Why Film, Exactly?

Sundance 2011: The Nine Muses

2011-09-27T11:17:00.000-06:00

As a film archivist and student of Classics, The Nine Muses (John Akomfrah 2010), a Ghana/UK co-production, was irresistible to me. This film was pitched as an experimental documentary/personal essay about the plight of the filmmaker's ancestors and others like them - immigrants from former British colonies coaxed to Great Britain to reconstruct a depleted workforce after WWII - illustrated by archive footage and ancient and modern poetry and categorized by themes represented by the nine Muses and set in the framework of the story of Odysseus' son, Telemachus, searching for his father as told in Homer's Odyssey.

Although the film's premise was fascinating enough to draw me into the theater and garner UK lottery funding, the overall execution of the piece is very poor.

The movie is divided into nine sections, one for each of the Muses:

Calliope: epic poetry

Clio: history

Erato: love poetry

Euterpe: song

Melpomene: tragedy

Polyhymnia: hymns

Terpsichore: dance

Thalia: comedy

Urania: astronomy

Each section features archive footage of workers who were brought to England to do blue collar jobs that badly needed to be filled in the country's struggling Postwar economy, then ostracized and eventually labelled an immigrant problem. The footage is accompanied by preexisting music and poetry meant to draw out to mood and fate of the immigrant community.

Unfortunately, many of the segments' content bears only a tenuous connection to its theme. The comedy section in particular displays a poor understanding of the ancient term, which generally referred to stage plays with happy endings. In The Nine Muses the comedy segment focuses on the tragic irony that the people brought in to save the British economy were later demonized as undesirables within the country.

The film's connection to The Odyssey is similarly vague. Homer's poem is quoted in the film, and we do see the filmmaker traveling in an inhospitable landscape in a metaphorical search for his heritage's meaning, but the metaphor is undeveloped. Throughout the film, we see Akomfrah and other, faceless people standing and walking in the snow in endless recurring segments unsubtly representing the lonely, misfit status of the descendents of this poorly integrated immigrant group. All of this footage was shot in Alaska, which is increasingly apparent as Akomfrah includes shots of American speed limit and other signs posted along icy coasts and snow covered roads. Although the cinematography in this section is very pretty, the repetitiveness of the shots and their irrelevant yet easily pinpointed location stagnates the film and the filmmaker's journey of personal discovery.

The subject matter in this film is historically and socially important and, it seems, little discussed in my part of the world. This documentary represents the poor execution of a creative interpretation of an important and interesting subject. Somebody should try again.

Sundance 2011: The Troll Hunter (Trolljegeren)

2011-09-26T13:23:00.002-06:00

Last winter at Sundance 2011 I saw only a few films, and the top pick of the group was the U.S. premier Norway's The Troll Hunter (or Trolljegeren) (André Øvredal 2010). Inspired by Norwegian fairy tales, this clever and creative mockumentary-horror-comedy follows three Volda college documentarians - reporter Thomas (Glenn Erland Tosterud), sound girl Johanna (Johanna Mørck) and cameraman Kalle (Tomas Alf Larsen) - who stumble upon a government conspiracy to cover up the existence of trolls while investigating a series of supposedly bear related deaths.

Believing him to be a poacher, the students foolishly follow Hans (Norwegian comedian Otto Jespersen) into the woods where they are attacked by a troll. Although actual fairy tale trolls wear clothes and talk and act like human beings, this movie's trolls are animals that have been secretly restricted to territories in Norway's less traveled areas. The deadpan Troll Hunter, Hans, is solely responsible for controlling the population and keeping the country clear of marauding trolls who escape their designated territories.

Though Øvredal's script does deal with political and environmental issues - it consistently satirizes the government agents and their cover-up, humorously addresses the erection of gigantic power lines all over Norway's fantastic scenery and, more poignantly, touches upon the subject of the control and even extermination of dangerous natural predators - the film is more concerned with being an light, exciting horror comedy than a serious social commentary, a decision which works to its advantage.

Practically a road movie, the film was shot all over Norway, and the extraordinary landscapes are both well used - as habitats for different trolls - and well shot. Although the characters are students, they are clearly meant to be experienced filmmakers, and, the movie successfully captures the feel of an on-the-fly amateur production without falling prey to irritating hallmarks of the "found footage" genre like dizzying, shaky camera movements.

The actors, who were encouraged to deliver their own interpretations of the written dialog, stay true to their characters' filmmaking roles. We hardly ever see Kalle, the cameraman, who wields a hefty shoulder camera with minimum jitter (except when fleeing trolls) while and Johanna uses professional grade sound equipment that supposedly picks up all sorts of alarming troll sounds. Øvredal effectively uses details of the filmmaking process - white balance, hooking up the boom mic - to enhance both the realism of the documentary within the film and the suspense, shock and horror brought on by the trolls when the monsters are revealed suddenly through night vision (used with tasteful restraint) or the activation of Johanna's microphone.

The trolls themselves are wonderfully designed. Taken from the illustrations in fairy tale books, the trolls steer clear of more conventional horror movie monsters; their bulbous noses make them look like giant, man-eating Muppets, and the CGI, all carefully crafted by Norwegian artists unused to the opportunity to work on a large scale film (in this case a comparatively low $3-4 million), blends in well with the environment.

The film loses suspense by showing the monsters so often, but it is plain that the Øvredal's goal is comedic fantasy with a horror element rather than straight up horror. Fast paced and entertaining, The Troll Hunter is a memorable film my friends and I still refer to nearly 10 months later.

Since I saw The Troll Hunter at Sundance it has played in American theaters and is now available on DVD and, currently, on Netflix streaming. Highly recommended.

They're Here . . .

2011-09-26T11:25:00.001-06:00

After a long absence I have decided to revive (or re-animate) this blog, just in time for Halloween 2011 and in celebration of the long awaited theatrical release of Tucker and Dale vs. Evil, my favorite film from Sundance 2010. Check out my review from the festival screening. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil comes out this Friday, September 30.

Elisha Cook Jr. Film Series: I Wake Up Screaming

2010-06-29T23:00:00.004-06:00

I Wake Up Screaming (Bruce Humberstone 1941) has a title that could mean nearly anything. But, after viewing the film, that vague, generic title seems surprisingly fitting. A fast paced mystery with over the top dialogue and lighting and a threatening overweight detective reminiscent of characters in later films like Born to Kill (Robert Wise 1947) and, particularly, Blood Simple (Joel and Ethan Coen 1984), I Wake Up Screaming is a movie packed with quintessential film noir themes. Fighting varying degrees of anonymity and helplessness, the cast descends into a futile film noir world that costs its residents their names, their homes, their freedom and their lives.

Elisha Cook Jr. stars as Harry Williams, an apartment switchboard operator enchanted by beautiful tenant Vicky Lynn (Carole Landis), a heartless ingenue who captures the imagination and inflames the libido of every man she meets. Among Vicky's more prominent conquests is professional promoter Frankie Christopher (Victor Mature), who, along with his equally smitten friends in high places, resolves to transform the attractive waitress into a star. The plan falls through, however, when Vicky announces that she is planning to ditch her New York benefactors for a Hollywood career and promptly ends up dead. Dogged by Ed Cornell (Laird Cregar), an influential police inspector convinced of the about-to-be jilted boyfriend's guilt, Frankie attempts to persuade the world, the audience and Vicky's wholesome sister Jill (Betty Grable) that he is actually innocent.

A variation on the Wrong Man subgenre of film noir, I Wake Up Screaming plays up the sinister figure of the tenacious, intrusive Inspector Cornell without ever assuring its viewers that Frankie is not the killer after all. Dwight Taylor's script, based on Steve Fisher's similarly titled novel, dispenses information about the crime with judicious leisure, the lack of evidence revealed and the lack of other likely suspects prohibiting both the audience and Jill from trusting the film's ostensible hero completely. Meanwhile, director Bruce Humberstone and cinematographer Edward Cronjager employ low key, Expressionist lighting techniques to heighten the already uneasy mood and emphasize the power the deftly ominous Laird Cregar's mysterious detective holds over the persecuted man . . .

. . . and the way in which his physically impressive presence pervades the movie, drives its plot and menaces its characters.

But while I Wake Up Screaming shares its wrong man persecution theme with other genre classics like The Blue Dahlia (George Marshall 1946) and Hitchcock's North by Northwest (1959) and The Wrong Man (1956), it ultimately shares much more with films like Laura (Otto Preminger 1944) and Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock 1940), in which the lives of the surviving characters are overshadowed by the lingering presence of the murdered girl. Frankie, Jill and Elisha Cook Jr.'s Harry Williams may all be pawns in Inspector Cornell's game, but even he is governed by his attachment to the late, seductive Vicky. Whether haunted by a far-reaching, shadowy detective or the ghost of a captivating woman, the players in this concise melodramatic mystery are impelled to act but given few attractive choices. In the noir tradition they are trapped, as Cornell says, like "a rat in a box with no holes."

The Vincent Price Song

2010-06-29T20:39:00.001-06:00

Last Halloween, wondering why matinee idols like Clark Gable get all the songs written about them, I wrote an affectionate if somewhat goofy song in a similar mode for one of my all time favorite movie stars, Vincent Price. At Film Walrus's request, I am posting the lyrics here:

All alone
I watch the movie in the dark
And it thrills, it thrills me
It chills me to the bone
There's no one here to hold my hand
Or to whisper, whisper
There's a kiss waiting for me
    If I come with him back to his door

I've been looking for a man
I've tried naughty, I've tried nice
Why don't they make more men like Vincent Price?

"Come inside,
"Come into my parlor, taste the jam"
And he could quote Shakespeare
As he sharpens his knives
"I set it down that one may smile and smile . . .
"And is it white bread or wheat bread
"That you'll take tonight?
    "They'll be red, stained with strawberry jam."

I've been looking for a man
I've tried naughty, I've tried nice
Why don't they make more men like Vincent Price?

Way out there
I know there's someone in a cold dark lab
Who can make me a monster
Or make me a man
A man who smiles and smiles
And takes care to make me, make me
And take me away
    To the arms of the lurid silver screen

I've been looking for a man
I've tried naughty, I've tried nice
Why don't they make more men like Vincent Price?

Bleeders, Liminality and Fate

2010-06-11T11:45:00.001-06:00

As a genre, horror is the master of the different and unknown. Even so, many tales of terror focus not on the utterly alien but on liminal monsters - vampires, werewolves, the victims of scientific accidents - those creatures that are very close to human. In serial killer movies, the objects of terror are human themselves. Happily munching popcorn, sitting on the sofa, watching a film we like to think of ourselves as normal, stable creatures. Movies like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Rouben Mamoulian 1931), The Fly (Kurt Neumann 1958; David Cronenberg 1986), and The Descent (Neil Marshall 2005) remind us just how close we are to becoming monsters. In Bleeders (Peter Svatek 1997) that step is only a few generations of natural evolution away.

Based on H.P. Lovecraft's story "The Lurking Fear," Bleeders follows John (Roy Dupuis), a man with an undiagnosed disease and an unclear family tree, on a journey of genealogical research and self discovery that reveals that inbreeding can lead to much worse things than anemia. When he reaches the island where he was born, John and local physician Dr. Marlowe (Rutger Hauer) begin to piece together the truth about the twisted evolutionary track taken by the narcissistic, inbreeding Dutch immigrants from whom John is descended.

The film is fraught with low budget genre movie cliches. Occasional scenes of graphic sex feel as though they were dropped in at random only to make the exploitation audience happy or to keep the movie safe from airing on network television. Shaky images and disorienting sound effects frequently interrupt the narrative as the laughably Byronic John suffers constant flashbacks to memories of his infancy on the island, an apparent side effect of his disease. Here, as in many modern horror films, this technique is overused and ineffective. Likewise, the voiceover segments that frame the film are cheesy and superfluous, particularly the tacky, sensational epilogue, which does lasting damage to the film through, among other things, its use of the phrase, "and so it came to pass." An extremely flawed film, Bleeders fares slightly better when compared not with other horror movies but with Canadian television of the time. The production values, general feel and synthesizer heavy score are reminiscent of Highlander: the Series (1992-1998) and La Femme Nikita (1997-2001), with which it shares its star.

In spite of its terrible wigs, poorly developed characters, shaky dialogue and alternately illogical and predictable storyline, Bleeders still manages to be both atmospheric and disturbing. Filmed on an island in New Brunswick, Canada, the film offers a daunting, confusing and isolated geography, and the lack of men on the island (they are all off in the fishing fleet) contributes to the feeling that something about the place and its community is not quite right. As John and his wife (Kristin Lehman) journey around the unfamiliar island looking for an answer to the mystery disease, the slow pacing is interrupted by sporadic bursts of brutal violence, which create effective shocks and tension until the mood is broken once and for all by the movie's overloaded finale.

SPOILER ALERT

The most interesting element of the film is the way in which it treats its monsters. The descendants of an inbred family who have evolved into a deformed, subterranean species, the remains of the Van Daam clan introduce themselves to the island community by snatching people down through open graves, sometimes digging into their flesh using mole-claw-like hooks. But while the monsters remain frightening and violent throughout the film, they are ultimately treated much more sympathetically than they are in Lovecraft's story.

In "The Lurking Fear," the narrator expounds the horrors of what he views as an accident of backwards evolution by describing a town terrorized by cannibalistic mole people who, under cover of violent thunderstorms, slaughter the unprotected inhabitants of the surface. Although the bloodthirstiness of the monsters is important, the real terror comes from the evolutionary angle. Lovecraft's hero sees "the ultimate product of mammalian degeneration; the frightful outcome of isolated spawning, multiplication, and cannibal nutrition above and below the ground; the embodiment of all the snarling and chaos and grinning fear that lurk behind life." His description emphasizes not only the monstrosity of the creatures but also their closeness to humanity. When he characterizes this simple evolutionary mistake as the "chaos and . . . fear that lurk behind life," he suggests that these barely inhuman mutants personify the preexisting dark side of the human animal in all its undiluted glory.

But, while the origin and bestial brutality of the monsters remain unchanged in the film penned by Charles Adair and Alien (Ridley Scott 1979) writers Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett, the on-screen creatures are not depicted as such unsympathetic abominations as their literary counterparts. In the movie, the Van Daam descendants have only resorted to taking living humans because their regular food supply has been disturbed: they had evolved to feed upon the flesh of embalmed corpses, and the cemetery is being dug up. Because of this change to the story, the conflict unfolds more like a culture clash and less like an organized attack, in spite of the terror of the townspeople and the heroic, Indiana Jones-ish image designed for Rutger Hauer as he strives to protect them. Plot holes aside, the film even allows for a peaceful resolution of sorts when John returns to the arms of his mutant family, apparently providing some sort of link or understanding between the two ethnic groups.

Unlike the Wolf Man or Frankenstein's Monster in Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale 1935) or Lovecraft's own protagonist in his famous fish-people story "The Shadow over Innsmouth" (from which this film lifted the descendant element of its plot), John considers neither self destruction nor confinement and insanity when the mystery of his genetic condition comes to light. While these older liminal characters cannot see a place for themselves in a normal human world, John ultimately embraces his monstrous heritage. It is possible that this trend in modern Lovecraft cinema espoused not only in Bleeders but also in Stuart Gordon's 2001 "Innsmouth" adaptation, Dagon, and the bleak, semi-apocalyptic mythos movie, Cthulhu (Dan Gildark 2007), suggests that we have moved beyond the limited understanding of humanity and acceptance of difference popularly practiced in Lovecraft's time. However, while a message of cultural understanding may lurk somewhere in the Bleeders script, the overall trend of fatalistic acceptance that seems to emerge in the past few decades of Lovecraftian cinema just as likely points to an emphasis on the hopelessness inherent in the author's cosmic horror. Suicide and isolation in the face of difference may be closed minded solutions, but they also represent a modicum of resistance to what the character perceives as malevolent forces beyond his or her control. Are these modern Lovecraftian heroes adaptive and accepting, or did they simply decide that resistance is futile and quietly succumb?

Elisha Cook Jr. Film Series: Born to Kill

2010-05-21T11:58:00.005-06:00

In an ambivalent 1911 poem, "The Female of the Species," Rudyard Kipling pens the famous line, "the female of the species is more deadly than the male." But while in Kipling's poem it is woman who, "wedded to convictions," "may not deal in doubt or pity," and "man the coward" who has evolved to "compromise" and "concede," these distinctions become muddied in Robert Wise's 1947 film Born to Kill based on James Gunn's referentially titled novel Deadlier than the Male. Although the allusion is not perfect, however, it remains fitting nonetheless. In this tale of basic instinct and mutual destruction, neither sex is cast in a particularly positive light.

Elisha Cook Jr. stars as Mart, a fairly harmless grifter whose best friend Sam (Lawrence Tierney) is a magnet for serious trouble. After brutally murdering his girlfriend and her escort in Reno, Sam takes Mart's advice and leaves town. On the train to San Francisco he encounters Helen (Claire Trevor), a recent divorcee who proved her cool (and her moral flexibility) near the beginning of the film when she discovered the murder victims and then phoned the railway station instead of the police.

Although Helen is desperately attracted to the dangerous man, she is not so impulsive as to forsake her sensible fiancee Fred (Phillip Terry). Instead, Helen waffles between reason and desire, sometimes trying to get rid of Sam, sometimes falling all over him while, unchecked, his uncompromising ambition and possessiveness wreak havoc on her family and friends.

As in Dillinger (Max Nosseck 1945), Tierney's stiff performance as the ruthless homme fatale is as unsympathetic as it is menacing. But while the earlier film hinged solely on its title character, Born to Kill is more interested in the effect that Tierney's character has on those around him. Consequently, although Sam is so unsympathetic as to make other characters' devotion to him seem nearly implausible, the film works because the viewer can identify with the terrible, self destructive and, sadly, universal decisions Mart and Helen make on his account.

We are all plagued by basic desires for pleasurable things: We want drugs, alcohol and unhealthy food. Like the slimy, unprincipled private detective deliciously portrayed by Walter Slezak we want money to dress up our lives. We want to stick by our friends and keep hold of our lovers even when we see terrible consequences looming just ahead. And so, while we can see that Helen ought to go back to Fred and Mart ought to stay out of Sam's business, we also understand them when they don't.

The main characters in the film are dominated by the Id, and their actions provide an outlet for an audience living in a world where survival generally depends on self restraint. The passion and the violence in the film are shown as harshly - both in lighting and in content - and as explicitly as the time period would allow, and director Robert Wise allows his audience plenty of opportunity to physically identify with Sam, whose violent impulses we sometimes witness from his point of view.

But it is Mart and Helen who, through a misguided act of friendship or the reckless lack of self control, provide the viewer with a real catharsis. Like the viewer of a Greek tragedy, Born to Kill's modern audience can experience and identify with the characters' emotions and purge these passions as we watch the characters fall. Both the female and the male are deadly when guided by their more bestial instincts. In the real world we try to keep our weaknesses in check to avoid being punished in kind.

Around the World in 7 Hours

2010-05-07T15:50:00.001-06:00

I have never read Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days, nor have I seen any of the films it has inspired. However, I have read Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, which contains a great deal of transcontinental travel for a book about books. In one chapter, Calvino describes air travel as no proper form of travel at all: you don't pass through one place on the way to another; instead, you get into a box and wait, out of normal space, for a duration of time, during which you read books, before disembarking at your chosen destination. Reading opportunities aside, has high flying convenience sucked the soul from modern transportation?

Michael Palin's 1989 Around the World in 80 Days 7 episode television series serves as something of a vicarious antidote to modern travel. In this, the first of several globetrotting documentaries he hosted for the BBC, Palin is tasked to follow in the footsteps of the fictional Phileas Fogg and circumnavigate the globe in no more than 80 days - without flying. Although the series does indeed introduce the viewer to images and customs of lands all across the world, it is the journey itself that is most fascinating, and Palin's challenge to complete his quest in 80 days engenders more unusual experiences and a more engaging sense of urgency than you would find in other travelogues, including Palin's followup, Pole to Pole (1992).

Overall, the series is very good, but nothing in its second half can ever quite compete with the particularly fine third episode aboard the dhow between Dubai and Bombay. Originally intended to be a ten minute segment in an episode incorporating the journey through all of Arabia and India, the sequence was masterfully compiled by editor David Thomas, who compelled the team to campaign for an extra episode to devote to the unfamiliar experiences and unique relationships Palin came to know during his excruciatingly slow passage from the Persian Gulf across the Arabian Sea. Although the series peaks here, the later episodes in India and the Far East and open Pacific enjoy the consistent wit and informativeness that made the first episodes in Europe, Egypt and Saudi Arabia so engaging.

Only the final episode, in which Palin travels from California back to England, is a bit of a let down. After endless journeys on board freight ships and conversations with friendly but somewhat grating Americans, Pailn is clearly exhausted and has a little trouble infusing the comparatively familiar paths through the United States and England with quite as much of his usual charm. After so many grand adventures, our hero's return is rather anticlimactic, and it is difficult to know whether the completion of such an impressive task is tainted by the fatigued Palin's literal world-weariness or by the fact of the end of the extraordinary journey he took.

Guide Post

2010-05-06T16:15:00.012-06:00

Welcome.

Now that this blog has been active for a couple of years, I thought it was time to give it a Guide Post both to reintroduce myself and to accent and organize my featured special projects and other content of interest that may not leap out at you from the archive list.

I am a career moving image and sound archivist with a background in film studies. I created this blog as an outlet and casual repository for my thoughts on the movies I watch outside of work - mostly entertainment cinema. Why Film Exactly? highlights the films new and old (and occasionally television programs) about which I felt I had something to say, and its content ranges from straightforward reviews to somewhat more academic musings to material informed by my training in film archiving, etc.

