With movies, we’re dealing with the outer world of the lights that dim as our screen lights up, and the inner world that sees what it will from that screen. A half real image that we partly sense, and partly imagine.

Maybe that’s merely technical stuff if we consider a biography, a documentary, or an historical theme. With action movies, it’s pretty much all about technique. I’ll leave those genres for those practical viewers and critics whom want their experience to make sense; whether that’s the same as realistic I’ll leave for those same folks to ponder.

I’m thinking about strange and weird movies. Science-fiction, horror, mystery/crime, and film-noir. The sense I want my type of movies to show is more of a reality spectrum--a closed world that operates by it own logic. If it’s well-imagined, and maintains suspension of disbelief--that’s the dim light of the half moon. Not quite one thing nor the other, it has it’s own difficult-to-define but tangible reality.

So, does that explain why the ghost of Frankenstein’s monster appears in a Japanese science-fiction movie (he’s as big as Godzilla into the bargain)? Well, he’s fighting other monsters, naturally...it’s strange and weird territory.

These are the territories featured in this exploration.

1. The Coming Darkness: Film Noir

2. Crime and Mystery Skulks About

3. Coffin City: Nosfertu To Ligeia (Horror)

4. Dinosaur Bones and Alien Clones: Science Fiction

For the actual reviews, I’ll use a star rating system (up to 10); the movie title is followed by its release date (some fudging on the 1946/1947 film noirs), and maybe a subtitle.

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With a few exceptions, the titles reviewed here are from the 1930s through the 1970s. This is not merely a function of nostalgia; at my somewhat advanced age, I still couldn’t possibly remember anything before the very late 1950s. although I did see many of these for the first time as a kid, many more I’ve only viewed recently.

Later films (1980s to present) I find too sensationalized and overdone; the sci-fi special effects are CGI-ed to death, becoming, in effect, hyper- or unrealistic. Outlandish gory violence, including torture, seems to have infected all of the other genres I cover here.

For example, 1992’s Resevoir Dogs, an intriguing and exciting retro-noir, is compromised by the abducted cop’s disgusting torture sequence. Yes, I know, film noir in particular, is a violent genre. But the violence--the era covered--is swift and not dwelt on; there’s fights, stabbings, shootings, car crashes, falling off a building, etc. Some of the assaults are gruesome, but as a whole, we’re watchig a story with some violence--not violence with some story.

Horror and Sci-fi had some innovative and brilliant special-effects (even in the ancient times of 1902’s Trip to the Moon). The modern CGI stuff is too much on a video game or graphic comic level; where characters are literally oozing with blood, or morphing with a semi-organic technological frenzy. This sort of treatment works for many, but I would say it’s less interesting, and even less realistic, than subtler effects that are meant to look believable.

Admittedly, there is a bit of borrowed nostalgia in this selection. That is, the slang, the styles, the scenes from the ’30 through the early ’50s I glimpsed only on the screen, but were brought to life first by stories that my parents and other adults told from experiences in those days. You know, when ’everyone’ smoked, guys wore hats (not ballcaps) out in public, cars were more distinctive, and people seemed quicker-witted. Not better, but different; in which something strange might lurk in Any Dark Corner.

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All of my reviews were published first on either IMDb or my blog farmermousesfilmfest.org

Next Chapter: The Coming Darkness