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.”

The Round-Up September 10-16

 Early in the week, I had to go to the archives and pulled up two pieces I'd posted about earlier, but that was four years ago, so who remembers that far back? It was also a bad week for horror, including what will likely be the worst film of the month, until I got to the end.

Hardcore

George C. Scott reacting to the second half of HARDCORE.

George C. Scott starts out smiling in Paul Schrader’s HARDCORE (1979, Tubi), and although he was often quite good in comedy, such is his image that it’s rather a shock. His smile points up a potential for his character that’s never fully realized in the script. The first half of the film offers a fascinating picture of Midwestern life within a faith-based community. There are moments of joy as people share meals or sing Christmas carols, and children play in the snow. There are also moments that poke fun at the strict religiosity of the characters’ world, as when one of the older men gets upset at the children’s watching a TV show with dancing Santas. And there are images of desolation as we see abandoned buildings, suggesting the slow death of middle America. You can understand why some people love it there and why others get away as quickly as they can. While Scott is home, the picture works very well. Then his daughter disappears while at a church conference in California, so he hires a private detective (Peter Boyle) to track her down. When Boyle shows up with a porn film featuring the young woman, it triggers a scene that was widely spoofed at the time but is actually quite powerful. Dissatisfied with Boyle’s further progress, Scott goes to L.A. to take up the case himself, and the film largely goes to pot. Part of the problem is that the horrified view of the porn world now seems rather dated. Schrader expects us to be shocked at things that aren’t that shocking anymore. And the plot doesn’t make sense. Scott tries to pass himself off as a porn producer and pulls off the masquerade too easily. Through a series of coincidences, he finds a sex worker (Season Hubley) who knows of the man who lured his daughter away, so he hires her to help him hunt the guy down. It’s an unlikely pairing that doesn’t go where you want it to. Hubley is a sweet-natured girl who may resent some aspects of her life in the sex trade but ultimately doesn’t consider the sex part that big a deal. Yet Scott never acknowledges her humanity. He won’t let her talk about her life and at one point, roughs her up to get information she’s withholding for no clear reason. It doesn’t bode well for his future relationship with his daughter, if he finds her, and the whole film goes sour in the wrong way. Schrader has said one influence on the film was John Ford’s THE SEARCHERS (1956). It’s basically THE SEARCHERS with porn in place of racism. The problem is Schrader otherizes the sex workers the same way John Wayne’s character otherized Native Americans. I’m not advocating sympathy for the daughter’s exploiters, but the other people Scott meets have their stories as well. And without them, the film comes off rather one-sided and shallow.

The Phenix City Story

Meg Miles is only one of the sins run rampant in Phenix City, AL.

Although its 1950s depiction of depravity now seems almost quaint (the film opens with Meg Myles as a stripper who never takes off more than her gloves), Phil Karlson’s gritty film noir is still a pretty powerful condemnation of small-town depravity. It’s hard not to see the parallels to the U.S. today in this tale of how the good citizens of Phenix City (mainly father-and-son lawyers John McIntyre and Richard Kiley) take on local vice lords in Sin City, U.S.A. Of course, Donald Trump doesn’t have a fraction of the class Edward Andrews (in his feature debut) displays as the chief criminal, nor do we have a state governor to call on to help drain the swamp. Karlson shot the film while the story was unfolding and even turned up evidence that helped put some of the criminals behind bars. He also played a bit with the facts, inventing the murder of an African-American child to up the stakes and depicting Kiley’s character — future governor John Patterson, an ardent segregationist — as a friend to the city’s black community.

Ladies They Talk About

Lillian Roth and Barbara Stanwyck do hard time because they're LADIES THEY TALK ABOUT.

