The Cozy Mystery List Blog

Cozy Mystery (and Other Favorite) Books, Movies, and TV

Halloween Movies Extravaganza!

It’s that time of year again! If you’re anything like me, it’s the time when you start to seek out the old Vincent Price, Bela Lugosi, and Boris Karloff movies>>> to get you in the Halloween mood! And look what I found!!! I am so excited about some of these old movies!

Every year I end up watching the same horror movies from the (+/-) 1940s, and I have yet to tire of them. I know it would be easier to buy or tape the movies, but with this search and seek mode, I get a wider variety of the old scary movies.

Here is a list of the movies that both TCM and AMC are showing this year. I have only included the old movies… not the more recent movies that I cannot sit through… much too realistic/scary for me! (I did notice that AMC is showing a lot of the more modern movies… but they simply aren’t “cozy enough” for me!)

I am going to go right now to set up a few of these movies on my Replay machine (like a TIVO)… Hopefully you will be able to find a movie or two that you want to watch!

TCM (Turner Classic Movies) “48 Hours of Horror”
Friday, October 30: 
Mad Love     6:15 a
The Beast with Five Fingers   7:30 a
I Walked With a Zombie   9:00 a
Curse of the Demon  10:15 a
The Gorgon   12:00 p
Mr. Sardonicus    1:30 p
The Tomb of Ligeia   3:15 p
The Tingler    5:00 p
House of Usher    6:30 p
Dead of Night    8:00 p
Torture Garden   10:00 p
Twice-Told Tales  11:45 p
Kwaidan     2:00 a
Spirits of the Dead   4:45 a
Saturday, October 31:
Tell-Tale Heart    7:00 a
Cat People    7:30 a
Freaks     9:00 a
The Devil Doll    10:15 a
Mark of the Vampire   11:45 a
The Devil Bat    1:00 p
White Zombie    2:15 p
The Body Snatcher   3:30 p
Bedlam     5:00 p
The Ghoul    6:30 p
The Haunted Palace   8:00 p  
Die, Monster, Die!   9:30 p
The Shuttered Room  11:00 p
The Dunwich Horror  12:45 a
Blood Feast    2:30 a

AMC (American Movie Classics)
Saturday, October 25:  
The Curse of Frankenstein  6:15 a 
Son of Frankenstein 8:15 a  
House of Frankenstein 10:30 a  
Sunday, October 26:  
Jack the Ripper 5:00 a
Monday, October 27:
Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte 4:00 a
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
The Invisible Man 6:00 a
Bride of Frankenstein 7:45 a
Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman 9:30 a
Wednesday, October 29: 
The Mummy’s Hand 6:00 a 
Thursday, October 30:
The Mummy 6:00 a
Friday, October 31:
The Fly 2:30 a
House of Dracula 4:30 a
House of Frankenstein 6:00 a
Horror of Dracula 7:30 a

Jonathan Creek Mystery Series…

Jonathan Creek - Season One If you are looking for a funny (television) mystery series… then you might enjoy the Jonathan Creek Mystery Series. The first three seasons of this series are some of the most entertaining mystery shows that my family has “accidentally” found. This entry is about just the first three seasons of the show. They were a delight to watch.

The show stars Alan Davies as Jonathan Creek , and the wonderful Caroline Quentin as his side kick Maddy Magellan. Actually, I use the term “side kick” rather loosely, since they are equally intrinsic to the show… but since Jonathan Creek is actually the magician/illusionist, I’ll go with that term.

Both of the actors are a delight to watch. The only negative that I can think of imparting is that Caroline Quentin decided to leave the show after its third season. (Don’t quote me on that…. it’s sort of what I remember from years ago when I looked it up…) The First Season (1997) was such a delight to watch… It was like finding a hidden gift. Season Two (1998) provided a continuation of the fun!  On to Season Three>>> More great fun with Jonathan and Maddy… somewhat reminiscent of Nick and Nora Charles (at least to me!) The fourth season brought in the very accomplished actress Julia Sawalha (Saffy from Absolutely Fabulous) as her replacement, but the dye had been cast for my family and we simply weren’t able to make the transition to the new “format” of the show.

The premise of the show is that a very accomplished magician/illusionist (Jonathan Creek) is called upon to help solve a mystery that is virtually impossible to solve… He consents to helping solve the mysteries…sort of against his will. It’s not a career choice that he has made>>> Solving the mysteries has been thrust on him. Maddy, on the other hand, is an investigative journalist, always looking for a breaking-news story. Maddy simply perseveres to get (as in “make”) Jonathan give her that story… She hounds him mercilessly. She simply insists on partnering up with him even though he is fervently against this partnership.

