The Round-Up: October 9—15

This was my theater week in New York city, so there's only one new film review, two from the archives and six plays, five on- and one off-Broadway.

Spirit Halloween: The Movie

If this scared you in the movie, you can go right to Spirit Halloween and buy one of your own.

That's the whole idea of this film.

Some films set up expectations you dread having fulfilled. Others set up expectations they meet well. David Poag’s SPIRIT HALLOWEEN: THE MOVIE (2022, Shudder) does both. As the title suggests, this film is largely a promotional vehicle for the Spirit Halloween chain. Three young teens break into one of their stores on Halloween night, where they awaken an evil spirit (Christopher Lloyd, mostly as a voiceover) that possesses various bits of merchandise while trying to take over one of their bodies. For the most part, that’s about as dreary as it sounds. There’s even an extended music video in which the three play with store items before the scary stuff kicks in. There’s a good side to the film as well. Early on, the main teen (Donavan Colan) is revealed to be facing two problems: he’s afraid of heights, and he resents his new stepfather and stepsister because he’s still mourning his father’s death. You can be pretty sure that he’s going to end up dealing with both issues — this is really juvenilia, after all — but it works because Colan and the young actors are pretty good. The film is at its best when the young people discover a basement beneath the store. The sequence creates a bit of wonder as they discover the remnants of a bulldozed orphanage and a cave containing a small cottage. Lloyd is mostly seen in the pre-credits sequence that explains why he’s haunting the place, and he’s so good at over-the-top villainy nothing else in the film can live up to it.  There’s also a cameo by Marla Gibbs as one boy’s creepy grandmother because, you know, old people are scary. The film is highly derivative.  The filmmakers have talked about going for the feel of THE GOONIES (1985) and MONSTER SQUAD (1987), and from the first sight of the young men riding bicycles around town it’s also clearly an attempt to cash in on STRANGER THINGS’ cultural capital. It’s far from offensive (though I prefer my horror films more on the edge), but it’s not total monkey dump and might please parents wanting a Halloween film to share with the family, particularly if they want to introduce their kids to the joys of B&E and vandalism. Since it was shot in Rome, GA, my Atlanta-area friends may spot some familiar names in the credits, though I’m wondering if the Doug Kaye listed as working for one of the production companies is the Doug Kaye I read plays with once a month on Zoom.

Spiral

Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman is worrying about the neighbors and with good reason.

The Shudder Original SPIRAL (2019) is a slow burn of a horror thriller with a lot of queer political resonance. Malik (Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman) and his partner, Aaron (Ari Cohen), move to a small town with Aaron’s daughter. Aaron wants the small-town life, but Malik, a survivor of gay-bashing, sees signs of bigotry everywhere. Exacerbating his problems is his work ghost-writing the biography of a professional homophobe who ran a conversion therapy clinic. Kurtis David Harder and writers Colin Minihan and John Poliquin keep the plot open for most of the running time; you can’t be sure if Malik is really uncovering some strange cult or sinking into paranoid delusions, and Bowyer-Chapman skillfully limns the character’s descent. Hander has chosen to have the film’s visual style mirror Malik’s mental state, so there’s a certain flatness to the early scenes about Malik and Aaron settling into their little “sweater fag” paradise. The main issue is that the plot, once uncovered seems to make more sense symbolically than practically.  Why do cults in the movies have such convoluted agenda for gaining supernatural power, and why do they always hinge on people’s being stupid? If Malik and Aaron would just talk about what’s going on, they’d sashay away like nobody’s business.

Shucked

by Robert Horn, Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally directed by Jack O’Brien

Corn? When did I eat corn?

Infectiously silly, this show has no deep meanings. It doesn’t tell us anything we don’t know already. But as the sadistic zookeeper said, “It’s more fun than a barrel of monkeys.” You have to be in the mood for jokes like “A grave mistake is burying grandma on a slope,” but there’s nothing wrong with that. The story of a con man visiting an isolated Southern town whose main industry, corn, has stopped growing is really a Restoration comedy, with a pair of constant lovers, a pair of gay lovers and a fool who carries the town’s manners too far. The female half of the gay couple, Lulu, has Tony written all over it, and though we didn’t get to see Alex Newell in the role, we did see an excellent understudy (sorry, no program insert, so I don’t know which of the three understudies it was). Jack O’Brien’s staging and Sarah O’Gleby’s choreography add to the joy and help showcase the bouncy score. Newell’s “Independently Owned” has gotten most play out of the score, but my favorite was the second act quartet, “I Do,” that tells you where the romantic stories are headed. I don’t know how well this will hold up. Right now the ensemble is very good at not carrying the obvious laughs too far, but I could see replacements turning it into a schlockfest. When it’s available, I’d expect a lot of regional productions.

Guttenberg! The Musical

by Scott Brown & Anthony King directed by Alex Timbers

Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells make a village.

How can one of the world’s worst musicals be so good? It can if it’s the very big play-within-a-play about two inept creators renting a Broadway house for one night (and hiring half of a New Jersey wedding band) to present their masterpiece to a group of Broadway producers. It’s clearly been my day for silly, only where SHUCKED was infectiously so, this one is aggressive about it. With Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad as the show’s creators and all its characters (thanks to a table full of hats with character names boldly written on them), it’s pretty much irresistible. In fact, it’s one of the few shows I’ve seen since COVID that made me forget I was masked (to protect my friends, chorus colleagues and cast mates). The creators joke that every musical has to tackle a serious issue (like having only half a face in PHANTOM OF THE OPERA), so their show includes clumsy references to anti-Semitism. The overall production, however, is about learning that you can live on dreams. It’s also about the creativity that makes the hats come to life as a chorus, backup singers and, of course, a kick line. The script could go further developing the characters’ relationship. It writes a check in the first act that never gets cashed. But that doesn’t put a damper on the evening. Now I want to direct it in North Carolina, and I know just the two actors to do it, but I’m not naming names.

Sweeney Todd

by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler, directed by Thomas Kail

How do you like your meat pies?