Although I freely state my opinions about the movies I watch, I do not give them ratings with stars or numbers. Be warned that my taste tends to skew toward the grim, ironic and bizarre.

That said, you shouldn't be surprised to learn that, from my very first post, this blog has been fairly overrun by horror. Here are a few lists - horror related and otherwise - to help you make sense of some of its content.

H.P. Lovecraft Adaptations:

Beyond Re-Animator
Bleeders (based on "The Lurking Fear")

Bride of Re-Animator
City of the Living Dead (non-mythos version of "Dunwich Horror")

Die, Monster, Die! (based on "The Colour Out of Space")

The Dunwich Horror

From Beyond

The Shuttered Room (based on a story written with "posthumous collaborator" August Derleth)

Hammer Horror Frankenstein Series:
only (and all) those films starring Peter Cushing in the title role - in order of release
The Curse of Frankenstein
The Revenge of Frankenstein
The Evil of Frankenstein
Frankenstein Created Woman
Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed
Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell

Classical Hollywood Film Noir:
my first love - and the subject of my undergraduate honors thesis
Born to Kill
I Wake Up Screaming

Smooth as Silk

Elisha Cook, Jr. Film Series:
a slowly unfolding series dedicated to everybody's favorite ubiquitous Classical Hollywood character actor
Born to Kill

Dillinger

Hellzapoppin'
I Wake Up Screaming

Sundance Film Festival 2010:
I try to attend a few film festivals each year, including the St. Louis Film Festival and, last year, the Kansas Silent Film Festival. This year, I attended the Sundance Film Festival with my friend and fellow blogger Film Walrus, and I made a point of writing about all of the movies we saw.
Buried
Enter the Void
Obselidia
The Red Chapel
Southern District
Splice
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil

last updated 6/29/10

Kick-Ass: Why Super-Heroes Couldn't (or Shouldn't) Exist

2010-05-01T12:30:00.012-06:00

In many ways, Kick-Ass (Matthew Vaughn 2010) is the movie Watchmen should have been. Without aspiring to the epic scope and complex alternate universe sci-fi mythology of its predecessor, Kick-Ass presents an indictment of our culture of violence and complacency all the more effective on the big screen because of its smaller scale. Based on a recent (2008-2010) comic written by Mark Millar and illustrated by John Romita, Jr., Kick-Ass introduces us to Dave (Aaron Johnson), a well-intentioned high school student who, after reading lots of comic books and ruminating on the glut of real villains in the world, begins to wonder why there aren't any real costumed super heroes to fight them. In an admirable but poorly thought out attempt to make crime-ridden New York City a safer place to live, Dave buys a teal wetsuit and resolves to become one.

Although he starts small - intervening in car thefts and tracking down lost cats - Dave's alter ego, "Kick-Ass," only really succeeds in getting his ass (violently and severely) kicked until his nearly futile heroism is witnessed by a roomful of unhelpful onlookers with video phones. After the video of his antics goes viral on the internet and Kick-Ass makes the news, Dave enjoys a moment of popularity and success until he winds up in over his head and has to be rescued by Hit Girl and Big Daddy (Chloë Grace Moretz and Nicholas Cage), a pair of real, bad-ass costumed vigilantes with a serious vendetta against organized crime kingpin Frank D'Amico (Mark Strong).

Kick-Ass is not a movie short on traditional entertainment. It offers exciting action sequences featuring the amazing, purple haired Hit Girl alongside goofy, off-color humor, often at Dave's expense. However, while the stylized, effects laden fight scenes of the costumed vigilantes in Zak Snyder's shiny adaptation of Alan Moore's similarly themed Watchmen dulled the effect of the film's extreme violence, Kick-Ass pulls no punches. Hit Girl and Big Daddy may show off awe inspiring moves, but, depicted with gut wrenching plausible realism, their actions seem excessively brutal even when juxtaposed with the horrific crimes of the unsympathetic goons they so ruthlessly kill.

Aiming for "shock" rather than "cool," Kick-Ass is not kind to its heroes, and it does not hesitate to pass judgment on of every member of its cast. Although their hearts may be in the right place, Big Daddy and Hit Girl have clearly crossed a moral line with their singularly vicious crackdown on organized crime, and Dave, in his naive quest to aid a general public too desensitized and apathetic to lift a finger for their fellow man, is forced to choose between failing utterly and embracing the same brutality.

With is smallish cast and simple plot and Dave's self-deprecating narration, Kick-Ass makes it easy to get to know its characters and care about them when they bleed. But, despite Dave's original intentions, the idea of a future full of costumed superheroes is more ominous than hopeful in the end. As entertaining and comic as the film - and even some of its ultraviolence - may be, its relatively happy ever after ending can scarcely begin to band-aid the gaping wound created by its dark themes, flippant violence and cynical attitude.

Cosmic Horror Express

2010-02-28T00:00:00.002-07:00

If, after watching The Creeping Flesh (Freddie Francis 1973), you longed for more films in which British horror icons Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee play rival scientists whose lives are turned upside down by the discovery of the skeleton of a previously unseen and very likely evil prehistoric man, then Horror Express (Eugenio Martín 1972) is the movie for you.

Made in the previous year by Spanish director Eugenio Martín, this film, which also goes by the more dynamic (and descriptive) international title, Panic in the Trans-Siberian Train, shares the basic premise but little of the mood of its almost immediate successor. While The Creeping Flesh, though not a Hammer film, is, like much of the Hammer catalogue, basically a lurid exploration of human nature's darker aspects, Horror Express makes comparatively little comment on the human condition, focusing instead on conceptually chilling sci-fi horror.

When Professor Sir Alexander Saxon (Lee), on an archaeological expedition to Manchuria, discovers an ancient skeleton that he believes could be the Missing Link, he is understandably protective of his find, particularly when he discovers that his scientific rival, Dr. Wells (Cushing), will be sharing his train-bound journey back across Siberia. But while Saxon is callous and suspiciously evasive regarding the contents of his packing crate and Wells' efforts to discover his counterpart's secret are questionably moral, neither character presents himself as a true mad scientist or villain. Instead, the pair are eventually forced to work together to protect the world's population from the monster they have accidentally released, and both the positive and negative facets of their own personalities become secondary to the disaster on the train.

Saddled with an event rather than character driven plot, Martín and his team conquer somewhat campy costuming and special effects with eerie darkness, skillful editing and a downright terrifying cosmic horror concept in the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft or The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby 1951).

SPOILER ALERT

In fact, the cause of the panic on the trans-Siberian train may be one of the most conceptually alarming monsters on film. What begins with the fairly conventional idea of a scientist discovering something ancient, ape-like and nasty slowly reveals itself to be something much more scary: an alien parasite capable of plundering people's brains for their memories and skills (a fatal process), transferring its consciousness from body to body, and transforming its victims into an army of zombies. Combining the traditional horror elements of both stunted human evolution and uncharted outer space, the being plays on more than one of the basic fears that have haunted horror fiction for generations. It is also neigh impossible to defeat.

A fairly astonishing film, Panic in the Trans-Siberian Train is an entertaining romp liberally laced with bleak and violent horror. With its Victorian Era locomotive setting, playful dialogue and innuendos, cosmopolitan cast (and a cameo by Telly Savalas as a sadistic military captain), Horror Express has more in common with a period adventure thriller like The Assassination Bureau (Basil Dearden 1969) or, considering its archaeological element, Raiders of the Lost Ark (Steven Spielberg 1981), than it does with many of the Hammer Horror films with which its stars are usually associated. But even though the movie's view of human life is much more positive, its attitude toward the truly unknown - in outer space and, to a lesser extent, in Earth's own undiscovered past - is at least as pessimistic. The scientists in the film are not defying nature or pushing the bounds of moral experimentation, but - in true cosmic horror fashion - even their ordinary research reveals knowledge that can lead only to disaster.

Sundance 2010: Southern District (Zona Sur)

2010-02-18T20:30:00.001-07:00

Since the Inca Empire was conquered by the Spanish in the mid 16th century, people of European descent have lorded over Bolivia's indigenous population in one way or another. In recent years, however, especially with the election of the country's first Native Bolivian president in 2005, this historic trend has finally begun to change.

Writer/director Juan Carlos Valdivia's 2009 film Southern District (or Zona Sur) examines this change from the perspective of an upper class white family and the Indian servants they employ. Living in La Paz's ritzy title district, Carola (Ninón del Castillo) is the matriarch of a family that has belonged for generations to the ranks of idle rich. As Bolivian society evolves, however, the family, though no longer rich, continues to be idle. Desperate to hold on to the lifestyle to which she is accustomed, Carola slips into debt as she struggles to maintain her family villa and support her spoiled children. But while the eldest son, Patricio (Juan Pablo Koria), unquestioningly exploits the family's perceived station to indulge in a life of leisure beyond his mother's means, it is becoming harder and harder for Carola, set in her ways as she is, to ignore the fact that the family's longtime indigenous manservant, Wilson (Pascual Loayza), is on his way to becoming her socioeconomic equal.

Winner of both the World Cinema Directing and Screenwriting awards at this year's Sundance Film Festival, Juan Carlos Valdivia constructs a slow, quiet and somewhat Impressionist film that effectively portrays a family reluctant to let go of a comfortable existence that soon will be, as someone once said, gone with the wind. Cinematographer Paul de Lumen employs a camera that constantly moves around the scene, heedless of the characters and what they are doing. Although the technique is distractingly overt, by literally passing by the actors on the set the camera movement surely emphasizes the way in which time itself is passing these characters by.

The only parts of the film that are shot and edited traditionally are the daydreams of Carola's youngest child, Andres (Nicolás Fernández). Largely unsupervised by his otherwise overbearing mother, the little boy, like de Lumen's camera, drifts easily from the company of his older siblings and their peers to the companionship of Wilson and the other Native Bolivians who live and work in the community without regard for race or class. The youngest character and the only one in sync with the camera, Andres clings neither to a bygone lifestyle nor to an impossible dream for the future; unbiased, his mind is open in the present. When he daydreams on the villa roof, Andres imagines flying with his mother on homemade paper wings.

Sundance 2010: Splice

2010-02-16T10:18:00.001-07:00

As an avid horror fan and former member of Washington University in St. Louis' film club, Splice, I was compelled to make Cube (1997) director Vincenzo Natali's latest film a priority at Sundance.

Splice (2009) is certainly appropriately named. A highly unusual monster movie-parenting/coming of age story hybrid, the film tells the story of two maverick (and stylishly quirky) scientists, Clive and Elsa (Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley), whose revolutionary gene splicing program is commandeered and castrated by their corporate backers after the lab's first major success creating a new organism out of the combined DNA of several different animals. Because their medical research was cut short before they had the chance to carry out their plan to splice in human DNA, the indignant pair decide to attempt the unpredictable experiment in secret.

Overreaching scientists are frequently criticized for "playing God," and Clive and Elsa, like their antecedent Frankenstein, venture into particularly murky ethical territory by creating a human-like life form. Throughout the film, the highly unscrupulous pair oscillate wildly between treating their creation, Dren (Delphine Chenéac), like a person and treating her like an interesting lab culture, and each "parent" reacts to the "child" differently as she ages and matures. But even though the film focuses on the ethical irresponsibility of the scientists involved, Elsa and Clive's decisions are so consistently and catastrophically terrible that they elicit far more disbelief than the movie's pseudo-scientific premise. An entertaining venture to be sure, Splice loses much of its disturbing poignancy as it descends into the sometimes laughably absurd. And while the film remains shocking throughout, it eventually arrives at a surprising degree of genre conventionality.

However, as the narrative and protagonists fly off the handle, Dren remains dependably fascinating. The monster is often the most sympathetic character in a Frankenstein film, but Dren is somewhat different. While the audience usually recognizes the humanity in a creation that the Frankenstein character and his peers regard as either a curiosity or an abomination, the viewers of Splice see in Dren's physical and behavioral characteristics not only humanity but extreme alienness as well. Victimized by her incompetent creators, Dren is a sympathetic person, but the unfamiliar animal elements in her carelessly spliced DNA also make her terrifying. This alien unpredictability is the film's most interesting aspect and, far more than the ridiculous behavior of the fully human characters, it underlines that thematic warning against scientific irresponsibility: How could anyone create a living, thinking being with such little regard for the consequences?

Sundance 2010: Buried

2010-02-02T10:15:00.001-07:00

Many horror movies have political agendas - or at least easily espouse political readings. The sci-fi horror of the 1950s, for example, was often critical of the atomic age (Them! (Gordon Douglas 1954)) or the Communist enemies in the Cold War (It Conquered the World (Roger Corman 1956)), and some could easily be read as indictments of either Communism or McCarthyism, depending on the sympathies of the viewer (Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel 1956). Buried (Rodrigo Cortés 2010) is much more alarming. Without dressing its subject up in an outlandish horror element like aliens or giant ants, the film depicts an all too realistic horror situation inspired by and set within an actual political conflict, the current war in Iraq.

After his convoy is attacked, civilian truck driver Paul Conroy (Ryan Reynolds) wakes up buried in a box with nothing but a cell phone in Arabic and a few sources of light. When Paul receives a call from his captors demanding the ransom that could save his life, he tries to use his telephone to contact someone who might be able to help. The unproductive runaround that Paul is put through by his employer, personal acquaintances and government agencies alike offers open criticism of United States corporate and foreign policy and, if possible, enhances the feeling of helplessness of the ordinary man in the coffin.

What the movie lacks in subtlety it makes up in atmosphere and relative restraint. While most of the directors courted by American screenwriter Chris Sparling wanted to expand the film, Spanish Hitchcock fan Rodrigo Cortés was eager to direct the movie as it was written: set completely within the underground box. Inspired by the master of suspense's smaller scale movies like Life Boat (1944) and Rope (1948), Cortés, relying on several different coffin sets to vary the mood of each shot, effectively plays with the extreme claustrophobia inherent to the film.

Although, to provide enough action to sustain a 94 minute movie, the script occasionally requires some (but not unreasonable) suspension of disbelief, overall, the film's old fashioned formula effectively transfers to a setting grounded in current events. A modern film with a Hitchcockian influence - especially obvious in its opening credits laced with descending vertical lines - Buried is even more strongly based in that primal fear of Edgar Allen Poe, being buried alive. In a movie about the helplessness of one person whose survival depends upon the mercy of others, even Ryan Reynolds' admirable one-man-show performance becomes secondary to the film's atmosphere and horrific, claustrophobic scenario - a timeless terror again made real by the worst corruptions of the modern age.

Sundance 2010: Tucker & Dale vs. Evil

2010-02-01T11:00:00.000-07:00

Any Salt Lake City film festival experience would be incomplete without a screening at the Tower Theatre at midnight. Host to yearly full-house midnight screenings of The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman 1975) and Evil Dead 2 (Sam Raimi 1987) and other crowd favorites, the theater proved an appropriate venue for Eli Craig's survival horror parody, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil (2009), unarguably the most fun film I saw at the festival.

When they stop at a gas station to purchase that staple of sustenance, beer, a group of vacuous college students on their way to a campsite in the Appalachians encounter Tucker and Dale (Alan Tudyk and Tyler Labine respectively), a pair of grubby locals stocking up on power tools and implements of destruction. The kids flee in fear, but the camera sticks with Tucker and Dale, an instantly likable pair headed into the woods to fix up their new "vacation home," a creepy, dilapidated cabin which our heroes, always looking on the bright side, do not find disturbing at all.

After the pair rescue beautiful psych major Allison (Katrina Bowden), who hit her head when they surprised her skinny-dipping, the rest of the panicky coeds assume that their friend has been kidnapped by bloodthirsty hillbillies. Led by the aggressive and increasingly neurotic Chad (Jesse Moss, who as the sole attendant of the film's 2AM Q&A cited "douche-bag frat boys" as his character inspiration), the students violently - and incompetently - retaliate against their confused adversaries with grisly, suicidal results.

Less a horror movie than a gory miscommunication farce, Tucker & Dale vs. Evil is filled with funny and well orchestrated slapstick and situation comedy. But what really sets the movie apart from the flattest teenage horror comedies is Tucker and Dale themselves. While the college kids are - as is usual in slasher movies - little more than underdeveloped cannon fodder, the title characters are charismatic and relatively well fleshed out. Written by Morgan Jurgenson and director Eli Craig, the screenplay, laced with witty banter, focuses on the longtime friendship between the agreeable protagonists and diffident Dale's development into horror hero and romantic lead. By creating characters the audience can care about and root for, Craig and Jurgenson prevent their movie from descending into idiocy and gore. A small scale buddy movie that, for the most part, refrains from stretching its premise too far, Tucker and Dale vs. Evil is successfully funny and, more importantly, fun.

Sundance 2010: Enter the Void

2010-01-29T14:00:00.000-07:00

Gaspar Noé's Enter the Void (2009) is an explosion of innovative artistry and cinematic experimentation. After Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), an American drug dealer living in Tokyo, is shot and killed resisting arrest, the story of his life cut short and the ongoing lives of the people around him unfolds though a series of stream-of-consciousness-like sequences that weave together Oscar's past, his friends' present and the ultimate fate of his confused and drifting soul.

For at least the first half of the film, Noé's psychedelic brainchild is extremely engaging. Either in the first person - as Oscar's spirit wandering though his loved ones' lives - or from a position behind Oscar's head - in flashbacks to his living past - the camera invites the audience to share in the mishmash of memory, tantalizing bright lights and the living world he is unwilling to let go that makes up Oscar's Tibetan Book of the Dead inspired afterlife. The rich visuals, special effects and drifting narrative imaginatively unveil the full story of Oscar's life while at the same time extrapolating from a religious text the sensory perception of a dying soul who, as his life flashes before his eyes, is torn between this world and the next.

Although Oscar and the other inhabitants of Tokyo's seedy underbelly are sympathetic and the motivations behind their chronically bad decisions understandable, neither investment in the characters nor fascination with Noé's unusual directorial style is quite enough to justify this repetitive film's over two and a half hour running time. It is certainly possible that, by subjecting his audience to hours of flashing lights, voyeuristic depictions of graphic sex and plot lines impossible to resolve, Noé was making an artistic decision to further immerse the viewer in Oscar's endless and increasingly nightmarish semi-existence. Unfortunately, it seems equally likely that the auteur director was simply unwilling to cut out excess materiel, especially when you consider a particularly outrageous indulgence near the end of the film that, according to a somewhat miffed post-screening Noé, "was not supposed to be funny."

Enter the Void is, for the most part, a lavish experiment in the experience of life and death. But unlike the stlolen life of the young protagonist through whose eyes we view the world, the movie is just plain too long.

Sundance 2010: Obselidia

2010-01-27T15:30:00.007-07:00

The word, "romantic," has several related definitions: "of, pertaining to, or characteristic of a style of literature and art that subordinates form to content, encourages freedom of treatment, emphasizes imagination, emotion, and introspection, and often celebrates nature, the ordinary person, and freedom of the spirit;" "characterized by a preoccupation with love or by the idealizing of love or one's beloved;" " imbued with or dominated by idealism, a desire for adventure, chivalry, etc."

Obselidia (Diane Bell 2010) is a romantic movie. Although the film's central characters are - in something of an independent movie cliche - a quirky loner, George (Michael Piccirilli), and the free-spirited woman (Gaynor Howe) who reinvigorates his life, its real romance is the one the characters and filmmaker carry on with history, hope for the future and human invention.

Reluctant to accept technological advancement at the cost of the obsolescence of older creations, gloomy librarian George's most common social connections seem to come from the interviews he conducts with people whose dying livelihoods he chronicles in the Encyclopedia of Obsolete Things (or Obseledia) he is composing on his typewriter. But George's cynical attitude toward modernity clashes with his loving nostalgia for the beliefs and devices of the past. With the help of Sophie, a zesty silent film projectionist who drives George to Death Valley to speak to Lewis (Frank Hoyt Taylor), an environmental scientist whose predictions suggest the human race and the world as we know it will themselves be obsolete in only a few decades, George is at last able to broaden his romantic mindset to encompass not only the disappearing aspects of the past but also the fleeting joys of the present.

Writer/director Diane Bell's overt message about appreciating life and living it to its fullest so pervades the substance of the film that it threatens to overwhelm the audience with warm and fuzzy preachiness. However, with the exception of an unnecessary, uncharacteristically clunky epilogue that makes the main point seem, if possible, even less subtle, the bulk of the film is redeemed by Bell's concise script and slow pacing and Zak Mulligan's languid cinematography. Accompanied by Liam Howe's simple, arpeggiated score - a thematically appropriate descendant of Bach's Prelude #1 from The Well-Tempered Clavier and Philip Glass's Koyaanisqatsi performed on obsolete musical instruments - picturesque images of Death Valley and the quirkier parts of Los Angeles combine to form a dreamy illustration of Bell's benevolent worldview.

Filmed in only 18 days, Obselidia delivers a life affirming message though a harmonious combination of plot, dialogue and form. Although the moral to the story is unduly heavy handed, the film's quiet beauty is inspiring nonetheless.

Sundance 2010: The Red Chapel

2010-01-26T23:00:00.005-07:00

After living in Salt Lake City, Utah most of my life, this year, with Film Walrus visiting from out of town, I finally took steps to attend the Sundance Film Festival.

The first film we saw was the Danish documentary, The Red Chapel (Mads Brügger 2009). Disturbed by the oppressive dictatorship of North Korea and determined to expose its evils, filmmaker Mads Brügger enters the country on false - or at least deceptive - pretenses: Claiming to be socialists interested in a cultural exchange, Brügger and the Danish-Koren comedy team he manages - Simon Jul Jørgensen and Jacob Nossell - receive permission to perform in the North Korean capitol, Pyongyang. The team is allowed to film, so long as they submit all of their footage to government authorities for review. Consequently, only spastic comedian Jacob, whose Danish the North Koreans find incomprehensible, is able to speak his mind to the camera.

