Today I'm going old school with films I've never seen before. The Wolf Man (1941) was pretty cool. I think this was only the second Bela Lugosi film I've seen. The Last Man on Earth started off a bit slow but picked up half-way through. I'm going to watch Omega Man later tonight. If only Netflix offered I Am Legend via streaming I'd be able to watch the trifecta.

I saw both The Wolf Man and The Last Man on Earth for the first time last year during the Horror Challenge and enjoyed both of them quite a lot. It struck me that today, Larry Talbot couldn't get away with his...aggressive...dating style. Otherwise, I thought it was a fine performance by Lon Chaney, Jr. He brought a very accessible vulnerability and desperation to the character while retaining an imposing presence.

As for Last Man, what really struck me was just how isolated the feel of the film is. There came a point during one scene where Vincent Price and the woman are basically just sitting in his living room waiting for the inevitable nightfall raid and the loneliness was visceral. Plus, I loved that he drove a hearse. That cracked me up.

I just finished the Rudy Behlmer commentary on The Adventures of Robin Hood. It's only the second commentary by him that I've heard (the other being Casablanca), but he's already one of my favorite speakers. My brain goes to mush trying to keep up with all the information he shares. I know he's working from extensive research and prepared notes, but he sounds as though he's just calling this all off the top of his head. He does a terrific job moving from production anecdotes to minutiae about the cast and crew, and then on to criticisms about historical inaccuracies and such. Dense, but rich.

Saw Super 8 followed by Predator, sort of a funky-alien-hangs-humans-upside-down double feature. I'd never seen Predator, and it was a decent action flick. No Die Hard, and I don't expect to watch it again for a while.

You don't need to burn a wildcard for "Moonraker" as IMDB lists one of its' genres as sci-fi along with "You Only Live Twice", and "Diamonds Are Forever". All the others are "Action | Adventure | Thriller" with an occasional "Crime" "Romance" or "Comedy" thrown in. So "legally" get your Bond on with one of those three.

You have a lot of catching up to do. Because he made so many poverty row quickies, Bela's reputation suffered. He was really an underrated actor. Here are some films with great work by him:

ISLAND OF LOST SOULS (1933) "Are ve not men?!"
Edgar G. Ulmer's THE BLACK CAT (1934)
THE RAVEN (1935)
S.O.S. COAST GUARD (1937) - a Republic serial where he plays a criminal mastermind and he plays it straight, no hamming
SON OF FRANKENSTEIN (1939) - he plays Ygor
SCARED TO DEATH (1947) - his only color film
ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948)
and, of course, his priceless Ed Wood films:
GLEN OR GLENDA? (1952)
BRIDE OF THE MONSTER (1954) his only real starring role in a Wood film, and he's actually quite good
PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (way too small a part to call this a Bela film, but still a must-see)

Bela...great work...Plan 9 From Outer Space...does not compute. It should been seen but not so much for him.

Very good film... but it's not sci-fi or fantasy. It's horror.

Bela Lugosi belongs on the Horror checklist, but he is out of place in July because he made vanishing few sci-fi films, and only a fraction of those are available to watch. There's always The Invisible Ray, and soon, Island of Lost Souls. I'd let The Wolf Man slide as "dark fantasy".

It's funny, half the movies I watch come from this discussion thread. Watched Brazil for the first time tonight, it felt so British even though I know Gilliam is from the US. Not bad, just not really my kinda film.

Surely it's just an oversight that Die Another Day doesn't have the genre tag, then, as it involves just as much science fiction as Diamonds Are Forever--actually more, really. I'll leave it as a wildcard, but I think an argument can be convincingly made for this one.

The problem with something like The Wolf Man is that not only is its premise built on the supernatural, but the story itself is a version of old folk legends. It's as much Fantasy as, say, Robin Hood--only darker. I agree it seems more appropriate for the Horror Challenge, but I don't see anything wrong with "dual citizenship" for a movie like this.

Bela Lugosi's on the checklist so I figured it counted (plus I always figured Werewolves and Vampires and the like were supernatural in origin and therefore would be considered fantasy - can we get a ruling on this?). I have seen Plan 9 From Outer Space but for some reason I just spaced that Lugosi was in it. Netflix has several other Lugosi films available for streaming so I might check them out next week.

I just streamed The Lost World (1925), another first time viewing. Netflix has the 2000 restoration that runs 91 minutes. The character in black face was unexpected and took me out of the movie more than the primitive effects, but otherwise I enjoyed the film quite a lot. I have a stronger appreciation now for what made Spielberg think it was okay to let loose a Tyrannosaurus rex on San Diego. Didn't care for the music, though.

I checked it off on I Check Movies.com and took a look at the comments. I wonder: do those people like any movies? It seems like every time I check something off, all I see on that site are "overrated," "awful" and "hated it." The negativity is so discouraging, I rarely even bother posting any thoughts.

