EricJ

It's actually a version of the same Bram Stoker story that was filmed much later and sillier as The Awakening (1980), with Charlton Heston as the archeologist.

"Well, they'll never catch me any other way!...His Excellency's car!" Despite what Comcast tells you ( ? ), you don't need an Internet provider to provide you with WiFi--They're just looking for an excuse to sock you with a more upgraded package and device charge. On the provider's tech-support page, they should (Comcast/Xfinity does, anyway) have a list of what specific models of modem and WiFi router are compatible with your paid Internet service, and a quick trip to Best Buy or Staples will soon reduce that dependency on rented boxes. If you buy the latest compatible modem off the shelf, you can return your existing one to the provider and avoid the fee, and if you buy a compatible WiFi router off the shelf, it should operate free of charge. The trick is not getting more devices, but getting the right ones. It's not the same as "Cutting the cord" with the cable-TV service, but as more and more programming moves from the cable channels to the streaming services, it helps to reduce a few of the wires.

Universal never HAD too many comedies, outside of Francis, Ma & Pa Kettle, and Abbott & Costello. "Studio identity" was a big business back in the mogul 30's-40's, and studios did a lot to keep up their reputations: Universal made themselves the "horror studio" even after the Code gutted the public's taste for horror, and then brought the Monsters back in the B-movies. Warner was the "street" studio of Humphrey Bogart, James Cagney and scandalous Bette Davis, and MGM was the "prestige" studio of great highbrow books, until the Arthur Freed musicals came along. Republic had the westerns, and Paramount had the comedies. As for why "The classic 30's monsters aren't scary!" in modern kids' eyes is that the Monsters have become so ingrained in pop culture, we remember them more as "lovable" and "sympathetic" than nightmare fodder--Karloff's Frankenstein was a tragic antihero, even if you never saw "The Munsters", and it's hard to say what would have made 30's audiences "faint", as the first movie's introduction warned us about. Todd Browning can still make the original 30's Lugosi Dracula creepy just from that silent talkie-era lack of music giving the film a nightmarish feel, but consider that the only other time Lugosi got to play Dracula was with Abbott & Costello. (TBF, Lugosi did manage to play Dracula without irony, even when turning his hypnotic powers on Lou Costello.) Hehehh...70's horror was NOT "Stupid and boring" ?, for exactly the same reason that the James Wan/Rob Zombie 00's era is. Three things 70's horror had: Theaters. You can turn on streaming and see it flooded with backyard indie micro-brew horror trying to do the same found-footage exorcisms and moving into haunted houses, but in the 70's, there was no home theater, there was very little cable, there was no streaming, and you HAD to take your chances with the kids looking for a Friday-night blast. Theaters were also local, or even drive-ins, so you went to whatever your local theater was showing sight-unseen sometimes, and if a 70's-horror or classic 80's-slasher just put up a poster promising cheap thrills, it might be worth a ticket...On the condition that the movie had to deliver those cheap thrills, and it probably only had one weekend to do it. The great 80's Jamie Lee Curtis slashers weren't epics, but they knew what they had to deliver, who they were delivering it to, and how to deliver it...If you're a teenager, what scares you more, a babysitter being stalked, or seeing someone like your mom worry about whether someone like your 6-yo. little brother end up possessed? What's scarier, an evil nun, or a poor picked-on girl at the prom? Low budgets. Studios wouldn't pay for horror--too risky for a mainstream audience--or if they did, it was usually for un-scary things that old studio executives thought was "horror". It was the Tobe Hoopers and Wes Cravens who had to go out with their own little gonzo cameras, and scrape together indie B-movies. That usually put teen non-actors (just like you or I) in the middle of deserted locations, with not much money for music or extras or set decoration, tapping into something primal--Our nightmares don't either, and come off just as weird, lurid and low-budget. Just try telling some young kid that nobody actually gets cut up with a chainsaw in the original '74 "Texas Chainsaw Massacre", yet it's still one of the freakiest horror classics on the hall-of-fame list simply for an eerie nightmarish atmosphere of dread. We BELIEVED all this. There's a reason why Rosemary's Baby was such a big hit in 1969, and The Exorcist was a such a craze in 1974: Whenever society faces a major upheaval, and can't put its trust in the political or religious culture anymore, we start becoming curious about the occult and paranormal, and things are too weird and out there to "betray" us. Watergate traumatized everyone out of believing in our political system, and we spent the rest of the Ford and Carter eras searching for witchcraft, UFO's and ESP psychics. When something like '76's "The Omen" actually believes most of its own apocalyptic hype, that comes across the screen a lot less cynically than James Wan taking one jump-scare from one franchise and trying to transplant it to another, thinking that he's living up to the "ritual" of what the movie audience expects. I tried watching a little of Zackerly on a best-of compilation, and it must have been the movies--All great local hosts have that great style of local-filler ad-lib desperation (ah, those great glory days of USA Network's Commander USA), but Zack's David-Letterman-like unspontaneous flop-chuckles just started grating after a while: "We're here broadcasting from the dungeon, uh, coming to you live, or, er, dead, as the case may be...Hahahaha!" ?

