Trawling Through The Thrift Stores with Joseph Finn

 Happy Thursday, everyone!  It's been a weirdly busy week so this is going up a little late.  Sorry about that.

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Back in 2018, Universal put out a collection of all 30 movies that were made around the big 6 of their monsters (Frankenstein, Dracula, the Wolf Man, the Invisible Man, the Mummy and Gill Man).  I've started to see the individual sets pop up in thrift stores and for prices way below the full set.  This is the first one I've actually grabbed, mostly because of all of those Universal releases from back then I always liked Creature From The Black Lagoon the best.  I find it the moodiest and best-filmed (and I'm including the excellent Spanish-language Dracula, which used the same sets as the Todd Browning version*, which would shoot during the day and the makers of the Spanish-language one would shoot at night after watching the day shoot and improving on the day's shooting).  It's a weird, atmospheric movie that has some very lovely underwater work.  And coincidentally, the one Universal monster actor (Ricou Browning) who is still with us at 92 years old.

I've sadly never seen the two sequels (in which Browning also plays the Creature), so this is a good resource for me.  

Creature from the Black Lagoon and Revenge of the Creature are both available for sale and rent; the second sequel, The Creature Walks Among Us is for some reason only on the Roku Channel.

*I'm always oddly fascinated that one of the stars of the Spanish-language Dracula, was the grandmother of directors Chris and Paul Weitz, of American Pie and About A Boy fame, and passed away in 2016 at 106.

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Ah, the weird joys of the era of Serious Men In Serious Lab Coats science fiction.  Well, sometimes it's a grim joy.  Like most of this time, there's almost no women in this and those who are are as thin a character you could imagine.  But this is still fairly worth reading; Clark knew how to make his science fiction plausible and didn't depend on far-out concepts like inertia and warp drives.  And it's interesting to see his take on a future Earth that has by dint of shame finally cut down on population growth.

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Ahhhhhh, my find of the week.  One of these days I do want to get the full Criterion set of all the Toho-era releases of Gojira movies, but I'm happy to start jam-packed set with all sorts of special features, including the American release of the movie that edits in Raymond Burr as an in for US audiences.  Plus, this besides being remastered also has a new English-subtitle translation.  

Like wow, the foldout of the blu-ray packaging is lovely.

And c'mon, look at that pop-up when you open the whole thing up!  It's so fun.

Godzilla is streaming on HBO Max, Criterion Channel, Roku Channel, Fubo, Crackle and Plex.

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My recommendation of the week is based on season 8 of Brokenwood premiering on Acorn TV.  A really fun New Zealand police procedural, it's worth your time if you have access to Acorn (you can get it as a channel through Prime Video or by itself).  It's a very appealing cast of characters that they've built up over a decade.