Happy 65 to Psycho

Happy 65 to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho today! Just a happy movie about fucking the perfection that is John Gavin for ninety minutes. That's all it is right? This is where you find out that I've never made it past the opening scene, haha. Can you imagine? I wonder if that person exists. If you're that person, contact me. I want to mind-meld with you. It seems like a happier, simpler existence to have. Alas! But we can pretend for this post anyway...

Thursday's Ways Not To Die

Sometimes I wonder if there is still magic to be discovered in this world, but this morning I am here to tell you kiddos that yes, there is -- there is still magic! Look no further than me discovering in the year 2025 that Texas Chain Saw director Tobe Hooper made I'm Dangerous Tonight, a Made-For-TV thriller in 1990 about an evil red dress possessed by Incan Devilry that starred Twin Peaks actress Mädchen Amick, Psycho star Anthony Perkins, E.T. & Cujo icon Dee Wallace, and... R. Lee Ermey? Because why not?

You'd think I'd have read something about this movie when my beloved Peter Strickland's killer red dress classic In Fabric came out in 2018 but if somebody did mention it it completely slipped past me -- only this week did I learn of its existence when Letterboxd made a list of movies about "Cursed Objects" (thanks to the release of Oz Perkins' The Monkey) and mentioned this film. Obviously I had to watch it immediately -- I couldn't even wait for the blu-ray to arrive in the mail, I watched the shitty quality copy that you see in these gifs. And it was worth every second of squinting!

Tobe clearly knew he had to lean hard into the camp, so this thing is soapy, it's stupid, it's trash, and I loved every fucking second of it. But let's get to this death scene here --  Mädchen's sex-obsessed cousin Gloria (Daisy Hall, chewing the walls themselves) steals the dress from Mädchen and upon putting it on immediately goes into a slutty rage. Her ten foot tall actual linebacker boyfriend obviously never stood a chance! Hit the jump for the rest of the scene...

Welcome to the Theo-Crazy

In a week chockful o' Theo I don't see any reason not to ring it out the same way we rung it in -- by staring at that million dollar face one more time. If you go see The Monkey this weekend, which I reviewed right here, come tell me your thoughts -- like I said it's a lot of movie and I'm not 100% it all works, but I liked it anyway. More than I have any of Oz Perkins' movies to date, which have been a mixed bag for me (I was not a fan of Longlegs) -- this one's still mixed but the way it seizes onto a real chaos, a real sense of unhinged madness, well I think it's a good direction for him and he should continue down this road. The world is fucking out of control! Our movies should follow suit! On that note everybody... just try and stay off the internet some this weekend. Go outside, smell some dirt or something. I don't know -- whatever people do "outside." Just try to stay sane! That's my advice. And it's good advice. 

The Monkey in 400 Words

Although it'd be neat if he wants to hang out sometime since he seems like a rad dude (just saying) I don't personally know Osgood Perkins, sometimes actor, son of Psycho star Anthony, and the quickly-becoming-his-own-brand horror director of The Blackcoat's Daughter, Longlegs, and my til-now-favorite Gretel & Hansel. And yet it's impossible to not think while watching his latest movie, the Stephen King adpatation The Monkey, that this feels like an extraordinarily personal movie for the man. 

Like I said -- I don't know him. And yet knowing what I do -- having watched him speak eloquently in Bryan Fuller's horror doc Queer For Fear about his closeted father's tumultuous relationship with the character of Norman Bates and his death from AIDS, and also knowing that Osgood's mother, the actress Berry Berenson, was killed in one of the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11 -- the thematic threads of cursed familial chaos passed down patriarchally that thrum though The Monkey feel, you know, fairly pointed! Notable. Of note. Resonant. And then when planes on fire start falling out of the sky? Can you blame me? These thoughts are right there for the taking.

The Monkey also feels the closest Oz has gotten to date to his father's wild late career work -- the absurdly nasty black humor on display here is very close to the Tony-directed Psycho III, or to his father's oh let's say lurid performance in Ken Russell's Crimes of Passion. This movie is bleak and pitch-black hearted and finds the absurd pointlessness of human existence to be a ribald punchline. It's of a piece with the Final Destination movies, but if they were less Rube Goldberg and more Albert Camus on acid. 