Thomas Kail’s production uses heavy shadows to create a mystical feeling for one of the greatest musicals ever written. At times, the characters seem to be rising out of the depths of our unconscious. It’s a stunning revival that still carries the original’s indictment of capitalism (ironic in a heavily capitalized production) while adding a post-colonial comment through the casting of Ruthie Ann Miller as the Beggar Woman and Daniel Yearwood as Anthony.  Annaleigh Ashford is a very funny, very specific and clean Mrs. Lovett. She plays her as sex-starved, which works in a play about appetites. John Groban sings quite well and is wise enough to create ugly sounds when needed. But he isn’t always very specific, and he still doesn’t know how to create a transition. His “Epiphany” is more about bellowing than discovering a course of action, but then he comes around for a strong and buoyant “A Little Priest.” Gaten Matarazzo was out, but his understudy, Felix Torre z-Ponce, did a good job. There were also solid understudies filling in on Judge Turpin and Pirelli. It’s a great compliment to the production that when the intermission hit, I couldn’t believe we’d been watching the show for 90 minutes. It seemed lots shorter.

& Juliet

by David West Read, Max Martin and Friends directed by Luke Sheppard

Rock me, Juliet!

There was a definite disconnect between me and most of the audience at this performance. Where they knew many of the Max Martin songs and often laughed at the clever ways they were slotted into the plot, I was only familiar with a few of them. But then, a lot of the more sophisticated Shakespeare reference went right over their heads. Except for the man next to me, most seemed as thrilled as I was with the way the script and production drew on what we know of Shakespeare’s theatre and his personal life to insert a lot of queer energy into the whole. The premise is that Anne Hathaway attends the opening night of ROMEO AND JULIET and insists on a new ending that becomes a beginning as Juliet lives to find her own place in the world. There are a lot of great moments: using “I Kissed a Girl” for a gay love scene, Romeo’s funeral, attended by all the women and men he loved before Juliet, Paulo Szot busting some boy band moves. The plot is clever and engaging until it settles for easy answers at the end. The good performances also include understudy Rachel Webb as Juliet, Betsy Wolfe as Anne Hathaway (if they want to keep SWEENEY TODD running with a new cast, she could easily take over Mrs. Lovett), Austin Scott as a preening, very sexy Shakespeare, Justin David Sullivan as Juliet’s gay BFF and Philippe Arroyo as the man who catches her eye in Paris. Be warned, the show is very loud. I have friends who probably could not watch it comfortably. There area  lot of well executed design elements, but I couldn’t help thinking how many small regional theatres could run for years on what it took to mount this show. Most of my favorite moments were simple and quiet: Anne Hathaway throwing a handful of glitter into the air in “Domino” and later advising Juliet on her love life at the start of “That’s the Way It Is” chief among them.

Here Lies Love

by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim directed by Alex Timmers

They've turned the Broadway Theater into a disco. Was it worth it?

I got to dance with one of my biggest current crushes Conrad Ricamora (not one-on-one, which might have been tragic considering my dancing skills and acrophobia; but he led one of the audience participation numbers mezzanine). And I wish I had enjoyed it more, not just for his sake, but also for the large representation of Asian actors in the cast. Based on a concept album (is this starting to seem familiar?), it’s a sung-through musical about a dictator’s wife, in this case Imelda Marcos, tracing her rise and fall (if you don’t know where this going, you might as well stop reading now). The problem is this isn’t even EVITA-lite. It’s more EVITA-anaemic. The anaemia is in the plot, which jumps from event to event with no time for becoming. Poor country girl Imelda Romualdez (Arielle Jacobs) marries rising political leader Ferdinand Marcos (Jose Llana), and suddenly she’s addicted to pills. He’s elected president, and suddenly they’re corrupt, and suddenly he’s cheating on her, and suddenly he’s a dictator, and suddenly he’s sick. There are some strong moments as when the Marcoses are on the campaign trail, and he keeps regulating her gestures until he realizes her gaucheness is winning the voters’ hearts. And the performances are all fine.  But the whole is amped up so loudly it’s almost impossible to follow the lyrics. They’re distorted beyond comprehensibility. And as a result, there’s no clear sense of why any of this happens.  There’s a solid number, “Order 1081,” about Marcos’ imposition of martial law, but my favorite was the final number, “God Draws Straight, when the DJ (Renee Albulario at this performance) who’s been screaming at us to dance for almost two hours, comes out with a guitar and quietly sings about the country’s move to democracy. It makes you wonder if the people didn’t overthrow the Marcoses because they just wanted a little peace and quiet.

Swing State

by Rebecca Gillman directed by Robert Falls

Bubba Weiler and Mary Beth Fisher make magic in the midst of Midwestern realism.

I don’t think I’m overreacting to the fact that this is the first straight play for me on this visit, but this tale of human connections dying in a dying world seemed utterly sublime to me. The widowed Peg (Mary Beth Fisher) tends 40 acres of prairie land she owns in rural Wisconsin. The wildlife and wild flowers are slowly fading under the effects of pollution, much of it from the farm next door. When her husband’s rifle and some tools go missing from the barn, the sheriff (Kristen Fitzgerald) suspects Ryan (Bubba Weiler), an ex-convict who survived an emotionally abusive father and alcoholic mother with the help of Peg and her late husband. But did he steal the rifle for criminal purposes or because he knows Peg is considering suicide? That’s not as grim as it sounds. Gillman has peppered the play with humor that grows out of character. It’s like Chekhov as he saw himself rather than as Stanislavksy saw him (look it up). Gillman gives everybody opportunities for dimensional work. There are no clowns or villains. Just people. The ensemble playing is terrific, and after five musicals it was a joy to hear natural, un-miked, undistorted human voices. The set is also a marvel of detail. The production is imported from the Goodman Theater in Chicago and represents them very well. The show has been extended, but there were empty seats at the Saturday night performance I attended. In a just world, this production would run to full houses for years.

The Roundup: October 2-8

Lots of rehearsals this week, so I've even included one from the archives I was embarrassed to put on my Facebook page. And be warned, next week will be very different. It's different now, because Blogger has clearly developed sentience and is formatting this thing on its own.

Siege

Tom Nardini looks particularly hot when taking out fascists.

