Arbogast on Film

2011-12-31T00:01:00.000-08:00

Laying myself to rest

2011-12-28T10:48:00.000-08:00

It should come as no real surprise to long-time AoF readers that I will be ending this blog before the new year. It has been a fun run since the fall of 2007, when changes in the world of print and online journalism and an overall downturn among the personal fortunes of many critics gave me the free time and headspace to post at will, at times obsessively, on topics that extended well beyond my vocation. I have been fortunate over the past year or so to have found other avenues of revenue still related to cinema and these new assignments occupy the better part of my workday. When you have a family to feed, it's rather nice to have the work laid out ahead of you beyond the vanishing point.

And yet my decision is not solely based in a paucity of free time. For a while now I've felt a creeping disinclination to review films in the way that I have for many, many years; I still watch as many movies, if not more, as I used to but now I find myself growing more reticent and less moved to spout off right away, to tender opinion, to thumb up or thumb down. I've long been hagged by the desire to step back from this obligation, to talk less and learn more, to re-educate myself, redefine myself, to retrench... and now seems as good a time as any. I've met some wonderful people through this blog, several of whom have become close personal friends, and they are the true reward for my efforts here. In the coming days, I'll be shutting down my Facebook page, too, which never interested me much in the first place, but the blog itself will remain online as a resource and I will be reachable through the comments section and my gmail account.

TTFN.

31 Screams: Bela Lugosi

2011-10-31T00:00:00.000-07:00

Monsters can scream, too, you know. And who better to take us out of 31 Screams 2011 than someone who has played more than his fair share of them?

In truth, Bela Lugosi is not a monster in WHITE ZOMBIE (1932). Murder Legendre is patently human although he enjoys the reputation of having occult powers. Legendre strikes me as a warm up for Julian Karswell in Jacques Tourneur's NIGHT OF THE DEMON (1957) - a charismatic man who has made a brilliant study of dark sciences and wields them against his fellows for power and status.

There's a subtle class struggle at the back of NIGHT OF THE DEMON, with the aristocratic Karswell needing to lord over his middle class academic and professional peers, and I think there's equally intriguing subtext going on below the surface of WHITE ZOMBIE.

Voodoo was the first social disease, in that it was a product of an open society, one in which everyone knew everyone else and everyone's else's business. The act of zombification was punitive but it wasn't meant primarily to punish its immediate victims so much as their families, their loved ones, through shame. Being a tale of voodoo, WHITE ZOMBIE brokers in the alchemy of representation. Wax dolls are given human form and humans are emptied out of all emotion and will to become pliant husks, automatons, slaves.

Each one of Murder Legendre's zombie helpmeets has a connection to his earlier life and represents, like a trophy, a triumph of his will. Likewise, Legendre triumphs over the film's secondary villain, Beaumont (Robert Frazer), and acquires the innocent woman (Madge Bellamy) he has made a zombie.It's hard to tell which triumph is more important to Legendre - getting the only white woman on the island or making Beaumont watch while he enjoys the spoils.

In the end, Beaumont dredges up what little sliver of humanity he has left to turn the tables on Legendre. The villain has already been cold-cocked by a heroic cleric (Joseph Cawthorn) and his zombie horde dispersed like lemmings over the parapet to drown in the sea below. As Legendre struggles to retain control over the woman, Beaumont sneaks up from behind - we see him first as a shadow that suits his present state as a two dimensional man. Legendre offers very little in the way of resistance as Beaumont gives him the bum's rush over the wall.

You may laugh at the use of an obvious articulated dummy to stand in for Lugosi as Legendre falls to his well-deserved demise but thematically it makes perfect sense. Caught between Heaven and Hell and with no one to corrupt, Legendre no longer exists as we have known him. He has been emptied of his venality, his malice, his evil, and all that remains of him is a cutaway coat, a celluloid collar and a pound of Joe Louis pomade.

He falls, like Lucifer...

... and at the end of a two hundred foot scream he disappears below the breakers, insubstantial now like one of Prospero's conjurations. Beaumont follows. Though mute, his own scream is voiced by a perched bird of prey, which takes flight with a squawk as Beaumont falls. Does the bird's flight represent redemption for Beaumont, an ascension to Heaven even as his body is consigned to a watery Hell? Maybe. Either way, the nightmare of WHITE ZOMBIE has ended and order has been restored, with the living and the dead in their separate corners, and wax once more being used exclusively for candles and mustaches.

Happy Halloween!

31 Screams: Pablo Álvarez Rubio

2011-10-30T00:01:00.000-07:00

I think people like Renfield. Despite possessing some unsavory and unhygienic habits, he's an amusing character and quite good company. Mind you, people can get a bit partisan about him, favoring one actor's performance over another. I think we can all agree that Dwight Frye gave it his all in Tod Browning's DRACULA (1931) but I'd be remiss in my duties (assumed) as a horror tastemaker if I were to neglect the interpretation of Pablo Álvarez Rubio.

Álvarez Rubio played Renfield in the Spanish language version of DRACULA filmed on Browning's sets at Universal by night. Now, I'm not saying that this performance trumps Frye's, no; however, scream-wise, he's got it all over his American cousin. In both versions of the film, Dracula's faithful heyboy falls afoul of the Undying Count by leading, unwittingly, Van Helsing et al to where the vampire has absconded with the heroine.

Though Renfield protests his innocence and undying fealty to his Master (or, Maestro), Dracula insists that he die. It's sort of an agree-to-disagree scenario. Now while Frye gasps it up really good, he dies silently, the life choked out of him mit out sound, and his lifeless body tossed over the side of the staircase of the catacombs without so much as a death rattle.

Álvarez Rubio, on the other hand, screams like Hell. He's clearly not happy about this turn of events and he wants everybody to know it. His screams are full-bodied ...

... robusto...

... and he keeps on screaming all the way down.

Here's where Francis Ford Coppola got it wrong. Dracula isn't a love story between Dracula and Mina, it's a love story between Dracula and Renfield. It's Othello, with the vampire as the Moor and Renfield his Desdemona, killed for no good reason (well, in the movie, anyway) and dying with a heart full of love, even as the object of his affection is throttling the life from him. You get that with Frye, of course, but God bless the Spanish for turning a love song into a full-blown aria.

31 Screams: Claire Hardwick

2011-10-29T00:01:00.000-07:00

In Michele Soavi's THE CHURCH (LA CHIESA, 1993),Claire Hardwick plays a young woman with commitment issues. She's with one boy but thinking of another as the pair diverts on their way to a rock concert into a stunning cathedral, full of history and activity.

Erected on the site of a mass execution in Medieval times, the site is now a gate to Hell itself. When the church doors seal in a dozen or so strangers, and a series of clockwork-type devices begin to winnow down the cast list from double to single digits, the young lovers make their escape through what they take to be a cistern.

When their escape route turns out to be a well and a dead end, they begin to tunnel. Half a dozen strokes in, the floor buckles beneath them and our girl drops through the hole. Caught by the hand at the last second, she dangles, screaming.

The fear of falling is more than primal, it's embryonic. In ancient times, children would be birthed from a standing position, allowing gravity to share in the midwifery. Perhaps in some distant corner of our brain, we remember that original fall from the certainty of the womb into the chaos of Day One.

Soavi plays the scene adeptly, allowing us to anticipate her drop, her isolation during that terrible free fall, and the ugly thud when she reaches bottom. Reassurances from above only sweeten the sauce of anticipation. But then something comes at us from another direction. Light. No, lights. They almost seem to dance at first, like fireflies. She is momentarily mesmerized by them, distracted from her situation. Until...

... she sees what she is up against. She has time for a final, soul cleansing scream before...

... she catches her train as it rockets through the tunnel into which she has dropped, like a worm on a hook. I've rewatched this scene a dozen times, easily, and it never doesn't work. And it isn't just schadenfreude, mein friends, it isn't just a cheap laugh or a sick joke. There's something truly profound about this bait and switch, a life lesson for the lot of us. You just never know.

31 Screams: Somebody's daughter

2011-10-28T00:01:00.000-07:00

Of course, every victim in a horror movie is somebody's child but the fact that I can't identify the actress in this early scene from Antonio Boccaci's METEMPSYCO (US: TOMB OF TORTURE, 1963) forces the association of innocence. We don't know her name, we only know what happens to her character, and if we were to try and find out who she was we would have no choice but to work backward from the manner of her death.

In the film, two young girls trespass on the ground of a castle, one daring the other to explore deeper into the foreboding stronghold. They're schoolgirls by the cut of their clothes and the plump of their cheeks. They're like characters in a Jean Rollin vampire movie but eroticism isn't on the tour for them today. Locked in, they panic. Cathy (above) hyperventilates and breaks into a sort of mad laugh. Her friend, Esther, tries to comfort her and, failing that, searches for a way out, leaving Cathy alone. The gaslight dims and...

By this point, Esther is dead. We've seen her body pushed rudely off of the rack in the dungeon below the castle. Their captor is disfigured, shambling -- barely human, but for the inane giggling as he tortures the girls. Cathy screams but no one can hear her and her terror actually seems to excite the hunchback. Given that Bava and Margheritti and other Italian filmmakers of the day were still sublimating sexual perversion via somewhat more palatable Gothic tropes, this scene is remarkably raw and brutal, very much at odds with the almost storybook setting.

As the hunchback shackles Cathy to the very rack upon which Esther's life ended, she keeps screaming, fighting her restraints. She knows more than we do at this point. She has seen her friend die. She knows what's in store for her.

Part of you expects that she'll make it, that someone will save her, that luck will go her way. Cathy has that smart look to her and an overbite that makes her specific, not just another generic victim. She's not the type to die like this.

When the authorities find their bodies, Esther and Cathy are together again. Someone has had the decency to cover them with a blanket, which makes the girls look -- despite the blood -- as if they are sleeping. Dreaming. In a way, that's the cruelest blow of all, to return the bodies of these angels in a mockery of them at their most cherished. TOMB OF TORTURE is an odd movie, frustratingly comic in parts, and never less than totally perverse. Antonio Boccacio made just one more film and then fell off the radar. As for the girl who played Cathy -- despite the fact that her likeness was used prominently on poster art and in publicity materials throughout Europe (where the film was exhibited alternatively as LA MANOIR MAUDIT and DIE BESTIE VON SCHLOSS MONTE CHRISTO), nobody bothered to write down her name.

31 Screams: Bodega Bay Elementary School

2011-10-27T00:02:00.000-07:00

Lots of horror movies have explored the phenomena of childhood fear and some have actualized those fears with the revelation of concrete, palpable, mensurable horror. Significantly fewer horror films have multiplied that tragic result twenty or thirty fold - in fact I can think of none besides Alfred Hitchcock's THE BIRDS (1963).

Panic scenes in sci-fi fear films were nothing new in 1963 but THE BIRDS is that rara avis (sorry - feel free to cry fowl) that localizes the fear reaction almost exclusively among children. The attack on the Bodega Bay Elementary School is the overture that brings us straight to the magnum opus that is the film's central attack sequence, in which a Rube Goldberg series of events results in the small fishing village's vestpocket Apocalypse.

Hitchcock's use of multiple processes (rear projection, double exposures) adds layers of unreality to this scene, which causes some contemporary audiences to burst out laughing. I understand the reaction but it's not mine. I saw THE BIRDS at a young age and this scene jumped out at me as the apotheosis of terror. How could it not? Nearly half a century later and the horror embedded in this scene has not diminished but only intensified. The screaming of the children cuts through me and leaves a ragged hole.

Part of that equation is that I'm a family man and invested in protecting the well-being of my children. Another factor is that, nearly five decades later, the image of school children fleeing the presumed sanctity of the classroom in abject terror, their faces stretched into masks of fear, desperation, and blind panic, is no longer just a movie plot point but a recurring motif in the news of the world. Sing along if you know the tune: Columbine, Dunblane, Red Lake, Beslan, Nickel Mines...

THE BIRDS is about - I mean, among other things - the loss of primacy, of sovereignty, of dominance. The previous decade was all about science run amok and the revenge of nature on an overreaching civilization but the problem boiled down, in most cases, to a single aberration. Science got on it, admitted guilt, accepted liability and worked the problem. In THE BIRDS, it's an entire class of animals -- individually small, insignificant, nearly weightless things that, when massed, turned society inside out. The attack on the Bodega Bay Elementary School shows the birds hitting mankind where he lives, threatening his children, his hope for the future.

THE BIRDS is cinema at its most castrating.THE BIRDS tells humanity "your advance stops here. Your issue stops here. You are done." THE BIRDS ends on a dirge note that effectively hisses "Your men are humbled, your women are dead or insane, and your children are fucked. They know you can't protect them. They know you can't save them. But, hey, hit the road if it makes you feel better."

Tweet that.

31 Screams: Debra S. Hayes

2011-10-26T00:01:00.000-07:00

The past is prologue - literally in the precredits sequence of FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980).

Claudette (Debra S. Hayes, about whom nothing later), a youth counselor at Camp Crystal Lake in the pine forests of Northwestern New Jersey, leads a circle of Eisenhower era Jacks and Jills in a few soothing camp songs before handing off the gitbox and repairing to an attic love nest to canoodle with boyfriend Barry (Willie Adams). The couple has got not much further than pillow talk before they are interrupted by someone known to them.

The interloper's intentions are soon quite evident and Barry falls, stabbed deep in the guts. He will not be playing the hero tonight or ever again. Left to fend for herself, Claudette flails about, moving backwards through the attic, her screams unheard. There will be no merit badge for survival.

As it was Barry's plan to get Claudette on her back, it is only the cruelest coincidence that that is precisely where she winds up.

Director Sean S. Cunningham pushes in tight on Claudette while the method of shooting goes from hand held vérité ...

... to slow motion, the velocity of inevitability.

We don't yet know, we who are watching FRIDAY THE 13TH for the first time, that Claudette is answering for her role in the drowning death of one Jason Voorhees, a child in her care the previous year. We who have come fresh to this story are thrown off guard by the swiftness of horror's handoff, surprised by Cunningham's narrative snap and the ferocity of the play.

We who have seen FRIDAY THE 13TH ad nauseam know the killer is Jason Voorhees' mother, an aid at the camp, and that these murders are setting in motion a cycle of violence, terror and lingering fear that will span decades, both in terms of the Camp Blood timeline and in production years of the seemingly endless succession of sequels.

What a thing it must be to make history with the act of your obliteration from it. I may be mistaken, but I don't think the character of Claudette ever rated a second mention, by name anyway, in the many sequels to ...

... and that makes me feel more charitable toward her than I'm wont to feel toward the subsequent victims of Mrs. and Jason Voorhees (not dead! Or is he?). I understand that the murder of Barry and Claudette was planned as a more involved setpiece but that the onset of an early winter in September 1979 precluded further outdoor shooting, forcing Cunningham to improvise. I think the compromise paid off in a death scene more haunting than would have been the result of a prolonged stalk and slash. It was a lesson in the genius of brevity that would find few applications through the rest of the franchise, in which a furioso of overkill was too often mistaken for a symphony of terror.

31 Screams: Janet Munro

2011-10-25T00:02:00.000-07:00

There's nothing so piquant as the scream of the wakened sleeper.

In THE TROLLENBERG TERROR (US: THE CRAWLING EYE, 1958), Janet Munro plays the sensitive half of a pair of bogus mind readers whose aptitude grows more genuine as the pair draws closer to Austria's snowcapped Trollenberg. Something positively evil is going on high above the scenic mountain town, and anyone who ascends to the summit turns up dead. Except for Brett (k. d. lang lookalike Andrew Faulds), who returns in a heightened state of not quite right.

When Brett proves a danger to the guests of the local inn (particularly the psychic Anne Pilgrim), he is locked up in the wine cellar. Breaking free and strangling one of his captors, Brett makes a beeline for the sleeping Anne. He's not quite homicidal enough to bother with Anne's older sister (Jennifer Jayne), which suggests there is a method to his madness and an intelligence motivating his otherwise shambling, zombie-like movements. When Anne senses him in her room, her reaction is really kind of sweet. She looks up without a trace of fear or judgment, as innocent as a faery.

But that all changes when she gets a look at Brett's face.

She doesn't need to be psychic to read his mind.

Caught somewhere between the fight or flight response to fear, her amygdala glowing like a bedside alarm clock, Anne bunches up under her bedclothes. She's got nowhere to go and no defense against this man who quite clearly means her the most extreme harm.