It also might be, all due apologies to Gretel, my new favorite movie of Oz's. It'll definitely take a second viewing to decide that because The Monkey is so tonally erratic and balls deep wackadoo that it's hard to decide from moment to moment if this shit's anarchic genius or gallumphing mess. Hell maybe it's both! But in a world of so much personality-free I.P.-driven "content", The Monkey feels so bloody particular, so preposterously gonzo, that I must slow-clap it for audacity alone. (If you liked last year's Cuckoo, which I've come to appreciate more and more with distance for how by-its-own-rules it flew, this should also be your cuppa.)

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

 ... you can learn from:

Remember My Name (1978)

Pike: I don't bother you. I expect the same.

Emily: I don't want to bother you. 

Just wanna be friendly and talk.

Pike: I don't talk to nobody. I listen.

Emily: What's the matter, you scared of women?

Pike: Look, what do you want from me?

Emily: I want a set of clean sheets.

If you've never seen Remember My Name go find some way to see Remember My Name -- it used to be hard to see but it is streaming right now on Tubi! (Go Tubi.) Co-starring Anthony Perkins, Alfre Woodard, Dennis Franz and Jeff Goldblum and directed by Alan Rudolph (who also did Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle and Afterglow) it's a fantastic way-ahead-of-its-time character study of an extremely difficult woman, and Geraldine Chaplin gives one of my favorite performances of all time in it. So hard-edged, such a total weirdo -- I relate! I deeply relate. Anyway Miss Chaplin is celebrating her 80th birthday today and we wish her a very happy one! Oh and it also muct be mentioned that the poster for this movie rules -- I gotta get myself a copy of this:

Longlegs in 350 Words or Less

I haven't quite gotten a handle on what it is I feel is missing from writer-director (and son of Anthony) Oz Perkins' movies, but something is missing from Oz Perkins' movies. Something that's keeping them from being the classics they get awful close to being for me. He feels like the horror version of Xavier Dolan -- infintesimally close to being just right, but there is some little spark that's missing that stops the chain reaction from domino'ing into its big boom. All four of his movies -- The Blackcoat's Daughter, I am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, Gretel & Hansel, and now this weekend Longlegs -- fit this description to a tee for me. I like all four of them. They all have great mood and killer atsmophere and some memorable performances. This certainly isn't a record to scoff at -- he's somebody to be appreciated, and I keep going into his films thinking this will be the one. But they keep not being the one. 

Longlegs has all the good stuff, but it's just missing that spark again that makes it feel singular. It's not even (entirely) the Nicolas Cage factor -- you might know I'm not a huge fan of Cage, especially when he goes big, and he is certainly going very big here. But the film keeps him at bay for most of it, yanking back his effortful chomping like a rabid dog on a chain. While the film's using him judiciously it's good and effective. It does finally let the dog off its chain and I groaned some, but I don't place my issues with Longlegs squarely on that. To be honest this is a brief review because I haven't entirely nailed down my issues -- I'll see the film again once it's out on streaming and perhaps have more to say then. I just very much want people to temper their expectations. The comparisons to The Silence of the Lambs are thuddingly obvious while also doing Longlegs no favors at all. It's fine. It ain't no Silence of the Lambs.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Rear Window (1954)

Stella: Intelligence. Nothing has caused the 

human race so much trouble as intelligence.

Even when I was a kid this quote from Thelma Ritter's character annoyed me. (Yes I was a nerd, why do you ask?) It makes perfect sense for her character, crammed full of folksy anti-intellectual colloquialisms, but that's a strain that runs through Hitchcock that I've never cottoned to myself. It makes him a very American film-maker though! It's part of why I will always consider him, for all his Britishness, a quintessentially American storyteller. He really believed and bought into the Dream of this place. I mean who else threw the bad guys off of the Statue of Liberty or Mount Rushmore?

Anyway I'm not sure why I am going off on that tangent -- I mean okay yes clearly given the state of the world, it makes sense why I've got American anti-intellectualism on my mind. But I'm really just here to wish my favorite Hitchcock movie (not to mention my sometimes Favorite Movie of All The Movies) Rear Window a happy 66th birthday!

The movie premiered here in New York City at the no-longer-standing Rivoli Theatre at 1620 Broadway on the night of August 4th, 1954 -- the premiere was actually a benefit for the American–Korean Foundation hosted by the U.N. for some reason, I don't know. The Korean War had just ended, I guess. Anyway the film was beloved from the get-go, getting rave reviews from basically everybody, but that wasn't too weird for him circa the mid-50s, at least until he cashed in his chips with Vertigo in '58. Sandwiched as it was in the center of his three movies with Grace Kelly this was clearly a very happy time for the director.