What a strange if often delightful film! Barbara Stanwyck is a gangster’s moll who helps set up a bank robbery. She’s caught, but an old friend turned preacher (Preston Foster) is about to get her off when she has a pang of conscience and confesses. That leads to a stay in women’s prison and the film’s best scenes. The inmates include Lillian Roth, who’s as lively and gritty as Stanwyck and even gets to sing, Madame Sul-Te-Wan as a sassy black woman named Mustard and the delightfully wacky Maude Eburne as a “beautician” whose parlor offered, shall we say, a different line of services. Ruth Donnelly is the assistant matron and in one scene walks around with a cockatoo on her shoulder, which somehow helps keep the inmates in line. There are also two jokes about a lesbian inmate who likes to wrestle and even seems to end up with a wrestling partner to call her own.

Mansion of the Doomed

Richard Basehart is no doubt distressed that

Gloria Grahame doesn't have to suffer through MANSION OF THE DOOMED any longer.

There’s something very sad about seeing Richard Basehart and Gloria Grahame stuck in a film as decrepit as Michael Pataki’s MANSION OF THE DOOMED (1976, Shudder), aka THE TERROR OF DR. CHANEY, aka MASSACRE MANSION, aka EYES, aka EYES OF DR. CHANEY aka HOUSE OF BLOOD. Both were gifted actors who didn’t play the Hollywood game and sank into B movies while lesser actors who did play the game rose to stardom. For that matter, it’s sad to see that a gifted character actor like Pataki turned out to be such a bad director, though the production here, an early film from Charles Band, has continuity issues at the end and is so choppy it looks at times as if they ran out of money and stitched together whatever footage they had. Basehart is a revered ophthalmologist whose daughter (Trish Stewart) is blinded in a car crash. With sister Grahame, he starts kidnapping people to transplant their eyes into Stewart’s head in vain hopes of curing her. Yes, it’s LES YEUX SANS VISAGE (1960) with eyes instead of faces, which, I suppose makes it “Les Visages sans Yeux.” Both stars do their best. Grahame’s role doesn’t have much of a throughline, but she plays each bit well and looks terrific. There’s a lot of narration, so you get to enjoy Basehart’s sonorous voice, even when the words are banal. And he makes Stewart look like a better actress in their scenes together. The film is ableist to a fault. There’s no thought of Stewart’s learning to live with blindness, and the people whose eyes Basehart steals are treated as monsters, albeit with good makeup by the young Stan Winston. Lance Henriksen is surprisingly pretty as a doctor engaged to Stewart who becomes Basehart’s first victim, and Vic Tayback is on hand briefly as a police detective whose dedication to his job is his salvation.

The Zombie Apocalypse in Apartment 14f

Sometimes I embarrass myself. My search for something different led me to Gilbert Allen’s THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE IN APARTMENT 14F (2019, Tubi, YouTube) because it had an interesting premise. Three losers (really one loser and two ultra-losers) using a drone to spy on the sex worker in the apartment below them accidentally send the drone a floor lower, where they discover what seems to be a zombie infestation. What do they do? Well, in this film the most interesting of the three (Wesley Sellick), the one who’s just a loser, tumbles to his death trying to retrieve the drone when it gets stuck in some netting. The remaining two (Griffin Cork and Ben Francis) snort endless lines of coke and talk…forever. They compare notes on zombie science (and get THE WALKING DEAD wrong) and discuss what they’d like to do to the sex worker. And that’s it. No action, no wit, nothing but what looks like bad improv for about an hour. It was all shot on a shoestring with a grant from the Alberta government and without a discernible lick of talent. In the U.S., we have a movement called mumblegore — low-budget, imaginative horror films rooted in improvisational theatre — and it’s produced some quite good films like A HORRIBLE WAY TO DIE (2010) and YOU’RE NEXT (2011), along with some utter drek. This doesn’t even make it up to the drek level. It’s not mumblegore. It’s mumblesnore.

Blanche Fury

Illicit passion is deadly for Valerie Hobson and Stewart Granger.