She screams, leaving herself wide open. But that's Anne Pilgrim for you - wide open, pure of heart, vulnerable.

She's toast... until director Quentin Lawrence rhymes her scream of abject terror with a gunshot. Brett falls, dead, revealing hero Forrest Tucker in his pajamas, a smoking revolver in his drinking hand. The hour has been saved but a long day remains.

31 Screams: Yûko Takeuchi

2011-10-24T00:03:00.000-07:00

Why does one thing work and not another? I'm not talking about timing or luck or the music of chance, I'm talking about things that succeed concretely and things that do not. Specifically, why does the first scene in Hideo Nakata's RING (RINGU, 1998) work such a damn charm, even on repeated viewings, even thirteen years later, when similar efforts by so many other filmmakers fail, fail, fail?

The setup is classic urban legend, which is both the style of the scene and its subject. Two high school girls at home in a Tokyo suburb, adults away at a Swallows game at Jingu Stadium, scaring one another with stuff they've heard. Although home computers exist at this time, it's still far back enough that not every kid has a laptop or a cellphone, so the oral tradition still has tremendous pull over the lives of pre-adults. As Tomoko (Yûko Takeuchi) listens with rapt attention, Masami (Hitomi Satô) relates the story of a boy who saw a strange video tape in Izu, on which a woman appeared and told him he would die in one week... and he did.

Tomoko's response (effectively): Yeah, I saw that tape, too. Director Hideo Nakata plays the scene in close, using the natural, coltish charm of these two performers to lure us in, to make us lean into their world. We fear for them, even before they know to fear for themselves. And yet they're home, they're safe; they're surrounded by American fetishes - the game on TV, containers of Ritz Crackers and Planter's Peanuts, a refrigerator magnet in the shape of McDonalds fries - these talismans reflect a real, contemporary, westernized world in which demons and ghosts and ancient evil have no purchase.

Anyway, that's the theory.

There's a false scare as the phone rings -- purportedly the medium by which the doomed are informed that their time has come -- but it turns out to be Tomoki's parents, calling from Shinkuju -- extra innings, they'll be late. The girls fall to the floor, weak-kneed with the laughter of absolute relief. Masami excuses herself to go to the bathroom, leaving Tomoko alone.

Throughout RINGU, Nakata employs an evocative and predatory soundscape that gets under your skin. You don't know what the hell you're hearing but you know it ain't right. Sounds from behind her draw Tomoko's attention. She turns and...

Well, who knows? Next thing you know, we're at her funeral. Or rather the reception afterwards. It's the usual bad scene -- no hysterics, just the horrible polite conversations and finger food and hushed tones. Later, the film's heroine (Nanako Matsushima), aunt of the dead girl, goes back to where she died. She's a TV reporter and she's naturally curious. In Tomoko's bedroom, the bereaved mother tears open the closet door as if revealing her secret shame...

... and we flash for a rotten second back to the discovery of Tomoko's body, to how she died, having taken refuge from the thing that frightened her in a closet, her hands over her ears to block the sound, her mouth agape as if to...

We don't know whether Tomoko made a sound in her death throes and that's part of what troubles us about it, what haunts us, and what makes RING so effective all these years later. It leaves us alone in the dark with terrible questions and the horrible weight of wondering.

31 Screams: Helen Jay

2011-10-23T00:19:00.000-07:00

"Who the hell was Mrs. Farley - the Mantis?" So Helen Jay's immortal turn in THE DEADLY MANTIS (1957) was mocked on MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000, episode 804.

If you've seen the flick, you know the set-up: getting off of a Mutual Transportation Bus somewhere near downtown Washington, D.C., Mrs. F. is offered to the audience as a potential victim of the eponymous big bug. In a foreboding fog bank, she is dropped off at her stop; there is a bit of chitchat with the driver (George Lynn), who tells her she's safe - a death sentence if ever we've heard one.

As her ride pulls away, the lady gives the vicinity a quick once-over and we start measuring her future life expectancy in seconds.

You can see she's thinking it was a bad idea that she got off the bus. And then...

... the Mantis looms out of the murk and goes for the bus, rolling it over like an ear of corn through a butter tray.

She screams.

It's a good one, too. A real ripper.

You can tell half of her brain is thinking "All those innocent people!" and the other half is like "Shit fire, that could've been me!"

Not sure which half is doing the screaming. Nor does it really matter. It's a good moment in an otherwise iffy film, a sort of Lewtonesque tip of the hat to the archetype of the imperiled Woman Alone that's torqued to thwart audience expectations.

You might recognize the New York-born actress from roles (credited and otherwise) in THE SPACE CHILDREN (1958), I MARRIED A MONSTER FROM OUTER SPACE (1958), OCEANS 11 (1960) and SIMON KING OF THE WITCHES (1971), and as one of the Three Stooges' imperiled sweethearts in RUMPUS IN THE HAREM (1956). Helen Jay died in 1989 and lies now in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, only about five miles from where she filmed her big scene in THE DEADLY MANTIS.

31 Screams: Godzilla

2011-10-22T00:02:00.000-07:00

When I was a little boy, I was rooting around in my Mum's garden and found a snake slithering between the leaves. Sensitive to my mother's extreme fear of reptiles, I went after the snake, driving it out with a long handled hoe whose blade had long since broken off and shooting at it with my pellet gun until it was dead. I'll never forget watching that snake die and how my initial feelings of fear and revulsion turned to pity and shame as I attended its death throes.

I get that same feeling watching the end of GOJIRA (GODZILLA, KING OF THE MONSTERS, 1954). Old G is clearly the baddie in this one, however his titanic size and rapacious appetite for wreaking havoc is not his fault. He's a city stomper nonpareil and thousands die in his wake. He's got to go, no way about it. And yet...

... his death agony is hard to watch. G's famous rebel yell, that lion's roar that would become his trademark in the many sequels and reboots to follow, can be read as a scream in this setting, as the air in his lungs is eaten up by Dr. Serizawa's Oxygen Destroyer. Even seeing G's little fist come up out of the water makes me sad.

There's something childlike about it.

The way we revert to a childlike state in the moment of our death has been a refrain throughout the four years of 31 Screams. Death - and not necessarily just violent death - seems to return us to ourselves, to take us back to a pre-intellectual, pre-scheming, pre-idea place, where we meet pure sensation with pure, infantile, primal responses.

KING KONG (1933) milked the pathos. The filmmakers wanted you to mourn the great ape's demise - there was really no other desired reaction. Here, I don't think Ishiro Honda and company are being so manipulative. And yet the result is largely the same.

As the dying - if not already dead - Godzilla's scaly corporeality comes to rest on the floor of Tokyo Bay, the monster is silent. His last scream has died away, stifled by the flood of sea water into his cavernous, fang-filled maw.

Of course, there will be no rest for Godzilla. His many follow-up adventures put the Japanese film industry on the international map the way that piker Kurosawa only wished he could. G would be recast in subsequent films as an avenger, as a champion, as a role model to young children and as a loose canon making a mockery of polite society with the thunderous stamp of his big feet, the swish of his giant tail, and a scream that can shatter the world.

31 Screams: Christiane Kruger

2011-10-21T00:26:00.000-07:00

Its slickly ominous title notwithstanding, Ken Hughes' THE INTERNECINE PROJECT (1974) isn't even remotely a horror movie... and yet Christiane Kruger is such a pretty screamer that I cannot help but include her.

In the film, she plays a high class prostitute on the payroll of espionage agent James Coburn. When Coburn has a presidential post dangled in front of him, he takes it upon himself to get rid of all the little people who helped him along the way - his inside men, snitches, hey-boys and call girls. With Mabusian cleverness, Coburn gets his operatives to do away with one another in a Schnitzlerian la ronde of malice aforethought. The odd man out in this number is the only woman, who has not been pressured to kill anybody, just to plant a device that will (though she does not know this) do the job for her.

As she cleans off after the assignment, creepy Harry Andrews sneaks up on her in her handsomely appointed bathroom. The lantern jawed actor hasn't got the most reassuring face in the best of situations and this particular situation must surely rank among the worst.

Despite being a hooker, Kruger's character is etched as a pure soul. She is not experienced enough to expect payback... and certainly not so soon. Her expression of surprise is a heartbreaker.

Kruger was always a dab hand at playing ice cold bitches (Radley Metzger's LITTLE MOTHER for instance) but here she's the closest thing THE INTERNECINE PROJECT has to an innocent. And we all know what happens to lambs...

The scene evokes the shower setpiece in PSYCHO but that's about as far as that comparison goes. The use of plastic wrap as a murder device always adds an extra layer of unpleasantness to movie murder, it Bob Clark's BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974), TWIN PEAKS (1990-1992) or Carl Franklin's ONE FALSE MOVE (1992).

If you grew up in the post-World War II suburban American boom, it's hard to disassociate something wrapped in plastic from the leftovers we stuffed into our freezers and summarily forgot. Seeing someone struggling against the flimsy yet strangely formidable medium is like watching a butterfly in the killing jar.

This moment turns the tide of THE INTERNECINE PROJECT, queering audience sympathy with Coburn's master criminal, allowing them to see him as the rat bastard he really is.

Christiane Kruger's striking Aryan beauty humanizes her in her last terrible moments by giving her a distinct silhouette behind the plastic shower curtain. She is perfect, even in her agony, and the moment brings her closer to the audience... if only so they can have the dubious pleasure of watching her die.

31 Screams: Beverly Garland

2011-10-20T00:00:00.000-07:00

It seems as though it took a lot to make Beverly Garland scream; thankfully, Roger Corman threw a lot at her.

In NOT OF THIS EARTH (1957), Garland plays Nadine Storey, a no-nonsense Beverly Hills private duty nurse who signs on for the care of the reclusive Mr. Johnson (Paul Birch), with the promise of a ridiculously generous weekly salary for doing not much more than changing the old weirdo's blood.

Ah, these deals never work out, though, do they? Nurse Nadine finds out in due course that Johnson is the point man for an alien race eager to take over the earth and that he can zap you with his eyes. (Could NOT OF THIS EARTH have inspired, per chance, HORROR EXPRESS?) Damning her own -- and isn't it funny that deference is so ingrained into Nadine's pretty little head that she still refers to her employer as "Mr. Johnson" even as he endeavors to fry her brain with a flash of his egg whites? -- to preserve her vitality, Nadine brooks this bit of non-hu-manhandling as would any of us...

She screams. And peeks, just a little. How can you not?

Luckily, screaming is the correct thing to do in this scenario, given that the alien's sense of hearing is particularly sensitive to loud noises. Weakened by Nadine's caterwauling, his grasp loosens, allowing his intended victim to escape. And we're all glad, because no harm should come to Beverly Garland pre-PRETTY POISON (1968), and even then only to advance the plot.

One of the reasons Beverly Garland gives such good scream (check out her turn as the heroine of THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE, profiled in 31 Screams 2009) is that she projects such an air of confidence, of resourcefulness and courage in extremis that such a reaction is literally her last resort, her mental fail safe. She'd rather run or fight than scream but, denied those avenues, she does what she can. We lost Beverly in 2008 but she left us with quite a legacy of great roles on screens big and small. Rent a Beverly Garland movie today!

31 Screams: Rita Calderoni

2011-10-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

Movies about doppelgangers are always interesting, doubly so when made in Italy, where filmmakers and actors often employed dual identities to better their chances in foreign markets. Directed by Paolo Solvay (aka Luigi Batzella), NUDE FOR SATAN (NUDA PER SATANA, 1974) stars Italian actor Giuseppe Mattei (aka James Harris, between Mario Bava's PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES and Lamberto Bava's DEMONS) as a physician answering an emergency call in the country in the middle of the night. Nearly run off the road by the apparition of a young woman, Dr. Benson comes to the aid of a female motorist (Rita Calderoni) whose own car has run off the road behind his.

Trundling the unconscious woman to a nearby castle, Benson finds himself enmeshed in a very peculiar set of goings on that involves devil worship, wall-to-wall perversions and evil twins for both himself and his traveling partner, Susan Smith. While Benson is distracted by Susan's lookalike (with sexy results), Susan tumbles into a giant spider's web, where she can only writhe helplessly with one boob hanging out and scream, of course, while the web's sole tenant advances towards her with diabolical slowness.

Rita Calderoni had the serious bearing of a legit actress, which made her frequent condescension to nudity and lesbian sex scenes disarming to say the least. (It's worth noting that Calderoni could clean up nice - she made her film debut with a supporting role in Elio Petri's A QUIET PLACE IN THE COUNTRY and elsewhere in 1974 she played a journalist in Roberto Rossellini's YEAR ONE, concerned with Italy's political scene in the first years following World War II.) Probably the most bizarre thing any of her directors ever asked her to do, Calderoni's encounter with a patently fake spider in a web made of fishing line is at least something one doesn't see every day.

I'd like to think Calderoni relished the chance to bug out a little but maybe that's projecting on my part. At any rate, NUDE FOR SATAN bears a superficial resemblance to the Ed Wood-scripted ORGY OF THE DEAD (1965) - the boy/girl couple who lose their way on a road to nowhere and find themselves at the mercy of a cadre of hellspawns - but there's a lot of David Lynch too in this tale of people running around a strange house full of red tapestries and into spiritually bankrupt - if not full-on Satanic - versions of themselves.Vaulted almost as soon as it was released to an exceedingly apathetic Italian public, NUDE FOR SATAN was resurrected for the home video market in 1999-2000, where modern eyes were better able to appreciate its aesthetic eccentricities and karmic curlicues.

Giant spider webs were often depicted on horror movie posters from the Continent during the 60s and 70s, whether or not they actually made an appearance in the film itself. A scene very much like this one had occurred previously in Massimo Pupillo's THE BLOODY PIT OF HORROR (IL BOIA SCARLATTO, 1966), starring Calderoni's occasional leading man Mickey Hargitay and a a fat fakey spider designed by Carlo Rimbaldi. While this redux may play as so much borrowing on the part of Solvay et al, it's fun to regard the movie's motif of doubling as extending as well to movie references, which commingles folklore and urban legend with cinema history for a very attractive and heady package.

Or you may just find that NUDE FOR SATAN is a bunch of horse shit. Either way, would you just look at that spider, though?

31 Screams: Gaby Fuchs

2011-10-18T00:00:00.000-07:00

I don't remember how old I was when I saw MARK OF THE DEVIL (1969) at a kiddie matinee but I wasn't very old, no older than 12. Nearly forty years passed between my first and second viewings, during which time I had fairly vivid memories of select images: a man made to sit on a spiked bench, another man subjected to Chinese water torture until driven visibly insane, yet another man having his hand chopped off and being tarred and feathered, and a woman being subjected to a battery of tortures before... well, I'm getting ahead of myself.

Subject to the 31 Screams treatment in 2009 for her work in Leon Klimovsky's WEREWOLF VS. THE VAMPIRE WOMAN (1972), Fuchs appears in a bit role in MARK OF THE DEVIL, albeit one that lingers in the mind long after she has left the frame. In this tale of the persecution of alleged witches in 18th century Austria, Fuchs plays a novice accused of murdering her baby (interestingly, that part of the indictment she does not challenge) and cooking up the corpse as part of a satanic bouillabaisse. Made to stand before witch burner Herbert Lom, Fuchs offers the defense that she was raped by a high-ranking cleric and that her naming as a witch is part of a coverup. You can probably guess how that goes over.

Made to undergo a gauntlet of tortures, including but not restricted to finger screws, the rack and branding, Fuch's willowy Deidre von Bergenstein can only scream and maintain her innocence.

Unfortunately, her audience (whose number includes Herbert Fux, as Lom's head executioner) are not particularly sympathetic.

Often fobbed off as borderline pornography camping on to Michael Reeves' WITCHFINDER GENERAL (1968) as an excuse to broker in copious female nudity and some violence under the aegis of topicality, MARK OF THE DEVIL is much more interesting in that. Few horror movies jerk the audience's expectations around quite so violently, with Lom's men offered as a seeming tonic to the cruelties of local witchfinder Reggie Nalder (whose character is called The Albino for some occult reason). When Fux and Lom's right hand man, Udo Kier, arrive and oppose Nalder, one has hope for the victims of persecution and superstition but that doesn't last... soon the good guys reveal themselves as the new bad guys (Kier's true believer notwithstanding) and it's the same old-same old.

