Recent DVD and theatrical releases of movies by Dario Argento have started me thinking about that oddball breed of cinema we know as "cult movies," or "guilty pleasures." I'm one of those people who don't usually use the latter term because if I enjoy a movie I don't see any reason I should feel guilty about it. Hell, if I felt the need to apologize every time I enjoyed The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra or a Wheeler and Woolsey comedy, I'd be more weighed down by guilt than Judas Iscariot wearing an SS uniform while clubbing baby seals with a burning cross.
Actually, not all guilty pleasures are cult movies. To be a cult movie, a picture has to be appreciated by a number of people and is generally thought to be "so bad it's good," making cult movies at least a subset of camp. Guilty pleasures—or as I like to call them, "what I watch on Friday nights"—may be totally unrecognized by others and don't have to have any redeeming qualities whatsoever beyond the perhaps perverse pleasure they provide for me personally.
I've thought many times that I'd like to write a series of pieces—part reviews, part criticisms, part appreciations, part apologetics—on these movies from closer to the bottom of the cinematic barrel in hopes of scamming, uh, encouraging you to cultivate your inner movie slob. No, seeing every new Adam Sandler movie on its first weekend of release doesn't count. That's just conformist bad taste and I know you can do better than that.
Let's begin 50 years ago, at childhood, that time in life when a person's tastes—good and bad—are formed. The theater is The State, on the square of the small Texas town in which I grew up. The State played "B" movies and, on Saturday mornings, pictures in Spanish for the farm workers who came into the city for a few hours. But what I loved there best were horror movies like …
The Screaming Skull (1958)
You can tell which schlockfest "B" horror movies manipulate the basic accoutrements of the genre best by the degree to which they scare the bejeezus out of small children, and one of the things that has great power to create a seat-wetting problem is the human skull. You don't even have to give the ridges over the eyes that Harryhausen touch to make them look more sinister, but it can't hurt.
I had just turned nine when I saw The Screaming Skull for the first time, and it scared the breath out of me. Fifty years later I can still remember being so frightened I couldn't yell. Ah, those were great times … Macabre came along later that same year, with House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler (both 1959) soon to follow. We adolescent horror hounds, readers of "Famous Monsters of Filmland" all, were convinced that William Castle was the greatest filmmaker of all time. Even Psycho (1960) couldn't pull us away as it was a little too adult—but we still read everything by Robert Bloch we could get our sweaty little hands on.
I don't know if journeyman actor Alex Nicol, who directed The Screaming Skull in an effort to expand his career possibilities, could have beaten Castle into our hearts had he continued to make shockers. (Can you imagine a grown man still considering such a question? Neither can I.)
I've re-visited TSS several times over the decades. It used to show up on late night TV with some regularity, until even the tube outgrew such hack work, and more than one DVD distributor carries it in the catalogue. No, the original fear is long gone—I wish I knew a nine-year old I could convince to watch it in a dark room just to check out the reaction—but the memory is intact.
In the film, a newly wed couple come to the house the groom lived in with his former wife, the haunting Marion, who died in a sudden thunderstorm when she slipped on a wet leaf and stumbled by the lily pond, cracking her head open on a stone wall and then drowning. I'd think that this plot construct was an accidental reference to Ibsen's Rosmersholm except for the fact that composer Ernest Gold—yes, the same man who would win an Oscar for scoring Exodus in 1960—borrows the same brooding Sabbat theme from Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique Stanley Kubrick used in The Shining (1980).
Maybe this movie is smarter than it has any right to be. John Kneubuhl, who would later write the "Pigeons From Hell" episode of Boris Karloff's TV program Thriller, wrote the script based on the legend of the screaming skull of Bettiscomb Manor, in England.
But setting references to classier stuff aside, Eric and Jenni Whitlock attempt to settle into the house. As he introduces her to the grounds, Jenni spots a small outbuilding and asks what it is.
"That's where Mickey keeps his gardening things," Eric replies.
"Who's Mickey?"
"The gardener."
Or maybe the movie isn't any smarter than it has to be. But you know that feeling you sometimes get, the feeling that the filmmakers are playing around a little because they know the kids that make up their audience aren't going to get it, anyway? TSS engenders that feeling often.
Soon, Marion's great friends, Reverend and Mrs. Snow, drop by for dinner and via some pretty unsubtle dialogue we learn that a) Mickey is still devoted to Marion and thinks her ghost haunts the house and grounds, b) Jenni had a nervous breakdown and was committed to a sanitarium when her parents were killed in an automobile accident, c) she is wealthy, and d) John Hudson, as Eric, is either the most ham-handed actor of the 1950s or he has been directed to make it clear to even the most naïve members of the audience that he wants to gain control of his new wife's fortune.
Later that night, Jenni awakens to discover that Eric is missing, a window is banging in the wind, and Marion 's self-portrait looks creepy in the moonlight. The next night, this scenario is replayed, only this time Jenni finds a skull in a cabinet. She tosses it out the window, but on her way back to bed she hears a knocking on the door and, yes, it turns out to be the skull.
It's not much of a spoiler to admit that Eric is behind all the, uh, skullduggery, but whether or not there is a real ghost on his trail I will leave to you to discover for yourself. If you've ever read a pulp magazine weird menace story, or watched an episode of "Scooby-Doo," you'll have no trouble figuring out the late night mumbo-jumbo.
Hudson, who was Capt. Hobart in G.I. Blues (1960) and Virgil Earp in Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (1957) was certainly a better actor than this script calls for, and I suspect he was playing the evil genius with deadpan irony. Peggy Webber, as Jenni, looks a bit too robust to make a convincing Mrs. de Winter clone. Like almost every other actor in the film, she found her greatest success on TV. Leading roles in movies were out of the question—bless her, she looks like Nicholas Cage in drag, but with heftier boobs.
Russ Conway, who had unremarkable roles in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) and The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967) gives Rev. Snow a quiet, patient demeanor even though he looks fit enough to beat the crap out of Eric. Tony Johnson, as his wife, has no other credits on IMDB.
Director Alex Nicol, who plays Mickey, will be better remembered from his small roles in movies, including The Man from Laramie (1955). He later went to Europe to take part in the spaghetti western boom, coming home for a turn as George Barker in Roger Corman's Bloody Mama in 1970.
In TSS he shows a nice camera eye for the clichés of the genre. His camera roams the empty halls of the house, creeping up on certain doors and importing to them a sense of dread that makes us both want to enter and run screaming away. I suspect that the movie would still work its dark magic on young kids, but many of them would be repelled by the questionable acting and black and white photography.
The film exists as a link between gothic chapbooks, dime novels, spooky radio shows, the pulp horror magazines and EC comics, and TV horror shows like Thriller and The Twilight Zone. Moments in it seem to have influenced Freddie Francis' The Skull (1965), which, since it was based on a story by Robert Bloch, takes us back to where we started.
The Screaming Skull can't possibly scare adults, and unless you saw it when you were young it won't have any nostalgia appeal. But honestly, I've known several grown-ups who did see it back in the day, and they all remember it fondly as one of the scariest movies they've ever seen. Maybe we should let it go at that.
Showing posts with label horror movies. Show all posts
Showing posts with label horror movies. Show all posts
Friday, June 18, 2010
The Screaming Skull (1958)
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Jeepers Creepers (United Artists, 2001)
“Jeepers Creepers,” is a horror flick from writer/director Victor Salva, and it’s two-thirds classy thrills and one-third example of how not to make a horror movie. The fact that both these sections occur in the same picture is a fairly remarkable feat of filmmaking. In class, you can show the first part as an example of the tricks of the fear-inducing trade and then show the second part to display how horror directors go wrong.
As the movie begins, Trish and Darry (Gina Philips and Justin Long), brother and sister, are driving the back roads on their way home for a visit from college. Trish likes to look at the countryside. They are briefly pursued by an enclosed truck, the unseen driver of which seems determined to scare them spitless. Finally, the truck passes them.
Sometime later, they see the truck parked beside an abandoned wood frame church, surrounded by trees, its yard overgrown. The siblings see the driver of the truck carry a bundle that looks suspiciously like a dead body wrapped in a crimson-stained sheet. “The Creeper” deposits the bundle into a large pipe sticking out of the ground. They slow down and he dumps another one.
The Creeper spots them and the chase begins again. Darry drives off the road into a field, and the truck continues on its way.
The kids go back to the pipe to make sure of what they saw and to convince themselves that if bodies there are, they are all dead.
Darry thinks he hears someone down in the hole, and, of course, is determined to climb down for a closer look.
“You know that place in horror movies where someone does something really stupid and everybody hates him?” Trish asks. “Well, this is it.”
Of course, Darry falls into the hole and, of course, we think The Creeper is coming back at any moment and, of course, the hole is more full of corpses than a cheesecake is full of calories. From this point on, the film becomes a conventional killer chases kids thriller.
It holds up well up to the point Darry and Trish bring the cops into the picture. It’s at this point our understanding of what The Creeper is begins to change. The more we know about him, the less frightening he is.
Do you remember watching monster movies as a kid and feeling less scared when the monster was already on the screen because you knew that if you could see it, it couldn’t jump out and yell “Boo!”
Salva has forgotten that basic point. John Carpenter, in “Halloween,” reminded us that you can’t kill the bogeyman, but you shouldn’t take too much time trying to explain him, either. That kills him more effectively than blades or guns.
As long as The Creeper remains unseen, or seen in shadow, he represents that potent, visceral force of the Unknown. When he hunts, does he do it for fun or is there a solid reason for all the corpses he’s dumped down the pipe? Why all the incisions? Why is the catch phrase for this picture “What’s eating you?”
And what’s the significance of the number “23”? You’ll know what I’m talking about if you ever see the flick. And there’s a legend that ties into the plot. Is it a real legend or one manufactured for the movie? If we’re going to be offered some degree of explanation, let’s have enough to make sense.
The movie is left open for a sequel—what kind of horror movie would it be if it couldn’t develop into a franchise for United Artists—but that’s not the main reason many viewers will find the ending unsatisfactory. I can’t go into that, but I will say that a soap opera on Friday leaves you with much the same feeling.
But when Salva is clicking during the movie’s first 50 minutes or so, he runs the thing like an expensive watch. Sure, a lot of the shocks come from pop-ups and loud noises, but these work so well because the director has set them up so nicely. First he attaches the electrodes, then he pushes all the right buttons.
The two leads are just fine. When they talk and argue as siblings, they sound real. The screenplay gets across a lot of background information via the humdrum talk of any long car trip. These kids are more than potential monster-fodder.
“Jeepers Creepers” is creepy and horrid without being gratuitously gory, but it never really moves from average to being worthy of a solid recommendation. It’s worth seeing, but I’m not sure it’s worth a special trip to the video store to rent. Maybe if you pick it up when you go to get something else. Or the next time it runs on cable. Or you could forget I mentioned it.
As the movie begins, Trish and Darry (Gina Philips and Justin Long), brother and sister, are driving the back roads on their way home for a visit from college. Trish likes to look at the countryside. They are briefly pursued by an enclosed truck, the unseen driver of which seems determined to scare them spitless. Finally, the truck passes them.
Sometime later, they see the truck parked beside an abandoned wood frame church, surrounded by trees, its yard overgrown. The siblings see the driver of the truck carry a bundle that looks suspiciously like a dead body wrapped in a crimson-stained sheet. “The Creeper” deposits the bundle into a large pipe sticking out of the ground. They slow down and he dumps another one.
The Creeper spots them and the chase begins again. Darry drives off the road into a field, and the truck continues on its way.
The kids go back to the pipe to make sure of what they saw and to convince themselves that if bodies there are, they are all dead.
Darry thinks he hears someone down in the hole, and, of course, is determined to climb down for a closer look.
“You know that place in horror movies where someone does something really stupid and everybody hates him?” Trish asks. “Well, this is it.”
Of course, Darry falls into the hole and, of course, we think The Creeper is coming back at any moment and, of course, the hole is more full of corpses than a cheesecake is full of calories. From this point on, the film becomes a conventional killer chases kids thriller.
It holds up well up to the point Darry and Trish bring the cops into the picture. It’s at this point our understanding of what The Creeper is begins to change. The more we know about him, the less frightening he is.
Do you remember watching monster movies as a kid and feeling less scared when the monster was already on the screen because you knew that if you could see it, it couldn’t jump out and yell “Boo!”
Salva has forgotten that basic point. John Carpenter, in “Halloween,” reminded us that you can’t kill the bogeyman, but you shouldn’t take too much time trying to explain him, either. That kills him more effectively than blades or guns.
As long as The Creeper remains unseen, or seen in shadow, he represents that potent, visceral force of the Unknown. When he hunts, does he do it for fun or is there a solid reason for all the corpses he’s dumped down the pipe? Why all the incisions? Why is the catch phrase for this picture “What’s eating you?”
And what’s the significance of the number “23”? You’ll know what I’m talking about if you ever see the flick. And there’s a legend that ties into the plot. Is it a real legend or one manufactured for the movie? If we’re going to be offered some degree of explanation, let’s have enough to make sense.
The movie is left open for a sequel—what kind of horror movie would it be if it couldn’t develop into a franchise for United Artists—but that’s not the main reason many viewers will find the ending unsatisfactory. I can’t go into that, but I will say that a soap opera on Friday leaves you with much the same feeling.
But when Salva is clicking during the movie’s first 50 minutes or so, he runs the thing like an expensive watch. Sure, a lot of the shocks come from pop-ups and loud noises, but these work so well because the director has set them up so nicely. First he attaches the electrodes, then he pushes all the right buttons.
The two leads are just fine. When they talk and argue as siblings, they sound real. The screenplay gets across a lot of background information via the humdrum talk of any long car trip. These kids are more than potential monster-fodder.
“Jeepers Creepers” is creepy and horrid without being gratuitously gory, but it never really moves from average to being worthy of a solid recommendation. It’s worth seeing, but I’m not sure it’s worth a special trip to the video store to rent. Maybe if you pick it up when you go to get something else. Or the next time it runs on cable. Or you could forget I mentioned it.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
Ed Gein (Tartan Films, 2000)
If black humor refuses to capitulate to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, it also refuses to take them seriously. We can only contemplate death soberly if there is some means of avoiding it. When faced with the inevitable, laugh, clown, laugh. And the more spectacular the death, whether in total numbers or intensity of the individual event, the darker the laughter.
Consider the films that are based to a greater or lesser degree on the ghoulish career of Ed Gein, the Wisconsin part-time handyman and full-time psycho. Everyone needs something to do to fill the hours of the day. It’s just that Gein’s choices were eccentric, to say the least. They were also such stuff as cinematic nightmares are made on.
But the oddest thing about the films that draw on the Gein story for their plots is that so many of them are comedies. Dark comedies, to be sure—comedies that may make you choke on your own laughter—but comedies just the same.
The most faithful to fact of them all is “Ed Gein.”
The picture opens with snippets of newsreel footage of Gein’s neighbors in the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin. The consensus of opinion is that he was a nice guy, maybe a little eccentric but certainly harmless.
Next we’re taken to the Plainfield Cemetery after dark. We see a teen couple, the boy eager to begin what he came here for. The girl hears noises, and then the boy does, too. They get spooked and leave quickly. The shot changes and we see Ed’s head emerge over the rim of a grave he’s opened.
At home, Ed has a disinterred corpse stretched out on a table. His head tipped back, he speaks a few words over it. He is inviting the body to return to life, but we don’t know if he expects a literal resurrection.
It’s a moment in the film, like many others, that doesn’t seem to go anywhere because it doesn’t link seamlessly with the scene that follows, but we will be introduced to his mounting madness through flashbacks and vignettes like this one.
Next up is a scene in which two young boys visit Ed at home. Later we will learn that some parents trust Ed to baby-sit. The youngest of the boys slips away from Ed and goes upstairs, just to snoop around out of idle curiosity. He finds heads hanging from the bedroom door. Ed will later explain that they are shrunken heads sent to him by a relative during the World War, but we can see what the boys, perhaps, don’t notice—they are too large to be shrunken. The room also contains a lamp made from a spine, and masks made from human skin.
The boys appear frightened, but no more so than Ed himself. He tells them to leave and not come back.
We then see him at a roadside bar, essentially off to himself but chatting sporadically with his twentysomething friend Pete Anderson (Craig Zimmerman). Most of the talking takes place between two bar regulars and Mary Hogan (Sally Champlin). Mary is a large woman, middle-aged and full of racy innuendos. Ed is clearly both attracted to and repulsed by her behavior and language.
As he listens to the goings-on in the bar, he flashes back to his mother Augusta (Carrie Snodgress) and her warnings about the whorishness of most women. We have seen earlier examples of her religious zeal as she read from The Book of Revelation to Ed and his brother as they grew up.
We also see Ed’s reluctance to assist his parents as they slaughter a hog. The animal is hanging by its back feet from a rafter and the sight terrifies young Ed. His father accuses him of being a sissy and then smacks Augusta for bringing him up badly. She then turns on her son and berates him for being a panty-waist. The poor kid, approximately ten years old, is visibly upset at being accosted by both parents.
Back to the present, and Ed is having dinner with his friends, the Andersons. Ed decides that nothing goes better with country cooking than a discussion of the changes the human body endures as it rots. Even his friend Pete wants him to drop the subject.
We see him taking a woman through his house, avoiding certain rooms. He has apparently approached her about exchanging houses with him since he lives alone and has no use for a two-story farm house. His evasive manner and the house’s general creepiness result in her turning down his offer and asking to leave as quickly as possible.
His behavior with people doesn’t change so much from beginning to end, but his interior madness is beginning to run away with him. He presents the same dead, half vacant smile throughout, but the visits from Augusta become more frequent. We realize that his moonlit trips to the cemetery have resulted in several corpses disinterred and brought home.
Finally he snaps and returns to Mary’s bar after closing. He shoots her, drags her out to his truck, and drives her home. Doing nothing to mend her wound, he ties the woman to the bed and allows her to die.
At this point in the film, we see Ed at his craziest. He emerges from the house one night wearing his woman suit. His face is covered by a mask made from the skin of one of the disinterred corpses. He wears a vest made from skin on which he has attached two breasts which dangle from the front. A vulva hangs from his crotch. Topped by a wig, he dances in the moonlight, yammering in falsetto.
Steve Railsback, who first jolted audiences as Charles Manson in the 1976 TV movie “Helter Skelter,” delivers a fingernails-on-the-chalkboard performance as Gein. I mean that in a good way. It’s the character who clog dances on our nerve ends, not the actor.
Railsback’s is also a gutsy performance. This is a man about whom the audience is hard-pressed to think anything positive. The nicest thought the average viewer would have said is, “Well, they guy is certainly messed up, but it isn’t his fault.”
We will see Gein trying on noses—real noses—like the world’s most deranged circus clown. He will murder one more woman who reminds him of Augusta after inviting her to go to a movie with him and being rejected. He is now seeing his mother, and she rides in his truck with him and encourages him to “do the Lord’s work.”
His insanity doesn’t make him fearless. He’s afraid of getting caught although his attempts at jokes almost trip him up. When Pete Anderson talks about Mary’s odd disappearance Ed tells him that the woman isn’t missing. “I’ve got her up at my place. Mary’s hanging out there right now.” Pete is startled for a beat, then laughs and tells Ed he has a mighty strange sense of humor.