Watching Marc Allegret’s BLANCHE FURY (1948, Criterion Channel, YouTube) is like eating an entire box of chocolates in one sitting. It’s a luscious wallow. Anthony Havelock-Ellis produced the film to cash in on the popularity of the Gainsboorough melodramas and provide a distraction for his wife, Valerie Hobson, who had just given birth to a child with Down’s syndrome. Her role as a poor relation hired as governess to her wealthy cousin’s motherless daughter certainly gives her a lot to work with, particularly when she’s torn between the cousin (Michael Gough, in his film debut; was he ever really that young?), who offers her security and wealth, and the groundsman (Stewart Granger), who offers her pure unbridled sex. She tries to have it both ways, with deadly results. The film has some interesting parallels to GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) in Hobson’s marriage of convenience, her grudging attraction to magnetic Granger and the presence of a female child obsessed with show jumping. There’s even a shot of Hobson in a 19^th-century bonnet turning to reveal her face to the camera that’s almost identical to a similar shot of Vivien Leigh. All that’s lacking is the passion. Hobson was a beautiful, intelligent actress and does a lot of solid work here, but it’s hard to believe she’s in the grips of uncontrollable ardor. Granger is quite good, and Gough is priggish enough you’re not going to miss him when he’s gone. And the whole thing looks scrumptious in Guy Green and Geoffrey Unsworth’s Technicolor cinematography. Clifton Parker did the lush, symphonic score that pushes the whole thing into the kingdom of divine decadence.

Tales of Terror

Vincent Price finds the perfect co-star in Peter Lorre and the perfect robe in "Morella."

If nothing else, the Criterion Channel’s festival of Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations is a showcase for Vincent Price. In TALES OF TERROR (1962), he narrates and performs three roles: the morose, alcoholic widower of an evil spirit (“Morella), a pompous wine-taster modeled on Percy Dovetonsils (“The Black Cat”) and a good-hearted dying man who falls prey to evil hypnotist Basil Rathbone (“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”). All three stories have their charms, and for once the normal characters are well-played, particularly by Debra Paget as Helen Valdemar and Joyce Jameson (who could play a lot more than dumb blondes) as Peter Lorre’s long-suffering wife in “The Black Cat.” That story also marked the fortuitous pairing of Price and Lorre, who bring a welcome touch of humor to the otherwise grisly story. Price never had another male co-star who could match his wit so well. For Lorre, Price was his second great acting partner after Sidney Greenstreet. Lorre’s role as an alcoholic lay about living off his wife’s meagre earnings would seem to be a turn-off by contemporary standards, but when he and Price engage in an hilarious wine-tasting contest, social conscience goes out the window. The two seem to be having a friendly competition to see who can get the most laughs, with Lorre’s underplaying of some of his lines, making them sound like ad libs, winning hands down. As in Corman’s other early Poe films, the picture benefits greatly from Floyd Crosby’s Technicolor cinematography, Les Baxter’s score and Daniel Haller’s art direction (though the sets in “Morella” don’t quite work; they seem like new sets quickly painted to look old). There’s also some good work from wardrobe supervisor Marjorie Corso, who spent most of her career in low-budget films. The women look terrific, and I’d move to a colder climate just for an excuse to wear Price’s wide-sleeved robe in “Morella.”

The Round-Up: September 3—9

 Two nights out this week, both of which required my going to the archives and raised the quality of my horror reviews by quite a bit.

Deathdream

John Marley and Lynn Carlin try to put a good face on son Richard Backus' return from the dead.

The metaphor is a little blatant but nonetheless intriguing in Bob Clark’s DEATHDREAM (1974, aka DEAD OF NIGHT, THE NIGHT ANDY CAME HOME and KING FROM THE GRAVE). In this variation on “The Monkey’s Paw,” the mother (Lynn Carlin) of a soldier (Richard Backus) killed in Viet Nam wishes him back to life. He comes back, all right, but he’s not alive and needs regular injections of blood to keep going. That’s not the only way the war invades their small town in Florida. He’s also acting like a different person, given to sudden bursts of anger, a reflection of PTSD before the general populace were using that term. There’s also an element of veterans’ anger. Before one murder, he utters the chilling line, “I died for you…It’s time you returned the favor.” Maybe it’s me, but I think there’s a subtle queerness to the plot. Carlin complains that her son only enlisted because his father (John Marley) thought he was too soft. He keeps going out at night without telling his parents where he’s going, and he looks at his ex-girlfriend as some kind of alien being (until he decides to feed on her). The film had a very low budget and shows it except for Tom Savini’s makeup for the rapidly deteriorating Backus (it was his first credit). But the leads and Henderson Forsyth as the town doctor are all very good. Backus never backs down from his decidedly outré character. Carlin as the mother is like a walking exposed nerve, while Marley and Forsyth are such old pros their scenes together are a joy to watch.