Although Brügger sets out to make a documentary with a clear political goal, the completed film is much more complicated than the one the director seems to have originally planned. The group's emotionally patriotic North Korean chaperon, Mrs. Pak, and the smiling uniformity and uncanny perfection of the school children the trio meets on their tours of Pyongyang certainly underscore Brügger's original point about Kim Jong Il's terror-inducing regime, as do the actions of the government officials who hijack and rewrite the comedy show, effectively eliminating the visiting comedians' artistic freedom.

As alarming as the North Korean society depicted seems to be, however, Brügger's own zeal to expose the evil he sees frequently compromises his own ethical integrity. He subjects Simon and Jacob to all kinds of manipulative pageantry in order to accomplish his goals, and the director is admirably willing to include footage that does not cast him in a particularly attractive light.

Though presented with disturbing evidence of North Korea's attitude toward the disabled - the conspicuous absence of handicapped people, the hosts' fawning attention - Jacob is able to extend much more sympathy to the people around him than Brügger does towards his documentary's subject, and Jacob's kind and passionate reaction to these oppressed people reveals the complexity and humanity in their situation much more effectively than Brügger's contemplative voiceover. The Red Chapel is a unique and fascinating film that tempers an extremely upsetting subject with dashes of comedy and absurdity and, ultimately, with a dose of warmth extended to all people, even those whom the filmmaker initially condemns as enablers of an oppressive regime.

Rats and the City

2010-01-21T22:12:00.001-07:00

Plenty of movies have been made about the unsatisfying emptiness that comes with "success:" the high powered job, the beautiful wife and, in this case most importantly, the beautiful house. Of Unknown Origin (George P. Cosmatos 1983), a slightly campy horror movie built on noir-ish themes, may not be the very best of these films, but the angle from which it tackles the popular motif is probably unique.

On the surface, businessman Bart Hughes (Peter Weller) has as perfect a life as is plausible. When his beautiful wife takes their son on a trip out of town, however, everything starts to go wrong. His boss and smarmy co-workers usurp the project he was excited about at work; his wife and son amble carelessly through one leisure activity after another and refuse to come home when he says that he needs them; and, most remarkably, a giant, malicious rat begins to wreak havoc inside of his spotless, self-renovated house.

As the other, more universal problems intensify, their negative effects are compounded exponentially in the crisis with the rat. And as Bart's social and professional relationships deteriorate and his concentration falters, his conflict with the local vermin descends into an all-out war resulting in several injuries to his person and many more to his ideal home. (I should take this time to make clear that the rat in the house is, in fact, giant, evil and out to get the hero. We see shots from its point of view before Bart even knows it's there. His is not an unbalanced obsession; Bart's dedication is merited.)

An argument could certainly be made that Of Unknown Origin is all about Bart regaining his manhood - perhaps even his person-hood - lost after years of living with a job where he isn't appreciated and a wife who constantly measures him against her father's accomplishments. Personally remodeling his house into a safe and lovely home may have brought a dose of manly pride, but can it really compare to the animal satisfaction of clobbering an enemy (and everything nearby) with a nail-studded baseball bat? In spite of Bart's physical and emotional suffering and the (occasionally ridiculous) horror elements of the film, the nefarious rodent ultimately provides our proper and fastidious hero with a catharsis of primal self-sufficiency and violence.

Before

After: Peter Weller solidifies the shift from family drama
to thriller with liberal swigs of the giallo beverage of choice

But Bart's regression into a man-with-club-fights-animal mindset is ultimately short lived. Faced with a week of loneliness, when all his stifled problems are free to rear their ugly heads at once, Bart suffers a breakdown, but, after the emotional relief that comes with the destruction of the rat, he seems to settle back into his former life without ever addressing its underlying problems.

Based on the novel The Visitor by Chauncey G. Parker III, Of Unknown Origin takes a prevalent film noir concept - the loss of individual worth in the face of a largely vacuous society - and offers a horror scenario as a solution to the problem. As the film's nightmare sequences illustrate, Bart loves and misses his family, and he strains to provide them with a safe and happy home. His less than extraordinary everyday existence may be damaging some part of his spirit, but to make a life with the ones he loves the return to normalcy is necessary. Although the film's outwardly happy ending seems to ignore the unresolved issues with his job and family, Bart's intense battle with the furry invader has indeed kept him from life crises' more usual balms - extramarital affairs, for instance - and provided the release necessary for him to go back to an imperfect existance that is probably really as good as it gets.

As the conflict with the rat develops, Bart and those around him frequently tout the uncanny survival ability of rats: they can chew through almost anything, live after being flushed down the toilet and tread water for days. These clever creatures are the ultimate survivors, and Bart, who rises both to defeat the most wicked rat in the world and to reign in his mania and return to family life in the soul crushing asphalt jungle that has swallowed so many of our favorite anti-heroes, may have developed a similar instinct.

Witchfinder General: The Tragdey, "Man"

2010-01-17T22:07:00.008-07:00

I'd like to say that Witchfinder General (Michael Reeves 1968) is overrated, but it wouldn't be quite the right word. Well regarded on account of its lack of camp and a particularly chilling performance by AIP regular Vincent Price, Witchfinder General is deftly crafted according to British wunderkind Michael Reeves' clear artistic vision. The story is inspired by real life Witchfinder Matthew Hopkins, who, ruthlessly exploiting a society of fear, was paid for exposing and destroying "witches" during the English Civil War, and Reeves uses this dreadful scenario to demonstrate the very worst of human nature in his bleak (and liberal) adaptation of Ronald Bassett's historical novel.

Traveling East Anglia with his sadistic henchman (Robert Russell), Matthew Hopkins (Vincent Price) contentedly collects his blood money as he goes from town to town - until he incurs the wrath of Richard Marshall (played by Reeves' boyhood friend Ian Ogilvy), a soldier in Oliver Cromwell's army, who, after Hopkins and his cronies rape his fiancee (Hilary Dwyer) and execute her uncle (Rupert Davies), an ostracized Catholic priest, as a witch, embarks on an insatiable quest for revenge.

With his usual entertaining scene chewing stripped away, Price gives a raw performance that is indeed exceptional, and the Witchfinder he portrays exudes a bald and human evil. In combination with Reeves' unpleasant vision, however, Price's humorless performance makes the movie very difficult to watch. Unlike many horror movies of this and other eras, Witchfinder General does not really use exploitation elements - sex, nudity and violence - to entertain, although all three feature prominently in the film. Instead, the sexual and violent crimes are portrayed as cold and horrible, and the jeering villagers who enjoy the sight enhance the hideousness of the situation. And Marshall's revenge, when it finally comes, is a gruesome and inevitable conclusion, awful and not remotely satisfying.

A grim and serious horror film, Witchfinder General is hard to enjoy, except, perhaps, as one might enjoy a difficult work by Joyce or Faulkner - for the clever skill of its construction and not necessarily for plot or characters or even for the pleasing way in which the words fly off the page. Feeling somewhat chastened for my fondness for the schlockier works of Vincent Price, I can't help but prefer them to this bitter, disillusioned film, uncomfortable, harsh and real. Not an entertainment, this movie is instead a lesson in the dark, corruptible nature of Man and his active role in his own, perhaps deserved, destruction. Although fans and scholars may complain about US distributor American International Pictures' marketing decision to retitle the picture, The Conqueror Worm, in an baldfaced attempt to fit it into its ongoing series of Poe adaptations, I find the new title and the poem from which it comes thematically appropriate:

. . . the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.

Erecting the Tomb of Ligeia

2009-12-06T20:23:00.011-07:00

With a deceased title character whose persistent presence dominates the action of the film, it is not terribly difficult to argue that Alfred Hitchcock's Oscar-winning thriller Rebecca (1940) is a horror film. Those who would like to see the story of a dead wife whose malignant presence plagues her widower and his new bride presented without genre ambiguity, however, might take a look at Roger Corman's The Tomb of Ligeia (1964) instead. One of an almost inexhaustible stream of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations starring Vincent Price, many of the best of which are directed by Corman, the film is - like most in the series - liberally extrapolated from a short story by Poe, in this case, "Ligeia."

Like many of Poe's stories, "Ligeia" illustrates a simple but disturbing idea: An unusual and strong willed woman succumbs to illness only to rise again by taking over the body of her morbidly obsessed husband's second wife. Neither outlandish pseudo-scientific experimentation nor mind control is involved. While the amusing but inferior adaptation I saw at this year's St. Louis International Film Festival - Ligeia (Michael Staininger 2009), filmed, in part, at my alma mater Washington University in St. Louis - loses its inspiration's upsetting aura in a tangle of cumbersome backstory, overt sexuality and jagged narrative structure, the earlier film - starring St. Louis native Vincent Price - benefits from a creepier and more controlled, if only slightly less free, interpretation by screenwriter Robert Towne.

While Price supports the film by lending his peculiar gravitas and credibility to the role of widower Verden Fell, this adaptation, like Rebecca, focuses on the unsettling experiences of the leading man's new wife, Rowena (Elizabeth Shepherd). Self possessed and not easily rattled, Rowena is not your average exploitation leading lass, and Elizabeth Shepherd, who seems to have been cast on account of her acting ability more than the size of her bust, gives a solid performance as a somewhat reckless woman whose plan to land a mysterious stranger backfires in the extreme.

Hardly the tightest of Corman's Poe adaptations, The Tomb of Ligeia maintains a suspenseful and sinister mood throughout the patchwork of horror movie tropes - hypnotism, possession, pagan customs, aversion to sunshine and possibly the most evil black cat in cinema - that blankets Poe's original tale. Constructing a pastiche from genre conventions, classic literature and popular films of the previous decade including House of Wax (André De Toth 1953) and Disney's Sleeping Beauty (Clyde Geronimi 1959), Roger Corman builds an entertaining thriller around a female character whose initial strength accents the horror of her situation as her self-assured existence descends into hysteria and hell. While Michael Staininger's version, with its sex, violence and slick 2000s style, feels very much like an exploitation film, it can't compete with an entry from Roger Corman, the exploitation movie master.

Frankenstein Project, Part VI

2009-10-22T00:30:00.000-06:00

Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (Terence Fisher 1974) is the final installment in Hammer's Frankenstein series, and, in many ways, it feels more like a summary of the series or the conclusion to an essay than the traditional climax of a violent horror plot. Like Frankenstein himself, regular director Terence Fisher and screenwriter Anthony Hinds have stitched together the best elements of the preceding films to create a new movie designed to be the culmination of those that came before, a monster of a Frankenstein film composed of familiar but no less shocking salacious details and a healthy dose of 1970s caliber gore.

Like the other films in the series, Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell gets down and dirty right away, this time rolling the credits over a vagrant (former Doctor Who Patrick Troughton) robbing a grave. Pursued by the police, the bodysnatcher eagerly gives up his employer, Dr. Simon Helder (Shane Briant), a wide-eyed young surgeon intent on replicating Frankenstein's experiments by studying his hero's published works. Even though the camera dwells on the gruesome details of these experiments and Simon himself is condescending and suspicious, the audience's sympathies are quickly swayed in favor of the young doctor when he finds himself convicted of sorcery and imprisoned in an insane asylum. There, after Simon is abused and humiliated by brutal guards before an audience of unsympathetic madmen, Baron Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) - masquerading as the resident physician, Dr. Victor - arrives as a savior. He stands up to the asylum director; he treats the patients with relatively tender understanding; he elevates Simon from inmate to assistant physician and allows him access to the experiments he had idolized and tried to recreate.

As in several of the previous films (II, III, and IV in particular), Frankenstein's experiments appear enlightened and their practitioners heroic underdogs juxtaposed as they are with the dregs of society, and, in this extreme culmination of the cycle, the effect is particularly acute. By setting the story in an asylum for the criminally insane, Hinds elevates the distastefulness of the supporting cast even beyond their usual nastiness: the institution's director is a sex obsessed rapist, his minions are sadistic, and their charges, while more sympathetic, are, for the most part, too unhinged to build the film a moral backbone.

Instead, viewers are forced to rely on Simon for any diegetic moral judgment. Slender, blue-eyed and fine featured, Shane Briant is an excellent physical match for Peter Cushing, and that visible similarity emphasizes Simon's role as Frankenstein's foil. Though more similar to his counterpart than many cinematic or literary foils, Simon more effectively highlights Frankenstein's character than any of the Baron's previous assistants. Paul Krempe (I) instantly opposed his friend's endeavors, Hans (II, III) mostly shadowed his mentor and Karl (V) was forcibly compelled to participate in the experiments. But Simon, who echos his hero's scientific enthusiasm and moral ambiguity and is hardly an example of righteousness himself, most sharply highlights Baron Frankenstein's monstrosity when even he vehemently opposes his mentor's most offensive actions.

Although Simon, jaded by the persecution of medievally closed-minded courts, seems to share Frankenstein's complete disregard for his fellow man and even appears to approve of the Baron's ruthless exploitation of the more extraordinary mental patients, his sociopathy stops short of his idol's, particularly when it comes to women. Vacillating from film to film between charismatically dubious and utterly villainous, Frankenstein has shown consistent disrespect for the women he meets, regarding them either as a nuisance (I, II) or an object (I, III, IV, V) predominantly useful as a vessel for his talent or his monstrous progeny. In the sixth installment, "The Angel," a traumatized mute, fills this role completely, and Madeline Smith's static face, arched eyebrows and perpetually pouty lips make for an awfully doll-like appearance that emphasizes her objectification. Frankenstein regards "The Angel" first as his surgical proxy and then as a handy breeding tool (which will fulfill her "real function as a woman"), and even though both Simon and the monster regard her as an object to protect, their efforts to shelter her from Frankenstein's particularly demeaning influence finally result in the return of her voice and her identity.

While the loosely principled Simon is eventually able to learn from Frankenstein's mistakes and look in horror on their disastrous results, the Baron himself is not. Most of the previous films end with Frankenstein's apparent death, but the final installment, working with a markedly cyclical formula, emphasizes its hero's ultimate inability to accept defeat or consider the widely destructive consequences of his radical experiments. At the end of Mary Shelley's book, a hitherto repentant Frankenstein again begins to show signs of his old lust for knowledge and fame, even at the expense of his own life and others. Likewise, and even more plainly depicted in this film, it is Frankenstein's unyielding ambition - unabated even in the face of carnage and disaster - that makes the story and its title character most chilling.

Frankenstein Project, Part III

2009-10-15T00:30:00.001-06:00

Over the course of the series' nearly two decade run, almost every installment of Hammer Horror's Frankenstein saga was directed by prolific studio regular Terence Fisher, whose harsh but lurid style helped develop the economical, gritty and yet over-the-top look and feel that was a credit to the Hammer name. But the third film, The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), is the exception. Directed by Oscar-winning cinematographer Freddie Francis (who also directed The Creeping Flesh), The Evil of Frankenstein offers a smoother, more alien look noticeably different from Fisher's - and the Frankenstein series' - usual style.

And the new director is not the only change to manifest itself in the series' third installment. Although the film maintains Hammer's usual and rather misanthropic attitude toward the human population as the whole, it completely rewrites the history of Frankenstein and his monster, bringing the updated franchise much closer to the Universal series of the 1930s and providing the most sympathetic portrayal of the Baron in the entire Hammer series.

Persecuted by closed minded people who - he believes - are far too devoted to preserving the used-up bodies of the dead, the bankrupt Frankenstein (still, in spite of major continuity issues, Peter Cushing) and his assistant Hans (now, in keeping with those continuity issues Sandor Elès) return to Castle Frankenstein to sell off assets and financially revitalize their research. The town is full of the usual nasties - the cruel and jeering proletariate, corrupt officials and their bimbo wives - but Hans and Frankenstein find a friend in a mute girl (Katy Wild), who has found Frankenstein's original monster in a glacial cave where he was preserved after being shot in the rewritten backstory. Able to revive the body but not the bullet damaged brain, Frankenstein is forced to turn to a sinister hypnotist (Peter Woodthorpe), who uses the monster for his own selfish gain.

Victimized by the opportunistic hypnotist and by the Church-blinded citizens of his hometown and elsewhere, this Frankenstein - much more affable than any other Hammer incarnation and completely exonerated by the film's new backstory - is an idealist who waxes poetic about scientific progress and rants frustratedly about the suffocating influence of the Church. This is a film about faith - Frankenstein's faith in science, and everybody else's faith in what they have been told about God - and, in a world where everybody's faith is unwavering, science and God cannot coexist. Victimized again and again, Frankenstein is only "evil" when perceived by the unenlightened populace.

In a particularly symbolic sequence,

the monster absconds with the cross from a church

Freddie Francis offers a stylized 1960s reinterpretation

of the lab and monster seen in James Whale's Frankenstein (1931)

Although it is visually rich and thematically sound, however, The Evil of Frankenstein feels rather like a pastiche of early horror references. Frankenstein, his monster, his lab and his vivification process all closely resemble their incarnations in James Whale's 1931 version, and the hypnotist and his activities are blatantly reminiscent of Dr. Caligari. This would not be a problem, but, additionally burdened with a cumbersome flashback necessary to screenwriter (and regular Frankenstein producer) Anthony Hinds' detailed reconstruction of the Baron's backstory, The Evil of Frankenstein is left little time for the disturbing and original elements that make Hammer's output such exceptional schlock.

Next: Frankenstein and the Monster from Hell (Terence Fisher 1974)

Part IV: Frankenstein Created Woman (Terence Fisher 1967)

Part V: Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (Terence Fisher 1969)

Frankenstein Project, Part II

2009-10-08T00:30:00.008-06:00

Even though The Revenge of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher 1958) ostensibly begins immediately after the end of the previous film, Peter Cushing's Baron Frankenstein is already something of a changed man. It may sport the same director and screenwriter as The Curse of Frankenstein, but this second installment in the Hammer Horror series inspired by Mary Shelley's famous novel takes a completely different approach not only to the title character's radical medical experiments but also to the ethical dilemmas involved.

Frankenstein himself is as smug and superior as ever, but screenwriter Jimmy Sangster's speedy exposition skims swiftly over the events of the previous film and encourages the audience to forget the Baron's less forgivable crimes (murder, for instance), suggesting instead that it was the acts of Frankenstein's monster alone that sent him on a journey to the gallows. Even more important, however, is the new film's change of scene: After escaping execution and putting in a single sinister appearance in a graveyard, Frankenstein moves his operation to the city of Carlsbrük, which, unlike the confined atmosphere of Castle Frankenstein - home to a small scale family drama in which the central character was obviously the villain - gives the filmmakers the opportunity to manifest a grimy and cynical view of the human condition, a task at which the Hammer Film Production company particularly excels.

While the main characters in the film are sympathetic and well developed, the population of the town at large is generally deplorable, and next to the callous and selfish members of city's business elite and the crude and filthy members of its lower classes, the refined - and retroactively reformed - Frankenstein seems nearly admirable. Carlsbrük is a big city full of big medical men interested in receiving big paychecks from big name clients. The only thing they hate more than the stench of the poorhouse is watching their well-to-do clients defect to the practice of the charming Dr. Stein (guess who), whose business they had initially tried to squelch by denying him membership in their big medical council. Using the money paid to him by upper class women with imagined conditions, Frankenstein - doing a little good for once - operates a hospital for the poor, from whom he scavenges (but does not, as far as we know, take by force) human parts for the construction of his new creations.

Even Frankenstein's experiments are marginally humanitarian. Feeling persecuted by the closed minded populace and the stagnantly traditional scientific community, Frankenstein vows to take revenge upon the population by proving his genius once and for all. To that end, the doctor, with the help of his protegee, Hans (Francis Matthews), transplants the brain of Karl (Oscar Quitak), a clever but crippled man desperate to be normal . . .

. . . into a handsome and well-formed body he has constructed (Michael Gwynn). Once again, the "monster" is the most sympathetic character in the piece.

Although Frankenstein's intention to exploit Karl as a scientific curiosity reflects poorly on the Baron and exposes his aristocratic egoism, most of the really nasty occurrences in the film are the result of accidental happenstance and persecution by either the exclusive and conspiratorial medical council or the frightened and unreasoning vagrant mob. The film's protagonists - Frankenstein, Hans, Karl, a beautiful social worker (Eunice Gayson) and, to a degree, the poor hospital's uncouth, philosophizing orderly (Lionel Jeffries) - are islands of humanity on the surface of a dirty and unpleasant world. In a metropolitan landscape full of far worse things than he, Frankenstein may well deserve his revenge, even if it is not, ultimately, as public as the Baron would have liked. In what is possibly my favorite film in the series, the Revenge of Frankenstein is as ironic as it is sweet.

Coming next week: The Evil of Frankenstein (Freddie Francis 1964)

Frankenstein Project, Part I

2009-10-01T00:30:00.013-06:00

Even though this blog has already been largely dedicated to horror, I have decided, in the tradition of Film Walrus (on hiatus) to celebrate October with a Halloween movie series. In the tradition of this blog, the theme will be Hammer Horror Frankenstein. Just under a year ago I began this blog with a post entitled, "In the Beginning: Frankenstein Created Woman," based on the fourth installment in the series, and I have since written about the fifth. Now I intend to fill in the gaps.

