Psycho (1960)

Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

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A Phoenix secretary embezzles $40,000 from her employer's client, goes on the run, and checks into a remote motel run by a young man under the domination of his mother.

Psycho is probably the film that represents Alfred Hitchcock the most in popular culture. With the proto-slasher killer and the now legendary shower scene where Janet Leigh gets butchered naked. Psycho is now encrusted in the common minds as Hitchcock’s masterpiece and his trademark of Horror.  Well that is part right and part wrong. First, Hitchcock was not a dedicated horror filmmaker has much as a storyteller that mastered thrills and suspense. Is Psycho his masterpiece? We can count at least five films as his masterpieces; Rear Window, North By Northwest, Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds. However, is Psycho his ultimate masterpiece? Some might say yes to that answer but recently, 2012, Vertigo was recognized as the greatest film of all time by the Sight and Sound poll held each decade since 1952. However, is you ask me, and I believe that if you are reading those lines you are asking me, Psycho might be the most personal masterpiece Hitchcock ever directed. With the floating sexuality from the beginning of the traveling in the hotel bedroom where Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) and Sam are having an affair to the shower scene, sex is present. Then you have the thrill, the build-up to the first murder, the fear of the policeman that suspects Marion of getting away in a hurry and follows her to the point where seh trades car, Hitchcock was affraid of cops since a childhood memory that his father asked the police to jail him for a moment so he would behave. There are themes of Hitchcock’s obsessions that are recurring but also completely succesful in their execution.

Let’s now discuss the thing that is almost synonymous with Psycho, the shower scene. In his discussions with François Truffaut, Hitchcock admitted that it was the only reason he wanted to do the film. I doubt that a bit since the film is so perfect in every one of its elements that, yes the scene is outstanding and his use of montage, jump cuts, traveling into Leigh’s eye to show us she looked at the money before life gets out of her, and the shot of the knife entering the flesh that was shot in reverse so that the knife never penetrates the wet skin, but still the build up leading to that scene is a lesson in cinema. That scene took many days to shot and the use of many angles makes it geometric and puts us into the shower side by side with Marion. As if we were taking the shower with her and witnessing the scene getting soaked. When the killer gets in and attacks then kill Marion, the story shifts from the point of view of Marion to Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) that comes and washes meticulously the crime scene. This long afterwards of cleaning and getting rid of the body and the car is also as interesting as the assassination scene itself. When he gazes the car slowly sinking into the swamp, the montage from the car to his face has a comic mesure that makes us his acolytes.

Janet Leigh

Anthony Perkins

Birds

Horror

Cinematography

Saul Bass 

The Monster Of Piedras Blancas

The Monster Of Piedras Blancas (Irvin Berwick, 1959)

The monster, which looks like a nastier version of "The Creature from the Black Lagoon," invades a sleepy lighthouse town. The superstitious lighthouse keeper is worried for the safety of his beautiful teenage daughter, so he leaves food for the monster, who dwells in a nearby cave. When bodies wash up ashore, the locals take notice.

The Birds

Note : this review is a contribution to The Universal blogathon hosted by Silver Scenes.

The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock, 1963)

A wealthy San Francisco socialite pursues a potential boyfriend to a small Northern California town that slowly takes a turn for the bizarre when birds of all kinds suddenly begin to attack people there in increasing numbers and with increasing viciousness.

Scanners

Scanners (David Cronenberg, 1981)

A scientist (Patrick McGoohan) sends a man (Stephen Lack) with extraordinary psychic powers to hunt others like him.

The Fury

The Fury (Brian De Palma, 1978)

A government agent (Kirk Douglas) is determined to come to his son's (Andrew Stevens) rescue when a sinister official (John Cassavetes) kidnaps him to harbor his extremely powerful psychic abilities.

The Unknown

The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927)

A criminal on the run hides in a circus and seeks to possess the daughter of the ringmaster at any cost.

Gremlins

Gremlins (Joe Dante, 1984)

A boy (Zack Galligan) inadvertently breaks 3 important rules concerning his new pet and unleashes a horde of malevolently mischievous monsters on a small town.

The Cabin in the Woods

The Cabin in the Woods (Drew Goddard, 2012)

While getting into things as the typical horror slasher film where every character must be typecast and situations  of scares and behaviors like having sex in the woods or reciting an ancient formula to rise their death, The Cabin in the Woods twists it topsy turvy and uses the stereotypes to demonstrate its manipulation of the characters and the viewers. Director/writer Drew Goddard and co-writer Joss Whedon are showing the strings behind your typical horror flick and translate it in a some kind of dark prophecy for film geeks and satire lovers. All that in a fashion way to criticize torture porn and a great sense of dark comedy. 

Scream

Scream (Wes Craven, 1996)

Scream is a 1996 American slasher film written by Kevin Williamson and directed by Wes Craven. The film stars Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, Drew Barrymore, and David Arquette. It follows the character of Sidney Prescott (Campbell), a high school student in the fictional town of Woodsboro, who becomes the target of a mysterious killer known as Ghostface. Other main characters include Sidney's best friend Tatum Riley (Rose McGowan), Sidney's boyfriend Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich), film geek Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy), deputy sheriff Dewey Riley (Arquette), and news reporter Gale Weathers (Cox). 

Re-Animator

Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon, 1985)

Gory as hell and funny as it could be, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator is a horror film lover’s wet dream. With enough classic elements of Sci-fi and Horror with the genius turned mad scientist in Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) openly based on H.P. Lovecraft’s Herbert West, Re-Animator story and a distant homage to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Re-Animator didn’t become a cult classic for the quality of its acting. Maybe. But it’s the outstanding use of gore and blood that at first gets in your face. Then it’s the cartoonesque story of the two young students Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott) and West (Combs) playing with life re-animating every corpse that gets in their way and the always in the wrong place Megan Halsey (Barbara Crampton) that is the tender half of Dan. 

