actually enjoyed that aspect of the film. It’s about a big New Years Eve rock show. They call it a “punk rock” show, but the music seems to be more straight up hard rock or classic rock. We do see bands performing several times throughout the movie.

I have a particular fondness for movies about rock bands. This Is Spinal Tap (1984) is a favourite of mine from way back – and it is, in way, about “bad music”, although my friends and I all bought the soundtrack and loved it. I am also a huge fan of the heavy metal horror films like Rock ‘n’ Roll Nightmare (1987), Black Roses (1988) and Rocktober Blood (1984). New Year’s Evil is not really like those movies. It’s not a story about the band(s), or in which the members of the bands are characters. In fact, the bands in New Year’s Evil are actually real bands. This makes it, in some ways, closer to movies like The Prowler (1981) which features a band performing on stage. But New Year’s Evil features so much music – and a flamboyant rockstar-like celebrity host played by Roz Kelly (who some might remember as Pinky Tuscadero on Happy Days (1974-84)) – that it takes on a bit of that rock band horror movie feel. And call me crazy, but I like the music featured in the film – you can hear the theme song by Shadow on YouTube.

So, I wasn’t lying to the radio host when I said that I had liked New Year’s Evil, but I think it was a fairly mild like after that first viewing. Over the years, however, I started to watch New Year’s Evil on New Years Eve (go figure), and I found my appreciation of the film growing stronger with each viewing. Kind of like a song or album that you hear once and think is okay, but after you hear it a few more times you start to really get into it. Those are some of favourite songs/albums. After wearing out my VHS tape, I upgraded to the Scream Factory Blu-ray and I couldn’t be happier. The film has never looked (and sounded) better, and it’s nice to have a few extras to enhance the experience.

One more rock and roll reason to love New Year’s Evil (at least for me), is the fact that Nurse Robbie, whom our psychopathic killer encounters at a mental institution, is played by Jennie Franks. She has a few acting credits over a ten year period, and was apparently also a photographer and playwright. I had never noticed this before, but she also has quite a few songwriting credits on the IMDb – and they are all for one song: Aqualung by Jethro Tull. Those who know me, know that I am a huge fan of Jethro Tull, and Aqualung is one of my all time favourite albums, and songs. When I saw Jennie Franks’ soundtrack credits on the IMDb, my brain couldn’t quite comprehend them – until I remembered that Aqualung is one of the only songs in Jethro Tull’s vast catalogue that wasn’t written solely by Ian Anderson. And I had noticed, years ago, that the co-writer of Aqualung was a woman… Jennie Anderson, in fact; Ian’s first wife. Now I discover, much to my surprise, that Jennie Franks, the actress who plays the nurse who (SPOILER ALERT) gets murdered in New Year’s Evil, used to be called Jennie Anderson, and is, in fact, the very same Jennie Anderson who co-wrote one of my all time favourite songs!

What are the odds of that?

I actually always liked Jennie Franks’ portrayal of Nurse Robbie in this movie, but I had no idea who she was until this year. I suspect that all future viewings of New Year’s Evil will only be enhanced by this exciting new discovery…

Director Emmett Alston only made eight films during his relatively brief career, and by the looks of them they might all be #NotQuiteClassicCinema of one type of another. Alston seemed to be particularly partial to ninjas, having made three films about them. A year before  New Year’s Evil was released, Alston made his directorial debut with something called Three-Way Weekend (1979). It’s described on the IMDb as “Two bisexual girls go camping in the woods and are followed around by a perverted guy in a gorilla mask and a man in uniform with a whip who thinks everyone’s a communist…”. If ever a film heralded the arrival of a cinematic genius it’s got to be this one. Needless to say, I’m putting it on my must-find-a-copy-and-watch list.

 

 

For me, New Year’s Evil (1980) will always be a welcome addition to any #FridayNightAtTheHomeDriveIn – especially if that Friday also happens to be New Years Eve, or New Year’s Day. And looking at my new 2021 calendar, I think I know what I’ll be doing next December 31…

Friday Night At The Home Drive-In: Tales from the Crypt (1972)

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I recently recounted the story of my earliest interactions with VCRs (not here, but for a another project that you’ll be hearing about in the months to come). It made me realize that one of the most important moments in my development as an aficionado of obscure, weird, horror and other B-movies was the purchase of my family’s first VCR. My parents had been a little slow to come around to the idea that we needed to OWN one, and in fact had resorted to renting a VCR a few times. But, after a few successful VCR rental weekends – and a lot of begging from me – my parents finally decided that it might be more economical – and less annoying – to buy one.

