Hooptober... And Then There Were Nine

74th Kill

A whole slew of folks will want to cancel this film because, let's face it, the central melodrama concerning a love triangle between our square jawed hero, his dowdy but salt-of-the-earth wife, and his upstart floozy young tart with the temerity to force her way into his domestic life, pretty much just plain sucks. Apart from not being very interesting, it's so rife with shitty outdated misogyny (as opposed to excitingly hip misogyny?) that it gets pretty damn annoying. Fuck this guy, he's an asshole (sorry Patrick Allen, but you're starring in a movie with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing - getting upstaged was an inevitability anyway).

Everything else in this movie is a hoot, which is all the more remarkable because we don't get to see "the monster" until the last five minutes and when we do, the creature design is hardly impressive. But there is something about this setting I just love beyond my own ability to articulate. It's all very Doctor Who with a quaint little British island community threatened by deadly space aliens, very cheap production design and a sense of siege inside a country pub - I am just so in for anything like that.

And yes, although this is not a Hammer joint (which explains why the art design and cinematography isn't as good), this is still the Holy Trinity of British Gothic Horror in action: Lee, Cushing and director Terence Fisher. So you gotta ask yourself: how bad can it possibly be???

Best Kill (may contain traces of spoiler)

Despite the shit-ton of horror movies he starred in, it's amazing how rare it is to get a chance to highlight a Peter Cushing death scene, but he gets to go all the way in Night of the Big Heat. In truth, it's just another of those rather simplistic kill scenes where someone dies of heat exposure when getting too close to an alien. But whereas everyone else in the film just screams and clutches their head and falls down, Cushing makes it look epic. The first sense of something wrong, his impeccable and imaginative use of props (in this case a walkie talkie, which he first uses to verbally express what is happening before it becomes something to accentuate the theatricality of his physical movement), the incredible expressiveness of the eyes, the patented Cushing head-toss with his wispy hair spraying out from his pate, the exaggerated drama of his movement. Watch the master at work, folks.