horrorfest evening nine: cheese from the 70s

the Car: (1977. dir: Eliot Silverstein) I'll be honest. I expected a hidden gem here. Instead, it's got everything you expect from a schlock 70s horror film: a silly idea, a bad script, stupid characters, lazy editing, a low budget, mediocre acting (not RG Armstrong, though; that guy always rocks); I could go on. However, it did one thing exactly right: the car itself.

The car gives an Oscar-worthy performance. It really does feel like a coldblooded, playing-with-its-food psychopath which has moments of terrifying tantrum freakout when it can't get its way. This being the 70s, we are never certain why this evil spirit erupted from the red canyons of Arizona, as we are never certain why it took the shape of a car. Does it have something to do with the Anton La Vey quote at the beginning? Probably not. None of this matters, though, because the car itself makes the movie worth watching, even with all the other stuff working against it.



*SPOILER ALERT*

the Fury: (1978. dir: Brian De Palma) You know what's fun? Watching John Cassavetes in movies like this. He never phones anything in, not that I've seen. He gives himself to this villain completely, seeming to take it as seriously as any role in his own great films. He is compelling to watch, and when he's speaking he makes the script seem better than it is. What a master, a magister tenebrarum in the shadowy art of cinema.

Now, the program notes: I started late with De Palma, and find myself generally restless with his movies, Blow Out being the only exception that leaps to the fore. (Bear in mind that I have yet to see Carrie, Carlito's Way and Dressed to Kill, among others.) In this one, he seems to have said to his actors, "Use a lot of bold hand gestures. Lots of them. I want to see your hands moving all the time, damnit." Or maybe it's a natural actors' mechanism, over-using hand gestures in a mad, last-ditch defense against our realizing the mediocre quality of lines they're having to speak.

The Fury was adapted by Robert Farris from his own novel (he wrote All Heads Turn When The Hunt Goes By, a classic horror tome which I found oddly disappointing, probably because the title is the paragon of titles, it cannot be matched, and so I was expecting food fit for gods behind it). The script doesn't quite find its grasp. The actors do what they can. De Palma has fun with the effects. The climactic image of Kirk Douglas finding his son in a darkened, burnt-out, blood-drenched room, hovering silently several feet above the floor, is effectively weird.

It's too long, this film, giving us a lot of filler we don't want, and the story more than once pulls out of focus into a kind of opaque I-guess-that-makes-sense leap-of-faith realm. It's an action film with horror elements (kids with scary psychokinetic powers that get out of hand). Kirk Douglas, probably sixty at the time, does his action hero thing, and that's alright, but Amy Irving, whose best talent is for hyper-emoting, and she does a vast deal of it here, has such a pretentious way of speaking that it takes at least half the film to bond with her. Her earnestness and ethereal beauty will win you if you stick with it, but then, alas, she gets a little kabuki in the end-scene (not in an interesting way like Isabelle Adjani in Possession, but in a kind of embarrassing way, like Winona Ryder in Dracula). Andrew Stevens is always a little scary, and one of the big set-pieces which does work very well involves his character walking in a fit of choler through a carnival, oblivious as electric lights explode when he passes.

Another of the grand set-pieces is the great escape scene, when Kirk Douglas is rescuing Amy Irving from her captivity. De Palma shows us the entire sequence in slow motion, some minutes long, with no sound except a bombast-score from John Williams (see * postscript for my tempered rant on that fellow). It is bold and, although not entirely successful, I applaud the effort.

The ending is abrupt, leaving us wondering what happens to the one character who's left standing. But when you think about it, how do you follow an exploding Cassavetes? You don't, and De Palma must have known that anything other than an immediate roll of credits would feel wan and sere in its wake.


* Personal aside on John Williams: apart from the music for Star Wars and Jaws, both obvious masterpieces, I would argue that this man was, in retrospect, a great scourge across the land in the '80s, his iron-clad dominance over movie-music an annoyance at best, his trademark sound become a cliche.

dirk bogarde: photographing thought

If you had the good fortune to watch the Dirk Bogarde version of Tale of Two Cities while you were young and impressionable, then it will have made an indelible mark on you. With age, there are cracks at the edges: Dorothy Tutin's Lucie Manette seems one-dimensional, although unoffensive enough. A crucial plot-point, the supposedly uncanny resemblance between Sidney Carton (Bogarde) and Charles Darnay (Paul Guers), requires so vast a suspension of disbelief as to daunt the cheeriest filmgoer. The ending dances dangerously along the cliffside of emotional blackmail with Carton's gallows-edge friendship with the absurdly innocent beauty who goes just before him to the guillotine.

