Leftover Halloween Candy Review #5

James Whale pulls another rabbit out of his hat with this perennially underrated Universal horror film based on H.G. Wells' eponymous novel.

Liberated from the shackles of onscreen visibility, Claude Rains really cuts loose with a bonkers performance that's a complete joy to (not) watch. The early special effects work a treat and enable just enough suspension of disbelief to make the premise not seem utterly ridiculous, and Whale surrounds Rains with a stable of…

I get why this film resonates so much with a specific demographic of nostalgic old hippies, and aging baby-boomers who feel creatively stifled by their careers, but its central message of tuning in, turning on, and dropping out was a tad outdated even when it was originally released, and it certainly hasn't aged like a fine wine since.

But what really chaps my ass are the 1-dimensional strawmen authority figures that director Hal Ashby sets up as Harold's obstacles on…

Leftover Halloween Candy Review #1

"Supernatural? Perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not."

That quote from Bela Lugosi's character, Vitus Werdegast, served as my Usenet .sig for many years and it's always stayed with me. I'm not exactly sure why. Possibly it's because I consider the supernatural to be orthogonal to our perception of reality and therefore something that cannot be explained rationally because it doesn't interact with our linear sense of space and time in ways that we can accept as normal…