Pic of the Day

Insert a kajillion exclamation points here -- how have I never seen this photo of Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski on the set of Nosferatu the Vampyre before? (click to embiggen) It is my new favorite thing -- I want it on t-shirts and greeting cards and chiseled onto my tombstone. Thanks to Mubi for sharing it on their Insta, where they've also got a couple other set photos included.

5 Off My Head: Top Vamps

With André Øvredal's Dracula film The Last Voyage of the Demeter hitting theaters this weekend (which I wasn't able to see a screening of so no, I have no idea if it's any good or not) I've got Vampire Movies on the brain. Which is exactly where they should be, at all times. And so I made a list! Well I made it first on Twitter, but I figured this is the kind of thing that needed to be immortalized here on the site, and y'all could then tell me in the comments your picks. Anyway these were my picks today -- tomorrow I might choose differently, but today is not tomorrow. So without further ado...

My 5 Favorite Vampire Movies

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) by Francis Ford Coppola

Thirst (2009) by Park Chan-wook

Near Dark (1987) by Kathryn Bigelow

Let the Right One In (2008) by Tomas Alfredson

Daughters of Darkness (1971) by Harry Kumel

Runners-up: From Dusk Til Dawn, Blade and Blade II, Vampyr, Nosferatu 1922 and Nosferatu 1979, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, Let Me In, What We Do in the Shadows, Once Bitten...

... The Fearless Vampire Killers, The Vampire Lovers, Twins of Evil, Byzantium, Shadow of the Vampire... and I am sure there are a million more that I'm forgetting. 

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What are your favorite vampire movies?

13 Rats of Halloween #13

Where else could my "13 Rats of Halloween" series of posts for this here Plague Year of the Rat ultimately take me besides right to the infernal king of the scuttling befanged beasts himself, the nightmare turned flesh Nosferatu. Twas always eventual! Whether it's Klaus Kinski for Herzog or...

 

... Max Schreck for Murnau, the scariest of all the vampires has always been associated with rats. It's been ages since I actually sat down and read Bram Stoker's book of Dracula (which of course Nosferatu ripped off and almost got erased out of existence because of) so perhaps one of you more literate types can remind me if rats play much of a factor in the original text? I assume so, I just don't feel like googling it. I do know that Stephen King, when he wrote Salem's Lot...

... he removed a truly disgusting sounding scene from its earliest draft where a character is eaten alive by rats. King's (and Tobe Hooper's) Mr. Barlow of course being a direct descendant of the horrifying Nosferatu lineage of vampire.

Of course as classic as Murnau's plague scenes are I think the best plague sequence belongs to Herzog -- I consider the fancy people eating their fancy final meal together at that table in the public square that's literally swarming with pestilence to be one of the singular images of Horror Cinema. And you can tell I'm being very serious, because I busted out the word "cinema"! That means I mean it! Art! Hey... did you ever notice if you rearrange the letters in "Art" you get "Rat"? Just sayin...

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Take a Bite Outta Count

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Okay so sure here in 2020 we've seen the Carpathian Count more times than we can, you know, count, but I'm forcing myself to shrug off my shrugs about a new movie version of Dracula this morning because of who's been hired -- The Invitation and Jennifer's Body director Karyn "fuckin'" Kusama, that's who. She's a big who! We love her! Maybe we didn't love her last movie so much -- that'd be Destroyer with Nicole Kidman -- but everybody's allowed a whiff now and then, and it's not like Destroyer's not an interesting experiment with structure and tone even if I don't think it ultimately worked. 

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Okay but hear me out what if Karyn Kusama made a Lesbian Vampire Movie instead

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) March 11, 2020

Anyway back to the bloody business at hand -- this is the studio called Blumhouse doing this, who just let Leigh Whannell reimagine The Invisible Man in a way that really worked and made that nearly hundred year old franchise feel fresh, so let's keep hope alive. (Also props to Jason Blum for hiring another female filmmaker after his jackass comments from a couple of years back.) And I mean after all it's not like Plague Times aren't the exact right time for a Dracula resurgence...

Oh I seriously might have to watch Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre tonight, I might. That sounds perfect. (And it's on Amazon Prime to boot!) Anyway the conversation now of course turns towards the casting department. I personally think they need to stay far far away from the Count being played by a white man with black hair, as that's been done to literal death at this point -- there's one on Netflix right now, and Claes Bang is pretty damn good at it too. That said I don't know what ideas Kusama & Co. have got in mind for their take -- they could go the route of The Invisible Man and make Dracula a supporting character in his own story, focus on Mina or Lucy, who knows. Thoughts from y'all?

Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Fitzcarraldo (1982)

Fitzcarraldo: What's he saying?
Don Aquilino: We must be quiet. He says whoever talks
will be swallowed up the evil spirits of the whirlpool. Shh.

Somehow it being Klaus Kinski's birthday on the same day that The Lighthouse is hitting theaters (read my review here) seems totally and tonally appropriate -- men and madness and all that muck. Werner Herzog totally could have made The Lighthouse with Kinski in Willem Dafoe's role 40 years ago, while I could see Robert Eggers making something like Fitzcarraldo now. In that vein I don't suppose it's a coincidence that Eggers also wanted to re-do Nosferatu! Which reminds me...