Still, its power survives because the story is one of the best romantic adventures ever written, and because the secondary roles are filled to perfection with the likes of Ian Bannen, Christopher Lee and Donald Pleasance, not to mention a stunning Madame Defarge turned in by Rosalie Crutchley, striding through the movie like an Act of God. I don't think you could remake it after this: she so fully embodies the character that she owns it absolutely, as Brando does Stanley Kowalski, and any new portrayal would be either an imitation of or a reaction against the perfection of this one.

If Bogarde weren't there, Crutchley's performance would be the thing one took away, the touchstone by which one remembered the film. Thank God, though, Bogarde IS there, playing a role that Dickens seems to have written for him, playing it with a deadly blend of sardonic wit and stoic resignation, punctuated by wild moments of zealous idealism. His Carton is the Romantic past his prime; all hopes have been crushed beneath the brutal drudgery and banal horrors of daily life, while death is still an impossibly distant promise of release. He manages to go on by dulling the rough edges with a constant drunkenness, at least until he meets the unobtainable girl who will reawaken his passion for life. Bogarde's performance is unassailable, and it's all but impossible to look away from him, even when he's standing still in the background. Every small, cynical twist of smile is perfectly timed, and his most demanding scene, when he drunkenly confronts Lucie with his impossible love, could not be more real: it veers wildly between the mortifying and the courageous, a combination of awkwardness, self-loathing, and undeniable nobility.

Although Tale might have been his apotheosis as a matinee idol, it was perhaps in his collaborations with writer Harold Pinter (the Servant, Accident) and, more importantly, with director Joseph Losey (the Servant, Accident, King and Country), that we find his greatest legacy. He was a great taker of chances in the roles he chose, exploring psychological darkness and diving into small, "problem" films which travelled as far from easy Hollywood glamour as he could go.

King and Country is a mid-sixties anti-war film adapted from a play and set in the trenches at Passchendaele. Sprung up from a genre that was popular in British theatre at the time, it starred the unimpeachable Tom Courtenay as a simple, fed-up Englishman being tried for desertion. Losey's camera is a vital force, a living thing, surreptitiously climbing and moving in too close, all without drawing attention to itself, and it saves the movie from its static, stagebound script without sacrificing the merciless claustrophobia of the trenches. There is never a moment, not a single flashback, which gives us respite from their closeness or from the wasteland of the battlefield, except for a single still photograph of the King in his regalia riding alongside the Kaiser, possibly sharing a joke. Although the tragedy seems to belong to Courtenay's doomed foot-soldier, it really resides in the pocket of Bogarde's wiser, more experienced, more fully despairing Captain Hargreaves, who knows from the outset that the trial is a sham formality but must do his utmost to defend the fellow anyway. After it's done, and Hargreaves is barely holding his own against a tide of anguish, he asks the presiding officer a rhetorical question to which he receives a devastating answer. The camera remains still, the officer in extreme forefront, but in the following seconds, the revelation playing across Bogarde's face is the film's true emotional climax.

If I had to choose his three most important films (allowing that there are many I have yet to see), I would say the Servant, Accident, and Victim. This triptych of psychological terrorism is by no means flawless even for a rock-solid Pinter fan. And if you are not a Pinter fan, if you find his earlier stuff pretentious and over-stagey and under-articulate, the first two will be hard going for you. What Pinter does in these scripts (separated by four years; the Servant came out in 1963 and Accident in 1967, but the gap feels longer) is what he does best: brings to life dark, malevolent power struggles which manifest without anyone ever speaking plainly about anything. Bogarde has a facility for it, expressing to us in tiny facial tics or a shadow of emotion fleeting past the eyes exactly what he is thinking.

