Tag: The Invisible Man

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Spooky Movies Haunt Halloween Weekend

Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare On Elm Street

Halloween is this Sunday, which means it’s the climax of horror movie season. Memphis’ big screens offer many options to slake your thirst for blood.

Saturday is the big day, beginning with a double feature matinee of classic horror beginning at 1 p.m. at Malco’s Paradiso and Collierville theaters. The Invisible Man was directed by the great James Whale, whose impact on horror cannot be underestimated. Filmed in 1933, after Whale had made the immortal Frankenstein and practically invented the haunted house film with The Old Dark House, The Invisible Man was the first of many attempts to adapt H.G. Wells’ groundbreaking sci-fi novel, and the only one with a script approved by the author himself. It stars Claude Raines in his breakthrough performance, beginning a career that would include such gems as The Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca, and Lawrence of Arabia. Here he is absolutely owning the town constable who wants to know what’s going on in his secret lab.

Raines also shows up in the second film of the double feature, The Wolf Man from 1941. Lon Chaney Jr. stars as the titular fuzzy headed antihero. He can’t help it, he just gets moony sometimes.

Take a break for dinner and then head to the Malco Summer Drive-In for the annual Halloween edition of the Time Warp Drive-In. This year’s theme is American Nightmares — The Teen Horror Cinema of Wes Craven. The first film is, for my money, the best of the ’80s horror boom. A Nightmare on Elm Street brought surreal imagery and experimental cinema back to the center of American horror. Made for $1.1 million, it grossed $57 million in its initial run; the fledgling studio New Line Cinema would become known as “The House that Freddy Built.” It was also the debut of Johnny Depp, who gets one of the greatest death scenes in horror history.

In 1996, Craven would deconstruct many of the horror tropes he had a hand in building with Scream. This trailer is built around the film’s infamous opening scene, where Drew Barrymore takes a fateful phone call.

Craven’s 1991 film The People Under The Stairs is an early entry in the horror comedy genre. The class-conscious satire is a little bit like Home Alone made with a lot of blood.

The final film of the evening is The Hills Have Eyes. Made in 1977, it was Craven’s second film after The Last House on the Left; both films would go on to be cult classics.

The Time Warp Drive-In begins at 7 p.m. at the Malco Summer Drive-In. Admission is $25 per car for a night full of scares.

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Jaws Leads Classic Summer Film Weekend at the Summer Drive-In

Bruce the shark and Roy Schider hit the beach in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.

With the 2020 summer film season on hold for at least another month, the newly reopened Malco Summer Drive-In is offering classic blockbusters for your socially distant entertainment this Memorial Day weekend.

Screen 3 is where the action is with a Steven Spielberg double feature. The early show is the one that started it all. Before Jaws’ 1975 release, summer was Hollywood’s sleepy season, and Steven Spielberg was directing made-for-TV movies. Jaws set box office records, created a template for the wide-release summer blockbuster, and made Spielberg a household name. Just look at this trailer from 1975, which crackles with tension and danger.

Jaws Leads Classic Summer Film Weekend at the Summer Drive-In

The second Spielberg masterpiece is one that brought CGI into the mainstream. 1993’s Jurassic Park broke the box office records that E.T. had set 11 years earlier. Say what you will about Spielberg, the man knows how to cut a trailer.

Jaws Leads Classic Summer Film Weekend at the Summer Drive-In (2)

On screen 2, another double feature. 2001’s The Fast and the Furious was a frothy street racing exploitation movie with a guy named Vin Diesel (who was clearly born to star in car movies) as a tough guy who couldn’t make cars fly. Yet.

Jaws Leads Classic Summer Film Weekend at the Summer Drive-In (3)

John Singleton directed the sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious, in 2003. Just look at that jawline on Paul Walker.

Jaws Leads Classic Summer Film Weekend at the Summer Drive-In (4)

Over on screen 1, a kids animation double feature with the pandemic’s surprise hit Trolls: World Tour, starring Anna Kendrick and Memphis’ own Justin Timberlake.

Jaws Leads Classic Summer Film Weekend at the Summer Drive-In (5)

The Trolls are paired with a film that spawned a million memes, 2015’s Minions.

Jaws Leads Classic Summer Film Weekend at the Summer Drive-In (6)

On screen 4, The Invisible Man and The Hunt continue their streaks as two of the only first-runs still in theaters. You can read my review of The Invisible Man here.

Tickets to the drive-in are currently a flat $20 per carload. You can buy tickets in advance to guarantee a spot on the Malco website. 

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Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Horrortober: The Invisible Man (1933)

There’s one thing that sets The Invisible Man apart from the rest of the classic monsters: He’s a jerk. Frankenstein Monster, the antagonist of director James Whale’s groundbreaking 1931 film, is dangerous, but childlike. King Kong, who made his screen debut in 1933, the same year as Whale’s The Invisible Man, is a wild animal driven mad by captivity, but he’s not evil. Dracula is a post-human predator, but at least he’s got excellent table manners.

But Dr. Jack Griffin (Claude Rains), the chemist who worked for five years to make himself dissappear, is evil in a banal way. He’s in it for the money. Or at least he was before monocane, the exotic chemical that renders him invisible, turns him into a psychotic megalomaniac. He’s something rare these days: a villain with a realistic motivation and a plausible plan.