Paul Donovan and Maura O’Connell’s SIEGE (1983, Shudder) played in its native Canada as SELF-DEFENSE, and both titles fit. It was the first producing effort for Donovan and its shoe-string budget shows in poor print quality, limited special effects (which might be a blessing as it cuts down on the gore) and some amateurish performances. But it has a visceral energy that’s hard to resist and the main setting, Donovan’s own apartment, is a fascinating collection of junk and strange architecture. During the 1981 Halifax police strike, a neo-Nazi group terrorizes the patrons at a gay bar. When they accidentally kill the bartender (Stratford regular Joseph Rutten) their leader executes the witnesses. The sole escapee (Terry-David Depres) seeks refuge in a ramshackle apartment building, where one man (Tom Nardini) leads his friends in holding off the killers with their few actual weapons and some makeshift devices. Yes, it’s STRAW DOGS (1971) with a social justice slant. The film moves well, and there’s some dark wit in making one of the neo-Nazis more effeminate than the men in the bar. It’s also very satisfying that the thugs, however lethal, are rather stupid. The film probably has more resonance now than it had 40 years ago, particularly with its final freeze frame (no spoilers here). But it’s also very much a product of the 1980s. Nardini is being visited by two blind friends, which means he has the benefit of their super-developed blind hearing. And the script gives Nardini a girlfriend (Brenda Bazinet), so we know he and his best friend are just friends. I’d love to see a contemporary version where the man on the run is taken in by a righteous gay couple. I can see Luke Evans and Cheyenne Jackson in the roles, and I’d like it even better if they played long stretches of the film with their clothes off.

Beautiful Darling

I watched this 2010 documentary about Candy Darling on Netflix years ago and found it very moving. The interviews were particularly strong, with chances to see people like Penny Arcade, Helen Hanft, Taylor Mead and my friend Paul Ambrose. They even had archival footage of a play in which Darling and Paul appeared together. With its combination of archival footage and contemporary interviews, it becomes as much a meditation on time as anything else -- what time does to people and the time it takes for a boy from New Jersey to re-create himself as a glamorous star and flame brightly before burning out.

Bigger Than Life

Nicholas Ray and cinematographer Joseph MacDonald turn middle-class family life into an expressionistic nightmare. 

Nicholas Ray explodes the patriarchal 1950s dream of middle-class perfection in BIGGER THAN LIFE (1956), a Jekyll-Hyde story in which he replaces the unbridled sexual appetites of most cinematic Hydes with a nightmare version of masculine aggression. James Mason, who also produced, plays a grade-school teacher who can barely make ends meet. He’s even taken a part-time job as a taxi dispatcher (imagine hearing those cultured tones when you call for a ride) without telling his wife (Barbara Rush). When he collapses from an arterial condition, the doctors prescribe cortisone. The rush he feels from being pain-free leads him to abuse the medication, pushing him into megalomania and even psychosis. As a result, he becomes a martinet in his home, tormenting his young son with his demands for perfection and eventually telling his wife he’s outgrown her. Interestingly, one of the figures combatting and helping overcome his most violent impulses is a possibly gay gym teacher (Walter Matthau, in only his third film, so the idea of his playing a gay man isn’t that off the wall). Ray and cinematographer Joseph MacDonald have a field day heightening shadows to an expressionistic level as Mason’s psychosis grows more severe, and David Raksin follows suit with the film’s score. Rush starts out delivering the kind of creamy non-acting second-string studio leading ladies like Alexis Smith used to fall back on but gets more convincing as her world deteriorates. At the end, she has a powerful scene telling off the doctors for not letting her know everything going on in her husband’s case because they’re depriving her of the one role society has allowed her, caregiver. Mason is simply masterful as he goes from everybody’s friend to tin-pot Fascist, because he plays his mad scenes as if he thought every outlandish thing he said and did was perfectly logical. In his moments of clarity, he demonstrates that he’s one of the screen’s best purveyors of self-loathing. The script went through several hands, including Ray’s and Mason’s, and the amazing speech Mason delivers coming out of sedation was written by Clifford Odets.

Untamed Youth

Mamie Van Doren puts her assets on display in UNTAMED YOUTH.

Calypso Go Go

Mamie Van Doren helped bring rock and roll to the movies and burlesque to rock and roll. When she performs “Obala Baby” in Howard W. Koch’s UNTAMED YOUTH (1957, TCM, YouTube), the camera dwells on her posterior as she shakes in rhythm to the song. She’s not a bad singer, but in most numbers she’s more contralto than belter, which puts her a step or two away from Mrs. Miller (look it up, you young whippersnappers!). Of course, nobody came to hear her sing. They came to watch her wriggle through her numbers, most of her steps, according to her, improvised. She performs four of the film’s five songs, with the other done by Eddie Cochran, who would go on to become an acclaimed rocker but here seems like a bad Elvis Presley imitator. Most of the songs are extemporaneous performances while the untamed youth of the title relax after a hard day’s work on a cotton farm. They’ve been sentenced there by a local judge (Lurene Tuttle) who provides unpaid labor to farmer John Russell in return for certain, shall we say, intimacies. They’re not all that intimate — this is the 1950s, after all — and she has trouble even getting him to share a drink with her since he’s also using his position to extort sex out of the female inmates. At one point he says, “I don’t like tramps — male or female,” which might suggest he’s not limiting his attentions to the women, but this being a 1950s movie we’d never know if he were. It’s all pretty flatly written and directed except for the dance scenes and an opening escape attempt played under the credits. Some of the dancers are quite good, and Jered Barclay has a funny bit as an inmate who refuses to give in to the rock and roll magic. There’s some good photography of the Bakersfield locations, and cinematographer Carl E. Guthrie gets some nice noir effects in the night scenes. Van Doren plays the young innocent here, which doesn’t quite go with her dancing style, and Tuttle has horrible material with which to work, but Lori Nelson, as Van Doren’s sister, has some good tough girl moments that show she could be more than a perpetual ingenue. The closing number, “Go, Go Calypso” is such an arrant piece of cultural appropriation — with lines like “If I’d known you were coming, I’d have baked a…rum cake” and “Me talkie funny. I take de money. I get de jiggles. Everything wiggles!” — it could be considered an act of international aggression.

Malignant

There's one decent effect in MALIGNANT. Now you've seen it,

so you don't have to bother with watching.