... that Lighthouse star Dafoe already played that role in Shadow of the Vampire; do you think Eggers would have -- I hate that I keep talking about his Nosferatu in the past tense but he really did seem to be speaking of it in the past tense when I saw him talk the other day -- cast Dafoe as his own Carpathian Count Orlok? 

I digress -- Eggers' well-documented obsessions with getting realistic realistic period details, right down to Robert Pattinson really jerking off again, and Herzog's own grueling obsessions that drove his actors and crew to near madness making Fitzcarraldo  and other films -- watch Les Blank's astonishing doc Burden of Dreams as soon as you possibly can -- do seem a neat fit. I'm glad this random confluence of dates made me think of them together.

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5 Off My Head: Siri Says 1972

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Say goodbye to the 1970s, everybody! This morning when I asked my phone to give me a random number between 1 and 100 and Siri replied with the number "72" she chose the last year of the 1970s that we hadn't yet done for our "Siri Says" series here. The 60s and the 80s are both getting close to completion too, but the 70s - the decade that many straight white men people point to as the height of the cinematic form - beat 'em to it. And now for your clicking convenience I'll link 'em all up:

 Here are my five favorite movies of 1970 

Here are my five favorite movies of 1971

Here are my five favorite movies of 1973

Here are my five favorite movies of 1974

Here are my five favorite movies of 1975

Here are my five favorite movies of 1976

Here are my five favorite movies of 1977

Here are my five favorite movies of 1978

Here are my five favorite movies of 1979

So onto some talk about The Movies of 1972 now then. Or the context of the movies of 1972 first anyway - this was the year that Richard Nixon won re-election and the massacre happened in Munich during the Olympics so, you know, it was kind of a shitty time to be alive. It was a dark year. (It feels familiar in that way!) Seriously though, some of the great directors (Hitchcock and Bertolucci and Bergman) were putting out very dark films and horror films (like Wes Craven's Last House on the Left) were going very dark indeed. I suppose it was the Charles Manson Effect?

Anyway the biggest box office hit was also the year's biggest critical hit (when does that happen anymore?) with Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, which, sigh, I like just fine... but you're not going to see me writing any Muriel's Wedding type shrines to any time soon.

But speaking of the box office I was shocked to see two titles in the year's Top 10 - the fourth biggest movie of the year was the porn film Behind the Green Door starring Marilyn Chambers. I knew it crossed over in that sleazy 70s way (I use that "sleazy" with longing) but I had no idea it made 50 million dollars! And the second surprise on the box office of the year sits at number nine, where the "horror docu-drama" The Legend of Boggy Creek sits. The film is a low-budget piece of garbage (I found it nearly unwatchable when I reviewed it in 2009) but it supposedly scarred a ton of children at the time, and it made a whopping 20 million bucks (something like 130 million now). It's also the grandfather of the "found footage" genre, inspiring the makers of The Blair Witch Project.

So that's way more introduction than I usually do 

for these things - let's get to the meat of it!! Here are...

My 5 Favorite Movies of 1972

Cabaret

(dir. Bob Fosse)

-- released on February 13th 1972 --

Pink Flamingos 

(dir. John Waters)

-- released on March 17th 1972 --

Aguirre, The Wrath of God

(dir. Werner Herzog)

-- released on December 29th 1972 --

Deliverance

(dir. John Boorman)

-- released on July 30th 1972 --

The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant 

(dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder)

-- released on October 5th 1972 --

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Runners-up: The Godfather (dir. Coppola), The Poseidon Adventure (dir. Irwin Allen), The Last House on the Left (dir. Craven), Frenzy (dir. Hitchcock), Last Tango in Paris (dir. Bertolucci), Cries & Whispers (dir. Bergman), Tales From the Crypt (dir. Freddie Francis)...

... The Canterbury Tales (dir. Pasolini), Dracula A.D. 1972 (dir. Alan Gibson), The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (dir. John Huston), Baron Blood (dir. Mario Bava), Dr. Phibes Rises Again (dir. Robert Fuest), Frogs (dir. George McCowan), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (dir. Luis Bunuel), The Merchant of Four Seasons (dir. Fassbinder), Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex... (dir. Woody Allen)

Never seen: The Getaway (dir. Sam Peckinpah), What's Up Doc? (dir. Peter Bogdanovich), Jeremiah Johnson (dir. Sidney Pollack), Solaris (dir. Tarkovsky), Sleuth (dir. Joseph L. Mankiewicz), Play It Again, Sam (dir. Herbert Ross), Lady Sings the Blues (dir. Sidney J. Furie), Ben (dir. Phil Carlson), Fritz the Cat (dir. Ralph Bakshi), Fata Morgana (dir. Herzog)

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What are your favorite movies of 1972?