Horrortober: The Invisible Man (1933)

Whale is the first of the great horror directors, creating three bona fide masterpieces in a busy four years in which he turned out an astonishing ten films. The Invisible Man is the middle of those, made between the groundbreaking Frankenstein and the gothic majesty of Bride Of Frankenstein. Like Victor Frankenstien, Griffin is a rouge scientist who “meddled in things man was not meant for.” The influence of Mary Shelly on H.G. Well’s 1897 science fiction novel is clear, which may explain why Whale was drawn to the story.

For Rains, this was the role that launched a 40-year career in which he would appear in such indelible classics as The Adventures Of Robin Hood, Casablanca, and Lawrence Of Arabia. When he was a villain, directors would ask him to cloak his evil in gentility. Not so for Whale, who never met a melodramatic flourish he didn’t like. Rains roughly insults and assaults the hapless inkeeper, Mrs. Conner (a hilarious, histrionic Una O’Conner), while ordering her to “bring me food!” He strangles policemen, tips over prams, and blames his victims for his actions.

Whale’s special effects crew pulls out all the stops to bring the Invisible Man to life. They developed a very early version of chroma key, a double exposure technique that is ubiquitous today, for shots such as the darkly comic moment when Griffin steals a policeman’s trousers and chases a terrified milkmaid through the countryside. But even though you know they’re doing it all with wires, such as the classic moment when a bicycle rides itself through the village square, the effects are always expertly deployed so as to create the sense that there is a real person moving through space.

The Invisible Man is overshadowed by Frankenstein and Dracula but it’s every bit their equal, and considerably more sophisticated in its special effects. The simplicity of Well’s premise (“He’s mad, and he’s invisible!” as the police chief says) is spun into a surprising level of psychological and moral sophistication. If no one could see you, you could do whatever you wanted. What would you do? 

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Film Features Film/TV

Time Warp Drive-In: It Came From The Drive-In

The Summer Drive-In was built by Malco Theaters in 1950, on the cusp of the country’s big drive-in theater boom. At the height of their popularity, there were more than 4,000 drive-ins all over the country, comprising more than one quarter of all movies screens. Now, that figure is at 1.5 percent.

But the lost pleasures of the drive-in are not lost on Memphis filmmaker Mike McCarthy and Black Lodge Video proprietor Matt Martin, who, last year, started the monthly Time Warp Drive-In series, which brings classic films, both well-known and obscure, back to the biggest screens.

“We were accepted by a large part of the Memphis community,” says McCarthy. “[Malco Theatres Executive VP] Jimmy Tashie took a chance at, not only saving the drive-in, but plugging a program in that would use the drive-in for what its American function used to be.”

The eight-month series will once again run four-movie programs, once a month, each united by a theme, ranging from the deliciously schlocky to the seriously artsy. Last year’s most popular program was the Stanley Kubrick marathon, which ended as the sun came up. “Who says the drive-in is anti-intellectual?” McCarthy says.

The appeal of the drive-in is both backward- and forward-looking. The atmosphere at the Time Warp Drive-In events is relaxed and social. People are free to sit in their cars and watch the movie or roam around and say hi to their friends. It’s the classic film version of tailgating. “Matt from Black Lodge brought this up: It’s a kind of social experiment, like America is in general. It’s getting back to turntables and vinyl. Maybe it’s not celluloid, but it’s celluloid-like. You didn’t get to see that, because you weren’t born. But you can go back to that. It takes a handful of people who believe to make it happen. And that’s why Malco has been around for 100 years. They’ll take that chance.”

Malco’s Film VP Jeff Kaufman worked hard to find and book the sometimes-obscure films that Martin and McCarthy want to program. “I think we’ve got the material, and we’re trying to get things that people want to see, while kind of playing it a little dangerous around the edges,” McCarthy says. “This Saturday’s totally kid-friendly. We make a conscious attempt to show the kid-friendly stuff first, so people can come out with their kids.”

The series takes its name from the most famous song from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, so the opening program is, appropriately, movies that were mentioned in the show’s opening number, “Science Fiction Double Feature,” that also appeared on Memphis’ legendary horror host Sivad’s long-running Fantastic Features program. “We’re showing what many people believe to be the greatest film of all time, the 1933 version of King Kong,” McCarthy says. “It’s not the worst film of all time, which is the 1976 version of King Kong.

The granddaddy of the horror/sci-fi special effects spectacle films, King Kong has lost none of its power. It’s concise, imaginative, and best experienced with a crowd. The evening’s second film comes from 20 years later. It Came from Outer Space is based on a story by sci-fi legend Ray Bradbury and was prime drive-in fare. It features shape-shifting aliens years before Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 3D imagery from the original golden age of 3D, and a twisted take on the alien invasion formula.

It Came From Outer Space

The third film, When Worlds Collide, was made in 1951, but it doesn’t fit the mold of the sci-fi monster movie. Produced by George Pal, whose credits include the original film takes on War of the Worlds and The Time Machine, the film asks what would happen if scientists discover that Earth was doomed to destruction by a rogue planet, presaging Lars Von Trier’s 2011 Melancholia.

The evening closes with The Invisible Man, starring Claude Rains as the title scientist who throws off social constraints after rendering himself transparent. Directed by Frankenstein auteur James Whale, the film has been recognized as an all-time classic by the Library of Congress’ National Film Registry and will richly reward intrepid viewers who stay at the drive-in all night long.