I’ve had today’s tribute to Mr. Dizzy Gillespie’s birthday in several of my playlists that I thought I’d already posted it. Happily, that was not the case, so please enjoy our man perform Manteca!
For this week’s selection I returned to another Halloween favorite, ghosts. (To be honest, I was going call this haunted houses but the ghosts are only limited to a single house)
In the first film on my list, Peter Jackson’s Frighteners, Micheal J Fox plays Frank, a “psychic investigator”. Who runs a scam apparently driving away ghosts creating havoc in the houses of people who have received his business card. In reality Frank isn’t a complete fraud. He really can see ghosts. In fact he has a couple of ghosts helping him with his shakedowns. However, when people in town are start dying of mysterious causes he finds himself forced to investigate.
This was Jackson’s first big film after Heavenly Creatures. All I knew about it was it was one of the stumbling points in his career. Having heard that, I didn’t have that much of a problem with it. It was mostsly cheesy, but in a fun way, with pretty good effect courtesy of a young Studio Wetta.
My only big problem with it was I found the rules of the paranormal were inconsistent. For example it made it clear that Ghosts remained on earth due to unfinished business. However there were several scenes when spirits who definitely had unfinished business are dragged kicking and screaming up the tunnel of light after dying.
Next on my list, Steve Miner’s House, tells the story of Roger Cobb, a successful horror writer who moves back to his childhood home after his aunt dies. Things haven’t been going well for Roger. His young son disappeared five years ago which led to getting divorced. On top of that he’s getting flashbacks from his time in Vietnam and he has a bad case of writer’s block. It’s almost a relief that the house is haunted. Now, when it’s not trying to kill him, it’s driving him crazy.
This was another movie on the “Meh” list. While the makeup and effects were okay It really didn’t impress me. The best thing I found about it was George Wendt’s performance as Harold, Roger’s well-meaning neighbor who thinks he’s going crazy.
I’m continuing with the series of Rhapsodies watercolor character sketches with Janet and Rowan. They are dressed in the brand new official Fitzpatrick Consulting polo shirts, which they will be showing off in their next appearance.
There were way too many possibilities for today’s prompt, “snow”. It took a few minutes to dispel any takes on the Snow Queen, partially because I want to keep things Halloweeny, and partially because they were all versions of Frozen posters.
I finally thought about winter in the forest and how it’s just as potentially scary as it is beautiful. The scariness may be improved by throwing in an actual threat. This made me remember a painting of the wendigo in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. In a moment of political correctness, I made the wendigo’s victims trappers instead of Algonquins.
I think I may be influenced by the wonderful work of Jakub Rozalski. I love the way he makes the supernatural elements in his work seem completely natural.
I’ve been playing around with the idea, that if I do some of my concept sketches on watercolor paper, I can paint them later. This didn’t well at first, because I was using some really cheap paper I was trying to get rid of. It wasn’t exactly what one would call water-soluble. because of this, I could barely do more than one layer on it. If I wanted to do more than one layer I had to wait for it to dry completely unless I wanted to ruin what I had.
Once I gave up on the stuff, things went much better.
So here are my first finished images of Dielle in the fall ensemble she’s going to be wearing in her next appearance.
Continuing my slow track through the works of George A. Romero, I returned to one of the recurring themes of my Halloween marathons, the zombie apocalypse.
Starting with Romero, the first film on my list was the third film of his Night of the Living Dead series, Day of the D
The apocalypse has been going on for at least nine months, with the cities completely abandoned by the zombies. Meanwhile, hidden in a Florida bunker, scientists desperately try to find a cure for the plague of the living dead. But as the months of isolation go on, their military entourage has gone slowly mad… and the head scientist (Richard Liberty) has been
This was an interesting film. It was well up to Romero‘s usual standards. Makeup lies the effects are much better than his previous efforts. Though considering the past films consisted of painting people gray, that’s not saying much. There were some very nice practical effects, the best being one of the zombies on an operating table with most of its lower half missing, and its guts hanging out.
To the movie’s credit, it is also the first one in the series of attempts to try any technobabble. For example, the lead scientist explains that the zombies aren’t rotting and don’t need to eat human flesh, and it’s just instinct. Speaking of instinct, some of them are getting smarter.
Interestingly, my favorite performance in this film was entirely a p
The next film on my list, Train to Busan, starts with a man hitting a deer after passing a quarantine stop. After he drives away, the deer gets up, its eyes a pale white. We switch to downtown Seoul, where Seok-woo(Gong Yoo) a divorced and workaholic fund manager, is taking his six-year-old daughter on the KTX 101 train to see her mother in Busan. Just as they leave Seoul, the apocalypse begins. Now the train must reach its destination as the country burns.
This was a very good and well-paced film with some fantastic performances, and the rise of the zombie plague was almost as subtle as the one in Shaun of the Dead. Regrettably, I didn’t like it. My appreciation and tolerance for horror
I’m usually able to detach myself from the horror and gore by studying the craft of the practical effects. This time, I found the zombie effects too good to effectively pull myself away.
Also, considering South Korea is a country that is no stranger to civil unrest, this was one of the most believable portrayals of the collapse of civilization I’ve seen on film in a while.
So, for me, this movie was very hard to watch… For everybody else, that’s a good thing.