Brutalized to within an inch of her sanity, Deidre von Bergenstein plays her only remaining card, to tell the executioner exactly what he wants to hear... that she consorted with the Devil, copulated, whatever. Anything to make it stop.

Ultimately, the woman's innate innocence and purity prevent her from exonerating the guilty party of his sins and so she is condemned to burn... after she had had her tongue pulled out of her head. It's a nauseating scene, not for the relatively minimal gore effects but for the numbing inevitability of it. Most of the torture devices seen in the film were handpicked by director Michael Armstrong from an Austrian hexenmuseum, meaning they are all too real.

One wonders what Fuchs was thinking when she acted this scene (which Armstrong directed in a single take but which wound up cut up as montage in postproduction by producer Adrien Hoven). What must she have felt when they lowered this particular armature over her head and shoulders. Fuchs' image from this bit featured prominently not only in poster art for MARK OF THE DEVIL but in the vomit bags that American distributor Hallmark handed out for showdates in the United States. (Full disclosure: I have two.) The movie was rated "V for Violence" in the States but I had no trouble seeing it as a preteen.

I don't know that I've ever read a comparison of MARK OF THE DEVIL and George Romero's NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) yet there are intriguing similarities. Both films end with the surge of a civilian faction - a militia in the former and an angry mob in the latter, whipped up to revolt against Lom's despotic witchfinder. As has happened throughout MARK OF THE DEVIL, hopes are momentarily raised (and none too soon, as several cast members literally have their heads on the chopping block) only to have the revolution miss its mark; as Lom escapes, the mob attacks the only available target, martyring Kier's young idealist even though he too has helped accused witch Olivera Vuco to escape.

Far from having its protagonist felled by a single bullet, shot as in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, Armstrong and Hoven propose a more cynical denouement. The implication is that revolutions wind up being less interested in justice than in the shared experience of sanctioned carnage. Kier's ostensible hero is crucified, his death protracted and offered as entertainment for the masses, his guttural cries of anguish echoing between alps, as reverberant as they are unheeded by anything resembling a loving God.

31 Screams: Unnamed Pop-eyed New Yorker

2011-10-17T00:00:00.000-07:00

Let's take a break from the screaming deepthink, shall we, and get back to first principles.

In THE BEAST FROM 20,000 FATHOMS (1953), this matronly New Yorker screams not as an expression of banked ennui but because a fucking dinosaur has just walked by her, dragging its enormous tail up the avenue like the Hampton Jitney.

She's a sweet old thing,with her white gloves and her little hat. She's a bit stocky and long in the tooth but that blouse shows she's got some verve. She can probably handle herself in most situations but even a native New Yorker can't help but scream at the sight of a thirty foot high Rhedosaurus that snaps the heads off of NYPD flatfoots like you'd bite into a Nik L Nip.

No, no judgement here for hiding her eyes. You see something like that, who wouldn't call for a do-over.

It's hard to tell by these frame grabs but she does something kind of cute here. After she's got her eyes covered by her hands, providing her with a moment's respite from this unfathomable (sorry) horror...

... she tilts her head up just slightly, as if she's peeking, as if, from the safety of her kid glove sanctuary, she still wants to check this thing out. Which makes sense, I guess, because, atomic nightmare notwithstanding, a New Yorker can't not look, right? Am I right?

31 Screams: Jill Bennett

2011-10-16T00:00:00.000-07:00

If you've ever lived through a personal tragedy, then you may remember, as I do, that last moment before you understood exactly what just happened, the moment before you changed forever. That milestone is preserved here, in the penultimate scene of THE SKULL (1965), about which we began discussing on Friday and continued yesterday. Jill Bennett's character, the dutiful but neglected life of demonologist Peter Cushing, has awakened to find her secretive and of late confused husband dead in his bed, his throat torn out. At the foot of his bed, a human skull. She sees this now but in this last, sweet moment of post-sleep befuddlement she does not yet understand. Let's let her enjoy it, because...

... it won't last. And here she is, up to speed.

And yet, even here, notice her eyes. They are not wide with terror. They seem almost resolved, or resigned, as if she always knew this day would come, this morning, that she would awaken to find or at least be told that her husband was dead. That his passions would finally get the better of him.

It's a natural inclination of screamers to cover their own mouths but in this setting, given all that we've discussed about the tension between disreputable or at least unorthodox interests, the action seems an extension of British modesty or shame. She cannot help but scream and yet a part of her brain that operates independently of her fear and horror zones has sent out the memo to batten the hatches. Dignity, always dignity. It's what separates us from the beasts.

And so she screams out behind bloodless fists. Is she saying with her scream "I don't know what just happened?" or "It finally happened?" I guess it's open to interpretation.

Poor thing. She cannot, ultimately, control her expression of ultimate horror. There's just too much scream to let out.

Director Freddie Francis and cinematographer John Wilcox do the lady a solid and push in, tilting up as if to provide something like a modesty curtain, to spare her the great embarrassment of anyone seeing her conjoined emotions of revulsion and fear. In a moment they'll cut away to THE SKULL's fadeout and some final thoughts courtesy of cops-on-the-case Nigel Green and Patrick Magee (good Christ, where was that series?) but for now let's savor this climactic demarcation for someone who has, through no fault of her own, just passed the point of no return.

31 Screams: Peter Cushing

2011-10-15T00:00:00.000-07:00

Did any actor calibrate with greater precision the distance between the emotive polarities of horror than did Peter Cushing? He could show you evil at its most perfunctory -- and as such, it's most cruel -- or he could take you into the mind of someone at his absolute wit's end of terror. It's the latter toward which he swings in THE SKULL (1965), our ongoing discussion of which began here yesterday.

If you've seen THE SKULL, you know how it begins. A French phrenologist in 1814 digs up the corpse of the recently interred Marquis de Sade to take the dead man's head, with a mind toward examining the skull for any lingering traces of malevolence. Pushing aside his mistress, the phrenologist locks himself in the loo to boil the head down to its bony essence and suffers the ultimate fate of the curious. The scene serves two purposes: it proves conclusively that Shakespeare was right, that the evil that men do lives after them; it also sets up a world in which men sequester themselves from the women they profess to love to do what men have to do.

In THE SKULL, Cushing plays an academic who lives with but apart from his missus (Jill Bennett, about whom more later). They maintain separate rooms, sleep in separate beds, and live lives wholly independent of one another. While she goes to the theatre or the opera (we don't know specifically where she spends her evenings but she wears a fur, so it's some place fancy), he stays home to knock around in his study full of rare volumes of forgotten and flesh-bound lore and to entertain the occasional gentleman caller. A regular guest is one Anthony Marco (Patrick Wymark, playing it seedy and sweaty), a procurer of wonders, relics, oddments and assorted abominations. It is Marco who offers Cushing's tweedy Dr. Maitland the skull of the Marquis de Sade and sets him (perhaps unwittingly, perhaps not) on a downward spiral of madness and murder.

We don't see many ladies here. We meet the phrenologist's mistress (God rest her), Maitland's wife and also his maid (THE FROZEN DEAD's Anna Palk, blink and you'll miss her). And that's about it, for THE SKULL is a man's, man's, man's, man's world. It's a world in which men meet with men and discuss things interesting and precious to other men while women are kept to one side, put up in the manner of a certificate or diploma, as if to say to the world, well see here, I do have one of those. It would be, I think, unforgivably glib to say that THE SKULL has a gay subtext and yet there's something going on here that sits well to one side of the A-story of an evil skull that floats around biting people on the neck.

Watch THE SKULL again or even for the first time and see if you don't agree that there's something -- and I know the word is loaded as all Hell but I think it's apt -- queer going on here. Watch as the men brush off the fairer sex (guiltily, always guiltily, you can see it in the downward cast of their eyes) to spend time in one another's company, sharing their odd compulsions and the particulars of their obsessively-maintained collections.

The men have a strange hold on one another. Christopher Lee turns up in a few scenes as a colleague and friend of Maitland's -- its' one of Lee's most affectingly sorrowful performances -- a man who has gone to the limits of his curiosity and now regrets the journey. Cushing's character leans on Lee's, prodding him; Cushing is in term prodded by Wymark's character, who is himself prodded by Peter Woodthorpe's nosy parker of a bedsit caretaker... all these strange, haunted men involved in an odd association by dark of night and with the occasional exchange of money and the intimation of blackmail.

When a woman does intrude on the arcane passions of a man in this setting, what invariably happens is that the Skull tells the man to kill her. We see the phrenologist's doxy stabbed to death by the coroner (George Coulouris) and Maitland stands above his wife's sleeping form, a dagger in his hand, ready to remove her from the equation until the sight of her crucifix cows him into beating a retreat. Though it seems a paradoxical suggestion, it almost seems as if de Sade's hellish, posthumous plan is to turn men back to their neglected women, exploiting the Achilles heel of their pathetic devotion to antiquity to get them to actually penetrate their wives and lovers, using a knife as a phallic surrogate, the only difference between this gesture and lovemaking being the shade of ejaculate.

It seems obvious but the more I think of it the more it seems right. What about the scene in which Cushing's character is taken into custody by two stone-faced cops and brought before a magistrate, who forces him to play Russian Roulette. Turns out it's all a dream but what is it even doing in a movie about a skull that floats around biting people on the neck? It's sole purpose seems to be to define the character played by Cushing as a closet case who dreams the walls are pressing in on him, that he has nowhere to turn, nowhere to run, and that the only avenue of escape available to him is suicide.

Of course, that's all just speculation and part of what makes watching THE SKULL so fun. Believe it or not, I still enjoy the movie on a perfectly linear, literal level, mostly because Peter Cushing paints such the perfect portrait of a hellbound heart. Maitland's high pitched animal screams as the Skull comes for him, his beating on his wife's door, his unheard entreaties for help, and his final, resigned but still disbelieving descent onto his bed are all so exquisitely tragic that I forget about trying to read into the moment and just live it.

Cushing's demise in this scene compares favorably to his somewhat similar comeuppance in the later Amicus anthology THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1970), which got the 31 Screams treatment back in 2008. Tomorrow we will conclude the weekend-long tribute to THE SKULL with Jill Bennett's reaction to the result of what we have just seen. And I imagine you can guess what that will be.

31 Screams: April Olrich

2011-10-14T00:02:00.000-07:00

And now for something of a hat trick for the weekend and an innovation for 31 Screams. The next three days will be devoted to a multitude of screams from a single movie, the Amicus shocker THE SKULL (1965), directed by Freddie Francis.

Based on a story by Robert Bloch, the film concerns the bleached noggin of the long dead Donatien Alphonse Francoise, the Marquis de Sade. A French aristocrat, author and notorious libertine, de Sade spent many years in prison, totaling nearly half his life, for his sundry blasphemies, which included a buttload of sodomy, and various escapes from various institutions. THE SKULL begins with a curtain warmer set in 1814, the year of de Sade's death, and his resurrection (think Burke & Hare, not Jesus Christ) by a French phrenologist (Maurice Good, seen briefly as an army sergeant bemused by nerdy James McDonald in QUATERMASS AND THE PIT) interested in the shelf life of ultimate evil.

As the phrenologist boils the dead skin off de Sade's severed head, we cut away to his mistress (April Olrich), who is more than a soupcon put out that she was bumped from a luxurious bath for this experiment. Noticing the clouds of steam weeping from beneath the door, she investigates. And what she sees, well...

Sacrebleu doesn't even begin to cover it.

The Zanzibar-born, Montevideo-raised Olrich was a ballet dancer who lucked into some early film and TV roles based on her aerobic grace and exotic pulchritude. She had ornamental roles in Powell and Pressburger's PURSUIT OF THE GRAF SPEE (1956), in which she shared a scene with Christopher Lee (who appears in this film as well), and Jack Clayton's ROOM AT THE TOP (1959) with Laurence Harvey, Powell's first choice to play the lead in PEEPING TOM (1960). Speaking of PEEPING TOM, Powell had considered, oh so very briefly, Olrich for the second victim (played ultimately by Moira Shearer) but ruled her out as too exotic, just as he had nixed Julie Andrews for being too famous.

Anyway, Olrich doesn't last long in THE SKULL. She screams -- I'm thinking dubbed -- but it's not the sound that impresses nearly as much as her big mouth.

Seriously, it is cavernous. If the Graf Spee had moored in her mouth, Henry Harwood never would have run her down. But I digress.

Backing away from the horror she has seen (but we have not yet) ...

... her lips curled with revulsion...

... she comes into contact with -- not just a skull but -- THE SKULL. Of the Marquis de Sade. The worst skull ever. The woman actually survives this encounter with ultimate evil but ...

... with ultimate evil the house always wins. We will speak more about THE SKULL and the significance of this opening sequence to the larger narrative and whispering subtexts tomorrow when our special guest will be Mr. Peter Cushing.

Special thanks to Peter Nellhaus for selflessly recommending a movie that has neither subtitles nor coffee.

31 Screams: Joanne Woodward

2011-10-13T00:00:00.000-07:00

Not that I think he'd care, alive or dead, but Tennessee Williams is/was a lot more deserving of a Bram Stoker Award than most of the poseurs and wannabes who queue up annually for the honor. Many of his works are chockablock with horrific elements - shout out your favorite titles. Mine just might be Orpheus Descending, which Sidney Lumet adapted for the screen as THE FUGITIVE KIND (1960).

THE FUGITIVE KIND offers much in the way of the eldritch and creepy and there's even a scene set in a cemetery. In the film's horrific denouement, the central setting burns, as in Corman's HOUSE OF USHER, released the same year. Joanne Woodward plays a mad character, a young woman whose mind has been eaten away (no, not literally) by alcohol and neglect and who can only stand idly by as one of the principals is murdered before her and dies on the stairs, eyes staring blankly like one of the victims in Mario Bava's BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1964) -- and she's Italian to boot! -- while another is driven back into the flames that will envelop him, consume him, eat him alive.

The anguished screams of Woodward's character amid the chaos and the play of firehouse water, which approximates the steady rain that has been falling throughout the movie but isn't now, brings to mind the climactic screams of Daria Nicolodi at the conclusion of Dario Argento's TENEBRE (1982).

In both instances, we see (and hear) the scream as a device of the human mind for emptying out, for cleansing. As the anguished exhortations of Woodward's woman-child Carol Cutrere fall on the deaf ears of a disinterested God, we sense that the protective layers of defensive madness she has accumulated after years in a cruel and punishing environment sloughing off.

She has seen a literal vision of Hell but given that Carol came in crazy she can only leave closer to sane than she has been in a long, long time.

I don't suggest that's a good feeling.

No, it must be awful.

As Carol's screams die in her throat, Lumet and cinematographer Boris Kaufman hold on her for a moment and then dissolve...

... with exquisite slowness...

... giving her a ghostlike aspect as she...

... vanishes into the smoking ruin. Throughout THE FUGITIVE KIND, Carol has bedeviled the locals. The draggletail scion of a wealthy family, she is a disgrace, keeping company with "that crazy conjure man that sells trinkets on the turnpike" and haunting the local juke joint, where she latches onto drifter Marlon Brando. In conventional terms, Carol's need to be "noticed and seen and felt and heard" marks her as a nymphomanic but her compulsion for sensual payback suggests that she's a ghost, whose presence shames this small town. Remind you of anybody?

Framed by ruins in the final shots of THE FUGITIVE KIND, the scarf around her neck suggesting from a distance the knee-length tresses of a little girl, Carol brings to mind the vengeful child ghost Melissa Grapps from Bava's KILL, BABY KILL (1966). I can't say whether the Lumet film was any sort of influence on the Bava film but given that Anna Magnani was Brando's costar here you have to know Bava probably saw it. These are the things that keep a body up at night.

31 Screams: Jill Dixon

2011-10-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

British actress Jill Dixon demonstrates, in Don Sharp's WITCHCRAFT (1964), one of the best types of screams.

In this tale of a centuries-old family feud between the witchy Whitlock clan (led by vacationing American actor Lon Chaney, Jr.) and the vaguely Anglican Laniers (captained by Jack Hedley, whose premature grays added gravitas to any film role to which he set himself), land speculation that encompasses a disused cemetery angers the hooded robe set, sparking a series of accidental deaths that are in reality Hell and gone from happenstance.

