Yikes, those eyes look so uncanny valley.
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I don’t know the IP status of Frosty or Rudolph(though I know the songs predate the Rankin Bass specials, and the Rudolph song is based on a story from 1939(, but at least in Frosty’s case, there’s an argument to be made that having the Frosty name attached to a piece of media doesn’t offer much over a generic living snowman character.
Anyways, continuing the theme and hitting a couple of feature length things, I listened to The Santa Clause and The Santa Clause 2 today and never realized before today that the title of that Trilogy is Clause, not Claus.
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If you fancy a cheesy zombie romp that has it’s tongue firmly planted in its cheek (although it would seem some of the cast didn’t get that memo), check out Z Force. Currently on Tubi, Roku, Apple TV, and Prime.
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When VHS rental stores just started opening, I remember seeing the cover and being freaked right out. Decades later, I was talking with a fellow who owned one of the last rental stores in western Canada. I was like, “There was this VHS movie cover when I was younger with a severed head, with beady eyes and weird antennae-like things coming out of his head or something…” Then he immediately cut me off and said, “Microwave Massacre.” 
The one thing I love about horror movie effects is that the makeup doesn’t have to look real, just uncanny and gross.
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And finished the Santa Clause trilogy this evening.
I just saw War of the Rohirrim. This is a hand-drawn animated film with an original script of a mostly original story set about 200 years before the LOTR stuff, directed by Kenji Kamiyama and with anime character stylings.
It’s a good adventure, and hand-drawn animated features are now hella rare, so I was glad to see it in a cinema.
I’m not especially a fan of anime (apart from series I saw as a kid in the 80s) but that didn’t bother me here. My way into LOTR originally was via Ralph Bakshi’s animated film in the 70s, so for me, this was more a return to familiar turf. It even ends broadly in the same way as the 70s film, with a big battle at Helm’s Deep. Though it also chucks in all the fan service stuff in the last 5 minutes, which looked especially pathetic when it had stood for over 2 hours on its own legs.
This film actually has more things in common with Bakshi’s production. Bakshi shot his whole film as live action, then rotoscoped it all. In the new film, they did the same thing with the actors, but collected motion capture data, stuck that in the Unreal engine, manipulated it to design the shots and then used those as guides (not rotoscope trace guides) for the 2d animators. The backgrounds are often smoothly moving 3d entities, and sometimes this didn’t gel with the 2d front animation, but this is a minor complaint.
-Wade
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The animated movie “The Snowman” (not Frosty) from 1982 is one of the most beautiful movies I have seen. It is based on the book by Raymond Briggs and music by Howard Blake.
The Snowman (Trailer for TV Movie 1982) - IMDb
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For the Holidays, this isn’t quite a movie, but it’s movie-adjacent.
My favorite Christmas Carol adaptation is Starkid’s VHS CHRISTMAS CAROL which is an original short musical with 80s flair and the Dickens and the Spirits and the Humbug.
Note: Some NSFW language and humor, nothing too scandalous for older kids: https://youtu.be/ieC-QuFKFVc?si=2mFXLSzNNk0vkOLA
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Started listening to the Jim Carry version of how the Grinch Stole Christmas last night for the first time ever and finished it earlier today after my mediaplayer’s batteries died on me. I don’t think it’s as charming as the Chuck Jones adaptation from the 60s, which has the advantage of it’s script being very close if not exactly 1-to-1 with Seuss’s original verse and the fact I grew up watching it on television every year, but it does a very good job of expanding the story and giving the Grinch a backstory and more of a personality beyond being a one note Christmas hating curmudgeon.
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Well, the last film I reviewed here (War of the Rohirrim) had a fan service cameo by an anime Christopher Lee (as Saruman) during its last five minutes.
The film I saw today, Meat Cleaver Massacre (1975) gives its top billing to Christopher Lee. But he’s not actually in it. But, he does narrate the trailer for the film direct to camera. BUT he also claims to have been tricked into doing this!
Christopher Lee has form with claiming to have been tricked. He appears In Jess Franco’s Story Of O knockoff Eugenie (1970), but said something like, “I didn’t know there was a nude woman behind that pillar.” If you know anything about him, you’d know he had this conflict all through his life after becoming famous as Dracula for Hammer, wanting to treat everything like Shakespeare but also appearing in a zillion exploitation films and not really owning it.
Anyway… Meat Cleaver Massacre. It doesn’t have Christopher Lee in it. It doesn’t even have a meat cleaver. That’s why they call them exploitation films.
This is a very strange supernatural slasher film in which a professor teaching Cthulhu-like folk mythology is home-invaded and left in a coma by wayward students. His revenge, from his coma bed, is to summon the demon he spake of and have it kill them in means foretold in a painting of the demon.
For instance, the first corpse in the painting is impaled on a big green thing. The first student to die is in the desert when he starts being hit by something. Eventually you realise he’s being killed by a tumbleweed (the green thing), thanks to the painting.
A wide variety of music, creative direction, good and terrible performances, nice photography and a non-sequiturial screenplay make this pretty interesting-weird-bad.
Please enjoy Christopher Lee’s (really funny, once you see what follows) narration, as you won’t see him in the film, were you to watch it. Trailer includes blood, some stabbing, some gore.
-Wade
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Such video nasty vibes! My favorite after Christopher Lee trying to class it up is
[title drop in flashing red with VO]
MEAT CLEAVER MASSACRE
[assailant picks up a candlestick]
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For a moment I thought of Burke and Hare, a comedy based on two real-life graverobbers who made their living supplying cadavers to the Edinburgh medical schools in the 19th Century.
The cast has the actors from the cult British comedy Spaced, plus Andy Serkis. It’s not stellar but I find it quirky and endearing. Portrays what is possibly the funniest orgasm in movie history.
I mean, it does sound better than CANDLESTICK MASSACRE.
Yeah, I saw that at the movies. The main thing I remember was a comedic montage of them snuffing people out, including sitting on someone to suffocate them. John Landis hasn’t directed a feature film since this one (though not because it was a disaster or anything).
-Wade
Listened to Santa Claus the Movie the other night, and the movie Jack Frost with Micheal Keaton tonight. The former I last watched on VHS, so there were details I had forgotten, the latter was completely different from what I was expecting.
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Home Alone.
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Since my last post, I have listened to White Christmas and the Night Mare before Christmas.
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Just typed up my thoughts on the 1977 animated movie version of “The Hobbit”, which we watched for the first time last night.
Alt text for above picture
Cover of the Spanish DVD of “El Hobbit (The Hobbit)” which we watched. Showing a smiling, and rather plump, hobbit standing on a pile of gold in front of white-bearded wizard Gandalf and the Lonely Mountain behind with a red dragon flying in front of it.
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I’ve seen it just once, about 20 years ago at a double of it then the Bakshi LOTR. I’d already watched the latter dozens of times on TV/VHS and loved it. The much cheaper The Hobbit inevitably seemed like nothing in comparison. It also looked like the print had been left in someone’s sunny windowsill.
I remember that at the ‘tween film interval, someone came out of the cinema crying, ‘The song! The bloody song!’ - referring to some song in The Hobbit that had rubbed them the wrong way.
Wade
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Oh, that movie was formative for me! Gollum scared the crap out of me as a little kid. Nightmares for weeks. I don’t know what my parents were thinking to let a 6-year-old watch that. I first read the books when I was about 10, and still saw Gollum as the scariest thing ever.
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