I love my new job. One of the advantages of working closer to home is that I feel so much more connected to the people around me. I reckon in the last two weeks I've seen more people socially than in two months at my previous job. I was even able to hook up with misteroblivious for a combination picnic and DVD/CD swap last weekend.
I lent him copies of Manos - The Hands of Fate, the Star Wars trilogy, and my Tomorrow People boxed set. I fully expect to at least see a review of Manos on the blog sometime soon. I ended up with the ELO boxed set and Bryan Ferry's Taxi. Plus, misterobvious was finished with my Midnite Movies double feature of Count Yorga, Vampire and The Return of Count Yorga.
With Lamont traveling to George Romero country to retrive children from summer camp, I spent my evening down at my mom's house. Steak dinner, swimming at the pool, nap and movie... It really doesn't get any better than that. My mom had requested that I bring along a movie to screen on her gigantic Phillips widescreen television. We had recently exhausted all the Hammer horror classics, so for a change of pace I brought along The Return of Count Yorga.
As a horror film fan, my adoration of the genre really runs towards the aforementioned Hammer films and Roger Corman's Poe series. But there's something about American-International Pictures of the early seventies that really fascinates me. No one will claim that the seventies found AIP at the top of its game. So maybe it's nostalgia that fuels my interest -- I remember catching a lot of them on TV back in elementary school, or maybe it's just knowing that these movies were the last gasp of fangs and castles before the genre was taken over by demon possession and mad slashers.
Take the Return of Count Yorga for instance. The acting, cinematography and makeup really aren't that great, but somehow the film hangs together as an experience much more than the sum of its individual parts. Scenes of Robert Quarry in pancake makeup running in slow motion should induce laughter -- instead, it's terrifying. The vampire brides attack on a family during a wind storm is particularly unsettling, even if it looks like their fake fangs are going to slip out of their mouths at any moment.
It was dark by the time the movie had finished and we all thought we could faintly hear the Santa Ana winds...
Like most AIP films of the era, The Return of Count Yorga is just plain fun, and isn't that what watching movies is all about?
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