THE LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE — SHOCKTOBER!

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Arriving in 1973, the same year that "The Exorcist" was released, "The Legend Of Hell House" is a barn-burning horror movie.

Many of the plot and design elements used in this influential genre film went on to be quoted, if not expanded on, by budding young horror directors in love with its artfulness.

The "Hell House" production designers went all out in creating a rich Gothic environment for our four intrepid ghost hunters to converge in the week before Christmas.

Physicist Dr. Lionel Barrett is hired to investigate ghost behavior at Belasco House, the "Mount Everest of haunted houses."

The home's millionaire owner was a sadist engaged in all sort of off-the-rails debauchery.

"Drug addiction, alcoholism, sadism, bestiality, mutilation, murder, vampirism, necrophilia, cannibalism, not to mention a gamut of sexual goodies. Shall I go on?"

The lost soul's of Emeric Belasco's sex-crime victims now want their own sexy-time payback.

The good doctor brings along his wife Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt), and physical mediums Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowall), and Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin).

Erotic dreams turn into hot reality as the week twists with demonic possession, and more effed up stuff than you can laugh your ass off at.

There's a black cat that does a lot more than just cross paths.

Dark, twisted, and embellished with dated "modern" touches that make it all worthwhile, "The Legend of Hell House" is a minor masterpiece.

Roddy McDowall's not-camp-enough performance redeems him if only somewhat, when McDowall goes full Nic Cage for his big finale monologue.

If only Anthony Perkins had played the role. If only.

"The Legend of Hell House" is a hoot and a half.

A devious electronic music score by Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson adds to the movie's creepy atmosphere.

Rated R. 90 mins.

THE HONEYMOON KILLERS — SHOCKTOBER!

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“Ray kissed them, Martha killed them. They turned a Lonely Hearts Club into a slaughterhouse.”

The salacious tagline for “The Honeymoon Killers” was a tabloid-styled ad almost as incendiary as the 1983 New York Post headline “Headless Body In Topless Bar.”

The film’s original title (“Dear Martha”) was far too pedestrian for writer/director Leonard Kastle’s roasting of Americana values, tortured attitudes regarding sexual expression, and nostalgia-riddled romanticism of the masses.

Check out the scene where Ray’s new bride belts out “America the Beautiful” from a bubble bath while Ray and Martha empty her purse in the next room. The filmmakers are merciless with a roiling subtext of satirical statements and deadpan counterpoint.  

Never mind that Kastle and producer Warren Steibel fired Martin Scorsese as the film’s original director after 10 days because Scorsese seemed to spin wheels. Nonetheless, a couple of sequences that Scorsese directed remain in the film.

Cool.

The movie is based on the real-life exploits of a pair of money-hungry serial killer lovers. Kastle’s eerie crime drama follows Alabama-born nurse Martha (played with brooding hostility by Shirley Stoler) and her Elvis-haired Latin gigolo boyfriend Ray (Tony Lo Bianco).

Opposites attract.

Martha is a zaftig woman with lust, greed, and jealousy in her heart. Ray is a handsome, suave Rudolph Valentino-inspired con man. Between his Latin accent and always-polite demeanor, Ray makes every woman he meets feel like the only woman in the world. The partners-in-crime pose as siblings while Ray conducts marriage proposals with unsuspecting widows who the couple eventually kill in order to steal the women’s life savings and life insurance. Naturally, things get complicated, messy, and nasty.

Made in 1969, "The Honeymoon Killers" presaged elements of David Lynch's filmic approach, and clearly informed John McNaughton's similarly-themed stomach-churner film "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer." Romantic dysfunction never looked so banal, brutal, and ugly as it does here. Kastle’s dry documentary style is as inspired by Cassavetes (“Faces”) as it is by Frederick Wiseman's films (see “Titicut Follies”). The real Martha Beck and Ray Fernandez were executed by electrocution on March 8, 1951. 

This is a raw crime drama exploitation movie that compares favorably to Richard Brook’s adaptation of Truman Capote’s “Cold Blood” (1967). Kastle employs a similar docu-styled editorial approach to the narrative and to its noir filmic compositions. The filmmaker allows social subtext of ‘40s era America to bubble up. When she's fired from her nursing position, it gives Martha opportunity to take the moral high-ground to authority; she indignantly announces her recent marriage like a diva in full bloom.  

The picture’s naturalistic black-and-white noir compositions are augmented by a stark soundtrack punctuated with Gustav Mahler’s anthemic classical music.

“The Honeymoon Killers” was the only film Leonard Kastle made, and he poured all of his talents into a picture that comes across as a labor of love. François Truffaut famously called “The Honeymoon Killers” his favorite American film.”

Rated R. 108 mins.

DRACULA — SHOCKTOBER!

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Ladies fainted when Bela Lugosi slowly rose from his coffin as the undead king of all vampires in the famous 1927 Broadway stage production of "Dracula."

Co-playwright/screenwriter Hamilton Deane constructed his sinewy script from Bram Stoker's celebrated novel.

The Depression era picture introduced horror to the era of sound film with a Gothic atmosphere that is still copied today. The play’s successful two-year national run (featuring Lugosi) preceded Tod Browning's brilliant 1931 film version. Naturally, Browning’s pre-code movie had an equally chilling effect on movie audiences even if not all critics at the time were convinced of the film’s many charms.

The film’s secret weapon is Bela Lugosi, whose thick Hungarian accent harbored such a sense of mortal dread and diabolical intent that you can’t help but hang on his every word. The vampire role typecast the 49-year-old Lugosi, who went on to enjoy success in films in which he played opposite Boris Karloff, whose own career took flight thanks to roles in Universal Studios horror pictures such as “Frankenstein.”  

Dwight Frye's eerie performance as Renfield, the hapless British accountant who dares set foot inside Dracula's foreboding castle, sets a ghoulish tone of insanity that the charismatic vampire instills in men.  

”The blood is the life, Mr. Renfield.” Lugosi’s Dracula waxes poetic his signature Hungarian accent. For his well-established part, Bela Lugosi is positively bloodcurdling as he stalks every scene in his dapper tuxedo and intimidating cape.

Born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1880, Tod Browning’s checkered career ran from working in circus sideshows and carnivals (as both barker and performer), before working as an actor in dozens of silent features before turning to directing 1917 with “Jim Bludso.” As filmmaker, Browning enjoyed a notable string of hit movies with his frequent collaborator Lon Chaney, whose life was cut short in 1930 by lung cancer exacerbated by a throat infection caused by breathing in artificial snow on the set of “The Unholy Three” (1930). Sadly, Browning’s career took a nosedive after “Freaks,” his misunderstood love letter to the circus, proved too controversial for the arbiters of taste at the time. 

"Dracula" is more than a milestone of cinematic horror; it represents a marriage of nightmare and reality that establishes an American Gothic sensibility for other dramatic sub genres that followed. Stark, formal, and deeply sensual, "Dracula's" atmosphere and intention is rooted in a fear of unfamiliar lust from which there can be no escape. There’s sufficient reason to believe that “Dracula” is a parable about sexually transmitted diseases. To watch Tod Browning’s "Dracula" is to be bitten by the vampire's infectious attack.   

Not Rated. 75 mins.