black and white double feature: a place of one's own and the search for beauty

a Place of One's Own: (1945. dir: Bernard Knowles) Knowles began as Hitchcock's pre-Hollywood cinematographer, and this was his first jaunt in the director's chair.

James Mason plays thirty years older than his true age, and does it with a certain Johnny-Deppian glee, and without a hitch or a falter. This is a ghost story, but plays out like an old parlor-play or chamber-piece, with the servants ducking in upon occasion to act as a Greek chorus, providing exposition and letting us in on the mood of the house. Mason and (also artificially aged) Barbara Mullen shine unfailingly as the unlucky couple who have retired to a haunted house, but Margaret Lockwood, a big star in Britain at the time, gets clumsy with the kabuki over-emoting and nearly ruins the piece. Well, the piece is so slowly-paced that it really ruins itself; she helps it along towards its inevitable failure.

It doesn't hold a candle to the Uninvited, another British ghost story from the same period. This one is like a short story stretched to try and fit across a novel-sized frame, with the same dull conversation about whether ghosts exist repeated as a sort of coda, just to fill the time. Its twist-ending, when it comes, is not sufficiently impressive to justify the build-up. Its best moments are when Mullen is watching the ghost (which we sometimes hear but never see); she is so entirely convincing that one can almost see the phantom reflected in her eyes, and these are the only chilling moments the film has to offer.

the Search for Beauty: (1934. dir: Erle C. Kenton) An early vehicle for Ida Lupino (when she was still blond and English) and Buster Crabbe (with the day's equivalent of a Schwarzenegger physique) about a shyster trio who want to cash in on the sex appeal of Olympian superstars to make a million bucks under the thin veneer of respectability offered by a "health and exercise" campaign. The film itself, pre-Hays and cheese/beefcake focused, achieves some inspired moments of levity with its skipping dialogue and the wonderful powers of reaction owned by James Gleason, a veteran of the Spanish-American War, then of the stage, then a frequenter of the backlot from the earliest times of Hollywood. Mostly, though, it's about healthy young bodies parading around wearing very little.

the guest: bravo

(2014. dir: Adam Wingard) I don't have a ten-best list for 2014 (because I went to the cinema exactly two times all year), but if I did, this would be on it. This film is great from the opening: we see, from behind, a guy running, then a title card drops in against a very effectively ominous strain of music, then cut to another great shot, a pumpkinheaded witch-scarecrow, beautifully framed, with a quiet, parental voice over it asking someone if they're ready. It never lags, either, this film; every detail is spot-on, right to the end. The music is especially lovingly chosen, and the sound is awesomely good, as in a moment when a distant thunderclap, just barely registered consciously by the audience, emphasizes a direful facial expression.

It's an old story. A stranger ingratiates himself into a household and, one by one, wins the trust of each family member, until some trifle slips and someone gets wise. This version is just better told than most. Even in the end, when it inevitably descends into shoot-em-up, it's such wonderfully well-filmed and well-edited shoot-em-up that it still works, and I don't remember the last time I was able to say that about a gunfire scene. (Yes, I do. It was the Lone Ranger, which you still ought to see.)

Dan Stevens gets my Oscar as the enigmatic stranger, equal parts corn-fed Kansas boy and psycho-robot Kansas boy. It is as self-assured a performance as you'll see. The scene towards the end when he realizes that the daughter of the house (Maika Monroe, channeling Kate Hudson to very good effect) has fooled him with the army boots, and a slow grin crosses his face while he lets his head fall sideways, as if he's falling a little bit in love, is just plain one of the best moments I've seen in a very long time.

the visitor: he jodorowskies, he misses!

*SPOILER ALERT*

(1979. dir: Michael J. Paradise) In his interview in the extras, Lance Henriksen says he thinks the explanation for this welter of confusion (or camp-classic, depending on your perspective) is that the Italian director had worked for Fellini and was attempting his own "Fellini", landing wide of the mark. I see no Fellini here: I think he was trying to "Jodorowsky", and missing by a country mile.

You've got Franco Nero in book-end appearances as a Christ-like teacher/storyteller. You've got roomfuls of pale skinheads, some of them kids, some young adults. You've got an exploding basketball which throws an important game to Atlanta. A woman with alien DNA who gives birth to super-mutant children. A bad-seed evil mutant girl who bears a resemblance to the young Linda Blair (even wearing her satin jacket from Roller Boogie) and keeps an attack-kestrel named Squeaky as a pet. She gets a toy bird from her aunt as a birthday gift but it morphs inside the box into a handgun with which she shoots her mom, then she does gymnastics while her mom is undergoing life-or-death surgery.

