Halloween Movie Marathon: The Crawling Hand

I saw this movie as a kid, probably on the horror movie show hosted by Richmond's answer to Elvira, a guy who called himself the Bowman Body. He wore Dracula drag and had a bandaid on his forehead. (As it turns out, I'm not the only one who remembers Bill Bowman fondly, a documentary about "the Bowman Body" called "Hi there horror movie fans" is having a run at the Byrd Theater in Richmond, VA on October 28. For more infomation, check the Bowman Body's official site.)
The movie was from 1963, a black and white horror tale about an astronaut's disembodied hand that crept around choking people. (How the hand/arm survived the re-entry process was, not as I remember, explained.)
I don't remember very much about the movie but I do know it scared the bejesus out of me. I remember hearing scuttling noises while taking a bath after I'd seen it and I knew, I just KNEW that there was a disembodied arm in a silvery astronaut suit sleeve just waiting, waiting for me. 

I looked the movie up on imdb and it looks like the only version of The Crawling Hand still available is one that MST3K has worked over. I find Mystery Theater kind of hit or miss, but again, this is the kind of movie that you throw on when you've had a couple of hard ciders and are jacked up on sugar  cookies shaped like pumpkins.  I think it's the kind of movie that you really need to see in a crowd so the snark can flow.
Peter Breck, who most notably played one of the sons on The Big Valley (and who died earlier this year at the age of 82) was the star and other names of note in the cast were  Alan Hale, Jr. (the "Skipper" in Gilligan's Island) and Richard Arlen, who did a lot of genre films, including Island of Lost Souls. He also seems to have been a guest star on every single western made in the 50s and 60s, including some now almost forgotten, like Yancy Derringer.  (An actor named Jock Mahoney starred in the series and he's notable now because he was Sally Field's stepfather.)
The movie was written and directed by Herbert L. Strock, who did a lot of television (77 Sunset Strip, Highway Patrol) and a lot of genre movies, including I Was a Teenage Frankenstein. That movie starred the original Lois Lane herself, Phyllis Coates, Whit Bissell and Gary Conway.

Halloween Movie Marathon: Sixth Sense

I used to walk my dog with a neighbor who was a union reader (aka "story analyst") at Paramount and inevitably, we talked about scripts we were reading, both good and bad. She'd been on the job longer than I had and was fairly jaded. But one morning she was full of praise for a script she'd read the night before and she told me the story. It sounded good to me too (especially since I'd just read the script for yet another misbegotten remake), but I didn't really think about that conversation until a summer night several years later when I was in Arizona and at a drive-in where Sixth Sense was showing. The moment it started I remembered hearing the plot and so I knew all the way through that Bruce Willis' character was dead.
I liked the movie anyway.
I liked the movie enough to see it again (something I rarely do) with my sister (who was not really a big movie fan). Several minutes into the movie, she leaned over to me. "Bruce Willis is dead," she said.
"How do you know?"
"When he opened the door there was no reflection in the doorknob."
I hadn't noticed that, but she was right.
And so she knew the twist of the movie all the way through and still liked it.
The movie doesn't really have a lot of scares in it. There's a shock moment when we see a girl who was murdered by her mother (the late Brittany Murphy) and another near the very, very end when the boy sees a dead person who's wandered off from an accident up ahead. What works in the movie is the relationship between Bruce Willis' character and the boy's, played by Haley Joel Osment. (Haley Joel Osment is 24 now, does that make you feel old? He was just 11 when he appeared in Sixth Sense.)
This is a movie you'd put on at the end of a marathon of Halloween movies to mellow everyone out before they head home.

Halloween Movie Marathon: Trilogy of Terror

This was a television movie that aired in 1975 and as the name suggests, it was a trio of stories strung together only by their star, Karen Black, who played different parts in each section. I only remember one thing about the movie and that's a scene where a creepy witch doctor doll chases Karen Black around with a knife-sized spear. If you ever saw the movie, you remember that scene (and probably not much else). I suspect watching the movie as an adult would be a very different experience. It's probably campy as hell and not scary at all, but I was scared to death.
Karen Black starred in Nashville the same year she did Trilogy of Terror, and she was also in Airport 1975. (Remember?  she was the plucky flight attendant who ends up landing the plane.) The year before, she'd played Myrtle Wilson in the Redford/Farrow Great Gatsby.  She's still working, and in fact has roles in three movies coming out in 2013.
The movie had a lot of geek cred--Dan Curtis (Dark Shadows) was the director and William F. Nolan (Logan's Run) wrote it.  Nolan also wrote the horror movie Burnt Offerings, which also starred Karen Black and was also directed by Dan Curtis. this is the kind of movie you put on in the background while decorating the house for a Halloween party. 