The mysteries are truly stumpers… the types that really would require a magician’s trained mind to solve. And, the audience has fun watching the duo go about solving those mysteries.

♦If you would like to see more TV & Movies suggestions, click here.♦

Bramwell Update…

I think that I mentioned before that we have all of the Bramwell DVDs… And, since we do, we are able to take our time watching them. I thought that I had seen the entire series when it first aired on PBS… Now that I have just finished re-watching the entire series, I find that I hadn’t actually seen the last (fourth) season.

I watched the series years ago when Masterpiece Theatre aired it. A few years ago I decided that we would enjoy the series as a family, so we got all of the DVDs. We waited to watch them when both of our college-age children were home, so it took us a while to watch all of the discs.  Our son watched the first season with us and decided that it wasn’t something he wanted to stay with, so we went on without him. And, our daughter comes home so infrequently, that it has taken us a long time to finish the series.

If there are any people out there who are thinking of watching the series: I would highly recommend the first three seasons. Everything I said in the initial post about the Bramwell series still stands.

HOWEVER!!!!!>>>>>

I would stop watching the series after the third season. It appears to be quite evident that they had planned on finishing the series after the third season… They had a definite completion (of sorts), with all of the characters seemingly knowing what they were going to be doing in the future. I would not recommend the fourth season. (It seemed like they simply tacked the fourth season on to the first three excellent seasons.) I won’t state the reasons since there are people out there who may be planning on watching all of the series’ discs, but be forewarned, the fourth season doesn’t stand up to the other three seasons’ level of excellence! My husband, daughter and I were left wondering who these characters were, since they were so “out-of-sorts” with the well-developed characters we “knew” from the first three seasons. Certainly, if we had started watching the series with the fourth season, we never would have watched the first three excellent seasons… That’s how much we disliked the new personalities of the old characters!

John Adams Miniseries : Happy Fourth of July!

John Adams (DVD) I feel particularly patriotic this Fourth of July! We just finished the last episode of the HBO miniseries entitled John Adams…. and ¡¡¡WOW!!!

Let me first mention that we don’t subscribe to HBO… And, that we have tried some other HBO miniseries/episodic shows, and that some of them are just a tad out of my particular comfort zone. Yes… It’s true… I get a little uncomfortable with gratuitous sex and violence. Call me a “square” or “old-fashioned” but those are just the facts, ma’am.

A very good friend of mine told me about the miniseries… and since Cora is a cozy-mystery reader… I knew that she would not be recommending something that was going to be … let’s just say… adult-situation-graphic! (Don’t I sound like a prude!?!)

My husband had already read “John Adams,” David McCullough’s bestselling novel, and had really enjoyed it. And, since this miniseries is based on McCullough’s novel… which is presumably accurate, we knew that the miniseries would not take some of the “liberties” that a lot of other miniseries take… tweaking more “juicy tidbits” into the plots so that they are more readily appreciated by the masses. Of course, my husband did notice some changes that were made in the miniseries for dramatic purposes, although they didn’t detract from the overall spirit of accuracy.

The cast does a wonderful job portraying the characters who we all (in the USA) grew up learning and hearing about… Cast: Paul Giamatti (as John Adams) and Laura Linney (as his wife, Abigail) are superb in their parts. Tom Wilkinson (as Benjamin Franklin), Stephen Dillane (as Thomas Jefferson), David Morse (as George Wahington), Sarah Polley (as the Adams’ daughter), well… the list goes on! We found the acting, the sets, the director’s view ALL exceptionally good. (Of course, if you are looking for a sanitized version… where you don’t see and almost feel what it must have been like… where you don’t see how excruciating it was to be sick back in those times… when blood-letting seemed to be a very common practice… where there is a lack of buzzing flies, then this very realistic (and, again, to use an adjective I use to show the superlative), phenomenal miniseries is not for you…

HBO’s John Adams miniseries did not disappoint! It truly is worth watching… And, it gives a true meaning of why we, in the USA celebrate the Fourth of July… We have these very heroic men, such as John Adams, to thank for the liberty we now know and enjoy!

♦If you would like to see more TV & Movie  suggestions, click here.♦

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