On HBO Max’s page for MALIGNANT (2021), they prompt viewers to “Come for the thrills, stay for the wild ending that has everyone talking.” They should have included “try not to drown in the cheese.” I’ve always thought James Wan was a better director than a writer. He did a good job directing THE CONJURING (2013), but the series fell apart when he started contributing to the scripts. MALIGNANT, apart from a superfluous prologue filmed in the self-consciously explosive style of a Zack Snyder, has some decently shot sequences. After being beaten by her drunken husband (Jake Abel), Madison (Annabelle Willis) starts to experience visions in which first he and then people she doesn’t even know are killed. The effect, as her environment melts into the locations of the murders, is ingenious. And later there’s a great kinetic sequence in which the killer takes out a police squad room. To get there, however, you have to wade through some medical absurdities and a sudden reversion to sentimentality that feels out of place in such a sadistic horror film. Wan worked on the story with his wife, Ingrid Bisu, and screenwriter Akela Cooper. It says a lot that the most refreshing character is a stereotyped black policewoman (Michole Briana White) because her sass keeps cutting through the improbable plot and emotional wallowing. Maddie Hasson is good as Willis’ sister, and leading man George Young sure is pretty. But the script left me crying, “Stop him before he writes again.”

Demons

If Busby Berkeley had made a horror film,

it would have had a number like the motorcyclescene in DEMONS.

Revisiting Lamberto Bava’s DEMONS (1985, Shudder) after two years so I could show it to a young friend offers some interesting perspectives. The story of a movie theatre whose patrons are turned into demons during the showing of a film about a young man turned into a demon is loopy as all hell, with stunt people flying through the air before they’re hit, others who seem to be sitting around waiting to be attacked and a young man riding a motorcycle through a demon-filled auditorium in a sequence that seems to be have been choreographed by Busby Berekeley. But it also has some very compelling elements, principally the art direction. The theatre is a modernist nightmare with saturated colors influenced by the giallo genre (Bava’s father, Mario, helped invent the field) and billowing curtains that seem to have wandered in out of a Jean Cocteau film. Bava does an expert job establishing the various characters — the innocent young lovers, the blind man whose daughter is having an affair he can’t see, the squabbling husband and wife, the pimp taking his working girls out and two music students cutting class. The latter seem to give the film its moral lesson: don’t cut class or you could help start a zombie apocalypse. And Bava keeps the action going with propulsive music from the likes of Motley Crue, Billy Idol, Accept, Saxon and Rick Springfield (!, one of these things is not like the others). There’s a great bit with the action on screen at the movie theatre mirroring events happening behind the screen. And the film-within-a-film looks pretty good without overshadowing the movie containing it.

Ivy

With William Cameron Menzies producing, IVY drips with style.

The credits for Sam Wood’s IVY (1947, Criterion Channel) play over an image of an urn containing flowers. At their end, the urn becomes a skull. That sets the tone for this gothic noir set in Edwardian England (the original novel by Marie Belloc Lowndes took place in the 1920s). It’s a visually scrumptious film, with producer William Cameron Menzies, a frequent Wood collaborator, supervising production design and even some of the camera set-ups. Joan Fontaine, often in white, looks the perfect young innocent. But she’s actually an ambitious schemer. Having run through husband Richard Ney’s fortune and tired of doctor lover Patric Knowles, she comes up with a plan to rid herself of both so she can seduce wealthy businessman Herbert Marshall. In the 1940s, her evil was so shocking it cost the film at the box office. Today, it seems like fitting revenge for saddling her with three such tepid leading men. Charles Bennett’s screenplay starts with Fontaine presented as a Gothic victim. She’s covered in shadows when she visits a fortune teller (Una O’Connor) whose spooky presence seems to terrorize her.  But when O’Connor advises her to dump her lover because she’s about to meet a man who can solve her problems, Fontaine perks up, and you realize how amoral she is. The actress looks terrific and has some fascinating flirtation scenes, though when she’s being duplicitous, she strays into the Joan Crawford school of energetic overstatement. None of the men are a match for her, but the film has some intriguing character women who more than hold their own, including Lucille Watson as Knowles’ mother, Sara Allgood as his nurse and Rosalind Ivan as Fontaine’s maid, a woman who can find the laughs in a mourning scene. Russell Metty did the moody cinematography, Orry Kelly and Travis Banton created the costumes and composer Daniele Amfitheatrof pours on the harpsichord whenever Fontaine does something particularly evil.

The Round Up: September 24—October 1

 A trip to the archives and the Criterion's list of films leaving at month's end made for a horror-heavy list of films last week. We'll be hitting the archives a lot this week (What can I say? I'm in demand), so we'll see where that takes us.

Gerald's Game

Not even Bruce Greenwood could get me into handcuffs,

so if he dropped dead while we're getting it on, I'd be more pissed than scared.

It takes a very special director to get me to dislike a film in which Bruce Greenwood, in prime physical condition, spends most of the running time in boxer shorts. But then Mike Flannagan is a very special director, and his GERALD’S GAME (2017, Netflix) irritated me to no end. Up front, I’ll admit I did not perform due diligence. I didn’t check to see who had directed the picture before committing to it, or I likely would have passed. Of course, that also means I started disliking it before I began to suspect who was behind the camera. I got an inkling during the flashbacks when Henry Thomas turned up as the leading lady’s abusive father. Thomas and the film’s star, Carla Gugino, are Flannagan regulars. That’s not necessarily bad for them. He at least has the good sense to get out of the way and let them do their jobs well. But his directorial glitches still get in the way. Like the Stephen King novel on which it’s based, GERALD’S GAME details the predicament of Jessie (Gugino) when she’s left handcuffed to a bed in a remote vacation house after her husband (Greenwood) succumbs to a heart attack during some kinky sex. It’s an intriguing premise, and Gugino hits all the right emotional notes while Greenwood and Thomas present two very different portraits of abusive males. Yet, the whole thing gets rather tiresome. Some of that problem is in the source material, which explains away the story’s most horrific elements, rendering the mystical mundane, but where King had Jessie confront her personal demons through imagined encounters with women from her past, Flanagan has her caught in an imaginary debate between her husband and a more self-possessed version of herself. In place of King’s facile psychological mystery, Flanagan gives us A DOLL’S HOUSE with handcuffs. Instead of grappling with the very real issues of abuse, as Taylor Hackford did with his much better adaptation of DOLORES CLAIRBORNE (1995), the film seems to be using it as a plot device. I understand the need to honor the strength of abuse survivors, but this is so transparently plotted it all starts feeling convenient. Jessie was abused as a child so she could come out a stronger person — that sort of thing. There are hints of how powerful it all could have been, particularly in the scene in which Thomas convinces the younger Jessie (the very good Chiara Aurelia) it’s her idea to keep his sexual abuse a secret. But it all gets overwhelmed by Flanagan’s reliance on forced irony and simplistic solutions. Jessie deserved better from father and husband, and she also deserves better from this film.