As for Victim, it's one of those films which was more important at the time than as it ages. In 1961, an Englishman could still be tossed into the hoosgow and his life and fortunes ruined for the crime of being gay, and this was the film which took a brave stance against that bigoted law. Taking the role (which quietly put to rest the matinee-idol portion of his career, incidentally) was stouthearted, as Bogarde was gay himself. Because it's a film with a mission, a mission which is long since accomplished, there is a tiresome tendentiousness about it, but its production values are so good, and it so brings to life the moment in history (London just building up to "swinging") that it's still worth watching.

There is a popular quote of Bogarde's (I don't know where it came from; probably one of his many engagingly written memoirs): "The camera can photograph thought." He seems to have built his acting style firmly around that simple, resoundingly true premise, and it is why he so fascinates: enigma that he is, he shows us his thoughts, which are more interesting than those of most actors. If you revisit Darling, that Carnaby Street spectacular in which Julie Christie first knocked off all our socks, now she comes across like a prettier, girlier Courtney Love and Laurence Harvey just seems rather carelessly vacant, whereas Bogarde's intelligence communicates itself continuously, particularly in the cracks and folds between speeches. Therein lies the eloquence of his personal daimon, and it is the reason we will keep watching him, long after others from his era are forgotten.

horrorfest evening eight: burke and hare and deathdream

Burke and Hare: (2010. dir: John Landis) Oh, for the love of God, is there no one who can write a comedy about grave-robbing that is in the slightest wise funny? Where's Martin McDonagh when you need him? There's the fellow to hire; he could write a Burke and Hare story that would stain your teeth and make your hair fall out. This one is even worse than I Sell the Dead, were that possible, which I'd have said it wasn't, not until I saw this pap. That, of course, was before I knew it was directed by John Landis, he of the excruciatingly anti-Midas touch. It's full of lovely actors and the worst gags you'll ever hear, the kind of gags that are too clunky and obvious to have made it into one of the Airplane! movies, the kind that a twelve-year-old would toss into the bin as unfunny without a second thought. Gags dependent on anachronistic elbows to the audience's collective rib about the origins of the phrases "protection racket", "funeral parlor" and "Listerine". The combined and considerable talents of Simon Pegg and Andy Serkis are helpless to create one single redeeming moment in this entirely humorless, completely retarded dungheap.

It's just possible that this is all a Byzantine intrigue on the director's part, a scheme to make movies so bad that Animal House looks like some kind of masterwork. And, yes, compared to this, it really, really does, so congratulations, and we're sending a squad of zombies to your house right now to brand you with a great U for Useless on your forehead, and simultaneously we hereby revoke your right to direct, for now and all of eternity. We, the horror-movie-going public, no longer quite believe that you directed our beloved an American Werewolf in London, but that thin sliver of doubt is the only thing standing between you and immediate death by silent, seething, hive-minded, undead mob. So watch your step, buster.



*SPOILER ALERT*

Deathdream: (1974. dir: Bob Clark) Low-budget horror-auteur Bob Clark of Black Christmas renown mines the monster-infested loam of post-war trauma, leaving an uneven but darkly creepy revenant story. A young soldier dies in Viet Nam, then comes home anyway by virtue of the sheer torque of his mother's iron will. But instead of the cleancut, happy-go-lucky boy they once knew, his family has a changeling on its hands: sullen, emaciated, pale, emotionless, addicted to injecting human blood into his veins to keep his undead flesh from decaying. Without overworrying his metaphors, Clark touches on the shellshock, drug addictions, alienation and loss of soul suffered by veterans returning to the desperate suburbias of America in the early '70s.

The casting is inspired: John Marley and Lynn Carlen are the stricken parents, six years after playing an unhappily married couple in Cassavetes' Faces. Christopher Walken was originally slated to play the lead role of young Andy, an idea which sends pleasant shivers down my spine, but his replacement Richard Backus hits just the right notes, oscillating in steady motion between unbreachable taciturnity and unflinching violence. Behind the scenes, this project also boasts gore-maestro Tom Savini's initial forays into hideous maquillage, fresh off the boat from the war himself.

horrorfest evening seven: the Gewissengeist film

Allow me to call your attention to a favorite subgenre of the horror film by giving it a name: the Gewissengeist film. That's "conscience" and "ghost" strung together, and everything sounds more impressive in German.