The Lanier family seating plan already thinned out by revived witch Vanessa Whitlock (a silent but deadly performance by Yvette Rees in full-on Barbara Steele mode), Tracy Lanier investigates some disturbances in the family vault.

Pulling open a door to God-knows-what, Tracy interrupts a black mass being conducted quite literally in her own back yard. She barely has time to register the proper degree of British shock...

... before she is bum rushed by several of the cultists. The scene is similar to one in John Llewellyn Moxey's CITY OF THE DEAD (aka HORROR HOTEL, 1960), in which snoop sister Venetia Stevenson interrupts a similar dark ritual and pays for the intrusion with her life; screaming all her way to sweet oblivion, Stevenson won a spot in 31 Screams '08. This one isn't quite on par with that one but it's still good, it still puts its subject in the unenviable position of being snatched out of the life she knows and trusts and thrust into one in which the very precepts of existence are anybody's guess.

Bad enough that she's out-numbered and out-muscled but weighing heavily on Tracy Lanier's shoulders is that she sees among the participants...

... her brother-in-law's girlfriend Amy (Diane Clare, 'twixt THE HAUNTING and PLAGUE OF THE ZOMBIES). Mind you, Tracy knows full well that Amy is a Whitlock, in fact the niece of Chaney's wizened paterfamilias, but she's just been so great these last few weeks, so deucedly normal and such a help around the house, that it really just hurts that she's playing for the other team. Rubbing salt into the wound is that Amy seems no less demure and sweet cloaked in black sackcloth and holding the twitching form of a baby-like shape in a bag than she did wearing Jean Muir.

This sense of betrayal and the horror of abject uncertainty cuts the terror with an element of heartbreak, which makes the attendant scream superior in my mind to one of pure terror.

Jill's struggle against her captors weakens as she has lost an appreciable degree of will. As played by the immensely likeable Jill Dixon, Tracy comes off as centered, dependable and true. She takes people at their word and when that trust is betrayed she takes it badly. In a sense, she dies a little with each lie.

But in another sense she is far from dead and it's her life, her purity and goodness that the Whitlock family covets at this moment. As she screams the good scream, Jill is looking at an altar with nobody on it. Perhaps in some distant and calm recess of her pulsing brain, she is wondering for whom that space is being reserved. Soon, very soon, she will know definitively.

31 Screams: Robin Groves

2011-10-11T00:37:00.000-07:00

A busy actress in the New York theatre scene of the 70s and 80s, Robin Groves had more than the minimum talent requirement to star in a movie. In Armand Weston's THE NESTING (1981), she plays an anxiety-plagued novelist who decamps to a rural setting, a foreboding octagonal house, in order to escape the high pressure environment of Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Though she was no slouch as a thesp, Groves seems ill at ease throughout the film, even beyond the scope of her troubled character. Perhaps it was the indignity of starring in a horror film, or possibly former porn director Armand Weston's direction left something to be desired. Either way, Groves only seems to come alive in extremis, as her character is torqued this-a-way and that-a-way by the supernatural goings on within her benighted rental.

Unnerved by sights and sounds she cannot explain, Groves' edgy Lauren Cochran bullies her analyst into making the trip upstate. The psychologist's arrival coincides with Lauren being trapped at the top of the house, on a window ledge outside the crowning cupola. In attempting to guide the hysterical woman back inside, the analyst falls and is impaled on a decorative spike.

The crazy thing about this scene is that this death is entirely accidental, unlike the spirit-driven demises of a pair of locals connected with the central mystery. Groves' reaction is big, as it should be. And she looks great, doesn't she? She has a great face for horror, thick-featured and full-lipped. Her stony countenance only really seems to have a spark of life behind it when she's screaming hysterically, as if in some way Lauren Cochran needed this great insult to her psyche.

THE NESTING isn't anywhere near a good movie, let alone a great one, and yet I'm fond of this scene, or more specifically Robin Groves' personification of abject horror. You can catch some actors standing outside of themselves, watching themselves scream, and admiring their reflection. Not so here. Robin Groves (who went on to play Corey Haim's mother in SILVER BULLET) is screaming from the inside out. That's classical training for you.

31 Screams: Hélène Rémy

2011-10-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

And now for little espresso blast of Gothic horror.

In Renato Polselli's L'AMANTO DEL VAMPIRO (THE VAMPIRE AND THE BALLERINA, 1960), Hélène Rémy plays Luisa, one of a troupe of dancers that has decamped in a rustic mountain setting to rehearse. The attack on a farm girl prompts her boyfriend, Giorgio, to order up a vampire-themed dance number, which dredges up country superstitions. As the farm girl is being buried, three members of the troupe wander off and find themselves lost in the woods. Taking refuge from the elements in a seemingly uninhabited castle, they swiftly learn the place is not at all untenanted.

Padding off by herself and distracted by a rack of what appears to be period costumes, Luisa has an encounter with the revenant referenced in the film's American release title. The exchange is textbook... the creepy setting, the angle on her back telegraphing her vulnerability, and then the classic clutching hand.

Luisa's reaction is similarly on the nose. She screams. It might all seem antique and routine, like a moment from one of those historical pageants that gets staged every year by the locals, were it not for the perverse subtext that informs every frame of L'AMANTE DEL VAMPIRO. Shot and set in the la dolce vita lap of postwar Italy, the film is about the relative affluence and liberty of the first generation to come of age after WWII. Obligated neither by economics nor by family pressure, the film is peopled by young metropolitan adults who may come or go, love and marry (or not) as they please. The relationships in the film, Luisa to Giorgia and her best friend Francesca to her boyfriend Luca, have a glib, gratuitous quality to them. Superficial. Beauty-based. The lovers intertwine easily, even gracefully, but there's no urgency there, no imperative, no heat.

When Luisa screams, it's too early in the film to pan for extracurricular meaning. She's frightened and she screams - it makes sense. Only afterwards, as Luisa falls under the spell of the vampire (Walter Brandi, in and out of old age makeup, a la Barnabas Collins in HOUSE OF DARK SHADOWS) and becomes a full tilt sensual animal do we see how corseted she has been with Giorgio (presented as a dully handsome and borderline comic character). Awaiting the first nightly visit of her new lover, Luisa peels off her leotard as if shedding dead skin and practically masturbates on camera, so hardwired as she is to his approach. Later, Luisa's friendship to Francesca will even take on erotic overtones (sublimated in a dance rehearsal, where the pair seem to be hearing a tune no one else can) as Luisa rejects the customary, the traditional, the orthodox.

Ernesto Gastaldi's script is all about passion, about the lack of it, about the want of it, and about excess of it. Luisa's journey-to-self will take her all the way to the vanishing point, will quite literally bleed her dry, allowing the surviving protagonists to see the tale through to its logical (yet oddly uncathartic) conclusion. Yet one might argue that Luisa's character arc is the only one in the film that is satisfied, or perhaps sated would be the more apt term. A passionate modern woman who has settled for a fashionable au courant relationship that leaves her skimming the surface of existence, Luisa yearns for more. When she screams in the grasp of ancient evil, she is expressing a release deep within her belly, more shocked than scared that someone could touch her so deeply. The vampire completes her; he had her at Hell.

31 Screams: Richard Dysart

2011-10-09T00:00:00.000-07:00

What does it do to us when the screamer's reaction to the horror is nearly as fearsome as the horror itself? It messes us up, that's what. And so is the case with Richard Dysart, who plays Antarctic sawbones Doc Copper in John Carpenter's THE THING (1982).

While attempting to jumpstart the failing heart of a research station staffer, Doc Copper applies the paddles of a defibrillator. The stricken man's abdominal cavity opens inexplicably, breaking like a pie crust, the edges of the gaping wound sprouting fangs to complete the picture of the pluperfect personal hellmouth...

... and severing Doc Copper's hands just below the elbow. The scene is as staggeringly awful as it is wholly unexpected. And nobody feels the pain more than Doc Copper.

Richard Dysart's screaming face got a lot of press at the time of THE THING's original theatrical release and it creeps in as well in latter day genre overviews. No small wonder, it's quite a face and Carpenter stays with it all the way down.

This double-tap, which redlines two names from an already limited cast of characters, signals a key change in THE THING, ramping up the adrenaline and raising the stakes through the roof. Moving forward, all bets are off and the transition from minor to major is personified in the screaming face of Doc Copper.

This extreme upward angle of Doc Copper falling backward reminds me of Arbogast's reverse descent of the staircase in PSYCHO (1960) while also revealing Richard Dysart's upper dentures. When you notice an actor's dental work, they must really be screaming up a storm.

31 Screams: Irish McCalla

2011-10-08T00:01:00.000-07:00

I'm not one to put words into Criswell's mouth but it does seem to me a universal truth that while no one wishes to see a man dance, everyone likes to see a pretty girl scream.

There's not a lot to this scene, which occurs early into SHE DEMONS (1958), the bust-out directorial debut of Richard E. Cunha. McCalla's rich bitch Jerrie Turner, soldier of fortune Fred Macklin (Tod Griffin) and house boy Sammy (Victor Sen Yung) wash up after a typhoon on an uncharted atoll off the coast of who-gives-a-shit and uncover strange Nazi goings on.

This scene isn't about strange Nazi goings on, though. It's about a snake. As the self-centered Jerrie tiptoes through the tickle grass, she stops to smell a flower. Above her head, a python uncoils from the boughs...

She screams, of course. Prettily.

Superficially, Jerrie Turner is a bit of a comedown for the former star of the syndicated SHEENA: QUEEN OF THE JUNGLE, who needed no help from mere men to survive in-country. But the role does give McCalla a new color to play and she does a pretty good job...

... shrinking and shrieking. And I love her man hands.

Her toes poised at the edge of the dive board at the apex of her character arc, Jerrie will turn a new leaf once saved by Fred Macklin and Sammy. She'll embrace altruism and put herself on the line for her fellows, even to the point of donning a black cocktail dress to distract the island's mad doctor lease holder, who has a sort of LES YEUX SANS VISAGE situation going on and looks disturbingly like Linda Hunt in THE YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY (1983). In the end, all's well that ends well, albeit with not nearly enough screaming or screen time with the Diane Nellis Dancers as the She Demons.

31 Screams: Charles Napier

2011-10-07T06:48:00.000-07:00

It struck me last year, just after wrapping 31 Screams '10, that Charles Napier in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991) would be a natural. I made a mental note to grab the frames in the interim and never did. Shame on me that I had forgotten the idea at the time I learned of Napier's death earlier this week. And so here goes my first 31 Screams profile presented in memorium.

Is there anyone who isn't familiar with THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS and the awful scene in which two Memphis cops make the fatal mistake of underestimating career cannibal Dr. Hannibal Lector? (It's a rhetorical question - please, no letters.) Having secreted a lockpick in his mouth,Lector slips his handcuffs and uses them to shackle Napier's character to the bars of his makeshift cell. Napier is such a tough old bastard that his immediate reaction is actually anger.

Anger turns to fear as Napier sees his partner bitten by the rapacious aesthete, pepper-sprayed, and then have his brains turned into mousse against the unyielding steel bars. Once senses, for Lector, his rough treatment of this nondescript and unprepossessing turnkey is both an appetizer for his main course and a bit of a floor show, too, with Napier a literally captive audience. The perversity of this scene (star Anthony Hopkins was lauded for his dialogue exchanges with Jodie Foster but its his silent moments that impress me most), and the way Lector exhibits both fury and exquisite patience, is what gives the setpiece, you should pardon the pun, bite.

When you see Lt. Bill Boyle -- the name alone sounds like a pair of swinging brass balls -- give in to panic, it hurts your heart. You feel for the guy, not just because he's as good as dead, which he is, but because it's so wrong for him. He was made to go down swinging, not chained to the wall like a motel TV.

There is a rather sad moment where he fumbles for his own key to the handcuffs but fate has run out the clock...

... and he knows it.

Napier has one of the most impressive screams in horror movie history. You can almost hear the testosterone pooling in the back of his throat as he sounds out.

This guy is an alpha dog. His piss could take the paint off a brick wall. And he wants Lector to know that as he dies. It may seem a minor point in the grand scheme of things but in the last seconds of his life that's the only ace Lt. Bill Boyle has to play.

Napier was possessed with a physique (though he was only of average height his chest seemed to have its own zip code) and a mandibular prognathism that gave him an Olympian bearing, whether he played it upmarket (RAMBO) or downhome (THE BLUES BROTHERS). You feared him a little and believed him a lot. In THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, he left us with a gift, a flash of insight into the psyche of an individual who shows, in extremis, more courage and pugnacity than we likely ever would. It's too bad that so few horror movies ever attempt this level of complexity because it is, in the final analysis, only human after all.

Charles Napier

April 12, 1936

October 6, 2011

31 Screams: Chowder

2011-10-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

I want to say at the outset that I heart Chowder, the fat best friend of MONSTER HOUSE (2006).

A delightful Halloween movie that gives you a real feel for the sensations of the season, the Columbia Pictures/Amblin Entertainment release is also a paean (pardon my dipthong) - one might even say an aenigmatic paean of faerie tale proportions - to the mysteries of childhood. Like the characters in the film, I too had a purportedly haunted house in my neighborhood, although mine was abandoned. Here, the eponymous domicility is very much occupied, by the apoplectic Mr. Nebbercracker, whose first words as a wee bairn must surely have been "Get off my lawn!"

When a run-in between Nebbercracker and pre-teen protagonists DJ and Chowder sends the senior citizen to the hospital (and, potentially, the bone orchard), the friends use the opportunity for Halloween Eve mischief. With the old bastard out of the picture, Chowder feels emboldened and clambers up on the front porch to ass around as DJ grows increasingly uneasy.

DJ's fears are, of course, not unfounded. As the door to the Monster House swings open, seemingly of its own piney accord, Chowder gets his -- and our -- first glimpse of the interior.

Planks in the parquetry snapping and popping up to form a veritable row of jagged teeth, the house rolls out its musty floor runner of a tongue, eager to crush the succulent Chowder between its taste buds. Chowder screams and makes a run for it... but one look at Chowder and you know he's not built for speed.

Any MonsterKid worth his salt, fat or thin, will see himself in Chowder. A trick-or-treat loving chubber with a penchant for the macabre and the steely reserve of a 4 year old girl, he's no match for the Monster House, in rapacity or relentlessness.Chowder's scream of fear will resonate with anyone who ever braved as a curious child an empty house, a length of sewer drain, a patch of eldritch woodland, a cave, a dark lake, a cobweb-laced attic, a cellar with a dirt floor.

Frozen in fear, DJ can only watch in horror across the seemingly vast expanse of the Nebbercrackers' front lawn as Chowder sprints ahead of the carpet the way the fat kid in CHRISTINE (1983) sprinted ahead of Christine. And we all know how that ended.

Luckily for Chowder, Rug Tongue runs out of slack before he runs out of speed. Chowder has survived this encounter with the unknown...

... but tomorrow is Halloween. To quote Sandor in DRACULA'S DAUGHTER (1935): "This night is nearly ended. Who knows what another will bring?"

31 Screams: Gladys Cooper

2011-10-05T06:54:00.000-07:00

I'm going to call major spoiler here for the 1941 THE BLACK CAT. Normally I don't bother with such warnings as I've always meant Arbogast on Film to be a place where film can be discussed on a plane above that of a rental incentive... but this being the Halloween season I'm feeling full of love and especially sensitive to those on the hunt for fresh movie meat. You may want to give this minor but agreeable horror comedy a spin before coming back here to savor the screaming. Or you may not.

Jumping right to the end of the thing, Gladys Cooper (Bette Davis' intractable mother in NOW, VOYAGER the following year) plays the murderess, the seemingly frail wife of ne'r-do-well Basil Rathbone, one of several heirs to the sizable legacy of reclusive cat lover Cecilia Loftus (who really did die after making this movie). Several corpses into a dark and stormy night, Cooper kidnaps the next-in-line (HOUSE OF FRANKENSTEIN's Anne Gwynne) to the Winslow family fortune and tries to burn her up in the family cat incinerator.

The eponymous pussy, who has seen all and knows all, knocks over a lighted candle just as Cooper is drawing a .38 caliber bead on the back of would-be hero Broderick Crawford. Her diaphanous (read: flammable) nightgown catches flame and the fire quickly spreads...

... to her horror.

Screaming, her murderously Machiavellian mind now focused on the far more mundane task of registering terror, she fires the shot meant for Crawford into the ceiling.