The Raven

Horror icons Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff become able farceurs,

with help from Jack Nicholson, Olive Sturgess and Hazel Court.

Roger Corman and Richard Matheson had enjoyed “The Black Cat,” the comic story in TALES OF TERROR (1962), so much they set out to do an entire feature in that tone. The result, THE RAVEN (1963, Criterion Channel), may never reach the inspired lunatic heights of a Leo McCarey or a Preston Sturges. It’s more on the level of Corman’s “schlemiel trilogy” (LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, A BUCKET OF BLOOD and THE CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA). And it’s an awful lot of fun. Medieval sorcerer Vincent Price is visited by a raven who’s actually a fellow magician (Peter Lorre) transformed by Price’s father’s oldest enemy (Boris Karloff). When Lorre lets drop that he saw Price’s deceased wife (Hazel Court) in Karloff’s castle, they set off to solve the mystery, accompanied by Price’s ditzy daughter (Olive Sturgess) and Lorre’s dim-witted son (Jack Nicholson, acting like Richard Crenna in OUR MISS BROOKS). The sets are re-cycled, thanks to Daniel Haller, as is a fire sequence that turns up in almost all of Corman’s Poe films. It’s all about as historically accurate as the script is faithful to Poe’s poem. Price lives in the Usher House, even if it’s more 19^ththan 15^th century and a lot of the furnishings are Victorian. This is easily Price’s most over-the-top performance in the Poe films, and at times his mugging gets a little too obvious. Lorre is dryer and ad-libbed some of the film’s best lines. But the real comic honors go to Karloff, who reportedly had the toughest time making the film between the rigors of production and trying to adjust whenever Lorre changed the script. His line readings are so sincere and expertly timed, I was laughing almost every time he opened his mouth. The women also deserve credit. Sturgess is smart enough to play her role straight, which makes her character’s ditziness much funnier than if she’d played for laughs. And Court, who always said she preferred comedy, is delicious as the scheming Lenore. She’s both sexy (critics mostly reviewed her cleavage) and witty, with a sense of relish whenever she exercises the power her beauty gives her.

Sheitan

Vincent Caseel has designs on the young men of SHEITAN,

a horror film that's also appropriate for Christmas viewing.

Vincent Cassel has so much fun playing the demented housekeeper and his wife in Kim Chapiron’s SHEITAN (2006, Shudder) it’s almost enough to carry you along when the whole thing stops make sense. But just almost. A group of delinquent posers accept an invitation from a young woman two of them are pursuing to party at her family’s country house. Once they arrive, things start getting strange. The girl’s father makes dolls, and the house is full of them, giving it an eerie air. Cassel works for the family and acts strange from the start, taking a special interest in one young man (Olivier Barthelemy, and who can blame him) to the extent he tries to hook the young man up with his sexually precocious niece while also seeming to come on to him. Beyond Cassel’s outlandish, creative performance, the film offers some interesting perspective on the three young men, who come on like thugs but are so desperate to prove their manliness they’re ultimately childish. At one point Barthelemy and his best friend go wild watching a revolutionary music video, and you realize their rebel stance is just borrowed cultural capital. The film is a very slow burn that relates somehow to the dolls and Cassel’s wife’s pregnancy, with her due to deliver at midnight Christmas Eve, but the fiendish plot behind Cassel’s behavior doesn’t make a lot of sense. At one point, Barthelemy has a very strange dream of how things might have played differently, and it’s a lot of fun. But then it’s back to the plot, with dream logic replaced by non-logic that seems as if Chapiron were just trying to figure out how weird he could get. THE ONLY PERMISSIBLE SPOILER: There’s a dog, and it dies…I think.

The Tomb of Ligeia

Vincent Price channel Rochester to Elizabeth Shepherd's feistier Jane Eyre.

The last of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations is almost the best until they screw it on the dismount. Robert Towne’s script for THE TOMB OF LIGEIA (1964, The Criterion Channel) has more psychological horror than the previous entries and for the most part approaches its haunted house plot with an ambiguity and subtlety reminiscent of the best Val Lewton films. It opens with the burial of Verden Fell’s (Vincent Price) wife, Ligeia (Elizabeth Shepherd), who has sworn that her will can surmount death. It’s an unusual horror scene, shot in daylight, yet still manages to shock when the dead woman’s eyes suddenly open after her black cat leaps on the coffin. Months later, Price meets the decidedly healthier and pluckier Lady Rowena (Shepherd again), who becomes fascinated with him. He’s not moved when she takes the initiative, but when he rescues her after she follows the cat into a treacherous bell tower, they marry. They return to his home, a decaying abbey, long enough to sell it, only to have indications of Ligeia’s presence haunt them both. Corman sustains the mood beautifully up to the climax, with a moving camera and the occasional off-balance angle to generate suspense. The film looks terrific, featuring the only extensive use of exteriors in the series and a great location at a decaying priory in Norfolk. Hammer regular Arthur Grant did the Eastmancolor cinematography, while Kenneth V. Jones supplied the symphonic score. And Shepherd is quite marvelous in her dual roles, easily the feistiest of Corman’s Poe heroines. No matter how terrorized she is, she keeps looking for answers. Price isn’t quite as effective. He’s too old for the part (AIP forced Corman to cast him rather than first choice Richard Chamberlain) and his efforts at restraint lead to some hollow line readings. But the film’s overall effect makes up for it until the picture reaches a perfectly satisfactory conclusion and then keeps going. It’s as if Corman had to fall back on the endings of his pervious Poe films, only in this case that means going over the top in the wrong way. At least Shepherd has one effectively ambiguous moment at the end. But to get there you have to sit through more shots of that damned barn Corman burnt down to make HOUSE OF USHER (1960). They haunt the Poe series like the ghost of the biggest bore you ever met.

