Night of the Demon (1957)
A black and white mystery flick about an American psychologist sent to Enlgand to investigate a demonic cult. The last guy to investigate this cult met an untimely end from a mysterious accident. In fact the first thing we get to see is the dude get wasted by a rad demon puppet by dropping some power lines on him and frying him. The American, Dr. John Holden, is very skeptical and basically spends the whole movie denying and trying to explain away the mysterious things the cult leader, Karswell is doing. Karswell doesn't directly do too many evil things, he mostly tries to protect himself. The focus of the movie is on a spell that comes from runes drawn on parchment which kind of works like the black spot in pirate lore. The last person to touch the parchment receives the demon's curse and will be killed by him next. The demon effects are pretty cool, although the youtube upload I watched this on wasn't of the best quality so it was hard to enjoy them too much. The movie almost plays out like a noir, with the fedora wearing detective/psychologist walking around night-time London and English countryside alike chasing clues, leads, and being generally surly about it all. Towards the beginning of the movie Karswell tells Holden that he is cursed and has until the 28th of October (Hey that's when I watched this! How 'bout that?). Holden blows this off like all the other claims of magic at the begenning, but we slowly start to see him change his mind, and as he gets deeper into the occult underworld we see the fear in him grow. Its pretty cool movie with mysteries, magic, and demons.
A good movie for a dark and stormy night
Dark and Stormy
2 oz dark or black rum (Kraken)
1 bottle Ginger Beer (try to find the alcoholic kind, if possible)
lime
Fill a glass with ice, pour on rum, then pour in the ginger beer, squeeze the lime and drop it in. Put on your best black robe and recite the ancient incantation: Asmodeus Baphomet Belial.
Too many sea monster movies yet? The confusing thing about this one is that barely makes any use of probably the main reason to even make a beach monster movie: chicks in bikinis. Doubly weird is that its Roger Corman who is usually not shy about showing us some ladies. Instead the cast is almost entirely dude scientists. Its not bad though, well I mean its still entertaining, and its mercifully short at barely over an hour. It starts off with this crew of people coming ashore to this island, one guy falls out the boat and we get a quick glimpse of one of the crab monsters before they pull his headless corpse out of the water. We don't even know who these people are or what they are doing (except that one of them is the Professor from Gilligan's Island) before one of them gets killed! Corman doesn't like to waste time. They seem to be far less concerned than you would expect by this, and continue on with their mission, although we still have no clue what it is. This one fat french (I think) guy starts talking about how quiet it is there, and says something about talking to the voices of the people that used to be there (foreshadowing). I'll skip ahead to the part where they tell you each one of these guys and the one gal is a scientist in a different field and they are there to study the effects of radioactive fallout left over from an H-bomb test. What a simpler time this was. There was also another team there before them but it has since gone missing. The quickly realize that apart from seagulls and crabs there are no other living animals on the island. Time passes and they start hearing strange sounds at night, and eventually disembodied voices. They start trying to investigate and realize its all coming from giant crab monsters. The rest of the movie follows suit with them trying to survive which means killing the hungry hungry crustacean. The monster effects are awesome and its pretty great how it talks to them with the voices of the dead scientists, mostly trying to mock them. Its a fun little popcorn movie, an almost textbook example of hokey 50's atomic critter flicks.