HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

So far, I'm having a GREAT Halloween Weekend!

...you know, in my own, low-key way...

My holiday began Friday morning when I got off work.

I'm dead broke, rent ate my whole check (as it usually does at the end of the month), but I had planned ahead for this Halloween's festivities. I dropped a chunk of change on Universal's The Legacy Collection for 4 of their classic monsters: Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man and the Creature from the Black Lagoon!

The Wolf Man has been a part of my Halloween celebrations since the mid-1990s, when it aired and I caught it on VHS. It's not a long movie, so I was also able to fit Gary Larson's Tales from the Far Side Halloween special on the same tape. And when that Halloween mood came upon me, I'd pop the tape in and watch.

As a result, I've become rather fond of The Wolf Man, and come to associate it with Halloween (beyond the natural association of the mere fact that he's a Universal monster and a classic Halloween costume).

But the last few years I haven't been able to trouble myself to dig up the VHS, so this year I was sort of missing Mr. Talbot. (Laurence Talbot, the name of Lon Chaney, Jr.'s character when he's not eating villagers by moonlight.) So I Netflix-ed the DVD.

But when I went to watch it, the main menu asked me which feature I wanted to see: The Wol Man, Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, Werewolf of London or She-Wolf of London.

Huh?!

I hadn't heard of the 3 other films. And 2 of them, it turns out, were only available on another disc. I checked Netflix, and they didn't offer that second disc.

So what is this amazing thing I have stumbled onto?!

Amazon held answers for me:

Back in 2004, as a sort of promotional tie-in with big-budget stink-bomb Van Helsing, Universal Studios apparently re-packaged their classic monster movies into these uber-packs: The Legacy Collection! As part of the Bonus Features in each package is the director of Van Helsing giving a short history of the monster, then talking about how he is going to treat the character in his film. (I was about to type, "Not well," but that's really not being fair. Mr. Sommers clearly loves the characters, and Van Helsing is clearly a love letter to the Universal classics, it's just that Sommers appears to have let the script get away from him. Toward the end of Van Helsing, I remember thinking that just watching the dailies -- after the special effects began coming in, that is -- there is no way anyone associated with the film could have guessed they were making a terrible movie! If you watched the scenes alone, separate from each other and out of order, you would be convinced that this was an awesome flick! It's just when you put all the scenes together, in order, that you become bored an unimpressed. G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra was good, though! I was disappointed with The Mummy, and I didn't see any of the sequels, but I dug G.I. Joe!)

Since the short promos for Van Helsing talk as though the movie isn't out yet, I'm guessing Universal released the Legacy Collection DVDs before the movie -- to remind people why they loved the classics, or to introduce new generations to them -- in order to perk-up interest in the new flick.

Naturally, when this was going on, I was unaware because I was -- as ever -- broke.

BUT...

...my broke-ness actually worked in my favor this time!!! :D

If you look on Amazon right now, you can get all these amazing collections for just under $20 each! And if you buy one of Amazon's 3-fers, you can get a whole mess of them for less than that!

Which is what I did with my birthday money this year! :D

I bought the Frankenstein collection, the Dracula collection, the Wolf Man collection and the Creature from the Black Lagoon collection!!!

But what's amazing is that I wasn't just buying 4 classic movies, I bought ALL the (official) SEQUELS, TOO!!! :D

So going into the Halloween season this year, here's what I'm working with:

Frankenstein (1931)
The Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Son of Frankenstein (1939)
The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)
House of Frankenstein (1944)

Dracula (1931)
Dracula (1931 Spanish Version)
Dracula's Daughter (1936)
Son of Dracula (1943)
House of Dracula (1945)

The Wolf Man (1941)
Werewolf of London (1935)
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (1943)
She-Wolf of London (1946)

Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)
Revenge of the Creature (1955)
The Creature Walks Among Us (1956)

That's the better part of 3 decades of Universal Studios classics!!!

It's insane, too, because though most of these flicks really wouldn't sell on their own (the and Son of... and House of... flicks, especially) Bride of Frankenstein and Revenge of the Creature really should be sold separately, from a value standpoint! One could argue that in both cases, the sequel somewhat eclipses the original!

But I'm immeasurably glad that Universal made this minor oversight, since I feel like I've gotten away with highway robbery, lol. (When was the last time you paid for entertainment and felt like you were the one on the better end of the bargain?)

Naturally, I broke into the DVDs long before they came. I watched the Making-Of featurettes for all 4 franchises, and watched Creature, Wolf Man and Dracula with the film-historian audio commentary. I even watched Dracula with Philip Glass's score, and I love it!!! I didn't know who Philip Glass was when Southpark dissed him in a Christmas episode, but that guy is a genius!!! (Well...at least, his score for Dracula is genius. I'm not familiar with the rest of his work.)

