Scary stuff, kids!

Unearth the unexpected for Halloween home viewing: 10 frightfully classic movies

Don't rent the remake; instead go for the 1942 version of Cat People
In Carnival of Souls, the University of Houston’s very own Sidney Berger,right, gives an iconic performance as a supporting character best described byRoger Ebert as “the definitive study of a nerd in lust.”
The classic 1951 movie, The Thing From Another World
Donald Sutherland in a dramatic scene from the 1973 movie, Don't Look Now

If you’re seeking scary movies for Halloween viewing, don’t be content to round up the usual suspects. Instead, consider these alternatives, easily accessible for rental, purchase on downstreaming at various online and brick-and-mortar outlets:

THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951)

CAST: Kenneth Tobey, James Arness

THE PITCH: At a remote Air Force outpost in the Arctic, a research team discovers a long-frozen spaceship – and, more important, a long-frozen spaceship pilot. After the ice melts, scientists try to reason with the defrosted alien. When that fails, a gung-ho commander (Tobey) switches to Plan B.

THE VERDICT: Forget about the John Carpenter remake and the recent prequel/sequel/whatever. Arguably the scariest monster mash of the Cold war era, this sci-fi shocker is best enjoyed with all the lights turned out. Hey, even the folks in Carpenter’s own Halloween were caught watching it.

CAT PEOPLE (1942)

CAST: Kent Smith, Simone Simon

THE PITCH: A handsome architect (Smith) hastily woos and weds a beautiful artist (Simon), then finds himself frustrated (to put it mildly) when she insists they cannot consummate their union. She claims that, if they enjoy conjugal bliss, she’ll turn into a murderous panther. Trouble is, she’s equally likely to get catty if she suspects her husband is romancing a co-worker.

THE VERDICT: Val Lewton brilliantly exploits the power of suggestion in this wide-awake nightmare of eerie shadows and unseen terrors.

DR. TERROR’S HOUSE OF HORRORS (1965)

CAST: Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing

THE PITCH: A tarot reader (Cushing) predicts some seriously fatal futures for his fellow train travelers: A jazz musician will pay dearly for “sampling” voodoo chants, a newly married professor (an incredibly young Donald Sutherland) will discover his bride is a vampire, an evil art critic (Lee) will be pursued by the severed hand of an artist he drove to suicide…

THE VERDICT: The very best of the Brit horror anthologies produced by Hammer and Amicus studios during the 1960s and ‘70s.

DIABOLIQUE (1955)

CAST: Simone Signoret, Vera Clouzot

THE PITCH: At a boy’s boarding school in a Paris suburb, the sadistic principal (Paul Meurisse) brutalizes his mistress (Signoret) and torments his wife (Clouzot). So they drown him in a bathtub, then dump him into the school’s swimming pool. But when the pool is drained, the body is gone. Uh-oh.

THE VERDICT: Henri-Georges Clouzot's classic thriller has spawned three authorized remakes, and influenced countless other films. But the ingeniously creepy original remains in a class by itself.

CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962)

CAST: Candace Hilligoss, Sidney Berger

THE PITCH: Low-budget cult fave about a woman (Hilligoss) who seemingly survives a car crash, then endures much dislocating weirdness – and many spooky hints that, hey, maybe she didn’t survive the crash — when she moves to Salt Lake City to work as a music teacher.

THE VERDICT: Herk Harvey’s stripped-to-essentials ghost story offers a nifty final twist that was echoed decades later in The Sixth Sense. The minimalist production values somehow enhance the overall sense of mounting dread. And the University of Houston’s very own Sidney Berger gives an iconic performance as a supporting character best described by Roger Ebert as “the definitive study of a nerd in lust.”

THE WICKER MAN (1973)

CAST: Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee

THE PITCH: While investigating the disappearance of a child on a small island off the Scottish coast, a police detective (Woodward) finds a contemporary cult still sacrifices innocents to ensure bountiful harvests. The situation is even more dire than it sounds, since the detective is – well, let’s just say he could have starred in The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

THE VERDICT: Robin Hardy’s subtly scary occult thriller – incalculably craftier than the misguided remake starring Nicolas Cage — continues to cast a spell on connoisseurs of the cinemafantastique.

HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM (1959)

STARS: Michael Gough, Shirley Ann Field

THE PITCH: Long before he was a faithful manservant to three different Batmen, Gough played a malevolent mystery writer who raises bloody hell with real-life mayhem.

THE VERDICT: Still shocking after all these years, this grisly horror show begins with horrific carnage – think binoculars booby-trapped spring-driven spikes – then turns even nastier.