One Missed Call

Ana Claudia Talancón is not looking forward to checking her messages.

The original Japanese ONE MISSED CALL (2003, Shudder) was hardly a great horror film, but at least it made a comment on life in the connected age, with the characters surrounded by technology as their cell phones turned against them. Eric Valette’s American ONE MISSED CALL (2008, Max) doesn’t seem to be about anything except a feeble attempt to scare people. It’s the same basic plot. People receive cell phone messages of their final moments with a date and time stamp in the near future; when that time arrives, they die. It also has a lot of the same basic incidents, though one or two of the deaths have been changed to create a FINAL DESTINATION feel — death as Rube Goldberg. College psych major Shannyn Sossamon gets the call after her third friend dies and joins forces with police detective Ed Burns, whose sister had been killed earlier. Valette’s directorial style is so intrusive it loses all power. From the first scene, he uses zooms, rapid tracking shots (accompanied by a swooshing sound) and disorienting angles so much that by the time the action is moving to its climax there’s nowhere to go. And the ending makes no sense. The film has a well-deserved zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so I have to be contrarian enough to point out the few things I liked. Sossamon, as a survivor of child abuse, does a good job conveying the effects of trauma in adulthood. The hallucinations experienced by those about to die are eerie, at least the first few times. Ray Wise and Jason Beghe are funny as the producer of a paranormal TV show and an exorcist, respectively. And since the film was shot in Atlanta, you get to see some of the area’s better actors, including Mary Lynn Owen as a psych professor (lucky students!), Rhoda Griffis as a ghost, Karen Beyer as a sympathetic foster mother, Donna Biscoe as a coroner and Bart Hansard as a police officer.

The Unfaithful

Eve Arden (r.) wants to know how a dead man turned up in Ann Sheridan's living room.

Warner Bros. tried to pass off Vincent Sherman’s THE UNFAITHFUL (1947, TCM) as an original script, but anybody with half an ounce of film literacy can spot it as a remake of William Wyler’s THE LETTER (1940), albeit one made by people who didn’t understand the original very well. That’s not to fault the cast, who do what they can with the reimagined material. Both films deal with a woman who kills a man and lies about the circumstances. In 1940, that gave Bette Davis the opportunity to deliver one of her greatest and most restrained performances, a burning portrait of sexual hypocrisy. Ann Sheridan plays a nicer lady who strayed while the husband (Zachary Scott) she wed quickly was off fighting World War II. Nonetheless, when she kills her former lover in self-defense, she lies to protect her husband’s feelings, even when lawyer Lew Ayres advises her to tell the truth. In place of the original’s depiction of racism and the colonial mentality, this film offers some cursory considerations of class and a more persuasive comment on the war’s effect on marital relations. By the time the script gets to Sheridan’s trial, the themes coalesce, though the last scene twists itself into pretzels trying to shoehorn the plot within the confines of the Production Code. Sheridan has some very good moments until the final scene, which I don’t think even Davis could have saved. Scott is OK as the husband, though playing a decent man robs him of a lot of his sexual mojo. Ayres works well, though you may wish they’d dropped the other shoe and made his character gay (forbidden under the Production Code, of course). You also get John Hoyt as the police detective on the case, Jerome Cowan as the apoplectic prosecutor, Steven Geray as a blackmailer (in this version, instead of an incriminating letter it’s a bust of Sheridan made by the dead man) and some great views of Los Angeles in the late 1940s. The real performance honors, however, go to Eve Arden, whose role as Scott’s cousin has the most intriguing character arc in the film. I’m tempted to say she’s the only one with an arc. She starts out as a flighty society type, dropping one-liners as she tries to pick up all the dirt she can on the crime at her cousin’s house. But the case changes her and reveals a serious, reflective side Arden rarely got to play on screen. If they’d really wanted to transform the material, they’d have made a film about a wise-cracking gossip who grows up when her cousin’s wife is accused of murder. That’s a movie I’d like to see.

