Fright Club

Fright Club: Best Horror Movies of 1974

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Chinatown, Young Frankenstein, The Godfather: Part 2, A Woman Under the Influence, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, The Conversation, Lenny—1974 was a hell of a year in movies! And horror was just as revolutionary.

We celebrate the 50th anniversary of those gems of 1974 with our pick of the five best. But we still love It’s Alive, Dark Star, Sugar Hill, Beyond the Door, Frightmare, CaptainKronos Vampire Hunter, and Abby. We just love these five more.

5. The Phantom of the Paradise

Brian De Palma’s first and only musical is a Phantom of the Opera/Faust/The Picture of Dorian Gray mash up (with some Frankenstein, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and more than a little Rocky Horror thrown in for good measure). That’s a heady mix.

A campy skewering of the soulless music industry, Phantom sees tiny Seventies staple Paul Williams as the Satan-esque Swan, a music executive with a contract for you to sign. Poor Winslow (William Finley) is just as wide-eyed about his music as all those would-be starlets are about their chances for fame and fortune in this evil world of pop super stardom.

Like many horror musicals, the film works best as a comedy, but Finley’s garish visage once he makes his transformation from idealistic musician to mutilated Phantom is pretty horrifically effective. The film as a whole is a hot Seventies mess, but that’s kind of the joy of it, really.

4. Blood for Dracula (Andy Warhol’s Dracula)

The film was also released as Andy Warhol’s Dracula, which is kind of rude since it was actually Paul Morrissey’s Dracula. The longtime Warhol collaborator had just made Flesh for Frankenstein with Udo Kier, Joe Dallesandro and Arno Jürging. (Both films were made available in 3D. If you are ever able to screen them theatrically in that format, you are compelled and required to do so!)

Set during a Socialist upswelling just before Fascism took hold in Italy, the film sees a weak and anemic Count reeling from the lack of virgins to eat. He travels with his manservant to the Italian villa of Il Marchese Di Fiore. But he did not take into account that Joe Dallesandro is the handyman there.

Lurid, hot and sloppy in that gloriously garish Morrissey tradition, it’s a trashy treasure.

3. Young Frankenstein

Will you look at this cast? Madeline Kahn and Cloris Leachman are untouchable comedy gods in this movie (per usual). Gene Wilder is the master of pretending to the a comedy’s straight man but employing every physical instinct for comedy. Peter Boyle, Teri Garr and Marty Feldman round out one of the most spot-on comedic ensembles ever assembled.

But Mel Brooks’s horror comedy is unlike many of his other comedies in that it honors and loves that thing it sends up. He used cinematic techniques popular in the 1930s, shot in black and white and even borrowed actual sets from James Whale’s original Frankenstein laboratory.

The result is a perfectly executed horror comedy.

2. Black Christmas

Director Bob Clark made two Christmas-themed films in his erratic career. His 1940s era A Christmas Story has become a holiday tradition for many families and most cable channels, but we celebrate a darker yule tide tale: Black Christmas.

Sure, it’s another case of mysterious phone calls leading to grisly murders; sure it’s another one-by-one pick off of sorority girls; sure, there’s a damaged child backstory; naturally John Saxon co-stars. Wait, what was different? Oh yeah, it did it first.

Released in 1974, the film predates most slashers by at least a half dozen years. It created the architecture. More importantly, the phone calls are actually quite unsettling and the end of the film is a powerful, memorable nightmare.

1. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

Tobe Hooper’s camera work, so home-movie like, worked with the “based on a true story” tag line like nothing before it, and the result seriously disturbed the folks of 1974.

Hooper sidestepped all the horror gimmicks audiences had grown accustomed to – a spooky score that let you know when to grow tense, shadowy interiors that predicted oncoming scares – and instead shot guerilla-style in broad daylight, outdoors, with no score at all. You just couldn’t predict what was coming.

He dashes your expectations, making you uncomfortable, as if you have no idea what you could be in for. As if, in watching this film, you yourself are in more danger than you’d predicted.

But not more danger than Franklin is in, because Franklin is not in for a good time.

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Mystery Tramp

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A Complete Unknown

by George Wolf

James Mangold’s Walk the Line wasn’t a bad movie. But that 2005 Johnny Cash biopic – along with Taylor Hackford’s Ray from one year earlier – relied so heavily on convention that Jake Kasdan’s 2007 comedy Walk Hard found easy marks for spoofing.

A Complete Unknown has Mangold’s biopic sights set on Bob Dylan, where a tighter historical focus helps him craft a more memorable film.