This is the moment I love. Look at her face. As I suggested with Barbara Steele in PIT AND THE PENDULUM, Cooper's character is at this precise moment no longer the person she was just a second ago. Her fear of a horrible, painful death, of being consumed by flames and reduced to nothing, has humanized her, infantalized her, returned her to her self.

Forgetting her schemes, her malice sloughing off like so much charred tulle, she makes a run for it. Where is she going? What will she do when she gets there? It doesn't matter.

All that matters is the promise, however impossible, of escape.

By now, she's running on pure instinct and vestigial adrenaline.

Disparaged by the rank and file of Universal fans, THE BLACK CAT is fun escapist fare and surprisingly cruel. That it metes out its toughest love for the villain of the piece is as it should be... but still... how horrible a death is this?

Crueler still is that director Albert Rogell offers Cooper's plotter no respite from her terror or what will soon be unimaginable agony; he just gets out of her way and lets her burn.

Mind you, it has just rained and there is talk of a washed out bridge (well, if Basil Rathbone is to be believed), so Cooper's horror hag might make it to water. She might survive, in one form or another. Maybe that's the most terrible fate of all: disfigured by fire and her mind gone, she'd likely live out her days in a lunatic asylum, a black widow schemer reduced to imbecility, the last mystery being who she is and how she got there.

31 Screams: Mimsy Farmer

2011-10-04T06:22:00.000-07:00

Thematically, we transition very nicely from William Conrad's TWO ON A GUILLOTINE to Armando Crispino's MACCHIE SOLARI (aka AUTOPSY, 1973). Set during a cruel Roman summer, the film attends the violent journey-to-self of an Italian-American pathology student (Mimsy Farmer) sweating out her dissertation on the "difference between simulated and authentic suicides" amidst what is or seems to be a wave of heat-related self-murder.

As in TWO ON A GUILLOTINE, the heroine of AUTOPSY has a long-dead mother and serious father issues. Her playboy dad hooking up with a variety of younger women, Simona Sana is frigid and yet an easy target for lechers and close talkers. When she begins to hallucinate that fresh corpses are copulating on the dissecting tables of the municipal morgue where she interns, Simona cuts her studies to look into the suicide of her father's latest chippy (Gaby Wagner). As the clues pile up and the list of likely suspect fattens to include her own boyfriend (Ray Lovelock) and a racecar driver turned priest (Barry Primus), to whom the dead woman confessed prior to putting a gun in her mouth, Simona does the sensible thing...

... she visits the local Black Museum. Shock-a-block with postmortem photos the size of Lichtenstein canvases and mannequins posed in homicidal and suicidal tableaux, the museum is (heh heh) dead when Simona wanders into room 13. The door shuts behind her and locks. The windows offer no promise of escape. Naturally edgy to begin with, Simona begins perspiring and mouth-breathing until she notices an important clue...

... pinned to the chest of mannequin.

She reaches for the note, confident that the shotgun at her elbow surely isn't loaded. This is, after all, a museum...

I suppose we all saw that coming.

Simona's first impulse is to scream. But here's the thing about Simona. She's repressed, corked up like a genie in a bottle. She cannot accept someone's love, she is suspicious of everyone's intentions and none more acutely than her own. Too often branded "a tepid thriller" (Some Asshole, IMDb), AUTOPSY is really a knowing drama that uses the convention of the giallo to speak to a concern with modern alienation, with people adrift, cut off from their families, from their place of origin... people who must sublimate their passions and fetishes in socially acceptable ways. Jealous of her father's predilection for young American tourists, Simona rejects the advances of Lovelock's brash libertine and fantasizes about Primus' anguished cleric, who confesses that he is the brother of the dead woman and becomes for Simona the father she has never known.

Meanwhile, the priest (whose backstory involves a racetrack crash that took out a bleacher full of spectators) is shouldering the added guilt of having given his sister the advice that likely pointed her to her doom... all of which makes AUTOPSY an unexpectedly thoughtful cocktail for what is supposed to be (says who, I don't know) a stalk-and-slasher. There's a B-plot involving a will, which many critics of the film cite as its greatest detriment, but I suspect that Crispino and writer Lucio Battistrada have provided an uncommonly complicated thriller with an intentionally overfamiliar subplot so that viewers don't have to spend time decoding symbols and can focus squarely on their agonized dramatis personae.

Back to Simona (whose Christian name evokes a host of etymological cousins, from similar to simulate) at the apex of terror. She opens her mouth to scream but... we don't hear it. Most likely, she doesn't let it rip because letting loose really isn't Simona's long suit. The shotgun blast stands in for her scream as Ennio Morricone's plucking strings override almost every other sound and Simona spirals...

As with our discussion of THE TINGLER the other day, AUTOPSY turns on the fear of inappropriateness. Although Simona's father and jerk boyfriend are sexually autonomous, Simona and Father Paul Lennox are constantly self-editing, self-assessing, self-doubting and deeply shamed characters haunted by the notion that their purest desires are contaminated by impure impulses. Unable to let loose on any level, Simona's scream dies in her throat and she simply shuts down, blacking out, returning to the safety of sweet oblivion as her body crumbles dumbly to the hard marble floor, as insensate now as the ghoulish simulacra who bear silent witness.

31 Screams: Connie Stevens

2011-10-03T00:01:00.000-07:00

Actor William Conrad had one hell of a year in 1965, busting out no fewer than three feature films in the space of less than twelve months. TWO ON A GUILLOTINE, MY BLOOD RUNS COLD and BRAINSTORM are all interesting comments on American life, mid-20th century. In TWO ON A GUILLOTINE, Connie Stevens plays the daughter of stage illusionist Duke Duquesne (Cesar Romero) who accidentally (or was it?!) killed his wife (or did he?!) during a performance. A mere child when mother Melinda's pretty head was separated from her shoulders (ostensibly) during a guillotine gag, Cassie Duquesne (Stevens) has grown up effectively orphaned. When her father dies, she returns to his So-Cal schloss to collect her inheritance... with a condition of Duquesne's legacy being that she must spend seven nights in his creepy house in order to collect.

TWO ON A GUILLOTINE is generally fobbed off as innocuous and vacuous, no big deal and not all that scary. Luckily, I saw the film as a pre-critical pre-teen and its images have always stayed with me. As an adult, I can appreciate its motifs and nuances even better now. The script by mystery novelist Henry Slesar and TV writer John Kneubhul offers us a world whose very essence is artificiality. Cassie is born of illusion, of bait and switch, and she enters into adulthood as an understandably uncertain woman, unsure of her own perceptions and suspicious of the attention of others.

By this point in the film, Cassie has suffered several minor traumas and one pretty good nightmare in which she is buried alive, screaming soundlessly as graveyard earth is shoveled onto the glass face plate of her coffin. Unable or unwilling to sleep, she roams her father's empty (or...) house, her nightgown billowing around her as if she is a Gothic heroine, a magician's rabbit entering the frame (the animal carries the dual connotation of fertility and sleight of hand) and giving her a moment of comfort. But it's not a pet that Cassie needs at this point in her life, it's basic human contact, reliability and constancy. She needs her life to get real, and so she turns back toward the staircase...

... and, well...

... it's complicated.

Never really prized for her acting chops, Connie Stevens does give good scream. Whether so directed by Conrad or left to her own devices, she kicks Cassie's terrified reaction to what she sees on the stairs old school...

We've seen these moves before -- the head halo, the hair squeeze, the finger fence -- but they always work, they always ring true. And if TWO ON A GUILLOTINE is about nothing else, it's about our common hunger for the truth, at any cost.

I'd like to throw my recommendation behind a Halloween season viewing of TWO ON A GUILLOTINE. It's got some great macabre imagery, crisp black-and-white cinematography by Sam Leavitt (taking a break from his duties for Otto Preminger), a Max Steiner score, a midget bartender, a cameo by Emergo and some interesting thoughts about the madness of trying to keep it real in a world powered by illusion.

31 Screams: Barbara Steele

2011-10-02T00:01:00.000-07:00

A bit of a cheat here but bear with me. In Roger Corman's PIT AND THE PENDULUM (1961), the filmmaker and screenwriter Richard Matheson frame Edgar Allan Poe's classic tale of survivor horror with the wraparound narrative of a Spanish nobleman being driven insane by his wife. Towards the end of the film, Vincent Price's Nicholas Medina is prodded into thinking he is his Inquisitor forbear but this has an unintended consequence for the his perfidious missus (Barbara Steele). "You will die in agony," he tells Elizabeth, before shunting her off into an iron maiden and, for all effects and purposes, forgets about her.

A whole reel goes by before we think of Elizabeth again, via one of the most devastating pans in horror movie history. Trapped inside her cast iron sarcophagus, Elizabeth stares out in abject terror as the film's survivors -- a number that does not include Nicholas Medina, I probably don't have to tell you - put their backs to the torture pit. "No one will ever enter this room again," says Catherine, all the film has left for a heroine. And they scoot, closing the door behind them. Cut back to Elizabeth in the iron maiden.

So not what Elizabeth wants to hear at this juncture.Her eyes wide, her fingers bloody (suggesting some desperate clawing, evocative of the end of Corman's HOUSE OF USHER) and her mouth gagged, Elizabeth can only look on as PIT's protagonists head topside, to light and air and the rest of their lives. To emphasize Elizabeth's terrible plight, Corman and DP Floyd Crosby iris in on her eyes, blacking out the already pretty grim world around her.

You don't hear a peep out of Elizabeth but you know she's got to be screaming, screaming like Hell.

But no one hears. Can the most awful scream, the most pitiable report from the depths of one's soul in the flashpoint of absolute terror even hope to compete with same scream stifled, silenced?

Corman leaves us with that question as Elizabeth is swallowed whole by the darkness of the pit.

Interesting that Corman uses the epigram of Poe's resourceful hero for the Machiavellian Elizabeth Medina. No two ways about it, the bitch has this coming, in spades, and yet Corman argues (arguably) for a measure of sympathy here. Perhaps he and Matheson are suggesting that by this point Elizabeth is no longer Elizabeth, as we have come to know her over the past 79 minutes... that her imprisonment in the iron maiden and her abandonment by her fellows to the horror of Nothing have humbled her, have stripped her of her layers of avariciousness and returned her to her essential self, to a childlike state of primal fear that can be answered only by the preverbal barbaric birth yawp. But even that inalienable right is denied Elizabeth, whose scream is dammed by a flimsy strip of cloth. If you can make no sound, are you really screaming?

31 Screams: Vincent Price

2011-10-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

Who better than Mr. Vincent Price to lead us into 31 Screams 2011? THE TINGLER (1959) is a fascinating case study, scream-wise, as it is I think the first horror film to deconstruct the physical act of screaming by way of positing that if we do not avail ourselves of this reaction something truly horrible will happen.

The human body has long been horror's hopyard, with such classic tales as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: or the Modern Prometheus and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde turning man's eye upon himself as a wellspring of dread. Robb White's proto-Cronenbergian script for THE TINGLER suggests that our bodies play host to a parasitical entity that grows apace with our fear and that, should we fail to express our feelings at the apogee of our terror, said being will be leased upon the world. The genius of this William Castle joint is that it comodifies grandmotherly admonishments about tapeworms in bellies, bees in bonnets, ants in pants and frogs in throats into a genuinely sophisticated reflection on the appropriateness of extreme human emotions.

Price plays good guy pathologist Warren Chapin, who learns that "spinetingling" isn't just a fanciful expression for horripilations. Deducing that the "tingler" rises on the backbone as a scream rises in the throat, he doses himself with LSD to induce a state of accelerated fright... hoping to be able to control his own scream so that he can know, ipso facto, whether his theory is correct.

Oppressed by the chemically-induced sensation of claustrophobia, Chapin is both inside his fear bubble, reacting with galloping horror to such genuine external stimuli as an anatomical skeleton, and watching himself from without, trying desperately to control the scream that is even now surging through his pipes like magma rising in the gut of an active volcano.

On the verge of letting it all go, he bites down on his own hand, hoping to leaven and localize his terror with pain... to no avail.

He screams. It's a good one, too... ugly, guttural and mannish, like Barbara Stanwyck.

As if the sound of his own screaming intensifies his need to scream, Chapin lets it all out. How good it must feel to him, even though he knows his experiment is toast. Overloaded, he faints... and his tingler shrivels, useless now.

This sexual subtext makes THE TINGLER more than just a gimmicky hoot 'n' holler. Produced in the interval between the buttoned-up Eisenhower era and the branding of Nixon's "silent majority," the film argues passionately for hysteria, for catharsis and release, putting forward the notion that not only do we all go a little mad sometimes but that we had damn well better.

Don't big empty houses scare you?

2011-09-30T10:37:00.000-07:00

John Willard's four-act grab-the-will melodrama The Cat and the Canary enjoyed a brief Broadway run in 1922 at the National Theater. Universal bought the rights to the play and studio head Carl Laemmle, Sr., turned the production over to his fellow German expat Paul Leni. Goosing the play's comic possibilities while heightening its Gothic potential via the vertiginous set design of Charles D. Hall and the invigoratingly restless camera of Gilbert Warrenton, Leni's THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1927) was a happy marriage of German expressionism and jazz era verve. Reviewing the film in The New York Times, the not-easy-to-please Mordaunt Hall noted that Leni's film marked "the first time that a mystery melodrama had been lifted into the realms of art."

Universal remade THE CAT AND THE CANARY after the introduction of sound as THE CAT CREEPS (1930), directed by PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (1925)'s Rupert Julian. The studio simultaneously funded a Spanish language version, shot on the same sets at night, and directed by George Melford (who would later direct the Spanish language DRACULA). Willard's melodrama was revived on Broadway in 1937, running a paltry 9 performances at the Majestic Theater before being put to bed. Paramount brought the property out of camphor in 1939, as a vehicle for radio funnyman Bob Hope.

Hope's cowardy custard hero Wally Campbell is an easier sell to contemporary eyes than Creighton Hale in the original and its Hope's hyperkinetic shtick that energizes Elliot Nugent's remake. Hope was a linchpin comic who bridged the gap between happy idiots like Laurel & Hardy and superficially smarter modern comedians like Woody Allen and Billy Murray, whose ticklish stock-in-trade is laced with self-deprecating humor.

Better known for his westerns but never afforded especially high regard, Elliot Nugent feels less of a force behind THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1939) than his actors -- whose number include Gale Sondergaard (as the creepy housekeeper), George Zucco (as a slightly suspect lawyer), John Beal (as a belligerent heir to a family fortune that clearly isn't going to him) and Nydia Westman (as a spinster cousin who tries to control her screams the way you might stifle a sneeze -- and cameraman Charles Lang (who received an uncredited assist from fill-in DP Ted Tetzlaff).
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Nugent's THE CAT AND THE CANARY lacks the expressionist embroideries of the Leni version but remains good entertainment, with Hope and leading lady Paulette Goddard making for an appealing pair of protagonists while Sondergaard, Zucco and the rest enliven the frame with their eccentricities. You shouldn't have much difficulty guessing the identity of an escaped lunatic known as The Cat for his feral fingernails or sussing out that there isn't really an escaped lunatic at all but the end result is so goddamned charming that you won't feel cheated. Screenwriters Walter DeLeon and Lynn Starling swap out the play's New York State setting for the Louisiana bayou, which doesn't have that much of an impact on the original story but leaves the door open for some ace set design and matte work.

THE CAT AND THE CANARY was an estimable success for Paramount at a time when Universal, who had sparked the horror boom in America with the two-fer of DRACULA and FRANKENSTEIN in 1931 was floundering a bit, their evocative Gothicry diluted by endless sequels and their pre-Code transgressions supplanted by monster pigpiles. Hope and Goddard were reunited the following year in the even-better THE GHOST BREAKERS (1940). Elliot Nugent was replaced by George Marshall in the director's chair but key members of THE CAT AND THE CANARY crew were retained, principally cinematographer Charles Lang, scenarist Walter DeLeon and art directors Hans Dreier and Robert Usher. Set on a creepy island in Cuba and rich in revenants of several stripes (including zombie Noble Johnson), THE GHOST BREAKERS benefited most from the special visual effects of Farciot Edouart, which give it a slight edge of THE CAT AND THE CANARY.

