Old-Time Religion

The Mummy: adapted by John Balderston from a story by Nina Wilcox Putnam and Richard Schayer; directed by Karl Freund; starring Boris Karloff (Imhotep) and Zita Johann (Helen Grosvenor) (1932): The first Universal Frankenstein movie had made Boris Karloff a big enough star by the time The Mummy was released that the legend 'Karloff!' dominated the posters. And Karloff and the set design are really the stars here -- Karloff's co-stars are a terribly forgettable lot. I've forgotten them already.

Of course, Karloff only appears in full mummy regalia for a couple minutes. For the rest of it, he's sinister but human-looking as the resurrected Egyptian priest Imhotep, mummified alive for the crime of loving the Pharoah's daughter. But you can't keep a good monster down.

Inspired by stories of the Curse of King Tut's Tomb, The Mummy sends Karloff on a tour of vengeance and love, as he seeks the reincarnation of his lost love. Yes, reincarnation. Not something the Ancient Egyptians were known for believing in, but what the Hell. Who can tell Hinduism from Egyptian mythology? You might as well just worship Hawkman!

Karloff is great as Imhotep. In one of his first full speaking roles as a horror star, Karloff seems to intuitively understand something that a lot of early sound actors did not: Less is More on the big screen. He has that great Grinch Karloff voice, and he knows how to use it -- for the most part, insinuatingly, softly. His movements are slow and patient, befitting a 3700-year-old man-mummy. Every time I see Karloff in a movie, major or slight, I'm again impressed by what a natural-seeming, finely tuned screen actor he was. I can pretty much happily watch him in anything. Recommended.

Philomena: adapted by Steve Coogan and Jeff Pope from the book by Martin Sixsmith; directed by Stephen Frears; starring Judi Dench (Philomena), Steve Coogan (Martin Sixsmith), Michelle Fairley (Sally Mitchell), and Anna Maxwell Martin (Jane) (2013): Steve Coogan shines again in a road trip movie, this one teaming his writer/reporter character with Judi Dench's eponymous Philomena as they embark on a mostly true story of lost children and Irish Roman Catholicism.

50 years before the main, early 21st-century events of the movie, young Philomena gave birth out-of-wedlock to a son. At the time, she was a prisoner in all but name of a Roman Catholic girls' reformatory run by nuns. In exchange for laborious work, the girls -- many of them in their early teens and pretty much all of them sent to the reformatory by relatives ashamed of their pregnancies -- got room, board, and one hour a day with their children. And then the children were put up for adoption.

Director Stephen Frears depicts the horrors of the past with a deft touch. He also uses identifiably 'old' media to depict many of Philomena's memories and conjectures about things she never witnessed: washed-out tones of old photos, 8 mm home movies, washed-out home video. The present sees the unlikely pair of grouchy, atheistic lapsed Catholic Coogan and (almost) perennially cheerful Philomena strive to discover what happened to Philomena's son. The former reformatory is politely non-commital. And lo, all the papers indicating the destinations of the adopted children burned in a mysterious fire!

The writing, partially by Coogan, is a delight. Both characters are right in their own ways at certain times -- Philomena may scold Coogan's Martin Sixsmith for his anger and cynicism, but it's that anger that gets the answers to certain questions. And the actions of the reformatory and its inheritors are absolutely dire and loathsome. Philomena's apologies for the actions of the Roman Catholic hierarchy wear a bit thin at times, but are nonetheless depicted as being an essential component of the more admirable facets of her character. Dench is a delight. Coogan is a delight. Maybe they should add Philomena to Coogan's next The Trip movie. Highly recommended.

Identity and Loss

Lost Angels by David J. Schow collecting the following stories: Red Light; Brass; Pamela's Get; The Falling Man; and Monster Movies (Collected 1990): The horror boom of the 1970's and 1980's helped make the 1980's and early 1990's the Golden Age of horror short-story collection released in mass-market (as opposed to specialty house) paperback. This continues to be something of a boon to this day, as used copies of some of the finest collections in horror history still show up in used bookstores and on-line for purchase in situations where the collections haven't been re-published.

David J. Schow has been immortalized as one of the founders of the Splatterpunk sub-genre of horror that came to prominence over the course of the 1980's. He's a writer of diverse interests, however, and this collection doesn't feature anything in the Splatterpunk genre. Instead, it features four novellas or novelettes that are indeed described in different ways by the collection's title, and a concluding non-horror story that's nonetheless deeply concerned with horror, its history, and those who love it in its many forms.