In related news this is one of the four films getting dropped in a fancy new 4K blu-ray boxed-set next month -- "The Alfred Hitchcock Classics Collection" contains brand-new updates of Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho and The Birds, and streets on September 8th. The most exciting content on this set is the inclusion of the "uncut" version of Psycho, which includes itty bitty bits of footage that Hitchcock had to cut in 1960 for the censors. I'm not convinced the film needs these extra snippets of prurience as I don't know if you noticed by it works just fine already! But from a historical standpoint it'll be interesting to see. Here's a video about the "uncut" version:

Thursday's Ways Not To Die

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This scene from Psycho III -- which was directed by Norman Bates himself, Mr. Anthony Perkins -- has the feel of an inside joke between Perkins and Alfred Hitchcock being played out. You might recall that it was a huge deal that the original Psycho showed a toilet being flushed...

... supposedly for the very first time on film. Scandal! And so here for his gaudy and 80s Slasher influenced tri-quel Perkins, now in the director's chair, went and one-upped (number two upped?) his ol' pal Hitch -- Tony transplanted the shower murder of the original a couple steps right on over onto the commode itself! That said this one, in that same 80s tradition, is pretty bloody, so I'll take the rest of it after the jump...

Something Witchy This Way Witches

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Alongside American popular culture's regression into a seemingly single-minded fixation on superhero storytelling and the live-actioning of animated features there's been a third, darker strand of Hollywood's grasping for familiarly branded content -- the gritty glance-backs at a once grim (or perhaps Grimm) Fairy Tale Theater. Some of this overlaps nicely -- if we thought in quadrants we'd mention quadrants here - with Disney's reboots, as Alice and Snow White and Maleficent's pretty victim Aurora don battle gear to fight the waves of CG trolls and such; the fables we got whispered to sleep with now turned into big clanging things.

Gretel & Hansel, from director Osgood "Son of Anthony" Perkins, fits in alongside those in its way, but it's far smaller and stranger, more in league with 1997's Snow White: A Tale of Terror starring Sigourney Weaver, or Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves with Angela Lansbury, or most especially A24's recent art-house output -- Perkins clearly loves him, as he well should, some Robert Eggers; you can see The Witch all over this thing. The Witch sought to up-end our sympathies on what draws a girl terrorized by patriarchal society into the sweet embrace of devilry, and there's a lot of that here as we watch Gretel (Sophia Lillis) slowly unearth an uneasy sisterhood (or perhaps a little more) from the gingerbread witch, here named Holda (and played to the fabulous hilt by Alice Krige, ever game).

The scenes between Gretel and Holda do thrum with a bizarre power -- somewhat sexual, it must be said, as the two women moisten their fingers and wave a divining rod back and forth, trembling open-mouthed with its every subtle tremor -- that sustains the film for a lot of its run time. Lillis and especially Krige make the most of the somewhat confused script, turning some nonsensical character beats into character quirks when needed. The movie doesn't seem to be sure of what it wants to say about the passing of an old school feminism towards a more modern sort, but then that conversation is a crowded one, littered with lots of bodies, male and female, on its path. Sometimes it's worthwhile just to throw all the guts on a table, fan 'em out, and see what looks tastiest. Eat til yer sick.

A lot of Gretel & Hansel looks and tastes very tasty indeed. Besides Krige's special-effect of a face the highest praise I can heap on this film is its stunning visual palette, with deep brown shadows melting into a gooey caramel crust -- it looks absolutely delicious. The design on all counts -- the costumes, with Krige's sharp-shouldered cloaks are a real stand-out, as well as the sets, with a modern-tinged A-frame standing absurdly as an elbow pressed into the forest's soft intestines. It clangs off-tune just right, which is to say just wrong.

And yet the film, for all the good bits, doesn't really ever cohere into a finished product -- too many of its interesting ideas remain half-baked in the oven, or otherwise burned black to soot where it should count. When Gretel and Holda aren't holding strange court as the flip sides of womanly considerations the film just kinda sits there, flat and pretty as a still picture, or twitching slightly at its corners, an elaborate moth pinned scientifically for some further study that never quite comes.