House of Usher

Give a B-movie director a budget and look what he can come up with.

Roger Corman’s HOUSE OF USHER (1960, Criterion Channel through month’s end) seems so much more a mood piece, and a surprisingly well done one, than a horror film that its box office success is rather surprising. Of course, it came out at a time when most horror films were all tease, with Corman’s no exception. What’s really surprising, however, is the growth in his directorial style between his previous films, SKI TROOP ATTACK and A BUCKET OF BLOOD (both 1959) and this one. It’s amazing what a bigger budget can do for a director. The film moves seamlessly through Richard Matheson’s romanticization of the Edgar Allan Poe story. Philip (Mark Damon) arrives at the House of Usher to claim his fiancée (Myrna Fahey) only to learn she’s ill, and her brother (Vincent Price) refuses to allow her to leave. To justify his behavior, Price explains the family curse. One thing carried over from Corman’s earlier work is its subversive nature. Where earlier films dealt with militarization, illness, women’s rights and consumerism, HOUSE OF USHER tackles racism and colonialism. The cast may be entirely white, but there’s no escaping the history of racial exploitation in the Usher line, with the oldest ancestor Price invokes having run a slave ship. There’s even an element of sexism in the way Fahey is caught between conflicting demands by the two men in her life. Price manages to chew the scenery even while playing a character who rarely speaks above a whisper, while Fahey is quite good. Damon isn’t bad, though his hair is way out of period (a problem with many early and mid-century historical films). Floyd Crosby’s Technicolor cinematography is a feast for the eyes, with art director Daniel Haller making the film look much more expensive than its $300,000 budget. And Les Baxter provides a powerful and highly influential score. HOUSE OF USHER inspired a series of Poe adaptations by Corman and AIP while also influencing the nature of gothic horror in other countries, particularly Italy.

Repeat Performance

+

The future Mrs. Lovey Howell is on the prowl; 

leading lady Joan Leslie (second from l.) looks on as Natalie Schaffer contemplates

 the next aspiring artist to buy. That's Richard Basehart as coded gay poet William Williams on the far l.

Eddie Muller has called Alfred L. Werker’s REPEAT PERFORMANCE (1947, TCM, YouTube) the noir IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946). The main difference is that inGstead of envisioning a world in which she hadn’t lived, protagonist Joan Leslie relives the last year of her life, which had led to her killing husband Louis Hayward on New Year’s Eve. It’s also not quite as masochistic as the Frank Capra film. Leslie actively attempts to change the future by changing her choices, and no matter how much things go wrong, she keeps trying. Leslie is a sweet, likable actress, though she wasn’t there the day they were handing out star quality, so it’s a little hard to believe her as a Broadway diva whose shows regularly sell out. Still, you can’t help rooting for her. The film starts with Hayward dead, so his first scene is a year earlier and he’s quite appealingly vulnerable. But then he starts drinking and carrying on with playwright Virginia Field, and by the time the picture is half over, you’re rooting for Leslie to plug him again. That’s a very modern reaction. In the 1940s, besides the old “sanctity of marriage” myth promoted under the Production Code, Leslie didn’t have any alternative. Living alone would be out of the question, even though she’s the clear breadwinner. She has to have a man to whom she can belong. And her only fallback guys, producer Tom Conway and poet Richard Basehart (in his film debut), seem to be coded gay characters. Basehart’s character in the original novel by William O’Farrell was a cross-dresser. That wouldn’t fly in Hollywood, though, but even though his character develops a relationship with a wealthy, older woman (Natalie Schaffer, who’s quite delicious as the libidinous society woman on the prowl for her next protégé), he plays up the effete mannerisms and gives his character’s bon mots a distinct lavender tinge. He’s marvelous in the role, and the producers were so impressed they gave him extra scenes. In the restored print shown on TCM, the picture looks terrific, with great camera work by L. William O’Connell. And Leslie is ravishing in a series of Oleg Cassini gowns. Who wouldn’t want to relive a year in which you got to dress that well?

