THE DANMAN CAN

A slow burn mystery thriller with lots of fog-enshrouded, cobblestoned London atmosphere,  Bob Clark 's  Murder By Decree (1979) pits Sherlock Holmes  (and Dr. Watson ) against Jack The Ripper  in a conspiracy coverup. I liked this film a bit more the second time around— Christopher Plummer and James Mason make a great screen Holmes and Watson, it's handsomely shot, it's rather dreary and downbeat (satisfyingly so), and the supporting cast—including David Hemmings , John Gielgud , and Donald Sutherland  plus a memorable scene featuring Geneviève Bujold —is aces. Bob Clark Feature Films Ranked

Black Christmas   (1974) (celebrating its 50th anniversary this year!) is my favorite slasher and might just be my favorite Christmas feature film (it's also one of my  Top 100 Films ). The performances are uniformly excellent, its female-centric cast is populated by actors that bring a realism and diversity of character that in the hands of a lesser director could have resulted in a basic stalk and slash exercise.  Bob Clark 's direction is economic—never flashy and every shot feels necessary.  Reginald H. Morris 's cinematography is stylish and makes exceptional use of shadows, the absence of light, and handheld camera. Despite a good deal of humor—which I still find funny every time I watch the film (and I've seen it a lot)—there is a feeling of unease that is absent from so many films in the horror genre. This can be attributed to a few sources— Carl Zittrer 's jarring and dissonant score for one, which falls more into the realm of sound design than music mu...

It's kind of amazing that  Deathdream   (aka  Dead Of Night ) was released just a few months prior to  Bob Clark 's classic holiday slasher  Black Christmas   ( review ), but the former was sitting on the shelf for some time because according to Wikipedia it was filmed in the fall of 1972.  Deathdream  is notable for being only the second screen credit for makeup/special effects wizard  Tom Savini . His work here makes great use of a small budget and honestly looks better than some of what he did later on in the '70s (the '80s were where he really shined).  Carl Zittrer  provides the same type of jarring and dissonant score work that he did for  Black Christmas , and some of the cues and techniques are almost identical but slightly less effective here. Similarly there are other parallels and techniques that director Clark mirrors from his other—more famous—1974 film, including the way he uses humor to balanc...