samhainfest 2014: tormented

(1960. dir: Bert I. Gordon) ...or, as the poster reads, "Tormented by the She-Ghost of Haunted Island!" Crazy, dad! Director Gordon, responsible for such classics as Attack of the Puppet People and War of the Colossal Beast, ramps the action down a few notches but doesn't let up on the camp, making for a truly strange, Ed-Woodian evening of ghost story. Tom Stewart (Richard Carlson) plays jazz piano for a living but lives on a tiny, secluded island full of wealthy vacationers in the northern Atlantic. He's about to marry a rich broad, Meg, who wears Doris Day's wardrobe and walks like her, too, and is utterly clueless, and happy to remain so, as to the dark depths lurking within her purported beloved's psyche.

We see his darkness straight off because we are introduced to him as he fights with an ex-girlfriend, a sultry, faux-Marilyn chanteuse (Juli Reding) who will destroy his life before she lets anyone else have him. The introduction is a good one: we begin with waves crashing violently and continually against rocks under the credits, then Stewart narrates, Sunset Boulevard-like, as we travel across the picturesque beach to a decrepit lighthouse, then up the stairs toward the bickering voices. It allows us to relax into the beauty of the place without fully trusting it before we are thrown in with the more wooden, two-dimensional human inhabitants. Right away we watch the incident which jump-starts the whole shebang: Stewart doesn't exactly KILL his evil chanteuse, he just ALLOWS her to fall to her death. And, almost immediately, his guilt starts to drive him nuts.

There's a slightly agitated, not quite histrionic, jazz score splashing up near constantly against the action, and it helps, rather than hinders, keeping the tension alive. Unfortunately, the supernatural occurrences (footsteps in the sand, a hand crawling across the floor, a head without a body conversing naturally from atop a table until Stewart wraps it in a cloth and tosses it down the stairs, where he finds it is only a bouquet of flowers, an incriminating phonograph record switching itself repeatedly on) are so clumsily done as to elicit only laughter, and the film lacks any semblance of the Polanski-touch, that dark, awful sense of slow-encroaching madness and the strange behaviors it inspires in its victims (see the Tenant, Repulsion, Rosemary's Baby, the Ghost Writer, Macbeth, and no doubt a hundred other examples from his body of work) which it sorely needs.

You can't write it off entirely, though. A young Joe Turkel (the genius robot-maker in Blade Runner, that cadaverous, spooky-assed barman in the Shining), looking wonderfully Stephen McHattie-ish, is assured and ominous as a hep-cat ferry-man with an attitude who susses out the situation and tries to wrangle money from the knowledge. The wedding, when it finally comes, has an organ-played processional which sounds like a funeral march and all the flowers decay beneath a breath of maledictory wind. Stewart's true love, interestingly enough, turns out to be Meg's nine-year-old sister, Sally (played by the director's daughter, Susan, who had a long and successful television career until she grew up). Sally is forthright from the beginning about her devotion to him, telling Stewart plainly that he is marrying the wrong sister. And, indeed, whereas the older girl willfully blinds herself to necessary truths, Sally sees her beloved clearly, sees his increasingly erratic behavior, even watches him do murder, and still fights through her fears to stand by her man.

The MST3K crew has already done a job on this movie, which I'm guessing is probably very funny. Meanwhile, the sheer strangeness of it makes it a good time on its own.