My mom took me down to Adi’s Video, one of the closest and most successful movie rental stores in the neighborhood. Adi’s wasn’t just renting movies in those days, they were also selling VCRs – and they had both VHS and Beta. My Mom asked the man in the store (I don’t think it was Adi), which format was the best. He did not hesitate to tell us that Beta was far superior to VHS. So, my Mom bought a Sony Betamax. It came with a wired remote control and a free Beta t-shirt (which I wore for a couple of years). I have to say, that machine worked really well. And even after Beta lost the war to VHS, I continued to use it to tape movies off the TV. In fact, I still have it hooked up to my TV today – and it still works (almost 40 years later). On the other hand, my family went through several VHS VCRs over the years. Some of them died after only a couple of years. Coincidence? Who knows…?

I have a really strong memory of the guy who sold us that Betamax, standing there in his “Beta #1” t-shirt, and I am certain that he is the one from whom I rented Tales from the Crypt (1972) – on Beta, of course. It must have been on the same day we bought the VCR. I remember the “Beta #1” guy so vividly, taking the movie box from my hand and examining it, approvingly.

“This is a good movie,” he said. “Jacqueline Bisset is great in it…” then he turned the box over and looked at the back. “Oh, wait,” he said, “It’s Joan Collins who’s in this. I get them mixed up.”

My Mom reacted, physically. “I wouldn’t want to be confused with Joan Collins,” she said, judgementally.

This comment has remained burned in my brain for all these years. My Mom thought it was an insult to Jacqueline Bisset that “Beta #1” thought she was Joan Collins. Or, rather, that he thought that Joan Collins was her, as the case might be. I never asked for clarification of that remark, because I assumed that it was because Joan Collins was the “bad woman” Alexis Carrington on Dynasty (1981-89) in those days. I was a little surprised, because I didn’t think my Mom even watched Dynasty – she was much more of a Dallas (1978–1991) fan.

In any case, because I can remember this moment so clearly, I know that my Mom was there, at Adi’s, when I rented Tales from the Crypt. After that first day, when we bought the (surprisingly heavy) VCR and took it home in the car, I don’t think my Mom was ever at the store when I rented movies. I would generally walk over with my brother, or with a friend. So, this means that Tales from the Crypt may hold the distinction of being the first movie that I ever watched on my family’s first VCR. As you might imagine, this makes it a seminal viewing experience for me.

I suppose it’s possible that my Mom came with us to rent movies at some point, but if she did, it would have been very early in our VCR owning days. So, either way, Tales from the Crypt is a movie that goes way, way back for me. It was, I’m certain, the first Amicus horror anthology that I ever watched. It wasn’t quite the first anthology, I don’t think. That distinction may go to Creepshow (1982), which I was lucky enough to see in the theatre. In fact, Creepshow may have given me the idea to rent Tales from the Crypt, but I’m not sure. I also saw Dead of Night (1945) on TV as a kid. I’m not sure exactly when, but my memory of it is pretty hazy, so I must have been pretty young. 

I loved Tales from the Crypt instantly. Every story worked for me, and felt fresh to me. The first one, And All Through the House, starring the aforementioned Joan Collins, was probably the first Christmas horror story I ever saw – and the first time I saw a murderer dressed up as Santa Claus. This would, of course, become a much more familiar sight to me, as I saw movies like Silent NIght, Deadly Night (1984). But in some ways, this short story was more effective, more clever and scarier than any of the other killer Santa movies. Even when they remade the same story for the TV series, Tales from the Crypt (1989–1996), it failed to be as scary as this original movie version.

I actually wrote a short play back in 1995 called The Blood On Santa’s Claws, which was meant to be a satire/homage to Christmas horror films. And All Through the House was one of my main inspirations. Interestingly, the play was part of an anthology of Christmas plays called Six Twisted Christmas Tales. Sadly, the show was cancelled and the play went back into my desk drawer to rot. A few years later, a theatre company called Cherry Red Productions in Washington D.C. found out about the play and asked me if they could do it as part of their Christmas extravaganza. Cherry Red Productions was once described by the Washington Post as “D.C.‘s only theater company dedicated to smut,” so of course I was thrilled. Sadly, they folded in 2012.

The problem with many horror anthologies is that they are uneven; a mixed bag of good, bad, and indifferent stories. This is partly due to the fact that the majority of them seem to be made by a bunch of different filmmakers. And I can understand that temptation. Hey, here’s four, or five, or ten interesting filmmakers. Let’s get ’em all together and have ’em make short films on a theme (or not). Even if they all do good work, the clash of their different styles often makes the whole seem like less than the sum of its parts.

All five of the stories in Tales from the Crypt were directed by Freddie Francis, and they are excellent as far as I’m concerned. I don’t know how many times I’ve watched this movie over the years, but it never fails to entertain me. I hesitate to call it #NotQuiteClassicCinema, because it is certainly a classic in my book. But, just as the original comic books that inspired it would not have been called great literature by the critics of the day, so this movie would have been maligned by people who think they have good taste. But as Pablo Picasso once said, “The chief enemy of creativity is good taste.” And I have always prided myself on being at least a little bit creative…

If you’ve never seen Tales from the Crypt (1972) – or even if you have – do yourself a favour and slot it into your next #FridayNightAtTheHomeDriveIn. You won’t regret it.