Movies & Life

Tonight's movie was "The Black Cat" (1934) starring Boris & Bela. Bela is the Good Guy once again, as he was in "The Invisible Ray", the other B&B co-starrer I saw and reviewed a couple weeks ago. This time he plays an Eminent Psychiatrist who is on his way to a small village in Hungary, where lives a certain doctor he intends to visit. While on a train, he ends up sharing a cabin with a young American couple who are heading for a town not far from the one Bela is going to, in order to visit the wife's parents. There is only a single train station in the area, and so Bela, his servant, and the young couple all depart the train and decide to share a taxi that will drop them off at their respective destinations. The taxi is huge, like a car from The Nethercutt Museum, and they set off down a muddy road running across a hillside. Rain is pouring down. Bela is telling the couple of the history of the area. There was once a wartime prison camp nearby (WW1, not 2), where thousands of prisoners died. Lugosi reveals that he was a prisoner there for 15 years, but escaped.

Just then, the taxi comes over a rise and hits a mud puddle and overturns. It goes crashing down a hill and the driver is killed. The young wife of the American couple is injured, and Bela Lugosi suggests that they accompany him to the doctor's house, which is of course set upon a hill.

They have nowhere else to go and the woman needs medical attention, and yet - it still seems like a really bad idea once they get there, and that is because the doctor is really creepy, and he is a Satanist, and he has a room down in his basement where he keeps Bela Lugosi's wife and daughter in a kind of suspended animation (which is never explained). Though he has not told the young American couple, Lugosi has come to the doctor's manse precisely to find out what has happened to his wife and daughter, who he knows were coveted by Doctor Karloff while he, Bela, was in prison.

It turns out that Karloff was the head of that prison camp, and that his ultra modern house (an architectural marvel) stands on it's former grounds.

This is one of the weirder, if not the weirdest Bela & Boris movie I've seen, and it comes complete with an authentic Hollywood version of a Satanic Ritual at the end. You can probably trust a Hollywood version for authenticity, haha; Lord knows there's been enough devil worshiping weirdos living there throughout the years for proper research to have been done.

So forget all the unexplained stuff, like how Karloff's zombie-like women are kept in glass boxes in which they seem to defy gravity, or why he lives in an Art Deco house when he should be living in a cavernous castle, or why Bela Lugosi is terrified of Black Cats.

You don't need explanations for those things, because the movie is too awesome for you to concern yourself with minor though curious story details.

It looks great (black and white of course), the house is awesome, as is the basement set for the Ritual. Karloff is gaunt and eerie looking in his gilt collared robe and black eye liner.

These 66 minute horror flicks from the early 1930s were flat out weird, plain and simple.

They would not get made today because people today aren't weird enough.

Two Huge Thumbs Up for "The Black Cat", one of the very best of the B&B collaborations.

I also watched a Mr. Moto last night : "Think Fast, Mr. Moto".

I am too tired to describe it, but you know that every Mr. Moto movie is great, and when you start watching them, you will wish you lived inside a Moto movie.

I'm still a bit beat up, ladies and gentlemen, and I apologize for not being my usual self.

My job is tough, and on top of that I never have anyone to talk to. I don't really like the Internet world that we have now. I liked the world better when people saw other people in person, and talked to other people in person. I've been writing a blog for almost 20 years, at different sites, and do you know that - although I've had tens of thousands of page views during that time - I've never had one single acknowledgement by anyone, that they have read my blog.

Not one.

I only keep doing it because I see those "hits", those "page views", which tells me that somebody is reading.

But I feel like I am slowly fading away, because no one ever communicates with me.

And all I have is my job, with a dementia patient, and if I could do one single thing it would be to eliminate dementia from the face of the Earth because, trust me, it is the worst thing a person can ever get.

Don't get dementia, whatever you do. Do your crossword puzzles, read your books, keep your mind engaged.

I also am starting to wish that I won't live in Los Angeles much longer.

I can't take the cars anymore. They come at you from all directions, every single time you step out your door.

They come at you from all directions, 360 degrees. And they accelerate too fast, and you are tailgated to within a few feet of your rear bumper.

You don't see as many people as you do cars.

All of this is wiping me out.

If I had someone to talk to, it wouldn't be as hard to deal with. But no one ever responds.