Musty TV's Maniacal Movie Countdown - Day 9: The Shadow of the Cat (1961)

Seems I can't get enough of cat-centered horror. This time we have The Shadow of the Cat, a Hammer production about the murder of an elderly rich woman by her husband and two servants, and the cat who witnesses the murder and seeks revenge.

So it's not really a horror movie in the classic sense, and it's not really a murder mystery since there's no mystery about who committed the murder. What it is, is a delight, because every time Tabitha the cat gets her revenge on the bad guys - seen from her POV - it had me gleefully laughing.

Of course there's always a bit of apprehension watching older movies that feature animals in prominent roles because we know there was a lot less attention paid to the animals' safety and comfort back then. For instance, there's an uncomfortable moment when Tabitha is held by her neck scruff that I really did not enjoy watching.

I do think editing did a lot of the heavy lifting, but it's also true that the shoot utilized a lot of cats because so many would just bolt from the scene and never come back. The excellent blog Cinema Cats has a good article about the film shoot and its troubles. So I do recommend the movie, but with the caveat (catveat?) that perhaps the cats didn't have the best time making it.

The Shadow of the Cat is available to rent online. I watched it on a Blu-ray borrowed from my library. 

Musty TV's Maniacal Movie Countdown - Day 8: Smoking Causes Coughing (2022)

 

I've included films by French director Quentin Dupieux in this countdown three other times (Deerskin; Mandibles; Rubber), but it's been a few years since he's made the list. I figured he was due back for inclusion, so I watched Smoking Causes Coughing, which once again, like the other Dupieux films featured in this countdown, isn't strictly a horror movie, but definitely includes some pretty horrible moments weaved into his usual absurd and surreal humor.

Essentially, this is a Power Rangers parody meets Tales From the Crypt. The "Power Rangers" are "Tobacco Force," and when they cannot defeat their enemies using brute force, they use the combined toxic elements found in cigarettes to destroy them. Their leader, Chief Didier, a giant rat who is constantly drooling green sludge from his mouth ("It could be detergent. It could be acid. We don't know!"), is also a ladies' man who two of the Rangers are in love with. Oh, and he's played by a puppet.

Didier sends the Tobacco Force on a team-building retreat where they, and other people/things, end up spending most of their time telling each other scary stories, which are then depicted, horror movie anthology style, as stories within the story. If this all sounds exceedingly stupid, you're right. But it also made me laugh, a lot. In all, its combination of extreme gore and absurdity reminded me of both Monty Python and Sam Raimi, which is a pretty strong combination.

As of this writing, Smoking Causes Coughing is available to stream free on Kanopy and Hoopla.

Musty TV's Maniacal Movie Countdown - Day 7: The Uncanny (1977)

At first glance you may assume, as I did, that the anthology horror film The Uncanny, starring Peter Cushing, is an Amicus production. But while it shares a producer with several of those films, it's actually a Canadian and British production from "The Rank Organisation," perhaps the worst name for a production company ever.

And to be sure, it's not as good as an Amicus production - it's got some terrible effects and egregious dubbing - but it makes up for this in having stories that are all centered on cats. And at times, it's pretty funny.

Cushing plays an author trying to get a book about the evils of cats published. He visits his publisher, played by Ray Milland, and regales him with three "true" stories about evil cats. In the first story, a rich woman intends to will everything to her many cats, and is murdered. In the second, an orphaned girl and her cat are tortured by the bratty cousin she is forced to live with. And in the final story, an actor (Donald Pleasance) and his mistress (Samantha Egger) murder his wife and then have to deal with the dead wife's spooky cat.

In all three, the people are much more evil than the cats, even if the cats do get their revenge. So it's a little odd that the Cushing character is so fixated on the cats and not, you know, the actual villains in these stories. But then again, I've always found people with cat phobias to be pretty irrational.

A good copy is currently streaming on Tubi.

Musty TV's Maniacal Movie Countdown - Day 6: Until Dawn (2025)

I saw Until Dawn after seeing the new Resident Evil. Both films are based on video games, but Resident Evil has raised the video game movie bar so high, I couldn't help but make comparisons in my head as I was watching it. And Until Dawn just pales in comparison.

Resident Evil somehow managed to fit so many aspects of game play into the film without it feeling like you were watching a video game. Things like the character talking to himself as he explores new scenarios, or finding a gun in one room, but then having to figure out where the bullets are, or being dumb and tossing aside a tool that will definitely come in handy later.