This is how you make a Gewissengeist film (and I wish you would. The formula works very well indeed):

1. Take a handful of excellent character actors, British whenever possible.

2. Trap them in a confined place: a submarine, perhaps, or a bunker. Wartime is an opportune setting, with WWII crossing the finish line with a conspicuous first place lead over other wars, probably because Nazis are so easy to turn into evil ghosts and zombies whilst retaining that weird photogenicity. It need not, however, be wartime as long as...

3. ...there is some terrible threat of physical danger from without (ie: the enemy or a posse closing in) to offset the growing supernatural threat from within.

4. Wartime, however, also affords plenty of chances for good people to do bad things, which leads us to the instigating plot-point: some -- but generally not all -- of the characters have, usually prior to the action of the film, been involved in an atrocity or travesty of justice in which innocents were killed. The ensuing psychological tension combined with an eerie, furtive, supernatural presence propels the action into madness, chaos, and, for the lucky few, catharsis and new beginning.

5. The entity in question is real; it exists independently of the characters. In my favorite examples of the subgenre, it rarely takes direct action (as in Below). It lurks and hunkers, rather, like Banquo's ghost; it goads and directs, threatens or warns, messes with machinery and minds, but you never see it clearly and may never be certain in the end exactly what it is. In lazier hands, it becomes the usual macabre specialist in creative gore-dispersal which Hollywood assumes that we want.

6. Lastly, this supernatural force may or may not be directly connected with the crime committed. Sometimes it is, but more often the general premise seems to be that it's your bad conscience which lays you vulnerable to curses and other malevolence from beyond the grave.


Below (2002. dir: David Twohy) is the quintessence of Gewissengeist, and an overlooked stunner. The ensemble cast is splendid, and the tension builds relentlessly without sacrificing subtlety. It's got genuine scares, tense action sequences, a perfect story. The submarine lends itself beautifully to the claustrophobia necessary for the Gewissengeist film to work its dark magic. Bruce Greenwood is the captain who must pay for his crew's terrible mistake, Zach Galifianakis has a fine turn as a horror afficianado with theories about "the malediction", and Jason Flemyng may be the best actor around to fill those all-important but glamorless character-actor shoes.


The Bunker (2001. dir: Rob Green) is less successful but still fascinating. Nine Nazi soldiers are stuck in a bunker in the last days of the war, and the Yanks are encroaching. This particular bunker was built on grounds of ancient evil, and you know what that means: something's skulking in the tunnels. More crucially, seven of the nine share a terrible memory which preys on them to varying degrees. The best thing about it is the flashback to the atrocity. Done in heavy, saturated yellows and greens and in slightly slower motion, the sound-scheme is brilliant: all noises are muffled except gunshots, the heavy drone of insects, birdsong, and the terrible clicking of a camera shutter. Taken together, it's absolutely haunting. The race to the climax unfortunately opts for loudness and gore over substance, but it's still a pleasure to be trapped for an hour and a half with this solid group of actors. (Jason Flemyng again!)


Dead Birds (2004. dir: Alex Turner) is both unique and wildly unsettling. Set in Alabama during the Civil War, it begins with a brutal bank robbery and follows the ragtag group of miscreants to a cursed plantation house. Nobody is innocent in this one, and no one finds redemption. The cast is stellar (Henry Thomas, Patrick Fugit, Isaiah Washington. Michael Shannon!) and the suspense'll keep you from sleeping soundly unless you wash your brain with a comedy before retiring.

POSTSCRIPT: As for Triangle, I'm going to amend my previous statement that it fits into Gewissengeist. Rather, I'm making up a new category for it: it's a Bardo film. It's all about conscience, to be sure, but no independent supernatural agent is necessarily involved, and really there's only one person whose guilt is being explored, so it's possible the whole thing is her mad, post-mortem rush through that liminal labyrinth of terrifying hallucinations and karmic feedback that the Tibetan Book of the Dead calls the Bardo state.

Other examples of the genre, off the top of my head, might be Siesta, Jacob's Ladder, and even, arguably, Inception.

last night's double feature: inserts and the delicious little devil

SPOILER ALERT

Inserts: (1974. dir: John Bynum) I remember when this came out. I was already a Richard Dreyfuss fan from American Graffitti, but of course I never saw this; this was rated X, and I was ten. Even if I had found someone willing to sneak me into a drive-in, I wouldn't have gone, since it's about porn, and porn embarrassed the crap out of me when I was a kid.

