Watched via streaming on Hulu.

Horror director Tobe Hooper — who passed away just a few weeks ago — was a tough one to pin down, without an obvious style to claim. His films are eclectic and erratic, from the iconic to the pedestrian.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 is one of his best and most memorable, and particularly embued with what ties most, if not all, of his work together.

What Hooper was amazing at was his ability to slowly, convincingly and frighteningly build his stories from the mundane to the absolutely horrific. From many accounts, his was a troubled Earthly soul and, seemingly from that, sprang the most awful of visions.

TCM2 does start out grotesquely, with a preppy high schooler getting his brains chain sawed out, but the film then settles into its benign ordinariness of main characters Lefty (Dennis Hopper) and Stretch (Caroline Williams) figuring out how to hunt down the chainsaw killers.

Lefty is not dissimilar to the Dr. Loomis character in the Halloween franchise — hunting deranged madmen while spouting ludicrous philosophical dialogue. More religous than Loomis, Lefty makes repeated mentions of Hell, which is represented metaphorically by Hooper and screenwriter L.M. Kit Carson by an underground amusement park lair where the maniacal Sawyer clan reside.

The last third of the movie is a completely bat-shit crazy exercise of extreme horror and gore. Between the maddening Sawyer banter, the carving up of a half-dead victim, and the creation of a “Miss Leatherface,” the film seems intent in lulling the audience into a despairing nervous breakdown. We are witnessing the bowels of Hell — a Hell that is other people.

Watched via TCM.

“Wax Museums” is an interesting and small sub-genre of horror films that may have started with this one, 1933’s Mystery of the Wax Museum, even though it’s more of a mystery film than horror. (Duh, look at the title.)

The film begins with a series of extremely impressive scenes, including a massive wax museum set burning to the ground, a densely populated New Year’s Eve street party and the theft of a corpse from the city morgue. The sets are beautiful and there are some mind-blowing camera moves and set-ups.

However, following this trio of killer scenes, the film settles into its more traditional “mystery.” Although billed third, Glenda Farrell seemingly takes on the lead role as a tough talking investigative reporter who sniffs out that something might be afoot at the creepy wax museum. Her performance is an interesting combination of humorous and grating, especially compared with the realistic performances of Lionel Atwill and Fay Wray.

Eventually, the film ramps up the mystery and spookiness, becoming interesting again and ending on a thrilling, fast-paced note in a German Expressionist-tinged laboratory.

It’s also worth noting that, according to the American Film Institute’s Catalog of Feature Films, Mystery of the Wax Museum was the last feature film to use Technicolor’s two-strip process. The colors are muddy and muted, amping up the film’s uneasy flair.

Lastly, director Michael Curtiz would later direct a more beloved film, Casablanca.

Watched via TCM Underground.

This is a late entry (1971) in Hammer‘s Mummy series, swaping out Christopher Lee with Valerie Leon, who is much easier to look at, but not actually mummified. Producers smartly have Leon lie around half-naked instead of being wrapped in bandages.

While the film has lots of that great, moody Hammer style; not much actually happens. Leon plays two parts: The perfectly preserved mummy and her reincarnation. Sort of. The modern age Leon turns evil as her personality gets overtaken by the dead Leon, who starts taking out the Egyptologists before they stop her full resurrection.

There’s some cool gore, including a disembodied crawling hand that you can see gets played up in the poster. But, the film is mostly taken up by slowly revealing the mysterious connection between the two Leons, which isn’t that scary or interesting.