The murder of his second victim, a storekeeper, results in his downfall. The film ends with newsreel footage of the real Ed Gein being put into the back of a police car. The end credits are interspersed with Railsback, as Gein in the asylum, smiling the smile and telling the camera that he doesn’t remember everything that happened.
So what was Edward Gein really like? This is the movie that stays closest to the facts and does a good job of presenting the man’s madness. He was born in 1906 and died in 1984. Mary Hogan was killed in 1954, Bernice Worden (called Collette in the film) was murdered in 1957.
What fascinated the first person to translate Gein’s life into fiction—novelist Robert Bloch, who immortalized Gein as Norman Bates in “Psycho,” was the fact that he lived so long in a small community and no one noticed his mania. If he never quite fit in with the common fold of Plainfield, he never stood out, either. For his trips to the cemetery, he enlisted the aid of a man named Gus, a peculiar loner who ended up in an asylum before Gein did. (Gus is omitted from every one of the Gein films.) Even with this association, no one saw through Ed’s smile.
The joke about the murdered barmaid is real. A few weeks after her disappearance, Ed told a sawmill owner with the unlikely name of Elmo Ueeck, “She isn’t missing. She’s at the farm right now.”
What do we make of this emotionally retarded man, in life and in this film? He’s not a guy most of us would have to fear because his interest was in older women only. The main sources for our fear are his psychology and the way it manifests itself. We can deal with the extremes of his oddness only through dark laughter. How else can you react to his woman suit? The horrible fact of the matter is that when he minces out the front door, his pot belly poking out under the vest, there is enough of the humor of an awkward man in drag to generate a laugh. But when we see what it is he’s really wearing, the laughter gets stuck in our throat.
“Ed Gein” is not designed to generate laughter, but the only sane reaction we can have to some levels of real-life horror is black humor. After his arrest, sick jokes known as “Geiners” began to circulate throughout the Midwest, some of which I suspect were used by Robert Bloch in his novel and later by screenwriter Joseph Stefano in his script for “Psycho.” “Mother is, how do you say it, not quite herself tonight.”
But black humor isn’t just a distancing device that allows us to contemplate the world’s horrors without collapsing into a morass of despair and inertia. It’s also a means for saying that the world can be as horrible as it wants to be—or as our fellow humans make it—but we have moved beyond caring. It’s either a perfectly rational response to an irrational universe, or a perfectly insane response to a sane universe when sanity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Consider the films that are based to a greater or lesser degree on the ghoulish career of Ed Gein, the Wisconsin part-time handyman and full-time psycho. Everyone needs something to do to fill the hours of the day. It’s just that Gein’s choices were eccentric, to say the least. They were also such stuff as cinematic nightmares are made on.
But the oddest thing about the films that draw on the Gein story for their plots is that so many of them are comedies. Dark comedies, to be sure—comedies that may make you choke on your own laughter—but comedies just the same.
The most faithful to fact of them all is “Ed Gein.”
The picture opens with snippets of newsreel footage of Gein’s neighbors in the small town of Plainfield, Wisconsin. The consensus of opinion is that he was a nice guy, maybe a little eccentric but certainly harmless.
Next we’re taken to the Plainfield Cemetery after dark. We see a teen couple, the boy eager to begin what he came here for. The girl hears noises, and then the boy does, too. They get spooked and leave quickly. The shot changes and we see Ed’s head emerge over the rim of a grave he’s opened.
At home, Ed has a disinterred corpse stretched out on a table. His head tipped back, he speaks a few words over it. He is inviting the body to return to life, but we don’t know if he expects a literal resurrection.
It’s a moment in the film, like many others, that doesn’t seem to go anywhere because it doesn’t link seamlessly with the scene that follows, but we will be introduced to his mounting madness through flashbacks and vignettes like this one.
Next up is a scene in which two young boys visit Ed at home. Later we will learn that some parents trust Ed to baby-sit. The youngest of the boys slips away from Ed and goes upstairs, just to snoop around out of idle curiosity. He finds heads hanging from the bedroom door. Ed will later explain that they are shrunken heads sent to him by a relative during the World War, but we can see what the boys, perhaps, don’t notice—they are too large to be shrunken. The room also contains a lamp made from a spine, and masks made from human skin.
The boys appear frightened, but no more so than Ed himself. He tells them to leave and not come back.
We then see him at a roadside bar, essentially off to himself but chatting sporadically with his twentysomething friend Pete Anderson (Craig Zimmerman). Most of the talking takes place between two bar regulars and Mary Hogan (Sally Champlin). Mary is a large woman, middle-aged and full of racy innuendos. Ed is clearly both attracted to and repulsed by her behavior and language.
As he listens to the goings-on in the bar, he flashes back to his mother Augusta (Carrie Snodgress) and her warnings about the whorishness of most women. We have seen earlier examples of her religious zeal as she read from The Book of Revelation to Ed and his brother as they grew up.
We also see Ed’s reluctance to assist his parents as they slaughter a hog. The animal is hanging by its back feet from a rafter and the sight terrifies young Ed. His father accuses him of being a sissy and then smacks Augusta for bringing him up badly. She then turns on her son and berates him for being a panty-waist. The poor kid, approximately ten years old, is visibly upset at being accosted by both parents.
Back to the present, and Ed is having dinner with his friends, the Andersons. Ed decides that nothing goes better with country cooking than a discussion of the changes the human body endures as it rots. Even his friend Pete wants him to drop the subject.
We see him taking a woman through his house, avoiding certain rooms. He has apparently approached her about exchanging houses with him since he lives alone and has no use for a two-story farm house. His evasive manner and the house’s general creepiness result in her turning down his offer and asking to leave as quickly as possible.
His behavior with people doesn’t change so much from beginning to end, but his interior madness is beginning to run away with him. He presents the same dead, half vacant smile throughout, but the visits from Augusta become more frequent. We realize that his moonlit trips to the cemetery have resulted in several corpses disinterred and brought home.
Finally he snaps and returns to Mary’s bar after closing. He shoots her, drags her out to his truck, and drives her home. Doing nothing to mend her wound, he ties the woman to the bed and allows her to die.
At this point in the film, we see Ed at his craziest. He emerges from the house one night wearing his woman suit. His face is covered by a mask made from the skin of one of the disinterred corpses. He wears a vest made from skin on which he has attached two breasts which dangle from the front. A vulva hangs from his crotch. Topped by a wig, he dances in the moonlight, yammering in falsetto.
Steve Railsback, who first jolted audiences as Charles Manson in the 1976 TV movie “Helter Skelter,” delivers a fingernails-on-the-chalkboard performance as Gein. I mean that in a good way. It’s the character who clog dances on our nerve ends, not the actor.
Railsback’s is also a gutsy performance. This is a man about whom the audience is hard-pressed to think anything positive. The nicest thought the average viewer would have said is, “Well, they guy is certainly messed up, but it isn’t his fault.”
We will see Gein trying on noses—real noses—like the world’s most deranged circus clown. He will murder one more woman who reminds him of Augusta after inviting her to go to a movie with him and being rejected. He is now seeing his mother, and she rides in his truck with him and encourages him to “do the Lord’s work.”
His insanity doesn’t make him fearless. He’s afraid of getting caught although his attempts at jokes almost trip him up. When Pete Anderson talks about Mary’s odd disappearance Ed tells him that the woman isn’t missing. “I’ve got her up at my place. Mary’s hanging out there right now.” Pete is startled for a beat, then laughs and tells Ed he has a mighty strange sense of humor.
The murder of his second victim, a storekeeper, results in his downfall. The film ends with newsreel footage of the real Ed Gein being put into the back of a police car. The end credits are interspersed with Railsback, as Gein in the asylum, smiling the smile and telling the camera that he doesn’t remember everything that happened.
So what was Edward Gein really like? This is the movie that stays closest to the facts and does a good job of presenting the man’s madness. He was born in 1906 and died in 1984. Mary Hogan was killed in 1954, Bernice Worden (called Collette in the film) was murdered in 1957.
What fascinated the first person to translate Gein’s life into fiction—novelist Robert Bloch, who immortalized Gein as Norman Bates in “Psycho,” was the fact that he lived so long in a small community and no one noticed his mania. If he never quite fit in with the common fold of Plainfield, he never stood out, either. For his trips to the cemetery, he enlisted the aid of a man named Gus, a peculiar loner who ended up in an asylum before Gein did. (Gus is omitted from every one of the Gein films.) Even with this association, no one saw through Ed’s smile.
The joke about the murdered barmaid is real. A few weeks after her disappearance, Ed told a sawmill owner with the unlikely name of Elmo Ueeck, “She isn’t missing. She’s at the farm right now.”
What do we make of this emotionally retarded man, in life and in this film? He’s not a guy most of us would have to fear because his interest was in older women only. The main sources for our fear are his psychology and the way it manifests itself. We can deal with the extremes of his oddness only through dark laughter. How else can you react to his woman suit? The horrible fact of the matter is that when he minces out the front door, his pot belly poking out under the vest, there is enough of the humor of an awkward man in drag to generate a laugh. But when we see what it is he’s really wearing, the laughter gets stuck in our throat.
“Ed Gein” is not designed to generate laughter, but the only sane reaction we can have to some levels of real-life horror is black humor. After his arrest, sick jokes known as “Geiners” began to circulate throughout the Midwest, some of which I suspect were used by Robert Bloch in his novel and later by screenwriter Joseph Stefano in his script for “Psycho.” “Mother is, how do you say it, not quite herself tonight.”
But black humor isn’t just a distancing device that allows us to contemplate the world’s horrors without collapsing into a morass of despair and inertia. It’s also a means for saying that the world can be as horrible as it wants to be—or as our fellow humans make it—but we have moved beyond caring. It’s either a perfectly rational response to an irrational universe, or a perfectly insane response to a sane universe when sanity isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
Monday, October 1, 2007
The Haunting Hour Volume One: Don’t Think About It (Universal, 2007)
Lots of people, i.e. adults, are still trying to figure out the appeal of R.L. Stine’s ubiquitous creepfests for the younger set, the Goosebumps books particularly. (Stine also produces some other series, including Rotten School, Mostly Ghostly, The Nightmare Room, and Fear Street, which actually predates the emergence of Goosebumps. We’re talking something like 300 million books sold worldwide.)
The made-for-DVD movie “The Haunting Hour Volume One: Don’t Think About It” may or may not have drawn its plot from a tale in one of Stine’s Haunting Hour books, which are apparently a series of short story collections. I’ve not read anything from this series. Dan Angel and Billy Brown are the credited screenwriters.
Emily Osment (15-year old younger sister of Haley Joel Osment) stars as Cassie Keller, gothy new girl in school. She doesn’t get along with her parents or her kid brother, and as soon as she strikes up a conversation with the boyfriend of Priscilla (Brittany Curran), Female Big Cheese on Campus, she finds herself on the outs with this “Mean Girls” wannabe as well. In a scene purloined from “Carrie,” Cassie humiliates Priscilla at the Halloween dance.
Curious about a place called The Halloween Store, Cassie enters to find the kind of set decoration any kid in thrall to the icons of horror movies would love. It’s dark. It’s cobwebby. The walls are covered with masks, skulls, skeletons wearing wispy shrouds. And it’s owned by a long-haired creep with a soft voice (Tobin Bell, of the “Saw” franchise).
He sells her a book called “The Evil Thing.” That night at home, she unlocks the clasp that holds the covers together and reads the doggerel incantation that would cause The Evil Thing to come to life if the jingle were to be read aloud.
Halloween night, stuck with sitting her annoying little brother, Cassie does read the verse out loud. The Thing appears so she and Sean, Priscilla’s disgruntled boyfriend (Cody Linley) spend the next few hours rescuing little brother Max (Alex Winzenread), Priscilla, and an unlucky pizza delivery guy from the beastie and its horde of ravenous offspring.
Directed by Alex Zamm, this surprisingly entertaining little picture is clearly aimed at the upper elementary/lower junior high set. The first half contains some nicely suspenseful moments, but after the monster makes its appearance the movie gallops towards comedy. Perhaps that’s so as to not really frighten its audience, or it may be because the budget didn’t call for anything like realistic monster effects so Zamm decided to ramp up the camp.
The acting is decent in that overdo-it-just-a-little-for-the-chillun style that is de rigueur for kiddie TV. Osment is the main attraction and she could go on to an adult TV or film career. It’s hard to tell how these young actresses will age.
This is a pretty good little movie for kids who want to see “something scary” that isn’t really scary at all, but adult fans of R.L. Stine’s work, assuming there are any, may be a bit disappointed. After all, some of the Goosebumps books, especially the ones about ghosts, can generate a true frisson that is totally lacking here.
The made-for-DVD movie “The Haunting Hour Volume One: Don’t Think About It” may or may not have drawn its plot from a tale in one of Stine’s Haunting Hour books, which are apparently a series of short story collections. I’ve not read anything from this series. Dan Angel and Billy Brown are the credited screenwriters.
Emily Osment (15-year old younger sister of Haley Joel Osment) stars as Cassie Keller, gothy new girl in school. She doesn’t get along with her parents or her kid brother, and as soon as she strikes up a conversation with the boyfriend of Priscilla (Brittany Curran), Female Big Cheese on Campus, she finds herself on the outs with this “Mean Girls” wannabe as well. In a scene purloined from “Carrie,” Cassie humiliates Priscilla at the Halloween dance.
Curious about a place called The Halloween Store, Cassie enters to find the kind of set decoration any kid in thrall to the icons of horror movies would love. It’s dark. It’s cobwebby. The walls are covered with masks, skulls, skeletons wearing wispy shrouds. And it’s owned by a long-haired creep with a soft voice (Tobin Bell, of the “Saw” franchise).
He sells her a book called “The Evil Thing.” That night at home, she unlocks the clasp that holds the covers together and reads the doggerel incantation that would cause The Evil Thing to come to life if the jingle were to be read aloud.
Halloween night, stuck with sitting her annoying little brother, Cassie does read the verse out loud. The Thing appears so she and Sean, Priscilla’s disgruntled boyfriend (Cody Linley) spend the next few hours rescuing little brother Max (Alex Winzenread), Priscilla, and an unlucky pizza delivery guy from the beastie and its horde of ravenous offspring.
Directed by Alex Zamm, this surprisingly entertaining little picture is clearly aimed at the upper elementary/lower junior high set. The first half contains some nicely suspenseful moments, but after the monster makes its appearance the movie gallops towards comedy. Perhaps that’s so as to not really frighten its audience, or it may be because the budget didn’t call for anything like realistic monster effects so Zamm decided to ramp up the camp.
The acting is decent in that overdo-it-just-a-little-for-the-chillun style that is de rigueur for kiddie TV. Osment is the main attraction and she could go on to an adult TV or film career. It’s hard to tell how these young actresses will age.
This is a pretty good little movie for kids who want to see “something scary” that isn’t really scary at all, but adult fans of R.L. Stine’s work, assuming there are any, may be a bit disappointed. After all, some of the Goosebumps books, especially the ones about ghosts, can generate a true frisson that is totally lacking here.
Dead Silence (Universal, 2007)
My original review of this picture began like this: “This movie is going to break my heart. I like it. A lot. And it’s going to bomb. A lot.” It took in less than 18 million at the worldwide box office, a.k.a., me being right.
What’s worst was that its weaknesses, and there are two—maybe three--big ones, didn’t sink it. Its strengths did.When you see that the Universal Pictures logo that opens this movie is the version that was used in the early 1930s, you’ll know that this isn’t going to be another torture porn hunk of splatterpunk.
On a dark and stormy evening, young James Ashen (Ryan Kwanten) and his wife Lisa (Laura Regan) find outside their apartment door a large package with no return address. It contains an old ventriloquist’s dummy named Billy. Lisa thinks it’s a hoot; James is creeped out.
While he’s gone to retrieve some take out, weird stuff starts happening in the apartment—a disembodied voice whispers to Lisa and then something we can’t see attacks her. James comes home to find her dead with her tongue cut out.
He becomes the only suspect in the case. Homicide cop Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg), with no solid evidence, lets him go and James takes off to his home town of Ravens Fair because he’s remembered the legend of Mary Shaw, a local ventriloquist from the 1950s who had been accused of kidnapping a child and was killed by the missing kid’s relatives. She was buried with her dolls, all 100 of them.
James interviews an old man named Henry, the town undertaker (Michael Fairman), who has a crazy wife. She hides in the cellar with her stuffed raven. James talks with his own father, Edward (Bob Gunton), with whom he has been angry for years. Ella, Edward’s new young wife (Amber Valletta) is right by the old man’s side.
It’s all just gothic as hell—old house, crumbling theater, ghosts, dead bodies that come to life, cemeteries, dolls that, whenever we stop looking at them, seem to move, and lots and lots of rain. Director James Wan (“Saw”) handles these traditional elements as if he’s seen every horror movie made in the 1930s, which I’m sure he has. His writing partner and “Saw” co-creator Leigh Whannell has snatched up as many pieces of these old movies as he can and stitched them together.
If you like those creepy old flicks, which, surprise, I do, you can have a lot of fun with “Dead Silence.” What you might not appreciate is Wan’s determination to make a film that is stylistically as unlike “Saw” as he can. Instead of the hyper kinetic camera work of that earlier film, this time everything is rock steady and framed perfectly. The camera is always in the most effective place and when it moves, it moves for a cinematic reason rather than just because jolting the camera is a post-“Blair Witch Project” horror movie cliché.
Weaknesses?
Kwantan is bland in the lead and Whalberg, who was convincingly intense in “Saw II,” is miscast here as a ‘40s style smart mouth cop. Also, the film builds to a double-whammy ending and the first whammy is ham-handedly introduced. Maybe Wan and Whannell did that on purpose to misdirect the audience into thinking that there would be only one jolt in the last reel. Whatever. It’s weak.
Inanimate objects in movies that start moving around creep me out. If that works for you, and you have a taste for gothic horror that is heavy on atmosphere and light on gore, give this one a try. But if your appetite for contemporary horror has been sharpened by “Saw” and you expect more of the same from Wan and Whannell, leave “Dead Silence” for those of us who still like that little chill that all too rarely runs down our spines.
What’s worst was that its weaknesses, and there are two—maybe three--big ones, didn’t sink it. Its strengths did.When you see that the Universal Pictures logo that opens this movie is the version that was used in the early 1930s, you’ll know that this isn’t going to be another torture porn hunk of splatterpunk.
On a dark and stormy evening, young James Ashen (Ryan Kwanten) and his wife Lisa (Laura Regan) find outside their apartment door a large package with no return address. It contains an old ventriloquist’s dummy named Billy. Lisa thinks it’s a hoot; James is creeped out.
While he’s gone to retrieve some take out, weird stuff starts happening in the apartment—a disembodied voice whispers to Lisa and then something we can’t see attacks her. James comes home to find her dead with her tongue cut out.
He becomes the only suspect in the case. Homicide cop Lipton (Donnie Wahlberg), with no solid evidence, lets him go and James takes off to his home town of Ravens Fair because he’s remembered the legend of Mary Shaw, a local ventriloquist from the 1950s who had been accused of kidnapping a child and was killed by the missing kid’s relatives. She was buried with her dolls, all 100 of them.