With October nigh and Halloween a scant 31 days away, you could do worse than to give the long unavailable THE CAT AND THE CANARY a spin. Do it tonight... before the clock strikes twelve.

2 will get you 31!

2011-09-29T08:08:00.000-07:00

In case anyone's been wondering, that old Arbogast on Film Halloween chestnut 31 Screams will return this year. I've saved up a few profiles over the past twelvemonth but in keeping with the holiday tradition I'm pretty much making it up as I go along. Join us for the reams of bad dreams and screams, screams, screams. You have two days to prepare.

Scary stiffs

2011-09-28T13:45:00.000-07:00

Paul Leni's WAXWORKS (DAS WACHSFIGURENKABINETT, 1924) is rarely upheld as a paragon of German Expression yet expressionist it is, reflecting as it does its pedigree as a byproduct of Germanic modernism between the First and Second World Wars, of Freud, of Egon Schiele and the school of expressionist painters and their identification of the limits of conventional perception in favor of a more psychic appreciation of life as we know it.

An early anthology film centered around a sideshow wax museum (a tip of the hat to Robert Wiene's THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI), a la Amicus' TORTURE GARDEN (1967), WAXWORKS finds an impoverished poet (William Dieterle, who would later emigrate to Hollywood and direct THE DEVIL AND DANIEL WEBSTER) lucking into a job writing histories for a triptych of eerie simulacra of Jack the Ripper, Ivan the Terrible and the Mohammedan caliph Harun al-Rashid whose accomplishments became the stuff of fable in The Thousand and One Nights (aka The Arabian Nights). As the poet sets quill to paper, he imagines himself as a character in each of the three stories. In the first, he is a lowly baker who steals into the palace of Harun al-Rashid (Emil Jannings) to steal a valuable wishing ring to better keep his pretty young wife. As fate would have it, the calif has, on the advice of his vizier, left his plush bedchamber to try his luck with the baker's better half.

In the rocking chair is a tale of old Russia and of the crookbacked despot Ivan the Terrible (Conrad Veidt). The poet sees himself here as a prisoner of the czar, who comes off as a bit of a Fu Manchu manque, cooking up punishments and tortures galore for those who think they can thwart his modus vivendi. While the first vignette was played for broad comedy (with a touch of the macabre), the second is considerably darker, aided immeasurably by the steely-eyed central performance of Veidt (post-CALIGARI, pre-MAN WHO LAUGHS). A painter and designer in his own right, Leni envisions Ivan's royal digs as a psychological landscape of low ceilings and nautilustic turns, and of impenetrable shadows broken systemically by shafts of sickly yellow light. Leni would carry his fascination with psychological architecture to Hollywood, where he made THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1927) and influenced the nascent horror genre he would never live to see.

In WAXWORKS' concluding episode, the poet hasn't time to imagine himself in Whitechapel, London, in 1888 because Jack the Ripper (Werner Krauss, minus his Caligari spectacles and zebra hair) breaks the fourth wall and steps down off of his pedestal to come directly after him. More dream-like than the previous vignettes, this episode substitutes optical trickery for set design, evoking a sense of delirium and galloping unreality as the poet and the daughter of the sideshow owner try to outrun Springheel Jack. In the end, it is revealed that our plucky young protagonist has fallen asleep on the job and that these nightmares were literally that.

I would never dream of trying to sell WAXWORKS to you as a horror film because the result could only be disappointment. Nevertheless, the film should be seen for its relative historic importance as an extension of what had come before it and a herald of an entire genre yet to be born. The film is also surprisingly canny about our relationship to history, via the intercession of art and storytelling, which distort and contradict the lessons of the past. No, WAXWORKS won't give you a sleepless night but I find these days that, the odd pleasant surprise notwithstanding, contemporary horror product achieves nothing so much as driving me back into the past, to a more thoughtful meditation on the origins of fear, to the interplay of light and show, and an embracing of first genre principles.

What's left of her

2011-09-23T10:04:00.000-07:00

To get the most mileage out of Herb Freed's HAUNTS (1975), it's best to start with star May Britt. (For the record, her Christian name is pronounced "my".) The icy-eyed Stockholm beauty was a discovery of Carlo Ponti. She made a handful of films on the Continent following her film debut in 1953, including THERE GOES BARDER (1955) with Eddie Constantine, WAR AND PEACE (1956) with Audrey Hepburn and THE YOUNG LIONS (1958) with Marlon Brando before being chosen to stand in for Marlene Dietrich in Edward Dmytryk's remake of THE BLUE ANGEL (1959), costarring Curd Jurgens. The year she played Stuart Whitman's doomed showgirl bride in MURDER, INC. (1960), she married Sammy Davis, Jr., resulting in a PR shit storm, death threats, and all sorts of sundry houha.

Britt left show business voluntarily, mostly to raise the children she bore for and adopted with Davis. The couple divorced in 1968. Though she appeared as a guest on a scattering of weekly series, Britt was by this point a relative nonentity in Hollywood. This cruel accounting informs her performance as Ingrid Swenson, a middle-aged woman running a farm on her own and slowly being eaten alive by loneliness and her somewhat complicated sexual needs in HAUNTS (1975). Scripted by director Freed and wife Anne Marisse (who also had a hand in the writing of his films BEYOND EVIL and GRADUATION DAY), HAUNTS is an odd amalgam of Roman Polanski's REPULSION (1965) and the as-yet unborn slasher cinema.

A rapist and scissor murderer is terrorizing a small coastal community. Who could the killer be? Creepy supermarket bag boy Frankie (William Grey Espy)? Recent arrival Bill Spry (Robert Hippard)? Or perhaps Carl (Cameron Mitchell), Ingrid's reclusive uncle? At first we cannot even be entirely certain that there is a murderer (or, for that matter, an Uncle Carl), so unhinged is Ingrid by the memories of her mother's death and by her utter isolation. When Ingrid reports that she has been attacked and raped by the resident sex killer, we're inclined to share the skepticism of the local sheriff (Aldo Ray, who acquits himself rather well at a dodgy point in his career), whose alarm at what turns out to be an actual case of serial murder is compounded by the sadness of watching a friend and neighbor slowly unravel.

I don't want to make the mistake of overselling HAUNTS but I'd be lying if I denied this as a rescue mission. I want more people to seek it out and give it a shot, though I'll warn you that I've never seen a print of this that didn't look like it had gone through the wash. I first caught HAUNTS on late night TV as a kid, before I could fully appreciate its themes, but it certainly did haunt me... and no image more potently than than that of a metal gate slamming shut, an apt metaphor for alienation. The fogbound Mendocino locations provide the production with a wind-swept sense of space and rolling dread, adding immeasurably to the leitmotif of isolation, while Pino Donaggio's evocative score is on par with his work for Nicolas Roeg's DON'T LOOK NOW (1973) and Brian DePalma's CARRIE (1976).

HAUNTS (which sat in camphor for a couple of years before finding a distributor in the Intercontinental Releasing Corporation) is available for streaming on YouTube and I guess that's as good a place as any to start if anything I've said has piqued your interest. Far better than its reputation (which is to say none), HAUNTS is a compelling women's horror film, in line (if not necessarily in league) with CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962) and even HALLOWEEN (1978), warning all the lonely people to be careful what they wish for.

Warning Shadows

2011-09-22T11:05:00.000-07:00

This recently released publicity photo of the cast of Tim Burton's impending (nay, looming) DARK SHADOWS reboot (watermarked by Entertainment Weekly so that, you know, nobody will be tempted to try to pass it off as their family portrait) is pretty funny and did tickle the little Dan Curtis geek in me (well, the dust of the bones of same I keep in a phial on my desk). On second pass, however, it seems like one of those painstakingly realized Vanity Fair classic movie scene recreations (Jodie Foster in THE BIRDS! C. Thomas Howell in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE!) that we all think are kind of cool but nobody in their right mind would want to see brought to life.

Country habits

2011-09-20T00:10:00.000-07:00

I must confess I'm deriving much too much joy from watching Eva Birthistle go through abject fucking Hell.

The last time I saw the Irish actress (which happens also to be the first time I ever clapped eyes on her), she was playing the sort of downmarket of two adult sisters in THE CHILDREN (2008) whose combined offspring turn against their parents during the Yuletide hols. A nasty compound fracture was the least of Birdthistle's problems in that, though her character did manage to hang in for an uncertain fadeout. A bit rough-hewn, perhaps, for the American fetish for flawlessness (even at the price of utter vacuity), Birthistle has the perfect face for horror. She gives good suffer, and suffer she must in WAKE WOOD (2011), as the mother of a young child who has died as the result of a vicious dog mauling and who relocates with her husband (Aiden Gillen) to the hinterlands... specifically to a rain-hagged little hamlet known as Wakewood. Cue tympani.

Only there's nothing evil about the residents of Wakewood, not in the least. They're decent folk, provincial to be sure, maybe not so quick to warm up to outsiders, but they mean well. And they've got a native talent... the ability to raise the recent dead from their graves. Seeing the new arrivals agonize over their loss -- and having been caught by the couple, quite literally red-handed doing same -- the local squire (Timothy Spall, always a pleasure) offers to bring back their daughter, albeit for three days only. Time enough to say a proper goodbye. The husband remains skeptical but the wife is desperate, desperate because she has seen more than her mate and because she needs this to be true. Acquiescing through gritted teeth, they listen to what is required of them before they can see their little one again... and on a miserably rainy night in Ireland, our protagonists steal out to rob a grave.

By virtue of its logline, this British-Swedish coproduction and latter day Hammer offering draws comparisons to DON'T LOOK NOW (1973), to Stephen King's 1987 novel Pet Sematary and its 1991 film adaptation, as well as to W. W. Jacobs' classic suspense story The Monkey's Paw and, I suppose, all the movies that nasty piece of work inspired. But it's also like none of those stories, taking a more matter of fact approach to its material, and broaching the raison d'etre of David Keating and Brendan McCarthy's script early on, with characteristically rural brusqueness. The protagonists have a problem, the supporting players have a solution - take it or leave it. WAKE WOOD isn't about cult behavior or superstition, it doesn't demonize the provinces or suggest that there are yet pockets of atavism alive in the world that need burning out. The film argues for the importance of balance in nature and of abiding by a few simple rules. And woebetide those who don't.

A far worthier use of Hammer's time than was Antti Jokinen's miserable THE RESIDENT (2011), WAKE WOOD is directed by Keating with an apt sense of place and an acute feeling for sorrow -- not just that felt by the protagonists but also the layers of sadness suffered stoically by the locals. Keating served as AD to Michael Radford on NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR (1984) and shares Radford's appreciation of textures (specifically the heft and jangle of archaic tools) and ambient sound. Cinematographer Chris Maris (who shot the handsome but hollow FROSTBITTEN) teases what is both homely and haunting about the Irish locations, the rime-laced heath, the sodden meadow and the neverending rain, creating a mood of dread that is complimented nicely by Michael Convertino's understated score. (The Paris-educated American composer has come a long way since FRANKENWEENIE.) And yet, WAKE WOOD falls short of being classic, though perhaps that should come as no great surprise.

If WAKE WOOD had detailed no more than an extra three days permitted the gutted parents of a young girl taken cruelly from this world then it would have still been a heartbreaker. What could be, to paraphrase Bram Stoker, a more perfect agony of grief than to hold that child again, to smell her hair, to feel the weight of her again in your arms, only to have to give her back in three days' time? That would be horror enough to any parent but, pitched as it is as a spine-tinger, WAKE WOOD has to conform to genre, even given its most welcome derivations. Disappointingly, the film condescends to body counting in its last act, with the risen Alice (Ella Connolly) being at the back of a string of deaths among the community.
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There's something brilliant buried in the schematics of WAKE WOOD but my sense is that the filmmakers tipped the pitch. Too much is made of the suggestion that Birthistle and Gillen are hiding a secret from their rustic hosts, and as such compromising the return of their daughter, but speculation mounts so wildly in one's head through the duration that when the cat's out of the bag, so to speak, it's all a bit anticlimactic and doesn't really explain why the last reel has to descend into bloodbathery. Perhaps I'm reading a bit too much into it, but it even seems to me that Keating appears less interested in this plot development, handling the killings atmospherically but perfunctorily, his heart more invested in the psychology of the thing than its inevitability.

Still, WAKE WOOD is for the most part good company as autumn plays its hand and yet another summer slips away from us, the encroaching darkness a harbinger of inescapable winter and a reminder that life goes on, if not for everyone.

Menace II Decency

2011-09-15T11:14:00.000-07:00

I'm throwing my weight behind the call for a boycott of Universal's Blu-ray disc of HALLOWEEN II (1981), from which the studio has expunged the name of executive producer Moustapha Akkad. Akkad put up the scratch for John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN (1978) and his imprimatur graced every subsequent sequel; when Rob Zombie remade/rebooted HALLOWEEN (2007), he showed respect and gave Akkad the proper thanks. Sadly, that thanks was posthumous, as both Akkad and his daughter Rima were murdered by terrorists in Jordan in 2005.There's been no word from Universal as to why Akkad's name was omitted - nay, replaced - in the HALLOWEEN II title sequence, although a possible explanation lies in Akkad's relationship to deposed Libyan dictator Moammer Gaddafi, who may have financed, whole or in part, Akkad's historical drama LION OF THE DESERT (1980). This seems a long shot and I suspect the reason might be entirely more mundane but fans of the film need to step up and demand answers and a repressing of the disc with proper attribution. There may well have been no HALLOWEEN, as we know and love it, without Moustaha Akkad. Let's bring him home.

Where we came in

2011-09-13T09:52:00.000-07:00

The hero and heroine of Duncan Jones' SOURCE CODE (2011) both die at roughly the film's midpoint, though this shouldn't count as much of a spoiler given that it's one of those karmic loop movies, like GROUNDHOG DAY (1993) and RUN LOLA RUN (1998), where the game changes every five minutes. Before you can say Holy Marion Crane, Batman, scenarist Ben Ripley has Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan back up on their feet, chasing down the domestic terrorist who has planted a bomb aboard a Chicago commuter train and falling in love en route. Seconds before their untimely but ephemeral shared demise, the characters had surprised said rotter in a train station car park and been shot for their trouble. Falling on either side of the van, the characters can do little but look at one another as the villain speeds away. There are no heroics here, no gritting teeth through the pain to carry the day... only the reality of diminished mortality. He tells her to hang on. Her eyes stare blankly ahead, lifeless. And then she blinks, alive. There is a flash of hope and then she is gone. He sees this and then he expires. It's one of the most romantic scenes I've ever seen in a genre film. Too bad the movie plods on to a happy ending that comes nowhere close to this level of tragic bliss.

Die cast monster die!

2011-08-16T10:59:00.000-07:00

Going through some seriously old issues of Fangoria recently, I ran across this circa 1981 ad for the Universal classic monsters in durable pewter. I was nearly going to revert to "Why didn't I get these?" mode and then I noticed the SRP of $25 per/$79 for the set. Well, 'nuff said. That price would be a bit dear now, let alone nearly thirty years ago when a movie ticket in Times Square cost, what, $3, and this particular issue of Fango a mere $2.25. (You've got to love that figure, though - what magazine costs two-and-a-quarter?) Okay, so if the actual product is a bit of a ripoff (I feel fairly confident that you could pick up the Franklin Mint's Civil War Chess Set for less - "Sherman's inimitable bowtie!") the ad copy here is pretty sweet.

Happy Birthday, Barbara Shelley

2011-08-15T10:01:00.000-07:00

Wishing the happiest of birthdays to Barbara Shelley, pictured here in her signature role from Hammer's QUATERMASS AND THE PIT (1968). I know what you're thinking, that her signature role is from Hammer's DRACULA: PRINCE OF DARKNESS (1965), but I respectfully disagree. While her Victorian stick-in-the-mud-turned-undead-wanton in D:POD is the flashier, sexier role, I find QATP crystallizes the sum and substance of the actress' film roles to that point. Frightened in VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960) and THE SHADOW OF THE CAT (1961), conflicted in CAT GIRL (1957) and THE GORGON (1964), cunning and resourceful in THE SECRET OF BLOOD ISLAND (1964) and BLIND CORNER (1965), Shelley brought a depth and texture to the Hammer stable of lovelies that otherwise just would not have been present without her. Her best roles required the actress to register process, at times boldly, at times subtly. Yes, the ill-starred Helen in Terence Fisher's second sequel to HORROR OF DRACULA (1958) does evolve but it's a toggle switch role - repressed here, perverse there. And all too typical of Hammer, they do away with her character well before you're ready to see her dismissed.