Released in 1957, director Terence Fisher's The Curse of Frankenstein marked the beginning of Hammer's Frankenstein series, as well as its cycle of remakes of the Universal horror classics. In this lurid re-imagining marginally more faithful to Mary Shelley's original than James Whale's definitive 1931 version, Victor Frankenstein (Melvyn Hayes) is the orphan son of a respected baron. Without his parents to guide him, the precocious teenager takes it upon himself to hire a tutor, Paul Krempe (Robert Urquhart) to guide him in his scientific research. After years of dedicated experimentation, the pair at last discover the secret to life itself when they successfully revive a dead dog. But, while Krempe is eager to publish this extraordinary advance, Frankenstein (now and forever Peter Cushing), to the growing horror of his partner, becomes obsessed with pushing their discovery to the next level: the creation of a new life form.

Shelley's Frankenstein mentions an interest in electricity early in the novel, but refuses to explain the construction of his creature of his vivification process. Faithful to that tradition, this Frankenstein gives his creature life using an unexplained machine that relies on electricity, multi-colored bubbling potions and a tank full of water - clearly the inspiration for the process in The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman 1975)

Like most cinematic Frankensteins (and unlike the literary original), the Baron is completely devoted to his creation even after he brings the horrible thing to life. But the creature (Christopher Lee) is not similarly steadfast. Instantly confused and violent, the monster first attacks his creator then, when left unattended, wanders the surrounding countryside and apparently kills an old man and a small child. However, none of these crimes occur onscreen, and not even the bodies of the victims are shown. Although some of this restraint may have to do with the film's pre-Psycho release, the decision effectively downplays the monstrosity of Frankenstein's creation. Coupled with the heavily made-up Lee's perfect expression of ponderous confusion and unsure and gangly gestures, this somewhat ambiguous editing emphasizes the monster's status as the victim of an irresponsible creator.

This bag of spilled mushrooms is the closest we get to seeing

the body of one of the rather sympathetic monster's victims

In contrast to the pitiable monster, the Frankenstein presented by Jimmy Sangster's screenplay is oddly unsympathetic. While the audience might forgive (or at least understand) the Baron's fanatical devotion to his experiments, it is difficult to empathize with a man who, without hesitation or regret, causes the deaths of those whose demise might help, or whose continued life might hinder his work. He also - in a salacious but poorly developed side plot detrimental to the movie as a whole - cheats on his fiancee (Hazel Court) with his maid (Valerie Gaunt).

Although the character somewhat redrawn - and much more likable - in some of the series' later films, this Frankenstein most noticeably reflects the nature of his creation. Throughout the film, the Baron persistently blames every unfortunate incident (including one of the aforementioned murders) on accidental damage caused to the monster's brain; unlike his guilt-stricken literary counterpart, he refuses to accept responsibility for his actions. Like his monster, Frankenstein is amoral and single minded. And clever and superior as he may believe himself to be, the Baron's moral blunderings indiscriminately ruin everything in his path. But, while we pity the monster - newborn, confused and abused - it is difficult to spare a tender thought for Frankenstein who, well educated and (initially) beloved by family and friends, really ought to know better.

Coming Next Week: The Revenge of Frankenstein (Terence Fisher 1958)

Doctor What?!

2009-09-01T11:30:00.000-06:00

Anybody who knows me or looks at this blog has probably figured out by now that I have a weakness for the sensational and over-the-top. I enjoy the films of Edgar Ulmer, Robert Siodmak and Dario Argento. I like sci-fi villains who keep giant robots in their underground lairs (little robots are also acceptable, provided they are powered by evil pig brains). I like the extremes - in light, color, scenario, violence and villainy - that often characterize horror and film noir. Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon 1985) is one of my favorite films. But Paco Limón's jaw-dropping 2007 feature Doctor Infierno (which also goes by the much less gripping English language title, Dr. Hell) belongs in a category all by itself; it delivers a quantity of excess nigh impossible to surpass.

Basically a semi-comedic pastiche of signature elements of science fiction and horror, this film nevertheless remains uniquely nasty and bizarre: Dr. Infierno (Arturo De Bobadilla) is a well respected member of the medical community, but he is a flawed man perverted by an egomaniacal ambition to control the world. Beneath his gynecological practice, Dr. Infierno has built a hellish, prison-like complex where he conducts vastly unethical research on human and animal patients, transforming them into disturbing hybrids and dangerous mutants. One of the doctor's more remarkable inventions is an experimental curative serum which lends its taker monstrous strength and power. This serum has been stolen by Nurse Garcia (Belinda Fernandez). When Dr. Infierno dispatches an assassin (David Ransanz) to get rid of her, the confused hitman, in the opening scene of the film, brutally murders the wrong woman. This man is Our Hero. The film unfolds hilariously with one shocking development after another, and, although it borrows copiously (and affectionately) from Transformers, James Bond and the darker recesses of science fiction horror, the film's untraditional approach to character and plot lends much originality.

Most delightful on account of its constant barrage of outrageous surprises, Limón's astounding film would likely lose much of its charm when seen a second time. Nevertheless, this sparsely viewed film is worth a look for any fan of the twisted or insane. Successfully operating with digital material on a shoestring budget, Paco Limón borrows old fashioned low budget techniques - like low-key lighting - to create a relatively smooth if cheap production buoyed by innovative episodes from the sexually nauseating to the playfully ludicrous. Shot almost entirely in black and white, Dr. Infierno relies on its stylized monochrome cinematography to soften the onslaught of grisly imagery, allowing audiences to appreciate the film's shocks and grotesqueries for their uniqueness instead of averting their eyes or turning their stomachs.

Frankenstein: Creator of Monsters

2009-08-31T20:38:00.005-06:00

For a film series to continue successfully, each installment must bring something new. After composing an unusual film about identity, class, gender and exploitation in Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) director Terence Fisher and star Peter Cushing return to Hammer's Frankenstein with a film about crime, consequences and corruption: Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed (1969), the fifth installment in the series.

The film begins with a bang: a doctor is brutally decapitated with a sickle as he approaches his own doorway, and Hammer's trademark thick, red blood spatters the sign of his practice. In this film, Dr. Frankenstein (Cushing) is not a morally ambiguous character. Twisted by several years (and four feature films) of cutting edge experimentation dangerous, destructive and morally dubious, the haughty and superior Frankenstein continues to spout the same spiel about scientific advancement for the good of humankind, but his words have turned particularly hollow as, without hesitation or remorse, the unempathetic scientist turns to murder, kidnapping and rape. Like woes, one crime doth tread upon another's heel, and Frankenstein, himself introduced in a monstrous disguise, sows seeds of monstrosity among all he encounters.

Apart from the usual Frankenstein Monster created out of dead and dying bodies (in this case involving a successfully transplanted brain), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed features more mundane monsters born of the doctor's corrupting influence.
Already trading cocaine to pay for her mother's hospital care, young Anna (Veronica Carlson) and her fiancee, Dr. Karl Holst (Simon Ward), easily blackmailed into Frankenstein's employ, are so desperate to protect one another that they become complicit in a series of horrible crimes.

Even the best people are shown to have the capacity to leap into a deadly downward spiral of illegal and immoral behavior. For love, for fear and for terrible revenge, with Dr. Frankenstein as catalyst the characters in the film turn to violence and crime with police investigators following close behind. As police experts repeatedly tell brusque Inspector Frisch (Thorley Walters) that these unique and dastardly crimes could only have been committed by a doctor it becomes increasingly clear that this film is rather appropriately named. For his own crimes and the monstrous effects of his bloody, obsessive experimentation, Frankenstein must be destroyed. Or stopped, at least.

Elisha Cook Jr. Film Series: Dillinger

2009-08-22T15:26:00.002-06:00

Even the FBI admits that, during the Great Depression "many Americans, nearly helpless against forces they didn't understand, made heroes of outlaws who took what they wanted at gunpoint. Of all the lurid desperadoes," claims the FBI, "one man, John Herbert Dillinger, came to evoke this Gangster Era, and stirred mass emotion to a degree rarely seen in this country." It is not, therefore, surprising that Dillinger (Max Nosseck 1945), the first film based on the notorious criminal's life, was billed as "the shock-by-shock life story of the most feared and wanton gunman since Jesse James."

But while Henry King's 1939 biopic depicts a sympathetic Jesse James - a tragic antihero of a bygone age driven to a life of crime by unfair land grabs made by powerful, legally untouchable railroad companies - this Dillinger effectively strips its subject (dead barely 10 years) of any and all folk hero accolades, instead painting a picture of an irredeemable sociopath, cunning and cruel, with little charm and no endearing characteristics.

Dillinger stars Elisha Cook, Jr. as Kirk Otto, an experienced bank robber who begins to appreciate John Dillinger's criminal ingenuity after his clever plan springs Kirk and his friends from prison. But, like fellow silver screen egomaniacs Scarface and Little Caesar before him, this cinematic Dillinger (Laurence Tierney, in his first major role) uses his criminal connections only to further his own agenda and set himself up as an underworld king. However, while films like Scarface (Howard Hawks 1932), Little Caesar (Mervin LeRoy 1931) and, later, White Heat (Raoul Walsh 1949) have similarly vicious central characters, Dillinger fails to elicit the same enthusiasm and emotional involvement.

When I was taking a class in American Film Genres back at Wash U, I remember Prof. William Paul suggesting that The Godfather (Frances Ford Coppola 1972) is not a good gangster movie because its characters don't enjoy committing crimes. Apparently desperate to avoid creating a version of a nearly contemporary criminal that audiences would root for, Dillinger, too, never allows its title character to relish his dreadful deeds, and, unlike The Godfather, which is an excellent drama regardless of its debatable genre purity, this movie suffers for it.

While Cook's character - grape loving and beloved by a charming elderly couple - evinces plenty of endearing human characteristics, Tierney's bitter, stoney faced Dillinger is cold, violent and unpleasant. Borrowing only a few token (famous) events from the real John Dillinger's life, screenwriter Philip Yordan - with help from an uncredited William Castle - constructs a imaginary crime spree for the outlaw's unappealing fictional counterpart that includes the brutal murders of several helpless individuals. And although the cinematography and editing by Jackson Rose and Edward Mann, respectively, viscerally emphasize the unforgivable violence of these crimes without actually showing them onscreen, Tierney's frosty performance presents a perpetrator neither loveably lawless nor deliciously evil.

So eager are the filmmakers to avoid presenting a recently active criminal as some sort of folk hero that they remove almost every trace of truth (both positive and negative) and, more importantly, sympathy from their Hollywood Dillinger story. The resulting movie invites the audience to gawk at untrue crimes but loses whatever soul it might have had by focusing on acts but not the man.

It! or . . . Fright in the Museum?

2009-08-22T13:54:00.006-06:00

I once attended a documentarians' seminar at the Imperial War Museum in London. Museum officials were adamant that the images and films of soldiers housed in their vaults be used only for the most upright and respectful purposes. It seems the same does not (or once didn't) apply to the use of their premises.

Though I doubt the film much impresses today's IWM curators (in spite of the fact that it was filmed there), the basic notions behind Herbert J. Leder's 1966 horror film It! are actually, amazingly quite sound. A true Cold War movie, It! brings the legendary Golem - a powerful man made being sculpted out of living stone and indestructible by water, fire or force - to contemporary London, leading to an escalating arms-race style conflict once the invincible Golem's power is, inevitably misused. Unfortunately, the film's relevant anti-nuclear proliferation message is awash in a sea of muddled schlock.

All the troubles begin when ambitious assistant curator Arthur Pimm (Roddy McDowall), an increasingly unstable nutcase somewhere between The Brain and Norman Bates, discovers the Golem amongst the artifacts at his museum. Fancying himself a bit of a whiz with the supernatural, Pimm soon learns to control the statue, but, being power hungry and insane, he proceeds to use it for destructive - and frequently illogical - purposes. The situation spirals out of control.

It's as if Leder wrote a number of scenes that could belong in a movie like this, strung them all together without cutting anything or checking for continuity, handed the whole mess to Roddy McDowall, and said, "Please save my movie." To his credit, the film's star very nearly manages to turn the material into something watchable and worthwhile. Delightfully unhinged, McDowall carries It! with almost enough strength of character to make Pimm's various ludicrous and contradictory actions believable when covered by the blanket excuse: he clearly just plain insane.

But while the movies' general descent into madness does, to some degree, reflect on the corruptible nature of man, Pimm's over the top insanity make it very difficult to relate to the protagonist and his ridiculous decisions. The government's violent reaction to Pimm and the Golem certainly echo alarming real world wartime rationalizations, but that plot-line comes very near the end. The rest of the film, though fairly entertaining, is, overall, so silly as to undermine its themes. In It! we see the sensational exploits of a singular loony but learn very little about the tragic temptation of an ordinary man.

Scientific Method and The Creeping Flesh

2009-08-09T16:30:00.003-06:00

There are plenty of movies out there about mad scientists who get into trouble trying to play God. But not every scientist can compete with the Jekylls, Frankensteins and Wests, who, through their misused genius, design extraordinary experiments with jaw dropping and disastrous consequences. Most people have to struggle along in the cruel and finance draining publish-or-perish scientific community, praying for a breakthrough in their painstaking research. Thus the protagonists of The Creeping Flesh (Freddie Francis 1973), who, even more than most premature publishers, come to regret the hasty exploitation of remarkable discovery.

After years of all-consuming, asset devouring research into the origin and evolution of mankind, Emmanuel Hildern (Peter Cushing) has finally discovered something really special: the skeleton of a huge, mentally advanced humanoid buried far deeper than the earliest specimens of prehistoric man. Although the discovery alone represents a scientific breakthrough, Emmanuel is over-eager to establish a conclusion exciting enough to win him the prestigious Richter Prize before his morally dubious but financially successful younger brother, James (Christopher Lee), who runs a mental institution and has been conducting rather disturbing research of his own into the causes of insanity.

Emmanuel's bright laboratory and scientific method may look sound and admirable next to his brother's extreme and violent research, but his actions are only marginally less rash and self absorbed. After the skeleton displays bizarre rejuvenating properties (the titular creeping flesh), Emmanuel hurriedly concludes that the bones he has uncovered belong to an ancient, evil creature mentioned in the mythology of the region of its discovery. Now able to extract some of the creature's blood, Emmanuel takes his research in a Henry Jekyll-ish direction, attempting to design a serum to inoculate mankind against the influence of evil as doctors inoculate against disease.

The Richter Prize is not the only motivation for Emmanuel's overhasty theorization. After having his unfaithful wife committed to his brother's asylum, Emmanuel has been fearing for years that his over-sheltered daughter, Penelope (Lorna Heilbron), will exhibit symptoms of her mother's mental condition.

When the straight-laced, obedient, house-bound and aptly named Penelope finds out what really happened to her mother, whom she had been told was dead, and finally rebels against her father, he overreacts and, fearing for her mental health, injects her with his unproven serum. The girl almost immediately heads for the nearest tavern, where she gets into a great deal of trouble of various sorts and begins a journey into true insanity, supposedly as the result of her father's dangerous serum.
While the ancient skeleton and Emmanuel's experiments upon it place this movie fairly comfortably within the realm of science fiction, there is little proof that the serum the protagonist creates has any measurable effect upon human behavior. Penelope's uncharacteristic post-injection actions could easily be attributed to the rebellion of an angry and brutally repressed young woman victimized first emotionally by her spectacularly overprotective father and then physically by the men she meets in the outside world. Has she been driven crazy by the serum or by persistent trauma, shock and abuse at the hands of a misogynistic society? Even the potentially hereditary nature of her insanity is called into question by flashbacks that depict her deeply unhappy mother's arrest by James' men after a series of wild extramarital affairs.

Nearly every action taken by the scientists in the film is based on false assumptions and unproven theories. Even the evilness of the prehistoric monster is scarcely concrete. Told through slowly nesting flashbacks reminiscent of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene 1920), The Creeping Flesh presents the story of two men so absorbed in their scientific research and consumed by their need to control and be right that they will pursue their own interests at the expense of wife, daughter, family and ethics, scientific or otherwise.

Return from the Grave

2009-08-08T10:32:00.005-06:00

After a rather lengthy hiatus, I return at last to my blog just as the subjects of today's movie return from the grave: covered in insects and with the ability to teleport. That's right - I'm not your average zombie. Lucio Fulci's 1980 film City of the Living Dead (Paura Nella Città Dei Morti Viventi - AKA "The Gates of Hell" and literally "Fear in the City of the Living Dead") features some of the most alarming zombies you will ever encounter.

Set predominantly in Dunwich - that's Lovecraft's New England Dunwich, not the real town in East Anglia (though I find it immensely satisfying that parts of that actual place have, over several generations, in fact sunk into the sea) - City of the Living Dead is essentially a more mundane, Judeo-Christian version of "The Dunwich Horror," which garners this entry a 'Lovecraft' tag, in spite of the film's general lack of cross-species procreation and cosmic horror. Instead of opening a portal to another dimension and releasing the all powerful Old Ones to wreak chaos and destruction upon the Earth, this Dunwich's wicked priest hangs himself in a graveyard, thereby opening the Gates of Hell and priming the world for a zombie apocalypse on All Saint's Day, when all the world's dead will rise. In the meantime, however, the late Father Thomas (Fabrizio Jovine) entertains himself by terrorizing the people of Dunwich - appearing, disappearing, and murdering them by smothering them with bugs and slime, squishing their brains and decimating their bodies by the power of his evil gaze.

In his Creature Features Movie Guide, John Stanley charges that director Lucio Fulci "is more interested in showing a woman vomit her guts out, a drill penetrate a man's head," etc. than anything else, which makes the movie "pointlss . . . and revolting." This complaint is not without merit. While the film's basic premise is solid enough, its plot - involving not only the people of Dunwich but also a psychic (Catriona MacColl ) and a reporter (Christopher George) from New York City searching, oddly aimlessly, for the cursed town and a way to close the Gates of Hell - is poorly thought out and hardly sustains even the most cursory analysis. It is, indeed, much more a sequence of alarming and disgusting scenes than it is a cohesive story, and its climax is narratively unfulfilling.

However, the horrific elements of the film - its bread and butter - are hardly worthless. Sergio Salvati's cinematography, full of intense, Spaghetti-Western-ish close-ups of eyes and uneasy pans in darkened rooms, and Vincenzo Tomassi's jarring editing techniques provide a delightfully unsettling atmosphere, making the plot-shy movie surprisingly suspenseful, and Fulci's use of bugs and slime in lieu of the more traditional bloody gore makes each brutal death unusual and disturbing. The zombies in City of the Living Dead are also uniquely terrifying: Instead of crawling out of their graves and slowly and randomly stalking the living in search of delicious internal organs, these undead are sneaky, powerful and purposefully malignant. They pose as dead bodies and appear outside windows to frighten their prey; they sneak up behind people and yank out their brains; they can TELEPORT. No mere flesh eating automatons - dead and "all messed up" - these are the minions of Hell.

The call of Cthulhu? or possibly Satan

There might be interesting academic points to address in this film, but I'm not going to look for them. It seems against the spirit of the movie even to try. Undeniably nasty, City of the Living Dead bridges its gaping plot holes with innovative horror (and occasional, intentional comedy), but watching it requires a specific mood and mindset. In spite of countless flaws, this film may be easily enjoyed by those who, like Lucio Fulci are more interested in having a sick bit of fun than in pursuing a grippingly suspenseful thriller.

The Moral of the Legend of Hell House

2009-05-10T15:34:00.000-06:00

There are two kinds of haunted houses in cinema: the kind people stay in by accident - The Innocents (Jack Clayton 1961), The Shining (Stanley Kubrick 1980), The Orphanage (Juan Antonio Bayona 2007) and the like, including a good chunk of J-horror - and the kind people stay in on purpose - The Haunting (Robert Wise 1963), House on Haunted Hill (William Castle 1959), 1408 (Mikael Håfström 2007) et cetera. Movies of both types are often psychological thrillers in which the perceived haunting is linked to the protagonists' questionable sanity, but, in the second case, the characters put themselves in danger by design, for money or some other kind of personal gain - they want to show that they can survive the haunted house; they want to find evidence that the house is haunted, or that it isn't; they want to rid the house of malignant spirits. Going in with their eyes open and something to prove, the people who stay in haunted houses on purpose are either very brave (they're liable to get hurt) or very stupid (they deserve what they get), and the characters in The Legend of Hell House (John Hough 1973) are no exception.

Adapted by Richard Matheson from his own novel, Hell House, The Legend of Hell House begins, like many stories of its type, with a company assembled by a wealthy benefactor to study the paranormal activity in an infamous haunted house. Led by imperious physicist Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill), who is always accompanied by his wife, Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt), the team also includes a promising young mental medium, Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin), and a jaded physical medium, Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowall), the only survivor of the last expedition to this house some twenty years ago. Though one might easily describe this film as "The Haunting, with sexual content and closure," - particularly considering the similarity of its title to that of the earlier film's source material, Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House - The Legend of Hell House does differ from that and other similarly conceived films in one fundamental way: There is never any doubt, even from the beginning, that the house is actually haunted.

By presenting mediums, poltergeists and visible ectoplasm as hard scientific facts unquestioned from the very outset of the film, Matheson removes the possibility of insanity and unreliable narration (visible and otherwise) from the mix. Instead of dwelling on the validity of the haunting, therefore, the film focuses on interpersonal conflicts the stem from the characters' different reactions to the spirits around them and their incompatible ideas concerning how to contend with the supernatural forces at work in the house. The haunting affects each character differently and all of them adversely, brewing dissent and hostility as their viewpoints and methods begin to clash and each character becomes convinced, beyond a doubt, that his or her hypothesis must be correct.