James interviews an old man named Henry, the town undertaker (Michael Fairman), who has a crazy wife. She hides in the cellar with her stuffed raven. James talks with his own father, Edward (Bob Gunton), with whom he has been angry for years. Ella, Edward’s new young wife (Amber Valletta) is right by the old man’s side.
It’s all just gothic as hell—old house, crumbling theater, ghosts, dead bodies that come to life, cemeteries, dolls that, whenever we stop looking at them, seem to move, and lots and lots of rain. Director James Wan (“Saw”) handles these traditional elements as if he’s seen every horror movie made in the 1930s, which I’m sure he has. His writing partner and “Saw” co-creator Leigh Whannell has snatched up as many pieces of these old movies as he can and stitched them together.
If you like those creepy old flicks, which, surprise, I do, you can have a lot of fun with “Dead Silence.” What you might not appreciate is Wan’s determination to make a film that is stylistically as unlike “Saw” as he can. Instead of the hyper kinetic camera work of that earlier film, this time everything is rock steady and framed perfectly. The camera is always in the most effective place and when it moves, it moves for a cinematic reason rather than just because jolting the camera is a post-“Blair Witch Project” horror movie cliché.
Weaknesses?
Kwantan is bland in the lead and Whalberg, who was convincingly intense in “Saw II,” is miscast here as a ‘40s style smart mouth cop. Also, the film builds to a double-whammy ending and the first whammy is ham-handedly introduced. Maybe Wan and Whannell did that on purpose to misdirect the audience into thinking that there would be only one jolt in the last reel. Whatever. It’s weak.
Inanimate objects in movies that start moving around creep me out. If that works for you, and you have a taste for gothic horror that is heavy on atmosphere and light on gore, give this one a try. But if your appetite for contemporary horror has been sharpened by “Saw” and you expect more of the same from Wan and Whannell, leave “Dead Silence” for those of us who still like that little chill that all too rarely runs down our spines.
Friday, September 14, 2007
"I Walked With a Zombie" (1943)
“Actually, it's very difficult for a reviewer to give something called ‘I Walked With a Zombie’ a good review.” So wrote producer Val Lewton in a letter to his sister. It’s one of the few times his instincts about film failed him. Nothing could be easier than writing positive things about any of the nine horror films he produced—and frequently wrote under one of his several pseudonyms—for RKO between “Cat People” in 1942 and “Bedlam” in 1946.
“I Walked With a Zombie,” admittedly a title that only a pulp magazine editor could love, was the second of Lewton’s films as producer of RKO’s newly formed horror movie unit. The idea then as now was to make chillers on the cheap that would return healthy profits. To keep costs down, Lewton relied more on lighting and sound to create an atmosphere of dread and unease.
The film begins with lush, romantic theme music more appropriate to a woman’s picture than a tale of voodoo. “Zombie” is what might be called now a “re-imagining” of Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre.” Frances Dee stars as Betsy Connell, a Canadian nurse who takes a job caring for the wife of a sugar plantation owner in the West Indies. On the boat taking her to her new home, she meets Paul Holland (Tom Conway, who appeared in two other Lewton thrillers). Holland is suffering from acute weltschmertz and tells Betsy that the beauty of nature only serves to disguise “death and decay.” She has no idea that he is her employer or she might have been tempted to return to Canada.
Just about the time the audience begins to think of Paul as Byronic, someone in the film describes him with just that word.
During her first night at the plantation, Betsy is told that she will meet the wife for whom she is to care the next day. Paul tells her nothing of Jessica’s condition, which just adds to the atmosphere of disquiet. Later that night, Betsy awakens to the sound of a woman weeping. Looking out her window, she sees a thin, blond woman in white wandering in what appears to be a trance around the garden. She follows the woman into an old tower. Inside, the woman begins to stalk her, completely without reaction as Betsy screams. Paul and some servants show up and the woman is led away. Betsy explains about trying to find out who was weeping and why, and Paul tells her that she must have been dreaming.
The next night, Paul’s brother Wes (James Ellison) and his mother (Edith Barrett) join the dinner party. The brothers get into an argument about what’s best to do for Jessica, who was the woman Betsy followed into the tower, and it becomes clear that Wes is in love with his brother’s wife. The subject of voodoo comes up and Paul dismisses it by saying that “superstition is a contagious thing.” He is repressed and soulfully unhappy, but Betsy is falling under his sway.
Betsy finds companionship with the servants, who are all happy and content. What at first seems to be a sad period stereotype is soon seen to be a disguise adopted by the house crew to hide their involvement with voodoo. Alma, the maid (Teresa Harris), suggests that a voodoo priest might be able to help the non-communicative Jessica (Christine Gordon). Betsy, knowing that Paul would never approve but thinking that it couldn’t hurt, decides to take Jessica to a voodoo ceremony that night.
The journey of the two women through the fields of sugar cane constitutes the film’s most celebrated sequence. Betsy is dressed sensibly and Jessica is wearing her standard loose fitting and flowing white gown, her blond hair whipped by the breeze. Director Jacques Tourneur puts no music behind this dark walk. We hear the wind as it moves through the cane. The camera moves with it, showing us the women as they progress along a path through the stalks.
The wind picks up as Betsy and Jessica move along from the safety of the plantation deeper into the heart of darkness. They pass the corpse of a goat, hanging from a tree, swaying across their path. They see an animal skull, and then a human one. Betsy’s pace increases as does the sound of the wind. Perhaps the sequence’s greatest shock comes with the sudden appearance of a skeletal male zombie blocking the trail. Given the proper signal supplied to Betsy by Alma, he allows the women to pass.
At the ceremony, the true nature of Jessica’s ailment is revealed.
Later, at the plantation house, Wes admits that he believes Jessica to be one of the walking dead. Paul denies this, believing just as fervently that the loneliness of living on the island has driven her mad. Since he has now fallen in love with Betsy, he demands that she leave so the same fate won’t befall her.
From this point, final secrets are revealed, the inevitable occurs, and the film hastens to its romantically gothic conclusion.
There are no sudden shock moments in “I Walked With a Zombie,” but that wasn’t Lewton’s idea of how a horror movie should be constructed. He believed in building tension from the opening scene, and everything in the movie is one more brick in the final structure. Cues to upcoming scares are not given on the soundtrack. The unexpected appearance of the thin zombie on the path to the voodoo ceremony is not underscored by an orchestral bang any more than turning around in a dark house to suddenly be confronted by a walking dead man would be emphasized by any sound other than your own gasp in real life. The wind and the steady drone of the surf are enough.
Lewton wasn’t interested in scourging the skin from your bones—he just wanted to get under it. Fans of the modern no-holds-barred horror movie may find his films slow and too quiet to be effective, but connoisseurs of psychological chillers will find much to admire in his approach.
This is definitely not Romero or Fulci, but Lewton wasn’t interested in making audiences scream and then forget their phony movie fears on their way across the parking lot to their cars. He wanted to make the experience of walking in the dark as terrifying outside the theater as it had been inside. The bleak, melancholy dread of “I Walked With a Zombie” stays with you for a very long time.
“I Walked With a Zombie,” admittedly a title that only a pulp magazine editor could love, was the second of Lewton’s films as producer of RKO’s newly formed horror movie unit. The idea then as now was to make chillers on the cheap that would return healthy profits. To keep costs down, Lewton relied more on lighting and sound to create an atmosphere of dread and unease.
The film begins with lush, romantic theme music more appropriate to a woman’s picture than a tale of voodoo. “Zombie” is what might be called now a “re-imagining” of Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre.” Frances Dee stars as Betsy Connell, a Canadian nurse who takes a job caring for the wife of a sugar plantation owner in the West Indies. On the boat taking her to her new home, she meets Paul Holland (Tom Conway, who appeared in two other Lewton thrillers). Holland is suffering from acute weltschmertz and tells Betsy that the beauty of nature only serves to disguise “death and decay.” She has no idea that he is her employer or she might have been tempted to return to Canada.
Just about the time the audience begins to think of Paul as Byronic, someone in the film describes him with just that word.
During her first night at the plantation, Betsy is told that she will meet the wife for whom she is to care the next day. Paul tells her nothing of Jessica’s condition, which just adds to the atmosphere of disquiet. Later that night, Betsy awakens to the sound of a woman weeping. Looking out her window, she sees a thin, blond woman in white wandering in what appears to be a trance around the garden. She follows the woman into an old tower. Inside, the woman begins to stalk her, completely without reaction as Betsy screams. Paul and some servants show up and the woman is led away. Betsy explains about trying to find out who was weeping and why, and Paul tells her that she must have been dreaming.
The next night, Paul’s brother Wes (James Ellison) and his mother (Edith Barrett) join the dinner party. The brothers get into an argument about what’s best to do for Jessica, who was the woman Betsy followed into the tower, and it becomes clear that Wes is in love with his brother’s wife. The subject of voodoo comes up and Paul dismisses it by saying that “superstition is a contagious thing.” He is repressed and soulfully unhappy, but Betsy is falling under his sway.
Betsy finds companionship with the servants, who are all happy and content. What at first seems to be a sad period stereotype is soon seen to be a disguise adopted by the house crew to hide their involvement with voodoo. Alma, the maid (Teresa Harris), suggests that a voodoo priest might be able to help the non-communicative Jessica (Christine Gordon). Betsy, knowing that Paul would never approve but thinking that it couldn’t hurt, decides to take Jessica to a voodoo ceremony that night.
The journey of the two women through the fields of sugar cane constitutes the film’s most celebrated sequence. Betsy is dressed sensibly and Jessica is wearing her standard loose fitting and flowing white gown, her blond hair whipped by the breeze. Director Jacques Tourneur puts no music behind this dark walk. We hear the wind as it moves through the cane. The camera moves with it, showing us the women as they progress along a path through the stalks.
The wind picks up as Betsy and Jessica move along from the safety of the plantation deeper into the heart of darkness. They pass the corpse of a goat, hanging from a tree, swaying across their path. They see an animal skull, and then a human one. Betsy’s pace increases as does the sound of the wind. Perhaps the sequence’s greatest shock comes with the sudden appearance of a skeletal male zombie blocking the trail. Given the proper signal supplied to Betsy by Alma, he allows the women to pass.
At the ceremony, the true nature of Jessica’s ailment is revealed.
Later, at the plantation house, Wes admits that he believes Jessica to be one of the walking dead. Paul denies this, believing just as fervently that the loneliness of living on the island has driven her mad. Since he has now fallen in love with Betsy, he demands that she leave so the same fate won’t befall her.
From this point, final secrets are revealed, the inevitable occurs, and the film hastens to its romantically gothic conclusion.
There are no sudden shock moments in “I Walked With a Zombie,” but that wasn’t Lewton’s idea of how a horror movie should be constructed. He believed in building tension from the opening scene, and everything in the movie is one more brick in the final structure. Cues to upcoming scares are not given on the soundtrack. The unexpected appearance of the thin zombie on the path to the voodoo ceremony is not underscored by an orchestral bang any more than turning around in a dark house to suddenly be confronted by a walking dead man would be emphasized by any sound other than your own gasp in real life. The wind and the steady drone of the surf are enough.
Lewton wasn’t interested in scourging the skin from your bones—he just wanted to get under it. Fans of the modern no-holds-barred horror movie may find his films slow and too quiet to be effective, but connoisseurs of psychological chillers will find much to admire in his approach.
This is definitely not Romero or Fulci, but Lewton wasn’t interested in making audiences scream and then forget their phony movie fears on their way across the parking lot to their cars. He wanted to make the experience of walking in the dark as terrifying outside the theater as it had been inside. The bleak, melancholy dread of “I Walked With a Zombie” stays with you for a very long time.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
"Ab-normal Beauty" (2004)
“Ab-normal Beauty” (Sei mong se jun), written by Oxide Pang and his twin brother Pak Sing Pang, and directed by Oxide alone, explores ground already investigated by Alfred Hitchcock, Michael Powell and, almost concurrently with “Ab-normal Beauty,” Takashi Shimizu (whose “Marebito” was released a few weeks before Pang’s film). “Rear Window” and “Peeping Tom” both present metaphors for our fascination with seeing on film things too awful to see in person. The camera, like a murder weapon, is neutral until a use is found for it.
Jiney is an art student living with her mother. Her best friend—and we come to suspect more than best friend—is Jas. They are both photographers and the roam about the city of Hong Kong snapping pix of whatever catches their attention. A young man named Anson (Anson Leung) has a crush on Jin. She rebuffs him gently; Jas tells him to bugger off.
Jin’s mother leaves town on a business trip, planning to be gone about a month, and left alone at home Jin allows her boredom with life to show. One day she happens upon a fatal car crash. The appearance of corpses on the street overwhelms her and she begins to take pictures furiously. Jas helps her develop them and is repulsed by the images of blood and injury. “Death,” Jin says, “is the ideal photo—scary and exciting.”
She starts to unravle. She makes a skin-tight mask—when worn, it is death’s face. She begins to see blood where these isn’t any blood. Visiting an outdoor market, Jin pays a butcher to kill chicken after chicken so she can photograph them as they die. Her darkroom becomes cluttered with shots of dead birds, dogs and fish. Her excuse to Jas is that she just wants to add a new element to her work.
She buys a collection of death photos gathered together in a book. She thinks the pictures are beautiful. “Pressing the shutter is like death in that it stops the subject.” Her greatest thrill comes from seeing a potential suicide atop a tall building. When the girl jumps, Jin follows her descent, snapping pictures all the way to the sidewalk.
Why, suddenly, has this passion for death seeped to the surface of Jin’s psyche? She tells Jas about the time when, as a young girl, she was molested by three boys and her own mother’s failure to believe her story. But is that enough to make the change we see in her believable? Is it just the sight of bloody death by traffic accident that sets this terrible change in motion?
When we hear, and see in flashback, the story of her youthful rape, we expect the film will move along with that new plot element to explain what is happening with this lovely and talented young woman, but suddenly the picture takes a sharp turn into more standard thriller country.
Jin finds on her doorstep a video tape. “Take a look” is scratched on the box, and when she does she sees a moment right out of “feardotcom”—a young woman is chained to a chair, begging for release, when a masked man (we assume) beats her to death with a length of lead pipe.
We’ve been jolted as severly as Jin has. What has this movie become? Are we to think, as the girls do, that Anson is responsible for some kind of sick joke? Is Jas secretly a sadistic killer? Is Jin, or is the masked man on the tape a reflection of her own madness? Jin has already expressed the fear that she might lose control and really kill someone for the sake of taking pictures of the body. The sudden shift in plot emphasis is jolting, but perhaps the Pangs are telling us that it takes a change from art to reality to shake us out of our routine existence.
The Pang Brothers insinuate themselves into the film by casting sisters in the roles of best friends/possible lesbian lovers. Race Wong, as Jiney, and Rosanne Wong, as Jas, are the two halves of the Cantopop music duo “2R.” As their characters become involved in reproducing life in photography and painting instead of living it, so have the Pangs made a similar choice.
Strictly on the level of thriller, the film has nice moments during the first story line as we watch Jin’s descent to madness and wonder what will happen to her, and others during the last third or so as the gore level increases considerably and the intellectual pondering of the first part give way to a more visceral reaction.
And the Wong sisters are superb as Jin and Jas. Apparently, Jin (the younger of the two) is having a more successful film career, although they have made films as co-stars. One made a year before “Ab-normal Beauty” is a parody of the international hit cop thriller “Infernal Affairs,” recently remade by Martin Scorsese as “The Departed.” The Hong Kong comedy is entitled, sublimely, “Love is a Many Stupid Thing.”
But here in “Ab-normal Beauty” the sisters are terrific. They are both quite lovely, but neither of them relies on looks to win our affection. More often than not, they appear just like students, attractive but not made-up or dressed to kill. They sell the friendship and, on another level of unease, the more-than-friendship convincingly. Jas is not just the disposable friend of the protagonist about whom we really don’t care too much. She works her way into our affection as completely as does the character with the interesting problem.
So many American horror films are concerned almost exclusively with dying and dying badly. “Ab-normal Beauty” is about preferring a bad death to an even worse life.
Jiney is an art student living with her mother. Her best friend—and we come to suspect more than best friend—is Jas. They are both photographers and the roam about the city of Hong Kong snapping pix of whatever catches their attention. A young man named Anson (Anson Leung) has a crush on Jin. She rebuffs him gently; Jas tells him to bugger off.
Jin’s mother leaves town on a business trip, planning to be gone about a month, and left alone at home Jin allows her boredom with life to show. One day she happens upon a fatal car crash. The appearance of corpses on the street overwhelms her and she begins to take pictures furiously. Jas helps her develop them and is repulsed by the images of blood and injury. “Death,” Jin says, “is the ideal photo—scary and exciting.”
She starts to unravle. She makes a skin-tight mask—when worn, it is death’s face. She begins to see blood where these isn’t any blood. Visiting an outdoor market, Jin pays a butcher to kill chicken after chicken so she can photograph them as they die. Her darkroom becomes cluttered with shots of dead birds, dogs and fish. Her excuse to Jas is that she just wants to add a new element to her work.
She buys a collection of death photos gathered together in a book. She thinks the pictures are beautiful. “Pressing the shutter is like death in that it stops the subject.” Her greatest thrill comes from seeing a potential suicide atop a tall building. When the girl jumps, Jin follows her descent, snapping pictures all the way to the sidewalk.
Why, suddenly, has this passion for death seeped to the surface of Jin’s psyche? She tells Jas about the time when, as a young girl, she was molested by three boys and her own mother’s failure to believe her story. But is that enough to make the change we see in her believable? Is it just the sight of bloody death by traffic accident that sets this terrible change in motion?
When we hear, and see in flashback, the story of her youthful rape, we expect the film will move along with that new plot element to explain what is happening with this lovely and talented young woman, but suddenly the picture takes a sharp turn into more standard thriller country.
Jin finds on her doorstep a video tape. “Take a look” is scratched on the box, and when she does she sees a moment right out of “feardotcom”—a young woman is chained to a chair, begging for release, when a masked man (we assume) beats her to death with a length of lead pipe.
We’ve been jolted as severly as Jin has. What has this movie become? Are we to think, as the girls do, that Anson is responsible for some kind of sick joke? Is Jas secretly a sadistic killer? Is Jin, or is the masked man on the tape a reflection of her own madness? Jin has already expressed the fear that she might lose control and really kill someone for the sake of taking pictures of the body. The sudden shift in plot emphasis is jolting, but perhaps the Pangs are telling us that it takes a change from art to reality to shake us out of our routine existence.
The Pang Brothers insinuate themselves into the film by casting sisters in the roles of best friends/possible lesbian lovers. Race Wong, as Jiney, and Rosanne Wong, as Jas, are the two halves of the Cantopop music duo “2R.” As their characters become involved in reproducing life in photography and painting instead of living it, so have the Pangs made a similar choice.
Strictly on the level of thriller, the film has nice moments during the first story line as we watch Jin’s descent to madness and wonder what will happen to her, and others during the last third or so as the gore level increases considerably and the intellectual pondering of the first part give way to a more visceral reaction.
