The Invisible Man

1933 science fiction

Rating: 17/20

Plot: A ambitious scientist with a bitchin' pair of sunglasses experiments with a twelve dollar chemistry set he bought at a discount store to find a way to reach his dream of being naked all the time without anybody being able to see how underdeveloped one of his nipples (the right one) is. He succeeds, but the concoction makes him batty, deluded, power-hungry, and surly. He figures out that not only can he now walk around naked, but he can probably steal bicycles and play practical jokes on people. And rule the world! Oh, snap! How can the authorities capture somebody they can't even see?

I wish this movie was a silent one. The main flaw is that overinflated early-30s acting that threatens to suffocate certain scenes. The landlady's screams might be the most obnoxious sound I've heard in a movie in a long time, and I don't really like Claude Rains' demented laughter that I guess is there to remind us that there's a dangerous invisible guy in the room. Despite that, this is great early sci-fi. My daughter Emma sat on the couch and watched some of this with me. At one point, she asked me how they were doing the invisible man special effects. That's part of the beauty of a movie like this. Nowadays, this movie would be made with computer effects. It could look a lot more realistic. Or, it could look choppy and glitchy. But there's just something pure about the effects used in this movie. They're pretty cool and must have been really cool in 1933, and they make you wonder how it was all pulled off almost eighty years ago. A bicycle riding by itself, books and cigarettes floating across the room, doors and windows opening by themselves, invisible asses indenting rocking chairs, men being tossed around. And the iconic image of the titular (there's that word again) character pulling the bandages off his face. Good stuff. I also like an opening panning shot of the innards of a tavern (complete with a guy playing darts at a 45 degree angle) and a montage of people locking their doors. This is a fun science fiction film, light on the horror as the invisible guy seems more like a jokester than a terrorist. One question though: Why would a criminal mastermind who is trying to elude the po-po tell everybody exactly when and where he's going to kill somebody? "I'll kill you. . .I'll kill you at 10:00 tomorrow night." My favorite scene: The invisible man's girlfriend Flora comes for a visit. He announces to his partner that he's going to get ready for her visit and leaves the room. When Flora shows up, there's only one thing different about him--those bitchin' sunglasses. For whatever reason, I thought that was hilarious.

The Man Who Would Be King

1975 adventure

Rating: 18/20

Plot: Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan, two big-balled former British soldiers dicking around in India, decide to cross dangerous Afganistan (where the Taliban hide in caves) to reach Kafiristan, a heathen land where they plan on becoming kings. They teach villagers to use some guns they brought along, and after Daniel is struck with an arrow during battle but does not bleed, the Kafiritanians decide that he is the son of Alexander the Great.

God's holy trousers, what a fantastic film this is! Connery and Caine have great chemistry in what's essentially a buddy/road movie. The dialogue's fresh and witty and enriches the adventure yarn. This isn't exactly a comedy, but there are a lot of times where you get a whiff of a controlled Monty Python with the two leads like a mature Abbott and Costello type comedy team. The greatness with The Man Who Would Be King is that it spits in the eyes of tradition, genre-crossing like a She-Devil in plaid pants, unhinged and groovy and barely holding together with absurd poetics and half-assed histories. Snake charmers, dudes with insects on their faces, dope smokers, holy men, and filthy beggars line streets pre-credits, splashes of brown and more brown and crazy ethnic musics and an antsy camera helping them shiver on the screen. It paints an exotic picture right off the bat. John Huston found some nice places for this story to sit, and the shots of snow-covered mountains, desert battlefields, bottomless chasms, and towering temples help give it all a unique personality. And so many extras! There are very few times when the screen isn't stuffed corner to corner with stuff to look at. The Man Who Would Be King grabs your ears and eyes, tickles the pickle, mesmerizes. This is the type of movie you want to consume entirely, absorb. Costume design, a great score, cinematography. Yeah, you can chew and chew on this one. It's a lot of fun, but there's a poignancy just below the surface of the action and humor. Great stuff.