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Six Degrees of Separation (1993)

Woody: You gave him my pink shirt? You gave a complete stranger my pink shirt? That shirt was a Christmas present from you! I treasured that shirt, I loved that shirt! My collar had grown a full size from weightlifting, you saw that my arms had grown, you saw that my neck had grown and you bought me that shirt for my new body! I loved that shirt! My first shirt for my new body and you gave that shirt away? I can't believe you! I hate this life and I hate you!

The Pink Shirt Speech is one of my favorite speeches in a movie full of favorite speeches -- I don't know if there's a movie I quote more in daily life than this one and perhaps you'll find it strange to know how often you can work a rant about a "new shirt for a new body" into your living experience but lemme tell you, it's often. 

But I bring this all up today for another reason. The character of Woody is played by the actor Oz née Osgood Perkins -- he was also memorable in Legally Blonde in 2001 -- and Oz née Osgood (who I might also be bothered to mention is the son of the actor slash Psycho star Anthony Perkins) has now gone and become a horror film director!

He's been at it for a few years, beginning with The Blackcoat's Daughter with Emma Roberts and Keirnan Shipka in 2015 -- I wasn't as bowled over by that film as some people were, but it's perfectly solid -- and 2016's I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House starring Ruth Wilson, which I haven't seen yet despite wanting to; I love me some Ruth Wilson but I just keep forgetting. 

And this week his third film is hitting theaters -- it's called Gretel and Hansel and is a reimagineering of that classic children's tale of cannibal terror and plum-sauces. It stars It actress Sophia Lillis and the always welcome Alice Krige, whose deeply creepy demeanor gives the trailer most of its bite...

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I've seen this trailer at least half a dozen times now in the theater and I was sold from the first, even if part of me worries they might have found a way to commodify what we might call "the A24 aesthetic" a la The Witch, into a tangible selling point... does that make sense? I think it looks cool but I'm not sure the look of it isn't borrowing, to put it mildly, from well celebrated others that have come recently. Or awhile back, even...

... although if you're gonna rip somebody off in 2020 ripping off Alejandro Jodorowsky is a plenty good one to be ripping off. Anyway I will find out tonight when I see the thing -- I'm mostly just excited to have just now figured out that it's the Pink Shirt Speech Dude who directed it. I'll give the Pink Shirt Speech Dude (and you know the son of Anthony fucking Perkins) the benefit of the doubt!

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Psycho IV: The Beginning (1990)

Norman: I know that in the cosmic scheme of things,
ittle boys are small, but some days they can be...
some days little boys can be giants.

Has anyone seen this recently? I haven't seen this in twenty years at least and I really remember very little about it, but it's director Mick Garris' 68th birthday today so I'm thinking about how maybe I should give it a re-watch. I'm mostly curious about Anthony Perkins' performance and also about how it plays in a post Bates Motel world...

... like, I don't remember that it was Olivia Hussey playing Norma at all! Was she any good? I mean obviously she wasn't Vera Good, but maybe she did her own thing. The boyfriend was just watching Black Christmas two nights ago and I literally said, "What the hell happened to Olivia Hussey anyway?" And now here, an answer. Psycho IV happened to her.

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Time To Do Tab

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Although I'm a little wary of celebrating his birthday now that John Waters confirmed Tab Hunter was a Republican up until the day he died exactly a year and three days ago, which was way past the point of no return, I will bring up Tab today on what would have been his 88th birthday because there was a little smidge of news this week on that movie they're supposedly making about his closeted relationship with fellow movie star Anthony Perkins. NewNowNext interviewed Tab's husband Allan Glaser this week because TCM is premiering the terrific doc Tab Hunter: Confidential, based off Tab's terrific autobiography, tonight, and they got a little update (thx Mac) on the fictional film that's being made:

"Doug Wright, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his Tony-winning play I Am My Own Wife, is writing the screenplay. In a recent interview with NewNowNext, Glaser gave an update on the project, noting that Wright knocked his screenplay “out of the park.”

“I’ve never seen the first draft of a script so well done,” Glaser explains. “Then again, Doug lived with Tab; he came out here about three months before Tab died and spent a couple of weeks with us just to absorb Tab’s sense of being, his dialogue, his thoughts.”

“When I read the script, he totally captured Tab. His voice, his mannerisms, his outlook on life—and he did for Tony Perkins, too! Right now, we’re out to directors on the project. I think it’s going to be terrific.”