And the Wong sisters are superb as Jin and Jas. Apparently, Jin (the younger of the two) is having a more successful film career, although they have made films as co-stars. One made a year before “Ab-normal Beauty” is a parody of the international hit cop thriller “Infernal Affairs,” recently remade by Martin Scorsese as “The Departed.” The Hong Kong comedy is entitled, sublimely, “Love is a Many Stupid Thing.”
But here in “Ab-normal Beauty” the sisters are terrific. They are both quite lovely, but neither of them relies on looks to win our affection. More often than not, they appear just like students, attractive but not made-up or dressed to kill. They sell the friendship and, on another level of unease, the more-than-friendship convincingly. Jas is not just the disposable friend of the protagonist about whom we really don’t care too much. She works her way into our affection as completely as does the character with the interesting problem.
So many American horror films are concerned almost exclusively with dying and dying badly. “Ab-normal Beauty” is about preferring a bad death to an even worse life.
Wednesday, August 8, 2007
"The Mask of Fu Manchu" (1932)
Ravening hordes of (gasp, choke) ORIENTALS are amassing in Asia with but one goal—to take over the world. Wait, make that two goals: take over the world and despoil white women while they do it.
Yes, it’s the pulp-infected world of Sax Rohmer brought to the screen for the 27th time by 1932, when “The Mask of Fu Manchu” was unleashed by MGM. Rohmer’s trashy but surprisingly readable novels and stories have provided the basis for over three dozen films, serials, and TV programs (Stephen King has him beat by over 50 titles, but King may not have the staying power.).
There are powerful stirrings in the East and British authorities fear that if a potent symbol of Oriental unity is discovered—say, oh, the legendary lost mask of Genghis Khan—unstoppable waves of the Yellow Peril will flow over the West and Civilization As We Know It will be submerged for generations to come.
Note right off the bat that the mask of Fu Manchu is really the mask of Genghis Khan, but we can’t let little things like that stand in the way of a good time.
Anyway, Scotland Yard worries that the mask could fall into the hands of the arch fiend, the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, Devil Doctor, Chinese genius, doctor of philosophy, medicine, theology, and just about every other damn thing you could be a doctor of, so top cop of the Empire, Nayland Smith (Lewis Stone) is sent to find the mask first.
That last sentence was long enough so I didn’t add the parenthetical thought “before James Bond” to the idea of the top cop, but the relationship isn’t that far off base. Watch Nayland Smith and Fu Manchu try to outwit each other and then think about Bond and Dr. No. You’ll see what I mean.
Okay, so Nayland Smith sets out with a team from the British Museum to find the mask and bring it back to London while Fu Manchu and his “insignificant daughter” Fah Lo See (Myrna Loy) want to use it to encourage their followers to take over the western world.
To this end, they lie, cheat, steal, murder, kidnap and torture (she’s especially fond of this as the pain of men brings her at least to the point of orgasm).
What happens will come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever sniffed the pungent aroma of decaying pulp magazines, and whether or not you enjoy the journey to film’s conclusion will depend greatly on your appreciation of or tolerance for 1930s melodrama that is more camp than a field full of tents.
“The Mask of Fu Manchu” was one of nine pictures Boris Karloff made in 1932, and the evil genius was his first horror movie role after “Frankenstein” the previous year. He and Loy, 18 years his junior, are famously on record as saying that neither of them could take anything about the film seriously, and many’s the take that was ruined when one of the other of them got a fit a giggles over the script’s ludicrous dialogue.
As a general rule, that kind of insistent corpsing (theatrical slang for laughing on stage during serious moments) is amusing for about five minutes and then becomes a pain in the ass, but none of Karloff’s and Loy’s incredulous amusement wound up on the screen.
Which is not to say that you can’t see any of it. Both of them try so hard to sell their characters’ villainy it must be because they know that if they can’t make themselves believe in their own decadence, no one else will, either. They snarl, they leer, they open their eyes as wide as Cecil Holland’s slant-eyed makeup will let them. Karloff waves his opulent fingernails gracefully and Loy quivers with the expectation of torturing white men before turning them into sexual playthings.
The film is an acquired taste, but once acquired it becomes a cornucopia of period movie delights. Truly is it said that some pictures you come to love not in spite of their weaknesses, but because of them.
Most films that have aged this badly have disappeared. This one survives because it has Karloff in it. Loy is always a plus, and it’s a treat to see her in one of her pre-“Thin Man” exotic vamp roles, but most of the movies in which she played the wicked seductress have gone to that great celluloid recycling dump in the sky.
Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books have managed, just barely, to stay in print, but the interest of readers alone wouldn’t have kept a movie this dated alive and on television for over 70 years.
No, I suspect it’s Karloff’s presence combined with Cedric Gibbons’ simple but evocative art direction—and the repeated reproduction of curiosity-inducing stills from the film in early 1960s issues of “Famous Monsters of Filmland”—that have kept this one’s pulse thumping.
“The Mask of Fu Manchu” is still entertaining, even if, for most viewers, it’s entertaining for all the wrong reasons. Unfortunately, it remains today what it always was: a pretty lousy movie.
But if you still get a kick, or even a small thrill, from “Doctor. X,” “The Mystery of the Wax Museum,” or “The Vampire Bat,” and you can overlook the painful stereotypes and clichés that make up the Yellow Peril subgenre, Rohmer’s criminal genius may be able to cast his spell on you.
Yes, it’s the pulp-infected world of Sax Rohmer brought to the screen for the 27th time by 1932, when “The Mask of Fu Manchu” was unleashed by MGM. Rohmer’s trashy but surprisingly readable novels and stories have provided the basis for over three dozen films, serials, and TV programs (Stephen King has him beat by over 50 titles, but King may not have the staying power.).
There are powerful stirrings in the East and British authorities fear that if a potent symbol of Oriental unity is discovered—say, oh, the legendary lost mask of Genghis Khan—unstoppable waves of the Yellow Peril will flow over the West and Civilization As We Know It will be submerged for generations to come.
Note right off the bat that the mask of Fu Manchu is really the mask of Genghis Khan, but we can’t let little things like that stand in the way of a good time.
Anyway, Scotland Yard worries that the mask could fall into the hands of the arch fiend, the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, Devil Doctor, Chinese genius, doctor of philosophy, medicine, theology, and just about every other damn thing you could be a doctor of, so top cop of the Empire, Nayland Smith (Lewis Stone) is sent to find the mask first.
That last sentence was long enough so I didn’t add the parenthetical thought “before James Bond” to the idea of the top cop, but the relationship isn’t that far off base. Watch Nayland Smith and Fu Manchu try to outwit each other and then think about Bond and Dr. No. You’ll see what I mean.
Okay, so Nayland Smith sets out with a team from the British Museum to find the mask and bring it back to London while Fu Manchu and his “insignificant daughter” Fah Lo See (Myrna Loy) want to use it to encourage their followers to take over the western world.
To this end, they lie, cheat, steal, murder, kidnap and torture (she’s especially fond of this as the pain of men brings her at least to the point of orgasm).
What happens will come as no surprise to anyone who’s ever sniffed the pungent aroma of decaying pulp magazines, and whether or not you enjoy the journey to film’s conclusion will depend greatly on your appreciation of or tolerance for 1930s melodrama that is more camp than a field full of tents.
“The Mask of Fu Manchu” was one of nine pictures Boris Karloff made in 1932, and the evil genius was his first horror movie role after “Frankenstein” the previous year. He and Loy, 18 years his junior, are famously on record as saying that neither of them could take anything about the film seriously, and many’s the take that was ruined when one of the other of them got a fit a giggles over the script’s ludicrous dialogue.
As a general rule, that kind of insistent corpsing (theatrical slang for laughing on stage during serious moments) is amusing for about five minutes and then becomes a pain in the ass, but none of Karloff’s and Loy’s incredulous amusement wound up on the screen.
Which is not to say that you can’t see any of it. Both of them try so hard to sell their characters’ villainy it must be because they know that if they can’t make themselves believe in their own decadence, no one else will, either. They snarl, they leer, they open their eyes as wide as Cecil Holland’s slant-eyed makeup will let them. Karloff waves his opulent fingernails gracefully and Loy quivers with the expectation of torturing white men before turning them into sexual playthings.
The film is an acquired taste, but once acquired it becomes a cornucopia of period movie delights. Truly is it said that some pictures you come to love not in spite of their weaknesses, but because of them.
Most films that have aged this badly have disappeared. This one survives because it has Karloff in it. Loy is always a plus, and it’s a treat to see her in one of her pre-“Thin Man” exotic vamp roles, but most of the movies in which she played the wicked seductress have gone to that great celluloid recycling dump in the sky.
Rohmer’s Fu Manchu books have managed, just barely, to stay in print, but the interest of readers alone wouldn’t have kept a movie this dated alive and on television for over 70 years.
No, I suspect it’s Karloff’s presence combined with Cedric Gibbons’ simple but evocative art direction—and the repeated reproduction of curiosity-inducing stills from the film in early 1960s issues of “Famous Monsters of Filmland”—that have kept this one’s pulse thumping.
“The Mask of Fu Manchu” is still entertaining, even if, for most viewers, it’s entertaining for all the wrong reasons. Unfortunately, it remains today what it always was: a pretty lousy movie.
But if you still get a kick, or even a small thrill, from “Doctor. X,” “The Mystery of the Wax Museum,” or “The Vampire Bat,” and you can overlook the painful stereotypes and clichés that make up the Yellow Peril subgenre, Rohmer’s criminal genius may be able to cast his spell on you.
Monday, August 6, 2007
"Freaks" (1932)
“Freaks” is a movie that has to be seen more than once. It generates a kaleidoscope of reactions when seen for the first time, and it’s impossible to sort them all out. A single viewing will overwhelm you emotionally, but it takes repeated visits to this surreal masterpiece to determine an intellectual response.
It’s a movie that's rich with anecdotes. One has Irving Thalberg, the film’s uncredited producer, telling director Tod Browning that he wanted to make the horror movie to end all horror movies, and then saying, when he saw the finished product, “Well, I asked for it and I got it.”
One story has it that F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was under contract as a writer at MGM when the picture was made, bolted from the studio commissary and threw-up when the unusual cast came in for lunch. Another version has it that Fitzgerald felt more at ease with the cast of “Freaks” than he did with the studio big shots and so sat with them and lunched at their table.
Some say that Tod Browning exploited the cast (only Olga Roderick, the Bearded Lady, went on record later as saying she regretted her participation in the production) while others claim that Browning, a former circus and sideshow man himself, befriended the performers and set them up for life by turning them into international celebrities.
One thing is certain: no other Hollywood movie has ever generated legends like these.
As the story opens, we are moving slowly through a sideshow. The indoor talker, who bears a striking resemblance to Tod Browning, begins to tell his audience the back story of the show’s most unusual attraction. He and his audience gather around to top of a walled pit from the interior of which a light is shining up. Then we slip into the past . . .
A well-tailored dwarf named Hans (Harry Earles, who had worked with Browning in the silent version of “The Unholy Three”) is engaged to Frieda, another dwarf (Daisy Earles, Harry’s sister in real life). Despite his betrothal to Frieda, Hans is smitten by Cleopatra, the circus’ star aerialist (Olga Baclanova). Cleopatra encourages the little man’s attentions because he is willing to loan her money and buy her presents.
Cleo’s casual cruelty is the talk of the circus. Everyone knows that she is playing Hans for a sucker except Hans, who continues to harbor the delusion that she likes him.
Unknown to Hans, Cleo is actually romantically involved with Hercules, the strong man (Henry Victor). We first see Hercules as he wrestles a bull, the animal’s horns representing both the phallus and the traditional crown of the cuckold.
Finally, Frieda confronts Cleopatra and begs the big woman to leave Hans alone. She lets slip that Hans has inherited a fortune and we can see on Cleo’s face that she decides to change her amused encouragement of the little man to a determined attempt to woo him. She soon maneuvers Hans into a proposal, which she accepts with a plan to poison him and steal his money.
The wedding feast provides the background for the film’s most celebrated and quoted scene. Cleopatra, Hercules, the freaks and the other normals with the circus who have befriended them are gathered around a large table under the big top. Cleo and Hercules think the event is one huge joke, knowing as they do what they intend for Hans.
But then another dwarf stands on the table and brings a loving cup to everyone gathered. They each take a sip while chanting the words that make Cleopatra a member of their community--“Gooble gobble, we accept her, one of us.” When the loving cup is thrust toward Cleopatra she rises, the full horror of what they’re saying dawning on her. “You. Dirty. Slimy. Freaks!” she screams, stilling the crowd.
Obviously, the party is over and soon the only ones left at the table are Hercules, Cleopatra and Hans. The drunken strong man lifts Hans from his bench and puts him on Cleo’s shoulders telling the woman to give her new husband a horsey ride back to his wagon.
Hans soon falls ill, but the freaks have overheard the plotting of Hercules and Cleopatra. Off screen they tell Hans what his wife and her lover are up to and one dark stormy night the freaks take their revenge.
The film ends back at the indoor sideshow. A woman looks down into the pit and screams. Then Browning shows us the nature of the freak’s revenge. Cleopatra is now a freak herself, the Human Duck Woman. Legless and covered with feathers, she stands on her hands and emits quacking sounds.
Absurd? Oh yeah. Effective? You better believe it.
An overview of the plot, which is a standard morality/revenge tale, does nothing to prepare you for viewing the film. The cadre of freaks is made up of dwarfs, microcephalics (referred to in the movie as “pinheads”), Siamese twins, people who are armless and legless—and in one case, both—a bearded lady, an hermaphrodite, and persons the description of whom are beyond my vocabulary.
The characters play their reaction to the sideshow performers several ways. Some of the normals abuse them. Some are casually cruel and some are deliberately so. Other normals befriend the freaks. Wallace Ford and Leila Hyams are Phroso the clown (a name used by Lon Chaney in Browning’s silent “West of Zanzibar,” also with a circus background) and Venus, the bareback rider, who, while sometimes a bit patronizing, are intended to represent acceptance.
More problematic is Browning’s attitude as evidenced in the film. We first see the freaks, described as “children” although several of them are anything but, frolicking on a picnic. As they skip around in a circle they look all the world as if Browning wanted to parody the fairies in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Of course, Max Reinhardt’s film of that play wouldn’t be made for another three years, but the suggestion of Arcadian fantasy turned into a sick joke is inescapable.
In fact, any joke involving the freaks must come across as black humor. One of the Siamese twins, Daisy Hilton, is married to a clown (Roscoe Ates) and the second twin, Violet, becomes engaged. The two men ask each other to bring their wives over for a visit.
But sometimes the joke is used to suggest that there isn’t much difference between one world and another. We first meet the half-man/half-woman Joseph Josephine as s/he strolls between the wagons and Roscoe is changing out of the costume of a Roman lady. The male/female combination is emphasized.
And occasionally the humor is just as bizarre as the visuals. When Phroso comforts Venus, who has just broken up with her boyfriend, she tells him, “Say, you’re a pretty good kid.” “You’re darn right,” he responds. “You should have caught me before my operation.” Whatever that may mean.
There really isn’t much of horror in this horror movie, although there is a lot of unease beginning when the freaks figure out that Hercules and Cleopatra intend to murder Hans. Everywhere the big woman turns, there are two or three of her unusual enemies watching from the shadows.
Things turn more grotesque during the climactic storm when the wagons carrying Cleopatra and Hercules tip over in the mud. One of the little men throws a knife at the strong man, dropping him and allowing several more freaks to attack him. Cleopatra rushes off into the woods before she is brought down.
Originally, Browning intended a tree to fall on Cleo, thereby giving the freaks the opportunity they need to carve her up. Hercules was supposed to be seen in the epilog singing like a counter-tenor, having been emasculated. As the film now stands, Hercules is last seen being swarmed under. Only Cleopatra survives to become truly, “one of us.”
But perhaps as shocking and horrifying as the appearance of the freaks to audiences of 1932 is the film’s sexual innuendo. Cleopatra is blatantly sexual. When Hercules comes to her wagon, she offers to cook some eggs for him. She turns to him, puts her hands on her hips, thrusts her breasts toward him and asks, theoretically about the eggs, “How do you like them?”
Pre-code audiences were used to stuff like that, but they hadn’t been exposed, in mainstream films at least, to the necessity of public sex when Siamese twins cohabitate with their husbands. The idea of a dwarf and a “big woman” having a sexual relationship can still generate some ribald snickering, but there’s undeniably off-putting in the mental image as well.
Part of this problem springs from the tragic gut-feeling that the freaks are somehow less than human, a delusion that the movie tries so hard to correct. But the question is: can it? Can any film move audiences completely beyond the unwanted and unwarranted notion that there is something unnaturally wrong with people who look so different?
Browning’s camera jumps in and out, and tracks with the movement of the characters with a freedom he had rarely allowed himself previously. But during those last moments, when the freaks wreak their vengeance, the camera stands still, their faces lunging at us in close-up, and even the most sensitive ones among us are likely to push backward in our seats to put as much distance as possible between us and the grotesque image on the screen.
It’s a movie that's rich with anecdotes. One has Irving Thalberg, the film’s uncredited producer, telling director Tod Browning that he wanted to make the horror movie to end all horror movies, and then saying, when he saw the finished product, “Well, I asked for it and I got it.”
One story has it that F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was under contract as a writer at MGM when the picture was made, bolted from the studio commissary and threw-up when the unusual cast came in for lunch. Another version has it that Fitzgerald felt more at ease with the cast of “Freaks” than he did with the studio big shots and so sat with them and lunched at their table.
Some say that Tod Browning exploited the cast (only Olga Roderick, the Bearded Lady, went on record later as saying she regretted her participation in the production) while others claim that Browning, a former circus and sideshow man himself, befriended the performers and set them up for life by turning them into international celebrities.
One thing is certain: no other Hollywood movie has ever generated legends like these.
As the story opens, we are moving slowly through a sideshow. The indoor talker, who bears a striking resemblance to Tod Browning, begins to tell his audience the back story of the show’s most unusual attraction. He and his audience gather around to top of a walled pit from the interior of which a light is shining up. Then we slip into the past . . .
A well-tailored dwarf named Hans (Harry Earles, who had worked with Browning in the silent version of “The Unholy Three”) is engaged to Frieda, another dwarf (Daisy Earles, Harry’s sister in real life). Despite his betrothal to Frieda, Hans is smitten by Cleopatra, the circus’ star aerialist (Olga Baclanova). Cleopatra encourages the little man’s attentions because he is willing to loan her money and buy her presents.
Cleo’s casual cruelty is the talk of the circus. Everyone knows that she is playing Hans for a sucker except Hans, who continues to harbor the delusion that she likes him.
Unknown to Hans, Cleo is actually romantically involved with Hercules, the strong man (Henry Victor). We first see Hercules as he wrestles a bull, the animal’s horns representing both the phallus and the traditional crown of the cuckold.
Finally, Frieda confronts Cleopatra and begs the big woman to leave Hans alone. She lets slip that Hans has inherited a fortune and we can see on Cleo’s face that she decides to change her amused encouragement of the little man to a determined attempt to woo him. She soon maneuvers Hans into a proposal, which she accepts with a plan to poison him and steal his money.
