Leigh Brackett was born on 7 December 1915.

If you’ve heard of her, it is probably because she co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back. But she did so much more.

She started writing for science fiction magazines in 1940. She went on to write quite a lot of crime and western pulp fiction. And starting in 1944, she wrote novels. She was best known for interplanetary romances. This is how she earned the moniker as The Queen of Space Opera.

Her first novel, No Good from a Corpse, provided her an entry into Hollywood. Apparently, Howard Hawks loved the novel and reached out. He thought she was a man and often noted that she wrote like a man. (Whatever that means!)

She co-wrote five films for Hawks: The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, Hatari!, El Dorado, and Rio Lobo. Additionally, she wrote screenplays for The Unholy Four (directed by Hammer regular Terence Fisher) and Crime Doctor’s Man Hunt (directed by William Castle during his studio period). And she wrote some TV, including two episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

George Lucas hired Brackett to write the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back based on his story. Fans have spent the last 4+ decades arguing that Lucas hated her script and threw it all out. This is almost certainly not the case. It rather shows a complete lack of understanding of how collaborative art works. This comes from the natural but unfortunate tendency to want to give all the credit to a single man.

She died of cancer shortly after finishing her draft of the screenplay. She was primarily a science fiction writer. But this was the first time she wrote a science fiction screenplay. So it was a fitting end to her career.

So let’s celebrate Leigh Brackett’s birthday by watching Crime Doctor’s Man Hunt. It’s one of the few films that she gets sole screenwriting credit. And it’s a good opportunity to see what William Castle (who directed 4 of the 10 Crime Doctor films) was doing before he became the wacky producer we all know and love.

Leigh Brackett via Picryl. It is in the public domain.

NBC showed Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer for the first time on 6 December 1964. Interestingly, CBS took over the show in 1972. It only came back to NBC last year.

It is my favorite holiday show. I like it even better than How the Grinch Stole Christmas! But it is a strong second.

It was the first Christmas special from Rankin/Bass Animated Entertainment. They did a lot of great stuff, but they never matched Rudolph. Romeo Muller wrote it. He wrote just about everything the company ever did — including the two Tolkien adaptations The Hobbit and Return of the King. It also features a great cast — mostly from Canada. This goes along with the Japanese animation. It is the most American product ever, if you ask me!

But I find it fascinating that thematically, it’s so… woke. Imagine it was released today. The usual suspects would scream about how it was Hollywood trying to propagandize our children. I mean, it teaches acceptance of differences!

Hermey is clearly gay. Even worse, he isn’t doing what his manager tells him to. Rudolph is hardly alpha, which is bad enough. But he turns out to be heroic because he’s different. WTF?! Even alpha Yukon Cornelius is silly and, even worse, accepting of people who weren’t like him. And don’t get me started on the Island of Misfit Toys!

But these are all reasons I think all children should watch Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. We used to all believe this stuff was good. Today? We are fast approaching the day when people start calling for an end to kindergarten. Better to get those lazy kids working in the coal mines!

But until then, we can all enjoy this incredibly sweet show that teaches us all how to be better people. Merry Christmas!

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (1964) title card via Wikimedia. It is in the public domain.

Angry Mule Films released Killer Piñata on 5 December 2015. That’s 10 years ago that it premiered somewhere in Logan Square in Chicago, Illinois — at The Logan Theatre. It doesn’t seem like it got a proper theatrical release, which isn’t unusual for crowd-funded films.

It is a remarkable film. Much of the humor is laugh-out-loud funny — even watching it alone.

Dark Alley SPFX (Alex Falk) created the excellent special effects. He claims that their driving force is “to create practical effects to eliminate overuse of CGI.” And the cast is quite good despite being comprised mostly of amateurs. The only veteran is Joette Waters in a hilarious but small role.

The writing stands out. Most low-budget films suffer from weak scripts. But this film would have worked because of it even with a weaker production. But the production is not weak at all. Clearly, the producers didn’t have a ton of money. But the film is shot very carefully with a number of techniques that we’ve seen in slashers from the past.

Killer Piñata is part of the Killer Doll subgenre of horror. If you would like to see what can be done with a larger budget, check out Benny Loves You. But even though it has far more blood, KP actually features more realistic gore.

I try to stay positive about films. But the Killer Doll subgenre has produced a lot of clunkers. Filmmakers can use the absurdity of their concept to sleepwalk through the script or even the entire production. But the concept only gets you about ten minutes of screen time. Producers need to bring more to the table.