Folks will tell you the reason this was a failure was because of the X-rating, but don't be fooled. It's a failure because it's a goddamn failure. And, man, I was so looking forward to it. I'll watch or read anything right now that deals with Hollywood during that transition between silents and talkies. (I'm on the prowl for a decent book about Thomas Ince, if you have any suggestions.) I'm chomping at the bit to see The Artist, but this is the sticks, and patience is a damn virtue, right? And this, my friend, is a piece of crap.

I'd call it a bad movie based on a bad stage play, since it's written like a bad stage play and it all gets shot in one stupid room, but according to IMDB it was written specifically to be filmed, which just goes to serve as a further sad example of that ongoing moral lesson about how directors should not be allowed to shoot their own scripts unless they're Woody Allen, and not always then.

There's some decent acting: Dreyfuss has a few inspired moments, but many of his choices are already (in retrospect, granted) starting to look like practiced shtick. Jessica Harper and Veronica Cartwright do some shining, the latter as a good-hearted, heroin-addicted has-been, the former as an ambitious starlet. Stephen Davies looks like he's acting for the nosebleeds at the Royal Opera House, and Bob Hoskins is utterly predictable all the way through, but so is the damned script. I made a game of it. "Now he's going to find the overdosed body," I'd say out loud. "Now that'll be Clark Gable at the door." "Now he's going to turn the lights out, and it'll be a really lame and ponderous metaphor for the lights going out on the entirety of his career, the entirety of his life." The one thing that kept me hanging on, the one thing that kept me watching, was the hope that the Dreyfuss character (they call him the washed-up Boy Wonder; he doesn't have a real name anymore, get it?) would talk some more about Wally Reid, whose death obviously impacted him with some force. I was disappointed. There's one monologue early on in which he describes the moment in which he found out about the death, but Bynum pulls the camera in slowly on him while he's speaking it, and he's cleaning his fingernails as he does, and it's all too damned precious for words. Bah! Humbug, I say.



the Delicious Little Devil: (1919. dir: Robert Z Leonard) Mae Murray was a sexy clown from the silents whose relaxed carriage and lack of vanity still invites affection. She began as a dancer and enjoyed immense stardom as a comedienne at Universal and MGM in those early days, reportedly earning as much as $10,000 a week (which is almost exactly a gazillion times what I make right now, nearly a full century later, thank you very much) then ending her days in penury after a bad marriage to a wicked prince and failing to make the leap into talkies. This is an impish comedy about a nice girl who's too vivacious to keep a hat-check job but has layabout relatives to support and so goes into disguise as a scarlet lady with a scandalous past in order to secure a job at a nightclub. Directed by Murray's third husband, it keeps a jovial pace and allows her the space to win us, with her Peacock Walk dance, for instance, or her manic preparations in her dressing room, or with her facial gestures alone. (My favorite is when she lets her eyes widen and her face go slack and presses her lips together so they disappear.) Her straight man is one heavily-powdered and very young Rudolpho De Valintine, a relaxed and good-natured foil as the rich boy who loves her in spite of her sins.

my miniature robert ryan film festival

SPOILER ALERT

Caught: (1949. dir: Max Ophuls) Ryan is fearsomely magnificent as Howard Hughes, shallowly disguised. Barbara Bel Geddes is the innocent gold-digger who has the misfortune to marry him, and James Mason is the do-gooder pediatrician who falls in love with her. Max Ophuls directs, and the way it's shot is the real star. The script is also very good, although it falls into some cliche by the end, a convenient heart attack and even more convenient miscarriage, all provided thanks to the Hays Code. Last I checked this wasn't domestically available on DVD, but it ought to be, both for Ryan's performance and for the stunning camera-work.


Act of Violence: (1948. dir: Fred Zinnemann) The sounds of this suspense thriller (about a threatened vengeance for a secret wartime offence) are the sounds of nightmare: Ryan's dragging foot as he walks around Van Heflin's darkened house while Heflin and Janet Leigh crouch, terrified, in the shadows, or the sound of Ryan's boat creaking as he rows out relentlessly after his prey. Otherwise, it's grotesquerie in suburbia: a parade of drunks at a convention is another nightmare image. The closing noose of tension, those slow-collapsing walls, reminds me of Odd Man Out: as if the Heflin character took the killshot when he first heard the Ryan character coming, and from there on it's one long, noirish descent into hell.