Note: Reportedly, this is Ass Masterson's second favorite movie. (Wikipedia)

Grizzly Man

2005 crazy person documentary

Rating: 17/20

Plot: For thirteen summers, Timothy Treadwell had ventured into Alaska to hang out with grizzly bears and foxes. During his later trips, he even videotapes himself with the bears. Several times, he tells his camera that he would die for these bears, and then, as if to prove that he's not just all talk, he and his girlfriend Amy are devoured by a bear he nicknamed Grumpy.

On a technical level, putting all of Treadwell's footage and Herzog's interviews into something this cohesive and meaningful is quite the achievement. I really like how Herzog focuses on the smaller aspects of Treadwell's story. The Cliff Notes version of this is that Treadwell and his girlfriend were eaten by a bear and that it was really gruesome. But Herzog gives us a much more complete picture of this nutty guy. He's much more than just a victim of a bear attack. My favorite moments from the interviews and from Treadwell's footage are the ones that are almost insignificant to the actual story--details about him working in a restaurant, his parents holding his stuffed bear, Timothy discussing his sexuality, lingering shots of the Alaskan landscape. Treadwell's footage is both haunting and sad, haunting as we see some of his last moments on earth and hearing him earlier seem to predict his death, and sad as we get such intimate glimpses into the soul of this tortured and pretty unstable guy. There's definitely some weirdness in this documentary, so much that I can understand why a lot of people might be put off by the whole thing or even think the entire thing is an elaborate hoax. Herzog's narration is often goofy and far from objective. He unapologetically shifts from documentarian to commentator several times. A lot of the interviews seem rehearsed and unnatural, as does a "candid" moment when the coroner gives Timothy's friend the watch that was found on his arm. I have no doubt that there was some coaching involved and that Herzog is guilty of creating a great deal of this reality, but I'm not sure that matters much. You also get such a disturbing picture of Timothy in his films, from the faux-action stuff where he's running around like an adventure seeker to the times when he completely spazzes out and turns himself inside out so that his internal dialogue is on full display, that he doesn't seem like he could possible have been a real person. There's an absurdity to all of this, and Timothy Treadwell was an absolutely absurd human being, but you're not going to get a more chillingly complete picture of this sort of obsessive personality. It's easy to see some parallels between subject and director here. This is dense stuff. The horrors and beauties makes Grizzly Man the type of movie that will bounce around your noggin for a long, long time after you've shut it off.

Honkytonk Man

1982 tuberculosis public service announcement

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Red crashes onto his sister's dust-caked Oklahoma property, a Grand Ole Opry invitation in one hand and a bottle in the other. His 14-year-old nephew Whit looks up to him and is a much better driver, and his mother reluctantly allows him to accompany Red on his trip to Nashville. They misbehave along the way.

This movie's covered in a layer of dust, like all good Depression-era flicks should be. And it's filled with all sorts of dusty eccentrics, colorful character after colorful character. They're not entirely believable (neither is Clint's honkytonk man exactly), but they're entertaining enough, especially when they talk about panther piss, folks who've got money "ten miles up a mule's ass," and dogs shittin' peach pits. My favorite line's right at the beginning when Red tumbles out of the car he's just driven onto the Waggoneer farm and his sister drawls, "Is he dead?" This is one of those meandering, stream-of-conscious road movies, and it's also a pretty good buddy movie. The buddy is Eastwood's son, and their rapport naturally drives the picture. It's fun watching Eastwood and son steal chickens, rob poker players, drink, and visit whores. A subtitle for this could have been Honkytonk Men Gone Bad. There's an ease in the direction and writing that almost makes things look kind of lazy, and this is a story that's been done and done again and one that will undoubtedly be done again and again in the future (see: Crazy Heart). Like Bad Blake, I'm the songwriting and Eastwood's singing voice aren't totally convincing. The songs are OK and his voice is OK, but there's nothing that makes me think Red should have been a legend. This stands out most when Red, in the recording studio, becomes too sick to finish a song. Marty Robbins grabs the microphone and finishes for him, and completely blows him away. That's a nice moment actually. I did enjoy watching Clint tickle the ivories or pick his guitar though. Honkytonk Man's an example of a movie with a lot of good pieces, but sort of like the poster up there, it just doesn't seem complete.