Mentioning FilmStruck and Trump in the same sentence brings up the same reason that FilmstruckMania rubbed the hairs on the back of my neck the same way-- I remember one political satire that showed red-cap Trump supporters as saying "You promised to FIX me! ", and we were almost literally hearing the exact same thing from the uptown and suburban FilmStruck fans: The trendy new fans broadcasted their FS queues to the world, first bragging, like Netflix, that they had finally cut the cord and flipped a bird to the expensive cable companies...But then, once the movies disappeared off of Netflix and were replaced by weird Swedish and Korean series, at the same time as Warner Instant Archive started moving Gene Kelly and James Dean to the former "Criterion channel", the movement turned to a greater desire to flip a finger to Netflix and Amazon. You didn't just watch Filmstruck because it had vintage movies and Netflix Prime didn't, you watched it because it was, quote, TEACHING you about a great film every night...It was the TED-talk channel of movies. And in the wake of the mania, I confess to getting a little shirty on my blog about the "If it's not on streaming, it doesn't exist" era, the fact that the same movies had been on disk all this time for twenty years (even for those who don't have cable/TCM), that the mania basically was an unfocused tantrum at a lot of the "betrayals" of the unrealistic hopes viewers had over their dream of the Post-TV Era, and that you don't need to pay a service to teach you how to be curious enough to learn something. Great films, even less. https://movieactivist.blogspot.com/2018/04/will-you-accept-this-flower-from-holy.html

Never shout Fire in a crowded thread: ? https://www.amazon.com/Introducing-Fire-TV-Stick-4K-with-All-New-Alexa-Voice-Remote/dp/B079QHML21 As for me, I'm stuck with a PS4 game console and a TV with one HDMI input. So, whatever I watch comes in through the console, meaning games, Blu-ray, Blu3D, DVD, Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, YouTube, Crunchyroll, HBONow, Vudu VOD streaming...but NO Filmstruck, even when the service was around!! (And before that, Warner Instant Archive could never adapt themselves to Set-top, since their site had been Microsoft-conned into using Silverlight early on..)

Digital HD flatscreens have certainly, er...come down in price since the FCC first made them mandatory back in '08. TEN YEARS AGO. I'm not sure whether the craze for "Channel 10.2" digital splinter channels is still popular in some area stations, as all local network affiliates have moved to digital-HD free-broacast, but I miss ThisTV before it disappeared in our area. Either the cable company or the network got tired of it. (Eh, it was only showing the MGM Orphans anyway.) That's exactly what people pay every year for Netflix, just for the low-tech name-association of having a cover-all one-stop service, even as the movies vanish and the original series get more and more foreign. It was the one pooper-spoiler to studios' dream of ten or twenty select vanity services, namely that people still expect ONE service to deliver everything, just like cable did. For some it's still Netflix (go figure), others made a big rebellious give-us-Barabbas show of dropping Netflix and Amazon for the "life-improving" classic movies of Filmstruck. The reason the other services are around and Filmstruck isn't, is that they weren't becoming corporately inconvenient to Warner. Except for HBO Now, and we shall see what happens... Still, as one Musta-Flopped poster pointed out, it would've been nice if Filmstruck had finally delivered on that X-Box/PS game-console streaming app they'd been promising users for two years. At least now I don't have to worry about whether to buy an Amazon Fire Stick or an AppleTV just to watch FS, and which has the worse reception for loading.

