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Day 12: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (2005)

what's this? on top of everything else, the early 2000s gave us a remake of the cabinet of dr. caligari, a film which at the time was 95 years old and which i'm sure EVERYONE in the target audience of emo teens had seen? why yes! yes they did! and it has tim russ and doug jones in it! tuvok and saru must have gotten up to some WEIRD holodeck adventures at one point, because that is the only reason this remake makes any sense.

jokes out of the way, this film............... let's start with something positive: doug jones was great casting for cesare, and cesare continues to be the best thing in the story. most of jones's performance is unfortunately just imitating conrad veidt's, due to the film's obsession with following the original exactly, but it's a good imitation and when jones does actually get his own stuff to do, he brings his own spin to the performance in a way that works wonderfully. most of the acting in this is really flat (much like the sets... we'll get there), which for something adapted from a german expressionist silent film just DOES not work, but since jones only gets one line of dialogue, he is spared the flat acting beam and gets to be the right mix of subtle and exaggerated. that said, he does look like the joan crawford drag queen in what really happened to baby jane?, so... there's that.

as for everything else, though... it Does Not Work. it does come across like there's at least a lot of love and passion for the original in this and that this was someone's weird passion project, which to me does put it above a lot of other horror remakes from this time period. but it still really, REALLY does not work. all the actors were shot on greenscreen and overlaid over really low-quality and crunchy screencaps of the original film, so everything looks SO flat, and nobody ever really looks like they're there. there's a few shots where they adjust the lighting enough that it's less obvious, but most of the time people's hair looks like its going to stab someone and fingers are getting cut off. definitely the worst parts are whenever the characters need to interact with the expressionist sets, particularly cesare slinking through the streets or walking on the rooftops--GOD, it looks bad. the whole point of those kinds of moments in the 1920 film is to show the distortion of the human body into architecture and create an off-kilter, uneasy mood and visual representation of madness. this just looks like i'm watching someone's computer screen while they drag cgi puppets across it in a weird forgotten flash game from the early 2000s.

the movie was also just. really cheap-feeling in general. not sure if it was cheap in actually, but they didn't even get a monkey for that one scene with a dancing monkey. it was just a stuffed animal they shook around in a closeup. it did make me laugh, but... i probably wasn't supposed to. which is probably the best way to describe the film overall. the main characters looked and acted like they were from an emo band and this was some weird beatlesmania-style vehicle for a new hit group, panic out the boy. the dialogue was also AWFUL. any good lines were the ones transplanted from the original (though the translation they picked was a bit cumbersome), everything else was just awkward exposition, terrible chemistry, and cliché after cliché. if the writing were better and the film felt smarter, i'd be able to forgive the cheapness and failed execution of the visual style, but dear god it hurt me it was so bad. and because everything was so flat, from the sets to the characters to the acting to the budget, i can't even really call this a "so bad it's good" film. sometimes it is, mostly it's just... a thing that exists.

anyway. purses my lips and peers snootily over the top of my glasses. when it comes to late 90s/early 2000s retellings of the cabinet of dr. caligari, i will stick with the music video for rob zombie's "living dead girl," thank you very much.

Day 13: Pharaoh's Curse (1957)

okay firstly and most importantly PLEASE look at the tubi thumbnail for this thing:

graphic design really on display here. good graphic design? well... it did make me say "i need to watch this immediately," so... maybe. every time i look at it i think the tasmanian devil is terrorizing these two women, one of whom is holding... something. not sure what. a pot? there was no pot in this movie. or skulls, for that matter.

anyway this has got to be the weirdest mummy i've seen in anything ever. his spirit comes out of the mummy body and possesses some random egyptian guy who never has any lines, and then the body disappears and that guy rapidly becomes a living mummy... except later it turns out the random egyptian guy was actually the reincarnated soul of the mummy and he assumes its place so. what happened to the original body? no clue. also as this guy rapidly mummifies he goes around drinking people's blood because he is in fact a vampire mummy. also his sister is the reincarnation of the goddess bastet. her body does not mummify, it just disappears. probably to the same place the original mummy body went to.