You have opaque cubes filled with moving silhouettes on top of a building; John Huston walks amongst them, looking regal. You have Sam Peckinpah as a philanthropist doctor who saves the world by performing an abortion. Lance Henriksen as an evil basketball magnate (what? who's ever heard of those?) and Mel Ferrer as the ringleader of the evil aliens who are apparently trying to take down the world. Glenn Ford is a cop who has his eye taken out by Squeaky while he's driving and ends up in a ball of flame. Shelley Winters is a housekeeper-slash-spiritual-sentinel, who holds her own against the devil-spawn child and tolls the death-knell for poor Squeaky after he turns into a hawk and attacks the mom.

The mom has been paralyzed by the gunshot, but adjusts to life in a wheelchair with remarkable rapidity, managing to move around, remain stunningly dressed and maquillaged without assistance, still drives a car and manages to climb in and out on her own, somehow folding the wheelchair and depositing it neatly in back before doing so. The best part may be a battle in a mall ice-rink in which the demon-child takes on a thuggish band of teenaged boys, making short work of them in the time it takes John Huston to walk down an endless flight of stairs. There's another showdown, between Huston and the little girl, amidst funhouse mirrors ala the Lady from Shanghai, and, not surprisingly, it's nowhere near as gripping as the original.

In the climactic scenes, John Huston orchestrates a groovy light-show in the skies which culminates in an army of pigeons who take vengeance on the little girl, while the basketball magnate gets skewered by a flying metal bird-sculpture.

I've left out some psychedelia and some chase scenes, some talking and a lot of hyperventilating, but you get the gist. It's quintessential seventies; check out the haircuts! Yes, I've given away a ton of spoilers, but "spoilers" is a misnomer here. The point is not enjoying the unfolding of the plot, because there is no "plot" in the sense of a cohesive, logical story-progression. This is meant as a double-bill alongside something like Look What's Happened to Rosemary's Baby. You get baked with your friends and laugh at it.

alien invasion triple feature

the Faculty: (1998. dir: Robert Rodriguez) ... in which Rodriguez gives us the best high school movie ever. Like the Breakfast Club, only without the suckage, and on steroids.

The kids at Herrington High come slowly to realize that their teachers have been infected by an alien entity, and, as traditional in the genre, neither parents nor cops can be trusted to set it right; they have to do it themselves. The cast is great, both students and faculty. Robert Patrick has a blast as the football coach, Josh Hartnett shows off his youthful mastery as the flunking genius drug-dealer, Jon Stewart is the geeky science teacher with a crush on the school nurse (Salma Hayek, weirdly underused), Clea DuVall plays the Ally Sheedy character, only way better. Bebe Neuwirth takes a couple of killer scenes to town as the principal. The only real downside is the silly endcap in which the school loser (Elijah Wood) winds up sucking face with the overachieving cheer-queen (Jordana Brewster). Also, Famke Janssen is disappointingly overwhelmed, faced with playing a neurotic introvert.

Slither: (2006. dir: James Gunn) Taking it's pleasure Schadenfreude-style via the road of total gross-out, this alien-invasion venture is both way too disgusting and has too much gratuitous cussing to succeed at becoming the Tremors-like funfest it would like to be. The cast is great, the production values excellent, and if you watch the extras, you can tell everyone had a big party making the thing. (It seems that, unsurprisingly, Nathan Fillion is a barrel of laughs to work with.) The alien "makeup" -- can you call it that when it takes up a whole room? -- is fantastic; Michael Rooker suffers a wonderful, uber-grody metamorphosis, but it's all just so endlessly disgusting that you shut off after a spell.

Still, if you have a high tolerance for the cussin' and the gross, this is your evening pleasure. Gunn is the fellow who wrote and directed Guardians of the Galaxy, so you can be sure he knows how to make you laugh. And definitely watch the "Who is Bill Pardy?" extra afterwards.

the UFO Incident: (1975. dir: Richard A. Colla) This is another of those rare '70s television movies that was actually very good. Based on the first modern tale of alien abduction, the story of Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple in middle-class Massachusetts who lost time on a night-time drive down a lonely road and woke to find their lives changed, it is so well-acted by James Earl Jones and Estelle Parsons that one forgives the rubbery looking aliens.