Equinox Flower

That red handbag and the ever-present red teapot suggest passions

lurking beneath the surface of traditional Japanese family life.

The night before a wedding, the bride’s disapproving father (Shih Saburi) and his friends sit at a table. They ask one man (Chishu Ryu) to recite, and he chants a poem about a samurai preparing to go to battle and vanquish his enemies. When he stops, the others offer their own lines on the same theme. It’s a key scene in Yasujiro Ozu’s EQUINOX FLOWER (1958, Criterion Channel). For all the horror westerners associate with Japanese men going to war, it’s also an affectionately comic moment, the last gasps of a traditional patriarchy being lost by men who are more to be pitied than feared. The film deals with a well-off businessman (Saburi) shocked when a young man (Japanese matinee idol Keiji Sada) asks to marry his daughter (Ineko Arima). This isn’t the traditional arranged marriage Saburi had dreamt of, but then, this is a new world in which sons and daughters marry out of love rather than duty. His resistance to the engagement, even as the women around him come to side with Arima, is the heart of the film. Saburi never blusters. This is a very quiet film driven by small details. Early on, Saburi comes home from the office and undresses, dropping his clothes on the floor as his wife (the utterly exquisite Kinuyo Tanaka) picks up and folds each item. Later, when he comes home and demands the submissive woman’s opinion of the engagement, she drops his clothes on the ground and tells him she’s come to know the young man behind his back and sides with her daughter. This was Ozu’s first color film, and he chose the German Agfa film, because he liked the way it showed his favorite color, red. It turns up as an accent throughout the picture, particularly as his famous red tea pot, suggesting the passions lurking beneath the staid traditions of Japanese family life. Throughout the film, little objects — a cigarette, a telephone, a tea cup — offer hints of the characters’ thoughts. Like many of Ozu’s films, EQUINOX FLOWER deals with the disappointments inherent in traditional family structures. Even as the young couple fights to marry despite the father’s disapproval, you know that their marriage will not be without hardships. But they’ll be the hardships the two have chosen to face, not those chosen for them by their elders, and maybe that move into self-determined uncertainty is more heroic than the battles the old men sing of to comfort themselves over their loss of power.

Graduation Day

You can run, but you can't hide...from the stupid.

The fact that Linnea Quigley doesn’t take her top off to die (don’t’ worry, horndogs; she doffs it earlier to seduce her chorus teacher into passing her) is one of the few distinctions of Herb Freed’s GRADUATION DAY (1981, Peacock, Prime, Tubi). A high-school athlete wins a race in a record 30 seconds, then collapses and dies. Months later her sister (Patch Mackenzie), a Navy ensign, comes home to accept the girl’s trophy at graduation. And then the killing starts. Someone wearing sweats and black gloves starts bumping off the track team while timing the crimes with a stopwatch to make sure they happen in 30 seconds. They don’t, but the killer and filmmakers seem to ignore that. There are certain traditions of the genre that, surprisingly, can result in effective plotting. Freed ignores them at the viewers’ peril. For one thing, the final girl needs to be in the killer’s crosshairs or there’s nothing at stake for her. That’s not the case here. Not only is the final girl uninvolved in the killings; there’s no clear sense who the central character is. We spend time with the coach (Christopher George, who tries to deliver a performance and has some decent moments), the principal (Michael Pataki) and various students, but there’s no sense of who besides the unseen killer is driving the plot. Mackenzie and George are treated as suspects, but when the killer turns up masked halfway through the film, it’s obviously neither of them, leaving the big reveal to come out of left field. At one point, Mackenzie finds a few bodies, including a severed head from someone we’ve never seen before. The filmmakers had the character’s head made but then fired the actress for refusing to do a nude scene and didn’t have the money to do a new head modeled on her replacement. The band Felony shows up at a roller disco party to offer some androgyny that’s more interesting than the film’s relentless showcasing of bosoms and butts, but they’re only on for one number. There’s also one decent sequence in which a gymnast’s routine is scored to Rimsky-Korsakoff. Then Freed wrecks it by having her flash back to the runner’s death. This and some other sequences are done with intrusively rapid cutting. It’s as if the director had seen Abel Gance’s NAPOLEON (1927) and said, “I can do that.” No, sir, you can’t. In an even bigger gaffe, at one point Mackenzie flashes back to memories of the same scene, which she never witnessed. She should count herself lucky she only had to see it once. The viewers have to sit through it three times. E.J. Peaker turns up and is rather funny. So does Vanna White. She isn’t.

Yield to the Night

Diana Dors shatters her blonde bombshell image and proves she could really act.

The sight of Diana Dors crossing a dance floor as a piano plays “The Very Thought of You” is enough to make even straight women and gay men forget those little ordinary things that everyone ought to do. That’s not her look through most of J. Lee Thompson’s YIELD TO THE NIGHT (1956, Criterion Channel through last night), released here as BLONDE SINNER, and the film is far from a daydream. Although it opens with the glamorous star committing murder, it then switches to her time on death row with no makeup, her natural hair color and her hair pulled back starkly. It’s an amazing transformation, but that would be just showmanship if she didn’t have the acting chops to back it up. She delivers a harrowing performance as a woman waiting to find out if she’s been granted a last-minute reprieve. J. Lee Thompson’s direction focuses on details, starting with the murder, depicted through shots of walking feet, a key in a lock, packages in a car, etc. He doesn’t cut to a closeup of Dors until she pulls out the gun. In prison, he focuses on every detail of her cell and the matron attending her. Thompson’s wife, Joan Henry, had been in prison and captured the mind-numbing routine and lack of privacy in her original novel and the screenplay she co-wrote. Those details are foremost in Dors’ mind, as relayed in voice overs. Thompson’s direction is fluid, with some great cuts and camera angles. At the same time, it often feels this is all to cover up the threadbare murder plot. Dors’ life before prison seems like a cautionary tale for young women apt to fall for the wrong man. She leaves her husband for pianist Michael Craig, only to have him dump her for a wealthy socialite. The film’s focus, however, is on the dehumanizing effect of prison life and, even though Dors is unrepentant, the inhumanity of making her pay for the crime with her life. Still, the dice are loaded in her favor. Not only can we see how Craig’s ill treatment has damaged her psyche; we also barely get to know the victim, and there are hints throughout that she treated Craig even worse than he treated Dors. The supporting cast is wonderful, with Yvonne Mitchell as a sympathetic matron, Marie Ney as the prison governess, Mona Washbourne as Craig’s landlady and the radiant Athene Seyler as a woman campaigning for prison reform and visiting inmates simply to offer them some comfort. The film is so good it’s hard to believe Thompson would later direct unmitigated schlock like MACKENNA’S GOLD (1969) and HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME (1981). It’s hard to believe he could even stomach pictures like that.