Dakota does it in French

I'm reading Dakota Cassidy's Burning Down the Spouse and loving every page. She just posted the French cover of her book You Dropped a Blonde on Me, from her ex-trophy wife series or as they say in French, "Le club des ex."  The puppy in the pink bag kills me.
"Larguee" means something like "abandoned" but it may be an idiom. "Abandoned and recycled?" 

Halloween Movie Marathon--The Haunting

The 1963 version of The Haunting, based on Shirley Jackson's novel The Haunting of Hill House, is one of the scariest movies I've ever seen. And yet ... it's all done with dutch angles and music and suggestion. (That was not true of the remake from 1999. I was working at DreamWorks at the time the remake was released and we were shown the trailer during one of our story meetings. The trailer line was, "Some houses are born bad." I laughed out loud, was not the reaction they were looking for.)
I am a big, big fan of the novel, which I believe is flat out the best haunted house story written in the 20th century. If you haven't read it, give it to yourself as a Halloween present. It's a fast read and available used online at a zillion places.  And any reasonably stocked library should have it on their horror shelves as well.
the movie stars Julie Harris, Claire Bloom, Russ Tamblyn, and Richard Johnson as the paranormal researcher. Of the four, Johnson had the lowest profile. He was a theater actor who'd mostly done television in England. (He's still working, and had a multi-episode arc on MI-5.) Russ Tamblyn had had a huge hit in West Side Story two years before this movie came out, but he worked mostly in television after that. (One high-profile gig was his role on Twin Peaks.) Julie Harris was a well respected stage actress whose breakout role had been recreating her part in A Member of the Wedding.  She was also in East of Eden and Requiem for a Heavyweight, playing "good girl" ingenue roles.  Like Tamblyn, she then divided her time between television and features and theater. (She was last on-screen in 2009.)
The movie is in black and white, and the lighting is moody and creepy. It was directed by Robert Wise, who also directed the classic The Day The Earth Stood Still, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, and the first of the Star Trek movies.
If you're putting together a night of Halloween movies, this movie should be in the mix.

12 Nights of Christmas

I know, it seems like I'm rushing the season, but last year I didn't get the book out until it was very nearly Christmas and it was greeted with a massive "ho hum" instead of a "ho ho ho." This year I'm republishing 12 Nights of Christmas (12 Short stories) with a new cover (courtesy of Indie Author Services) and some little tweaks and twists. I'm very fond of these stories, some of which originally ran on the Dark Valentine site as part of our Twelve Nights of Christmas promotion. The stories are  al"inspired" by the verses of the classic Christmas son.
As of today, it's available at Smashwords (for 99 cents) and it will be up at Amazon.com by tomorrow if all goes well.

Halloween Movie Marathon--Silver Bullet

It is no secret that I'm a fan of Stephen King's books and more often than not, I've really liked the movies/miniseries made from those books. (I love, love, love Dolores Claiborne, and thought Kathy Bates was even better in it than she was in Misery, which won her an Oscar.) I also loved The Stand, and I hear through reliable sources that the reboot/update of that is very good.  I've not heard good things about the new It, though.
One of my favorite Stephen King movies isn't actually that good, 1985's Silver Bullet (or as it was billed, "Stephen King's Silver Bullet"). If you've never seen it, Silver Bullet is a werewolf movie and the "mystery" of the werewolf's identity is pretty much obvious from the moment the character walks on the screen.
Forget the werewolf stuff. The reason to see the movie--the reason I love it so much--is that the story is about a spunky, likable kid in a wheelchair and his maternal uncle, who supercharges the chair without the boy's mother knowing it, and who is a warm and supportive presence in the boy's life.
The kid was played by Corey Haim and his uncle was played by Gary Busey and both were terrific.
It makes me sad that Haim did not survive Hollywood and became yet another drug casualty. Silver Bullet came before the movies he's most famous for, Lucas and Lost Boys.
Gary Busey, who played "Uncle Red" was in kind of a mid-period in his career. He's been working steadily since 1968 (he has three movies coming out next year) and mixed in with the good stuff is so much not-so-good stuff that it's easy to forget just how damn good he is.  I first saw Busey in a little-known television show about a quirky family called The Texas Wheelers. It was sort of a Texas version of Party of Five (although Jack Elam played the dad) and I loved it to death.  Busey played the eldest brother and a pre-Star Wars Mark Hamill was one of his little brothers.  I don't really remember much about it except that the theme song was John Prine's "Illegal Smile."
Three years later, Busey channeled Buddy Holly in The Buddy Holly story and earned, if I'm not mistaken, an Oscar nomination for the part.  He's so natural and so likable in this movie that it's a shame he's been doing so many psycho villains lately.
This is a good Halloween movie to watch with little kids.