WatchTCM was pretty much doomed from the start--It was left around from the days (about '08 or so) when everyone buzzed about "Online movies", but no one yet knew where anyone would watch them. So every network and studio tried building their own browser-site streaming service, with varying degrees of success. That's probably why TCM was so eager to create FilmStruck with Criterion's attempt at a browser channel, and take it to the new 10's media of mobile apps and STB's, and ditch their earlier amateur attempts at an online identity. The big myth is floating around that "Well, Warner must've dropped Filmstruck because it wasn't popular!" I don't know about its financial profits, but FS was getting a fierce cult online and becoming the main topic of the affluent mainstream TCM was trying to court, so it wasn't because of unpopularity. It was because of, as noted, Warner eliminating stragglers and circling the corporate wagons, under their mighty Shield. They live in terror of Disney having their own one branded studio-content Netflix-rival streaming channel, and whatever roofs Disney jumps off of, Warner must jump as well...Batman must not lose to Mickey!!

Filmstruck was competition to Warner's idea of One W-Branded Streaming Service to Rule Them All--That was why Warner Archive had to pull their classic studio content out of it, and take the service with it. We'll probably hear something similar about their DC Universe channel in a month or two. TCM, OTOH, is competition to no one on cable--There's no Warner-owned cable channel it's taking movies away from, and it's branded within the company, so there's no reason to disinherit it. That's one good thing about nobody caring what's on dying cable TV anymore.

AT&T's all for the General Warner service, because it means they can ditch their own failing attempt at a streaming channel. (The one that was supposed to attract all their smartphone customers, most of whom never even knew it existed.) Filmstruck's cult was so uber-loyal because--coming from the already existing Blu-DVD uber-cults online for Criterion and Warner Archive--its members felt like they were an "outpost" against, quote, "Mad King Ludwig"'s attempt to wipe any pre-1985 movies off the face of the earth. As long as FS was the baby of two "overlooked" companies who were still in touch with the public, it felt like movie fans were safe, but now, Warner needs to make a few changes in what movies it thinks are "worth showing" to a "mass-market audience". The main studio already believes there's only three old vintage movies the public wants to see, and that the rest can go hang.

Yep, that it was--Walt also wanted to make Liberty Square at Disneyland, based on "Johnny Tremain", but that would have to wait for the Florida park. Most of the modern improvements in Disneyland, like the Matterhorn, Monorail and Submarine ride were brought in for the 4th anniversary celebration in '59. The Matterhorn used to have daily Third-Man climbers as a feature at Disneyland, but that was soon retired for safety.

Basically, you have to appreciate what William Goldman was doing--Westerns was one of the genres that was most up for the late-60's/early-70's "Deconstructionist" period, and Goldman was deconstructing by making a sort of Princess Bride Western: Where the cowboys all act a little more 60's-contemporary and goofy/wisecracking than usual, and outlaw "legends" are reduced to lovably bumbling and roguish hip regular-guys. That certainly accounts for most of Newman and Redford's dialogue, and also for the rainbow-and-flowers bop-a-da 60's Burt Bachrach score in the old West--If you couldn't be a hippie in 1905, being one of the last outlaws in an increasingly civilized West was the next best way to do your own thing.

(Yyyyeah. You said it, we didn't. ) You could REQUEST it, but you probably wouldn't GET it--Disney still owns exhibition rights to the movies. (Oh, and the TCM ride is already gone at Disney World: They're bringing some kitschy "30's Mickey & Minnie" ride into the Grauman's Chinese building, because the new Disney marketers hate Mickey Mouse.)

...Good, could you tell me which one Cedric the Entertainer is? And teetering dangerously on the border of racism, there is a need to bring back summer-replacement prime-time gameshows--okay, so Disney/ABC beat "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" into the prime-time ground twenty years ago and almost killed off the genre singlehandedly--but the hosts, audience and demographics have almost completely been taken over by the black urban audience. (Just last month, I was in a doctor's office where the daytime Family Feud, now hosted by black comic Steve Harvey, was showing on the waiting-room TV, and hearing one mom who didn't want her kid to watch, as she thought that "too many 'booty' jokes" had crept into the former Richard Dawson/Louie Anderson daytime staple.) There's an unspoken frustration in the public with the Game of Thrones-era of TV, and a need for comfort-food viewing again, which is why the variety-competition shows have taken over the spot that summer variety shows used to have in the 70's...Not EVERY single moment of TV has to be "Bold", "Fearless", "Groundbreaking" or "Your Next Binge-Addiction". But back in the 70's, the only people who dreamed of getting free money on game shows, and had the available daytime afternoon free time to get it, were housewives, college students, and newlyweds who needed it, and now, with fewer housewives...they seem to have reduced the demographic appeal of Who Wants to Get Free Money? During the 80's, the "celebrity" gameshow of Hollywood Squares became a dinosaur and the "goofy" gameshow of Press Your Luck or Let's Make a Deal became extinct, replaced by the intellectual dichotomy of Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy...Don't bother with the jokes, cars or furniture, just hand over the money. Now we want a taste of "simple" TV again, but like the black-washing of SNL, it seems those most in touch with what Free Broadcast TV used to offer the public in the 70's and 80's are those who could never afford expensive cable in the 90's and 00's. (Which is why Alex Trebek hosts "Jeopardy", but Snoop Dog hosted that TBS revival of "Joker's Wild".) Pluto has a stoner channel--which must have gone through six different names in six months, since it couldn't decide whether it was "goofy" or "socially aware"--but those mostly show either YouTube-friendly stoner-host talk shows or...whatever public-domain pop-camp the other channels are showing. ("Here, here's some Clutch Cargo cartoons, giggle over those!") The "Scenery" channels, OTOH, were geared more for high-definition TV. The train rides on "4KTV Channel", for ex., are special programming produced for those folk who rushed out and bought a new 4KTV, and immediately wanted something to watch on it besides movies...Ie., generally the same "demo screen" mountains, temples, colorful wharfs and city skylines you see playing on 4K UHD screens at your local Best Buy. Any tech-folk here have the same experience trying to find "special" programming for their first HDTV flatscreen, back in 2008?