Instead of attempting a complete life arc, Mangold and co-writers Jay Cocks and Elijah Wald wisely choose a four-year whirlwind that changed the course of music and culture. Opening in 1961 as a 19-year-old Bob Dylan (Timothée Chalamet) travels from Minnesota to visit an ailing Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) in a New York hospital, the film follows Dylan’s legendary rise to savior of the folk music scene, through his defiant choice to turn Judas and “go electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival.

Dylan became a pop culture enigma long ago, fueled by his obvious delight in tall tales, an antagonistic stage presence and prickly interactions with the press. He’s cared little for letting us know him, leaving the more avant garde approaches to telling his story (especially Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There) as the most compelling.

It’s hard to imagine a mainstream treatment working better than this one. And it’s one propelled by an absolutely transformative performance from Chalamet. His success at emulating both Dylan’s voice and guitar style is beyond impressive, as is his ease at moving the iconic persona from an ambitious Greenwich Village newbie to the cynical voice of a generation feeling “pulverized by fame.”

And maybe most importantly, he crafts Dylan as a soul bursting with song ideas 24/7. This not only provides an important layer for his sometimes cold social behaviors, but it gives the birth of classic compositions a much more organic, believable feel than the revisionist pandering of biopic films looking to simply pad a soundtrack (cough, cough, Bohemian Rhapsody.)

The supporting ensemble provides terrific backup, especially Edward Norton’s turn as folk hero Pete Seeger. A committed pacifist, Seeger serves as gentle mentor to Dylan early on, then nervously tries to navigate the young man’s ascension once it’s clear that his talent is too great to contain.

That early take-and-give is a subtle step toward the intimate triangle that anchors the film: Dylan’s relationships with girlfriend Sylvie Russo (Elle Fanning, perfectly supportive, naive and wounded) and singer/activist Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro, impressively handling her own assignment of embodying a legend). The film doesn’t shy away from the self-centered way Dylan hedged his bets at both women’s expense. And though it’s clear Dylan was following his artistic voice above all, you never get the sense he’s being entirely forgiven, either.

That’s refreshing, especially since Dylan himself was reportedly involved enough in production to provide some dialog and request the “Sylvia Russo” name change from the real-life Suze Rotolo. He also apparently gave his blessing to a major anachronism in the storyline that will seem egregious to longtime fans but ultimately adds dramatic weight to the final fiasco at Newport. (The ill-advised addition of Chalamet’s face into some real archival footage, though, is a curious misstep.)

For all its many strengths, maybe the most impressive aspect of the film is the way it uses that implied mystery of the title to its advantage. Eschewing the standard biography, this time Mangold paints us the time, the place, and a movement that’s content to tread water, then adds the mystery tramp seemingly sent from outer space as a necessary chaos agent.

As I write this review I’m listening to one of the 16 Dylan albums sitting in my playlist. Major fan here, and the closer I got to seeing this film, the more cautiously optimistic I felt. More than happy to report it exceeds expectations.

A Complete Unknown is an intoxicating, engrossing mix, and one of the best films of the year.

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Born Again

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Nosferatu

by Hope Madden

It’s a funny idea, revisiting Nosferatu. F. W. Murnau’s 1922 original is itself a reimagining of Dracula (criminally so, as the filmmaker was successfully sued by Bram Stoker’s estate and all prints of the film were believed destroyed at the time).

But Murnau’s changes to the vampire fable and his approach to the story were compelling enough to motivate Werner Herzog to put his own magnificently bizarre spin on Nosferatu in 1979. And the fascination and horror surrounding the forbidden original inspired E. Elias Merhige’s brilliant 2000 horror comedy Shadow of the Vampire (for which Willem Dafoe earned a much deserved Oscar nomination).

So, there is obviously something there. Something in the criminal DNA of Murnau’s macabre fantasy arouses the most fascinating reincarnations. Since the 1922 masterpiece, none is as assured, as complete or as clearly stand-alone from Stoker’s source material as Robert Eggers’s Nosferatu.

In collaboration with longtime cinematographer Jarin Blaschke and The Northman composer Robin Carolan, Eggers conjures an elegant, somber, moody Austria breathlessly awaiting death.

His film pulls in the shadow play that made Murnau’s film so eerie, as well as the plague-infested storytelling that gave Herzog’s film its touch of madness. But Eggers’s script fills in narrative gaps with a backstory that diverts from any previous tellings, enriching characters with a ripe darkness that influences the entire fable.

Eggers centers his tale on a love triangle, as so many have, but he invests in two characters the other storytellers, including Stoker, mainly wasted. Nicholas Hoult (having a banner year) plays Hutter, the intrepid real estate man sent to Transylvania to finalize accounts with an eccentric nobleman, leaving behind his beautiful bride, Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp).