Barbara Judd, however, in Roy Ward Baker's big screen adaptation of the Nigel Kneale teleplay, has the whole of the picture to show us her colors and emerges, shaken and coltish on the other side, one of the more compelling portraits of a modern woman facing down ancient evil. It's a performance that rewards on new levels with repeat viewing and Shelley manages to steal the film from her male costars without ever upstaging them or deliberately stealing focus. It's a mini masterclass in film acting. Join me in saluting this wonderful actress on her 78th birthday.

Abject vacancy

2011-08-12T13:15:00.000-07:00

It's impossible for me to speak with any insight about the recent Hammer Films' release, THE RESIDENT (2011), without diving right into a full revelation of its plot, so if you haven't seen the film and want to experience it cold I suggest that you stop reading here.

Here's the movie I would have made. On the mend from a messy break-up, ER doctor Hilary Swank moves into her own apartment, coltishly stepping forward into a new life on her own.

While she revels in her new-found liberty...

... and takes a few tentative steps toward finding love again in the arms of quietly decent neighbor Jeffrey Dean Morgan...

... something is not quite right. Her sleep is troubled. When she awakens, she does not feel refreshed, as if she has never quite been asleep. And locked within what should be the nurturing environment of her flat she never feels fully ... what's the word ...

... alone. And so she does what any of us would do in her place. She sets up a security camera to see what she cannot see...

... and what she sees ...

... she sees...

... to her horror.

Cue Herrmann strings because her nocturnal interloper is...

... her quietly decent nice guy neighbor Jeffrey Dean Morgan. And they fight a bunch and...

... she kills him eight times. The End. And, you know, we could tweak what seems to be an obvious revelation by having her more interested in him than he is in her, have her spy on him a little, get girlishly obsessive about him, even sneak into his apartment (she finds the door open) to snoop to find out the obvious answers (boxers or briefs, does he have a girlfriend, how big is his thing?) and almost get caught so that what turns out to be an incredibly horrific invasion of privacy is only an amped up version of what she has been guilty of all along. And then she kills him with a nail gun. The End.

But that's not the movie Hammer delivered. Half an hour into THE RESIDENT, after the logline has been established and Dr. Swank is poised to find new true love with Not Quite Javier Bardem/Almost Brad Garrett, director Antti Jokinen rolls back the film to the beginning and starts it again, albeit this time from Morgan's perspective and how he has seen her and how in the eye abides the heart and how he contrives to bring her into his life and keep her there. It's a bold, unexpected move which has the unfortunate consequence of making THE RESIDENT a very dull "hider in the hatch" affair from the 31 minute mark onward.

Part of what makes the horror subcategory of Women Unsure of their Own Perceptions so rich a vein (CAT PEOPLE, THE WOMAN WHO CAME BACK, CARNIVAL OF SOULS, REPULSION, SUSPIRIA) is that we usually share their confusion -- we find ourselves torn between believing they could be accurately sensing something dreadful or just plain crazy. But here we know. We know the whole story at the half hour mark and all the rest is just biding time. To break up the monotony, the filmmakers throw in ...

... Christopher Lee as a charming red herring (or is he?) but they type him out almost immediately as physically unfit and then dismiss him well before the second act has been drawn up the takeup reel. As stated, after the first third, the movie goes from being Hilary Swank's to Jeffrey Dean Morgan's, giving its leading lady very little to do but look confused and consult occasionally with her black best friend while Morgan creeps round, touching her lounge wear, brushing his teeth with her toothbrush and other things that, however unpalatable, fall markedly short of being a symphony of terror.

What rankles is that this is Hammer Horror. There's their goddamn logo at the top of the film reminding you that from their corporate loins sprang the Frankenstein monster, Count Dracula, Countess Dracula, the undying Mummy, the Gorgon, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde, the Phantom of the Opera, Rasputin the Mad Monk, Night Creatures, the Goat of Mendes and zombies-zombies-zombies bursting like corn stalks out of the Cornish peat. And what do they offer us now? Jeffrey Dean Morgan masturbating in Hilary Swank's bathtub.

This movie needed more than its one bold move -- it needed vision and the subgenre savvy to know that THE RESIDENT had to be more than PSYCHO-like. I can't imagine a duller protagonist/antagonist pairing than these two. Yet that could have worked if the filmmakers had suggested that Morgan's infatuation with Swank was entirely unjustified, that in effect it wasn't who she was but rather where she was, that he was, having been denied the love of the one he wanted, loving the one he was with. That would have put a canny spin on the title (although RESIDENT would have been better, denoting no one in particular) and given the viewer something to think about during what is on its own terms an ass-numbing and utterly pointless 91 minutes, including credits.

Peek-a-who?

2011-07-14T14:57:00.000-07:00

Grande maul

2011-07-06T13:54:00.000-07:00

It's been ten years since Christophe Gans' BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF (LE PACT DES LOUPS, 2001) padded into cinemas on the Continent (arriving here in January 2002), making it high time for a reevaluation. Giving the hyperbolic, hyperkinetic and excessively hip action-slash-horror film hybrid another shot a decade later feels even more satisfying than seeing it first run, structured as it is as a memory piece... leaving us with the ineluctable conclusion that the film is best seen first the second time around.

Based on the legend of the La bête du Gévaudan, a suspected/never captured werewolf that plagued the mountain-ringed French provinces in the mid-18th Century, BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF is framed by Gans and co-writer Stéphane Cabel as the recollection of an aristocrat (Jacques Perrin, forty years past his beginnings in cinema as the apple-cheeked protagonist of Valerio Zurlini's GIRL IN A SUITCASE) facing down the wrath of the French Revolution. His date with the guillotine imminent, the narrator recalls a three year period during his youth in which a monster "with teeth like knives" was mowing down the peasantry like so much chaff, leaving their remains broken on boulders or floating in a broth of their own viscera. Called in to investigate is royal taxidermist Grégoire de Fronsac (Samuel Le Bihan), who packs in with his toolkit of calipers, catgut and glass eyes a bona fide American Indian (Mark Dacascos, in the role of a lifetime), whom he calls his blood brother and with whom he shares an almost preternatural bond of loyalty.

Seemingly a movie with something for everyone -- Hammer horror-style tropes, Hong Kong-style wuxia, animatronics, romance, intrigue, swordplay, conspiracy theory, folklore, sex and exploding pumpkins -- BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF instead inspired (at least in the States) a cacophony of bitching. Horror purists seemed to resent the admixture of chop-sockey with Gothic scare tactics while others bemoaned the "MTV-style" cinematography, which zoomed, glided, froze and step-framed through the action setpieces, a highly digitized aesthetic whose time -- Ridley Scott's GLADIATOR (2000) notwithstanding -- had not yet come.

For this reason in particular, BROTHERHOOD plays better now that we've become accustomed (if not necessarily forgiving) of this amped up shooting style. On re-view, the film reveals its sweep and grandeur and attention to textures and minute details. With the focus off technology, we can better appreciate Gans' casting coup of balancing his dramatis personae between the new wave of French actors (Vincent Cassel, Jérémie Rénier, Emilie Dequenne, Philippe Nahon) and the national cinema's old guard (WEEKEND's Jean Yanne, Bernard Fresson from THE FRENCH CONNECTION II, Truffaut regular Jean-François Stévenin and the inimitable Edith Scob, star of Georges Franju's EYES WITHOUT A FACE). The distance of ten years takes the punk kid patina off BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF, revealing a goodwill basket of significant cultural and pop cultural resonance.

Positioning itself as a sort of postmodern catch-all, the film's seeming use of cinematic quotes, of tropes that seem instantly familiar and evocative of older times makes perfect sense, shoehorning in as it does allusions to SUSPICION (1941), SEVEN SAMURAI (1954), PSYCHO (1960), THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE (1974), JAWS (1975), AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON (1981), POLTERGEIST (1982), Michael Mann's THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS (1992) and THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES (any version) alongside references to bullet points in French history in general and the Age of Enlightenment in particular. Perhaps this was all a bit heady for American audiences and if so pas de pot, as BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF remains a full ten years after its debut one of the more thoughtfully conceived and artfully realized horror films in recent memory.

Mind you, it's not a perfect film. At two-and-a-half hours, it may overstay its welcome (ten years later and I'm still on the fence but keep in mind that 7 out of that 142 minutes is end credits) and the bodice-ripping and bordello scenes are the most disposable. Sulking smokily as she does as a madame with a penchant (pardon my French) for prophesy, Monica Bellucci is BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF's weakest link, through no fault of her own. In fact, the heterosexual couplings are far less interesting than the manlove between Bihan and Dascosos ...

... and the rivalry that arises between Fronsac and Cassel's titled bounder (the pair stood shoulder to shoulder most recently in Jean-François Richet's hugely entertaining MESRINE: PUBLIC ENEMY #1, albeit with star and supporting player roles reversed to reflect the former's rising cinematic stock). Bihan's progressive protagonist is a little too righteous for his own good, a little too au courant, although what his character may be denied in terms of the expected learning arc is replaced with a significant humbling experience that allows him to assume avenger mode for the film's denouement but then sends him off to the takeup reel as a shattered man all too ready to be made stronger in the broken places.

BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF ends as it begins, with the torches of the mob lighting up the night sky and Jacques Perrin's elderly Thomas d'Apcher resigning himself to the Apocalypse that the court of Louis XV had thought, erroneously, it had thwarted by sanctioning the destruction of la bête du Gévaudan. At the final fadeout, there is no REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN (1958) style reprieve for our narrator, whose service in the salvation of the world (or at least a tiny chunk of rural France) has been forgotten and supplanted by a blind hatred of status, of title and perceived privilege. That d'Apcher's final thoughts concern simpler times of an age of monsters torn from the pages of myth underscores BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF's ultimate irony that Hell, for all the whistles and bells of superstition and imagination, will always be other people.

Happy Birthday, Warren Oates

2011-07-05T10:36:00.000-07:00

Can it be almost 30 years that we've had to make do without Warren Oates? It gets harder and harder to describe to those born in the last two decades what it was like live with actors such as this, to have them handy year after year and have their lives be both essential to your own and at the same time routine, no big deal. You went to the movies and they were there. You flipped on the TV and they were there. How long would you have to wait nowadays for Warren Oates to happen by?

I spend too much time gassing on about days gone by and, while I don't delude myself that I'm deluded about the past being better than the present (it was/it is), I need to stop that because nobody cares and it's a waste of good complaining. You can get a sense of the man now on DVD or in the odd rep house screening but it's not like having been there, oh no not at all.

The mother of meaning

2011-06-29T12:43:00.000-07:00

I suppose it's true of most if not all art forms but there's something about the way that cinema allows the participant to be both in the moment and off on a tangent that makes it my particular poison. In Dario Argento's PROFONDO ROSSO (DEEP RED, 1975), expatriate pianist David Hemmings rushes to the rescue of a woman he sees being attacked in her apartment. Arriving only seconds later...

... he finds the woman close enough to death to not bother with a distinction and can only attempt palliative measures centered on the victim's comfort. Her throat severed by a jagged pane of glass, she bleeds out as Hemmings lifts her up.

I've always found this moment to be sublimely awkward. Never a performer exhibiting anything but average physical strength, Hemmings appears to have difficulty hefting the dead weight of Macha Méril and there's that unexpected moment in which her breasts slip free of the folds of her robe. I've often though of both the perversely erotic aspect of this encounter and its embarrassing inverse. The moment takes me even farther afield of what Argento is offering. If you've an alcoholic for a parent, you may well know the misery of having to care for them in their cups, to uplift them, clean them, keep them out of harm's way. All these things come to mind watching this scene from PROFONDO ROSSO (an allusion to abject shame?), though none are really germane to the story being offered.

I wonder, though. The next time you watch the movie, focus on Hemmings' reactions and how muted they are. He registers neither fear or horror in the moment but a kind of dead-eyed resignation, as if he has lived through this situation before and has defaulted to the autopilot mode of the reluctant caregiver. His character makes (perhaps only in the Italian version) an allusion to his piano playing being a sublimation of bashing in his father's teeth, hinting at a backstory of abuse or neglect; the character never mentions his mother, although where there is an abusive father there is invariably an enabling mother, who refuses to admit what she has seen or to articulate what she knows. This reading is not entirely out of sympathy with the plot of PROFONDO ROSSO, which has to do with reconciling the impossible with the known facts.

The funny thing is that Macha Méril was only a year older than Hemmings and yet there is something matronly and motherly about her performance, which compliments Hemmings' portrayal of a somewhat stunted man-child who - once he has insinuated himself into this nightmare - turns a latent aptitude for investigation into a much-needed journey-to-self. It's as if he is born in this moment, spawned in the awful spray of blood and broken glass, and sent into the world alone to make a man of himself.

Lemmy tell ya

2011-06-28T11:03:00.000-07:00

I'm looking over an advance copy of the latest issue (163, to be exact) of Video Watchdog and biting myself in bitterness that the stack of work in front of me (well, presently on the other side of issue 163 of Video Watchdog) prevents me from devouring this in one sitting. VW has always been an invaluable resource but it's been many-a-moon since a particular issue came so close to approximating my dream-state. The cover story on American actor/French icon Eddie Constantine is one thing - and, brother, it is quite a thing, an interview with EC's daughter Tanya and one-half of a career-spanning article by Tim Lucas himself plus exceedingly rare family photographs, book covers and LP sleeves (the issue's inside cover is a shot of a tweedy, sweater-vested and mustached Constantine looking bookish in a Hugh Marlowe sort of way) - but elsewhere are reviews of such burned-in-the-brain classics as THE FROZEN DEAD (1967), THE NIGHT DIGGER (1971), BONNIE'S KIDS (1973), DARK NIGHT OF THE SCARECROW (1981), TWO ON A GUILLOTINE (1965), THE EVIL (1978) and CANNIBAL GIRLS (1972). On the sheer strength of these bullet points, issue 163 looks to be the cool party of the summer and I can't wait to trunk up and freak out.

In lieu of flowers

2011-06-01T09:18:00.000-07:00

To file under Thankless Jobs, this will be my attempt to salvage to some degree the lousy reputation of W. Lee Wilder's Yeti procedural THE SNOW CREATURE (1954). If you follow Fifties sci-fi, you should be familiar with the critical brickbats ("... possibly the worst abominable snowman film...", Michael Weldon, The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film) and I'm not here to pull off a complete critical reversal... but as is so often the case, there is more here to consider than "another inept feature by Billy Wilder's brother."

The script by Myles Wilder (Lee's son, Billy's nephew) gets the jump on THE MOLE PEOPLE (1955) with an expedition of white guys (botanists rather than archeologists) who find themselves cashiered by their own Sherpas and driven up into the Himalayas at gunpoint when the eponymous bigfoot makes off with a local woman... the wife of lead guide Subra (Teru Shimada, a familiar Japanese face in a wealth of Hollywood movies, from the Halperins' REVOLT OF THE ZOMBIES to BATMAN: THE MOVIE). Skeptical of local legends about the Yeti and fearful for their lives, scientist Frank Parrish (Paul Langton, Grant Williams' brother in THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN) and photographer Peter Wells (Leslie Denton, a reliable rent-a-Brit with a back catalog of Englishmen, London bobbies and RAF officers to his credit) put aside their personal differences and bide their time, waiting for a chance to escape.

THE SNOW CREATURE divides its time between the Himalayas and Los Angeles, where the Yeti is brought for study after his capture. Filmed in frosty Washington State, the first act finds Parrish and Wells stuck for the most part in their tent as the winds howl and the monster skulks without. Tight with a penny, Wilder keeps the camera within these cramped quarters with lots of "Did you hear that?" business, anticipating the similarly flinty authorial tack of THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999) by 45 years. The white men's edgy relationship to their Sherpa who has flip-flopped the master-slave relationship by nothing more than desperate necessity, is complicated by the fact that Subra seems to enjoy having power for the first time in his life. Grinning maniacally, he smashes the two-way radio as his captives attempt to call out, a pre-Quint moment of martinet madness twenty years ahead of JAWS (1975).

