Folks, it is an hour until #MONSTERDON, the weekly monster movie watch party.
This week we're watching KINGDOM OF THE SPIDERS (1977), which features William Shatner and about 5,000 spiders. If either of those things is a problem for you, I heartily recommend filtering this hashtag, which can be done in your Preferences.
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) is a sweeping and monumental science fiction dystopian drama that is at times mesmerising and profound. The special effects are some of the best ever put to film, using a mixture of matte painting techniques, modelling and keen set design this early motion picture has aged surprisingly well considering that it is almost 100 years old.
Lang’s direction is clever and the camera work is at times quite modern in its approach, evoking emotional reactions. Lang relies heavily on the quickness of the film to be in time with the constant orchestral score to help elevate important moments as there is no dialogue spoken to convey emotional beats.
Metropolis is a black and white picture and this stark contrast of light and shadow helps to convey the melodramatic story being told. A story which uses biblical ideas and tales as one of its core narrative devices, this movie itself can be interpreted as a religious film in some ways - a tale of wayward sons and imperious fathers, sinners and patricians and so on.
The acting is at times ham-fisted and at times superb, which might be expected as motion picture acting was relatively new at the time, with most ‘early’ film actors having extensive backgrounds in stage productions and theatre where acting sometimes needs to be dialled up a notch so as to convey the emotion of a scene to the whole audience instead of just the front row.
Lang’s emotional core is of course the score, composed by Gottfried Huppertz, which is dramatic and majestic but over the course of the 2 and a half hour long movie we can see how Huppertz uses the same musical techniques to represent different emotions and eventually the score begins to become dull through familiarity.
Enjoyable but also hard to recommend as the source material, being very old, has not survived intact and as such large portions of the film are greatly decayed and some of the film is entirely missing, being replaced with story cards, so that the ‘full’ Metropolis doesn’t really exist in a way that audiences can enjoy.
Jack Nicholson holds the screen well enough in Sean Penn's debut as a writer director.
It's a piece of depression porn that contains all the self indulgent beats and hokey dialogue you might expect from a first timer (so much introspection!).
If I were to quibble, I'd say this dreamy thriller wobbles when it delights too much in the archetypical Lou Sr. But Stewart and O'Brian embody lovers with enough sustenance to make this romance a worthy companion to 1996's Bound, albeit one with a heavier dose of derangement.
Today, May 2, 1974, Dr. Frederick Frankenstein marries his assistant Inga, while his former fiancee Elizabeth has become a couple with Frankenstein’s reanimated man (Young Frankenstein, 1974)
Today, May 1, 1973, Police Sergeant Neil Howie finds that he is unable to leave remote Hebridean island Summerisle. The island residents celebrate May Day with pagan rituals (The Wicker Man, 1973)
This week on #Monsterdon, it's KINGDOM OF THE SPIDER (1977) starring William Shatner! It's gonna be like The Giant Spider Invasion but with better spiders and Captain Kirk gnawing on the scenery for an hour and a half :D
It's 8pm Eastern which means there's only one hour left until #MONSTERDON, your weekly monster movie watch party. If you don't want your timeline full of toots about a goofy old flick, set up a filter while you can.
This week we're watching LOGAN'S RUN (1976), a sci fi thing about a dystopia that kills you at 30. Jack Weinberg, dictator?
#OnThisDay, April 28, 1992, Jim Gallien gave Christopher McCandless a ride to the head of the Stampede Trail in the Denali Borough in Alaska, the last time McCandless was seen alive (depicted in Into the Wild, 2007)