One more thing about the classic horror flicks: Every time I watch the original Halloween (John Carpenter's version, the real one) I can't help but notice how all the TVs are playing old black & white horror flicks, and it makes me kind of want to experience that. I mean, I watch black & white flicks all the time (whenever the mood takes me, anyway) but I've never spent Halloween that way. When I was a kid, a teen and in my 20s, Halloween was always about going out, not-being-home. Then in my 30s, when I didn't have the money or sleep schedule that allowed me to go out, I usually gravitated to newer horror flicks, stuff that still scared me.

So this year, I'm reveling in the Classics!

And reveling I am! here's how my Halloween is breaking down this year:

Friday, October 29, 2010

I started out by logging into Hulu and watching the latest episode of Castle, assuming this macabre-yet-fun show would surely have Halloween episode, right? Wrong. Oh, sure, the episode was good! But it was too good, in the wrong way. It's this deeply moving character piece that had me in just the wrong mindset for a Halloween-y good time.

But I recovered, and watched House of Frankenstein, the first of the "monster mash-ups" with most of Universal's line of monsters: The Mad Scientist (played by Boris Karloff, interestingly), the Hunchback (the Mad Scientist's assistant, naturally, but in a subplot clearly lifted from The Hunchback of Notre Dame), Dracula (played by a cowboy in an Abe Lincoln hat), Wolf Man and Frankenstein's Monster!!! It was the second-to-last of the "Golden Age" of Universal's monster films (excluding the Abbot and Costello Meet... parody pics, the cycle wouldn't start back up again, in earnest, for almost another decade with Creature from the Black Lagoon), so it was guaranteed to be a bit of low-quality, schlocky fun!

And it didn't disappoint!!! :D

And watching all the behind-the-scenes stuff about the making of these films -- particularly the Frankenstein films -- I had to watch Gods and Monsters finally, the film about the end of James Whale's life. It didn't really have much to do with the making of either of his monster films -- except to sort of suggest where some of his creative inspiration for bits of them came from, and why he was such a master with macabre imagery -- but the film was really good.

Too good, though, in the wrong way.

So I followed Gods and Monsters up by watching the rest of Them!, and that movie is just surprisingly great! Made in 1954, it's clearly the 2012 of its time! I was seriously surprised at what they pulled off with that flick! Now, I mean, my daughter and her friends aren't going to watch it and be impressed. (I fell asleep the first time I tried to watch it.) They can create more convincing special effects on their iPhones. But for what they were working with back then, Gordon Douglas must have been the Michael Bay of his day!

Then I fell asleep to House of Dracula.

When I woke up Friday night, I listened to a couple of episodes of Spooky Southcoast, watched It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown on Hulu, then tracked down "the Halloween episode" of Quantum Leap and watched it on Netflix (because Tim Weisberg mentioned it on one of the SSc eps).

And I'm blanking on what else I watched...

Is it possible that I went to sleep to Invasion of the Body Snatchers? No, I remember waching Gods and Monsters and Them! Friday morning, so I must have fallen asleep to Body Snatchers Thursday morning.

Actually, I think I'm getting some of this out of order. Hmph.

Okay, I know for sure that tonight when I woke up, Brian and I watched the end of Young Frankenstein (he was watching it when I woke up, so he saw the whole thing) and then we listened to Spooky Southcoast live!!! :D We almost never get to do that. And tonight was a psychic who has what she believes is new information about Ron DeFeo (the guy who lived at 112 Ocean Avenue and murdered his entire family back in 1974, before the Lutz family moved in and left after 28 days, sparking off the "Amityville Horror" phenomenon). It was a creepy show than ran half an hour longer than usual (probably because they somehow knew Brian and I were listening).

Then after that, Brian & I enjoyed Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein!!! HALLOWEEN FUN!!! :D

When Brian went to sleep (poor guy has to work tomorrow) I popped in Son of Frankenstein, The Ghost of Frankenstein and I was partway into Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man when I paused to write this entry.

After I finish FMTWM I will have seen ALL of the Frankenstein series! :D (Actually, I need to rewatch House of Dracula, because Frankenstein's Monster appears in there, but I fell asleep long before his scene popped up, lol.)

AND THE COOL THING IS, I STILL HAVE PLENTY TO WATCH!!! :D There are several awesome classics on Netflix that I queued, and there are plenty of horror flicks in my Hulu queue, too! (That's completely leaving out my vast DVD library of horror titles, intentionally.)

So whatever happens between this moment and All Saints' Day, I know I'll be having a funky-fun time!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!

:D