The wedding feast provides the background for the film’s most celebrated and quoted scene. Cleopatra, Hercules, the freaks and the other normals with the circus who have befriended them are gathered around a large table under the big top. Cleo and Hercules think the event is one huge joke, knowing as they do what they intend for Hans.
But then another dwarf stands on the table and brings a loving cup to everyone gathered. They each take a sip while chanting the words that make Cleopatra a member of their community--“Gooble gobble, we accept her, one of us.” When the loving cup is thrust toward Cleopatra she rises, the full horror of what they’re saying dawning on her. “You. Dirty. Slimy. Freaks!” she screams, stilling the crowd.
Obviously, the party is over and soon the only ones left at the table are Hercules, Cleopatra and Hans. The drunken strong man lifts Hans from his bench and puts him on Cleo’s shoulders telling the woman to give her new husband a horsey ride back to his wagon.
Hans soon falls ill, but the freaks have overheard the plotting of Hercules and Cleopatra. Off screen they tell Hans what his wife and her lover are up to and one dark stormy night the freaks take their revenge.
The film ends back at the indoor sideshow. A woman looks down into the pit and screams. Then Browning shows us the nature of the freak’s revenge. Cleopatra is now a freak herself, the Human Duck Woman. Legless and covered with feathers, she stands on her hands and emits quacking sounds.
Absurd? Oh yeah. Effective? You better believe it.
An overview of the plot, which is a standard morality/revenge tale, does nothing to prepare you for viewing the film. The cadre of freaks is made up of dwarfs, microcephalics (referred to in the movie as “pinheads”), Siamese twins, people who are armless and legless—and in one case, both—a bearded lady, an hermaphrodite, and persons the description of whom are beyond my vocabulary.
The characters play their reaction to the sideshow performers several ways. Some of the normals abuse them. Some are casually cruel and some are deliberately so. Other normals befriend the freaks. Wallace Ford and Leila Hyams are Phroso the clown (a name used by Lon Chaney in Browning’s silent “West of Zanzibar,” also with a circus background) and Venus, the bareback rider, who, while sometimes a bit patronizing, are intended to represent acceptance.
More problematic is Browning’s attitude as evidenced in the film. We first see the freaks, described as “children” although several of them are anything but, frolicking on a picnic. As they skip around in a circle they look all the world as if Browning wanted to parody the fairies in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Of course, Max Reinhardt’s film of that play wouldn’t be made for another three years, but the suggestion of Arcadian fantasy turned into a sick joke is inescapable.
In fact, any joke involving the freaks must come across as black humor. One of the Siamese twins, Daisy Hilton, is married to a clown (Roscoe Ates) and the second twin, Violet, becomes engaged. The two men ask each other to bring their wives over for a visit.
But sometimes the joke is used to suggest that there isn’t much difference between one world and another. We first meet the half-man/half-woman Joseph Josephine as s/he strolls between the wagons and Roscoe is changing out of the costume of a Roman lady. The male/female combination is emphasized.
And occasionally the humor is just as bizarre as the visuals. When Phroso comforts Venus, who has just broken up with her boyfriend, she tells him, “Say, you’re a pretty good kid.” “You’re darn right,” he responds. “You should have caught me before my operation.” Whatever that may mean.
There really isn’t much of horror in this horror movie, although there is a lot of unease beginning when the freaks figure out that Hercules and Cleopatra intend to murder Hans. Everywhere the big woman turns, there are two or three of her unusual enemies watching from the shadows.
Things turn more grotesque during the climactic storm when the wagons carrying Cleopatra and Hercules tip over in the mud. One of the little men throws a knife at the strong man, dropping him and allowing several more freaks to attack him. Cleopatra rushes off into the woods before she is brought down.
Originally, Browning intended a tree to fall on Cleo, thereby giving the freaks the opportunity they need to carve her up. Hercules was supposed to be seen in the epilog singing like a counter-tenor, having been emasculated. As the film now stands, Hercules is last seen being swarmed under. Only Cleopatra survives to become truly, “one of us.”
But perhaps as shocking and horrifying as the appearance of the freaks to audiences of 1932 is the film’s sexual innuendo. Cleopatra is blatantly sexual. When Hercules comes to her wagon, she offers to cook some eggs for him. She turns to him, puts her hands on her hips, thrusts her breasts toward him and asks, theoretically about the eggs, “How do you like them?”
Pre-code audiences were used to stuff like that, but they hadn’t been exposed, in mainstream films at least, to the necessity of public sex when Siamese twins cohabitate with their husbands. The idea of a dwarf and a “big woman” having a sexual relationship can still generate some ribald snickering, but there’s undeniably off-putting in the mental image as well.
Part of this problem springs from the tragic gut-feeling that the freaks are somehow less than human, a delusion that the movie tries so hard to correct. But the question is: can it? Can any film move audiences completely beyond the unwanted and unwarranted notion that there is something unnaturally wrong with people who look so different?
Browning’s camera jumps in and out, and tracks with the movement of the characters with a freedom he had rarely allowed himself previously. But during those last moments, when the freaks wreak their vengeance, the camera stands still, their faces lunging at us in close-up, and even the most sensitive ones among us are likely to push backward in our seats to put as much distance as possible between us and the grotesque image on the screen.
Monday, July 30, 2007
“The Boogie Man Will Get You” (1942)
There is one comic bit of surreal silliness in TBMWGY that endears it to my heart. Peter Lorre stars as Dr. Lorentz, who is town coroner, sheriff, mayor, justice of the peace, and just about everything else. He is the grandest of grand Pooh-Bahs. He wears a black frock coat and stiff hat with a short crown and wide, circular brim. And he never goes anywhere without putting a Siamese kitten in his inside coat pocket.
Fortunately, no explanation is ever offered for this nuttiness, nor is the kitten ever to put to any use—not even as a paperweight, as is the one in “You Can’t Take It With You.”
Boris Karloff is Lorre’s co-star. King Karloff plays Prof. Nathaniel Billings, a crazed but amiable scientist who works in a “B” movie lab in the cellar of a rapidly fading colonial inn. He uses traveling salesmen in his experiments, attempting to—it’s been a week since I last saw this movie and damned if I can remember what it is Prof. Billings is trying to do. Doesn’t matter. It’s just silly.
His money running short, Billings sells the inn to perky Winnie Slade (Miss Jeff Donnell), who wants to turn the place into a working hotel. She is followed by her ex-husband Bill Layden (Larry Parks) who wants to talk her out of the deal but then decides to stick around, Nancy Drew style, to uncover The Secret of the Old Inn.
Assisting the professor as house and groundskeepers are Amelia and Ebenezer (Maude Eburn and George McKay), she obsessed with the chickens she doesn’t have and he with being mysterious.
When Bill stumbles over what he takes to be a corpse in the basement, he calls the local police and Lorentz shows up. By the time the official gets to the inn, the body is missing.
From this point on, the action is farcical, nothing makes much sense and it doesn’t matter.
Karloff and Lorre seem to be having a good time spoofing the kinds of films they were better known for, although my teeth starting grinding every time Karloff had to stoop and pick up a corpse—he had severe back problems from “Frankenstein” on. Parks, who later became one of the actors most damaged by HUAC when he admitted to having belonged to a Communist cell from 1941 to 1945, is boyish and was undoubtedly held in adoring awe by junior high girls. Donnell, whose second film this was, continued as a “B” movie queen until she moved to TV in the mid-1950s. And “Slapsie Maxie” Rosenbloom adds his trademark air of punchdrunk je ne sais quoi.
The movie was directed by Lew Landers, who followed Donnell’s career path and ended up directing over 150 “B” films and TV shows. He’d partnered with Karloff on “The Raven” in 1935. Landers (who worked under his birth name--Louis Friedlander—for his first 9 pictures, 1934-36) is one of the few guys in Hollywood who turned out so much product with so little inspiration. Only Bela Lugosi’s over-the-top raving and Karloff’s understated masochism in “The Raven” give that sole Landers’ effort a chance at immortality.
As for TBMWGY, well, this one is for old school horroristas on holiday and small children who want to see “a scary movie” that isn’t really scary at all.
Fortunately, no explanation is ever offered for this nuttiness, nor is the kitten ever to put to any use—not even as a paperweight, as is the one in “You Can’t Take It With You.”
Boris Karloff is Lorre’s co-star. King Karloff plays Prof. Nathaniel Billings, a crazed but amiable scientist who works in a “B” movie lab in the cellar of a rapidly fading colonial inn. He uses traveling salesmen in his experiments, attempting to—it’s been a week since I last saw this movie and damned if I can remember what it is Prof. Billings is trying to do. Doesn’t matter. It’s just silly.
His money running short, Billings sells the inn to perky Winnie Slade (Miss Jeff Donnell), who wants to turn the place into a working hotel. She is followed by her ex-husband Bill Layden (Larry Parks) who wants to talk her out of the deal but then decides to stick around, Nancy Drew style, to uncover The Secret of the Old Inn.
Assisting the professor as house and groundskeepers are Amelia and Ebenezer (Maude Eburn and George McKay), she obsessed with the chickens she doesn’t have and he with being mysterious.
When Bill stumbles over what he takes to be a corpse in the basement, he calls the local police and Lorentz shows up. By the time the official gets to the inn, the body is missing.
From this point on, the action is farcical, nothing makes much sense and it doesn’t matter.
Karloff and Lorre seem to be having a good time spoofing the kinds of films they were better known for, although my teeth starting grinding every time Karloff had to stoop and pick up a corpse—he had severe back problems from “Frankenstein” on. Parks, who later became one of the actors most damaged by HUAC when he admitted to having belonged to a Communist cell from 1941 to 1945, is boyish and was undoubtedly held in adoring awe by junior high girls. Donnell, whose second film this was, continued as a “B” movie queen until she moved to TV in the mid-1950s. And “Slapsie Maxie” Rosenbloom adds his trademark air of punchdrunk je ne sais quoi.
The movie was directed by Lew Landers, who followed Donnell’s career path and ended up directing over 150 “B” films and TV shows. He’d partnered with Karloff on “The Raven” in 1935. Landers (who worked under his birth name--Louis Friedlander—for his first 9 pictures, 1934-36) is one of the few guys in Hollywood who turned out so much product with so little inspiration. Only Bela Lugosi’s over-the-top raving and Karloff’s understated masochism in “The Raven” give that sole Landers’ effort a chance at immortality.
As for TBMWGY, well, this one is for old school horroristas on holiday and small children who want to see “a scary movie” that isn’t really scary at all.
Friday, July 27, 2007
"The Raven" (1935)
At the pinnacle of his insanity in “The Raven” Bela Lugosi, as the mad surgeon Dr. Richard Vollin, screams out, “Poe, you are avenged!” But who will avenge Poe for the misuse of his name in this monster mish-mash of mad scientist, torture chamber, haunted house, and ugly-faced butler clichés?
When the first pairing of Karloff and Lugosi in “The Black Cat” (1934) turned out to be a hit, Universal concocted a story “suggested by Edgar Allan Poe’s immortal classic” “The Raven.” Unfortunately, the new script, credited onscreen to David Boehm alone, although there were seven other contributors, including Dore Schary and Guy Endore, was one of the most insipid from Universal’s golden age of horror.
Lugosi is Dr. Vollin, whose reputation as a brilliant surgeon proves to be more a curse than a blessing. When Jean (Irene Ware), the daughter of Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds) crashes her car and her life is in the balance, the young woman’s doctors tell her father that Vollin is the only man who can save her life. Vollin has given up his practice to devote himself to research and at first refuses to help. Thatcher plays on his vanity and Vollin agrees to operate.
Within a matter of weeks, Jean is up and perfectly well again. Vollin misreads her gratitude as passion and determines to wed her. Thatcher, at first thinking like Vollin that Jean loves him, tries to dissuade the older physician from encouraging her attentions. When he realizes that it’s Vollin who is doing the chasing, he become horrified and warns the doctor to keep away.
The good-natured Jean, who is a ballerina, choreographs a dance called “The Spirit of Poe”—dressed in a costume that makes her look like a Margaret Brundage “Weird Tales” cover girl--to show her appreciation to Vollin, who is such a admirer of the writer’s that he has created life-sized replicas of the torture devices mentioned in Poe’s tales.
Discovering the extent of Vollin’s fanboyism is one of those hold-the-phone moments. This is a man who boasts about building and owning working torture devices and no one appears to find it in the least peculiar. Books, okay. Miniatures, okay. But a full-sized pit and pendulum set-up? “Death is my talisman,” he says. He first saw Jean lying still as death on the operating table, as good a stand-in for a morgue slab as the wealthy necrophile can find.
Paging Dr. Krafft-Ebing—call for Dr. Krafft-Ebing.
Now it’s time for Karloff to make his entrance into the story. He is Edmond Bateman, on the lam from the law after shooting his way out of prison and killing two policemen in the process. He’s also shoved a burning acetylene torch in some fella’s face, pretty much on a whim. Yes, he’s the one we end up feeling sorry for, which just goes to show what a fiend Vollin is.
Bateman is in some kind of dive or speakeasy. We can’t hear what’s being told to him, but we find out later that he is in search of a doctor who can alter his face enough to avoid recapture. He goes calling on Vollin.
Why? When a killer needs a crooked doctor, why does Vollin’s name enter the conversation? Vollin agrees to help Bateman when he gets the idea that if he makes the escaped con look ugly, he will be more apt to perform ugly acts. Vollin takes Bateman to his hidden operating room and reassures the con that a simple operation on the nerve endings of his face will alter his appearance, and it will take only ten minutes. The desperate Bateman agrees.
When the bandages are removed we see that the right side of Bateman’s face has been altered, but not for the better. Thanks to an uncredited Jack Pierce, Karloff’s face seems to have been melted. The actor completes the image by tipping his head slightly to the right, as if the neck muscles could no longer hold it upright. He hunches his shoulders forwards to create a stooped, hunched look.
Bateman first sees his new face in a series of mirrors that have been installed around the walls of the circular room. Each is behind a curtain, and the curtains are drawn one by one revealing a curved line of reflections. The moment is effective, but the question arises, why would Vollin have such a place in his house unless he’s made a hobby of distorting people’s faces and then forcing them to stare at repeated images of their new ugliness.
From this point on the film becomes more and more a reflection of Vollin’s mind, and as such it becomes less and less sane. The doctor lures Jean, her father, and her fiancé to the house for a weekend party—along with two other couples of such lesser importance it is difficult to fathom why they invited along unless they represent a plot development that was cut from the final film.
But now the house, with its secret doorways, hidden torture chamber, steel shutters, and traps in the floor, becomes huge. There is no end to the torture chamber, which goes on forever into the shadows.
Vollin straps Judge Thatcher—named as he is for a representative of solid American respectability and sanity in “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn”—onto a slab under the swinging pendulum, and he locks Jean and her fiancé (Lester Matthews) into a steel-walled chamber that will crush them to death.
Vollin and Bateman have the inevitable falling out over the girl’s fate and only those who deserve a horrible death receive one.
There are two attractions to “The Raven.” One is the pairing of its two stars, both of whom are credited at the film’s opening by their last names only. They are still working well together although Lugosi’s over the top hysterical mania is less convincing than Karloff’s soft-spoken, hesitant, almost reluctant murderousness and masochism.
The film’s second pleasure is its heedless rush to barking madness. Director Louis Friedlander’s (later billed as Lew Landers) lack of restraint stands out in a field that has since given us “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” as the benchmark of cinematic no-holds-barred lunacy.
“The Raven” is a 12-year old boy’s interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe, all they-think-I’m-crazy-but-I’ll-show-them-how-sane-I-am-heh-heh-heh screeching and posturing. It’s not possible to take it seriously, nor is it in the least frightening at the visceral level. But it is fun and, taken with “The Black Cat,” it makes a nice showcase for its two leads.
When the first pairing of Karloff and Lugosi in “The Black Cat” (1934) turned out to be a hit, Universal concocted a story “suggested by Edgar Allan Poe’s immortal classic” “The Raven.” Unfortunately, the new script, credited onscreen to David Boehm alone, although there were seven other contributors, including Dore Schary and Guy Endore, was one of the most insipid from Universal’s golden age of horror.
Lugosi is Dr. Vollin, whose reputation as a brilliant surgeon proves to be more a curse than a blessing. When Jean (Irene Ware), the daughter of Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds) crashes her car and her life is in the balance, the young woman’s doctors tell her father that Vollin is the only man who can save her life. Vollin has given up his practice to devote himself to research and at first refuses to help. Thatcher plays on his vanity and Vollin agrees to operate.
Within a matter of weeks, Jean is up and perfectly well again. Vollin misreads her gratitude as passion and determines to wed her. Thatcher, at first thinking like Vollin that Jean loves him, tries to dissuade the older physician from encouraging her attentions. When he realizes that it’s Vollin who is doing the chasing, he become horrified and warns the doctor to keep away.
The good-natured Jean, who is a ballerina, choreographs a dance called “The Spirit of Poe”—dressed in a costume that makes her look like a Margaret Brundage “Weird Tales” cover girl--to show her appreciation to Vollin, who is such a admirer of the writer’s that he has created life-sized replicas of the torture devices mentioned in Poe’s tales.
Discovering the extent of Vollin’s fanboyism is one of those hold-the-phone moments. This is a man who boasts about building and owning working torture devices and no one appears to find it in the least peculiar. Books, okay. Miniatures, okay. But a full-sized pit and pendulum set-up? “Death is my talisman,” he says. He first saw Jean lying still as death on the operating table, as good a stand-in for a morgue slab as the wealthy necrophile can find.
Paging Dr. Krafft-Ebing—call for Dr. Krafft-Ebing.
Now it’s time for Karloff to make his entrance into the story. He is Edmond Bateman, on the lam from the law after shooting his way out of prison and killing two policemen in the process. He’s also shoved a burning acetylene torch in some fella’s face, pretty much on a whim. Yes, he’s the one we end up feeling sorry for, which just goes to show what a fiend Vollin is.
Bateman is in some kind of dive or speakeasy. We can’t hear what’s being told to him, but we find out later that he is in search of a doctor who can alter his face enough to avoid recapture. He goes calling on Vollin.
Why? When a killer needs a crooked doctor, why does Vollin’s name enter the conversation? Vollin agrees to help Bateman when he gets the idea that if he makes the escaped con look ugly, he will be more apt to perform ugly acts. Vollin takes Bateman to his hidden operating room and reassures the con that a simple operation on the nerve endings of his face will alter his appearance, and it will take only ten minutes. The desperate Bateman agrees.
When the bandages are removed we see that the right side of Bateman’s face has been altered, but not for the better. Thanks to an uncredited Jack Pierce, Karloff’s face seems to have been melted. The actor completes the image by tipping his head slightly to the right, as if the neck muscles could no longer hold it upright. He hunches his shoulders forwards to create a stooped, hunched look.
Bateman first sees his new face in a series of mirrors that have been installed around the walls of the circular room. Each is behind a curtain, and the curtains are drawn one by one revealing a curved line of reflections. The moment is effective, but the question arises, why would Vollin have such a place in his house unless he’s made a hobby of distorting people’s faces and then forcing them to stare at repeated images of their new ugliness.