And the producers of Killer Piñata did that. The principals seem to be Stephen Tramontana (director, co-writer, co-editor), Jennifer Kunkel (producer), Megan MacManus (co-writer), and Paul Summers (cinematographer, co-editor). Vincent Alcarese (credited as Vin Alcerese) created the animated backstory.

I can’t embed the film. But you can watch the whole thing on Plex.

Bride of the Killer Piñata

Seven years after the original film, all the principals came back together for Bride of the Killer Piñata. Eliza-Jane Morris, Joette Waters, and Elvis Garcia return but otherwise it features a more professional cast. (Daniel Hawkes from the first film is also here but with a better part.) Alex Falk is also back with make-up effects. There is way more blood. The puppetry is great. And the production is overall better due to its increased budget. It also looks like the folks at Full Moon provided some help with the production. (Note: it’s a bit hard to square the film credits with what’s listed on IMDb.)

Of particular note is that the screenplay is much more complex. But it fully justifies the almost two-hour runtime. It’s pretty much a perfect script. And it includes a touching homage to the end of Bride of Frankenstein. Overall, I’d say it is more enjoyable. But the two films would make a great double feature.

Again, I can’t embed the film. But you can watch the whole thing on Tubi.

Killer Piñata (2015) poster via Plex under Fair Use.

Tony Todd was born on 4 December 1954. Sadly, he died last year on 6 November of stomach cancer.

Todd played the title role in all the Candyman films. I’ve only seen the first of the films. It was based on a Clive Barker short story. And it works well. The critics hated the second and third films. So, you know, probably worth watching. Critics loved the last of them. But critics are so keen to praise Jordan Peele that this may mean nothing. (Well, it means nothing anyway. Critics are idiots!)

Of course, I love Tony Todd because he starred in Tom Savini‘s exceptional Night of the Living Dead remake. I think Duane Jones is great in the original. But Todd was a better actor. And in the film, he plays the part with an intensity that seems more real.

Despite dying relatively young, Todd had an amazing career. In fact, he had the kind of career that I think the vast majority of film actors would prefer. He has 260 credits on IMDb. He worked mostly in film. But he also did a fair amount of TV. This even includes 14 epsiodes of the soup opera The Young and the Restless — despite not getting fed.

A lot of actors I talk about here have been in notable psychotronic films. They aren’t what you would call psychotronic actors. I think I can say that Todd is a psychotronic actor. It would be annoying for me to list all these films. But a few notable ones include The Crow (1992), Death House (2017), and, of course, four of the Final Destination films where he played mortician William Bludworth.

So, let’s celebrate Tony Todd’s birthday by watching Candyman. (If you’d rather watch Night of the Living Dead, just click on Tom Savini’s name above and you’ll find it for free.) He doesn’t get a lot to do, but he is what makes the film work. It’s fun — and scary!

Image cropped from Tony Todd by Super Festivals under CC BY 2.0.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer released London After Midnight on 3 December 1927.

It is a silent film starring Lon Chaney — one of his last. And it has him in one of his most iconic looks as the Man In The Beaver Hat. Otherwise, the film is a decent little mystery with a nice love story and some very creepy visuals. Not that I’ve ever seen it. No one my age or younger has seen it.

The 1965 MGM vault fire destroyed the last known copy of London After Midnight. It also destroyed Lon Chaney’s earlier A Blind Bargain (1922) in addition to the Greta Garbo vehicle The Divine Woman (1928). So this is a sad loss all around. And no one will likely ever discover prints of these films. As it is, most studios took little care in preserving their silent films. And others had little reason to hang on to them. (TV stations often archived prints of sound films for possible broadcast.)

Remember the Iraq War back in 2003? Looters stole many ancient artifacts. (This is yet another reason not to start wars.) And I feel the same way about these lost films. Of course, all these films are in the public domain now. (They weren’t in the public domain when they were destroyed.) It’s kind of hard to believe. In a social sense, these films were certainly in the public domain by the 1940s.

But greed drove us to this. A film might make 99% of all the money in the first year of its release. But we distort the market. Corporations must wring every cent out of the property! The benefit to society at large be damned.

But corporations aren’t all bad. Turner Classic Movies created a 45-minute filmed version of the original using existing photos. Frankly, it’s like a Ken Burns documentary of the film (but without the folksy narration). And it is surprisingly engaging. And on this 98th anniversary of London After Midnight‘s release, let’s watch this reconstruction!

London After Midnight (1927) poster via Wikimedia. It is in the Public Domain.

Jimmy Sangster was born on 2 December 1927 in Wales.