The Round-Up: September 17-23

 Only six this week. The one night I was out rehearsing was a date on which I'd never previously posted a review. But I'm making up for it with a trio of video clips, because I'm just that special.

[rec]

Manuel Velasco gets more than she bargained for

when she hosts a soft news report on a night in a fire station.

Arguably the best found-footage horror film and one of the few in which that format makes dramatic sense, Jaume Belaguero and Paco Plaza’s [REC] (2007, Prime) is a totally immersive film experience. A news magazine host (Manuela Velasco) and her cameraman, Pablo, are filming a typical night at a fire station when the crew to whom they’re assigned is called to answer a distress call from an apartment building. What they discover is the start of an infection that turns people into fast zombies, and before long they’re trapped with the tenants as the government seals off the building until the plague can be identified and a cure developed. You could get whiplash watching the film. Pablo is pretty quick on his feet. But Balaguero and Plaza wisely build at least one oasis into the picture — a series of often comic interviews as Velasco gets the tenants to talk about what’s going on. The infection has its convenient side. The medical examiner sent into the building states that the time between exposure and full-blown infection varies depending on one’s blood type. And since we don’t know the characters’ blood types, they can turn at whatever point suits the filmmakers. One has been holding on for over a day. Another gets bitten and it’s presto, instant zombie. But it’s the rare horror film that gets to me, and when my dog jumped off the sofa at a key point, I had to peel myself off the ceiling. Back in 2007, the film got some resonance from 9/11, with its depiction of policemen and fire fighters risking their lives in a building that reeks of death. It’s also got a more contemporary power now that we’re dealing with COVID. There’s even a character who’s a Spanish Karen. Balaguero and Plaza didn’t think the film would go anywhere and considered releasing it direct to DVD. But it took off at the international box office, inspiring three sequels in which one or both were involved, a tepid American remake, a spirited take-off on DRAG RACE ESPANA and even an immersive theatrical experience.

Women Talking

The magnificent ensemble in Sarah Polley's superb WOMEN TALKING

How far should forgiveness go? When does forgiveness become permission? These are the questions at the heart of Sarah Polley’s WOMEN TALKING (2022, Prime). The film is based on an actual case in Bolivia in which men in a Mennonite community gassed and raped 151 women between the ages of 3 and 65. Miriam Toews’ novel has the community’s elders, some of whom were complicit in the assaults and their cover-up, order the women to forgive their attackers or face ostracism. When the women are split between staying to fight or leaving on their own, members of the key families debate the issues. This could make for a very dry film, but Polley wisely breaks up the action visually with images, some from the past, some simply showing the children going about their lives in the community. She has the wisdom to get inside the women’s heads so you can understand people whose positions might be very far from your own. She also captures the power of an approaching utopian moment as women raised to see themselves as objects struggle to figure out how to become the subjects of their own stories. And she’s cast an amazing ensemble — Rooney Mara, Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley, Judith Ivey, Frances McDormand, Sheila McCarthy, Ben Whishaw (as the sympathetic teacher taking notes at the meeting) and August Winter — to bring the issues to life. The script is filled with tantalizing details about their lives. Mara is pregnant after her rape and will be forced to give her child to a married couple, possibly even her rapist. Winter has lived as a man since their rape (some critics have questioned the religious community’s accepting a trans man). McCarthy deals with problems by talking about her horses. It’s hard to single out a single cast member for praise, which may be why the highly regarded film didn’t score acting nominations in any of the major industry awards. But I was particularly impressed with Foy’s complete transformation into the angry Salome who tries to kill one of the rapists at the film’s start. And McCarthy has held a special place in my heart ever since I first saw her in I’VE HEARD THE MERMAIDS SINGING (1987). Her Greta is a masterpiece of understatement. Polley’s direction is clean and totally at the service of the material. It may seem sparse at first compared to the more frenetic films that tend to rule the box office. But if you can adjust to it, you’ll be well-rewarded for your openness of heart. 

Relic

Is Emily Mortimer more troubled by Robyn Nevin's dementia or the script?

“Everything Decays” is the tagline for Natalie Erika James’ debut feature RELIC (2020, Shudder). Apparently, that applies to critics’ memories as much as the aging Edna (Robyn Nevin), whose mental and physical deterioration is a concern for daughter Emily Mortimer and granddaughter Bella Heathcote. The film won praise for its use of thriller and horror conventions to create a metaphor for the effects of aging on both those growing older and their younger family members. The three actresses do some good work, and early on the script by James and Christian White paints a realistic picture of intergenerational conflict with Mortimer trying to convince Nevin she can no longer care for herself alone while also confronting Heathcote over her life choices. But the script writes some checks it can’t cash. At one point, Nevin says there’s something under her bed. Mortimer looks, hears something breathing and then forgets about it. At various points, Nevin has conversations with something that isn’t there, but we never resolve whether it’s some kind of supernatural presence or a product of dementia. Later the metaphor takes over so completely there’s no real sense of what’s going on. The film ends with a potentially powerful image, but it’s presented so baldly you’re just as likely to laugh as to gasp with recognition. If you really want to see a good example of how to use horror to deal with the problems of aging, check out 2014’s THE TAKING OF DEBORAH LOGAN (Prime, Tubi), with magnificent performances by Jill Larson in the title role and Anne Ramsay as the daughter who’s not sure if her mother’s problems are dementia or demonic possession.