Madman

1982 crazy guy with an ax movie

Rating: 4/20

Plot: Some old guy, a few counselors, and some campers at a summer camp share some scary stories around a campfire. The old guy tells the tale of Madman Marz, a crazed ax murderer who lives in that house right over there. This inspires one of the kids to start shouting his name. That's apparently a bad idea. You know how the rest of this goes.

If you're a young woman running from a Sasquatch with an ax and you decide to hide in a refrigerator, wouldn't it be easy for the Sasquatch to find you if you had emptied the contents of said refrigerator all over the kitchen floor before you crawled inside? Not in Madman. There's not a single original idea in this slasher. The killer isn't the least bit interesting, and neither are the victims. I do like that the madman apparently has an unseen sidekick who periodically noodles around with a portable synthesizer. This is a bad movie, but it's not the kind of bad that makes it worth watching. I really lost patience waiting for all of these kids to die.

Young Man with a Horn

1950 jazzman movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: "Horn" is, as you would probably expect, meant euphemistically. Young Man with a Horn is the story of pubescent Rick Martin's discovery of his "horn" and how a sage named Mr. Miyagi helps him learn how to wield it. He practices by himself over and over again, and then he uses it on both Doris Day and Lauren Bacall. Not bad, little Rick Martin! Not bad at all!

First off, look at that tagline at the top of the poster. "Put down your trumpet, Jazzman--I'm in the mood for love!" That's a good one. Young Man with a Horn is loosely based on the biography of jazzman Biz Biederbecke, but it's got a tidy little Hollywood ending. There's nothing particularly wrong with this movie. The performances are fine, the music is fine, the scenes in smoky nightclubs are really fine. But as a whole, this is so antiseptic, just so white bread. This movie needed a little zip or some zap or some pop. Or something. It's definitely a case where a movie loses steam as it goes on, especially since all it could build to was an ending that seemed like it was rewritten at the eleventh hour in order to please some studio execs. Kirk Douglas is really good, especially pulling off the virtuosic horn blower without being anywhere near a virtuosic horn blower, and the movie looks great. It just should have been a whole lot better.

The Man Who Came to Dinner

1942 comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Acerbic radio personality Sheridan Whiteside agrees to dine at the home of the Stanleys, but after slipping on ice on their front steps and injuring his hip, he has to stay indefinitely. He demands outrageously, entertains an assortment of eccentric pals, has an octopus and penguins sent to him, and finds numerous other ways to disrupt the Stanley household. Meanwhile, his assistant Maggie has fallen in love with a local newspaper writer, and Sheridan feels threatened by the idea.

What a fun movie. Not only do I get to use my "inexplicable penguin" tag, but there's a character named Banjo, always a plus. Most of the fun emanates from the title man coming to dinner. I don't know who Monty Woolley is, but I loved his performance and this character, just the type of old man I'd like to be some day, only not as gregarious. He's witty and he's mean, saying things like "My great aunt ate a whole box of candy every day of her life. She lived to be 102, and when she had been dead for three days, she looked better than you do now." This movie's a bit stagy and very scripty. There's nothing wrong with the performances; in fact, an unhinged Jimmy Durante as the aforementioned Banjo, the perpetually grinning Richard Travis, the egotistical Reginald Gardiner, society snob Ann Sheridan, et. al. bring this great enthusiasm to their roles. But it's all written to the point where it doesn't seem natural. Surely nobody ever talked like these people, right? However, when the script is this good, you really can ignore stuff like that. A lot of the humor is dated, to the point where a few references go over my head seventy years later, but the majority of this still works just great today. Insults, of course, are timeless. And I'm inspired by Whiteside to reintroduce the words "ducky" and "peachy" into my vocabulary.