Hoult may be the first actor in any version—Nosferatu or Dracula—to give the Hutter/Harker character real depth. He is flawed, terrified, earnest, insecure and loyal. It’s a standout performance in an impeccable ensemble.

Depp mines for something primal, and her performance is unsettling. Isabelle Adjani’s turn in Herzog’s version hints at what obsesses this desperate bride, but Depp is given the space to create a solid, haunted character to hang the movie on.

There are three other characters that every filmmaker has fun with, and Eggers finds ways to freshen up the monster, his minion, and the mad doctor who would be his downfall. Willem Dafoe’s Professor Albin Eberhert von Franz (the Van Helsing stand in) is just manic enough to be alarming.

As Knock (known in Dracula as Renfield), Simon McBurney is a menacing, manipulative lunatic with a far meatier and messier role in society’s unraveling.

Eggers keeps the Count (Bill Skarsgård) shrouded in darkness long enough to build excitement. What the two deliver is unlike anything in the canon. It’s horrifying and perfectly in keeping with the blunt instrument they’ve made of this remorseless monster.

His monstrousness makes the seductive nature of the tale all the more unseemly. This beast, the rats, the stench of contagion infesting the elegant image of Austria and her beautiful bride—it is the stuff of nightmares.  

It makes you grateful that Eggers was not intrigued by Stoker’s elegant aristocrat and his tortured love story, but drawn instead to the repulsive carnality of Nosferatu.

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Good Girl

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Babygirl

by Hope Madden

It seems impossible not to compare writer/director Halina Reijn’s Babygirl with Steven Shainberg’s 2002 indie treasure Secretary (based on Mary Gaitskill’s brilliant short story). Reijn’s tale is almost a perfect inversion.

Secretary saw a relative newcomer (Maggie Gyllenhaal) deliver a revelatory turn as an absolute nobody actively seeking domination, finding it in a chilly CEO (James Spader), and slowly, wickedly, hilariously discovering ways to take control of the situation so she could pressure him to control her.

Fast forward more than two decades and Babygirl completely reframes the same tale of one woman who really wants somebody else to be in charge for a change.

Nicole Kidman—a veteran whose craft is beyond reproach—plays Romy, a tech company’s CEO. Romy has a perfect life that includes a saucy relationship with her hot husband (Antonio Banderas), little notes left in the lunches she packs her two kids each morning, and an incredibly successful company.

And all seems almost well until an absolute nobody—an intern (Harris Dickinson)—senses something in Romy and acts on it. Soon this woman who is in control of everything she surveys risks all for a little humiliation and discipline.

Though Reijn’s film benefits from sly humor, it’s far from the dark comedy of Secretary. Babygirl hones closer to thriller, building tension, keeping the pace charged, and breathlessly suggesting our protagonist’s ruin behind every unlocked door.

Kidman is characteristically amazing. She is a risk taker as an actor, and what she does with this character is fascinating. The outer shell is different, person to person, interaction to interaction, but the humanity lurking beneath is never far from the surface.

Her chemistry with Dickinson is electric but not exactly sexual. Babygirl complicates gender politics and sexuality and shame, specifically as each is loosely defined across generations. It’s an observant script and a film a bit less interested in titillation than in human drama.

Reijn’s entire ensemble is unafraid to be unlikeable, which is necessary when ambition, jealousy, insecurity, sex and shame commingle. This is a tight script, perhaps too tidy and structurally familiar because its most satisfying moments are its messiest. But it is a fascinating and fresh look at something we’ve been conditioned to turn away from.

The Screening Room

Screening Room: Mufasa, Sonic 3, Nosferatu, A Complete Unknown, Babygirl & More

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Mufasa: The Lion King, Sonic the Hedgehog 3, The Six Triple Eight, Nosferatu, A Complete Unknown, Babygirl, The Fire Inside, Nocturnes

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Once and Future

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Mufasa: The Lion King

by Hope Madden

It was hard not to be a little worried about Mufasa: The Lion King. Or maybe it was hard not to be worried about Barry Jenkins. Too few of our genuinely brilliant independent film directors come away from Giant Studio Efforts unscathed. (Quick callback to last week’s JD Chandor debacle, Kraven the Hunter.)

Surely there are some auteurs who are able to leave their unique thumbprints on Disney films. No one comes to mind except Rian Johnson, and man, people really universally loved The Last Jedi, didn’t they?   

Well, Mufasa is far from the flaming disaster of Kraven, thank goodness. And it’s not nearly as polarizingly renegade as Jedi.

Safe. That’s what it is.