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6 Off My Head: Siri Says 1979

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After a bit of a break we're trying to get ourselves back on schedule... which will probably be blown to shreds in about a week when press screenings for the New York Film Fest begin. But for now let us pretend! And so we asked our phone to choose us a number between 1 and 100, as we do, and our phone today gave us the number 79. Which means we're listing our favorite Movies of 1979. I was two at the time and I don't believe my parents were taking me to the movie theater yet (and if they were they were assholes) but I've somehow managed in the time since to see a bunch of 1979 movies all the same. It's a fine year! So fine I refused to narrow this list down from six to the usual five, actually. So let's take a look...

My 6 Favorite Movies of 1979

Alien

(dir. Ridley Scott)

-- released on June 22nd 1979 -- 

The Muppet Movie

(dir. James Frawley)

-- released on June 22nd 1979 --  

All That Jazz

(dir. Bob Fosse)

-- released on December 20th 1979 --  

Being There

(dir. Hal Ashby)

-- released on December 20th 1979 --  

The Brood

(dir. David Cronenberg)

-- released on May 25th 1979 -- 

Manhattan
(dir. Woody Allen)
-- released on April 25th 1979 --

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Runners-up: Apocalypse Now (dir. Coppola), Kramer vs Kramer (dir. Robert Benton), The Warriors (dir. Walter Hill), Nosferatu (dir. Herzog), The Jerk (dir. Carl Reiner), The Amityville Horror (dir. Stuart Rosenberg), Mad Max (dir. George Miller), Phantasm (dir. Don Coscarelli)...

... When a Stranger Calls (dir. Fred Walton), My Brilliant Career (dir. Armstrong), The Marriage of Maria Braun (dir. Fassbinder), The Tourist Trap (dir. Schmoeller), The China Syndrome (dir. Bridges), Woyzeck (dir. Herzog), Zombi 2 (dir. Fulci)

Never seen: Breaking Away (dir. Peter Yates), Moonraker (dir. Lewis Gilbert), 1941 (dir. Spielberg), Norma Rae (dir. Martin Ritt), Stalker (dir. Tarkovsky), The Rose (dir. Mark Rydell), The Tin Drum (dir. Volker Schlondorff), Rock n' Roll High School (dir. Allan Arkush), Love at First Bite (dir. Stan Dragoti), Tess (dir. Polanski)

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What are you favorite movies of 1979?

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Give Me Venom Or Give Me Venom

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Kind of dumbfounded that I still haven't seen Venom, the 1981 thriller starring Klaus Kinski and Oliver Reed (!!!!!!!!) which is about, and I quote straight from IMDb, "Terrorists in the process of kidnapping a child get trapped in a house with an extremely deadly snake." I mean...! Starring these two! Any of you seen it? The problem with this sort of movie is it's always a gamble whether any of the off-screen nuttery is translated to an entertainingly bad movie, or if it's just a boring bad movie. 

Still stories of the behind-the-scenes drama are great - if you scan down to the end of this highly entertaining recap of the movie they've collected loads of the stories, some from bios of Kinski but mostly from an audio-commentary by the director  Piers Haggard. Like how this is another movie that Tobe Hooper got replaced on after shooting nine days (similar to the rumors about Poltergeist in this same time period). Or that Klaus Kinski turned down a role in Raiders of the Lost Ark to do this movie!!! But mostly the fun comes reading how Reed tormented Kinski on the set:

"Oliver used to amuse himself by going to Klaus Kinski’s trailer and shaking it – cos Ollie was as strong as an ox – and shaking it and saying… “Oh, you fucking Nazi bastard! Nasty Nazi bastard!” And then Kinski would come out, you know, trembling with rage and swearing back as best he could.”

Boys, boys - you're both gigantic assholes! Anyway this movie just got dropped onto a fancy blu-ray edition a couple of months back, so let's all go watch it together!

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Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979)

Count Dracula: Time is an abyss... profound as a 

thousand nights... Centuries come and go... 

To be unable to grow old is terrible... 

Death is not the worst... Can you imagine enduring 

centuries, experiencing each day the same futilities... 

Klaus Kinski was born 90 years ago today!

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This Is My Sophie's Choice

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Egads it's another painful instance of how living in New York can sometimes present me with terrible choices between incredibly awesome things. The night of August 1st shall tear me in twain! I've already got tickets to see the Talking Heads doc Stop Making Sense at the Film Society of Lincoln Center with living genius David Byrne attending for a Q&A. David Byrne! David fucking Byrne!

But just now I've spotted that the Anthology Film Archives is doing a Klaus Kinski retrospective from July 31st to August 10th and the night of August 1st they are showing the awesome WTF-ery of Crawlspace, and the director David Schmoeller will be there! CRAWLSPACE, you guys. Let me refresh your memory - Crawlspace, the movie where Klaus Kinski wears Cosby sweaters as an exiled Nazi who kills people by shooting arrows up their butts. Crawlspace, the movie with Tané. Tané!!!

Style Maven, Songstress, Icon. What if Tané shows up too??? What if I could get a picture of myself with Tané, and I miss that opportunity? What if I could sing a duet of her breakaway pop hit* called "Just Tonight" with her in person? WHAT IF THAT???? (*not a breakaway pop hit)