The Changeling

Director Peter Medak makes a red ball so terrifying it even scares George C. Scott

The next time critics hail some third-rate horror film as intelligent and scary (which means it’s usually neither) simply because it doesn’t have a lot of blood, they should be made to watch Peter Medak’s gem of a haunted house thriller THE CHANGELING (1980). A slow burn film that’s as much about exploring the psychology of grief as scaring the audience, the film features a terrific George C. Scott performance as a composer trying to recover from the deaths of his wife and daughter in a freak accident. He relocates to Seattle, where he rents an historic mansion from Trish Van Devere, only to uncover evidence of another dead child, this one out for revenge. It’s filled with wonderful, spooky touches: a quiet séance in which the medium speaks in a near monotone while scribbling out automatic writing, a ghostly voice that can only be heard on the tape recording of the séance, a ball that keeps reappearing, even after Scott throws it in the river. The film is a treat for the senses, with beautiful, autumnal cinematography by John Coquillon and an effective score by Rick Wilkins and Howard Blake. Melvyn Douglas has a great supporting turn as a corrupt senator, and Scott gets possibly the ultimate George C. Scott line, addressed to the ghost of a child, no less: “You goddamn son of a bitch! What is it you want!?!?”

Mill of the Stone Women

Wolfgang Preiss as a graduate of the Vincent Price Art Institute

If HOUSE OF WAX (1953) had a child by EYES WITHOUT A FACE (1960), it would be Giorgio Ferroni’s MILL OF THE STONE WOMEN (1960, Shudder in Italian, YouTube in English). I can’t explain that genealogy without divulging some major spoilers, so all the plot you get is this: a student (Pierre Brice) arrives to do research on a Dutch mill noted for its moving figures of historical women. He’s welcomed by the professor (Wolfgang Preiss) who runs the place and intrigued by the man’s sheltered daughter (Scilla Gabel) and her heaving bosoms. One night, he allows her to seduce him, which makes him realize he’s really in love with his childhood best friend (Dany Carrel), because you know how straight men are. Of course, the mill, the professor’s daughter and her heaving bosoms all have a terrible secret related to the kind of nonsensical pseudo-science that motivated a lot of European horror films in the early ‘60s. You may fall asleep waiting for the plot to kick into gear (I usually pause every film I watch alone for a brief power nap), but once it does, things move pretty well. Ferroni isn’t exactly a stylist on the level of Mario Bava or Dario Argento, but the cluttered settings and Pier Ludovico Pavoni’s vivid Eastmancolor cinematography point to their later gialli. Brice is pretty good as the student in over his head, and Preiss does some terrific physical work as the mad professor. There’s also a good score by Carlo Innocenzi.

The Round-Up: August 27—September 2

After some real bowsers, I finally broke my string of bad luck with horror films, but professional obligations (I thought I was retired) sent me to the vaults twice for the two best films reviewed this week.