The Birdman of Alcatraz

1962 bestiality epic

Rating: 14/20

Plot: Robert Stroud, our hero, is serving a life sentence at Leavenworth prison for killing somebody. While there, he has problems getting along with the guards and other cons, spends some time in solitary, and then kills a guard who was going to report him for getting too aggressive earlier. He's sentenced to die, but his mommy whines until he gets the sentence reduced to life in solitary. One day, he finds a new friend, an injured canary. This new buddy gets him interested in ornithology. He gets some more birds, builds some cages, gets Telly Savalas interested in ornithology, and becomes an expert in the field.

This is a heavily-fictionalized account of the real Robert Stroud. "Loosely-based" probably a strong enough, and I'm sure Stroud's family appreciates having their relative's history rewritten like this. But that's not my main problem with the film. My main problems are that it manages to be both too long and have a story that's undercooked. Things are also pretty flat, and it's just too much of a movie. I liked Burt Lancaster in this version of Stroud. The character's development isn't 100% believable, but Lancaster's able to go from violently apathetic to delicately nurturing in a believable way. I enjoyed seeing Savalas with some hair, and I also thought Karl Malden was good as the warden in this one. The film is weakened by Thelma Ritter's annoying performance as Stroud's mother. I also liked a lot of the shots of Lancaster's life in prison. The black and white photography's crisp, and at times I wished it was a little grittier. The birds, specifically the training involved in getting them to do what they do, really steal the show. All the scenes with the birds are wonderful, from the simple moment when Lancaster gets his bird friend to fly to his finger for the first time to the more complicated multi-fowl shots later on. An extended scene showing the birth of a bird (or maybe some sort of alien being) is also cool. This is hampered a bit with far too much narration (part of what makes it too movie-ish), but my favorite scene might be when the narrator briefly shifts to second person to describe life in solitary confinement.

The Man with the Golden Gun

1974 James Bond movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: 007 finds out that the titular man wants to kill him with the titular gun and globetrots to find the assassin before the assassin finds him so that he can go back to saving the world or whatever it is he does.

Bitchin' 70s funk here! Within minutes, you've got Herve Villechaize, the appearance of a third nipple, fake skeletons, an old-timey shooting range, chaos in a house of mirrors, and wax figure finger target practice. Then, the theme song to end all theme songs! "One golden shot means another poor victim has come to a glittering end. For a price, he'll erase anyone. The man with the golden gun!" All behind the visual of women's dancing silhouettes against a background of fireworks! Shipoopi! Just when you think the movie has to slow down and take a breath, you're treated to details of a circus-born assassin, bellydancing, swallowed bullets, gun fondling, kung-fu hijinks, an attack with a watermelon, faux nipples, sumo wedgies, threats with a trident, something called a Solex Agitator or something, a car chase, a boat chase, another car chase, a racist Cajun, elephant molestation, a car-plane, a sun gun, a stunt that out-Dukes the Duke Boys with slide whistle accompaniment, a conceited Christopher Lee, explosions, more than a few bad puns, and a lot more Herve Villechaize. This is nutty stuff, but you've got a great bad guy doing his damage with a cigarette case, a lighter, and a fountain pen, and an intriguing plot stuffed with too many twists and turns for the average slide whistler to be able to keep up with. I'm far from a James Bond aficionado, but I really like the tongue-in-cheek approach this one has. It's nutty but not afraid to be nutty. It leaps on a kung-fu bandwagon unapologetically. It's got lines like Christopher Lee's "Look behind you. . .lower" which, in context, is as funny as anything I've heard in any comedies I've recently seen. It's got exotic locales, improbable action sequences galore, and beautiful women. And Herve Villechaize, sometimes shirtless! What more could a warm-blooded man want?

The Man from Laramie

1955 Western

Rating: 15/20

Plot: A guy who rolls up the cuffs of his jeans brings a load of supplies from Laramie to Coronado, a dinky town controlled by a rancher named Waggoner. Secretly, he wants to get to the bottom of who's selling rifles to the Apaches. He has a run-in with the mischievous Waggoner son, resulting in his wagons being burned and his mules being shot. He decides to stick around anyway and gets on everybody's nerves.