It’s also very pretty, if equally needless. The film delivers the origin story of Simba’s father Mufasa, providing—as origin stories so often do—a glimpse into the early development of other beloved and not-so-beloved characters. Young Mufasa (Braelyn Rankins) is separated from his parents and his pride by a great flood. Washed far from home, he’s saved by a bratty little cub called Taka (Theo Somolu). While Taka’s father, the king, will never accept this outsider, Taka’s mother (Thandiwe Newton) takes him in.

As Simba and Taka (voiced as older lions by Aaron Pierre and Kelvin Harrison Jr., respectively) flee a marauding pride led by the villainous Kiros (Mads Mikkelsen, gloriously and effortlessly villainous), they find out what kind of lions they really are.

And here for a while we get a bit of something refreshing. Mufasa’s worthiness to rule is grounded in skills learned from hunting with the females in the pride. And some of these transcend hunting skills: he listens, he’s humble, he’s honest.

The CG animation is mainly very impressive and there are camera movements and choices that feel like new ideas in an old tradition. But tradition wins out, not just in the look but in the storytelling. (Outsiders are bad. It takes a king to lead. Women support the men who make things happen. Lions don’t eat meat?)

The core story is often interrupted by a framing device of an elderly Rafiki (John Kani) telling the story of Mufasa. These breaks are meant to be funny, and sometimes they do generate a chuckle, but they feel more like well-timed bathroom breaks for when the film hits Disney+.

But it’s not bad. Your kids might like it. They won’t likely remember it, but they won’t hate it. It’s perfectly safe.

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Third Time Charm

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Sonic the Hedgehog 3

by Rachel Willis

There seems to be a trend in kids’ movies lately where sequels outshine their originals. That’s not always the case, of course, but it’s certainly true with director Jeff Fowler’s Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

The stakes continue to rise for Team Sonic – which includes the titular hedgehog (Ben Schwartz), Tails (Colleen O’Shaughnessey) and Knuckles (Idris Elba) – as another hedgehog, Shadow (Keanu Reeves), is awakened from a 50-year-long hibernation. Shadow has a mission to avenge his mistreatment at the hands of humans by teaming up with Ivo Robotnik’s grandfather, Professor Robotnik. Both Robotniks are played with panache by Jim Carrey.

As with the previous entries, a lot of the film’s focus rests on Carrey. His villainous turn is amusing, but it often feels like too many others are underutilized, such as James Marsden and Tika Sumpter who reprise their roles as Tom and Maddie. Several additional actors return from the previous two films but, aside from Agent Stone (Lee Majdoub), they’re not given much to do.

However, the animated characters are the real stars of the show.  Our new villain, Shadow, is given a certain amount of depth we haven’t seen in the previous two films. Though it’s not a very original backstory, Reeves brings a certain quality to his character that helps elicit audience sympathy.

Sonic, himself, continues to learn what it means to make good choices in life and continues to impart a strong moral message to kids without losing the good-natured humor with which Schwartz imbues in the character.

The story isn’t without flaws, but the fast-paced, entertaining moments make up for the weaker moments. The overall feeling you get from the film is fairly satisfying, and without giving anything away, there is a sense of closure with the conclusion.

But make sure to stick around through the end credits for a hint of what may be in store for Team Sonic in the future.

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Why Yes, That Chicken Looks Familiar

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Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

by Hope Madden

Just over 30 years ago, cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his long-suffering dog Gromit took in a lodger and invented a new kind of pants. Neither were what they seemed.

And just when you thought you’d seen the last of Feathers McGraw—well, several decades after you thought you’d seen the last of him—he resurfaces with a diabolical scheme involving zookeepers, turnips, and gnomes.

Oh, and vengeance. Vengeance most fowl.

Longtime Aardman Entertainment filmmaker Nick Park takes on a couple of partners this go-round in co-writer Mark Burton (Shaun the Sheep) and co-director Merlin Crossingham, who’s been part of the Aardman team for years, directing video games, television, as well as the documentary A Grand Night In: The Story of Aardman.

After 2023’s disappointing Aardman sequel Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, the stop-motion plasticine legends could use a reminder of how they nabbed all four of those Oscars. And so, W&G return with Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

What have the lads been up to? Gromit’s been finding peace in his garden. Meanwhile, Wallace has invented a yard gnome that does gardening so Gromit doesn’t have to. Norbot (voiced Reece Shearsmith) is so efficient and hardworking that the whole of Wallaby Street wants his help! What could go wrong?

Loads! Especially once Feathers McGraw catches wind of the new invention, thanks to the crack reporting of one Onya Doorstep (Diane Morgan).