Cinematographer Alan Hume and editor Geoffrey Foot enhance the film's unsettling atmosphere, making jarring cuts from wide angle long shots -
- to fairly extreme close-ups.
The film's stylized construction keeps the audience off-kilter while simultaneously highlighting both the isolation and hostility each character endures. Not about one person's - or even a group's - struggle with their concept of reality, The Legend of Hell House is, as its title, expanded from the original Hell House, could imply, a story with a moral. Here is a tale of human nature, of how our compassion, curiosity and unwavering convictions can do us in when we refuse to cooperate with one another. Although this point is underlined each time a character slips into some darkened room determined to face the ghouls on their own, the haunted house and its central mystery, barely relevant to the film's principal themes, ultimately exist only as a disturbing venue for this sparsely cast, widely applicable fable.

The Feminine Mystique: Trapped in the Shuttered Room

2009-05-09T22:06:00.003-06:00

In her article, "When the Woman Looks," Linda Williams proposes that "the female look - a look given preeminent position in the horror film - shares the male fear of the monster's freakishness, but also recognizes the sense in which this freakishness is similar to her own difference. For she too has been constituted as an exhibitionist-object by the desiring look of the male. There is not that much difference between an object of desire and an object of horror as far as the male look is concerned." Williams further suggests that "the power and potency of the monster body in many classic horror films . . . should not be interpreted as an eruption of the normally repressed animal sexuality of the civilized male (the monster as double for the male viewer and characters in the film), but as the feared power and potency of a different kind of sexuality (the monster as double for the woman)." Although I'm not always a proponent of gender studies in cinema, at least when it comes to grand, sweeping arguments like this one, David Greene's eerie 1967 horror film, The Shuttered Room, provides a textbook example in which Williams' thesis holds true.

Adapted from a book by H.P. Lovecraft and August Derleth, The Shuttered Room follows Susannah Whately (Carol Lynley) who, raised in New York after the death of her parents, returns to her childhood home of Dunwich Island on the arm of her new, "older and wiser" husband, Mike Kelton (Gig Young). In keeping with Lovecraft's fascination with human evolution and its opposite, Dunwich is an isolated island community that civilization seems to have passed by. Overseen by austere Aunt Agatha (Flora Robson), the island's superstitious inhabitants need no monster to help them express their animal sexuality, and a gang of young ruffians led by Oliver Reed's sexually aggressive Ethan prowl the island harassing the newcomers like a pack of wolves.

But even they are afraid of the infamous Whately Curse brought on by the island's most primitive inhabitant, the resident of the shuttered room.

Almost exclusively depicted through point of view shots peeking through the titular shutters, the monster is key not only to the movie's ominous atmosphere and central mystery but also to its depiction of Susannah's impotent femininity.

A well groomed, big city blonde, Susannah seems always to be either shepherded by her well-meaning but almost oppressively condescending husband or ogled and harassed by a physically threatening band of animalistic youths and their would-be-rapist leader. On her own, she seems endlessly vulnerable: a "perfect woman" - the kind to be seen and not heard - stripped of any undesirable, uncultivated qualities, including the ability to look out for herself.

SPOILER ALERT

It seems that Susannah Whately, like Henry Jekyll, has been split in two: The prim, presentable, vulnerable young woman is shipped off to civilization to become the victim of men, all the more helpless when she returns to that half-wild place of her birth. Meanwhile, her stronger, baser characteristics have been left behind with her sister, Sarah (also played by Carol Lynley), who lives like a wild animal, trapped inside the shuttered room.

Carol Clover has described how, in the slasher film, the viewer's potential identification with the monster - through point of view shots - wanes as camerawork begins to privilege the Final Girl: "We are linked, [through point of view shots], with the killer in the early part of the film, usually before we have seen him directly and before we have come to know the Final Girl in any detail . . . By the end, point of view is hers: we are in the closet with her, watching with her eyes . . ." Though The Shuttered Room can hardly be considered a slasher film, it is possible to view Sarah as both the monster and the Final Girl, watching ominously from her hiding place and striking out at those who happen by until she finally eliminates the film's most tangible threat: Ethan, the man who has, increasingly violently, pursued her sister.

The Shuttered Room gives us the essence of Linda Williams' feminized monster. "What is feared in the monster," she writes, "is similar to what [Susan] Lurie says is feared in the mother: not her own mutilation, but the power to mutilate and transform the vulnerable male." Carol Lynley's sisters Whately show us not only just how frightening that animal womanhood Williams connects to cinematic monstrosity can be but also exactly how useless and incomplete a woman becomes when those potentially threatening elements are removed.

Elisha Cook Jr. Film Series: Hellzapoppin'

2009-05-07T22:00:00.004-06:00

Here begins a series of posts honoring the films of everybody's favorite ubiquitous genre film performer, Elisha Cook, Jr.

Probably best remembered for his performance as the pint-sized thug, Wilmer, in The Maltese Falcon (John Huston 1941), Cook was a prolific character actor and a particular mainstay of horror and noir during a career that lasted from the 1930s to the 1980s. I think that's all the introduction this man needs:

In Hellzapoppin' (H. C. Potter 1941), Elisha Cook, Jr. stars as a Hollywood screenwriter hired to adapt a popular play to the screen. A long running hit on Broadway, the original stage-play Hellzapoppin' was a chaotic musical revue crammed with ridiculous slapstick and topical humor and headlined by former vaudevillians Ole Olsen and Chic Johnson. Its onscreen counterpart, on the other hand, jettisons those political and pop culture references to send up a topic nearer at hand; it turns instead to the subversion of moviemaking conventions. Although much of the film is nearly too silly to take, it deserves recognition for the innovative ways in which playwright Nat Perrin tackles the transition of his work from stage to screen.

While plays can often make relatively talky or confined movies as they try to bend the cinema to accommodate their original form, Hellzapoppin' bends to fit the cinema instead. I am not normally a fan of adaptations that present greatly altered versions of their source material, but I have never seen the original play, so I have no reference point from which to be outraged. Consequently, I am free to admire the way in which Perrin and fellow writer Warren Wilson have transferred the Broadway hit's anarchic tone to a new medium.

Have Chic Johnson and Ole Olsen lost something

in translation from stage to screen?

Not only does this movie feature numerous sight gags that could only be created on film, but it also makes use of its physical form, making the projectionist a character in the film and his errors a part of the diegesis. This segment, near the end of the show, was the absolute highlight for me.

Even the plot hinges on the fact that this is an adaptation for film. A movie about making a movie of Hellzapoppin', this film has a plot driven by a fictional Hollywood producer's inevitable meddling, and the bulk of the story actually takes place within yet another nested movie - the movie about creating the stage version of Hellzapoppin' - that the producer wants Chic and Ole to make. Even though the film diverges drastically from its source material, it remains true to its spirit, redirecting its lunacy from the real world to the silver screen. The fictional producer may have wanted to tone down the madness of the play, but thanks to our hero, Harry Selby (Elisha Cook, Jr.), it remains completely batty.

Beyond Redemption?

2009-04-22T16:30:00.001-06:00

Following my post about Bride of Re-Animator, my friend Chris - horror aficionado and fellow Lovecraft fan - wrote this:

"I challenge you to find anything redeeming in Beyond [Re-Animator]!"

Although Brian Yuzna's second Re-Animator follow-up is not as spectacularly bad as that comment might lead you to believe, it is easy to see why he made it. Beyond Re-Animator (2003) may not be particularly terrible, but neither is it particularly interesting, and insightful comments don't exactly leap into the brain.

Just as poorly linked to Bride of Re-Animator as that movie was to the original, Beyond Re-Animator revisits Herbert West (still Jeffrey Combs), now serving time in prison after one of his re-animated corpses escaped and killed an innocent girl. Thirteen years later, the dead girl's brother (Jason Barry) - traumatized by his sister's death and, ironically, fascinated with West's research - arrives as the new prison doctor and recruits Dr. West to work in his lab. Without any more of Lovecraft's original material to fall back on, screenwriter José Manuel Gómez offers a fairly formulaic narrative: An idealistic young doctor is seduced by the death-defying potential of West's research, his dedication to his new calling is jeopardized by his attraction to a beautiful woman (Elsa Pataky), and she, along with Dr. West, is threatened by a powerful, predatory man - here Warden Brando (Simón Andreu) - whose villainy far outpaces the morally dubiety of Herbert West.

A familiar situation

While West's relationship with his partner Dan Cain was important to the first film and crucial to the second, Dan is sadly absent from the third - apparently he testified against his friend - and we are left to examine West alone. Throughout the series, Dr. West has been an unusual protagonist. Re-animating corpses and (both indirectly and directly) causing many, many deaths, he could easily have been portrayed as a villain. However, each film casts him as the victim of a much worse man, which pushes West toward the unlikely role of hero (or anti-hero), and in Beyond Re-Animator he comes into his own.

Now I don't mean to suggest that Dr. West suddenly develops a conventional sense of morality and takes up arms against the forces of evil. Quite the contrary. But Beyond Re-Animator, set in a prison, surrounds its protagonist with so many characters more unsavory than he that it is difficult to have many qualms about the good doctor's actions. Even the supposedly positive characters don't hold the moral high ground very well. Elsa Pataky's reporter is fairly underhanded as she bribes and seduces her way to her story and Jason Barry's young Dr. Phillips - unlike his much more interesting predecessor, Dan Cain - actually seeks out West for the purpose of furthering his experiments, so it is hard to pity him too much when everything goes horribly wrong. Herbert West finds himself the only rational man on a ship of fools: The reporter is reckless, the doctor naive, the prisoners stupid, violent and unpleasant and the sadistic warden blinded by the intoxicating power he so readily abuses. Although West is instrumental in beginning (and occasionally furthering) the chaos that erupts within the prison walls, the other characters' abuses of his discoveries make Dr. West's own experiments seem downright reasonable.

Older, colder and less effeminate than before, Herbert West has, with age and isolation, developed an icy air of detached authority absent from his more neurotic and bully-able younger self. Of course, bullying West has never been a good idea, but, when directed at this older man, the warden's threats and blows are considerably less disturbing than were the intimidating actions of Detective Chapham or Dr. Hill, and West's retaliation seems less desperate and more calculated. Essentially a scientist running a violent, large scale experiment in a confined space, West takes concise action to further his experiments and secure his freedom, casually quipping while his companions destroy themselves. Because all the other characters are either supremely foolish or supremely unpleasant, it is tempting to suggest that they get what they deserve - or at least what they had coming. It's a little like High Plains Drifter (Clint Eastwood 1973), if it were a Spanish produced horror sequel teetering on the shabbier side of mediocrity. The film may be a mishmash of contrived plot and tasteless gore, but, like High Plains Drifter, Beyond Re-Animator offers a cynical and grisly picture of the brutality human nature: Presented with West's remarkable re-agent, these people opt to use it to further torture, mind control and drug abuse, and, against that backdrop, our unemotional protagonist seems refreshingly intelligent. It's actually quite satisfying to watch him get the better of them all.

My work here is done.

Happy Birthday, Chris!

Ten Characters

2009-04-19T12:04:00.005-06:00

Film Walrus tagged me for a list of my ten favorite movie characters - not actors - though, as he notes, character and performance are difficult to completely separate. It is not easy to commit to favorite characters at all, much less without months of careful consideration, but here is a list of ten characters I particularly enjoy. Unsurprisingly, it skews towards film noir and includes plenty of villains:

10. Roger (Ben Wright) - 101 Dalmations (Geronimi, Luske and Reitherman 1961) - As a musician myself, I have a special place in my heart for the songwriter who composes an insulting jazz ditty about his wife's odious friend and then pounds it out on the upstairs piano while she is visiting downstairs.

9. Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) - The Black Cat (Edgar Ulmer 1934) - Though it can't begin to measure up to the real horror classics of the 1930s, Expressionist director Edgar Ulmer's film is remarkable for its lurid excesses, most of which stem from its sensatinoal villain: a traitorous war criminal, who builds an ultra-modern mansion on the site of his wartime betrayal, worships Satan, keeps dead women suspended in his basement and plays chess for the lives of hapless passers-by.

8. Charters and Caldicott (Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne) - The Lady Vanishes (Alfred Hitchcock 1938) - A cheat perhaps, but these two stiff-upper-lipped, cricket obsessed Englishmen are practically inseparable. I'm not the only one who likes them: The steadfast pair banter on, unflappable, through two encounters with European espionage in The Lady Vanishes and Night Train to Munich (Carol Reed 1940) and appear in numerous other films, even persevering after death in the Golfing Story in Dead of Night (Charles Crichton 1945). They may occasionally have different names, but the distinction is moot.

7. David Korvo (Jose Ferrer) - Whirlpool (Otto Preminger 1949) - This smooth-talking astrologer is one of film noir's sneakier and more unusual villains: "I have done many things too clever for you to understand!"

6. Ellen Berent Harland (Gene Tierney) - Leave Her to Heaven (John M. Stahl 1945) - A garish melodrama to be sure (and don't get me started on the book), Leave Her to Heaven sports a different kind of femme fatale. No less deadly than the women of Out of the Past or Double Indemnity, Ellen hasn't got an ulterior motive; all she wants is her husband's unqualified devotion . . .

5. Kitty March (Joan Bennett) - Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang 1945) - I love Kitty March not only because she is a manipulative seductress who casually bleeds her mark of money, talent and self respect but also because of her twisted devotion to her sleazy boyfriend, Johnny Prince (Dan Duryea). Together, they represent my favorite depiction of nasty people in love.

4. Richard III (Ian McKellen) - Richard III (Richard Loncraine 1995) - There's a reason why Richard III is William Shakespeare's most performed play, and it has everything to do with the wickedly conniving (and almost certainly historically inaccurate) title character, who smilingly confides his murderous plans to the audience. Ian McKellen's alternate twentieth century incarnation lives up to the character's gleefully evil potential in a way that Laurence Olivier's more traditional 1955 version decidedly does not.

3. Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) - Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk 1945) - An old fashioned hero for the darker corners of the 20th century - and even more outmoded by the time Robert Altman resurrects him in 1973 - Philip Marlowe seems to be the model for every scoundrel with a heart of gold that Humphrey Bogart played both before and after he tried on the role in The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks 1946). Slightly rougher around the edges, the version of the character Dick Powell plays in this adaptation of Raymond Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely best employs the tough guy persona and cynical, metaphor-laced voiceover that belie his tenderer sensibilities.

2. Ed Wood (Johnny Depp) - Ed Wood (Tim Burton 1994) - Brimming with charm and enthusiasm in spite of his utter lack of talent, the onscreen version of this infamous Z-grade director inspired the essay that got me into college. "Haven't you ever heard of suspension of disbelief?!"

1. Jack Lint (Michael Palin) - Brazil (Terry Gilliam 1985) - As a successful member of this noir-ish dystopia's suffocating bureaucracy, Jack Lint represents a subtle and alarmingly realistic brand of evil. Careless with family and friends, the outwardly pleasant civil servant has traded in humanity for a comfortable office on the 50th floor.

"B" Noir Night at the Egyptian

2009-04-14T14:31:00.000-06:00

Miss me?

I've been around, about and lazy. I've been in Boise. And Los Angeles. And, of course, I can't go to Los Angeles without seeing a movie. And, knowing me, it has to be noir. Fortunately, with American Cinematheque's 11th Annual Film Noir Festival playing at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, I was in luck.

This Noir City festival not only plays genre staples like Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur 1947) but also prides itself on its screenings of lesser known films like the especially rare pair of alliterative, gut-pleasing-cliche-titled flicks I saw on "Forgotten B Noir Double Feature" night: Roses are Red (James Tinling 1947) and Smooth as Silk (Charles Barton 1946).

At first I was most captivated by Smooth as Silk; its lurid plot, cynical characters and unscrupulous femme fatale appealed to my more warped sensibilities. Determined to snag the lead role in a new play, actress Paula Marlowe (Virginia Grey) unleashes her feminine wiles on the elderly theatrical producer, Steven Elliott (John Litel), and his alcoholic nephew, Don (Danny Morton), much to the distaste of her sister, Susan (Jane Adams) - not to mention her boyfriend, Mark (Kent Taylor).

While Paula's shameless exploitation of her blatant sexuality drives the movie toward moral abomination - her manipulation of the pathetic Don is particularly disturbing - the men she toys with react with a foot to the accelerator. Although many noir films feature femme fatales who intentionally drive men to their destruction (Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944), Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang 1945), Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk 1944) . . .), other movies, even some with famous so-called femme fatales (Laura (Otto Preminger 1944), Gilda (Charles Vidor 1946)), are stories of comparatively upstanding women whose mere presence compels men to do terrible things. There are certainly plenty of onscreen women whose horrible actions speak for themselves, but it is the corrosive affect on men that creates both aforementioned types of femme fatale - and Paula Marlowe is a bit of both. Once she has completed her own dastardly plan, the men in her life carry on the downward spiral she began, stooping to murder, manipulation and more: the unintended consequences of her unchecked ambition.

Unfortunately, once Paula's machinations are no longer leading the plot, Smooth as Silk begins to fall apart, slipping, like its male characters, into unnecessary extremes and finally coming to an abrupt, unsatisfying stop that neither its sensational set-up nor its bright, irony laced dialogue can cushion. With a running time of only 64 minutes, Smooth as Silk is a dark and interesting noir that suffers considerably when it bites off more than it can chew.

Roses are Red, on the other hand, is much tighter. It is also considerably lighter - reminiscent, on the surface, of a spunky newsroom comedy-drama like His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks 1940) or Dodge City (Michael Curtiz 1939) or an earlier, pre-noir, less nasty crime film like Roy Del Ruth's 1931 adaptation of The Maltese Falcon. But while Roses are Red holds little room for noir-ish pessimism or moral ambiguity, its underlying themes express the anxieties that helped create American film noir during and after World War II somewhat more richly than do the simple romantic betrayals in Smooth as Silk.

Fresh out of prison, Don Carney (Don Castle) is surprised and thrilled to learn he is the spitting image of the new district attorney, Robert Thorne (also Don Castle, of course). Needless to say, the local organized crime syndicate is only to pleased to kidnap the D.A. and set the doppelganger Carney up in his place. Set in the asphalt jungles of urban America, noir films frequently deal with the loss of individual identity and the corresponding unattainability of the traditional American Dream - to be able to seek your fortune on your own merits, pull yourself up by your bootstraps and, ala Manifest Destiny, claim a piece of this vast country as your own. Film noir mise-en-scene is usually as far away as possible from that friendly notion of self sufficient, cultivated farmland; rain shines on hard asphalt streets instead of sinking nourishingly into the earth, and fruitless, twisted tropical plants cast menacing shadows over the lairs of villains like Roses are Red's crippled crime boss (Edward Keane). Caught somewhere between urban wasteland and malicious jungle, stereotypical noir protagonists are nobodies with no good way to improve their situation. The hero of Roses are Red may be an important man, but he is forced to watch his identity being stripped away by a criminal underworld already clawing its way up into the police force, pecking away at the last protectors of the city's anonymous throng.

However, distressing as it is to watch Evil Don Castle gradually soak up Good Don Castle's individual idiosyncrasies, director James Tinling and writer Irving Elman seem content to leave these darkest elements at the bottom of the plot while its upper layers fill with good guys vs. bad guys action sequences, cheeky dialogue and frank but playful sexuality (How do you tell which outwardly identical man is which, I wonder?). All of the characters -except the truly evil ones - are more positive than those in Smooth as Silk. D.A. Thorne is incorruptible and his enterprising journalist girlfriend (Peggy Knudsen) is a much more active and interesting "good" woman than you generally see in crime films of the 1940s. When it is suggested that Thorne "needs practice" kissing, you don't doubt that he'll get some - and nobody is going to die because of it.

Anatomy of Die, Monster, Die!

2009-03-15T21:14:00.004-06:00

When it comes to genre movies, nonspecific, genre-tag titles are a fact of life. We have horror movies called And Now the Screaming Starts (Roy Ward Baker 1973) and Them! (Gordon Douglas 1954), film noir thrillers called A Kiss Before Dying, (Gerd Oswald 1956), Kiss of Death, (Henry Hathaway 1947) and Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich 1955), and countless other unhelpfully titled genre films of poor and splendid quality alike. Saddled with a generic exploitation title, Daniel Haller's 1965 film Die, Monster, Die! - released in the UK with the equally nonspecific name, Monster of Terror - sounds suspiciously like a film that distributors knew was horror, and therefore exploitable, but did not quite know how to sell. Watching the movie, it's easy to see why. Adapted from H.P. Lovecraft's 1927 story "The Colour Out of Space," Die, Monster, Die! is a transitional film balanced oddly between traditional Gothic horror and the science fiction terrors of the atomic age.

Looking for the girlfriend he met in a university science class, American Stephen Reinhart (Nick Adams) arrives in Arkham, England. The residents are friendly enough at first, but their geniality evaporates as soon as they discover that Stephen will be visiting the family seat of the local members of the ruling class. Unable even to rent a bicycle to help him reach the Witley family estate, Stephen ventures there on foot, passing over eerie expanses of desolate heath where the only vegetation that remains are the black, crumbling corpses of trees. When at last he arrives at the house, Stephen meets not only his girlfriend, Susan (Suzan Farmer), but also her unwelcoming, wheelchair bound father, Nahum Witley (Boris Karloff), who does not want Stephen to stay, and her mysterious, bedridden mother, Letitia (Freda Jackson), who wants Stephen to take Susan away.

By transporting the action to an English country estate, screenwriter Jerry Sohl has adapted Lovecraft's unsettling but impersonal science fiction treatise into a story of the isolated, antiquated aristocracy devouring themselves from the inside out. When the American visitor arrives in the British incarnation of Lovecraft's ubiquitous Massachusetts town, he finds Arkham quaint but certainly not outmoded. But the Witley family home is an imposing, Gothic mansion with one ominous secret in the upstairs bedroom and another, more sinister one in the stone-walled cellar.