Ohh, THAT'S what "Buzzr" is! It's been airing on free Amazon Prime, and my old Match Game 70's habit is reawakening itself for the first time since I used to come home afterschool from 4th grade. https://www.amazon.com/Match-Game-1973-Episode-00/dp/B07BMK1PFP/ (And I've newly re-discovered that Gene Rayburn really wasn't as creepy as I used to think he was, and that Bob Barker, in fact, was...Ah, remember the days when white housewives watched game shows that weren't hosted by black rap comics?) FWICS, Buzzr seems to have package-licensed only the Mark Goodson & Bill Todman series--Match Game, Family Feud, Tattletales, Price is Right, the various incarnations of Password--like other PlutoTV channels that get one package of source material and make a "channel" out of it, but I find it better watched piece by piece than on PlutoTV's old-school-broadcast pot luck. Oh, and I want to see who else does this: Forty years later, anyone else still make Match Game jokes when someone deliberately leaves a sentence unfinished? In a news discussion last week about the latest Trump investigation, somebody joked "And Stormy is going to have the FBI look for Trump's........" Naturally, my 70's-conditioned reflex was to joke, "'And Stormy is going to have the FBI look for Trump's (BLANK)'--Richard Dawson:" "I said 'Brain' (ding!)" I've been watching PlutoTV for a while, and it never used to be, so it's probably joining soon. Some channels come and go quickly, so the lineup is in a constant state of flux: The Gorilla Channel didn't seem to last more than a month, and yet for some reason, Pluto's still showing Eye Candy, the most visually painful channel on the entire service to watch...

If you can check up Criterion DVD at the library (it won't be on Blu-ray, for obvious reasons), you can find "The Golden Age of Television" which collects rebroadcast kinescopes of the major pre-"Twilight Zone" Playhouse 90 live-TV dramas that built Serling's reputation-- Patterns, Requiem for a Heavyweight, and an as-you've-never-seen-him Mickey Rooney in "The Comedian" is enough background to understand the big three Serling topics. Screaming's one of the funnier classics (and they still managed to do a title song!), but Amazon Prime VOD has a few of the other 60's-color Carry On's for rental, if you're curious: https://www.amazon.com/Carry-Up-Khyber-Gerald-Thomas/dp/B0029ZR4OO/ Just helping out more board members, for us clueless Yanks who thought "Are You Being Served?" invented the style.

Stewart's hardly a "cameo", his character has one of the major subplots, and probably as central to the story as the other leads. As for why, he was no stranger to sardonic but good-hearted loners by that point. The real-life Ringling circus performers in the bit-part scenes, OTOH, are cameos, and they get "Guest-star" billing.

Well, if you count Hitchcock remaking "The Man Who Knew Too Much", even despite Doris Day's singing. And to think that everyone still whines about her stripping down to that tank top in "Alien".

YOU CAN START A THREAD...IF YOU'D LIKE!! ?

The term "Cameo" didn't really exist until the late 50's, when Michael Todd invented it as a nice-sounding euphemism for getting A-list stars to make one two-minute appearance in Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Up to then, credits had to be creative about how to suggest that major stars showing up in one scene without playing a lead character was only a "highlight" of the film, but they still required major notice in the credits. Thus, he was a special "Guest" of the movie.