He was a screenwriter and producer — largely with Hammer Film Productions during its most successful period. But he worked there as a production manager. Hammer had to push him into writing. He first wrote the short, A Man on the Beach. It is a crime drama that would have fit right in with Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

He next wrote the feature X the Unknown. It is sort of a sequel to Hammer’s previous year’s hit, The Quatermass Xperiment. With that, he was on his way. He wrote multiple films for most years into the early 1970s. At that point, he also directed 3 horror films for Hammer.

But starting in 1972, he changed and wrote primarily for US television — continuing at a breakneck speed. He wrote the “Horror in the Heights” episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, which will be of interest to psychotronic fans.

But Jimmy Sangster is best known for his Hammer films. He wrote or co-wrote the first three Dracula films and was the sole writer of the first two Frankenstein films and the first Mummy film. He also co-wrote, produced, and directed the final Hammer Frankenstein film, The Horror of Frankenstein.

Today, let’s talk about the two Bette Davis films he wrote and produced. The first was The Nanny (1965). It is an excellent evil-nanny horror film. But I figure most people have seen it.

But more interesting is a film I only just watched for the first time, The Anniversary (1968). It is an extremely funny black comedy where Davis chews the scenery with delightful effect. It is hard to escape the conclusion that she wasn’t the basis for Jessica Walter’s character in Arrested Development.

So let’s celebrate the life and work of Jimmy Sangster by watching this exceptional film!

Jimmy Sangster via TMDB under Fair Use.

Universal Pictures released House of Frankenstein on 1 December 1944. Or not. Some sources say they released it at select theaters starting 15 December 1944 with its wide release not coming until February of 1945. But just a year later, Universal released the follow-up, House of Dracula, on 7 December.

I’m not terribly fond of either film. But when I was younger, I hated them. They just didn’t live up to the original films. But if you watch them with fresh eyes, you see that they are extremely well-made. The acting is fantastic. The sets are glorious. The camera work is modern and engaging. So what’s the problem?

The stories. They are just kind of boring. But don’t blame the writers. What more is there to do with Dracula? The Wolf Man was so uninteresting, it only had a single film by itself. And Frankenstein’s monster? There isn’t a lot to do with that character. Son of Frankenstein and The Ghost of Frankenstein only worked because of Lugosi‘s evil Ygor.

But writers could have done something creative with each of these properties. The biggest problem is combining them. Dracula and Frankenstein exist in different worlds. And throwing in the Wolf Man to whine his way through yet another film makes matters so much worse!

It is thus kind of strange that neither of these films is hard to watch. House of Frankenstein works pretty well. Karloff steals a traveling horror show, which is a wonderful meta-comment on what Universal is doing here. And the film is divided neatly in two, with both halves working as complete films. And at 70 minutes, it is never boring.

House of Dracula is almost a remake of its predecessor. A different mad scientist supposedly helps Dracula and the Wolf Man but is really only obsessed with Frankenstein’s monster. It does annoyingly bring back Dracula despite clearly being destroyed in the previous film due to a very bad sunbathing incident. But it also includes a hunchbacked female nurse, so that kind of makes up for it.

Let’s celebrate the day by watching both films. First House of Frankenstein:

And then House of Dracula:

House of Frankenstein (1944) poster via Wikipedia under Fair Use.

Rex Reason was born on 30 November 1928.

He was a handsome leading man who only worked as an actor for about a decade. He starred in his first film, Storm Over Tibet. And late in his career (but not life), he starred in two seasons of Man Without a Gun, where he played a newspaper editor in the Old West who fought bad people without violence. After that, he starred in two seasons of The Roaring 20’s, where he was again a newspaper man.

He was in a lot of westerns and war movies. But we do not remember him for these. Psychotronic fans know him for two films. And they both co-star Jeff Morrow!

The Creature Walks Among Us is the less important of these films. It is the third of the Creature from the Black Lagoon film. However, I think it is the best of the series. And it set up a fourth film, which never came.

The other psychotronic film is This Island Earth. It is a classic. And so, many people were confused when it was the featured film in Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie. That show is responsible for a lot of confusion. RiffTrax has shown that it is trivial to riff on even the best films.

If you’ve only seen the MST3K version of the film, you haven’t seen it. They cut the film from 86 minutes to roughly an hour. As I recall, they joke about the film not making sense. And they are right! When you remove one-quarter of a film, it tends to destroy the plot.

What annoys me about this is that idiots now think the film is bad. I discuss this in my article about The Mads doing Choppers.