But the main conceit of Until Dawn is straight up video game play. All of the characters keep dying over and over again until they can figure out how to make it through the night and kill the big bad. And sure, that concept doesn't immediately mean it's going to feel boring and repetitive. But it felt boring and repetitive. It didn't help that none of the characters is very interesting, so I was never invested in their survival.

There was one night in their long series of nights that I did find genuinely surprising and grossly hilarious, and another night that cleverly turns the movie into a found footage film, but the movie just did not have enough of that ingenuity for me to feel fully engaged.

Until Dawn is streaming in Netflix.

Musty TV's Maniacal Movie Countdown - Day 5: Circus of Horrors (1960)

Circus of Horrors is another movie that I watched because it's on my shower curtain. (Previous shower curtain watches can be found here and here.) It's a lurid British film, somewhat along the lines of Peeping Tom, which came out the same year, thought it's not nearly as good as that one. 

Describing the plot makes it sound insane: A plastic surgeon botches a surgery and goes on the run, changing his name, but then he performs a successful facial surgery on the disfigured young daughter of the owner of a circus but when that owner is mauled to death by a bear, the surgeon takes over the circus, filling it with formerly disfigured women he is able to turn beautiful, but only if they agree to become performers in his circus, and when they eventually get tired of that life he kills them.

Like I said, pretty insane. 

While the film has some good visuals and costumes, I wish it was as entertaining as the plot makes it sound. Alas, I found it to be pretty boring, and it took me two days to finish it because I kept getting distracted by other things, like my phone. Or the sun setting. Or sleep.

I watched it on Tubi, which seems to have two versions, one is a really good print, and one is terrible. Choose wisely. Or choose differently, as it's probably not actually worth watching.

Musty TV's Maniacal Movie Countdown - Day 4: Depraved (2019)

I haven't watched a lot of Larry Fessenden's movies - and to be sure, there are a lot of them - but my dad's a big fan, and recommended Depraved, Fessenden's modern take on the Frankenstein story, so figured I'd dive in for this countdown.

Dr. Frankenstein this time around is Henry (David Call) a war veteran with untreated PTSD who deals with his trauma by creating life in his Brooklyn loft-turned-laboratory. He names his creation Adam (Alex Breaux), and Adam is quick to learn the basics of bodily coordination, though mastering the subtleties of human interactions are harder to instill. 

There are a lot of parallels to the two classic Universal films, such as a version of the Pretorious character, called Polidori (played by Josh Leonard of The Blair Witch Project) and Adam's desperate yearning for a bride, which comes to equally disastrous ends. 

It's a low budget movie, so it gets creative with some of the special effects, including some groovy "monster vision," as we see though Adam's eyes at times, and it's a pretty psychedelic view.  

But the best thing about Depraved is probably Alex Breaux's performance as Adam. Like the best of Frankenstein's monsters, he is both pathetic and scary, and he carries the entire picture on his patched-together shoulders.

I watched Depraved on Shudder.  

Musty TV's Maniacal Movie Countdown - Day 3: Deadly Blessing (1981)

Wes Craven's Deadly Blessing is another one of those movies I thought I may have seen before, but also thought, maybe it was just that I remembered the poster, which, to be fair, is pretty memorable:

 

If I had seen it, I remembered nothing about it, including that fact that a young Sharon Stone has a supporting role, and is maybe the woman on the poster? But with darker hair than she has in the movie? 

There are a few things I liked about this movie. I liked that it has so many female characters, including the three leads, Maren Jensen (probably best known for the original Battlestar Galactica series); Susan Buckner (who only made three movies, but did a lot of TV); and the aforementioned Sharon Stone (in only her second movie role). 

I liked the weird, made up religious sect led by Ernest Borgnine, the "Hittites," who "make the Amish look like swingers," and how the movie sets them up as the bad guys, but also maybe they're victims too? But also maybe they have a point with all the warnings they keep passing out?

The movie is essentially a slasher, but with possible supernatural overtones, and again, keeps you guessing about what's really going on. But that leads me to what I did not like. The ending just goes off the rails, with two ridiculous revelations, one of which is pretty offensive, and the other that essentially negates the entire movie that preceded it and doesn't make a lot of sense.

This is a Wes Craven movie, so it does have some good scares, looks great, and features some actors and scenarios that he loved to use over and over in multiple movies. It's that ending though. So dumb.

Deadly Blessing is available to rent online, and is streaming free on Hoopla, although the print was pretty bad. So I watched a Blu-ray copy from my library instead.

