Stars in B-Movies Blogathon 2025: Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel and Eating Raoul

"I knew what was art and what was shit. But sometimes the shit was more interesting." -- Mary Woronov

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The first film I ever saw in which Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov both appear was Rock 'n' Roll High School, but I didn't start to associate them as collaborators until I saw Bartel's Eating Raoul on HBO in 1984. I had seen Death Race 2000 by then, too, but it didn't register for me that it was their first film together because Bartel, who directed the film, does not appear in it. They ultimately made 17 films together, sometimes playing husband and wife, sometimes with Bartel nowhere to be seen in front of the camera. Their best known collaborations were in films written and/or directed by Bartel himself (most famously in Eating Raoul in 1983), but they were a ubiquitous part of the company of actors who worked at Roger Corman's New World Pictures in the 1970s. I always loved it whenever they showed up in films together, and even when they showed up in films without the other.

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A Monkey on Your Back

"I was in New York on business about four years ago. I was walking back to my hotel after visiting my people at New American Library when I saw a guy selling wind-up monkeys on the street. There was a platoon of them standing on a gray blanket he'd spread on the sidewalk at the corner of Fifth and Forty-fourth, all grinning and bending and clapping their cymbals. They looked really scary to me, and I spent the rest of the walk back to the hotel wondering why. I decided they reminded me of the lady with the shears . . . the one who cuts everyone's thread one day. So keeping that in mind, I wrote the story, most of it longhand, in a hotel room."
--Stephen King, "Story Note on 'The Monkey,'" Skeleton Crew, 1985

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The new film version of The Monkey (2025) is a bit of a departure for director Osgood Perkins. It has a grotesque sense of humor that I didn't know he had and an instinct for the grand guignol that is new to his films. Ordinarily, his films are mood pieces that trade on atmosphere and menace more than plot, but this one is a cartoon. It shares with the Stephen King story its central idea of a wind-up monkey that causes death when it's wound up to action. In the story, the monkey has a pair of cymbals. In the movie they've changed it to a drum for reasons of copyright (they did not want to run afoul of Disney and their army of lawyers). It's a minor change. It also takes from the story its central characters, two brothers who find the monkey in childhood and realize its power. Apart from that, this is a film that ranges far afield of King's story, which is nothing new to the author. "Based on" is too strong a credit for what this takes from King. "Suggested by" might have been more apt. That doesn't mean that it's bad. Just different.

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Stupid Cupid

Christopher Landon is having a ball these days making pop horror movie mash-ups. His new film Heart Eyes (2025), which he wrote and produced for director Josh Ruben, follows the Happy Death Day movies (mashing the slasher film with Groundhog Day) and Freaky (mashing the slasher film with Freaky Friday). Heart Eyes is a slasher film for lovers, a film that eviscerates the rom com and winds up being surprisingly romantic anyway. But emphasis on the word "eviscerate," because this is a film that uses the full scope of what a hard R-Rating allows.

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A Retro Prometheus

Lisa Frankenstein (2024, directed by Zelda Williams). I'm sure the name came first. Surely screenwriter Diablo Cody thought of the play on "Lisa Frank" and tailored a Lisa Frank-inflected Gothic to suit the name? I can't imagine it started with the story. The title is too big a cultural allusion. There are plenty of films where this was the order of operations in their creation, including at least one great one. Cody denies that this is the case. She says that this is just a coincidence, that the genesis of the film is as a distaff reworking of Weird Science. Maybe that's true. I have a suspicious nature. Cody is certainly capable of writing stories of great sophistication. Juno and Young Adult are both layered, complex character studies underneath the hipster dialogue that made their screenwriter famous. That's not this film, alas. This is a ramble-y nostalgia piece. It's so savvy about its time and influences that one can't help but be suspicious about its provenance. It has its pleasures, sure. It's just...if you're not a specific kind of viewer, one raised at the right time and in the right place, one steeped in a specific kind of culture from the late 1980s, then this film is kind of a mess.

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Double Double Toil and Trouble

October is upon us again and that means horror movies and the October Horror Movie Challenge. The first film I watched was Underwater, which I wrote about when it was in theaters. This was the second.

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I was a grown adult when the original Hocus Pocus came out in 1993 and I never had children of my own, so that film was never part of my childhood. I saw it on television one year and charitably decided that it wasn't for me. I wasn't really planning to watch the sequel, newly released to streaming, but it's had pretty good notices--something the original item never got--some of them from people I admire. So in the wee hours of the morning on the first day of October, I clicked play. Hocus Pocus 2 (2022, directed by Anne Fletcher) is considerably better than the first film, at least, as far as I can remember. It's been a while. As kid-friendly spooky shows go, I could get behind this one if I had little ones of my own. Even as a bitter middle-aged woman, I can see its charms. I'm inclined to Halloween candy more than is probably good for me.

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Another Roadside Massacre

100 Bloody Acres (2012, directed by Cameron and Colin Cairns) is one of those rural massacre movies that grew up in the American South, only to take root worldwide. This one is set in Australia, where the bush is prone to drive folks a bit looney. The Cairns are completely aware of the cinematic tradition in which they're working, and they're certainly not above throwing in references to other movies, but they don't do it in a lazy, self-referential manner. Instead, they weave it into a running thread of black comedy. There has always been a strain of ghoulish humor in this kind of movie, and this one embraces that with a gusto.

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Grave Men

It's appropriate that Burke and Hare (2010), John Landis's long-delayed return to feature filmmaking should bear the name of Ealing Studios. Ealing, after all, made its name with quirky comedies laced with gallows humor in such films as Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers, and they produced at least one genuine masterpiece of a horror film in Dead of Night. Even at their sunniest, Ealing's films often had a whiff of Halloween about them, even if they never really went in for the kinds of shocks Hammer Studios would pioneer a decade later. Hammer's biggest star, Christopher Lee is in this film, and thus acts as a bridge between their traditions, while adding a touch of class and a smidgen of horror movie cred to a film that's a sweet-tempered black comedy at its heart.

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