Introducing...THE MOVIES OF MY LIFE

Okay, here’s the deal.  I had fun with the Halloween Horrorfest, even though it wore me out.  The most fun I had was conducting the daily Poll which dictated what I reported on.  I started doing that after a disastrous encounter with Zombie Hunter, and I came to enjoy the interactivity and unpredictability of not knowing what I was going to watch every day. 

So what I’m going to do is a biweekly Poll feature.  Starting with my birthyear, 1964, I’m going to choose four films at random.  These will be films I have not seen before, or saw so long ago that I have only the vaguest of memories of.  I’ll be emphasizing more obscure stuff and choosing based more on what intrigues me than on historical importance.  I’ll post the trailers for each along with some descriptions here at the start of each poll to help you make your decision.  And when all is said and done, I will have to report on the winner.

I’m 54 presently, so you figure we’ve got a good two years before this project peters out--especially since I put all the features of this blog on hold for Halloween Horrorfest time.

So, as I mentioned, we’re going to start off with 1964.  If I saw any of these when they first came out, I definitely would not remember it.  Your choices are:

HUSH, HUSH SWEET CHARLOTTE

One of the forgotten sub-genres of exploitation cinema is Hagploitation (a.k.a. Psycho-biddy), a fad that lasted roughly a decade.  You take an aging female movie star, have them play a mentally unstable woman with a tragic past, mix liberally with some lurid murders and family trauma, and stir.  Bouyed by the surprise success of What Ever Happened To Baby Jane, this is Robert Aldrich’s follow-up featuring an all-star cast playing Southern Gothic Games on Bette Davis.  I’ve been itching to revisit some hagsploitation and talk about the genre, so that’s why I chose it.

CARRY ON CLEO
The Carry On films were institutions of British Cinema.  This was the stuff that Monty Python and The Goodies were railing against in the late 60‘s.  I have to assume they came over here at some time, but they never showed up on TV as I was growing up, and I would never have known about them until I bought a second hand copy of Leonard Malton’s Movie Guide that included capsule reviews of all of them.  This is supposedly the best (its poster actually appeared on a stamp in 2008 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the series), and I'm intensely curious about them, which is why I chose it.

Incidentally, this is the only color film of the four.

THE EARTH DIES SCREAMING

As a Tom Waits fan, I was instantly drawn by the title--but this little, brief (it’s barely more than an hour) black and white sci-fi film was directed by Hammer Horror Mainstay Terrence Fisher.  I’m obviously a big fan of Fisher’s horror work, and am curious to see how he handles the science fiction trope of an alien invasion.

MURDER AHOY!

Given that we just had the umpteeth Hercule Poirot feature in Kenneth Branagh’s Murder on The Orient Express, it surprises me that there’s only been six films featuring Miss Marple.  Four of them were comic adventures featuring Margaret Rutherford, of which this is the last.  It’s not based on any Agatha Christie novel, and probably pissed off Christie something fierce.  As a fan of mystery fiction, I’m curious about this little alleyway of detective cinema, and that’s why I chose it.

I promise you it’s a coincidence that three of the four films are British.

So there are your choices.  Take a look at the trailers, read up on them and vote on what you’d like me to write on.  You have until Friday to make your decision.