From this point on the film becomes more and more a reflection of Vollin’s mind, and as such it becomes less and less sane. The doctor lures Jean, her father, and her fiancé to the house for a weekend party—along with two other couples of such lesser importance it is difficult to fathom why they invited along unless they represent a plot development that was cut from the final film.
But now the house, with its secret doorways, hidden torture chamber, steel shutters, and traps in the floor, becomes huge. There is no end to the torture chamber, which goes on forever into the shadows.
Vollin straps Judge Thatcher—named as he is for a representative of solid American respectability and sanity in “Tom Sawyer” and “Huckleberry Finn”—onto a slab under the swinging pendulum, and he locks Jean and her fiancé (Lester Matthews) into a steel-walled chamber that will crush them to death.
Vollin and Bateman have the inevitable falling out over the girl’s fate and only those who deserve a horrible death receive one.
There are two attractions to “The Raven.” One is the pairing of its two stars, both of whom are credited at the film’s opening by their last names only. They are still working well together although Lugosi’s over the top hysterical mania is less convincing than Karloff’s soft-spoken, hesitant, almost reluctant murderousness and masochism.
The film’s second pleasure is its heedless rush to barking madness. Director Louis Friedlander’s (later billed as Lew Landers) lack of restraint stands out in a field that has since given us “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” as the benchmark of cinematic no-holds-barred lunacy.
“The Raven” is a 12-year old boy’s interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe, all they-think-I’m-crazy-but-I’ll-show-them-how-sane-I-am-heh-heh-heh screeching and posturing. It’s not possible to take it seriously, nor is it in the least frightening at the visceral level. But it is fun and, taken with “The Black Cat,” it makes a nice showcase for its two leads.
Thursday, May 3, 2007
“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (1936)
The puzzlement of Tod Slaughter’s films, as even his most enthusiastic fans have to admit, is this: are his peculiar performances enough to let us recommend his movies when “by any objective standard they are cheaply-produced rubbish.” (britishpictures.com) If you want to try one, “Sweeney Todd” should be it.
The long journey of “Sweeney Todd” from blood and thunder stage melodrama to Broadway musical began in an urban legend. One of Sweeney’s stops along the way was a “quota quickie,” a movie made in England on the cheap with at least 75% of the paid cast and crew being English. These came about because of the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, which was enacted to help the British film industry compete with American movies at home.
Slaughter was born in 1885 so by the time he made “Sweeney Todd,” just his third picture, in 1936, he was already in his 50s. He’d spent his early years on the provincial stage, touring England in the kind of be-whiskered melodramas much beloved by the Victorians and kept alive by shamelessly barnstorming theater companies.
George King, a producer and later director of quota quickies, discovered Slaughter and decided that he would be as successful in films as he was on stage if he performed in the same kind of story, and so cast his new aging star in “Murder in the Red Barn.” It clicked with less demanding audiences and Slaughter began his cinematic reign of terror.
In “Sweeney Todd,” Slaughter plays the title roll of a demented barber in Victorian London who uses a tricked-out barber’s chair to “polish off” his wealthier customers. A gentleman sits in the chair, Todd pulls a lever, and the chair and platform on which it rests swivel backward dropping the victim through a hole in the floor and into the cellar. If the fall doesn’t kill him, Todd soon will.
The barber shop shares its cellar with the shop next to it, Mrs. Lovatt’s bakery of meat pies. The movie never explicitly points out that Mrs. Lovatt (a deliciously pinched-face Stella Rho) cuts up the bodies of Todd’s customers and bakes them into her pies, but several hints are dropped. In one scene, a supporting character is eating one of the pies as he ponders on why the corpses of the murdered men are never seen again. Either cannibalism was a taboo that could never have gotten past the censor or it was assumed that the British public already knew what the Todd/Lovatt connection was.
As the film opens, a solid British sailor named Mark Ingerstreet (Bruce Seton) is being greeted on his return from the sea by Johanna, his one true love (Eve Lister). Unfortunately, Mark sails for Johanna’s father, one of those Victorian paters who would never consider a mere employee to be an acceptable suitor for his daughter’s hand (D.J. Williams).
We see Todd standing in the shadows, watching for a likely customer he can murder and rob. “I love my work,” he cackles, slapping his hands together and wringing them. “Money!” he hisses with all the subtlety of a jackhammer when he sees a wealthy nabob come ashore. Todd invites the man into his shop for a close shave and before dropping him through the hole in the floor, he sends his young apprentice Tobias (Johnny Singer) next door for a pie.
As fate, and melodrama, would have it, Todd knows Johanna’s father and wants to invest in his next voyage. Of course, he also has his beady eyes on Johanna and determines to win her either through wooing or through skullduggery, preferably the latter. (I am reminded of the fella in “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man” who asks Larson E. Whipsnade (W.C. Fields) if he wants to earn an honest dollar. “Does it have to be honest?” Whipsnade replies.)
Weeks pass and Mark sets out on the very voyage in which Todd has invested. The film now offers a diversionary segment in which the captain of the ship is killed by rampaging natives and Mark assumes command. When he returns to London he has with him a sack of pearls. Todd sees him disembark, lures him to the shop and attempts to kill him. This time, the fall doesn’t “polish him off” and, after Mrs. Lovatt spies Todd stealing the pearls so he won’t have to divvy up with her, she helps Mark to escape.
Mark then decides to disguise himself as an old country farmer and goes back to Sweeney’s shop. He’s dropped into the cellar again and with the assistance of another sailor he figures out exactly how Todd performs his evil deeds.
Now we get to the wild-as-a-March-hare conclusion. Johanna discovers what Mark is up to so she disguises herself as a young boy and goes to Todd’s in case she needs to rescue Mark. Todd figures out who she is, knocks her out, and locks her in the closet. He has already killed Mrs. Lovatt, offstage, and in order to cover up his crimes, he sets fire to the shop.
Back rushes Mark and smashes his way into the building to look for Johanna. As he pulls her from the closet, Todd returns to kill him. Todd ends up in the blazing cellar, Johanna ends up in Mark’s arms, and the ill-gotten gains end up spilled in an alley.
It’s been said that if the Victorians could have made movies, the product would have looked like Tod Slaughter’s pictures. Obviously, there isn’t much in the plot to attract anyone born after 1902 and the production values (except for the costumes) are laughably low. The acting from the supporting players is actually a notch above what you find in poverty row American films of the era—but then there’s Slaughter.
He’s so hammy his performances should have been condemned in Leviticus. His smile is so wide you know his characters have to be faking their bonhomie, and the smile is never reflected in his eyes, which are unmoving and dead. He does a great deal of acting with his hands, double gesturing, wringing, and rubbing palms together. He often speaks in a throaty, raspy whisper that makes him sound like the host of a radio horror series. He doesn’t seem to have figured out that you don’t have to play everything so broadly in front of a camera.
But there’s no denying that the guy is a one-man time machine. Watching him transports you to another era. In fact, you may find yourself hissing the television.
I suppose, though, that the real pleasure comes from watching a performer who seems to genuinely love what he’s doing. I know a critic shouldn’t try to slide by with saying, “I can’t explain it any better than that,” but hell, I can’t explain it any better than that.
Let me go out quoting britishpictures.com once again. “A new generation of fans have stumbled onto his work [seeing it on late night British TV] and asked the question ‘What the bloody hell was that!’"
What indeed.
So is it a good movie? Oh hell no. As a work of cinema, it's abysmal. Okay do I recommend it? I just can't. I want to, but I can't. But if you've read this far, you know I recommend Tod Slaughter. Forget what I say and read what I mean. Seek him out.
The long journey of “Sweeney Todd” from blood and thunder stage melodrama to Broadway musical began in an urban legend. One of Sweeney’s stops along the way was a “quota quickie,” a movie made in England on the cheap with at least 75% of the paid cast and crew being English. These came about because of the 1927 Cinematograph Films Act, which was enacted to help the British film industry compete with American movies at home.
Slaughter was born in 1885 so by the time he made “Sweeney Todd,” just his third picture, in 1936, he was already in his 50s. He’d spent his early years on the provincial stage, touring England in the kind of be-whiskered melodramas much beloved by the Victorians and kept alive by shamelessly barnstorming theater companies.
George King, a producer and later director of quota quickies, discovered Slaughter and decided that he would be as successful in films as he was on stage if he performed in the same kind of story, and so cast his new aging star in “Murder in the Red Barn.” It clicked with less demanding audiences and Slaughter began his cinematic reign of terror.
In “Sweeney Todd,” Slaughter plays the title roll of a demented barber in Victorian London who uses a tricked-out barber’s chair to “polish off” his wealthier customers. A gentleman sits in the chair, Todd pulls a lever, and the chair and platform on which it rests swivel backward dropping the victim through a hole in the floor and into the cellar. If the fall doesn’t kill him, Todd soon will.
The barber shop shares its cellar with the shop next to it, Mrs. Lovatt’s bakery of meat pies. The movie never explicitly points out that Mrs. Lovatt (a deliciously pinched-face Stella Rho) cuts up the bodies of Todd’s customers and bakes them into her pies, but several hints are dropped. In one scene, a supporting character is eating one of the pies as he ponders on why the corpses of the murdered men are never seen again. Either cannibalism was a taboo that could never have gotten past the censor or it was assumed that the British public already knew what the Todd/Lovatt connection was.
As the film opens, a solid British sailor named Mark Ingerstreet (Bruce Seton) is being greeted on his return from the sea by Johanna, his one true love (Eve Lister). Unfortunately, Mark sails for Johanna’s father, one of those Victorian paters who would never consider a mere employee to be an acceptable suitor for his daughter’s hand (D.J. Williams).
We see Todd standing in the shadows, watching for a likely customer he can murder and rob. “I love my work,” he cackles, slapping his hands together and wringing them. “Money!” he hisses with all the subtlety of a jackhammer when he sees a wealthy nabob come ashore. Todd invites the man into his shop for a close shave and before dropping him through the hole in the floor, he sends his young apprentice Tobias (Johnny Singer) next door for a pie.
As fate, and melodrama, would have it, Todd knows Johanna’s father and wants to invest in his next voyage. Of course, he also has his beady eyes on Johanna and determines to win her either through wooing or through skullduggery, preferably the latter. (I am reminded of the fella in “You Can’t Cheat an Honest Man” who asks Larson E. Whipsnade (W.C. Fields) if he wants to earn an honest dollar. “Does it have to be honest?” Whipsnade replies.)
Weeks pass and Mark sets out on the very voyage in which Todd has invested. The film now offers a diversionary segment in which the captain of the ship is killed by rampaging natives and Mark assumes command. When he returns to London he has with him a sack of pearls. Todd sees him disembark, lures him to the shop and attempts to kill him. This time, the fall doesn’t “polish him off” and, after Mrs. Lovatt spies Todd stealing the pearls so he won’t have to divvy up with her, she helps Mark to escape.
Mark then decides to disguise himself as an old country farmer and goes back to Sweeney’s shop. He’s dropped into the cellar again and with the assistance of another sailor he figures out exactly how Todd performs his evil deeds.
Now we get to the wild-as-a-March-hare conclusion. Johanna discovers what Mark is up to so she disguises herself as a young boy and goes to Todd’s in case she needs to rescue Mark. Todd figures out who she is, knocks her out, and locks her in the closet. He has already killed Mrs. Lovatt, offstage, and in order to cover up his crimes, he sets fire to the shop.
Back rushes Mark and smashes his way into the building to look for Johanna. As he pulls her from the closet, Todd returns to kill him. Todd ends up in the blazing cellar, Johanna ends up in Mark’s arms, and the ill-gotten gains end up spilled in an alley.
It’s been said that if the Victorians could have made movies, the product would have looked like Tod Slaughter’s pictures. Obviously, there isn’t much in the plot to attract anyone born after 1902 and the production values (except for the costumes) are laughably low. The acting from the supporting players is actually a notch above what you find in poverty row American films of the era—but then there’s Slaughter.
He’s so hammy his performances should have been condemned in Leviticus. His smile is so wide you know his characters have to be faking their bonhomie, and the smile is never reflected in his eyes, which are unmoving and dead. He does a great deal of acting with his hands, double gesturing, wringing, and rubbing palms together. He often speaks in a throaty, raspy whisper that makes him sound like the host of a radio horror series. He doesn’t seem to have figured out that you don’t have to play everything so broadly in front of a camera.
But there’s no denying that the guy is a one-man time machine. Watching him transports you to another era. In fact, you may find yourself hissing the television.
I suppose, though, that the real pleasure comes from watching a performer who seems to genuinely love what he’s doing. I know a critic shouldn’t try to slide by with saying, “I can’t explain it any better than that,” but hell, I can’t explain it any better than that.
Let me go out quoting britishpictures.com once again. “A new generation of fans have stumbled onto his work [seeing it on late night British TV] and asked the question ‘What the bloody hell was that!’"
What indeed.
So is it a good movie? Oh hell no. As a work of cinema, it's abysmal. Okay do I recommend it? I just can't. I want to, but I can't. But if you've read this far, you know I recommend Tod Slaughter. Forget what I say and read what I mean. Seek him out.
Friday, April 20, 2007
"Psycho" (1960)
Note: This piece was written for Halloween, 2006.
Here’s the thing about what you’re about to read, assuming that you don’t hate pieces that begin “Here’s the thing about what you’re about to read” and go on to something else instead. This is where I tell you that something you know about PSYCHO is dead wrong. I’m writing it, but I don’t know if I believe it or not.
Well, hell, it’s Halloween and if you can’t make a complete fool of yourself at Halloween, when can you? Oh yeah, St. Patrick’s Day. Okay, if you can’t make a complete fool of yourself at Halloween and St. Patrick’s Day, when can you?
Here’s the bit of revealed wisdom about PSYCHO, and I mean revealed repeatedly, in just about every critical essay ever written about the film: the least involving, most boring, most unnecessary scene in the entire movie is the penultimate one in which Simon Oakland, as psychiatrist Dr. Fred Richmond (you never knew the character had a name, did you?) tells the cops, Lila, and Sam that all is not well with Norman’s inner child.
Wait a minute—you have seen the film, haven’t you? If not, don’t read further, even if you can’t resist pieces in which the fourth paragraph admonishes you “don’t read further.” Beyond this point are spoilers. And I promise that I won’t use that gag again, the one in which I repeat at the end of the sentence what I wrote at the beginning, even if you tell me that you love it when I repeat at the end of the sentence what I wrote at the beginning.
Anyway, that scene in the movie is universally reviled as being unnecessary because it spells out in agonizing detail what the audience has already figured out, i.e., that Norman is a member-for-life of the Ed Gein Fan Club.
But I would like to suggest that in 1960, when the film was new and the world was still able to keep the mask of sanity in place, audiences may not have known as much about what ailed the kid as we do now, and that we know more about it today because Norman introduced us on a pop culture level to this type and degree of mental aberration. Putting oneself into the mind set of obviously historical characters is hard enough and yet still easier, in some ways, than recapturing the thinking of characters who were contemporary when the film was made but have retreated into history since. Norman looks, talks, and acts enough like us now that we see him as a 21st. century man, but he is far from that.
Okay, now we come to my particular hobby horse, the theory that appeals to me greatly while at the same time lacking in rational believability. For this it’s best that you watch the scene, but I’ll try to describe the relevant action.
Richmond enters the room in which his audience is gathered. He comes in from the left and crosses to a central position in the room. Over his right shoulder we see a picture on the wall and, above that, a light fixture. The fixture has two prongs for the light bulbs, reaching out to left and right from a sort of metal centerpiece.
Oakland doesn’t move around much because Richmond wants to remain in the center of our, and his listeners’ attention. He occasionally takes a step or two toward the camera to speak directly to Lila (Vera Miles) or to react to something Sam (John Gavin) says, but before he returns to his original spot in the room, he moves a little closer to the light, allowing us to see more of it. Then he will take a step toward us and resume talking.
His explanation of Norman’s peculiarities is loaded with psychobabble, but whenever he has a point to make that he thinks is particularly telling—“So he began to think and speak for her,” “After the murder, Norman returned as if from a deep sleep,” “These were crimes of passion, not profit”—the lamp on the wall appears directly over his head, sometimes even forming glowing horns.
Here’s what I see: a cartoon in which someone is expounding an idea he thinks explains the ways of the world, with a light bulb coming on over his head to let us know how bright he thinks he is.
It’s as if Hitchcock, whose earliest job in films was providing illustrations to adorn the dialogue title cards in silent movies, is winking at us, letting us know that he thinks all this psychiatric gobble-de-gook is just whistling in the graveyard to hide our fear of the boogie man.
As Richmond snaps a cigarette out of a pack to light up and take a bow, Hitch cuts to the outside of the room and follows a policeman carrying down the hall a blanket for the chilled Norman. We cut to the inside of the room where Norman, as Mother, sits before a blank wall. As Richmond delivered his monologue in front of a wall with a couple of items on it—one of which served to ridicule everything he had to say—Mother delivers her monologue in front of a wall that is blank, as empty as a serial killer’s conscience, as spotless as a freshly cleaned bath tub.
There it is. Do I really believe Hitchcock intended the scene with the doctor to be read this way? I wish, but no. I think it’s there to explain to the unworldly what the hell has been going on. But do I think Hitch was aware of the cartoon cliché regarding the light bulb over the head? Sure I do. Maybe he set and blocked the scene the way he did because unconsciously he wanted to suggest that Dr. Richmond was just too content living in his jargon of earthly delights.
You can’t have too many ways of looking at a film as rich as PSYCHO. And it is Halloween. Trick or treat.
Here’s the thing about what you’re about to read, assuming that you don’t hate pieces that begin “Here’s the thing about what you’re about to read” and go on to something else instead. This is where I tell you that something you know about PSYCHO is dead wrong. I’m writing it, but I don’t know if I believe it or not.
Well, hell, it’s Halloween and if you can’t make a complete fool of yourself at Halloween, when can you? Oh yeah, St. Patrick’s Day. Okay, if you can’t make a complete fool of yourself at Halloween and St. Patrick’s Day, when can you?
Here’s the bit of revealed wisdom about PSYCHO, and I mean revealed repeatedly, in just about every critical essay ever written about the film: the least involving, most boring, most unnecessary scene in the entire movie is the penultimate one in which Simon Oakland, as psychiatrist Dr. Fred Richmond (you never knew the character had a name, did you?) tells the cops, Lila, and Sam that all is not well with Norman’s inner child.
Wait a minute—you have seen the film, haven’t you? If not, don’t read further, even if you can’t resist pieces in which the fourth paragraph admonishes you “don’t read further.” Beyond this point are spoilers. And I promise that I won’t use that gag again, the one in which I repeat at the end of the sentence what I wrote at the beginning, even if you tell me that you love it when I repeat at the end of the sentence what I wrote at the beginning.
Anyway, that scene in the movie is universally reviled as being unnecessary because it spells out in agonizing detail what the audience has already figured out, i.e., that Norman is a member-for-life of the Ed Gein Fan Club.
