Saturday, October 21, 2006

31 Days of Halloween - Day 21 Movie



Loosely based on H.P. Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space," "Die, Monster, Die!" (1965), looks and feels much like the Roger Corman Poe movies, though with a more contemporary aspect. Starring Nick Adams as an American student visiting his girlfriend, Susan, at her family estate in Arkham, England (transposed from Arkham, Massachusetts in the Lovecraft mythos), he finds himself in the center of a mystery involving an entire town shunning Susan's family and its house, a missing maid, a dead butler, a mother lying shut in her room, suffering from a mysterious illness, strange cries coming from the locked and glowing greenhouse, and a secretive father played by Boris Karloff.

This movie is highly enjoyable, moody, and moves right along which is pretty amazing once you realize how much of it is made up of padding involving characters carefully moving through rooms in search of things. The special effects, while by no means state of the art are pretty creative, and while some could say the mutated creatures look like playdough versions of the "yip, yip, yip" Martians from "Sesame Street" I thought they were pretty cool, and very alien looking.

In a lot of ways this movie is very similar to the recently viewed "Konga", though superior overall.

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