“For Tony Perkins, I was thinking Andrew Garfield,” reveals Glaser, but he is stumped when it comes to who could portray Hunter. “Maybe we’ll find an unknown, much like Tab was cast in his first movie,” he adds. “He was an unknown, and that made him a star. So, you know, we’ll have our own Hollywood story to come out of it.”

Andrew Garfield is of course a perfect pick for Perkins, even if he might be getting a little old for it at this point -- they really should hurry this up! But when the movie was first announced I asked for casting ideas and got a lot of suggestions for Tony (Andrew, Timothée, Ezra Miller) but not so many for Tab. So let's cast Tab! Give me your best suggestions in the comments...

Good Morning, World

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The terrific and troubled Anthony Perkins was born on this day in the year 1932 -- you know, a person lives an entire life, it's got to be annoying t get reduced to "troubled." Aren't we all fucking troubled? I rescind that "troubled." Perkins went through some shit and by all accounts was often an asshole because of it (Tab Hunter's book doesn't show the best side of Tony) but if I'd been forced to closet myself up I think I'd have ended up a lot worse than Anthony damn Perkins, that's for sure. Hell I'm nowhere near a closet and I'm no Anthony damn Perkins. 

I hope they think this stuff through when they make the movie about Anthony and Tab's relationship -- we ought to be past the place where even a story of someone in the closet has to be a relentless misery fest like Bohemian Rhapsody was. People find a way. Life finds a way. We can criticize the structures that were built around but not for us while also managing to find some appreciation for the way we rise above, survive. Hmm I haven't even had my coffee yet, I don't know where all that came from! Good morning, everybody!

Who Wore It Best?

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bike trails

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Today is the 20th anniversary of Gus Van Sant's near-identical remake of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which has remained a fascination ever since -- most people scoff it off as a joke but I think Van Sant made the movies a tad bit more interesting a place with it. And I doubt what Luca Guadagnino just did with Suspiria would've been possible without it. I know some of you would be fine with that being true, but not me! What are your thoughts on the remake? Besides being thankful for the Naked Viggo, I mean...

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Pretty Poison (1968)

Sue Ann: You know, when grown-ups 

do it, it's kind of dirty. That's because 

there's no one to punish them. 

A happy 50 to this movie, released on

this day in 1968. Who's a fan? 

Tuesday Weld is just so freaking good.

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Fear Strikes Out Gays

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The relationship between the actors Anthony Perkins & Tab Hunter in the mid-1950s is one we've covered here at MNPP plenty over the years - here's a little post but really just scroll through our Tab Hunter Archives and you'll see Tony all over the place. These classic Hollywood gay romances (see also Cary Grant & Randolph Scott) fascinate me, as I think they do any movie-loving homosexual so it was only a matter of time before Hollywood, full of movie-loving homosexuals itself, caught up. And by "caught up" I mean "gave a gay person enough power to produce something of this sort." 

Enter Zach Quinto! He's teaming up with his Star Trek buddy JJ Abrams to produce a movie about those two titled Tab & Tony, which will apparently take its inspiration from Tab Hunter's (wonderful) autobiography of a couple years back and which had a couple of chapters devoted to their time together. What I think is especially interesting about this is those two have never really seemed like they had the great love affair we might want to ascribe to them - it always seemed like they probably had some really good sex but that was followed by just a couple of deeply difficult years together, made all the harder by a business that refused to let them just be, but also by a mis-matched clash of personalities.

Those two factors fed one another, obviously - their relationship fell apart when Tony pursued a film role, that of baseball player Jimmy Piersall in the 1957 film Fear Strikes Out (and a terribly, terribly apt title, that; that could probably be the title of the bio-pic itself), which was a role Tab had just played for TV; basically Tony swept in and stole Tab's big role out from under him. 

Anyway as soon as this news broke last night everybody on Twitter was throwing out casting ideas - this was a good one, I thought...

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Well because it should be Andrew Garfield and Billy Magnussen.

— Ryan (@sortathatguy) June 6, 2018

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... although they're both 10 years older 

than Tab & Tony were at the time. 

I thought maybe you could go this way:

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I have to think about it more but you could probably just throw a couple of random twinks from Dunkirk in there and call it a day pic.twitter.com/Rshf733ogO

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) June 7, 2018

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But I am putting it to y'all!

Give up some casting ideas in the comments...