my god there was also soooo much drama in this movie. it was like a soap opera at points. which combined with the fact that the mummy's spirit was targeting people even before they arrived at his tomb in order to make them turn back did give the film a degree of much-needed uniqueness as mummy movies go. but it still maintained the themes of the subgenre of being really racist and colonialist, so... yay? the very first shot of this movie was a map of egypt with the UK flag overlaid in the background, and honestly, if that isn't an image that sums up the entire colonial conflict of this subgenre, i don't know what is.

Day 14: The Good Son (1993)

this film is the serious answer to the question of "what if kevin mcallister really was a future serial killer?" the answer, it turns out, is not as engaging as one would think, but it was fine. honesty, in theory macaulay culkin was really good casting for the evil kid in this, due to the squeaky clean family-friendly image he held after home alone. in practice, however... this was at the point in his child star career where for whatever reason (i've seen several proposed) he was really flat and boring and talked like a robot. if this movie had been made before that phase though, i think the potential of his casting would have been better utilized.

anyway, like i said, this film was Fine. not bad, not great, but perfectly okay. as creepy kid movies go, i liked that the protagonist in this was a kid rather than an adult. it added an extra element of threat because A.) no one wants to see bad shit like this happen to kids unless they're some sick sadist, but also B.) people typitically don't take kids seriously. a lot of the movies i've seen like this are about the mother of the creepy kid realizing her child is evil, but no one taking her seriously because "oh she's just some hysterical woman." so i did like the idea of telling that same narrative but with a child, and exploring how the narrative would change with that new kind of protagonist. a little thing, but sometimes those little things can go a long way. it didn't really in this one, but meh. it was what it was.

Day 15: The Woods (2006)

if i saw this movie when i was about fifteen, a wee little baby gay, i would have IMMEDIATELY become obsessed with it. there's everything baby henry could possibly want: cool outcast teen girls, supernatural hijinks, a historical setting, and hints of lesbianism i will read alllllll the way into. adult henry, meanwhile... thought it was good but was disappointed by the lack of more explicit lesbianism (especially considering some of this director's other work--hiya, all cheerleaders die, you hot messterpiece you) and also felt like things fell apart a little teeny bit at the end and the film didn't live up to its potential.

this film was simultaneously confusing and predictable. confusing because there was some strange surreal editing that i honestly liked, as well as a focus more on the atmosphere than explanations which i also really liked--but then things fell apart in the end and i had to read the wikipedia summary to know what exactly happened, which is not a good way to end a movie. this confusion is kind of ironic because the plot itself is very predictable. of COURSE the teachers at the school are all witches who are doing something to the students, of COURSE there's something weird going on with all the plants everywhere, of COURSE so-and-so is about to disappear, etc. it wasn't always predictable--the twist that the bully girl was in fact trying to help the protagonist was not something i saw coming, and makes so much sense writing-wise when you look back and is honestly incredibly-done--but it was predictable enough.

and the ending. woof. there's the confusing ending that i talked about, but for me the main thing was bruce campbell's character: after two minutes of no-dialogue screentime at the start of the movie and then being gone for the next two thirds of it, suddenly there's SO much time spent on him and he becomes a major hero figure. it really feels like they were like "oh shit, we have bruce campbell, we should probably do something with him" and made him start battling evil plants like this was evil dead even though This Is Not His Story. i probably wouldn't have minded so much if there had been a scene between him and his daughter earlier better establishing their relationship and establishing him as something more than The Silent Doormat Father. as is... eventually the daughter DOES get to kill the witches herself, so his hero rampage is curbed, but it felt like such a diversion from what the point of the story was right when the point should have been coming into central focus.

absolutely loved the ending being that the arsonist protagonist got to commit more arson though. and how the witches are associated with the woods, and fire with the protagonist, and fire destroys woods typically, so she turned the power they wanted from her against them. it's just... so good. so good. if the movie had focused more on that instead of bruce campbell, i think this would have been a masterpiece.