I should try to see that for this challenge. I watched THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953) last night and on one of the DVD extras, Ray Harryhausen and Ray Bradbury, in a joint appearance, cited THE LOST WORLD as their inspiration for entering the field of fantasy. (They were both five years old when it came out. 35 years later, I was a child when the remake of THE LOST WORLD, 1960, came out. It didn't quite have the same effect on me. I'd have to wait a year until I saw KING KONG on TV.)

What struck me about BEAST this time, my first viewing in many years, was just how much GOJIRA (1954) owes to this film. (I'd already previously noted how much the 1998 American production of GODZILLA owes to this film--in fact, if they'd just titled the remake THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS, my reaction would have been much less negative.) One key detail in BEAST that I noticed this time was the heavy radiation that the Rhedosaurus emitted, making the soldiers combating it fall down sick. However, even though both dinosaurs (the Rhedosaurus and Godzilla) are revived due to nuke bomb tests, the American film doesn't seem to regard atomic power with much in the way of a critique. There's no big speech at the end (or anywhere else) about the dangers of it. In fact, the original trailer (provided on the disc) makes a much bigger issue of it, with several shots of entirely new footage (with new actors) created just for the trailer. GOJIRA, of course, is completely infused with such a critique, with the memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nine years earlier, still of course fresh in the audience's mind.

Here's where I pulled the subgenres for fantasy from
http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/b...res/index.html

Dark Fantasy is described as:
and

As for Bela, he has enough sci-fi/fantasy movies that be easily found in the public domain, which means at least some can be found at www.archive.org

Here's a non-comprehensive list from just looking at genre tags at imdb:
Plan 9 from Outer Space
The Black Sleep
Bride of the Monster
Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla
Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein
Zombies on Broadway
Return of the Ape Man
Voodoo Man
Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man
The Ape Man
Bowery at Midnight
The Corpse Vanishes
The Ghost of Frankenstein
The Devil Bat
Black Friday
The Phantom Creeps
Son of Frankenstein
S.O.S. Coast Guard
Shadow of Chinatown
The Invisible Ray
Murder by Television
The Return of Chandu
Island of Lost Souls
Chandu the Magician
Dracula

I'd count The Wolf Man as dark fantasy. It's also found in the science fiction and fantasy section at Amazon.

I find more positive comments on foreign films. Bergman's a good source as are things which aren't mainstream.

I finally made it to 26 in the rankings over there a couple weeks ago but got tired of watching stuff just to go up in the ranks. I've done all the lists that I've wanted to, so I'm pretty much done over there. Last year I went through the sci-fi and fantasy lists for this challenge, so when this one rolled along, I didn't have anything to watch without feeling like I'm wasting time for watching things that aren't on a list. It just stopped being fun.

Watched Hanger 18, I remember hearing about it when I was very little back in the early 80s, but forgot all about it. And for good reason, it is laughably bad. The idea behind it is a pretty good one, but everything else is something Roger Corman would reject.

That was one of the first few VHS tapes I bought back in the mid 80s. Even then it was found in a bargain bin similar to what Wal-Mart uses for DVDs.

Hangar 18 just reminded me that Robert Vaughn and Darren McGavin would be could for the starring list next year.

Another monkey off my back: I just streamed 2001: A Space Odyssey. Gorgeous photography, amazing production design. Very easy to see its influence on a lot of the stuff that's been made since. Odd story structure, though. It feels more like an anthology to me than a singular narrative. The entire Jupiter mission story with H.A.L. was perfect and could easily stand on its own without the other three stories. The tension is maddeningly tempered by the coldness of the film. Great stuff.

Just finished Split Second (1992) with Rutger Hauer and Kim Cattrall. Hauer's over the top, but that's to be expected with his character being a caffeine and chocolate fueled paranoid. Great quotes like: "That wasn't a him. That was a fucking it. We gotta get bigger guns"

Another interesting thing is the monster. There's plenty of movies where the monster's monstrous. Same here, only it's also a monstrous asshole. Most movies, the monster is just monster.

One of Hauer's more under-appreciated films.

If I watch the same film more than once (not different cut or with commentary) can I count each viewing, or just the first one?

just the first

Congrats, MLS!

I went ahead and checked it out after reading this. The blackface guy looked more like a monster than the ape-man

Yeah, that guy alone is probably worth an entire thread. Bizarre!

I woke up around 4 and decided to stay in bed but finally get to some of the free TV shows I've downloaded from iTunes. I chose the Stargate SG-1 double-length pilot, "Children of the Gods." I saw the movie when it opened in '94 but I haven't seen it since then. A lot of it came back to me through the references in this episode. It feels like a 90s TV production; it's clearly more sophisticated than it would have been several years earlier, but it still has that "made by people who make TV shows" aesthetic. I think I could get into this series.

Incidentally, this episode is so far the winner of this challenge's Most Unexpected Nudity award: Vaitiare Bandera appears fully nude in one entire scene (though they blurred her pubic area). There are probably three or four closeups of her breasts. Totally did not expect that.

Finally have been able to watch the Heisei Gamera trilogy thanks to G Fest airing Gamera 3, and finding Gamera 2 on ITunes for 9.99. May download Gamera 3 as well when I get paid and have the money on my card.