The Wicker Man (1973)

The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973)

Often praised by critics and recommended by one of my friends, Christian Audet an Independent filmmaker and Horror aficionado, The Wicker Man is an intriguing and very interesting movie. Sgt Neil Howie (Edward Woodward) is a catholic investigating the Summerisle community about a missing young girl. The people of the village don’t want to collaborate and Howie witnesses many pagan rituals that alarm him. Those are Celtic pre-catholic rituals including couples copulating in public fields, teaching children the importance of the maypole as a phallic symbol, women dancing around a fire naked to celebrate the coming of a child, and strange cures like putting a frog in the mouth for a sore throat.

An American Werewolf in London

An American Werewolf in London (John Landis, 1981)

David (David Naughton) and Jack (Griffin Dunne) are two young men on a backpacking trip in Europe beginning by England and then fleeing to Italy. After a long day of walking in the rain, they attend a weird pub where they get expelled for asking a wrong question. Just after, they are attacked by a mysterious beast. It easily get obvious that it was a werewolf. Jack dies of his wounds but David got saved by the villagers who kill the beast. David then wakes up in the hospital getting treated for his scars and traumatism but it slowly gets clearer that he is now the new werewolf and that the curse of the werewolf must be stop by killing the last of them.

Don't Look Now

Don’t Look Now (Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

After the accidental death by drowning of their daughter, a couple (Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland) goes to Venice for a contract of church restoration. Laura (Christie) meets a couple of elderly sisters that told her that her daughter his still with them. It is one of the sisters, who is blind, that tells that she can see her sitting between them. Following this memorable scene the couple will be intertwined in a story of look alike and apparitions. It also contains one of the most well recognized sex scenes ever shot on film.

Nosferatu the Vampyre

Nosferatu the Vampyre (Werner Herzog, 1977)

This Gothic homage to F.W. Murnau’s Expressionistic masterpiece of 1922, brings to the big screen another vision of the classic story of Dracula. Shot simultaneously in German and in English, Werner Herzog’s version of Nosferatu highlights the bleak bringing of the plague and the loneliness of its title character.

Nosferatu

Nosferatu (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1922)

A classic canon of Films with a major F and one of the earliest instalments of Horror in movies, Murnau’s Nosferatu has inspired, influenced, been copied, and idolized. This review won’t try to repeat the thousands of analysis and critics it already been praised and sang. However, this critic who is now writing at the third person, ranks it as one of his personal favorite films. Not just Silent films but films in general. It even was on this critic’s ballot for the 2012 Sight and Sound Poll. But BFI didn’t asked me to cast my votes so I won’t be bragging much about it.

Carrie (1976)

Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976)

With the reinterpretation of Stephen King’s novel by Kimberly Pierce lately, it was natural that the classic Horror film that amongst all film enthusiasts, Quentin Tarantino himself ranks as one of his favorite films of all time would be revisited. And for Halloween’s sake let’s have a re-watch of this landmark.

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

Dawn of the Dead (Zombi) (George A. Romero, 1978)

Let’s go  to the mall said Robin Sparkles, but here it is a question of survival that our four protagonists escape by helicopter and land on a mall in Pennsylvania. Two SWAT members Peter (Ken Foree) and Roger (Scott Reiniger), an helicopter pilot Stephen (David Emge) and his wife Francine (Gayleen Ross) take refuge in this suburban mall where they have food, ammunition's, and leisure to pass the time. However, the zombie infested lands of America isolate them from the rest of the world and zombies seem to be attracted by the shopping centre. Explaining why, the characters only summarize it by saying that it is their instinct of converging to a place that was important for them. As a consultant I have worked in a mall for two years straight at a client’s offices and I really enjoyed it and someone can almost never leave the place and live his whole life there. It wouldn’t be sane to do but most people may find it appealing. Even the central characters of the film go on a shopping spree and calculate how much the things they get costs.

Rosemary’s Baby

Rosemary’s Baby (Roman Polanski, 1968)

A young couple move into a new apartment, only to be surrounded by peculiar neighbors and occurrences. When the wife becomes mysteriously pregnant, paranoia over the safety of her unborn child begins controlling her life.

Hour of the Wolf

Hour of the Wolf (Ingmar Bergman, 1968)

When one gets into art house cinema masters, it is mandatory to step into Ingmar Bergman’s territory. With such landmarks as The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring, Cries and Whispers, Persona, and Fanny and Alexander just to name a few. But once a cinephile has seen all the major films from Bergman there’s another level of films into his vast filmography. Into those titles you find interesting pictures that explore a concept, a sentiment, or a state of mind more clumsily than his aforementioned work, but still, very strong films. Lesser Bergman is still better than most of the mainstream film out there.

The Phantom Carriage

The Phantom Carriage aka Körkarlen (Victor Sjöström, 1921)

This article is part of a series of self- imposed movie reviews set in the participation of this film critic to the 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die Club. It is an attempt at catching up the reviews that I’ve missed in my recent period of inactivity in the blogosphere.

This landmark in Swedish Cinema, recently released in Blu-Ray as part of the Criterion Collection, is one of the primary works of Horror films, Fantasy, and psychological studies. The whole ghost story and Death taking the souls of the deceased is a theme that is directly linked to Ingmar Bergman’s masterpiece The Seventh Seal. Also, the director of The Phantom Carriage starred in Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, has been revealed has been a great influence on Bergman and many others that followed. It is also a very Swedish theme of the visiting ghost that can be easily connected with August Strindberg’s writings that often involved ghosts.