Blacula
I always thought this would be a campy blaxploitation piece of cheese, and it certainly delivers at that, but Blacula is a surprising piece of effective horror cinema with some genuinely freaky moments that I did not expect. It's also got some distasteful ones, for sure, but there's a rough edginess to it and how it handles its portrayal of interactions between varying races, genders, and sexualities that seems radically different from the mostly white productions of Hollywood at the time. How many other films from 1972 or earlier can you say contained an interracial homosexual couple which appears unremarked? Sure, there's some awkwardness(I don't think Dracula cared much one way or the other about slavery, considering he was too busy fighting the Ottoman Empire), and this film is very, very 1970s and lives up to its blaxploitation reputation. But it has some great moments where it plays with vampire myth, and William H. Marshall gives a powerful performance as an African prince-turned monster who is driven by both his need to feed and his love for his long dead wife. Marshall was one of the great Shakespearean actors of his decade, lauded for his work in Othello, and he brings a capability and a charm to the low budget production that is both reserved and fierce.
Is Blacula phenomenal? No, but it's both entertaining and far better than I expected. It's a shame talent like Marshall's was largely passed over by Hollywood.
The Crawling Eye
Oh, this movie is shit. The acting is bad, the plot meanders and makes no sense, there are too many characters and not enough real meat to explain them all, and I found little reason to care much about what was going on. To top it off, the audio quality is horrendous, and the film suffers from terrible darkness that can make it hard to watch. Sure, the paper mache crawling eyes have a great hokey cheapness to them, but there isn't much of a hint about them for the hour of the movie, and the plot struggles to make much sense in the build up to the big reveal. This is a bad film, no way around it.
It was also the first film of MST3K's Comedy Central run, if you're a fan of the show.