Although the house itself is an appropriate setting for an old fashioned horror tale, the younger characters in this contemporary film do not blend in with their Gothic surroundings. Stephen Reinhart is a stereotypically brash American immediately out of place on a European estate, and Susan, the daughter of the house, looks even more incongruous investigating creepy nighttime noises in a pair of decidedly 1960s, fluffy, blue slippers.

The members of the older generation, on the other hand, reflect the antiquity of their home. While the local aristocracy once served as the cornerstone of this community, the increasingly classless modern world has rendered them largely irrelevant. Susan's parents, meanwhile, obstinately clutching their bygone nobility, have physically withered along with their land. Given a more aristocratic family name than the comparatively plebeian, occupational surname, Gardner, that belongs to the farming family in the original text, Mr. Witley is so tied to his old money and family heritage that he bears regal, golden lions on his wheelchair, the very symbol of his infirmity.

Witley's inability to separate himself from past glories finds emphasis in the casting of 1930s horror legend Boris Karloff. Nearing the end of his career (Karloff died in 1969), the actor most famous for portraying Frankenstein's Monster inevitably recalls the glory days of Hollywood's Gothic horror, a film genre that, in the 1960s, was beginning to feel as outdated as Nahum Witley's crumbling family honor.

But while Die, Monster, Die! may have plenty to say about the fate of Gothic horror, it refuses to share the genre's obsolescence. This Cold War era movie certainly indulges plenty of old school, haunted house style scares, but the central mystery unfolds to reveal not a traditional monster (as the film's absurd title suggests) but a threat rather more reminiscent of the radiation laced monstrosities of the atomic age.
The science fiction components of the film feel decidedly more up to date than its dreary Gothic foundation; nevertheless, even they emphasize the chasm between the Witley family and the real world. Instead of opting to evolve and advance like Arkham and the rest of the modern world, Witley tries to revive his family's relevance by, like the classic overreacher, meddling with elements he does not understand.

Exploring the greenhouse of the Witley estate, Susan observes the effects of her father's experiments:

"The scent in here," she says, "It's so sweet. It's sickening."

And Stephen replies: "It's the effect of decay."

In Die, Monster, Die!, Arkham, Steve and Susan represent an enviable, twentieth-century norm, while antiquated traditions and hasty scientific advancement are, alike, corrosive.

"And Now, If You'll Take the Necronomicon and Return it to the Library . . ."

2009-03-11T22:04:00.011-06:00

Of the numerous movies based on the works of H. P. Lovecraft, The Dunwich Horror (Daniel Haller 1970) is one of the few that offers a viewing experience comparable to reading one of the author's tales. Slow and atmospheric overall, the film begins with the birth of Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell), whose dastardly conception is described in a brilliant title sequence of morphing silhouettes - the highlight of the film.

Now, twenty five years later, Whateley is determined to release the Old Ones - an ancient race of powerfully destructive extra-dimensional beings - upon the world. He visits Arkham, Massachusetts to look at the demonic Necronomicon and returns home to Dunwich with a beautiful ingenue (Sandra Dee) in his thrall, intending to use her to complete his evil plot.

(R-L) Dean Stockwell, Sandra Dee and the Necronomicon

While some adaptations of Lovecraft's short stories pad their feature length narratives with extraneous gore, The Dunwich Horror - as adapted by Curtis Hanson, Henry Rosenbaum and Ronald Silkosky - while not faithful to the letter of Lovecraft's text, adheres admirably to its relatively simple story line. Indeed, although the movie ultimately sports a relatively high body count, it contains almost no graphic violence. Instead, the filmmakers rely on Lovecraft's concepts to generate the horror: Wilbur Whateley's villainous, inhuman power of seduction, the threat of unseen monsters from another dimension. And, although monsters figure heavily in the plot of the film, they almost never appear onscreen - an intelligent decision; nothing makes a horror movie laughable faster than a poorly rendered monster. Elements of the supernatural appear only in brief flashes, while their nefarious influence is none too subtly implied by bizarre color effects.
The film was produced by schlock house, American International Pictures (AIP) - in fact regular AIP affiliate Roger Corman himself slipped a Lovecraft adaptation into his gothic Poe series starring Vincent Price; The Haunted Palace (1963) is actually based on "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" - and, in the context of exploitation cinema, director Daniel Haller (art director for The Haunted Palace and numerous other Corman productions) shows admirable restraint. With plenty of eeriness and a good dose of sexual content, The Dunwich Horror successfully creates a more cinematic version of Lovecraft's original story.

The most interesting element of The Dunwich Horror, however, is the story of Wilbur's ostracized clan and his own uncertain place upon his family tree. Shunned and slighted by Dunwich's intolerant mob, Wilbur Whateley could, for all his villainy, easily be interpreted as a lonely man looking for a place to belong and willing to commit any unspeakable crime to make the world his home. Unfortunately, as the film stretches on with its dream sequences, color flashes and long scenes of wicked rituals and demonic chanting, Haller, as Lovecraft himself is wont to do, seems to lose track of the human element of the story, leaving us with a final product that is intellectually but neither emotionally nor viscerally upsetting.

What was that about Watching the Watchmen?

2009-03-08T11:49:00.007-06:00

When people make comic book movies, they generally have decades of printed material from which to draw the elements of their story. The process involves considerable sifting, picking, choosing and reinterpreting, all of which will doubtless make some fans and aficionados unhappy even if the final screenplay manages to compile the picked and chosen into a gripping and meaningful story. When I heard they were making a movie of Alan Moore's dense and relatively hefty graphic novel Watchmen, I worried. How could a filmmaker begin to do justice to the source material when forced to pick and choose elements from a single cohesive and complete story arc, every piece of which is relevant and vital? Apparently, that fear was unfounded. When they adapted Moore's story for Zack Snyder's 2009 screen version of Watchmen, writers David Hayter and Alex Tse did hardly any picking and choosing at all.

Excepting some minor deletions and a slight (and arguably beneficial) alteration to the ending, the film is reverentially faithful to its source material. It's 1985 in a world shaped by the advent and proliferation of costumed heroes, most of whom are physically normal human vigilantes who have now have been forced into retirement by a government ban. Only the atomic superman Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup) - product of a nasty accident in experimental physics - remains in President Nixon's official employ, the threat of his near omnipotence maintaining an uneasy peace in a world on the brink of nuclear war. There is, however, one vigilante left on the streets. Operating illegally and in secret, the disgusted, unforgiving sociopath Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) suspects that someone is trying to eliminate the old order of masked men when one its most brutal and sardonic members, the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), is murdered in his New York apartment. As Rorschach sets out to warn his former cohorts - Nite Owl (Patrick Wilson), Silk Spectre (Malin Akerman), Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias (Matthew Goode) - the retired heroes gradually don cape and mask and join the fight to prevent annihilation.

The film is visually stunning, not the least because of the shockingly faithful way in which Snyder replicates Dave Gibbons' original artwork in both live action and CGI. All of the characters are the spitting image of their comic book counterparts; although, while a great deal of effort obviously went in to animating a believable glowing, blue Dr. Manhattan, the more basic hair and makeup effects seem to have suffered, making characters like Silk Spectre and Ozymandias look almost less plausible than their computer generated colleague. The film's violence is also rather unreal. Reveling in the his 'R' rating, Snyder indulges in brutal but surreal effects-laden action sequences too spectacular to be performed by real people. It is almost impossible to remember that most of these characters are merely meant to be highly motivated people in costumes. Furthermore, the constant stream of ultra-violence quickly desensitizes an audience, and viewers are scarcely horrified when one of the Watchmen goes too far or surprised when another exhibits what should be an outstanding talent. Indeed, all of the heroes seem a trifle too "super," a flaw aggravated by the seemingly magical transformations of Rorschach's ink blot mask and the too-shiny fight scenes, which eliminate the grittiness of the original comic.

First published as a 12 part serial, Watchmen - whose title was inspired by the age old quote, "Who watches the watchmen?" or, from Juvenal, "Who will guard the guards themselves?" - asks serious questions about fascism, individual freedom, power and abuse. Does the pursuit of truth and justice have anything to do with saving the world? Though the characters themselves philosophize aplenty, Snyder leaves the final judgement to the audience, preferring, to his credit, to show and not tell. However, although the important issues of the novel remain in the film, they are largely overrun by the plot, which, in an effort to include every scrap of Alan Moore's story, allows little time to consider one character or scenario before moving relentlessly on to the next. Though I was not disappointed to see some of Moore's signature cynical nastiness fall by the wayside, the movie's unabating narrative drive, like its flashy, stylized violence, robs sordid and poignant moments alike of their emotional punch.

Instead, the film, stocked with cleverly altered images of historical events and almost ironic uses of iconic popular songs, becomes something of a twentieth century cultural pastiche that never quite resolves into satire. Zack Snyder, whose slick action sequences and flashy stylings effectively glorified the sincere actions of the heroes of 300 (2006), seems less at home with the grayer morality and black social commentary so central to Watchmen. More a fan, perhaps, than a true believer, Snyder has done his best to faithfully recreate Moore's novel on the silver screen. The movie is enjoyable enough, and the likeness is startling, but, as with all copies, the film of Watchmen has neither the depth nor the clarity of the original.

KSFF: Bardelys the Magnificent

2009-03-02T18:08:00.009-07:00

At the height of the era of silent film, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, chasing the success of The Big Parade (1925), once again paired its top director - King Vidor - with its biggest star - John Gilbert. Their new project was a motion picture swashbuckler that would compete with the wildly popular output of United Artists co-founder Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. The film they made was Bardelys the Magnificent (1926). Unfortunately, when MGM's rights to Rafael Sabatini's novel lapsed in 1936, the studio, now refitted for sound, saw little reason to renew its stake in a silent picture and chose instead to relinquish the rights. As a result, MGM was required to destroy the film. For years, it was believed that only a few clips survived, tucked into a movie theater scene in Vidor's 1928 comedy Show People.

Recently, however, an incomplete copy of Bardelys surfaced in France, and, with the aid of the surviving cutting continuity, title list and production stills, France's Lobster Films has been able to effectively reconstruct the print's missing third reel and restore the film to something of its original glory. Restorationist David Shepard and the wonderful Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra presented the film at this year's Kansas Silent Film Festival, which hosted Bardelys' first American screening since its deliberate destruction in 1936:

In a romantic adventure geared for a slightly older audience than Douglas Fairbanks' kid-friendly action fare, John Gilbert plays Le Comte de Bardelys, a good natured, unapologetic womanizer whose antics provide entertainment for all the court of King Louis XIII. When a rival seducer, the less upstanding Comte de Chatellerault (Roy D'Arcy), is embarrassingly rejected by the daughter of a potentially disloyal rural aristocrat, he wagers all his lands that Bardelys cannot woo and mary the maiden in question (Eleanor Boardman). Even though he has no desire to take a wife, Bardelys feels bound by honor to accept. Beginning with this simple, not quite friendly bet, Bardelys' adventure soon involves rebel plots, deceitful lords and, of course, true love.

Although Dorothy Farnum's script offers some light satire of King Louis' decadent court and its leader's frivolous nature, the film is more than anything concerned with being fun. Gilbert is dashing as he sweeps through the film wooing beautiful women, spouting arrogant but witty one-liners and being generally "magnificent." Additionally, the tongue in cheek intertitles - dialogue and otherwise - coupled with William H. Daniels' creative cinematography, push the entertaining feature almost to the level of a spoof.

As the core of the plot - Chatallerault's bet - rapidly expands to include all manner of dangerous deeds, the process of escalation continues at the level of the scene. Filled with close-ups of spear tips and John Gilbert dangling from swinging fabric, the climactic action sequence builds from exciting to ludicrous (but still exciting). Even the love scenes become silly when lovers float endlessly under weeping willow trees whose branches pass over their faces and in front of the camera first mysteriously and romantically, then increasingly amusingly as the romantic leads confess their feelings while continually brushing plants out of their faces.

Bardelys the Magnificent may not be regarded as a motion picture masterpiece, but we can be grateful not, after all, to have lost a solid if mostly conventional, over the top swashbuckler whose grown-up goofiness makes it truly timeless.

Bardelys the Magnificent, complete with the Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra's new score, should be released on DVD later this year.

The Clairvoyant: Looking Beyond the Dust and Scratches

2009-02-18T22:12:00.014-07:00

There is, in the culture at large, a nasty misconception that old film is, by necessity, damaged film. As an archivist, I feel obliged to wag a finger at modern movie makers for plastering artificial dust and scratches all over footage that is supposed to seem old.

Fake spots and tramlines introduce

a faded flashback in Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Of course, there are perfectly valid artistic reasons to simulate damage to film, especially in works of fiction like the one pictured above, in which the editor has cheekily slapped tramlines on a flashback that takes place 1000 years before the invention of film. In fact, the artificial degradation Robert Rodriguez employed throughout the Planet Terror half of Grindhouse (2007) - which drove me mad at first - ultimately proves an extremely effective editing technique that lovingly highlights the narrative defects of his chosen genre and allows for one of the most creatively constructed scenes of literally burning passion I have witnessed. Nevertheless, the propagation of fictional flaws on fictionally aged film seems to reinforce in both distributors and the viewing public the belief that poor quality transfers of older movies, particularly those in the public domain, are a necessary evil. Furthermore, the popular association of the most damaged movies with the shoddier examples of exploitation cinema might well lead audiences to preemptively misjudge other aspects of a poorly cared for film, as per the Mystery Science Theater 3000 theory of film preservation.

Additionally saddled with the absurd American title The Evil Mind, the British made The Clairvoyant (Maurice Elvey 1934) was, for me, greatly marred by the washed out, scratched, speckled and frame-shy video copy of a copy of a transfer from a damaged negative I had to sit through to watch the film on TV. Glen MacWilliams' cinematography may have been a nearly total loss (though some of the more extreme low key lighting has survived, and you can still imagine how its fiery climax would have been alarming), but the film as a whole is quite a nicely measured thriller that belies the ravages of the public domain.

Claude Rains stars as Maximus, a psychic who performs an ordinary stage act with his wife, Rene (Fay Wray) until, one night, a strange woman (Jane Baxter) appears in the audience, and Max begins to yield genuine prophecies. Seduced by the fame and fortune brought by his newfound talent, Max begins to lose track of the important things in life, much to the disappointment of his wife. The consequences of Max's decisions and his gift grow evermore disturbing, and the film's slow building tension - enhanced by the lack of nondiegetic music, as was the custom at the time - brings on subtle but (with the exception of a courtroom scene near the end of the film) surprisingly plausible horrors. Although it is, arguably, a genre movie at heart, The Clairvoyant is more subtle with its supernatural element than it is with its indictment of pride and greed, and it is the human focus of the film, not Max's gift or curse, that makes it most distressing. An irritatingly softball ending slightly damages the movie's ominous effect, but it does reinforce its central theme - It is vital to take care of the important things in life, the little things that prosperity may cause us to neglect - a lesson that the distributors of the world might do well to consider.

Herbert West Created Woman

2009-02-15T16:10:00.001-07:00

Once upon a time, Herbert West had "a very good head on his shoulders . . . and another one in a dish on his desk." I love a good tagline, and this one, from Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator (1985), is one of my favorites. I'm also partial to the tag for Dr. Giggles (Manny Coto 1992): "The doctor is out . . . of his mind!" and the English language slogan for Mil Gritos Tiene la Noche (Juan Piquer Simón 1982): "Pieces: It's exactly what you think it is," both of which are relevant here. In fact, if you were to attempt to sum up Bride of Re-Animator (Brian Yuzna 1990) in just one word, "pieces" might well be it. Not only does its plot hinge on the Frankenstein-like construction of a new living being from dead body parts, but the film itself also seems to be spliced together from several slightly mismatched reels.

In the previous film, Dr. Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) achieved his greatest (and most catastrophic) success reanimating "whole parts," and the central plot of Bride of Re-Animator sees West - inexplicably alive and still practicing medicine at Miskatonic Medical School - continuing his ghastly research by creating a new person made out of variously assembled limbs and organs, beginning with the heart of the late girlfriend of his partner, Dr. Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott).

In spite of its general hamminess and the increasingly neurotic Dr. West's gratuitous tooling around with inappropriately married extra body parts (did the makers of The Spirit watch this film?), this basic story line is fairly strong. Surprisingly character driven, the film exposes West and Cain's twisted devotion to one another and the even more twisted role that women play in their lives. At the first Cine-Excess conference in London, I heard Gordon and Yuzna half jokingly describe the first film as a gay love story of sorts, with West's attempts to reanimate corpses representing a sort of motherless birth: "Come on, Dan, we don't need her . . ." In this, the second film, women have been entirely objectified, literally dismembered and reassembled by men, and Dan finds it very difficult to choose between an intact, living woman and the reanimated object Herbert creates for him. The titular bride my have the heart and limbs of real women, but she is defined only by the men in her life: Herbert West, her creator, and Dan Cain, her . . . lover?

Had the filmmakers stuck to their solid and thematically rich foundation, Bride of Re-Animator might have been a schlocky sequel on par with the similarly themed but ultimately far superior Frankenstein Created Woman (Terence Fisher 1967). Unfortunately, the movie is stacked so high with other grisly muck that its simple infrastructure threatens to collapse. In my post about the Gordon/Yuzna adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's From Beyond, I suggested that part of the success of the original Re-Animator film (which Yuzna produced and Gordon directed) stems from the fact that the screenwriters were able to plunder one of Lovecraft's longer works, "Herbert West: Reanimator," and develop their story from its juiciest morsels. But when Yuzna and fellow writers Rick Fry and Woody Keith returned to the original text they were left with the dreaded, disconnected Other Bits: the volunteer medical service in a foreign war - the house by the cemetery - neither of which receive enough attention to contribute rather than detract from the film as a whole. Mix in various subplots involving a fairly unpleasant detective (Claude Earl Jones), a curious pathologist (Mel Stewart) and West's literally disembodied nemesis, Dr. Carl Hill (David Gale), and you need a pick and shovel to uncover the interesting film described above. Though flush with other horror themes, the only really Lovecraftian element this adaptation retains is the loathsome wrongness of West's perverse experiments. Like their hero, Dr. West, the makers of Bride of Re-Animator have taken a good heart and sewn it into something disjointed and sadly degenerate but not actually terrible.

Go Tell the Spartans . . .

2009-02-08T13:20:00.000-07:00

In the 5th century BC, an army from allied Greek city states led by King Leonidas' 300 Spartans held off the army of Persian king Xerxes I by bottlenecking the invading hoards in the pass of Thermopylae for several days before their inevitable annihilation. In spite of their disproportionate number of casualties, the Persian army was (very) decisively victorious, but the Battle of Thermopylae was an early turning point in the Persian Wars because it bought enough time for the Greek allies to organize forces to effectively defend several other key territories and, ultimately, win the war.

Because of my past life as a student of Classics, I knew that I would eventually see Zach Snyder's 2006 film, 300, in spite of my general distaste for motion-capture animation.

Digression: People tend not to favor things that are neither one thing nor another. Sticking to Classics, the Romans was very disturbed by seals because they are mostly like dogs, or other land animals, except that they have flippers and live in the water. Hence, Ovid's extra-contextually amusing description of the horror of the great flood in Metamorphoses: "And where but now the graceful goats had browsed / Gross clumsy seals hauled their ungainly bulk." For me, motion-capture is, for the most part, an irritating hybrid of live action and animation detrimental to both the tangible realism of photographing actual actors and the stylized imagination of an animated world. And now, back to the point:

Based on Frank Miller's graphic novel inspired by the famous battle, 300 glorifies the Spartans' dedication to the honor and glory of battle, their tactical prowess, and their willingness to sacrifice themselves for the greater good. Just before his final stand, King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) dispatches a messenger, commanding him to "go tell the Spartans" what had happened and the noble reason why.

Ted Post's 1978 film Go Tell the Spartans, on the other hand, uses its allusion to Thermopylae for the opposite effect. Set in the early days of the Vietnam War, Go Tell the Spartans features an aging Burt Lancaster as a crass and jaded army major in charge of a group of soldiers trying to hold an isolated fort against the Vietcong - a fort that one platoon already died defending, leaving behind an ominous cemetery and a placard saying, "Go tell the Spartans." After stumbling through a first half fraught with awkwardness and uncomfortable obscenities, the film improves dramatically when the soldiers hunker down and try vainly to defend the fort. Though, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, these soldiers are outnumbered by an undefeatable enemy, their bloody stand lacks the honor and necessity of its ancient counterpart. The position they are defending is tactically unimportant, and the fact that the fort has already been held and lost by another doomed company makes their inauspicious task seem even more pointless.

At the time of its release in 2006, 300 drew considerable flak from those who viewed its grotesque, demonized portrayal of the the Persian forces as an attack on modern Middle Eastern people (ancient Persia has become modern Iran) and its glorification of the Spartans' stand as a distressing endorsement of President Bush's "crusade" against the Muslim world, and this interpretation is certainly not without merit. Literal parallels aside, however, 300 is a story about a proud people desperately fighting against the oppressive force of an invading army. Not motivated by politics or the vague notion of some future threat, this necessary war and King Leonidas' heroic sacrifice exemplify not only the kind of war worth fighting but also its terrible cost. While true believers in an anti-Persian message might see the film as reinforcement of their ideals, it is also possible to view 300 as a grand, expanded version of the ironic allusion in Post's Go Tell the Spartans, highlighting the gap between undeniably important, worthwhile warfare and the more obscure, controversial reasons why people are dying right now.

