Frankenstein 1970 (1958) Karloff of Future Past.

While there's little better in life than movies from the past that take a shot of what life will be like in the future, there's really nothing better than when they get brazen enough to tack the futuristic year at the end of their title. This traps the movie or TV show into a path where it can't escape feeling dated, and, quite often, this leads future viewers to see the work as nothing more than a campy projection, like how incredibly behind the times Disney's "Futureworld" looks next to the ’80s era exhibits at Epcot center. Today's film definitely falls into that trap, unless there's been a catalog with home nuclear reactors available for purchase in the past forty three years. However, it does hit on some things that were surely 70s, interest in the occult, rampant narcissism, the dominance of TV, and the fact that no matter what era it is Boris Karloff is the man. Some twenty seven years after Karloff portrayed the monster in James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein, he returned to the laboratory, but not with a bolted neck. Instead, he portrayed a descendant of the creature's creator in the 1958 film that imagines mad science at work twenty two years into the future. This is Frankenstein 1970.

Don't Go Into The Lightning Bug's Lair #12: Don’t Scream, Doris Mays (1965)

I can see you haven’t heeded the creepy, crazy old man’s warning when he told you, “Don’t Go in the Lightning Bug’s Lair”, and I’m sure glad you didn’t because I have the second entry in my Halloween countdown to share with you. In the wake of Hitchcock’s Psycho, a number of films took a similar tact to try and cash in on the serial killer motif. William Castle even went to the well twice with his features Homicidal and Straight Jacket, both spins on the loose psychological theorizing that had tied up Hitch’s film so neatly. Castle wasn't the only one to see potential, and in 1965, John Bushelman, an editor with limited film experience, undertook a script from a first time screenwriter that took one of the major elements of Norman Bates’ mental problems and, by way of Ed Wood, filtered it into a film known as Day of the Nightmare. For the purposes of this list though, I’m going to talk about it under its alternate title which was used as it barnstormed around the country from drive in to drive in, and that title was Don’t Scream, Doris Mays.

Little Darlings (1980): A Camp with Virgins & No Slasher?

When I was a young girl going to camp, oh wait, I’m not a young girl and I have already established I didn’t go to camp. Let me try this again. When I was a thirty something guy sitting on his couch preparing to watch a movie about young girls at camp, I wasn’t sure what to expect. The film’s two young stars were both names I recognized, but I wasn’t sure if I was in for the female version of Meatballs or something more akin to an Afterschool Special. Surprisingly it was neither, and a bit of both. The film in question is Little Darlings, a movie I had heard about, but it was long out of print and never released on DVD. I finally recorded the flick when it played on TCM a few weeks back, and heads up, it’s playing again next Saturday (6/23/12, 2:15 AM) if this review inspires you to want to check it out. I could easily now write something titillating about the film’s man conceit, a race between two girls to lose their virginity, but Little Darlings isn’t crass. It tries to paint a picture of the secret life of teen and pre-teen girls, and, at least in this old guy’s opinion, it works.

Friday the 13th Part 3: A New Dimension in Mediocrity

Camp, I’ll be the first to tell you that I never went. My one aborted effort ended up with me coming home in the middle of the night rather than staying one moment more. While some may say that I missed out, and that I would never know the joys of making a wallet or swimming in a muck filled lake, I think I’m good with that. Over the years here at the Lair, I’ve talked about a lot of campers, but I’m still making my way through the most famous group of all, alumni of Camp Crystal Lake. So today I’m turning an eye to the Voorhees clan’s hat trick, and first appearance of the hockey mask,  Friday the 13th Part 3. Presented in 3-D, or 2-D with some rather silly scenes intended for the third dimension, which is how I watched it, this third entry (like the fourth after it) was intended to bring to franchise to a close. Yet, how can it, when every year there’s a waiting list for parents looking to send their snot nosed kid off to Voorhees country for a summer of terror. As long as they keep making teens and sending them into the woods, Jason is going to be there to hack them up.