THE OLD DARK HOUSE (1932)

CAST: Boris Karloff, Ernest Thesiger

THE PITCH: On a dark and stormy night, stranded travelers seek shelter in a decaying mansion way off the beaten track. This, of course, is a big mistake. Karloff plays a mute butler who knows where all the bodies are buried, quite possibly because he buried most of them himself.

THE VERDICT: Call it an early draft for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and you won’t be far off the mark.

INVADERS FROM MARS (1953)

STARS: Jimmy Hunt, Arthur Franz

THE PITCH: A younger (Hunt) awakens from a bad dream to see a UFO landing near his home. Unfortunately, no one believes his story. Even more unfortunately, many grown-ups – including the boy’s parents – start acting really, really strange after they visit the landing site.

THE VERDICT: You may watch this one with your kids, but don’t be surprised if you, too, wind up having to sleep with a night light in your room.

DON’T LOOK NOW (1973)

STARS: Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie

THE PITCH: A restorer of ancient churches (Sutherland) fails to appreciate his powers of precognition, even after he foresees the death of his young daughter. Which means, alas, he can’t spot portents of another untimely demise.

THE VERDICT: Strictly for grown-ups (and not just because Christie and Sutherland share a notoriously erotic bedroom scene), Nicolas Roeg’s sophisticated stunner is well worth a look.

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Movie Review

New comedy I Want Your Sex saddles an all-star cast with a dull story

Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

Cooper Hoffman and Olivia Wilde in I Want Your Sex.

Writer/director Gregg Araki has been making provocative movies for nearly 40 years, releasing his debut — Three Bewildered People in the Night — in 1987. Most of them have had plotlines that revolved around sex in one way or another, and for his latest — his first film in 12 years — he’s putting it right there in the title, I Want Your Sex.

Elliot (Cooper Hoffman) is an aimless twenty-something who can’t even afford the rent for his apartment with best friend, Apple (Chase Sui Wonders). Thankfully, he finds a job at the gallery of artist Erika Tracy (Olivia Wilde), who is open with her sexuality both in her artwork and in her day-to-day life. That soon includes Elliot, whom she convinces to enter into a dominant-submissive relationship with her, with sessions taking place both at work and her home.

Elliot, who’s in a going-nowhere coupling with Minerva (Charli XCX), is more than willing to participate, both because it lets him feel something he doesn’t get normally and because Erika offers a perspective on sex that’s much different from people of his generation. But as he gets in deeper with her, he starts to lose a sense of himself, going down a path in which he finds himself talking to police detectives Zem (Johnny Knoxville) and Zola (Margaret Cho).

Araki does his level best to make I Want Your Sex into a broad comedy, and early on it seems as if he might succeed. The deadpan way that sexual objects appear in the film (a penis-shaped rug in Elliot and Apple’s apartment, a vagina artwork with chewed gum as the medium) make for amusing sight gags. He also makes Elliot the bewildered other in multiple twosomes, with Minerva being the funniest, as she’s way more interested in studying than his ham-fisted attempts at sex.

It’s clear that Araki wants the film to be a commentary on the generational differences about sex, but he fumbles his own idea. It starts with an on-the-nose conversation between Erika and Elliot, and continues with the various dalliances, which seem to be more about making Elliot look and feel ridiculous than giving true insight. Their encounters certainly open his mind about what sex can be, but their one-note nature makes them repetitive and frankly boring, odd considering the acts in which the two engage.

The uninspired storytelling makes the 90-minute film drag way more than it should. Araki includes a few other characters to try to vary the tone of the film, including gallery workers Zap (Mason Gooding) and Vikktor (Daveed Diggs), but their early promise yields little results. The framing device of Elliot’s interview with the detectives never works, especially because Araki completely neuters the personalities of Cho and Knoxville for seemingly no good reason.

The cast as a whole goes to waste. Hoffman is showing the promise of his late father (Philip Seymour Hoffman), and even though he’s appealing here, the material pulls him down. Wilde just made her own provocative movie about sex (The Invite), and this one pales in comparison despite her heightened performance. Wonders, Charli XCX, and Gooding are all young stars who deserve to be showcased much better than they are in this film.

A film called I Want Your Sex is announcing itself as daring and alluring, but this film contains almost none of those qualities. Instead, it’s a slog that only occasionally has something interesting to show or say, mostly relying on the power of its actors to hold viewers’ attention — and failing at even that.

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I Want Your Sex is now playing in select theaters.