The Black Castle; Permanent Midnight; The Poseidon Adventure

It’s well into July and I haven’t yet posted! I have much to catch up on. Briefly, then, let me enumerate our recent films. Most recently, Joe and I watched Boris Karloff in The Black Castle (1952) with our friend Day, but I remember only that Lon Chaney Jr. stole the show as the monstrous, gigantic and massively scarred henchman. “His name is Gargon!” Day exclaimed. Of course, what else could it be? And before that, we watched Permanent Midnight, a dark comedy/schlockfest starring a very sinewy Ben Stiller as Jerry Stahl (based on Stahl's autobiographical book about being a television writer hooked on junk). The first half was the dark comedy, which was actually not bad, featuring the memorably shocking line uttered by Ben Stiller’s blond mistress when they first screw: “Ohmygawd, I’m f**king a Jew!” The second half descended into schlockfest with every cliché in the book, so to speak, and it might have been funny had it been done ironically. Alas! It didn’t seem ironic in the least. It felt instead like a studio ending cooked up by executives welding focus group tests. “They really messed that one up,” Joe said.

And before that… The Poseidon Adventure! The 1972 version,and don’t even talk to me about the remake. Along with The Towering inferno (which I saw as a kid and it scared the shit out of me), this is Seventies Disaster Movie at its best! It’s got religion in the form of Gene Hackman as an arrogant and buff preacherman battling to lead his flock of survivors up to the hull of a cruise ship after it gets hit by a tidal wave and turns over. Lots and lots of bodies. Big cheesy fun acting. Big cheesy but pretty good effects. The new version only had lots and lots of bodies and cheesy but too CGI-ey effects, no character whatsoever. However! We do have an odd story associated with the remake. While in New York last year, when Poseidon was in theatres, Joe and I saw a giant billboard advertising the movie, just across from the cruise ship that we were about to board. Was it a joke, we wondered?