But I would like to suggest that in 1960, when the film was new and the world was still able to keep the mask of sanity in place, audiences may not have known as much about what ailed the kid as we do now, and that we know more about it today because Norman introduced us on a pop culture level to this type and degree of mental aberration. Putting oneself into the mind set of obviously historical characters is hard enough and yet still easier, in some ways, than recapturing the thinking of characters who were contemporary when the film was made but have retreated into history since. Norman looks, talks, and acts enough like us now that we see him as a 21st. century man, but he is far from that.
Okay, now we come to my particular hobby horse, the theory that appeals to me greatly while at the same time lacking in rational believability. For this it’s best that you watch the scene, but I’ll try to describe the relevant action.
Richmond enters the room in which his audience is gathered. He comes in from the left and crosses to a central position in the room. Over his right shoulder we see a picture on the wall and, above that, a light fixture. The fixture has two prongs for the light bulbs, reaching out to left and right from a sort of metal centerpiece.
Oakland doesn’t move around much because Richmond wants to remain in the center of our, and his listeners’ attention. He occasionally takes a step or two toward the camera to speak directly to Lila (Vera Miles) or to react to something Sam (John Gavin) says, but before he returns to his original spot in the room, he moves a little closer to the light, allowing us to see more of it. Then he will take a step toward us and resume talking.
His explanation of Norman’s peculiarities is loaded with psychobabble, but whenever he has a point to make that he thinks is particularly telling—“So he began to think and speak for her,” “After the murder, Norman returned as if from a deep sleep,” “These were crimes of passion, not profit”—the lamp on the wall appears directly over his head, sometimes even forming glowing horns.
Here’s what I see: a cartoon in which someone is expounding an idea he thinks explains the ways of the world, with a light bulb coming on over his head to let us know how bright he thinks he is.
It’s as if Hitchcock, whose earliest job in films was providing illustrations to adorn the dialogue title cards in silent movies, is winking at us, letting us know that he thinks all this psychiatric gobble-de-gook is just whistling in the graveyard to hide our fear of the boogie man.
As Richmond snaps a cigarette out of a pack to light up and take a bow, Hitch cuts to the outside of the room and follows a policeman carrying down the hall a blanket for the chilled Norman. We cut to the inside of the room where Norman, as Mother, sits before a blank wall. As Richmond delivered his monologue in front of a wall with a couple of items on it—one of which served to ridicule everything he had to say—Mother delivers her monologue in front of a wall that is blank, as empty as a serial killer’s conscience, as spotless as a freshly cleaned bath tub.
There it is. Do I really believe Hitchcock intended the scene with the doctor to be read this way? I wish, but no. I think it’s there to explain to the unworldly what the hell has been going on. But do I think Hitch was aware of the cartoon cliché regarding the light bulb over the head? Sure I do. Maybe he set and blocked the scene the way he did because unconsciously he wanted to suggest that Dr. Richmond was just too content living in his jargon of earthly delights.
You can’t have too many ways of looking at a film as rich as PSYCHO. And it is Halloween. Trick or treat.
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
"The Screaming Skull" (1958)
You can tell which schlockfest “B” horror movies manipulate the basic accoutrements of the genre best by the degree to which they scare the bejeezus out of small children, and one of the things that have great power to create a seat-wetting problem is the human skull. You don’t even have to give the ridges over the eyes that Harryhausen touch to make them look more sinister, but it can’t hurt.
I had just turned nine when I saw “The Screaming Skull” (1958) for the first time, and it scared the breath out of me. Almost 50 years later I can still remember being so frightened I couldn’t yell. Ah, those were great times . . . “Macabre” came along later that same year, with “House on Haunted Hill” and “The Tingler” (both 1959) soon to follow. We adolescent horror hounds, readers of “Famous Monsters of Filmland” all, were convinced that William Castle was the greatest filmmaker of all time. Even “Psycho” (1960) couldn’t pull us away as it was a little too adult—but we still read everything by Robert Bloch we could get our sweaty little hands on.
I don’t know if journeyman actor Alex Nicol, who directed “The Screaming Skull” in an effort to expand his career possibilities, could have beaten Castle into our hearts had he continued to make shockers. (Can you imagine a grown man still considering such a question? Neither can I.)
I’ve re-visited TSS several times over the decades. It used to show up on late night TV with some regularity, until even the tube outgrew such hack work, and more than one DVD distributor carries it in the catalogue. No, the original fear is long gone—I wish I knew a nine-year old I could convince to watch it in a dark room just to check out the reaction—but the memory is intact.
In the film, a newly wed couple come to the house the groom lived in with his former wife, the haunting Marion, who died in a sudden thunderstorm when she slipped on a wet leaf and stumbled by the lily pond, cracking her head open on a stone wall and then drowning. I’d think that this plot construct was an accidental reference to Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm” except for the fact that composer Ernest Gold—yes, the same man who would win an Oscar for scoring “Exodus” in 1960—borrows the same brooding Sabbat theme from Berlioz’ “Symphonie Fantastique” Stanley Kubrick used in “The Shining” (1980).
Maybe this movie is smarter than it has any right to be. John Kneubuhl, who would later write the “Pigeons From Hell” episode of Boris Karloff’s TV program “Thriller,” wrote the script based on the legend of the screaming skull of Bettiscomb Manor, in England.
But setting references to classier stuff aside, Eric and Jenni Whitlock attempt to settle into the house. As he introduces her to the grounds, Jenni spots a small outbuilding and asks what it is.
“That’s where Mickey keeps his gardening things,” Eric replies.
“Who’s Mickey?"
“The gardener.”
Or maybe the movie isn’t any smarter than it has to be. But you know that feeling you sometimes get, the feeling that the filmmakers are playing around a little because they know the kids that make up their audience aren’t going to get it, anyway? TSS engenders that feeling often.
Soon, Marion’s great friends, Reverend and Mrs. Snow, drop by for dinner and via some pretty unsubtle dialogue we learn that a) Mickey is still devoted to Marion and thinks her ghost haunts the house and grounds, b) Jenni had a nervous breakdown and was committed to a sanitarium when her parents were killed in an automobile accident, c) she is wealthy, and d) John Hudson, as Eric, is either the most ham-handed actor of the 1950s or he has been directed to make it clear to even the most naïve members of the audience that he wants to gain control of his new wife’s fortune.
Later that night, Jenni awakens to discover that Eric is missing, a window is banging in the wind, and Marion’s self-portrait looks creepy in the moonlight. The next night, this scenario is replayed, only this time Jenni finds a skull in a cabinet. She tosses it out the window, but on her way back to bed she hears a knocking on the door and, yes, it turns out to be the skull.
It’s not much of a spoiler to admit that Eric is behind all the, uh, skullduggery, but whether or not there is a real ghost on his trail I will leave to you to discover for yourself. If you’ve ever read a pulp magazine weird menace story, or watched an episode of “Scooby-Doo,” you’ll have no trouble figuring out the late night mumbo-jumbo.
Hudson, who was Capt. Hobart in “G.I. Blues” (1960) and Virgil Earp in “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (1957) was certainly a better actor than this script calls for, and I suspect he was playing the evil genius with deadpan irony. Peggy Webber, as Jenni, looks a bit too robust to make a convincing Mrs. de Winter clone. Like almost every other actor in the film, she found her greatest success on TV. Leading roles in movies were out of the question—bless her, she looks like Nicholas Cage in drag, but with heftier boobs.
Russ Conway, who had unremarkable roles in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962) and “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” (1967) gives Rev. Snow a quiet, patient demeanor even though he looks fit enough to beat the crap out of Eric. Tony Johnson, as his wife, has no other credits on IMDB.
Director Alex Nicol, who plays Mickey, will be better remembered from his small roles in movies, including “The Man from Laramie” (1955). He later went to Europe to take part in the spaghetti western boom, coming home for a turn as George Barker in Roger Corman’s “Bloody Mama” in 1970.
In TSS he shows a nice camera eye for the clichés of the genre. His camera roams the empty halls of the house, creeping up on certain doors and importing to them a sense of dread that makes us both want to enter and run screaming away. I suspect that the movie would still work its dark magic on young kids, but many of them would be repelled by the questionable acting and black and white photography.
The film exists as a link between gothic chapbooks, dime novels, spooky radio shows, the pulp horror magazines and EC comics, and TV horror shows like “Thriller” and “The Twilight Zone.” Moments in it seem to have influenced Freddie Francis’ “The Skull” (1965), which, since it was based on a story by Robert Bloch, takes us back to where we started.
“The Screaming Skull” can’t possibly scare adults, and unless you saw it when you were young it won’t have any nostalgia appeal. But honestly, I’ve known several grown-ups who did see it back in the day, and they all remember it fondly as one of the scariest movies they’ve ever seen. Maybe we should let it go at that.
I had just turned nine when I saw “The Screaming Skull” (1958) for the first time, and it scared the breath out of me. Almost 50 years later I can still remember being so frightened I couldn’t yell. Ah, those were great times . . . “Macabre” came along later that same year, with “House on Haunted Hill” and “The Tingler” (both 1959) soon to follow. We adolescent horror hounds, readers of “Famous Monsters of Filmland” all, were convinced that William Castle was the greatest filmmaker of all time. Even “Psycho” (1960) couldn’t pull us away as it was a little too adult—but we still read everything by Robert Bloch we could get our sweaty little hands on.
I don’t know if journeyman actor Alex Nicol, who directed “The Screaming Skull” in an effort to expand his career possibilities, could have beaten Castle into our hearts had he continued to make shockers. (Can you imagine a grown man still considering such a question? Neither can I.)
I’ve re-visited TSS several times over the decades. It used to show up on late night TV with some regularity, until even the tube outgrew such hack work, and more than one DVD distributor carries it in the catalogue. No, the original fear is long gone—I wish I knew a nine-year old I could convince to watch it in a dark room just to check out the reaction—but the memory is intact.
In the film, a newly wed couple come to the house the groom lived in with his former wife, the haunting Marion, who died in a sudden thunderstorm when she slipped on a wet leaf and stumbled by the lily pond, cracking her head open on a stone wall and then drowning. I’d think that this plot construct was an accidental reference to Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm” except for the fact that composer Ernest Gold—yes, the same man who would win an Oscar for scoring “Exodus” in 1960—borrows the same brooding Sabbat theme from Berlioz’ “Symphonie Fantastique” Stanley Kubrick used in “The Shining” (1980).
Maybe this movie is smarter than it has any right to be. John Kneubuhl, who would later write the “Pigeons From Hell” episode of Boris Karloff’s TV program “Thriller,” wrote the script based on the legend of the screaming skull of Bettiscomb Manor, in England.
But setting references to classier stuff aside, Eric and Jenni Whitlock attempt to settle into the house. As he introduces her to the grounds, Jenni spots a small outbuilding and asks what it is.
“That’s where Mickey keeps his gardening things,” Eric replies.
“Who’s Mickey?"
“The gardener.”
Or maybe the movie isn’t any smarter than it has to be. But you know that feeling you sometimes get, the feeling that the filmmakers are playing around a little because they know the kids that make up their audience aren’t going to get it, anyway? TSS engenders that feeling often.
Soon, Marion’s great friends, Reverend and Mrs. Snow, drop by for dinner and via some pretty unsubtle dialogue we learn that a) Mickey is still devoted to Marion and thinks her ghost haunts the house and grounds, b) Jenni had a nervous breakdown and was committed to a sanitarium when her parents were killed in an automobile accident, c) she is wealthy, and d) John Hudson, as Eric, is either the most ham-handed actor of the 1950s or he has been directed to make it clear to even the most naïve members of the audience that he wants to gain control of his new wife’s fortune.
Later that night, Jenni awakens to discover that Eric is missing, a window is banging in the wind, and Marion’s self-portrait looks creepy in the moonlight. The next night, this scenario is replayed, only this time Jenni finds a skull in a cabinet. She tosses it out the window, but on her way back to bed she hears a knocking on the door and, yes, it turns out to be the skull.
It’s not much of a spoiler to admit that Eric is behind all the, uh, skullduggery, but whether or not there is a real ghost on his trail I will leave to you to discover for yourself. If you’ve ever read a pulp magazine weird menace story, or watched an episode of “Scooby-Doo,” you’ll have no trouble figuring out the late night mumbo-jumbo.
Hudson, who was Capt. Hobart in “G.I. Blues” (1960) and Virgil Earp in “Gunfight at the O.K. Corral” (1957) was certainly a better actor than this script calls for, and I suspect he was playing the evil genius with deadpan irony. Peggy Webber, as Jenni, looks a bit too robust to make a convincing Mrs. de Winter clone. Like almost every other actor in the film, she found her greatest success on TV. Leading roles in movies were out of the question—bless her, she looks like Nicholas Cage in drag, but with heftier boobs.
Russ Conway, who had unremarkable roles in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962) and “The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” (1967) gives Rev. Snow a quiet, patient demeanor even though he looks fit enough to beat the crap out of Eric. Tony Johnson, as his wife, has no other credits on IMDB.
Director Alex Nicol, who plays Mickey, will be better remembered from his small roles in movies, including “The Man from Laramie” (1955). He later went to Europe to take part in the spaghetti western boom, coming home for a turn as George Barker in Roger Corman’s “Bloody Mama” in 1970.
In TSS he shows a nice camera eye for the clichés of the genre. His camera roams the empty halls of the house, creeping up on certain doors and importing to them a sense of dread that makes us both want to enter and run screaming away. I suspect that the movie would still work its dark magic on young kids, but many of them would be repelled by the questionable acting and black and white photography.
The film exists as a link between gothic chapbooks, dime novels, spooky radio shows, the pulp horror magazines and EC comics, and TV horror shows like “Thriller” and “The Twilight Zone.” Moments in it seem to have influenced Freddie Francis’ “The Skull” (1965), which, since it was based on a story by Robert Bloch, takes us back to where we started.
“The Screaming Skull” can’t possibly scare adults, and unless you saw it when you were young it won’t have any nostalgia appeal. But honestly, I’ve known several grown-ups who did see it back in the day, and they all remember it fondly as one of the scariest movies they’ve ever seen. Maybe we should let it go at that.
Friday, March 30, 2007
“Bedlam” (1946)
Boris Karloff was always publicly grateful to the horror genre and its fans for making him a star and allowing him to maintain that status, even if most of the films he starred in were far from memorable for any reason other than his presence in them. But he also made no secret of his preference for historical melodrama, a love he carried over into movies from the stage plays in which he had performed for so many years before Hollywood beckoned. He reveled in pictures like “The Black Room,” “The Strange Door" (with Charles Laughton doing his best Tod Slaughter impersonation), “Tower of London,” and two of his Val Lewton-produced thrillers, “The Body Snatcher” and this one, “Bedlam.”
Lewton, too, has come down to us as a horrorista—and like Karloff, he was a damn good one—but he preferred costume dramas. It’s no wonder, then, that they made two of their best films together.I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for “Bedlam.” The first time I saw it was late one Friday night or early one Saturday morning. I was spending the night with a pal. He and his big brother had both fallen asleep before the weekend horror movie came on television. I would have been more likely to sleep through a meal than I would have to miss an old horror picture on television, especially one starring the Master of Horror, the great King Karloff.
My friend had a TV in his bedroom, rare in those days, but I remember lying on the bed on my stomach so my face would be close to the screen and I could watch the movie with the sound turned down low. Do you remember the bitter frustration as a kid when some post-horror phase adult would make you turn off the movie in the middle because it was too late at night to still be watching television? I did what I had to do to avoid that fate.
Okay, I know I’ve drifted pretty far from the boat with these soggy memoirs, but recalling that night is part of the experience of “Bedlam” for me. I’ll stop it now and get to the film itself.
Anna Lee (“The Man Who Changed His Mind,” “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”) stars as Nell Bowen, a pretty but too clever young woman in the London of 1761. Nell is the current favorite of Lord Mortimer (Billy House), a pudgy, would-be wit and preening fop who makes up in ready money what he lacks in charm. Nell is his jester, at least (perhaps more but if so, any more personal relationship is sub rosa). He enjoys listening to her abuse society. Her satire is as cold as her sense of justice.
One day, Master George Sims (Karloff) comes to call. Sims is head of the asylum of St. Mary’s of Bethlehem, a name abbreviated in the English manner to Bedlam. In his spare time, Sims, too, is a wit and author of poems and masques. It is hinted that he has been able to assist Lord Mortimer in the past by “accidentally” incarcerating enemies and troublemakers. We learn that an inmate we saw earlier fall from the roof of the asylum and die during an escape attempt was in fact a rival poet Sims managed to confine in the hospital.
To curry favor, Sims offers to lend his “loonies” to Mortimer to serve as entertainment at a party the peer is giving. To complete the evening, Sims will compose a masque for the Bedlamites to perform. Mortimer loves the idea, but Nell, while professing no great pity for the insane, pooh-poohs the idea out of dislike for Sims.
Soon after Sims’ visit to Mortimer, Nell pays her first visit to the asylum. For tuppence, anyone can tour the wards and be amused by the human wreckage they contain. She enters a hall filled with the insane. Some are quiet—one young woman is nearly catatonic, standing stock still by the doorway. Others babble or shriek. Many are seen in attitudes drawn from the William Hogarth plates that inspired the film, collectively titled “The Rogue’s Progress.”
The scene begins with a close-up of Nell’s face, then the camera pulls back to reveal the terrible contents of the room. Nell is shocked and dismayed by what she sees, and she leaves the place after striking Sims with her riding crop and telling him that he is “an ugly thing in a pretty world.”
At the opposite end of the spectrum from Sims is the Quaker Hannay (Richard Fraser). Hannay is a stone mason. He’s applied for a job at the asylum but Sims refused to employ him unless the upright young man would kick back some of his salary. At first, he has little use for the haughty Nell, claiming that she is as hard and shallow as Sims and Mortimer.
But her veneer breaks at last the night of Mortimer’s party at Vauxhall Gardens when a mad boy, gilded from head to foot by the unfeeling Sims, suffocates while attempting to recite his lines. Nell convinces Lord Mortimer, who is on Bedlam’s board of directors, to work to improve conditions at the hospital, but Sims reminds him that improvements cost money and will cause his property taxes to go up. Mortimer balks, and then decides to renege on his promises to Nell. In a rage, she tells him off.
Later, Sims offers to bring her before the Commission of Lunacy and Mortimer agrees. When asked by the Commission what she considers to be absurd questions, Nell uses her wit to answer. Her cleverness and contempt work against her and she is committed to Bedlam.
With Nell’s interment, Lewton and co-writer/director Mark Robson (Lewton using his Carlos Keith penname) have some fun blending black humor with the horrors. Ian Wolfe plays the self-proclaimed greatest lawyer in London locked up by his enemies, and Jason Robards, Sr. is Oliver Todd, a writer who has had himself committed to prevent him from hitting the bottle and thereby not being able to support his family. These are the People By the Pillar, the inmates closest to sanity and therefore the cream of asylum society.
Of course all will work out well for Nell and ill for Sims. Anyone watching the film for the first time will quickly figure out that his ultimate fate will somehow be left in the hands of his charges, but I won’t go into detail about what happens.