Five Miles to Midnight

The plot in a nutshell: Anthony Perkins plots while Sophia Loren suffers

For a while in the middle of Anatole Litvak’s FIVE MILES TO MIDNIGHT (1962, TCM, DailyMotion), I wondered why the film had never turned up on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley.” Sure, it has a weak opening. We’re thrown into the middle of the disastrous marriage between Anthony Perkins and Sophia Loren with no context and, like her friend Jean-Pierre Aumont, are left wondering how the two ever wound up with each other. And at first, Perkins doesn’t seem all that comfortable in the role. He’s posturing instead of acting. Then he’s seemingly killed in an air crash, and with the plane’s descent the picture takes off. It’s a relief to be freed from the performance he’s been giving, and Loren looks smashing in her widow’s weeds. When he turns up again, having miraculous escaped the crash with a plan to get rich defrauding the flight insurance company, his performance falls into place. You can see the boyish charm that must have attracted her in the first place, and then you see that charm coalesce into something more neurotic and almost menacing. It all reeks of corruption, and Loren plays her predicament quite well as the normal person pulled into her role as Perkins’ accomplice. Henri Alekan’s black-and-white cinematography, Alexander Trauner’s art direction and Guy DeRoche’s costumes, particularly Loren’s black vinyl trench coat, come together to fit one of Muller’s definitions of film noir as the place where style meets suffering. Then it all goes kerflooey in the last act. I can’t go into specifics about what doesn’t work without creating spoilers so let’s just say that by the end you’re wondering how an earth mother like Loren could get sucked into all this — both her husband’s plot and the Peter Viertel-Hugh Wheeler script, which includes a rather unfortunate mad scene. After the debacle of DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS (1958), their first film together, I kept expecting Loren to turn to Perkins and say “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into.”

The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue

Vito Salier is my kind of zombie.

I originally saw Jorge Grau’s THE LIVING DEAD AT THE MANCHESTER MORGUE (1974, Shudder) during its U.S. theatrical release as DON’T OPEN THE WINDOW. It’s also been released as LET SLEEPING CORPSES LIE, DO NOT PROFANE THE SLEEP OF THE DEAD, DO NOT SPEAK ILL OF THE DEAD, ZOMBI 3 and ten other titles. Don’t let that questionable provenance fool you. Although it’s far from the greatest zombie film ever made and has its share of flaws, it’s also far from total monkey dump. It’s got a strong environmental viewpoint, beautiful location photography of the English countryside, a camp performance by an Irish-accented Arthur Kennedy as the world’s dumbest police inspector and the lovely and talented Ray Lovelock one of the hottest hunks in European genre films. Lovelock is an antiques dealer on the way to Windermere when a beautiful redhead (Cristina Galbo) backs into his motorcycle. He dragoons her into giving him a lift, then accompanies her to visit her drug-addicted sister (Jeanine Mestre) in Southgate, an area where experiments with a sonic pesticide have caused the dead to rise and feast on various body parts. Grau contrasts shots of pollution and overcrowding in London with the idyllic countryside to position the deadly sonic pesticide as another step in humanity’s destruction of nature. At one point, Lovelock turns off the car radio when a commentator starts trying to debunk environmental concerns. What did he expect listing to the Vivek Ramaswamy station? The scenes with the zombies are truly frightening, though they may be too gory for some. But the fight scenes are clumsily, almost laughably staged. And though the two male leads are good, Galbo is basically a blank face and Mestre’s depiction of a drug addict is almost ludicrous, like Marion Cotillard channeling Andrea Martin’s greatest hits. But the film has a queasy power, not just because of the gore but also because of the different types of zombies, from the seemingly normal homeless man who starts the apocalypse to an accident survivor with a bandaged head and profuse autopsy scars. You may laugh in a lot of places, but there are images you won’t soon forget.

Thank Your Lucky Stars

Hattie McDaniel Rules

Olivia and Ida Rock

Bette Davis Sings and Swings

During World War II, most of the major studios produced all-star musicals, usually built around some kind of benefit performance, to raise money for the war effort. David Butler’s THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS (1943, TCM) was the first of two such films Warner Bros. made to support the Hollywood Canteen, which is natural as it was founded by two of their biggest stars, Bette Davis and John Garfield.  Early on, aspiring composer Joan Leslie says of a makeshift community of show-biz hopefuls, “It’s either very quaint or very corny.” I wasn’t feeling well last night, so I leaned toward the former as a cure for what ailed me. The plot is negligible. Producer Edward Everett Horton and composer S.Z. Sakall want to do a benefit with Dinah Shore, but since she works for Eddie Cantor, they can’t find a way to get her without letting him take over the show. Meanwhile, aspiring singer Dennis Morgan tries to get into the show with help from Leslie and an actor who can’t get work because he looks too much like Cantor. Yes, it’s Cantor in a double role, though the joke is that Cantor as Cantor plays a nightmarish egomaniac while his double is more like Cantor’s real image. Arthur Schwartz and Frank Loesser wrote some catchy upbeat songs — including the title number, impeccably sung by Shore, and Davis’ “They’re Either Too Young or Too Old” — and some soupy ballads. Part of the film’s charm is seeing performers not noted for musical skills sing and dance, with special honors to Garfield for doing a version of “Blues in the Night” that spoofs his screen image. Choreographer Leroy Prinze deserves a lot of credit for coming up with a dancing style to suit Errol Flynn’s image, throwing Davis into a jitterbug number, turning Olivia de Havilland (dubbed) and Ida Lupino into bobbysoxers and staging a bang-up number headed by Hattie McDaniel, who should have done more musicals. Watch closely and you’ll catch Ruth Donnelly as a surgical nurse, Henry Armetta as a barber, Frank Faylen as a sailor, Mike Mazurki as Cantor’s trainer, Mary Treen as an autograph hound and Butler and producer Mark Hellinger as themselves. As icing on the cake, you get to see Spike Jones and his City Slickers do “Otchi Chornya.”