Sanguine Appetites - Aug. 27 - Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

     Another blur and muddle of a week, with much of my attention on other personal and professional matters. Still, I've seen (or at least started to see) a few things. Oddly enough, aside from the TCM notes, threats looking for blood turned out to be the binding theme this week.
     Nicolas Cage has gotten involved in another fun entertainment, this time with the horror action comedy Willy's Wonderland (2021 - TV MA - 1h 21 m). It's much the same premise as the video game Five Nights At Freddie's, where someone is locked into an abandoned children's theme restaurant with an array of Chucky Cheese-ish animatronic characters who've become bloodthirsty menaces.

     Cage came in as one of the producers and as the star. With unnaturally dark hair and goatee, Cage's character goes unnamed (referred to only as "The Janitor" in the script and credits), and while he occasionally makes some vocal noises (usually during some violent action) he doesn't utter a single line regardless of the extreme circumstance or the various other characters who try to have conversations with him. His social repertoire is generally just shifting between staring and glaring. The character is simple and intense, with an intense work (and play) ethic. I've quickly come to think of him as an at least borderline autistic action hero.

     If nothing else, it's entertaining to see Cage go to town on bloodthirsty, life-size animatronics, beating down on and ripping them apart... and then dutifully cleaning up. While there is blood and gore, the true splatter scenes are mainly machine oil and grease.
     This was another COVID casualty, originally set for theatrical release just before Halloween last year, but eventually got a limited theatrical release this past February, along with video on-demand access... finally ending up on Hulu.
   Newly-arrived from Norway on Netflix this week is Post Mortem: No One Dies In Skarne. This is a 6-part (44 to 47 minutes ea.) series that starts with a dead woman being found in a field in a small town. A local woman, Live Hallangen, with seemingly no signs of violence. Her father (Arvid) and brother (Odd), who run the family funereal business, get the call. Being established in a small, quiet town, we gradually come to understand that theirs is not a thriving, prosperous business, merely the only game in town when the inevitable happens. Minorly ghoulish glee at signs of new business quickly turns to shock as the specifics are added. Both Arvid and Odd are distraught to learn who the new client is, but there's clearly shades other than paternal grief coming from the father. This becomes more pronounced once word comes back that despite being clearly dead in the eyes of the police, family, and the two medical examiners during their preliminary examinations, Live wakes up during the start of the autopsy.
     So begins a dark dramedy.
     The trailer gives away possibly more than it should, but on the other hand it's such a mix that it's difficult to know how to pitch it to an audience without giving much of it away. By about the middle of the second episode most of the key points are in play.

     I'm only about a third of the way into it (hey, it's supposed to be entertainment, not homework) and am interested to see how this plays out, but they haven't convinced me what tone they're going for, and I'm uncertain how much emotional recalibration I should be doing to account for Nordic culture.
     The trailer's in Norwegian, but my Netflix feed defaulted to giving me a reasonably smooth British English dub, with English subtitles, and various other combinations were offered. There should be some combination that'll work for you.
     As ever, I'll aim to double back and add any additional notes once I've seen the rest of it.

   Next Thursday, September 2nd, on FX will be the start of season three of the vampire mockumentary series What We Do In the Shadows. (Hulu has the previous two seasons, and will be carrying each new episode the following day.)

    We're down to the final days of August, and so the final days of TCM's 2021 Summer Under the Stars. As discussed last week, today and tomorrow are spotlights on Merle Oberon and Lee Marvin. The final three spotlights of August are:
     Sunday Aug 29th: Ingrid Bergman
     Monday Aug 30th: James Cagney
     Tuesday Aug 31st: Fredric March

 Closing out this week is another of movie that seemingly would have been great for one of the Saturday horror host shows I watched as a kid, but hadn't seen until recently -- probably in part because of its relatively short run time. This week it's the Roger Corman produced and directed Not Of This Earth (1957 - 67 min.)

     Starring original Marlboro Man Paul Birch, and the sultry-voiced Beverly Garland, who that same year was tv's first policewoman, as the star of Decoy. It even has perennial "That Guy" actor Dick Miller, here playing vacuum cleaner salesman Joe Piper.
       With shoestring budget king Corman running the show, you know better than to look for much in the way of fancy effects, but it all works smoothly enough, especially if you can recapture the heady, hormone-drenched mindset of one's late teens, which were the target audience for this film. Part of a wave produced to fill double features at drive-ins in the late '50s. (This one was paired with Attack of the Crab Monsters, btw., and did amazingly well, with a reported 400% profit in their first week!)
     Entertaining in its way from the opening, with a young couple sharing a moment of truly pallid passion at the end of their date, complete with a middle-aged screenwriter's idea of hep teen talk, and someone playing with the camera's f-stops in a clumsy attempt to makes scenes shot in the full bright of day pass for late night. They cut to an owl for a couple of hoots, though, so the audience has its bearings.
     This is the theatrical release, though I've read that there's a version that was expanded for tv syndication... by four minutes! This was reportedly accomplished mostly by reusing a bit of film as padding, so don't worry that you're missing out. The Corman spirit conquers all fiscal challenges, even in that new age of tv!
     Take care of yourselves, and come back next Friday, for what will be my final post of the Consortium of Seven's Year Two cycle. The following week we'll be formally onto Year Three!  -- Mike