Overall, Lost Angels is a dynamite collection. Schow sets all the stories in Los Angeles (another reason for the title). The city insinuates itself into every narrative in all its weird, night-bright oddness. Hollywood players, hangers-on, and bystanders populate the stories. Schow integrates the supernatural with this Hollywood Babylon in sinister but sometimes comic ways -- one supernatural being wants its story told on film, for example.

The thematic concerns of the stories firmly place Schow within the legacy of Fritz Leiber. Like Leiber, Schow searches for supernatural situations that fit the contemporary world, or even grow out of it, per Leiber's seminal 1940 story "Smoke Ghost." Indeed, one story here is a brilliant companion to Leiber's "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes" -- or an inversion, in some ways.

Aside from that search to create new ghosts and monsters, Schow explores the loneliness of the modern urban and exurban world through romantic and familial relationships, quests through bars and parties and decaying sections of Los Angeles, and keenly observed set-pieces in very specifically imagined locations that include strange, junk-filled warehouses, topless bars for ruthless businessmen, studio offices, and occult shops with sarcastic clerks. Love, identity, and loneliness inform much of this collection. It's not that Nothing Is What It Seems...it's that Some Things That Seem, Aren't. Highly recommended.

Imitations of Life

Tootsie: written by Larry Gelbart, Murray Schisgal, Don McGuire, Robert Garland, Barry Levinson, and Elaine May; directed by Sydney Pollack; starring Dustin Hoffman (Michael Dorsey/Dorothy Michaels), Jessica Lange (Julie), Teri Garr (Sandy), Dabney Coleman (Ron), Bill Murray (Jeff), Charles Durning (Les), George Gaynes (John Van Horn), Geena Davis (April) and Sidney Pollack (George Fields) (1982): Ah, what a great comedy. The cast is terrific and in fine form in this fable of an actor (Hoffman) who learns to be a better man by pretending to be a woman in order to get a job on a soap opera.

It's really remarkable how zingy the dialogue is throughout, and how uniformly excellent is the cast (including director Pollack as Hoffman's long-suffering agent). The difficulty of working with Hoffman forms a subtext to the entire picture -- Pollack refused to direct him again despite Tootsie's massive critical and commercial success. Bill Murray drifts in and out to provide a loose, improvisational Greek Chorus as Hoffman's playwright-room-mate, Jessica Lange won an Oscar for her sweet, funny performance, and everyone else is also awesome. Highly recommended.

The Mummy: written by Jimmy Sangster; directed by Terence Fisher; starring Peter Cushing (John Banning), Christopher Lee (Kharis the Mummy), and Yvonne Furneaux (Isobel/Ananka) (1959): Enjoyable, atmospheric remake by British Hammer Studios of the original 1930's Universal horror movie The Mummy. This movie completed Christopher Lee's Hammer trifecta of playing three of the four classic horror-movie monsters originally made famous by those Universal movies of the 1930's -- Dracula, Frankenstein's Monster, and the Mummy, but alas, no Wolf Man.

Lee hated the heavy make-up and costuming for the Mummy, and would avoid heavy make-up ever afterwards. Like Karloff before him, he towers over the rest of the cast (there's a funny moment in which a drunk English poacher claims that the Mummy is 10-feet tall, and it doesn't seem like that much of an exaggeration). Lee is again teamed with his Dracula and Frankenstein co-star Peter Cushing, here playing the son of the archaeologist who released the vengeful mummy into the world.

The Egyptian sets and costumes are really quite impressive, as are the moody scenes set on the moor and in the swamp nearby, with some nice staging for scenes in which the Mummy emerges from, and later descends into, the swamp. Cushing makes for an interesting hero here as he did in the Dracula films as Van Helsing, and Yvonne Furneaux is lovely in the dual role of Cushing's wife and the long-dead Egyptian priestess Ananka, whom Lee's high priest loved and was ultimately mummified alive for loving.

Lee does what he can with his eyes, the only expressive part his made-up face shows, and by the end achieves a sort of lurching, Frankensteinian pathos as the Mummy. That pathos is also partially obtained by having a cultist give the Mummy his murderous orders. The Mummy really looks like he'd rather not stir from his 4000-years' sleep. Recommended.