A Prairie Home Companion

2009-01-31T21:02:00.008-07:00

"It's a dark night in a city that knows how to keep its secrets, but on the twelfth floor of the ACME building one man is still trying to find the answers to life's persistent questions: Guy Noir, Private Eye . . ."

The show begins at 5PM, but it's already dark. There isn't snow on the ground. It must be Fall in Minnesota. Or Spring. The streets are slicked with rain, and the neon lights from the train car diner gleam down on the hat and up on the striped trousers of Guy Noir, a man at home on dark and rain slicked streets, a man who really knows how to deliver hard boiled narration, a man who can't close a drawer without getting his hand caught in it, a man whose slagging detective career has left him in charge of security for a certain radio program - a radio program that, in the Middle America of the silver screen, is about to slip softly off the air.

Though Guy Noir, the diner and - as Guy crosses the street - the Fitzgerald Theatre all seem to belong in a period picture, a closer look reveals a modern audience filing into the auditorium, ready to witness the last live broadcast of another relic of a bygone age, A Prairie Home Companion. Revolving around a doomed, fictionalized version of Garrison Keillor's old fashioned radio variety show, Robert Altman's last film, A Prairie Home Companion (2006), is a movie about death and loss, about how we inevitably lose the things we love, but also about how their essence and their memory can never really be destroyed.

About to lose their beloved program to their local radio station's new corporate owners, who want to remove the show and its obsolete format from the air and raze its theater to the ground, the cast of this practically plotless film set out to put together one final, almost ordinary, night of nostalgic entertainment. The script, by star and Prairie Home Companion mastermind Garrison Keillor, presents what is essentially a big screen version of his real life show, populated now in part by fully embodied versions of his regular radio characters - the cowboys Dusty and Lefty (Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly), Guy Noir (Kevin Kline). Altman's drifting camera moves softly through the Fitzgerald Theatre, through scenes, around people, in and out of rooms both on and off the stage. It captures fragments of advertisements and musical numbers that Keillor and his fellow performers send out over the air.

And it witnesses the backstage hijinks of Keillor, Dusty, Lefty, Guy, the Johnson Sisters (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin) and the program's staff and crew, whose stories and conversations take the place of the ramblings and radio plays interspersed throughout the real program's broadcast. The entire film is an entertaining, thought provoking but arguably narratively aimless celebration of life and death.

In short, A Prairie Home Companion is the kind of film that will appeal exclusively to the kind of person who will enjoy Garrison Keillor's radio show, which, unlike its counterpart in this slightly warped fiction, continues to broadcast on Saturday evenings. Look for it online, or, depending on your temperament, avoid it like the plague.

Serial Absurdity: Dick Tracy

2009-01-23T19:56:00.011-07:00

Whether or not you've read the comic strip, and no matter how you feel about Warren Beatty's showy primary palette 1990 film, there are certain elements of the Dick Tracy franchise that are bound to spring to mind whenever someone mentions Chester Gould's hero by name: most notably, his two-way wrist radio. It is incredibly disorienting to see him without it.

In Alan James and Ray Taylor's 1937 serial, however, Dick Tracy doesn't even have an ordinary walkie-talkie. They didn't exist. And Tracy's spiffy wristwatch wasn't even imagined until after World War II. Instead, Tracy (Ralph Byrd) must rely on ordinary radio transmitters he finds in the villains' lairs - from which he broadcasts information at whatever frequency he can - and hope his buddies back at HQ have their ordinary radio tuned just right and just happen to be sitting right there. Indeed, Dick Tracy's first foray onto the big screen is a bizarre (and sometimes laughable) picture of 1930s serial adventure and early mainstream science fiction crime-fighting.

Now, when I say "science fiction crime-fighting" what I mean is "science fiction crime." Unless you consider the onscreen Tracy's miraculous ability to stand up, right as rain, after flying an airplane into a bridge or being shot in the chest and subsequently falling off a roof evidence to the contrary, all the imagined scientific advances depicted in this serial belong to the Spider Gang. Headed by the mysterious Lame One, the Spider Gang employs a hunched, cat stroking surgeon named Moloch (John Picorri), who conducts a devilish experiment on Dick Tracy's lawyer brother, Gordon (Richard Beach), turning him into an immoral, mind-wiped henchman. (Like many of the serial's developments, Moloch's claim that a scar and a swath of white hair make Gordon unrecognizable is rather difficult to believe, in spite of the fact that Evil Gordon is played by a different actor (Carleton Young).) But while the Lame One and his gang rely on mad scientists, scheme to capture new technologies and zoom around the California skies in their futuristic stingray-like aircraft, the Wing, Dick Tracy and his friends rely on more down to earth methods.

Although the film version recasts Tracy as a California FBI agent instead of a locally based Midwestern detective and eliminates most of the comic strip's cast (including his sweetheart, Tess Trueheart), the onscreen crime-solvers continue to employ the strip's signature forensic science and deductive reasoning - as well as their fists, guns, and the occasional near super-human feat of physical prowess - to take down their sci-fi stocked foes. In addition to his fellow G-men and the plucky kid, Junior, the only other character to cross over from the comic, Tracy's sidekicks include a female scientist (Kay Hughes), who helps her boss examine crime scenes for forensic evidence.

Unfortunately, science and science fiction alike get the fuzzy end of the lollypop, and, like an Isaac Asimov story turned on its head, interesting concepts and scientific method are frequently lost in the fast paced, action oriented serial. As fun as it is to watch Dick Tracy bash the bad guys' faces with his fist, it is a little disappointing to be offered a glimpse of worthwhile science fiction mixed with early police procedural only to see it overtaken by unsteady pseudoscience and unbelievable action sequences. Of course, that won't keep me from watching the final installments tonight on UEN. It may not be the most solid cinematic undertaking in the world, but this fine specimen of 1930s mass media is modern television I can believe in.

Neptune's Daughter: A Hollywood Grab-Bag

2009-01-10T12:55:00.008-07:00

To call Neptune's Daughter (Edward Buzzell 1949) a prime example of formulaic Classical Hollywood movie making would be a disservice both to the film in question and to formulaic Classical Hollywood movies. Both more outlandish and less cohesive than the standard "boy meets girl; boy loses girl; boy sings a sing and gets girl" assembly line musical, Neptune's Daughter is a film of small amusements, of unique diversions strung together to form an agreeable but rather insubstantial whole.

The film stars aqua-musical headliner Esther Williams as Eve, a competitive swimmer turned bathing suit designer, whose only interest in men concerns preventing them from taking advantage of her dopey but man-crazy sister, Betty (Betty Garnett). To that end, when Betty starts stepping out with accident prone masseur Jack Spratt (Red Skelton), whom she has, incredibly, mistaken for South American polo champion José O'Rourke, Eve begins dating the real O'Rourke (Ricardo Montalban) to shift the notorious womanizer's attention away from her sister. Using this flimsy plot as an excuse to showcase their strengths, the cast and crew of Neptune’s Daughter provide an almost episodic mishmash of uniquely specialized talents more reminiscent of a sketch or variety show than of a traditional Hollywood movie. Esther Williams and Ricardo Montalban, elegant and athletic, seize the opportunity to demonstrate their prowess in the pool.

Esther Williams takes a dive

The genuinely funny Betty Garnett performs musical comedy numbers. Red Skelton exploits the mistaken identity plot, stuffing his disastrous impersonation of a smooth South American full of idiotic slapstick. Indeed, enjoyment of this film may well hang on just how much Red Skelton the viewer can take. In my case, not much, though I am sure there are those with lower tolerances than I. Fortunately, the film offers still more diversions: Warner Brothers’ seldom seen go-to cartoon voice man, Mel Blanc, appears as O’Rourke’s right hand man, delivering his lines in a jaw dropping voice halfway between Bugs Bunny and Speedy Gonzales.

Betty Garnett and Mel Blanc

Popular Latin bandleader Xavier Cugat also performs several times, and Guys and Dolls composer and lyricist Frank Loesser provides the film with quality songs, most notably the Oscar-winning “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” Though the performance - by all four romantic leads - may not be as dynamic as later recordings (like the famous Capitol Records rendition by Johnny Mercer and Margaret Whiting), it remains a damn fine song, played here for laughs as the balmy California setting cheekily highlights its singers’ already blatant ulterior motives.

While the individual elements are strong enough on their own, the movie's wispy plot fails to bind them into a cohesive whole. Unbolstered by screenwriter Dorothy Kingsley's superfluous subplots about gangsters and alternative love interests, the narrative comes up short, leaving the somewhat disconnected songs, sketches and spectacular water ballets to stand up on their own. Like the monkey that leaps from drum to drum in Xavier Cugat's orchestra, each bit is cute but pointless.

Oh no! There's a Khan in my soup!

Rest in peace, Ricardo Montalban.

Red Ties and Rubber Balls: Watch Out for the Spirit!

2008-12-30T18:46:00.006-07:00

Let's be perfectly honest: The Spirit is not a good movie. Adapted from a comic Will Eisner created in the early 1940s, the 2008 film, written and directed by Frank Miller, tells the story of a police sanctioned masked vigilante (Gabriel Macht) who fights crime in his beloved Central City, USA and inspires all its female inhabitants to blush and swoon. Investigating what turns out to be a shady deal in supernatural antiquities involving an old flame with a ridiculous name, the Spirit inevitably encounters his nemesis, the Octopus (Samuel L. Jackson), a costume loving, egg hating mad scientist with a flare for the dramatic. In their initial confrontation, the ostensibly immortal adversaries pummel each other with heavy bric-a-brac and toilet tanks, causing each other no real harm and establishing an resounding pointlessness that pervades the movie as a whole.

The plot is feather-light, predictable and uninspired, the acting grating - particularly Eva Mendes and Scarlett Johansson as Sand Seref and Silken Floss, respectively - and the noir-inspired voiceover too redundant to enjoy. Frank Miller, whose work on the page and alongside director Robert Rodriguez in 2005's Sin City is something to admire, fails to deliver as a moviemaker on his own. Inconsistently applying the same silhouette heavy, hyperstylized visual design that made Sin City unique, the veteran graphic novelist composes shots so stiffly handsome that the audience feels every panel line and page turn in Miller's storyboard. The resulting ostentatious, comic-like format and shifting color palette prove almost as jarring as the film's tone, which bounces from dark to goofy like a red rubber ball dropped onto concrete from a very tall building. Uncertain whether to be grim and gross or campy and outrageous the film becomes ludicrous and bumpy.

Nevertheless, I found myself having quite a good time. The directing may be stilted and the screenplay mostly dreck, but, while most of the movie slips into mediocre muck, other aspects stand up and shine. Gabriel Macht's portrayal of the title character may be hammy enough to irritate some, but his handsome silhouette and wide-eyed gee-whiz performance are well suited to the campier, more charming aspects of the film. It is, however, Samuel L. Jackson, who, not shockingly, steals the show. Chewing the scenery with gusto, he creates a gleefully unreasonable Octopus, relishing every new and brilliantly irrelevant villainous costume - gunfighter, samurai . . . Nazi??? Each unbelievable scenario is more fun than the last, eliciting genuine laughs of relief as the audience takes a break from fruitless melodrama. One reviewer criticized the film for trying to be intentionally campy, but I believe that Miller could have made a much better movie had he left the angsty plot behind and focused on the more ridiculous elements at hand. Less Casablanca and more Flash Gordon, if you will. Even as it is, with aggressive use of fast forward the upcoming DVD may become a cult classic yet.

Film Noir Spotlight: Holiday Edition

2008-12-24T11:20:00.007-07:00

Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery 1947) begins with a

Christmas carol medley that plays over the titles, which appear

on Christmas cards. As the medley descends ominously into

a minor key (God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen), the last

card is removed to reveal Philip Marlowe's gun.

Directed by actor Robert Montgomery, the 1947 adaptation of Raymond Chandler's Lady in the Lake is probably one of the most deliberately experimental of Classical Hollywood's film noirs. Robert Montgomery is not my favorite leading man (and he's certainly not my favorite Philip Marlowe), but I like him better behind the camera than in front of it. I was consequently predisposed to like Lady in the Lake, which cinematographer Paul Vogel, camera mounted on his shoulder, filmed entirely from Marlowe's point of view while Montgomery stood beside him saying his lines. Stunt hands appear when Marlowe picks things up or throws a punch, and the actor himself appears only occasionally as he passes a mirror. Montgomery called the device the "Camera I."

Lady in the Lake is not the only film noir to utilize extensive point of view shots. Director Delmer Daves employs a similar technique to hide the face of his surgically altered protagonist for most of the first half of his 1947 Bogart/Bacall vehicle Dark Passage. However, 1947 was not quite ready for the full-on "Camera I." Apparently, test audiences would not be pleased until they saw a conventional, third person shot of Marlowe and his lady love embracing at the end, and Montgomery was forced to insert introductory and refresher segments in which he sat in front of the camera and spoke directly to the audience regarding what was going on (Shane Black uses this device for comic effect in his 2005 pulp pastiche Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang). Although these inconsistencies detract from the movie as a whole, Montgomery's "Camera I" remains well suited to the hard boiled detective film.

Though hardly subtle in its design, Lady in the Lake is an entertaining film that consciously highlights the prominent characteristics of Raymond Chandler's prose. Easy to judge as a gimmick meant to involve the viewer more directly with the hero, the "Camera I" effectively reflects Chandler's novels' first person narration, which tends to be not only laced with hard boiled metaphors but painstakingly detailed as well. The original text of Lady in the Lake begins with a meticulous description of every wall and bottled perfume Marlowe sees on his way to and through the reception room of his new client, and the film opens in a similar fashion, using camera movements to call the viewer's attention to each item the detective observes. Even the film's Christmas setting - to return to my holiday theme - serves a purpose. Marlowe's own unique persona, part romantic gallant, part hard boiled tough guy, feels right at home amidst the ironic mixture of conspiracy, murder and holiday cheer.

Horror at Home: The Bad Seed

2008-12-13T13:47:00.005-07:00

Believe it or not, there are people who, unlike me, do not enjoy horror movies full of slime and gore. Some people, no doubt, don't even care for movies about goblins and ghosts. The Bad Seed (Mervin LeRoy 1956) is a horror movie for people who like neither schlocky genre films nor polished movies about things that go bump in the night - people like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who offered this film Oscar nominations for its lead and supporting actresses and its handsome black and white cinematography.

A disturbing domestic melodrama, The Bad Seed depicts the demise of a happy family. Left at home when her military husband is posted to another town, Christine Penmark (Nancy Kelly) gradually discovers that her outwardly sweet daughter Rhoda (Patty McCormack) is a completely amoral child easily capable of murder.

Based on Maxwell Anderson's stage adaptation of William March's novel, the 129 minute film - like many movies based on plays - bogs down at times during talky discussions of the criminal mind. It is these lengthy conversations about whether the tendency towards evil deeds can be inherited that most detract from the film, both because they cause it to drag and, more importantly, because they offer slightly too easy an explanation for Rhoda's behavior, which would be more frightening and close to home had it had no explanation at all.

On the whole, however, the film's leisurely pacing is well employed. Rhoda's alarming actions intensify like a slow burning fire, and her mother's distress and paranoia build gradually as she realizes that the little girl she loves is a dangerous criminal almost impossible to control. Patty McCormack is chilling as Rhoda, an innocent looking monster without any conscience at all, but The Bad Seed is ultimately her mother's story. Torn between her love for her child and her knowledge of the girl's true nature, Mrs. Penmark feels compelled to face her torment alone, and it is her increasingly dreadful situation - any mother's nightmare - that, in spite of her occasional descent into stereotypical 1950s feminine hysteria, provides the movie's most poignant horror.

Unlike The Omen, Village of the Damned and most other movies about dangerous children, The Bad Seed features a child who is not an alien, the spawn of Satan, a changeling or some other inhuman evil. In spite of the excuse that some criminal gene may lurk in Rhoda's family history, she is the natural product of a normal American family, a monster who could live and grow in any home. Testament to the movie's distressing moral dimension comes from its Hollywood Ending; (SPOILER ALERT) not often does a tacked on, set-things-right ending call for the death of a child.

Shakespeare for the Bloodthirsty and Impatient

2008-12-07T19:47:00.007-07:00

It is certainly not the only movie with a plot based on themed murders (calling Agatha Christie . . .), nor may it be the best, but Theatre of Blood (Douglas Hickox 1973) holds a special place in my heart. If I had not already been sold on the premise - Vincent Price plays Edward Lionheart, an unhinged and disgruntled exclusively Shakespearean actor who seeks revenge against a circle of theater critics who failed to award him an honor he thought he deserved by murdering each one in the manner of a death from one of Shakespeare's plays - I would have been won over by the opening credits. In one of my favorite title sequences, the credits for the film play over footage from silent film versions of Shakespeare plays. Not just any scenes, though. Death scenes. The effect is chilling, and it sets the scene for the creatively morbid and surprisingly gory action to come.

Although the 104 minute runtime stretches the film's simple concept a little too long, what Theatre of Blood lacks in narrative complexities it makes up for in style and ingenuity. Anthony Greville-Bell's screenplay scours Shakespeare's works for the most grotesque and interesting deaths. The film features murders that allude not only to the Bard's most famous plays, including Julius Caesar, Richard III and The Merchant of Venice (ever wish Shylock had actually taken a pound of flesh?), but also to those less oft performed - Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida and Cymbeline, for example. And, despite Edward Lionheart's pretentions and villainy, the film depicts his victims as equally despicable. Uncaring elitists, these theater critics drove an unstable man to homicidal mania not necessarily by denying him his coveted award but by ruthlessly mocking him for his unwarranted confidence it would be his. This none too subtle indictment of the powerful, uncharitable upper crust affords the film a more meaningful theme and allows the audience to sympathize to some degree with the mad murderer and his accomplices - a pack of socially invisible street crazies who have adopted him as their leader.

On the whole, however, the movie is simply entertaining, almost entirely because of the slightly guilty joy of watching the filmmakers cleverly exploit the works of William Shakespeare, using his beautiful speeches and famous lines as segues into all the nastiest horrors the playwright could compose.

The Three Musketeers . . . on TV

2008-12-07T10:59:00.006-07:00

Literary adaptations are tricky - extreme fidelity can bog a screen version of an exciting story down amidst unnecessary detail. For instance, Chris Columbus' by the book adaptation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001) seems to drone on and on while Alfonso Cuaron's Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), which makes massive cuts and minor alterations to its source material, is a far superior film. On the other hand, an absurdly liberal adaptation like Stephen Herek's ridiculous 1993 version of The Three Musketeers can be downright infuriating.

Often, adaptations of long novels like Alexandre Dumas' Musketeers are better suited for television, where their complex plots can be spread out across miniseries format. In 1966, the BBC, perennial producer of the miniseries costume drama, aired a version of The Three Musketeers divided into ten 23 minute episodes that mimic the fast-paced serial format of Dumas' original work, which tells the story of d'Artagnan, who comes to Paris to seek his fortune and finds himself the friend of musketeers Athos, Porthos and Aramis and the adversary of cunning Cardinal Richelieu and his dangerous agent, Milady de Winter. More faithful than many of its cinematic cousins, Anthony Steven's adaptation preserves many more characters and political details than is usual, and it retains humor born of Dumas' dialogue and comic situations instead of manufacturing laughs with unnecessary slapstick.

I won't pretend that a more literal adaptation makes this story anything less than a swashbuckling melodrama of the most sensational degree. There is little subtlety in the story's plot or in its larger than life characters. Jeremy Brett's chewy performance suitably embodies the reckless Gascon hero, but his d'Artagnan is overshadowed by the titular musketeers. Brian Blessed and Gary Watson shine as the bellowing hedonist Porthos and the priestly scholar (and devoted lover) Aramis, and Jeremy Young's convincing turn as the cynical Athos is particularly welcome after disappointing portrayals of the character by Kiefer Southerland and John Malkovich. Richard Pasco also gives a strong performance as Cardinal Richelieu, and Mary Peach and her ample bosom are delicious as the malevolent Milady de Winter.

But the series is not without its share of problems. The narrative sporadically leans on an omniscient voiceover, which begins abruptly in the middle of episode three. Moreover, director Peter Hammond is more interested in symbolism and storytelling than he is in filming action sequences. This did not particularly bother me, but if you're looking for exciting sword fights, watch Richard Lester's 1973 film, or Fred Niblo's 1921 Douglas Faribanks star vehicle instead. More bothersome is Hammond's devotion to his elaborate cinematography, which proves distracting when characters heads are lost to preserve a fancy framing or when strange angles and unusual pans pop up for no reason. For the most part, however, the zooms, pans, extreme high angles, complex frames and compositions and other overt artistic decisions are more interesting and effective than they are gimmicky.

A zoom through a hole in the floor reveals Porthos, Athos

and Aramis (right from top) eavesdropping on the Cardinal's plans

The fleur-de-lis that haunts the characters' pasts

physically manifests itself as a projection on the wall

Though some viewers may be put off by its foggy black and white video transfer and its lack of engaging fight scenes or physical comedy, the 1966 BBC miniseries version of The Three Musketeers is a vastly entertaining, faithful adaptation that includes the best intrigue and charm of Alexandre Dumas' novel and makes the most of its small screen format.

The Inevitable Ivor Novello Post

2008-12-04T19:09:00.011-07:00

One of my favorite rants has to do with Ivor Novello, darling of British performing arts in the first half of the twentieth century. Talented composer of "Keep the Home Fires Burning" and "We'll Gather Lilacs" - anthems of the first and second World Wars - Novello was the author of numerous witty but formulaic fluffy musical stage plays in which he starred even into middle age. Additionally blessed with regular, handsome features, the ubiquitous Novello became, in his youth, an idol of the silver screen, starring in several films in the 1920s and early 1930s. He was also, famously, gay. And this is the point that modern criticism can't seem to get past.

