On Tuesday, December 16th, the Grindhouse Film Festival at The New Beverly Cinema will present the perfect antidote to Yuletide schmaltz… a blood-soaked double bill of Bob Clark’s BLACK CHRISTMAS (aka SILENT NIGHT, EVIL NIGHT 1974) and Theodore Gershuny’s SILENT NIGHT, BLOODY NIGHT (1972).  I reviewed both of these movies here in 2006, as part of my “Cruel Yule” review series of holiday-themed horror movies.  I quote myself in saying that I found BLACK CHRISTMAS had an eerie magic present in very few slashers new or old and that SILENT NIGHT, BLOODY NIGHT was and remains an a resonant study of human disaffiliation taken to its logical and gory extreme. READ MORE

In considering the darker aspects of Disney movies with my fellow Morlocks this week, I’ve been mulling over my own shifting emotions about these undeniably compelling movies.

One of the joys, and occasionally jarring aspects of relishing Walt Disney movies is that your perception of them can change–sometimes drastically–when seeing these films over a lifetime. As I mentioned in an earlier blog on Swiss Family Robinson (1960), mischievously endearing characters such as child actor Kevin Corcoran in that movie were the kind that I keenly identified with when I first saw the film. Now, however, well, let’s just say I’d probably swim away from that island if I were stuck there, sharks or no sharks.  As the youngest member of the shipwrecked family, Kevin‘s pleas in that film to keep every living thing as a pet, his wheedling complaints whenever his elders tried to keep him from harm, and his misplaced sense of injustice touched me once, giving voice to all the grudges I probably nursed as the youngest of four, though now, that piercing whine of his could probably crack crystal.

There are some characters in almost every Disney movie that I once wholeheartedly enjoyed whose rants, capers, and irksome pleas for attention now make me lunge for the fast forward button. For want of a better term, I’ve decided to term this evolving movie-going experience as “the Corcoran syndrome”. By the same token, there are often other, once stodgy figures in Disney movies, whose mild, wet blanket tendencies or ambivalence once dismayed me, but who now seem to be among the saner, or at least, realistic and perceptive characters in these films. Even Walt himself and his corny, avuncular manner bored me as a kid during his seemingly endless self-congratulatory introductions for The Wonderful World of Disney, which once seemed in the way of the story that was coming up. Today, despite all his salesmanship and blather, he seems to be a much more interesting, even complex cultural figure.

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Twice over the weekend, I found myself in conversation about Thanksgiving movies, particularly the fact that there are so few of them. On each occasion, the group of movie-savvy people that I was with struggled to think of the names of even a few films. Considering Thanksgiving is a major holiday that even Grinches look forward to because of the four-day weekend, there are surprisingly few TG movies. Perhaps it is because TG comes between two other holidays that are rife with related movies  - Halloween and Christmas. Or, perhaps it is because the male of the species thinks that football is the only choice for Thanksgiving viewing.  (I’ll start watching football on Thanksgiving when the coaches make their players dress like Pilgrims.)

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