Escape to Burma: (1955. dir: Allan Dwan) A project unworthy of its stars, alas. I love Stanwyck and Ryan together; he's big enough to match her strength, and she's strong enough to match his presence. This is a movie full of set-pieces, though, instead of a movie about people: there's a jungle pavilion bit, bits with elephants, stolen rubies, a tiger hunt, native bandits. The plot itself is just a MacGuffin for a big, kind of faded, Technicolor extravaganza: the Ryan character is being pursued by the authorities for the murder of a royal prince. He finds his way to Stanwyck's teak-and-elephant plantation, where passion is inevitable. They don't have much to say to one another; nobody does. Characters spend a lot of time walking across enormous rooms to pour drinks without conversation to fill the space. They're just waiting for the next action sequence.

horrorfest evening six: the dunwich horror and triangle

SPOILER ALERT

the Dunwich Horror: (1970. dir: Daniel Haller) Trippy, '60s interpretation of the great Lovecraft story, one which is probably unfilmable as written, but catches so strong a hold on the imagination that it is, I trust, destined to be re-interpreted by moviemakers for all of eternity.

This time, the plot is dumbed down to include a ridiculously passive virgin-for-the-altar character (pity poor Sandra Dee), and the gargantuan and goatlike Wilbur Whateley is shrunken and humanized into a man who looks very much like a hipster version of Dean Stockwell. It has been re-set in 1970, relegating the "I look like Sandra Dee, I'm 27 and still lousy with virginity" idea to the slop-bucket of the utterly absurd. That said, there is still evidence of the true story squirming beneath the mountainous blasphemy of updates and rewrites, like the inclusion of that raucous flock of whippoorwills who hunker and wait to catch the souls of the dying as they leave their bodies.

In any case, the revelation for me was that psychedelia was a nice, low-budget way of expressing a Lovecraftian monster in those pre-CGI days. When the brave redshirt girl marches up and opens the fearsome, locked attic-chamber to release the beast, -- and, no, you won't find this scene in the Lovecraft story,-- she is overwhelmed by psychedelia. Consider the description of this monster in the original prose:

'Bigger'n a barn... all made o' squirmin' ropes... hull thing sort o' shaped like a hen's egg bigger'n anything with dozens o' legs like hogs-heads that haff shut up when they step... nothin' solid abaout it - all like jelly, an' made o' sep'rit wrigglin' ropes pushed clost together... great bulgin' eyes all over it... ten or twenty maouths or trunks a-stickin' aout all along the sides, big as stove-pipes an all a-tossin' an openin' an' shuttin'... all grey, with kinder blue or purple rings... an' Gawd in Heaven - that haff face on top..."

YOU try and film that without help from a computer.

Anyway, it's not a success, not by any standards, but it's an interesting failure, like a time-capsule from the Altamont era.




SPOILER ALERT

Triangle: (2009. dir: Christopher Smith) Ambitious Gewissengeist(*) horror outing by the director of Black Death, a man whose Christopher Nolan-ish, David Twohy-ish boldness in story and attention to detail attract me utterly. Flawed as it was, Black Death won me with its intrepid audacity (did I just say the same thing twice? consider it an attempt to emphasize the compliment). Triangle is more problematic, but equally bold, using both Time Vortex and Ghost Ship tropes, and using them rather well.

(The less you know about this film, the better, so stop reading now if you haven't seen it yet.)

A Time Vortex is a tricky thing, turning on a dime from suspense to Keystones Kops once you have more than a couple of versions of the same characters inhabiting the same space. Also, because it's plot-driven with an emphasis on action, an admirable attempt, the full dimensions of the characters have been sacrificed to favor pace and forward movement. Smith has made a crafty attempt to circumvent this flaw by casting extraordinarily well (would that all directors were so crafty), but the result is still not entirely effective. The other extremity of that particular stick is that once you know the ending, the "heroine's" maladroit and sometimes downright crazy-assed decisions become less inscrutable, but by that time certain skeptics in the audience may already have turned the channel.

*Gewissengeist: Conscience-Ghost