It's likely that KING KONG (1933) was an inspiration, as the Yeti is trucked into the City of Angels in a custom-designed cold box only to escape into the night. Universal had mimicked the Kong template for THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954) but it would take two sequels to describe completely the Gillman's character arc. Wilder and Wilder accomplish the same rise and fall scenario in a mere 69 minutes, with the Yeti slipping roadblocks by ducking into the intricate network of sewer drainage and river runoff conduits... requiring the police to follow with "walkie-talkies, rubber boots, lamps and so on." Warners' THEM! (1954) had premiered the previous summer but given that THE SNOW CREATURE was shot in early spring of '54 I suspect Alfred L. Werker and Anthony Mann's HE WALKED BY NIGHT (1948) is a more apt progenitor... or maybe even Carol Reed's THE THIRD MAN (1949).

What the naysayers get absolutely right about THE SNOW CREATURE is the disappointing execution of the title bogey itself. The Yeti suit is subpar (I say this even though, given that it was the first abominable snowman movie ever, par had yet to be established), giving Academy Award winning cinematographer Floyd Crosby (THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM) very little with which to work. The Yeti's big move is to advance toward the camera and stop, then -- after a cutaway to someone hearing or seeing him -- to back away from the camera. This is repeated a number of times, which pushes what is elsewhere a fairly competent low budget feature into kitsch territory. Still, the movie is slightly better than its reputation, leading out of the gate Ishirô Honda's and Val Guest's abominable snowman movies and boasting elements that would be echoed (and, arguably, improved) in GARGOYLES (1972) and C.H.U.D. (1984).

The wretched condition of existing prints and transfers of THE SNOW CREATURE makes a definitive reassessment all but impossible - it's difficult to say whether the film is truly "dreary" (as charged by critic and era aficionado Bill Warren) or if what we're looking at can be attributed to years of multi-generation barnacling. (Remember those 80s era reviews of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD that declared the film's grainy aspect was intentional?) No, THE SNOW CREATURE is not a lost gem and a renaissance is unlikely but you've got to hand it to a monster-on-the-loose picture in which the scientists and local authorities take time out from monster wrangling to consider the creature's immigration status.

What a rack!

2011-05-11T07:55:00.000-07:00

David Robson, proprietor of the The House of Sparrows blog, has contributed our 41st entry in the The One You Might Have Saved blog-a-thon. I haven't seen the film in question - and may never - but David's argument is persuasive and disarmingly heartfelt.

Happy Arbogast Day!

2011-05-09T08:06:00.000-07:00

For once, I have not missed Arbogast Day, a tradition over at my brother blog Kindertrauma, where Uncle Lancifer and Aunt John do a bang up job of making us never forget our childhood fears. (I'm shaking already!) Each twelvemonth, on the day after Mother's Day, K-T writes up another entry for my galloping "The One You Might Have Saved" meme and this year's entry is more controversial than most. In the spirit of Arbogast Day, I have resolved to lower my normally sky-high veil of secrecy to reveal the man behind the mask. Feast your eyes... glut your soul... on my accursed mundanitude!

Arbogast's Dad Wallet!

Arbogast's chequebook!

Arbogast's "cellular" telephone!

Arbogast's shoes - size 13, of course!

Overstuffed shelves from Arbogast's library!

Arbogast's condiment shelf!

Portrait of the Arbogast as a young man. Okay, that's enough. I'm starting to freak myself out. Please leave a note to help celebrate Arbogast Day 2011 and help yourself to the deviled ham and Mr. Pibb!

An occasion to make the soul tremble

2011-04-28T09:56:00.000-07:00

The Hollywood formula for alien "invasion" movies in the early Fifties seemed to play out at least 90% of the time (THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD being an exception) that solitary visitors (THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL, THE MAN FROM PLANET X) were benign but extraterrestrials in greater numbers (INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, INVISIBLE INVADERS) spelled trouble. The Xenomorphs of Jack Arnold's IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953) say they come in peace but they're ugly as All Hell and have a penchant for running off cheap copies of the residents of Sand Rock, Arizona, to do their scutwork, which puts astronomer Richard Carlson in a ticklish predicament... to trust or not to trust?

Produced for Universal-International by William Alland (who, as a member of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre of the Air, had participated in the infamous Halloween 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast), IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE is an entertaining but unmistakable polemic that puts xenophobia -- and, by extension, nationalism and isolationism -- under the microscope, providing a panoply of human reaction to the arrival from Somewhere Out There a space ship from another world, which crashes into the desert and embeds itself like a tick under the skin of the desert community. The script is, for the most part, the work of science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, whose The Martian Chronicles had the same softly scolding tone about human hubris in the face of infinite possibilities.

The received wisdom about IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE is that Bradbury got shafted by U-I, who hired screenwriter Harry Essex to flesh out Bradbury's 70-80 page treatment and in so doing hogged all the glory for himself. Essex gets sole screenplay credit while Bradbury is left with a lesser story byline. Essex often spoke derisively about Bradbury's participation, diminishing the author's input, and contemporary writers tend to flip-flop the equation, citing Bradbury as the film's true auteur and Essex as an opportunistic arriviste.

If you've had a chance to read any of Bradbury's original material, however, you will appreciate what a service Essex provided, paring down the novelist's reams of purple prose and making IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE leaner, more economical, faster-paced and, it bears mentioning, more fun. Bradbury never had Carlson's beleaguered stargazer say in one sentence what he could gas on about in three, making the character a bit like the wordy villain in Robert Aldrich's KISS ME DEADLY (1955) but trying to make what Aldrich depicted as a character flaw into a signifier of erudition and clarity. As etched by Bradbury, Carlson's character is such a gasbag that you're practically rooting for local sheriff Charles Drake to put a bullet in him or at least just give him a shove over the lip of the lunar crater that serves as the aliens' carport.

But enough complaining, as IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE is such a delight. Jack Arnold got his DGA card while shooting the picture in February and March of 1953 and what a run he would have after this -- THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954), REVENGE OF THE CREATURE (1955), TARANTULA (1955), THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN (1957),THE SPACE CHILDREN (1958) and MONSTER ON THE CAMPUS (1958) -- before turning to mostly TV work from the Sixties through his retirement in the early 80s. Clocking in at just 80 minutes, the film is a model of efficiency, with Bradury's evocative dialogue used sparingly enough ("All that sand out there with the rivers and lakes that aren't real at all... and sometimes you think that the wind gets in the wires and hums and listens and talks.") to soften the production's machine-like precision with a bit of Thorton Wilder-like whimsy. Remember whimsy?

As with Jack Tourneur's NIGHT OF THE DEMON (US: CURSE OF THE DEMON, 1957), IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE was reshaped in postproduction to bring out its eponymous bogeys, which Alland, Arnold and Bradbury had preferred to keep offscreen, left to the viewer's imagination. And as with NIGHT OF THE DEMON, complaints about obviousness and exploitation (the Xenomorphs make their first appearance here at only six minutes in!) are mitigated in the minds of many viewers by the fact that the monster is pretty sharp-looking, pretty freaky, looking to modern eyes like the love child of ROBOT MONSTER (1953) and THE CRAWLING EYE (1958).

The alien presence, so often communicated by Arnold as an almost Gothic, ghostly presence, is beautifully underscored by the unsettling employment of the Theremin and a powerhouse original score boasting cues from Henry Mancini, Herman Stein and Irving Gertz. Also worth noting is the persuasive special effects photography of David Horsely, credited by more than a few sci-fi film historians as IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE's unsung hero. Cinematographer Clifford Stine shot a number of Universal's Fifties sci-fi films, after getting his start in the industry shooting B-roll on KING KONG (1933).

Made in the post-war boom years as the nation glided into a comfortable modernity of acquisitiveness and relative affluence (Carlson's swank bachelor is an intellectual pacifist but he still keeps a .38 snubnose in the glovebox of his Ford Crestline so don't touch his stuff!), IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE is a gentle scold (in 3D, no less!) to complacent Americans who consider a telescope to be deck furniture rather than a window on the Great Out There. As the decade went on, the collective paranoia would grow apace with technological developments abroad (particularly in the Soviet Union) but this film finds us in a more receptive, reflective mood, eager for "other nights and other stars to watch" even if we should find something looking right back at us.

Same as Nick, same as Rico, same as Carl.

2011-04-26T08:36:00.000-07:00

To a kid seeing this Universal-International release for the first time in the early 70s, when most of its cast was not only still alive but starring in TV shows that were in circulation - David Janssen (THE FUGITIVE, HARRY O), Richard Long (THE BIG VALLEY, NANNY AND THE PROFESSOR), Marshall Thompson (DAKTARI), William Reynolds (THE FBI), Jack Kelly (MAVERICK) - CULT OF THE COBRA (1955) was like watching a snuff movie.

Directed by Francis D. Lyons (whose career began in the cutting room, assisting in the editing of THINGS TO COME, INTERMEZZO, BODY AND SOUL and, dig, BRIDE OF THE GORILLA), from a script credited to Jerry Davis, Richard Collins (LADY SCARFACE) and Cecil Maiden, CULT OF THE COBRA is a light brushing up of tropes from Universal's THE MUMMY'S TOMB (1942), with a clutch of American infidels being knocked off one by one by the agent of ancient and unforgiving evil... but instead of a shambling Lon Chaney, Jr. tramping the back lot in artificially distressed linen and Fuller's Earth the black op this time out is smoky Faith Domergue (THIS ISLAND EARTH), as the slinky helpmeet of an Asian snake cult.

CULT OF THE COBRA is a full-on horror movie cranked out by the studio amidst a flood of science-fiction product. For lazy categorization, the production is often lumped in with TARANTULA (1955), THE MOLE PEOPLE (1956) and MONSTER ON THE CAMPUS (1958) but there isn't a jot of science in this thing, not a soupcon, not a smidge. Perhaps the presence of Marshall Thompson is the culprit, given that the rangy Peoria-born actor graduated from second male lead status here to a running subspecialty in genre fare, with appearances in IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (1958), FIEND WITHOUT A FACE (1958) and FIRST MAN INTO SPACE (1959), threatening for a while to out-Agar John Agar.

There isn't much innovation here. The glob-cam from Jack Arnold's IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953) gets trucked in to serve as the snake woman's POV for stalk and strike scenes and there are a smattering of false scares, from the sound of a hissing cobra that turns out to be a pressure cooker to the by now patented hand-on-shoulder gag seen first in IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE and THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954). Lewtonisms abound, particularly in the sequence, set in an abandoned bowling alley, that leads up to the death of Janssen's character.

Given all its borrowings, CULT OF THE COBRA retains a queasy charm, due in large part to a lot of peripheral choices. Set in the immediate aftermath of World War II, the film unspools a decade in the past, when returning GIs were moving on to careers that would help redefine American living mid-century. The bulk of the film is set in a pre-Beatnik Greenwich Village (albeit devoid of jazz and Negros), which puts it in the literal neighborhood of Boris Ingster's STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR (1940) and Val Lewton's CAT PEOPLE (1942) and THE SEVENTH VICTIM (1943).

Though Domergue is a draggy antiheroine, not able to generate much sympathy for her conflicted "snake with a brain" nor much heat in her (strictly first base) love scenes with Marshall Thompson (who is, conversely, delightful and loose, in sharp contrast to his later, gruff-n-grim leading man assignments), the attack scenes still have - you will pardon the expression - bite. The cast is incredibly strong, with Long (then the husband of TARANTULA star Mara Corday and a regular in Universal's "Ma and Pa Kettle" films) warming up for his turn in William Castle's HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL (1959) and William Reynolds impressing with some Johnny Depp-like smolder. As stated, it's just plain bizarre watching these actors die in front of you... although perhaps that was more of a 1974 thing.

CULT OF THE COBRA ends with the requisite hurlyburly occurring backstage at an Off-Broadway reveue, which seems random (and perhaps just an excuse to get second female lead Kathleen Hughes into something skimpy) until you remember that it began, for all intents and purposes, with the staged celebration of an Asian snake god. Favoring its surviving white protagonists, who exit the narrative aggrieved but wiser, the conclusion mirrors the film's inciting event, with an interloper ejected again from the venue in a welter of shouting and screaming, as if in testimony to the east-is-east impossibility of cultural merger.

Dropping in snake form to the alley below, where she dies under the front fender of an NYPD cruiser, Domergue's character hovers between states before materializing finally in human form, anticipating the fade-out of Alfred Shaughnessey's CAT GIRL (1957) by a couple of years and bringing the curtain down on one of the more interesting titles from the U-I canon during this strange but exciting time.

Walkin' and killin'

2011-04-21T00:02:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time some genius dubbed Edward L. Cahn's INVISIBLE INVADERS (1959) NIGHT OF THE LIVING DADS for the legion of shuffling corpses -- reanimated not via an atomic brain but by the initiative of, well, Invisible Invaders -- whose dress code is strictly Sunday-Go-to-Meetin'. The concept of the dead rising from their biers to hag the living is certainly NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) all over but INVISIBLE INVADERS more closely resembles George Romero's DAY OF THE DEAD (1985), complete with well-stocked bunker hidey-hole, in-fighting among the human survivors (with a martinet militarist playing Alpha Dog and calling the shots), a lady protagonist torn between factions, a zombie kept in captivity and a kooky scientist whose job it is to sort it all out.

INVISIBLE INVADERS is a somewhat more straight-ahead take on the same concept as PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE (1959), with a race of alien squatters hoping to beat down human resistance by repurposing the recently deceased. And in its own little way this warty little United Artists acquisition is just as nutzoid, from its preposterous plot points (the aliens boast of having made everything on their planet invisible -- how to they avoid tripping over their own furniture?) and unpersuasive stuntmen stand-ins to its earnest docu-drama approach and dependence on stock footage to depict the invaders' swath of Apocalyptic destruction (one clip shows a spectacular conflagration being tended to by Nazi soldiers while a car crash is clipped out of THUNDER ROAD -- the same one that later turned up in THEY SAVED HITLER'S BRAIN).

John Agar is the star of the show, although he doesn't turn up for 25 minutes of the 65 minute running time; even then, his first big move is to fetch the luggage of leading lady Jean Byron (THE MAGNETIC MONSTER). Still, he looks pretty smart in an Air Force flightsuit (just like Charlton Heston in THE OMEGA MAN) and his first big order of screen business (apart from fetching that luggage) is to shoot a desperate farmer (THE COSMIC MAN's Hal Torey) right in the head for trying to hitch a ride in his Jeep and gain unauthorized entry into Bunker 6 -- actually Bronson Cave, the hang of ROBOT MONSTER (1953) and THE CAPE CANAVERAL MONSTERS (1960). Touted as being a state-of-the-art government fall-out shelter, Bunker 6 has no on-call military staff and the first thing you see upon driving through the electronic sliding door is a wall of crescent wrenches.

Agar's might is meant to contrast with the measured right of Robert Hutton (THE SLIME PEOPLE), cast as a civilian scientist. This being a 50s movie, however, Agar is proved to be the one on the trolley while Hutton becomes, as the alien menace mounts and the ultimatums arrive pell-mell, a wrongheaded appeaser, like Neville Chamberlain and that egghead in the turtleneck from THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD (1951). Initially disgusted by the seemingly coldblooded USAF major, Byron comes around right quick when he reveals his vulnerable side and even Hutton reconsiders after his and Agar's stuntmen punch one another in the face a few times.

The one to watch in INVISIBLE INVADERS is Philip Tonge (MIRACLE ON 34TH STREET), as the atomic scientist to whom the aliens first reach out... in the creepy corporeality of John Carradine. Most video and DVD releases of the film use Carradine's mug to sell the show but his role is relegated to the first reel, in which he shuffles from his grave to knock on Tongue's door like the returning son in W. W. Jacobs' The Monkey's Paw. So unnerved by Carradine's reappearance and ostensible function as a mouthpiece for a predatory alien race, Tongue prays to God to be insane rather than face this reality, which is a novel approach to the problem. The 60-ish actor rises to the occasion time and again in INVISIBLE INVADERS, which is doubly impressive given that his character is coded as an early victim. Though Tonge survives the final fade-out here, in real life he died four months before the film had its spring premiere.

INVISIBLE INVADERS is just a lot of goddamned fun and you should jump on this joint now. If you can't be charmed by the sight of a zombie crashing the press booth at a hockey game to choke-hold the announcer and his engineer and hog the microphone for himself then I suggest you check yourself for a pulse.