Day 16: The Ghoul (1933)

oh now THIS was interesting. it's kind of a mummy movie but more an egypt horror movie really where the eyptologist who acquired something that doesn't belong to him ends up being the one running around killing people! and instead of it being about how cool and awesome the british empire is it's about how religion, including european ones, suck and are easily taken advantage of. and the female characters each get personalities and get to be resourceful and helpful in saving the day, even the one relegated to annoying comic relief! aaaaaaaaaaaand then that's as far as it gets being subversive for its time and genre. because this all rests on the arab characters being evil stereotypes and egyptian culture being primitive and beliefs not having remotely changed since way-back-when BCE. all of which makes me. so mad. we came so close... but alas...

and with the arab streotyping in particular it's so... ugh. there was this one scene between the main arab villain in this and the white female comic relief that was... really something. i will admit that in the moment of watching it i was like "oh we're supposed to be laughing at how utterly absurd and unrealistic this woman's notions of arab men are and the use of closeups on the arab man's face indicates that we are supposed to be siding with him and his annoyance even as he takes advantage of those stereotypes to get what he wants." which okay, isn't great, but it's sort of like invisble ghost: when the bar is set so low even the devil is tripping over it, sometimes you need to celebrate the wins that you get.

after watching the ending though, which really emphasizes how evil and (to coin a phrase) "barbaric" this arab man is supposed to be... i don't think that initial reading was accurate. i do still think it can be made, but mainly i think the purpose of that scene was, instead of laughing at this woman and her ludicrous stereotypes formed by clearly watching wayyyy too many rudolph valentino movies, to laugh at how obviously suspicious this evil brown man is being and the woman's innocent white female naïveté. which is AWFUL.

it almost makes the film's portrayal of arab men feel like an evolution from those romanticized, eroticized stereotypes of films like the sheik to the more cruel and violent stereotypes we see nowadays. i'm sure the "barbarous arab" stereotype existed even back in 1933, and god knows modern representations of arab people owe way too much to post-9/11 american nationalist propaganda, but just based off the things i've seen and the admittedly narrow scope of knowledge i have, that was the vibe i got. which... certainly makes this an unsettling film, just not the way the film intended.

Day 18: Der Student von Prag (1913)

heyyy it's german silent horror time. whoop whoop!

so according to the research i did, this movie is considered the first art film and the major film to "uplift" cinema as a medium not just for low-brow poor people but one of artistic merit for the intellectual upper class as well (hence the snooty upturned nose in the poster, i'm sure). very interesting considering how much this film is about class and class-crossing in general. intentional? maybe. or not. who knows.

as for the film itself, i'm cutting it some slack because i know i've been programmed for modern films and it's unfair to judge a freaking 112-year-old movie (dear god) for not feeling the same as something that just came out. that said, this film was... rather dull. for me the main reason for this was that i just did not understand what the threat of the doppelgänger was supposed to be until two-thirds in, so it most of it just felt like treading water with very few stakes. i know people find the concept of doppelgängers inherently creepy and threatening, but as someone who grew up constantly being mistaken for somebody who apparently looks exactly like me living in my own community and who then even went to the same college as me, i personally don't. so i needed a little more understanding of the doppelgänger's motives to be threatened by him, and needless to say him throughout the first two-thirds of the movie just showing up to. idk. cockblock? is not particularly intimidating or interesting, mainly just funny. it's not until he kills somebody that it's clear he's dangerous and actively seeking to ruin the protagonist's life, and i'm sorry, that revelation comes WAY too late.

but like i said, cutting the movie some slack because filmic storytelling has changed a lot in 112 years. at least the special effects were undeniably quite good. i'm not the best with faces, so it took me an embarassingly long time to realize that the protagonist and the doppelgänger were both played by paul wegener, and i was pleasantly surprised when i realized! there was a lot of early use of split-screen technology, and sometimes it doesn't quite blend together as well as it could, but most of the time it looks better than some more modern films than i've seen that use it, which is both incredible and reaaaaally unfortunate for those movies if they're being shown up by something made in freaking 1913.

