31 Days of Halloween: Tim Burton Night: Edward Scissorhands – A Classic if You Can Stomach Johnny Depp's Bullshit

Edward Scissorhands – Tim Burton - 1990

★★★-Day 2 of the Nightmare on Film Street  31 Days of Halloween Horror Challenge. Tim Burton night. Went with Edward Scissorhands, which I haven’t seen in 30 years. Gist is an artificial man with scissors for hands struggles to find acceptance in a suburban community while navigating love, isolation, and prejudice. Blah, blah, blah.

Gonna start with this… I’m pretty over Johnny Depp’s shit, and this is Johnny Depp at his most Johnny Deppiest. This is a glimpse into how insufferable he would become, with his sort of whiny, shuffling shtick. Get the feeling he is the type of guy that believes he knows what it is like to be a black man getting hounded by the cops because it happened to his character in this movie. 
 
But this film has a lot to like, of course. Casting is dope. Alan Arkan is fantastic in everything. Ditto on Winona Ryder. Dianne Wiest really steals the show though. She is kind of the Gen X surrogate mother, always playing a kind somewhat out of her depth mother in flicks like The Lost Boys, Footloose, and Parenthood. Also features Anthony Michael Hall and Kathy Baker, whom I’ve always had a bit of a thing for since seeing her in The Right Stuff. Even get the legend Vincent Price in his final film role.
 
Quick anecdote about Price that I love, John Waters said he used to pretend Vincent Price was his dad growing up, which makes sense. 
 
Style is top tier. A random still at any point in the film and you can 100% tell it is a Tim Burton movie. Plus it is completely original. Not anything I’d seen up to that point. The ending is lame though. Ryder is old, Depp is young and in a world of shit, and then it is over. Cool. 
 
But the film did give birth to the drinking game “Edward 40hands.” You can do this with pretty much any item, sure, but this is the inevitable most hilarious iteration. 

Witchfinder General is the okayest movie of all time

"If they swim, the mark of Satan is upon them. They must hang." Yeesh. Too much torture, rape, hanging of innocent people, and screaming in agony for my taste. Even see a woman get burned alive while her husband is forced to watch. While a "good" movie, I fucking hated watching it. Therefore, okayest, I guess. 

Gist of this extremely disturbing movie is that Matthew Hopkins, a real POS, and his even worse assistant, John Stearne, wander the English countryside gathering up supposed witches before torturing confessions out of them and condemning them to death. 

Law and order are pretty much nonexistent. The film takes place during the English Civil War between the Royalists and Parliamentarians when everything was in complete chaos. The film mostly focuses on a Royalist soldier named Richard Marshall who pursues Hopkins and Stearne for raping his fiance, Sara, and murdering her priest uncle, John Lowes. 

Released in 1968, the film was directed by Michael Reeves. It stars Vincent Price, Rupert Davies (Lowes),  Hilary Dwyer (Sara), Ian Ogilvy (Marshall), and Robert Russell (Stearne). It was based on the book of the same name by Ronald Bassett. 

Vincent Price plays the role of Hopkins, the witchfinder general, a historical figure, making it all the more disturbing (though this is highly fictionalized). It was in the government's interest to murder clergy at that time. Clergy lived off tax money, so murdering them meant that they could just pocket that money. They paid sociopaths like Vincent Price's character to do this shit. It was cheaper to pay them a one-time fee than continually pay the clergymen. Plus, they could seize the land and whatnot. So, yeah, these witchfinder general types not only loved killing and inflicting pain, but it was also in their best interest to make shit up and kill as many "witches" as they could. The world has never been just. But eventually, Parliament got uneasy with his mass murder and such and accused him of witchcraft, because why not, and forced him into retirement. When Oliver Cromwell tells you you need to chill the fuck out, you are indeed wilin' out. 

Anyway. This is part of a folk horror collection on Shudder. It's considered part of the unholy trinity of the genre, along with Blood of Satan's Claws and The Wicker Man. I saw the remake of the latter, a real insane piece of work staring Nicholas Cage, this is the "not the bees" movie. I'll probably check those out. If they are equally brutal, I'm done with folk horror. 

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein is the greatest movie of all time

I know there's no such person as Dracula. You know there's no such person as Dracula. But does Dracula know it? Pretty fun flick. Costello, the short one, is more than a little irritating and the ending is anticlimactic, but it's funny even now and has serious nostalgia for moi. Saw this as a child with my grandma, miss her. Turned me onto it after we watched Monster Squad together. Good companion movies. Both are solid intros to the Universal monsters and are what I'd call gateway horror. Also, super kid-friendly. 

Cast is what you think it is with one exception. You have Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. They are their normal personas. Lon Chaney Jr. is the Wolf Man and Bela Lugosi is Dracula. Lugosi is apparently smacked out his mind by this point of his life. Frankenstein's Monster I always thought was Boris Karloff but it's some look-a-like named Glenn Strange. There are also a couple of chicks and a pretty boy, none of whom I recognize, that play central parts. Oh, and Vincent Price is sort in like 10-seconds of the movie. He's the uncredited voice of the Invisible Man. 

Gist of the movie is that Abbott and Costello deliver wax monsters figures (Frankenstein's monster and Dracula) to a wax museum. However, the monsters come alive and take off. The Wolf Man is onto this shit though tries to warn these idiots. Costello sees the shit go down but can't convince Abbott. Also, Costello is trying to slay two chicks at the same time, I'm pretty sure. They are into him, but he's a moron. The fact that he is so dumb makes Dracula want to use his brain for Frankenstein monster's body so he can control it. Seems like something of a Get Out situation. It doesn't really hold up under scrutiny, but, again, fun. 

MVP of the flick is totally Abbott. His straight man schtick makes the movie and the duo, in my opinion. His deadpan, don't have time for this nonsense is tits. He does the funniest straight man of all time while Costello is out there trying to play hero ball.