It's still hard for me to see Jimmy Stewart as a tough guy, but there's a terrific long shot of a very pissed-off Jimmy walking toward a guy who wronged him who apparently is also the cameraman. It made a believer out of me. The fisticuffs that follow, wrastlin' amidst a herd of cattle on the dusty streets, have a grit that lends a realism to the proceedings, as do a few gun fights that come later. We catch the stock characters in medias res, but as the story unfolds, there's a depth to them that I really like. That story's a little uneven at times, and there's a ludicrous explosion along the way. Parts of certain conflicts seemed unresolved or, when I did squeeze pieces together, didn't really fit right. Sort of like Jimmy Stewart's pants. There had to be easier ways for some of these characters to get what they wanted in the movie. Regardless, this is beautifully shot and well-acted Western that shows off the great American West in a story that, although it wasn't, seems like it was pinched from the samurai.

A Man Called Horse

1970 movie

Rating: 15/20

Plot: King Arthur, taking a break from shooting birds to bathe in a stream, is attacked and captured by Sioux Indians. At the Sioux village, he's forced to work for Buffalo Cow Head. To make matters even worse, someone left his cake out in the rain. Green icing's melting all around, and he doesn't think he can take it. It took so long to make it, and King Arthur will never have that recipe again. Oh, no! The Sioux make fun of him for obsessing over a cake. They dance around him, point at him with spears, and scream "Gay baker!" in a Sioux ritual called Hazing of the Homosexual White Man under the Fall Moon Dance. Eventually, King Arthur learns to appreciate Sioux culture and is suspended by his nipples to prove that he's actually a tough guy.

This is really just a metaphor about how far the typical man would go to get a woman to come into his teepee. But what a woman! Wankatanka! This is a pretty good film, a sort of cowboys and Indians thing but without any cowboys. It does have a more shots of Richard Harris's ass than you're likely to see in any other film, the possible exception being that second Harry Potter movie. Wankatanka! Harris's performance is a solid, physical one. Dame Judith Anderson gave what was likely the performance she was most proud of as Buffalo Cow Head. Nope, that's not a name I made up. This is a fascinating look at Native American culture although I wonder if it was all historically accurate. Highlights (other than Dumbledore's naked bum, of course) include the Sun Dance Ceremony in which Harris's character is suspended by two chest piercings and a dizzying battle near the end. The former looks completely real and completely painful, and the lighting and music contribute to make that a really powerful, if sort of unpleasant, scene. The latter's got some editing that could induce a seizure and is stuffed with scalping, pouncing, clubbing, and jousting, more action than you can shake a tomahawk at. A large percentage of the movie isn't in English (I doubt a lot of it, especially when Judith Anderson is involved, is spoken in Sioux either) and the other "language" isn't translated, but the story moves along just fine without words. I also liked a weird almost psychedelic sequence even though it dates the movie somewhat. It's groovy stuff!

Man of the Year

2006 dramedy

Rating: 10/20

Plot: Comedic talk show host Tom Dobbs (side note: Isn't there a real talk show host named Tom Dobbs?) decides to run for president. He's got no chance although with his hilarious speeches and shooting-from-the-hip approach, his popularity grows and he even gets an invite to a presidential candidate debate. Election day arrives, and to the surprise of everybody, Dobbs wins. However, the computer people running the vote just might be hiding details of a malfunction that gave Dobbs the victory.