The Hills become depressed and paranoid after their evening of strangeness and eventually go to a psychiatrist who performs the first of the now-familiar regressions to retrieve lost memories. It is Jones' performance while under hypnosis and reliving his abduction that is a truly riveting scene; man, what an actor.

When I watched it as a child I wanted only the alien story, which, by the way, is very well written, moving back and forth in time and memory gracefully, giving us clues and hints ("Silly dog. Why are you barking at the moon?") which build our suspense with perfect timing. The other half of the story, though, is the relationship between the Hills, and this I found dull and frustrating at the time. In retrospect I see that it would have been groundbreaking stuff for its day, and this may have been the filmmaker's primary motivation behind the project. Certainly it's far more compelling than any of the old Guess Who's Coming to Dinner crap. This is a loving couple whose relations are already tested by the strain of the societal gaze, who undergo something undescribable, something which must remain secret, a metaphorical Journey into the Underworld, and we are watching them pick their uncertain way back into the light. In the meantime, we watch a white woman and a black man just being married, something which I'm guessing hadn't much happened in television or even on the movie screen back then, not with any sort of realism. Leave it to science fiction: it's always easier to sneak a political or socially fraught message into the living rooms of suburban America via a genre piece, as Star Trek well knew, than through flat-out. undisguised drama.

For students of the Fortean, it is required viewing.

stephen mchattie double feature: pontypool and death valley

Pontypool: (2008. dir: Bruce McDonald) What if a virus could take refuge within a language, hide there and transmit itself through specific words? What do you do if you're the disc jockey on a radio station when the English language becomes its chosen method of transmission? McHattie plays radio shock-jock Grant Mazzy, recently shuttled out of the mainstream and into the Canadian hinterlands after offending the wrong people. It's early morning, the world is socked in with snowstorm, he makes it to work at his new podunk job, accompanied only by his producer (Lisa Houle) and a young engineer recently returned from service in Afghanistan (Georgina Reilly). After the usual struggles in the first part of the morning, things start to get weird.

It's a strange, bold idea, and early on it builds some terror by refusing to show us the horrors. We hear them described (masterfully) by the guy in the "weather copter", and then, in one instance, we watch a poster of Mazzy's face on the wall in skewed Dutch angle as we listen to a murder being committed just off-screen. McHattie and Houle, Canadian actors long married, work well together and give the piece a certain necessary cohesion even after its script has begun to fall apart. Before the end, it gets twisted up in its metaphors and chokes fatally on its own pretensions, but the two leads are so good we keep caring. The last moment before the credits is inspired. Then there's some silliness following the credits which must have been an inside joke. Anyway, I didn't get it.

Death Valley: (1982. dir: Dick Richards) This is a weird-assed little movie. It begins in an eastern city, with Billy (Peter Billingsley, he of the coke-bottle lenses in Christmas Story) spending a day of culture with his dad (Edward Herrmann): they play chess, visit museums, then make a tearful farewell. His mother has a new man in the Southwest, and he is off for a vacation in Death Valley. A plot which initially seems to be heading into "how will the new stepdad win the kid's affection?" country runs sideways into la-la-land when Billy steals a necklace from an RV which turns out to be a murder site, then sees the pendant's exact double around the neck of a waiter (McHattie), then reports this to the Sheriff (Wilfred Brimley, who might as well be Billingsley grown older)... and weird pieces of chaos follow, one after another, without making a whole lot of sense, but without seeming to care much about making sense, either, which somehow makes it more acceptable.

The reason to watch it, the one reason, is McHattie. He's given a lot of leeway with the improvisation, and he makes it great. The scene in which young Billy locks himself in the motel bathroom and bad hombre McHattie breaks him out by removing the moulding from around the door, all the while making light banter with the boy, is the kind of inspired that drags a bad movie upward a couple of pegs, a thing for which this actor is known. Once the boy escapes and runs to hide by the pool, just the way his predator prowls around it, calmly tracking, is beautiful to watch. Then McHattie improvises a whole bit while driving, including a rendition of "Billy Boy", and it all builds up to his dance on the rooftop: "I'm dancing on the roof, daddy, and there ain't nothing you can do about it!"