David Annandale

Gilbert (Gilbert John) is a film student with a radical idea: make a documentary about someone who is going to commit suicide. Get to know why, get to know the person, follow the whole process, right up to the very end. Collaborators Valerie (Valerie Hurt) and Michael (Michael Traynor) have deep misgivings about the project, but sign on when the apparently ideal subject is found. This is Matt (Matthew Tilley), who suffers from a brain tumour and simply wants to choose his moment to bow out with dignity before the pain becomes too severe.
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Two more episodes from Elvira’s Movie Macabre. The two films have little in common, but they do have odd little claims to fame. Scared to Death (1947) is Bela Lugosi’s only colour film. Tormented (1960), meanwhile, is actually pretty good for a Bert I. Gordon film, and features no back-projection-enlarged insects or people!
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This particular double-bill of offerings (in the form of rather muddy, scratched prints) from Elvira’s Movie Macabre makes a certain odd kind of sense: each film features one of Victor Frankenstein’s female descendants up to no good: his daughter in Lady Frankenstein, and his granddaughter in the inaccurately titled Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter.
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In the late-19^th Century, we find Elvira (Cassandra Peterson) as much in love with the idea of being a showgirl as she was in the original Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (1988). But given that Las Vegas doesn’t exist yet, she is on her way to Paris to be a can-can dancer. Elvira and her maid, Zou Zou (Mary Jo Smith) take a detour through the Carpathians (naturally), where they wind up at the castle of Lord Vladimere Hellsubus (Richard O’Brien). It transpires that Elvira is the spitting image of Lord Hellsubus’s deceased first wife, and all kinds of scheming and counter-plotting begins on the part of the various factions in the spooky old castle.
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