Rex Reason is remembered primarily for his role as Dr Cal Meacham in This Island Earth. He is great in these kinds of American Hero roles that were so popular in the 1950s. But overall, he had an amazing career for one so short.

Let’s celebrate Rex Reason’s birthday by watching his best-known film!

Note that this print has an aspect ratio of 1.37:1. There is also a 1.85:1 version of the film on the Shout Factory Blu-ray. The filmmakers shot it at 1.37:1 aspect ratio with the intent to release it as widescreen.

Rex Reason via Straight 2 DVD under Fair Use. (But I believe the image is actually in the public domain.)

Busby Berkeley was born on 29 November 1895. He tried to kill himself in the 1940s. And he almost succeeded. He also killed two people while driving drunk (nearly killing himself). Despite all this, he lived to the rip old age of 80, dying on 14 March 1976.

Berkeley is synonymous with his lavish musicals. So you might be thinking that he isn’t a psychotronic filmmaker. But have you ever watched them? They are insane!

But what is a psychotronic film anyway? I first heard the term back in the early 1990s. I was at Movie Madness in Portland, Oregon. And I wanted The Last Man on Earth, but couldn’t find it. So I asked the clerk, and he said, “Oh, it’s in the back under ‘psychotronic.'” I soon became a frequent visitor to that section!

The standard definition of “psychotronic” is that it is the kind of movie you would see at drive-ins during their heyday in the 1950s. But I’ve come to see the term differently. It is more about how you watch films than the films themselves. Psychotronic fans keep their minds open.

I hate that most people will only watch recent big-budget films. When I talk about a film I admire, I most often get the response, “Is it new?” Since I consider any film from 1970 onward as new, we normally miscommunicate after that.

This has led me to the unusual position of thinking of any older film outside of classics like Casablanca as psychotronic. But if you don’t like that, I can assure you that Busby Berkeley films made it to the drive-in. Consider his masterpiece, The Gang’s All Here. It came out in 1943, and I’m sure it was making the drive-in rounds in the 1950s.

But if you’re a purist, he did make a crime drama, They Made Me a Criminal. It features psychotronic actors John Garfield, Claude Rains, Ann Sheridan, and The Dead End Kids. It is in the public domain and Archive has a decent print of it. But I have to go with The Gang’s All Here. If you won’t watch the whole film, at least watch “The Lady In The Tutti Frutti Hat“!

You might think that Busby Berkeley was gay. In fact, he was married six times. Three ended in divorce. Two were annulled. And the final one lasted almost two decades, ending in his death. The median length of his marriages was 14 months. He was not a stable (or happy) guy!

Image cropped from Busby Berkeley Portrait by The Fabulous Miss Fisher under CC BY 4.0.

Joe Dante was born on 28 November 1946.

Dante made one of my favorite films: Matinee. It is a love letter to exploitation filmmaking. And I really appreciate that. But it also exhibits the problems that make me not much like Dante as a filmmaker.

Joe Dante is the Steven Spielberg of horror. He’s very good. He knows how to tell a story. But his films have no grit. He’s the anti-Tobe Hooper. Or better: the anti-Lucio Fulci. Comparing these directors is hard because Dante has generally had much bigger budgets. But he is what most people would think of as a better director.

My biggest problem with Dante is Gremlins. I like the film. But it is a classic “horror for people who hate horror” film. And since it was first released, I’ve been annoyed by all the people quoting the film to me and gushing about how great it is. It’s not great. It’s not quotable. To be clear, it’s fine — just not much more.

We can’t blame Joe Dante alone, of course. Chris Columbus wrote Gremlins. But I can’t escape the notion that the two men are actually the same man. Has anyone seen them together? But it’s probably just that both men are testicle deficient. That is, they lack balls.

There is nothing wrong with this! People love both men’s films! Hell, I enjoy many of their films. The Adventures in Babysitting poster hangs proudly on my wall (more because it is an awesome poster). Columbus has never made a horror film, of course. I’d give him a pass if he hadn’t written The Goonies.

But Dante? I can’t forgive a man who has made a number of films that could have been great but were instead just profitable. But like I said, Matinee is great. It’s still very much a Joe Dante film. But it works for me because I was kind of that kid. And I still am. The truth is, Dante probably is too. The economics of filmmaking is terrible. And I can’t blame him for choosing a profitable and stable career over cult stardom. But I can still grouse about it!

But enough of this! Let’s watch Matinee!

Image cropped from Dante and Elizabeth Stanley attending the 66th annual Venice International Film Festival in 2009 by nicolas genin under CC BY-SA 2.0.