Wednesday, August 29, 2012

It was a dark and stormy night...

 
Weathering the effects of Hurricane Isaac (the darkness, howling winds, and rain) put me in the mood for classic, cheesy horror. Given the fact that on-demand technology seems to outstrip actual on-deman offerings, I headed over to YouTube to see what full-length features were lurking about in their public domain postings. To my delight (and, frankly, surprise) were two fairly decent films:

Horror Hotel (1960) with Christopher Lee--A young college student, studying the history of witchcraft,  heads to an old Massachussets town where she falls into a trap set by a long-lived coven bent on blood sacrifices.

Horror Express--(1972) Finds Christopher Lee meeting up with Peter Cushing and an outrageously over the top Telly Savalas as they try to stop a murderous creature on a train from China to Russia. In a bizarre mix of the Love Boat meets horror by way of a Sherlock-Holmes-style whodunnit in retelling what is so obviously "Who Goes There?" (aka "The Thing"), Horror Express could have easily ridden off the rails, but the perfomances are such fun (Cushing at being acused of being the monster: "Monster? We're British, you know!") that you hardly notice or even care about such insignificant details.

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