Musty TV's Maniacal Movie Countdown - Day 2: Little Monsters (2019)

When I started watching this movie I was convinced I had started to watch the wrong Little Monsters. No, it's not that I was intending to watch the 1989 Little Monsters starring Fred Savage (but perhaps I should?). I was set to watch a zombie movie starring Lupita N'Yongo as a kindergarten teacher protecting children from zombies. But the opening montage featured an Australian couple bickering with each other over increasingly stupid topics. So I double-checked to make sure I was indeed watching the 2019 movie Little Monsters and not some Australian sitcom.

And indeed I was. 

I did know going into it that it was a comedy, but I thought the whole film would center on Lupita N'Yongo's character. Instead, she shows up about 20 minutes into the movie, while the first part focuses on Dave (Alexander England), a deadbeat musician who has just broken up with his girlfriend and is living with his sister and nephew, Felix (played excellently by a kid with the best name ever: Diesel La Torraca ).

The duo eventually finds themselves on a field trip to a petting zoo with kindergarten teacher Miss Caroline (N'Yongo) and children's show host Teddy McGiggle (Josh Gad). And this petting zoo is inconveniently located next to a U.S. military testing facility that has just had a breach...

I'll give the movie props for having the balls to turn kids into zombies, albeit not any kids we really care about, and also appreciate that it manages to keep the kids-in-peril-plot pretty low stress. But it doesn't do anything new with the zombie set-up, and just isn't really funny enough for me to fully recommend it. Much of the comedy relies on Josh Gad's character, and whether you enjoy that will have a lot to do with how much Josh Gad you can stand (my tolerance is pretty low). 

But I will say I really did enjoy Lupita N'Yongo's performance. She's a great combination of fierce and compassionate in the role, doing her best to protect her class and maintain calm.

Little Monsters is streaming on Hulu. 

Musty TV's Maniacal Movie Countdown - Day 1: Slaughterhouse Rock (1987)

It's been a few years since I launched this countdown with a San Francisco-set horror movie, so I thought I'd go back to that tradition for 2026. Too bad the movie I chose was Slaughterhouse Rock which just barely counts as a San Francisco movie (or, really, a movie at all).

About half of the movie is set on Alcatraz, though aside from a few establishing shots that include the San Francisco skyline and the Golden Gate Bridge, it is very clearly not actually Alcatraz. There's also not a lot of "rock" - in either sense of the term - happening in this slaughterhouse despite the story's initial set-up being the death of a heavy metal band as they were visiting Alcatraz.

Plot wise, it begins with a local college student having bad dreams related to that event, so he and seemingly everyone he knows decide the only way to stop the dreams is for all of them to venture to Alcatraz after dark together to break a curse. Or something.

It's there that they run into the only thing that makes this movie even slightly worth watching, and that's Toni Basil as a ghost who's stuck on the island, but knows how to set the other souls stuck there free. And yes, it involves a dance, a clip of which I will include below. She also has several great costume changes that are peak 80's does 1940's and 1950's retro that I'm pretty sure came out of her own closet. And she is also featured, along with Devo, on the soundtrack.

Other than that this movie manages to be a total snooze. Like, I literally fell asleep twice while watching it. You need only watch the film's opening scene, which goes on forever, to know that this is a movie that will streeetttch wherever it can to make its 90-minute running time.

Slaughterhouse Rock is streaming on several platforms. I watched it on Prime, to avoid commercials.

Clear the Cobwebs and Mothballs, It's Countdown Time!

I can hardly believe tomorrow is the first day of October. Where did September go? Where did this summer go? Where did this year go??

But I'm not complaining. October is the official start of my favorite time of year, and I am very excited to once again take part in the blog-based Countdown to Halloween. It's officially the 19th year the Maniacal Movie Countdown has been a part of the Countdown to Halloween! And as has been tradition for the past six years, I will be posting every day about a new-to-me horror movie, 31 (at least!) movies in all. 

I am selecting the movies to watch a little differently this year. I have a huge Letterboxd Watchlist, and a huge chunk of them are horror movies. So, for the most part, I am choosing my picks at random, while still trying to strike a balance between newer and older titles. No doubt this will lead to me sitting through some stinkers. But perhaps my doing so will save you from a similar, dreaded fate.

As always, I want to offer a huge thank you for joining me this year, and in years past. Please also be sure to check out some of the other blogs and social media profiles that are partaking in this year's Countdown! You can find a full list on right sidebar of the countdown's official site. 

So, please check in tomorrow for what will hopefully be a treat. If it isn't, I welcome any tricks you may want to offer.