Ah, Barry Levinson's movie almost tricked me. I anticipated more of a dumb comedy, but more than half of Man of the Year has more elements of a political thriller or drama than your typical comedy. So I was almost tricked into liking this thing, but the longer it went on and the more I thought about things, the more I realized how empty it was. As satire, it's incomplete. As a drama, it's color-by-numbers. And as I expected before popping it in, the comedy doesn't work either. The comedy comes mostly from conversations with Dobbs and his cohorts or from Dobbs speeches, sound bite after sound bite that I think are supposed to sound politically profound but mostly sound like stuff I've already heard before. There's dialogue where it seems like Robin Williams was given room to improvise, and those are the moments that failed most obviously. I will give credit to Man of the Year for using three of the most distracting actors working today (Robin Williams, Jeff Goldblum, and Christopher Walken) and somehow keeping the whole thing coherent and tolerable. Watching scene after scene with Robin Williams giving speeches or debating with quick flashes to Walken saying, "Yes!" or "Bring it home!" got pretty old though. The most irritating character is actually played by Laura Linney. Her performance is also irritating, but the biggest problem is that almost everything that happens to her character Eleanor Green is something that could only happen in movies. Even her name is a movie name. I just didn't believe in any of these characters, so I couldn't believe in their stories. This is a film that probably could have said something. But it doesn't and ends up incomplete and unsatisfying.

Superman Returns

2006 sequel

Rating: 10/20 (Dylan: 2/20; Emma: 12/20; Caden: 20/20)

Plot: Superman's been away a while, five years specifically. So has Clark Kent actually, but nobody's able to make that connection. Meanwhile, Lex Luthor somehow wins he appeal, is released from prison, and concocts a complicated plot to use crystals to make a big island because, just like in the first movie, he's obsessed with the idea of beach front property. Superman takes care of bad guys while dealing with the fact that Lois Lane has moved on.

I don't like this Superman. There's nothing wrong with this Brandon Routh kid, the guy who plays the Man of Steel, but just like the above poster presents him, he at times seems more like a magician in this movie than he does a superhero. Plus, this version of Superman is both a Peeping Tom and a wife stealer, and I felt bad for Lois Lane's new guy (Richard) who really did nothing to deserve having a guy in tights trying to move in on his girl. I didn't realize that this movie was a sequel. I thought "reboot" had more to do with starting from scratch, so I was surprised to see Marlon Brando and hear the recognizable music. Unfortunately, a lot of ideas are recycled, too, if not from previous Superman movies than from other contemporary comic book superhero flicks. This movie is uglier and darker though and the fun from those first two Superman movies (probably the other two, too) is replaced with a sinister seriousness, mostly because of a different Lex Luthor character. Kevin Spacey is awful here in what would have been called an attempt to Heath-Ledgerize his bad guy if The Dark Knight had come out a couple years before Superman Returns. Spacey looks more like Graf Orlok than a criminal mastermind, and I actually thought he was going to try to bite Superman at one point. At least he's about the right age, unlike Superman and Lois Lane who, despite being in a movie that takes place five years after the others, looks a lot younger than Chris and Margot. This movie's got some clean, crisp visuals, but the special effects aren't consistent, sometimes even within the same scenes. There's an early scene with involving a plane, easily more exciting than anything that happens later in the movie, that looks pretty cool, completely ridiculous, and all the adjectives in between. And don't get me started on how Lois Lane survives without a scratch despite being bounced around that plane like she is. There's also a scene with a young Clark Kent running through a cornfield that reminded me of the rubber-legged Clark Kent in the first Superman movie. Perhaps it's an homage to that scene? Ironically, my favorite effects were when Lex Luthor destroys a model train set. I liked that scene, and I also liked a completely unnecessary shot of Jimmy awkwardly eating a sandwich and a scene with a poorly-tattooed henchman and Lois Lane's son playing a piano duet. But when the best scene in an action movie is less than two seconds of a guy eating a sandwich, you've got a problem.

Note: I only saw the first fourth of this movie with Dylan, Emma, and Caden. They finished without me, and I had to finish watching later.

Indestructible Man

1956 science fiction B-junk

Rating: 7/20

Plot: A murderer known as The Butcher is executed for his crimes but soon after revived by a scientist and his assistant who start dicking around with his body. Not only is he brought back to life--he's also indestructible! He's ticked and wants revenge on his "friends" who double-crossed him.

