Halloween is just as much about fun as it is fright, and director Brian De Palma’s 1974 rock-and-roll musical THE PHANTOM OF THE PARADISE is a real scream. It’s THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA set to a beat and De Palma’s visual mastery, with Dorian Gray and Faust thrown in for extra color. PHANTOM is a worthy cult film, actually a much better movie, more outrageous, than THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. De Palma’s special ingredient? Paul Williams — that’s right, the guy who wrote the songs “The Rainbow Connection” for Kermit the Frog and “Rainy Days and Mondays” for the Carpenters — as the Faust character, an evil record producer. Williams also wrote all the songs for the movie, including the killer glam rock tune “Life at Last”. And a bit of trivia: The set dresser for the movie was Sissy Spacek. Two years later she’d be the lead star of De Palma’s CARRIE.
This is the first of a weekly column in which I’ll list random things I love from movies I’ve seen over the years. Performances, scenes, a line of dialogue, a look or a glance, a piece of wardrobe, any random thing I love that comes to mind. An entry on the list might even be something great from a bad movie, or something funny from a sad movie; a bit of music or a particular shot. Perhaps a continuity mistake or a particularly striking image. If it’s on the list, I love it. I swiped the idea for this column from Alex Maidy at the movie fan site JoBlo Movie Network. Thanks to them for the inspiration.
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Take a look, have a listen … and tell me in the comments something YOU love from the movies.
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I LOVE the opening credits for Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO, brilliantly designed by graphic designer Saul Bass, nerve-shredding music by Bernard Herrmann. Check it out …
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I LOVE Madeline Kahn as Eunice Burns in Peter Bogdanovich’s hilarious WHAT’S UP, DOC?
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I LOVE this image, the very first shot in Stanley Kubrick’s A CLOCKWORK ORANGE.
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I LOVE that there was a movie written by Dr. Seuss way back in 1953 — THE 5,000 FINGERS OF DR. T — and hardly anyone I know has seen it. And if you haven’t seen it, I envy you … because now you can find and enjoy it for the first time! And I REALLY love this insane song from the movie. Remember, this is 1953!
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I LOVE the must-see trailer for the must-not-see 1978 movie MAGIC.
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I LOVE a sadly irrelevant Joan Crawford putting everything she has — bad wig, cheap jewelry, awful dress and a ton of Crawford attitude — into her role in a lousy Hitchcock rip-off thriller, STRAIT JACKET.
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I LOVE the scene where Reese Witherspoon as a juvenile delinquent Little Red Riding Hood comes face to face with her would-be murderer, Keifer Sutherland’s Big Bad Wolf serial killer, weeks after she got the better of him in the wonderfully twisted 1996 cult movie FREEWAY.
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I LOVE that evil — but oh so fucking beautiful! — 1957 Plymouth Belvedere from the Stephen King movie CHRISTINE.
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I LOVE the heartbreak of the unlikely friendship between these two characters in MIDNIGHT COWBOY.
The Most Beautiful Fraud 