The film is interesting on a number of levels. It was Robson’s fifth film as director, all four of his previous movies made with Lewton over the course of four years after editing “Cat People,” “I Walked With a Zombie,” and “The Leopard Man.” His lighting is Expressionistic and the cast in his mad room interior represents the character types utilized by Hogarth. The film is set just three years before the birth of the gothic with the publication of Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto” in 1764, and Robson blends gothic with Age of Reason elements nicely on a miniscule budget.
Karloff delivers one of his best and oiliest performances. Sims is cynical and superior. He’s a forerunner of the kind of condescending but controlled madmen in which Peter Cushing would later specialize. It’s a pleasure to watch Karloff force smiles as Sims flatters Lord Mortimer and drops evil suggestions in his ear, only to give expression to the most withering contempt when his patron’s back is turned.
But the grand old man of horror also gets the opportunity later in the film to wheedle and plead for his life, begging the inmate to pity him because he’s just as miserable a victim as they are, forced to do what he does out of fear of the way the world would react to him if he was powerless. It’s to Karloff’s credit that this cynical and self-serving defense almost works on us.
“Bedlam,” for all its horrific content, is less a traditional horror film and more the kind of historical melodrama Boris Karloff liked so well. It’s also, in its odd way, an attack on middle managers who abuse those under them in an effort to make themselves look good to upper management. At that level, the film is timeless.
Lewton, too, has come down to us as a horrorista—and like Karloff, he was a damn good one—but he preferred costume dramas. It’s no wonder, then, that they made two of their best films together.I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for “Bedlam.” The first time I saw it was late one Friday night or early one Saturday morning. I was spending the night with a pal. He and his big brother had both fallen asleep before the weekend horror movie came on television. I would have been more likely to sleep through a meal than I would have to miss an old horror picture on television, especially one starring the Master of Horror, the great King Karloff.
My friend had a TV in his bedroom, rare in those days, but I remember lying on the bed on my stomach so my face would be close to the screen and I could watch the movie with the sound turned down low. Do you remember the bitter frustration as a kid when some post-horror phase adult would make you turn off the movie in the middle because it was too late at night to still be watching television? I did what I had to do to avoid that fate.
Okay, I know I’ve drifted pretty far from the boat with these soggy memoirs, but recalling that night is part of the experience of “Bedlam” for me. I’ll stop it now and get to the film itself.
Anna Lee (“The Man Who Changed His Mind,” “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”) stars as Nell Bowen, a pretty but too clever young woman in the London of 1761. Nell is the current favorite of Lord Mortimer (Billy House), a pudgy, would-be wit and preening fop who makes up in ready money what he lacks in charm. Nell is his jester, at least (perhaps more but if so, any more personal relationship is sub rosa). He enjoys listening to her abuse society. Her satire is as cold as her sense of justice.
One day, Master George Sims (Karloff) comes to call. Sims is head of the asylum of St. Mary’s of Bethlehem, a name abbreviated in the English manner to Bedlam. In his spare time, Sims, too, is a wit and author of poems and masques. It is hinted that he has been able to assist Lord Mortimer in the past by “accidentally” incarcerating enemies and troublemakers. We learn that an inmate we saw earlier fall from the roof of the asylum and die during an escape attempt was in fact a rival poet Sims managed to confine in the hospital.
To curry favor, Sims offers to lend his “loonies” to Mortimer to serve as entertainment at a party the peer is giving. To complete the evening, Sims will compose a masque for the Bedlamites to perform. Mortimer loves the idea, but Nell, while professing no great pity for the insane, pooh-poohs the idea out of dislike for Sims.
Soon after Sims’ visit to Mortimer, Nell pays her first visit to the asylum. For tuppence, anyone can tour the wards and be amused by the human wreckage they contain. She enters a hall filled with the insane. Some are quiet—one young woman is nearly catatonic, standing stock still by the doorway. Others babble or shriek. Many are seen in attitudes drawn from the William Hogarth plates that inspired the film, collectively titled “The Rogue’s Progress.”
The scene begins with a close-up of Nell’s face, then the camera pulls back to reveal the terrible contents of the room. Nell is shocked and dismayed by what she sees, and she leaves the place after striking Sims with her riding crop and telling him that he is “an ugly thing in a pretty world.”
At the opposite end of the spectrum from Sims is the Quaker Hannay (Richard Fraser). Hannay is a stone mason. He’s applied for a job at the asylum but Sims refused to employ him unless the upright young man would kick back some of his salary. At first, he has little use for the haughty Nell, claiming that she is as hard and shallow as Sims and Mortimer.
But her veneer breaks at last the night of Mortimer’s party at Vauxhall Gardens when a mad boy, gilded from head to foot by the unfeeling Sims, suffocates while attempting to recite his lines. Nell convinces Lord Mortimer, who is on Bedlam’s board of directors, to work to improve conditions at the hospital, but Sims reminds him that improvements cost money and will cause his property taxes to go up. Mortimer balks, and then decides to renege on his promises to Nell. In a rage, she tells him off.
Later, Sims offers to bring her before the Commission of Lunacy and Mortimer agrees. When asked by the Commission what she considers to be absurd questions, Nell uses her wit to answer. Her cleverness and contempt work against her and she is committed to Bedlam.
With Nell’s interment, Lewton and co-writer/director Mark Robson (Lewton using his Carlos Keith penname) have some fun blending black humor with the horrors. Ian Wolfe plays the self-proclaimed greatest lawyer in London locked up by his enemies, and Jason Robards, Sr. is Oliver Todd, a writer who has had himself committed to prevent him from hitting the bottle and thereby not being able to support his family. These are the People By the Pillar, the inmates closest to sanity and therefore the cream of asylum society.
Of course all will work out well for Nell and ill for Sims. Anyone watching the film for the first time will quickly figure out that his ultimate fate will somehow be left in the hands of his charges, but I won’t go into detail about what happens.
The film is interesting on a number of levels. It was Robson’s fifth film as director, all four of his previous movies made with Lewton over the course of four years after editing “Cat People,” “I Walked With a Zombie,” and “The Leopard Man.” His lighting is Expressionistic and the cast in his mad room interior represents the character types utilized by Hogarth. The film is set just three years before the birth of the gothic with the publication of Horace Walpole’s “The Castle of Otranto” in 1764, and Robson blends gothic with Age of Reason elements nicely on a miniscule budget.
Karloff delivers one of his best and oiliest performances. Sims is cynical and superior. He’s a forerunner of the kind of condescending but controlled madmen in which Peter Cushing would later specialize. It’s a pleasure to watch Karloff force smiles as Sims flatters Lord Mortimer and drops evil suggestions in his ear, only to give expression to the most withering contempt when his patron’s back is turned.
But the grand old man of horror also gets the opportunity later in the film to wheedle and plead for his life, begging the inmate to pity him because he’s just as miserable a victim as they are, forced to do what he does out of fear of the way the world would react to him if he was powerless. It’s to Karloff’s credit that this cynical and self-serving defense almost works on us.
“Bedlam,” for all its horrific content, is less a traditional horror film and more the kind of historical melodrama Boris Karloff liked so well. It’s also, in its odd way, an attack on middle managers who abuse those under them in an effort to make themselves look good to upper management. At that level, the film is timeless.
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
"Strait-Jacket" (1964)
By 1964, the year “Strait-Jacket” was unbuckled and America tried it on for size, producer/director William Castle had a half-dozen horror movies under his ample belt, and none of them were “A” pictures. He’d seen “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” 17 times, pointing to the screen each time while mumbling, “I want one of those.”
He grabbed writer Robert Bloch, whose novel “Psycho” had worked brilliantly for Alfred Hitchcock a few years before—after “Homicidal” in 1961, Castle had broken ties with screenwriter Robb White, who had delivered five of his horror scripts—and Bloch set to work on a story loosely suggested by the Lizzie Borden axe murders of 1892.Bloch was the author of some great short horror stories, a couple of terrific novels, and scores of mediocre scripts. Screenwriting earned him most of his money, but it didn’t produce his most memorable work.
Perhaps Castle saw the approaching wave of “hag horror,” generally “B” creepers starring fading actresses who still had the big name but could no longer command big parts in big movies. He signed Joan Blondell for the role of axe murderess Lucy Harbin. Before shooting began, Blondell had an accident that prevented her from making the movie, and Castle went after one of the stars of “Baby Jane,” Joan Crawford.
Crawford was willing to accept the part, but she demanded cast and script approval. Castle agreed. So arrogant was Crawford, she gave the small role of Dr. Anderson, Lucy’s psychiatrist, to Mitchell Cox, a vice-president of Pepsi Cola, a non-actor but a personal friend, without telling Castle what she was up to. It’s to Cox’ credit that he comes across on screen no worse than many professional actors in “B” horror flicks, and he seems to be having a great time. He’s no Boris Karloff, but he’s no Paris Hilton, either.
Anne Helm was cast in the important role of Lucy’s estranged daughter Carol, but Crawford didn’t like her and out she went. Diane Baker had worked with Crawford in “The Best of Everything” (1959), and with Susan Hayward in “Stolen Hours” (1963), so she knew her way around a diva. Crawford liked her and “suggested” her for the role.
The movie opens with a flashback, a trick Robert Aldrich, the director of “Baby Jane,” would use for his second foray into hag horror, “Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte,” later that year. We see Lucy’s husband (Lee Majors in his first screen role) flirting and drinking with a young woman. He invites her to his house because his wife is out of town and not expected back for a day or two. The adulterer and his lover make a little whoopee, unaware that they are being watched by three-year old Carol (Vicki Cos).
Then Lucy comes home early.Crawford makes her first entrance in a way that she must have loved. The camera is aimed at the steps that come down from the passenger car of a train. When Crawford steps into the frame, all we see are her legs—and nice looking gams they are still for the 58-year old former dancer. The shot also gives us our first dose of Robert Bloch’s signature black humor. Stenciled above the steps, just below Lucy’s feet, is the admonition “Watch your step.” Listen, too, for lines like “She’s dying to meet you,” and “Sanity is relative.”
When Lucy returns to her house, she finds hubby and his gal in bed. Shocked, she stumbles from the house and trips over a tree stump, imbedded in which is an axe. Bracelets jangling, she pulls the axe from the wood and goes back into the house. We see the outlines of the sleeping lovers in shadows on the wall as Lucy hoists the axe above her head and takes off each of theirs with two manic blows. She then goes to work in earnest.
There is absolutely nothing realistic about these murders. The heads are severed from the bodies too easily and there is no blood splatter as Lucy whacks away. Since Castle cuts a couple of times to close-ups of Carol’s terrified face, maybe we are seeing the crime as the little girl saw it, with full emphasis on her mother.
Okay, Lucy goes to an asylum and Carol is sent to live with her mother’s brother (an amusingly jovial Leif Erickson) and his pinch-mouthed wife (Rochelle Hudson) on a farm somewhere in the Midwest. (Bloch has more fun by letting us know that Lucy’s maiden name was “Cutler.”)
Twenty years later, Lucy is declared sane and she comes to live with the Cutlers and Carol. Carol shows her around the farm and you have everything you need to know to plot the rest of the picture yourself by the 20 minute mark.
Carol decides, in a move reminiscent of “Vertigo,” to re-make her dowdy mom in the image of what she was when she wielded the chopper. Lucy starts wearing loud print dresses, dangling bracelets, and a black wig with a mid-‘40s hairstyle. Then she begins hearing voices chanting “Lucy Harbin took an axe and gave her husband 40 whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave his girl friend 41.”
One night she wakes to find two disembodied heads and a gory axe in her bed. Not too surprisingly, she takes to drinking a wee bit too much.
On the afternoon she meets Carol’s fiancé Michael (John Anthony Hayes), Lucy gets tight and flirts shamelessly with the younger man. This scene is the most memorable for viewers who like the picture for the wrong reasons—i.e., its camp value—as Crawford pulls out all the stops. She drapes herself over Hayes and even runs her fingertips around and between his lips. This was apparently not in the script nor the direction, and Hayes wondered what God had wrought, and he wondered it in a big way.
To make matters worse, Lucy’s psychiatrist, Dr. Anderson, shows up on his way to a fishing trip and the former patient gets upset. Lucy runs off and the doctor goes outside to look around. He soon looses his head over the place to the accompaniment of the sound of jangling bracelets.
Handyman Leo Krause (a wonderfully dim and degenerate George Kennedy) finds the doctor’s abandoned car and blackmails Carol into letting him keep it. He, too, is soon headed off, and then the film rushes to its conclusion with villainy revealed and honesty triumphant.
You don’t really know the movie is working as well as it is until you get to the murders and find yourself growing apprehensive. Castle’s best moment comes in a scene that finds Lucy watching Leo decapitate a chicken. The sound of the spinning blades on the weather vane builds throughout the brief scene until it reminds you of the jangling of Lucy’s bracelets. By the final reel, every time someone bends slightly at the waist, you expect an axe to enter the frame.
I suspect the participants had four ways of looking at “Strait-Jacket.” Crawford saw it as a star vehicle, while the supporting cast saw it as a paycheck. Castle saw it as an entry to “A” filmmaking, and Bloch saw it as a huge, sick joke. Viewers today don’t care much about what the supporting cast thought. Castle was wrong, while Crawford and Bloch were dead right—especially Bloch. It’s in the joke that the film is still most enjoyable.
Sadly, as a vehicle for Crawford, it’s really just the first step toward “Trog,” and there’s nothing funny about that.
dgb
He grabbed writer Robert Bloch, whose novel “Psycho” had worked brilliantly for Alfred Hitchcock a few years before—after “Homicidal” in 1961, Castle had broken ties with screenwriter Robb White, who had delivered five of his horror scripts—and Bloch set to work on a story loosely suggested by the Lizzie Borden axe murders of 1892.Bloch was the author of some great short horror stories, a couple of terrific novels, and scores of mediocre scripts. Screenwriting earned him most of his money, but it didn’t produce his most memorable work.
Perhaps Castle saw the approaching wave of “hag horror,” generally “B” creepers starring fading actresses who still had the big name but could no longer command big parts in big movies. He signed Joan Blondell for the role of axe murderess Lucy Harbin. Before shooting began, Blondell had an accident that prevented her from making the movie, and Castle went after one of the stars of “Baby Jane,” Joan Crawford.
Crawford was willing to accept the part, but she demanded cast and script approval. Castle agreed. So arrogant was Crawford, she gave the small role of Dr. Anderson, Lucy’s psychiatrist, to Mitchell Cox, a vice-president of Pepsi Cola, a non-actor but a personal friend, without telling Castle what she was up to. It’s to Cox’ credit that he comes across on screen no worse than many professional actors in “B” horror flicks, and he seems to be having a great time. He’s no Boris Karloff, but he’s no Paris Hilton, either.
Anne Helm was cast in the important role of Lucy’s estranged daughter Carol, but Crawford didn’t like her and out she went. Diane Baker had worked with Crawford in “The Best of Everything” (1959), and with Susan Hayward in “Stolen Hours” (1963), so she knew her way around a diva. Crawford liked her and “suggested” her for the role.
The movie opens with a flashback, a trick Robert Aldrich, the director of “Baby Jane,” would use for his second foray into hag horror, “Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte,” later that year. We see Lucy’s husband (Lee Majors in his first screen role) flirting and drinking with a young woman. He invites her to his house because his wife is out of town and not expected back for a day or two. The adulterer and his lover make a little whoopee, unaware that they are being watched by three-year old Carol (Vicki Cos).
Then Lucy comes home early.Crawford makes her first entrance in a way that she must have loved. The camera is aimed at the steps that come down from the passenger car of a train. When Crawford steps into the frame, all we see are her legs—and nice looking gams they are still for the 58-year old former dancer. The shot also gives us our first dose of Robert Bloch’s signature black humor. Stenciled above the steps, just below Lucy’s feet, is the admonition “Watch your step.” Listen, too, for lines like “She’s dying to meet you,” and “Sanity is relative.”
When Lucy returns to her house, she finds hubby and his gal in bed. Shocked, she stumbles from the house and trips over a tree stump, imbedded in which is an axe. Bracelets jangling, she pulls the axe from the wood and goes back into the house. We see the outlines of the sleeping lovers in shadows on the wall as Lucy hoists the axe above her head and takes off each of theirs with two manic blows. She then goes to work in earnest.
There is absolutely nothing realistic about these murders. The heads are severed from the bodies too easily and there is no blood splatter as Lucy whacks away. Since Castle cuts a couple of times to close-ups of Carol’s terrified face, maybe we are seeing the crime as the little girl saw it, with full emphasis on her mother.
Okay, Lucy goes to an asylum and Carol is sent to live with her mother’s brother (an amusingly jovial Leif Erickson) and his pinch-mouthed wife (Rochelle Hudson) on a farm somewhere in the Midwest. (Bloch has more fun by letting us know that Lucy’s maiden name was “Cutler.”)
Twenty years later, Lucy is declared sane and she comes to live with the Cutlers and Carol. Carol shows her around the farm and you have everything you need to know to plot the rest of the picture yourself by the 20 minute mark.
Carol decides, in a move reminiscent of “Vertigo,” to re-make her dowdy mom in the image of what she was when she wielded the chopper. Lucy starts wearing loud print dresses, dangling bracelets, and a black wig with a mid-‘40s hairstyle. Then she begins hearing voices chanting “Lucy Harbin took an axe and gave her husband 40 whacks. When she saw what she had done, she gave his girl friend 41.”
One night she wakes to find two disembodied heads and a gory axe in her bed. Not too surprisingly, she takes to drinking a wee bit too much.
On the afternoon she meets Carol’s fiancé Michael (John Anthony Hayes), Lucy gets tight and flirts shamelessly with the younger man. This scene is the most memorable for viewers who like the picture for the wrong reasons—i.e., its camp value—as Crawford pulls out all the stops. She drapes herself over Hayes and even runs her fingertips around and between his lips. This was apparently not in the script nor the direction, and Hayes wondered what God had wrought, and he wondered it in a big way.
To make matters worse, Lucy’s psychiatrist, Dr. Anderson, shows up on his way to a fishing trip and the former patient gets upset. Lucy runs off and the doctor goes outside to look around. He soon looses his head over the place to the accompaniment of the sound of jangling bracelets.
Handyman Leo Krause (a wonderfully dim and degenerate George Kennedy) finds the doctor’s abandoned car and blackmails Carol into letting him keep it. He, too, is soon headed off, and then the film rushes to its conclusion with villainy revealed and honesty triumphant.
You don’t really know the movie is working as well as it is until you get to the murders and find yourself growing apprehensive. Castle’s best moment comes in a scene that finds Lucy watching Leo decapitate a chicken. The sound of the spinning blades on the weather vane builds throughout the brief scene until it reminds you of the jangling of Lucy’s bracelets. By the final reel, every time someone bends slightly at the waist, you expect an axe to enter the frame.
I suspect the participants had four ways of looking at “Strait-Jacket.” Crawford saw it as a star vehicle, while the supporting cast saw it as a paycheck. Castle saw it as an entry to “A” filmmaking, and Bloch saw it as a huge, sick joke. Viewers today don’t care much about what the supporting cast thought. Castle was wrong, while Crawford and Bloch were dead right—especially Bloch. It’s in the joke that the film is still most enjoyable.
Sadly, as a vehicle for Crawford, it’s really just the first step toward “Trog,” and there’s nothing funny about that.
dgb
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