Schlock Watching

It was almost back to normal this past weekend.  In schlock watching terms, at least.  After a double bill of Arch Oboler's intriguing, if flawed, The Bubble (1966) and Ossorio's Tombs of the Blind Dead (1972) on Friday night, Saturday brought a delirious triple bill of John Boorman's Excalibur (1981), Renfield (2023) and Toho's The H-Man (1958).  A pretty eclectic mix by any standards, (for good measure, I also caught part of Robbe-Grillet's Trans Europ Express), which left me too exhausted for any serious schlock watching on Sunday.  Now, I know what you are thinking - isn't Renfield a bit contemporary and mainstream for me?  Well, ordinarily I'd agree, but the opportunity to watch it came via one of those dodgy streaming services available via Roku and any film featuring Nicholas Cage is generally pretty off kilter - one featuring him playing Dracula, (or, more accurately, playing Bela Lugosi's version of Dracula), even more so.  I might well write about this one at greater length in a future post, but suffice to say, I was pleasantly surprised by how enjoyable it was, providing not just a decent horror comedy, but also an affectionate homage to Universal's 1930 Dracula, (to which, technically, it is a sequel of sorts), not to mention making some references to the lost 1925 Lon Chaney Sr vampire film, London After Midnight.  Its the sort of cinematic erudition on the part of its makers that warms the heart of a classic horror movie obsessive like me.

But to get back to the subject of streaming services on Roku, apart from the well dodgy ones which I always expect to get shut down at any minute, (which some of them frequently do, but within days have usually mysteriously reappeared, sometimes with a new identity or amended content, but generally not), I recently discovered that I could access the Kino Cult livestream via a legit streaming app.  The last time I had access to this it was via the F2V TV apps, which were shut down after it was 'exposed' by a low rent media blogger that most of the livestreams they carried were being accessed without specific permission.  Anyway, I recently realised that it is possible to toggle the Distro TV app (which bundles together a vast array of livestreams, most of which don't have their own Roku apps), between its English language and Spanish language versions.  It turns out that there is considerable variance between the content of the two versions and that a significant number of the channels on the Spanish version are in English.  Kino Cult is one of the streams only available on the Spanish version and it is in English.  It shows a huge variety of films, with arthouse pictures or black and white cult movies rubbing shoulders with exploitation classics and sub-title foreign language movies.  I've caught all manner of stuff there since regaining access: Pete Walker films, the aforementioned The Bubble and Trans Europ Express and even the 1966 Fantomas movie.  

The other movies I caught courtesy of other (apparently) legit streaming services, either on demand, or, in the case of Excalibur, in a one off showing as part of the schedule of another livestreaming channel.  I have to say that I find Excalibur one of the best cinematic interpretations of Arthurian legend and simultaneously one of the most frustrating.  Not only does it look magnificent, but it grasps the mythos underlying the stories better than most and boasts a magnificent and suitably other worldly performance from Nicol Williamson as Merlin.  On the other hand, its script's compression of Malory's narrative to fit a feature film, compounded by nearly forty minutes of footage being cut from it before release, leaves its narrative uneven, jumpy and ultimately unsatisying.  Too many characters significant to the cycle are either omitted altogether, combined with other characters or reduced to mere walk on parts, denied their own narratives.  Likewise, plot lines are truncated or combined with others, rather than properly developed in their own right.  Nonetheless, the film still succeeds in conveying the sheer power of the Arthurian myth.  H-Man, by contrast, is a relatively straightforward piece of science fiction horror from Toho.  Much like The Human Vapour, which it resembles in many respects, it starts as a police procedural which gradually segues into a horror movie.  Its main weakness is that, unlike the title character of the Human Vapour, the title monsters - a liquid organism created from humans melted by nuclear fall out - lack any individual character or coherent intent.  Nonetheless, it is very well made and features some excellent special effects, especially when people melt and are reduced to what looks like soapy gloop.  

So there you have it, another mis-spent weekend watching schlock.  I have a strong feeling that this is going to turn out to be another Summer of Schlock for me...