anyhoo. there were two remakes of this made in 1926 and 1935, and they're both on youtube. i'm going to try and watch them before the end of the month, but if not both then definitely the 1926 version: it's got conrad veidt in the lead, the screencaps i've seen look breathtaking, and at this point i need only a 1920s movie to hit my arbitary requirement to myself to see a movie from each decade of narrative-based filmmaking this month. so stay tuned, i guess, for the continuation of the prague chronicles.

Day 18: El laberinto del fauno (2006)

oh my god i had COMPLETLY forgotten that this film is in spanish. i've seen it before, it's just been a few years, so yesterday i came home from work after a day of my brand new cold getting steadily worse (combined with surprise PMS anxiety, yayyyy) and put this on expecting i could watch it and work on my quilting project to detox after dinner. needless to say i speak barely any spanish, so uh. that didn't happen. and also i did nearly bawl my eyes out at the ending as all the emotions of this movie crashed head-first into my already-fragile emotional state.

anyway this movie is so, so good. the combination of practical and CG effects makes me mad, they're so well done. and even when the CGI looks a little off, the film benefits from the king kong effect of the designs being creative and imaginative enough for their time that it doesn't really matter. and even if all the effects in this were bad, the film would still be really good. ofelia is such an easily-likeable protagonist and the film is so heartbreaking however you interpret her journey. are the fantasty elements all in her imagination as she tries to escape the increasingly impossible-to-ignore horrors of war around her, and even in death are her only comfort? or are they real and it takes her literally dying for her to find a safe place where she and her family can be together? i don't really know, and i like the ambiguity.

also, i like how the captain is portrayed; he's evil, 100%, but he's also very human. we don't learn a whole lot about him, but his twisted relationship with his father and his own twisted relationship with his unborn son really shows a lot about how he thinks and his priorities (and arguably serve as a metaphor for fascist priorities in general). it's uncomfortable, because it almost makes him sympathetic, but ultimately just makes him human, like any other real life evil person. flat evil antagonists have their place in media, but i think this film really benefits from a more complicated one, particularly in contrast to the simplistic yet disturbing fantasies of ofelia's fairy tale world.

honestly my only real complaint with the movie is that ofelia gets rather uncharacteristically stupid in the scene with the pale man. like... the faun tells her not to eat anything and that there is a very specific timeframe in which she needs to complete this task, and when she gets in there she sees numerous pictures of the pale man eating little children, AND she really wants to prove herself, but then she just... ignores the faun anyway? if this were a simpler story then i could understand it, that's the kind of thing you see in fairy tales all the time, but this story really is not simple and i think ofelia established herself as smart enough to not do something so obviously stupid as eat those grapes. maybe if she had gone to bed without her supper or if it had been shown that even the captain's family was being forced to ration food supplies, or even if it had been established that she really loved grapes but because of the war they hadn't been able to get any fresh fruits imported in years. i don't know, just something to give her a motivation to try and bend the rules a bit or drive her to some kind of desperation. as is, it feels like it just happens because ofelia's quest needs a wrench thrown in it by making her need to extra prove herself, and it all just comes across as so contrived.

otherwise, though, the movie's great. i loved it even more this second time around and can't wait to watch it again in the future.

Personal Comparital Rankings Because I Can

Jaws (1975)

El laberinto del fauno (2006)

Witchfinder General (1968)

The Shining (1980)

The Night Eats the World (2018)

The Woods (2006)

There's a Zombie Outside (2024)

Two Thousand Maniacs! (1964)

The Ghoul (1933)

I Walked with a Zombie (1943)

Invisible Ghost (1941)

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1936)

Cat People (1942)

The Good Son (1993)

Der Student von Prag (1913)

Pharaoh's Curse (1957)

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (2005)