Ian McKellen would be Gus, the Theater Cat, the role reserved for old British actors (like Sir John Mills in the '98 direct-video). Especially as they don't have to dance.

Since I know better than subject myself to the entire series--only looked at bits of 3, and the goofy #2, back when Jason still wore a burlap sack because "The Road Warrior" hadn't come out yet--settle a bet: Along with "James Cagney never said 'You dirty rat'" and "Humphrey Bogart never said 'Play it again, Sam'", I've always thrown around the movie-lover's nitpick of "In the original Paramount films, Jason never wielded a chainsaw". (As he's often depicted in goofy pop-culture references, especially around Halloween time.) That was the other guy--Jason preferred phallic weapons, like long machetes or skewering weapons. So...DID Jason ever use a chainsaw in the later films? Did one of the later campy New Line producers ever ruin that bar bet for us? ?

I don't think the producers know either--I know it's a project that's baffled producers into limbo hell literally since the late 80's, and was either an early warning sign or helped contribute to the brief "Death" of movie musicals in the 90's. Just call it blind stubbornness. (Les Miserables, Sweeney Todd, Into the Woods and Phantom of the Opera were also supposed to be movies in the late-80's and early 90's, and there was talk of "La Cage Aux Folles", but all died either of ridiculous studio-hell ideas, or stage unions' new crackdown on waiting for the stage show to close.) At one point it was going to be an animated musical; at another, John Travolta was going to be Rum Tum Tugger. Finally, Andrew Lloyd Webber formed a video production unit out of his Really Useful Company, and gave us not-too-bad direct-video stage concerts of Cats, Joseph/Dreamcoat and Jesus Christ Superstar in '98-'00. Like Starlight Express (which our local youth-theater group tried staging on a high-school sized stage ? ), Cats isn't really a Webber musical you CAN translate to film outside of its stage gimmicks, and at best would probably end up looking as weird as the "Godspell" movie.

I'd just watched Bubby's young-hoofer contract days in the MGM "Broadway Melody" musicals, and he wouldn't have been bad (except for the more primitive earlier makeup, even if they had used the healthier version, and that Ebsen's singing wasn't...really...that great)--Ebsen specialized in a sort of easygoing tall long-leggedy tap, not as wild as Ray Bolger's "eccentric" style, but still for funny country-boy effect. Watching Ebsen in a long-leggedy tuxedo cut a few steps with young Judy Garland in the climax of Broadway Melody of 1938, you know where the studio got the idea for casting.

Flight of the Navigator is actually overlooked fun by 80's Summer-of-Love kiddy standards, if you accept that the last half is pretty much a star vehicle for Paul Reubens doing his then-unknown Pee-Wee shtick. We didn't know that back then, and audience reaction was divided at best. Bedknobs and Broomsticks (Ron Miller digging up Walt's old backup-memos from the "Saving Mr. Banks" days, in case Pamela Travers said no to Mary Poppins) is probably the best of the latter-Disney Poppins-wannabes, assuming they show the extended "restored" version that came to disk back in '01. The Cat From Outer Space is inoffensive 60's-Disney throwback trying to tap into 70's spaceships, and The Black Hole is best viewed as a...curiosity. Big studios trying to embrace "the Star Wars craze", back when "2001" was still coin of the realm, and Disney tries to paste cute robots onto a cerebral-scifi plot. I remember when it opened within a week of the equally soporific first Star Trek movie, and the two deserve each other.

The scene where our Fearless Killers don't realize they're at the vampire ball, until they look at the huge Versailles mirrors and see an entire ballroom of...two people is one of the great single visual gags of horror comedy, but that's pretty much it for comic timing. Mostly because it's a visual gag, and nobody struggles to parse English dialogue in it. If you want to get fan-nitpicky, the Daleks technically AREN'T robots--They're a mutated creature that took to "survival tanks" to survive the planet's post-nuclear atmosphere, and started developing the robot-like mentality to survive by "Exterminating all inferior species". However, they're still individually a bit stir-crazy, and capable of going hysterically off the rails in crises, hence the tendency to get too overexcited about invasion, or scream or panic when faced with the Doctor's interference. And while fans technically don't hate Cushing for being cuddly, they do hold a little fan-grudge against the 60's features that the two movies were rushed into British theaters on the craze for the marketing, and never bothered to even try and explore the Doctor's alien origin...Reducing Cushing's Doctor to just a lovable absent-minded inventor out of a Disney comedy, and his two spunky teen-appeal sidekicks to two kids the matinee audience was expecting.