We lost Peter Sallis, longtime voice of Wallace, back in 2017, but Ben Whitehead takes on lead duties with appropriate aplomb.

Otherwise, expect the expected, which turns out to be the film’s strength as well as its weakness. The film mixes silly with clever in exactly the right proportion, as is the charm with the entire franchise. Wallace is so addicted to tech that he’s sure his old ceramic teapot is broken because he keeps pushing its knob and nothing happens. It doesn’t turn on. Nothing!

There are dozens of bright sight gags, loads of Rube Goldberg style tech, and plenty of endearingly dunderheaded characters. The animation itself, full of thumb prints and vivid color, is as brilliant as it has ever been.

There’s just not a lot of surprises. No one expected a giant were-rabbit in the lads’ last film, and it was right in the title of 2005’s magnificent Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Vengeance Most Fowl is a comforting, comfortable adventure, but it breaks no new ground and leaves less of an impression than you might hope.

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Have the Moths Stopped Flapping?

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Nocturnes

by Matt Weiner

You’ll never look at a moth the same way again after seeing them up close—very close—in Nocturnes. The new documentary film from Anirban Dutta and Anupama Srinivasan is an intimate look at the hawk moth population in the dense forests of the Eastern Himalayas.

But this isn’t a traditional nature documentary. Night after night, the filmmakers slowly reveal the work of the scientists as they study the moths, with a slice of life in the laboratory here and there. Mostly, though, there is only a well-lit screen in the middle of a dark forest, with only a scientist or two and a few local guides to assist with the meticulous photography.

Nocturnes is the kind of film that’s impossible to not use the word “meditative,” but that also doesn’t fully do justice to Dutta and Srinivasan’s subject. It is meditative, sure, but also hypnotic—and never dull.

And like other philosophical nature documentaries (with Koyaanisqatsi feeling like its biggest spiritual predecessor), Nocturnes is as much interested in humanity’s relationship to the natural world as it is to the moths themselves.

Climate change might seem far away from the verdant forests, but its presence and our human effects on a delicate ecosystem hover over the research. Nocturnes looks beautiful and sounds even better.

And yet the nonstop insect and animal noises from the forest (a soundtrack that pairs well with a restrained score by Nainita Desai) is nothing compared to its clarion call for humans to reflect on our place in the environment. And how even the smallest creatures can become a subject of endless fascination and study with the right perspective.

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Appointed Rounds

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The Six Triple Eight

by George Wolf

“Where there is no mail there is low morale.”

For a time during the height of WWII, there was no mail. Battalion 6888 – the only all-black outfit in the Women’s Army Corp to see overseas duty – was given six months to sort through a backlog of 17 million letters between soldiers and their loved ones back home.

If they succeeded, the women would restore hope to families and morale to the troops. If they didn’t, bigots throughout the military would use the failure as proof of inferiority.

Netflix’s The Six Triple Eight tells a lesser-known story of unsung heroes who deserve the acclaim, but the best intentions of writer/director Tyler Perry are often hamstrung by his broad brush and heavy-handed approach to telling it.

Our window into history is Lena Derriecott (Emily Obsidian of TV’s Sistas), who enlists after her high school love Abram (Gregg Sulkin) is shot down and killed in action. Captain (later Major) Charity Adams (Kerry Washington) whips Lena and the rest of the women into shape, and longs for marching orders that her superiors have no intention of providing.

But when President Roosevelt (Sam Waterston), First Lady Eleanor (Susan Sarandon) and National Council of Negro Women founder Mary McLeod Bethune (Oprah Winfrey) learn of the interruption of mail service, openly racist officers such as General Halt (Dean Norris) have to begrudgingly deploy the 6888th.

Perry adapts Kevin Hymel’s 2019 article “Fighting a Two-Front War” with a well-deserved respect for the mission, but a lack of depth that often reduces the timelines to little beyond sanitized set pieces and expositionary dialog. The ensemble consistently over-emotes, while even reliable talents such as Washington and Norris seem coached to push the dramatics and facial reactions.

The history lesson here – which includes the Army’s attempt to sabotage the 6888th – doesn’t need that hard sell. What these women accomplished was truly heroic, and Perry works best when he’s letting us in on the meticulous methods they found to connect the more hard-to-decipher addresses with their rightful owners.

Even the finale – when we get the expected (and welcome) archival footage featuring the real women involved – comes equipped with an extended retelling of the plot points we just watched unfold. From start to finish, The Six Triple Eight seems engineered for the distracted attentions of streaming audiences. So while the film’s limited theatrical run is appreciated, it also feels a bit outside the post code.

Hope Madden and George Wolf … get it?