This wasn't very good. Lon Chaney Jr., who I have nicknamed "The Man of One-and-a-Half Faces," competently plays a big, mute goon. There are a lot of unnecessary close-ups of his face, including one where he is supposedly dead but has wildly-flickering eyelids. He kind of looks like a Native American Andy Griffith at times. Hokey voice-over narration and almost constant music don't help this one, but it's got some moments--a surprise theramin, a scientist who can't pronounce the word syringe correctly, a gangster's womanly scream before a dummy version of himself is tossed off a roof, another obvious dummy thrown in an alley, attacks with a flame thrower and bazooka that prove the indestructible man's clothing is also somehow indestructible, and an improbably silly ending. This is cheap and choppy, seemingly shot in a fortnight, and beefed up with a ill-fitting and half-assed love story between the police detective and The Butcher's love interest. This story could have easily been told in under thirty minutes, so a lot of the seventy minutes drag. This is campy, but it's not really campy enough to make it worthwhile.

The Last Man on Earth

To celebrate the two year anniversary of when I last saw The Last Man on Earth, I decided to watch it again.

Long before the impressive "man" streak, long before my beard was longer than it is now but shorter than it was before, long before my wife threatened to take my life because of this blog, and long before I was ready to admit that Vincent Price is the greatest actor of all time, I sat down and watched this, the first adaptation of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend. It was June 23, 2008. I sat down with my action pants (a pair of tights with a jock strap worn over them), a muscle shirt, and a bowl containing approximately eight servings of tapioca pudding, and I watched The Last Man on Earth. Halfway through, I realized (and I've never told anybody about this before, but this is the kind of thing you share on two year anniversaries) that the ghost of Vincent Price, sans pants (action or otherwise), had sat beside me, leaning forward slightly and fondling the coffee table like it was a woman. We watched the rest of the movie together. I laughed twice, and he shot me a look like you see on the poster there. I yawned once; he shot me the same look. One year and two days later, while I was celebrating the one year anniversary of when I watched The Last Man on Earth, I was playing Michael Jackson's Thriller, and the song "Thriller" came on. I had attached jumper cables to my nipples in anticipation of the part of the song where Vincent Price laughs, and at that precise moment, my telephone rang and a man named Lucas who I had briefly, at a gas station in Nebraska, conversed with about how many different kinds of soda pops there were now compared to when he was a kid and then never seen again informed me that the King of Pop had died. "I thought you'd like to hear it from me first," he said. "I'm drinking something called a Grape Crush. Where the hell do they come up with this stuff?" That night, I was visited once again by the ghost of Vincent Price, sans shirt this time, and we wept together while he quoted a line from "Thriller": "Now is the time for you and I to cuddle close together. Yeah." It was one of five life-changing experiences I had that week, but I don't remember the other four.

You can find my other write-up on June 23, 2008. My feelings haven't really changed. I think Price is excellent as usual. This movie really starts strong, sags in the middle with a really long flashback, and then has an unsatisfying conclusion. There are some great opening shots--empty gray buildings and streets, a gray sunrise, haunting gray corpses curled up on sidewalks or across stone steps, abandoned gray automobiles, a church sign with the ominous message "The end has come." And this has such a great opening line (Price's narration): "Another day to live through; better get started." The zombies really remind me of Romero's in Night of the Living Dead, but that could just be that I haven't seen a black and white zombie movie in a long time. I'd still rather them be mute though. When the zombies are first shown in motion, it's right after Vincent Price's character has thrown on a jazz record, and it looks for a moment like they're dancing. Something else I noticed this time around: There's a scene where Price is watching film, and he starts laughing at a scene with monkeys. It reminded me of the scene in Ghostrider where Nicolas Cage is laughing at televised monkeys, a scene that, if you haven't had to pleasure of watching Ghostrider yet, is very nearly a religious experience.

This is, for those of you keeping score, 50% better than The Omega Man and over 100% better than the terrible I Am Legend. And before you accuse me otherwise, that has nothing to do with my opinion on rights to own firearms or my racism.