I don't mean that people learn about the man's homosexuality and condemn him or drop the subject in shock. No. I mean that Ivor Novello the Gay Icon is like a particularly fascinating brick wall that nobody bothers to walk around to see if anything else is there. To be fair, I have not read everything written on the man, but much of the scholarly material I have found about his film career is frustratingly focused on the actor's sexuality.

As the title character in Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 thriller The Lodger, Novello gives a performance full of grand, hyper-dramatic mannerisms that modern audiences often find laughable. The scholars I mentioned above see his gesticulations as overt camp - an expression of his gay identity. I do not deny that this is a perfectly valid reading of Novello's performance, but it bothers me that the analyses I have read do not seem to allow for other conscious artistic decisions on the actor's part, as though the man's personal proclivities supersede all other reasons why he acts the way he does. Certainly, Ivor Novello's acting style is overdramatic, a narrow and persistent stereotype of silent movie acting. But his performance in The Lodger is even more over the top than usual; next to it, his melodramatic turn as the Rat (in Graham Cutts' films of 1925 and '26) seems almost subtle. Is is not possible that the actor's exaggerated pantomime in The Lodger is consciously reminiscent of the German Expressionist movement that so influenced Hitchcock in general and this early film in particular?

Actually, one of the things I find most interesting about Novello on film is that many of his characters mesh . . . poorly with the nostalgic and sometimes patriotic image associated with him courtesy of his music and his plays. In The Lodger his character is shady, emotionally damaged and suspected of being Jack the Ripper. In Downhill, another 1927 Hitchcock film, he plays a man whose life is on a steady downward spiral. In The Rat he plays a gypsy thief. The list goes on and on. A couple of summers ago, notable collector and film historian Kevin Brownlow graciously allowed me to view his 16mm print of The Constant Nymph (Adrian Brunel 1928). A fine melodrama, The Constant Nymph is a modern day story of Echo and Narcissus, the nymph who wastes away captivated by beautiful young man who is captivated only with himself. In the film, Tessa (Mabel Poulton) falls for Novello's character, a self absorbed composer who fails to appreciate her unerring adoration until it is far too late. Novello's acting is much more nuanced than in The Lodger, and the film culminates in a performance of the composer's magnum opus - particularly interesting in a silent film (which I watched in uncharacteristic complete silence). Sadly, Brownlow's print is one of the only copies remaining, and many of Novello's films, like others of this period, have been lost.

From Beyond and H.P. Lovecraft Cinema

2008-11-25T23:37:00.009-07:00

Also, an antidote to the long Thanksgiving weekend.

H.P. Lovecraft's fiction tends to hold more intellectual than visceral horror. His fascination with human evolution and devolution and his ideas about vegetable life from outer space, non-Euclidean geometry and quantum physics are all disturbing when carefully considered, but the dry and theoretical qualities of his prose often overshadow his more conventionally horrific creations - like tentacled monsters and cannibalistic mole people. Consequently, Lovecraft's mentally upsetting stories are difficult to adapt to the visual medium of the cinema.

While successful horror flicks like The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi 1981) and The Thing from Another World (Christian Nyby/Howard Hawks 1951) espouse the author's ideas, direct adaptations of his text can be problematic, however liberal they may be. In 1985, director Stuart Gordon and producer Brian Yuzna (who seem to have made careers adapting Lovecraft) had great success with a film version of his unusually traditional Frankenstein-like serial, "Herbert West: Reanimator," but even they run into trouble when they try to adapt his more characteristic fare.

Their 1986 followup From Beyond stars the re-animator himself, Jeffrey Combs, this time not as a reckless scientist playing god (that part goes to Ted Sorel as Dr. Edward Pretorious) but as his much more reasonable assistant, Crawford Tillinghast, a sensible man who can recognize a bad idea when it twists his mentor's head off. Twitchy and traumatized from his experience with creatures from beyond the range of normal human perception, Crawford is faced with a near impossible choice: either spend his days locked in a mental institution or prove his sanity to Dr. Katherine McMichaels, a beautiful psychiatrist played by Combs' Re-Animator co-star Barbara Crampton, by recreating a dangerous experiment that expands one's sensory horizons by stimulating the pineal gland with resonant vibrations.

The plan is a success. The frightful experience proves Crawford's ravings true; it forces him to face his fears and emerge heroic; and, it helps awaken the mutual attraction between Katherine and Crawford. But they don't live happily ever after. Instead, while Crawford continues to advocate the destruction of the resonator he and Dr. Pretorious created, Katherine becomes another overreacher determined to use the machine to find a cure for schizophrenia and, like Edward Pretorious before her, to experience sensations no human has experienced before. She abuses Crawford's trust and his dangerous invention with spectacularly disastrous results.

While Re-Animator offers a concise blend of humor, suspense and graphic 1980s body horror crafted from the most memorable elements of a long and fairly conventional tale Lovecraft serialized for the magazine Home Brew, Gordon, Yuzna and screenwriter Dennis Paoli extrapolate From Beyond from an eight page short story based on a theme of addiction and the unsettling idea that an entire universe of entities exists around us all the time, just beyond the range of our perception. The resulting movie is neither as focused not as funny as the team's previous film. Loaded down with oodles of sex, violence and monstrous transformations, Lovecraft's simple science fiction tale lurches from sadomasochistic titillation to grotesque prosthetics to slimy baths of gore like a spastic version of Clive Barker's Hellraiser (1987).

typical dangers at a Miskatonic University waterpolo game

The single element this messy film perfects is the quintessential Lovecraftian hero. Although the original Crawford Tillinghast is a mad scientist of the worst degree, the character as he appears in the film is an archetypal Lovecraft protagonist - a curious intellectual driven to the brink of insanity when he finds himself investigation terrors man was never meant to know - exactly the sort of character that narrates "The Call of Cthulhu," "The Whisperer in Darkness," "The Rats in the Walls," and "The Shadow Over Innsmouth."

Portrayed by Jeffrey Combs at his mousiest and most sympathetic, this Crawford Tillinghast is a diminutive and scholarly young man who faces otherworldly monsters with steadily increasing pluck only to find himself undergoing uncontrollable changes abhorrent to his sense of self, humanity and morality. Though the story's exploration of addiction and its basic sci-fi ideas threaten to drown in a torrent of gore and exposed flesh, From Beyond and its ill-fated hero remind us of Lovecraft's most pervasive theme of all: in a malevolent universe beyond conception and control, mankind is tiny, helpless and exposed. Ignorance is bliss. Be a hero? Fight the forces of darkness? It'll only make it worse.

Film Noir Spotlight: Foolish Americans and Cynical Brits

2008-11-23T17:01:00.011-07:00

Obsession (Edward Dmytryk 1949) and The Quiet American (Joseph L. Mankiewicz 1958) are two of my very favorite noir films. Both are dark, stylized crime dramas set in the years after World War II. Both focus on a deadly conflict tangentially related to the relationship between England and America in those uneasy postwar years. And both seem, these days, to be largely overlooked.

Set in prewar Vietnam, this film version of The Quiet American suffers from a reputation damaged by its drastic alteration to Graham Greene's original novel. Both Greene's book and Phillip Noyce's faithfully adapted 2002 film tell the story of a jaded British journalist who befriends a charming American only to discover that his new acquaintance's secretive political and financial machinations have been sowing carnage throughout the region - a stirring indictment of American foreign policy. Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1958 film follows almost exactly the same plot with the same characters and the same scenes but with one very major change: the American is innocent.

Though it can certainly be argued that this older version of the film does severe disservice to Greene and his novel, Mankiewicz's adaptation is nevertheless an effective noir film that criticizes the United States' presumptuous foreign policy in a different fashion. Instead of overtly demonstrating the catastrophic immorality of America's actions, The Quiet American (1958) casts decorated war hero Audie Murphy as the title character and then proceeds to characterize his morally unimpeachable and well-intentioned actions as naive, futile and ultimately self destructive. Baby faced Murphy may be the real life embodiment of American heroism, but, in The Quiet American, where does that get him? Nowhere good. That kind of old fashioned idealism and good-triumphs-over-evil mentality have no place in the darker fringes of the 1950s' cinematic landscape, and America's brash attempts to shepherd the rest of the world seem ill conceived and foolish when viewed through venetian blinds. In this new era, only the cynical film noir anti-hero, here Michael Redgrave's world weary journalist Thomas Fowler, manages to soldier on, caught up in the evils all around him in spite of his best efforts to do good.

While The Quiet American depicts the figurative death of America's ideal values and national pride, Obsession can be read as a reaction to that other United States' - the one in Greene's novel, the colossus shepherd of the world - rise in power after World War II. After an evening at his club discussing postwar England's disturbing dependance on the American economy, Dr. Clive Riordan (Robert Newton) returns home to catch his wife (Sally Gray) getting cozy with, appropriately, the couple's American friend, Bill (Phil Brown). Clive then devises a sinister scheme for revenge, one that will allow him to murder Bill and never be caught. I hate to give any more away, but I'll never look at a hot water bottle the same way again.

Robert Newton and Phil Brown consider Anglo-American relations

Adapted for the screen by Alec Coppel from his own book, A Man About a Dog, and directed by blacklisted American film noir auteur Edward Dmytryk, one of HUAC's Hollywood Ten, Obsession serves as a metaphor for America's imposition on British society and culture, and Clive's murderous plot can be read as a desperate attempt to obliterate that foreign influence even as he is himself, in a way, Americanized.

Although Clive is certainly the villain of the piece, it is also difficult to make a hero of the imposing and adulterous Bill. Interestingly, the only truly positive character in the story is the old fashioned Scotland Yard detective played by Naunton Wayne, an actor so quintessentially British that his New York Times obituary labeled him "the perfect Englishman" (which is a little bit ironic considering he was born in Wales, but never mind).

Probably best known for his many stiff-upper-lipped performances alongside comic partner Basil Radford, the first and most notable of which is in Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 film The Lady Vanishes, Wayne may provide a ray of hope for Merry Old England's survival in the postwar world. But don't place too much confidence in his ability to triumph! His character's investigative insights owe an uncomfortable debt to dumb luck. Ultimately, both Obsession and The Quiet American are films about crumbling national identity. Like many protagonists of noir films made after World War II, America and England have fought the good fight, won the right war, and moved on to find a world that's changed for the worse.

Top 100 Film Noir

2008-11-23T16:13:00.007-07:00

About a year and a half ago, my good friend the Film Walrus asked me to compile a list of my top 100 noir films to complement the top 100 film noir list he published on his blog. "Film noir" is a nebulous and troublesome term invented by French critic Nino Frank in 1946 and first used to describe the grim and stylized American crime dramas The Maltese Falcon (John Huston 1941), Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944), Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk 1945) and the gloomy tale of alcoholism, The Lost Weekend (Billy Wilder 1945). To some scholars, film noir is a quintessentially American movement lasting only from 1941 to 1958, the years during and after World War II. To others, true film noir only exists when the antihero is destroyed by the femme fatale, as in Double Indemnity, Detour (Edgar Ulmer 1945) and Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur 1947). Local poet Dee Wolfe is a proponent of this more literary and tragedy oriented theory. Both the Walrus and I employ broader definitions of the term. However, while his list encompasses a wide range of films from myriad decades and countries of origin, mine leans decidedly toward Classical Hollywood, largely on account of the academic work I did for my BA honors thesis, which explored the idea of film noir as a symptom of disillusionment with the idyllic American Dream: individual accomplishment, amber waves of grain, Manifest Destiny and all that. And so, without further ado, from the vault:

My Top 100 Film Noir List:

1. Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
2. Scarlet Street (1945)
3. Taxi Driver (1976)
4. Out of the Past (1947)
5. Laura (1944)
6. Miller’s Crossing (1990)
7. The Quiet American (1958)
8. Detour (1945)
9. Insomnia (1997)
10. The Big Combo (1955)
11. The Maltese Falcon (1941)
12. Blood Simple (1984)
13. Double Indemnity (1944)
14. Vertigo (1958)
15. Gun Crazy (1950)
16. Obsession (1949)
17. Chinatown (1974)
18. The Third Man (1958)
19. Sunset Blvd. (1950)
20. Ride the Pink Horse (1947)
21. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
22. The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)
23. The Lady of Shanghai (1947)
24. The Lost Weekend (1945)
25. A History of Violence (2005)
26. Body Heat (1981)
27. D.O.A. (1950)
28. Brick (2005)
29. Blade Runner (1982)
30. Murder, My Sweet (1944)
31. The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
32. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)
33. White Heat (1949)
34. Barton Fink (1991)
35. The Long Goodbye (1973)
36. Touch of Evil (1958)
37. Panic in the Streets (1950)
38. The Big Sleep (1946)
39. L.A. Confidential (1997)
40. The Wrong Man (1956)
41. The Killers (1946)
42. Crossfire (1947)
43. Mildred Pierce (1945)
44. Mr. Arkadin (1955)
45. Nightmare Alley (1947)
46. Memento (2000)
47. The Godfather (1972)
48. Leave Her to Heaven (1945)
49. The Big Heat (1953)
50. Sin City (2005)
51. Brazil (1985)
52. The Asphalt Jungle (1950)
53. The Seventh Victim (1943)
54. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005)
55. Key Largo (1948)
56. The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946)
57. Pursued (1947)
58. Criss Cross (1949)
59. Force of Evil (1948)
60. The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001)
61. Strangers on a Train (1951)
62. The Glass Key (1942)
63. The Blue Dahlia (1946)
64. Killer’s Kiss (1955)
65. Ruby Gentry (1952)
66. Dark City (1998)
67. Rear Window (1954)
68. Reservoir Dogs (1992)
69. The Blue Gardenia (1953)
70. The Apartment (1960)
71. Phantom Lady (1944)
72. Basic Instinct (1992)
73. Whirlpool (1949)
74. Dark Passage (1947)
75. Stage Fright (1950)
76. Branded to Kill (1967)
77. Casablanca (1942)
78. Gilda (1946)
79. The Killing (1956)
80. Blue Velvet (1986)
81. The Lady in the Lake (1947)
82. Sudden Fear (1952)
83. Se7en (1995)
84. Pickup on South Street (1953)
85. Ministry of Fear (1944)
86. Fight Club (1999)
87. The Scar/Hollow Triumph (1948)
88. To Have and Have Not (1944)
89. Citizen Kane (1941)
90. Night of the Hunter (1955)
91. The Woman in the Window (1944)
92. The Naked City (1948)
93. Notorious (1946)
94. The Matrix (1999)
95. Oliver Twist (1948)
96. A Better Tomorrow (1986)
97. Strange Days (1995)
98. The Big Lebowski (1998)
99. High Sierra (1941)
100. Jail Bait (1954)

The Black Cat: "Satan's Favorite Meal is Sheep Eyes and Cream"

2008-11-21T15:45:00.014-07:00

Watching a good giallo (and here I mean the narrow definition pulp fiction murder mystery sort of giallo and not Italian horror in general) can be quite a bit like reading Edgar Allen Poe: something terrible is bound to happen, and you can't trust anyone, least of all the protagonist.

My mother gave me an illustrated book of Poe stories for my twelfth birthday, and they have had a special place in my heart ever since. "The Cask of Amontillado" was the first short story I ever loved. Roger Corman's garish 1962 film Tales of Terror, liberally adapted from "Morella,""The Case of Amontillado," "The Black Cat" and "The Case of M. Valdemar," sent me home, frightened from a slumber party in the middle of the night. But my most lasting trauma came from "The Black Cat," which has haunted me ever since I first laid eyes on the phrase, "buried the axe in her brain." Like the aforementioned "Cask of Amontillado" and the famous "Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat" features an unreliable narrator driven to grisly crime by the chafing of some aspect of his everyday environment against his sensitive and unhinged mind. It contains the disturbing combination of smoldering madness and brutal violence that is just as characteristic of Italian mystery thrillers.

Although Edgar Ulmer's 1934 film The Black Cat is one of my favorite Classical Hollywood horrors, the most innovative cinematic incarnation of "The Black Cat" is perhaps Sergio Martino's giallo Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972), which shares about as much content with its title's inspiration (Martino's previous film, The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (1971)) as Ulmer's movie does with Poe's original. Simply put: very little indeed. A serpentine, sex-heavy thriller about people striving to out-manipulate each other into insanity and murder, Your Vice is a Locked Room binds its convoluted plot together by focusing on the obsessive animosity between Irina (Anita Stringberg) and her husband's black cat, Satan.

Irina's encounters with the cat progress almost (literally) by the book - she even puts out one of the animal's eyes - and the film's reliance on a preexisting story provides its spiraling, conspiratorial plot with one straightforward and familiar thread that runs through the movie from beginning to end. The overt influence of Edgar Allen Poe both grounds Martino's film and enhances its already disturbing atmosphere. Just like the original story of "The Black Cat," Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key is a story of characters unreliable and unbalanced, characters with unhealthy obsessions that dominate their lives. In a genre already associated with violence, insanity and deceptive narration, this film provides an ideal environment for Poe's story and its themes - albeit one with lots and lots of sex.

Oh Dear, Max Payne

2008-11-21T11:56:00.013-07:00

The other night I went to a free late night screening of Max Payne (John Moore 2008) at Brewvies Cinema Pub. I did not have high expectations. The film, based on the popular noir video game, has not been generally well received, and it sped from the multiplex to the second run cinema pub in less than a month - for good reason. As we left the theatre, the friend I went with said something like,

"If it had been 10% more straightforward and replaced some of its plot twists with gunfights, it could have been a good movie."

By "good," I'm assuming he means "wildly entertaining." In the art and entertainment mishmash that is cinema, the two ideas are certainly not always synonymous, and, though there is plenty of overlap in the middle, movies certainly run from one end of that spectrum (good) to the other (entertaining).

Indeed, Max Payne has all the ingredients of a fun, if not exceptional, movie: A wronged man caught up in a corporate conspiracy that has killed his wife and partner and ruined his career as a police detective seeks justice in the darkest corners of a city filled with hallucinating drug addicts plagued by visions of the none to pleasant winged specters of the Viking battlefield. The perpetually snowy mise-en-scene proviedes Max Payne's world with a frozen over film noir landscape, combining the rain slicked streets most antiheroes stalk with the bitter cold of the far north and the Norse mythology that inspired the dangerous drug, Valkyr.

The film's plot, however, is very poorly put together. Though I have never played the video game, I understand it's very good. Generously, I could suggest that the movie suffers because it tries to stuff hours and hours of gameplay into a running time of just over an hour and a half. Frankly, though, it's rubbish. The film plays on for ages while Max and his foul weather friends try to discover what the audience already knows: the whole mess has something to do with a sinister blue drug. Then, the remainder of the conspiracy unfolds, rapidly revealing plot points that seem at once confusing and predictable. Like an early Dario Argento film gone horribly wrong, Max Payne relies entirely on its sinister atmosphere and giallo-esque inexplicable quick-wrap-up ending. But even its potentially enjoyable generic elements fail to deliver. Mark Wahlberg's voiceover is not a satisfying, tough talking, metaphor laced guide to the horror-noir world, but rather a fleeting, mumbled introduction to the film, and we are constantly distracted from the visually engaging winged hallucinations and darkly moody mise-en-scene by sledgehammer deliveries of poorly developed plot. With plot and scene working ceaselessly against each other, Max Payne is neither thought provoking nor particularly entertaining, and it fails to match even the standards of Xavier Gens' equally unreasonable but much more fun 2007 video game adaptation, Hitman. Oh dear.

In the Beginning: Frankenstein Created Woman

2008-11-20T14:58:00.008-07:00

Salutations. It may be ill advised, in a opening post, to admit that my Frankenstein adaptation viewing has been less than comprehensive. In fact, Terence Fisher's Frankenstein Created Woman (1967) is the only Hammer Frankenstein that I have seen. Nevertheless, I doubt I am risking my credibility by suggesting that it is fairly unique.

Having survived The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), The Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) and The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), Peter Cushing's title Baron turns his attention from the creation of life to the preservation of the soul. When his young assistant, Hans (Robert Morris), is wrongly beheaded and his charming but disfigured lover Christina (Susan Denberg), commits suicide, Frankenstein seizes the opportunity to test his theory by transferring the soul of the freshly slaughtered youth into the more intact (and surgically perfected) body of his lady love. Although the experiment is more or less successful, Frankenstein's lovely new creature eventually proves herself a deadly femme fatale, using her alluring figure and unrecognizably modified face to get revenge on the aristocratic rogues who set the tragedy in motion (Peter Blythe, Barry Warren and Yes, Minister's Derek Fowlds).

While the film suffers considerably from its reliance on foggy metaphysical pseudoscience and its characters' chronically rash behavior, its unusual take on Frankenstein's Monster makes it worth a look. Instead of building a grotesque creature, the callously superior Baron creates a beautiful woman with a normal human body and a rational human mind, which suffers from a crisis of identity because of the mismatch between body and soul. Victimized by upper class men both before and after her bizarre reanimation, the woman Frankenstein creates embarks on a brutal but understandable quest for revenge reminiscent of High Plains Drifter (1973) and Kill Bill (2003, 2004), and Baron Frankenstein himself becomes even more monstrous when set against his sympathetic creation. Hands perpetually gloved to hide the scars of his previous adventures, Frankenstein enters the scene, emerging ominously from deep freeze to play god - wreaking havoc on the lives of his underlings and tampering with life itself. A grisly story of social and sexual oppression, Frankenstein Created Woman plays like a dark parable set in Hammer Horror regular Terence Fisher's lush and lurid Technicolor world.