 Phantasm IV: Oblivion

A. Michael Baldwin surveys the majestic landscape his plot line cannot hope to match.

The grandeur of the American Southwest is poorly supported by the actors and script in Don Coscarelli’s PHANTASM IV: OBLIVION (1998, Shudder), aka “Phantasm: OblIVion.” Coscarelli admitted he only made the film to cash in on the franchise, but did he have to do it so poorly? Sadly, the picture starts promisingly, with a montage showing the Tall Man (Angus Scrimm) stalking, Mikey (A. Michael Baldwin) driving, Reggie (Reggie Bannister) escaping the trap in which Scrimm held him at the end of PHANTASM III (1994) and scenes and outtakes from the earlier films. It’s all very dreamlike, in the manner of the first film, and then Bannister’s voiceover narration comes in and drags everything down to mundanity. At one point, he refers to himself and Baldwin as “soldiers,” which would indicate Coscarelli didn’t realize one of the charms of the original was that the main characters weren’t soldiers. They were a group of schlubs who got caught up in the mystery surrounding the local funeral home. The third sequel conveniently forgets there was a child kidnapped by Scrimm at the end of the previous film. Instead, it follows Baldwin as he tries to resist being turned into the next Tall Man and Bannister as he tries to find Baldwin. There’s lots of driving and walking through Death Valley, three exploding cars (no originality for us), a demon woman with death orbs as her breasts (misogynistic much?) and lots of outtakes from the original, some with new dialogue post-dubbed, that are supposed to reveal something or other but just serve to pad out the running time. There’s one intriguing scene in which Baldwin travels back in time to meet Jebediah Morningstar (Scrimm), the good-hearted undertaker who would become the Tall Man. Scrimm gets a chance to use his natural voice, and for a moment there’s the possibility he’ll get to show off his stage training (he was particularly noted for high comedy), but the script doesn’t do anything with the idea. You don’t even get to see his transformation. Then it all ends on a cliffhanger that wouldn’t be resolved for almost 20 years. As if at this point anybody cared.

Something Wild

Ralph Meeker offer Carroll Baker the chance to escape the good movie

she's been dominating for a trip to mediocrity.

Rarely have I seen a film so thoroughly squander a strong first half as does Jack Garfein’s SOMETHING WILD (1961, Criterion Collection). It doesn’t just squander the first part’s good will. It throws it to the ground, kicks it in the face and puts out its eye. That’s particularly distressing since it has some very good people — Carroll Baker, Ralph Meeker and Mildred Dunnock — in leading roles. College student Baker is raped on her way home from school and, in the film’s strongest scenes, bottles up the experience even as the trauma changes her life. She comes home to wrap herself in a blanket and shiver next to the radiator, scrub herself in the bath and cut the clothing in which she was attacked into pieces to flush down the toilet. She then runs off to live in a run-down boarding house (with Jean Stapleton as the hooker next door) and work at Woolworth’s, where her inability to connect is misinterpreted as snobbishness by co-worker Doris Roberts (in her film debut). This is all done with a focus on subtleties of behavior. It’s clear early on that Garfein is great at finding visual expressions of his characters’ inner states. He’s not that good with action, though, and the rape scene, another attack on Baker and her bullying by co-workers all fall flat. The rest of his work is so strong that’s forgivable. But then auto mechanic Ralph Meeker stops Baker from throwing herself off the Manhattan Bridge, offers her a safe haven and locks her in. At this point, the psycho-drama turns absurd and not in a good way. The two actors are required to go from zero to 60 too many times, and some of their liners are funny in that “What were they thinking?” way. When Baker turns down Meeker’s marriage proposal, he yells, “What’s wrong with me,” after he’s held her prisoner, drunkenly tried to rape her and berated her for not seeming happy about the situation. The actors are still good, at least in silent moments, but it’s hard to recover from dialog like that or the hopelessly sentimental ending. Dunnock is quite good as Baker’s mother, and the cinematography by Eugen Shuftan, score by Aaron Copeland and credits sequence by Saul Bass are all terrific. For the rest, it’s maddening to see a sensitive depiction of a woman’s response to rape suddenly turn into an incel’s wet dream.

Friday the 13th (2009)

Jason Voorhees kills again...and again...and again...

but he can't erase the memory of the original franchise.

Six years after FREDDY VS. JASON (2003) seemingly put an end to two horror franchises, Paramount, New Line and Warner Bros. joined forces to relaunch one series with Marcus Nispel’s FRIDAY THE 13^TH (2009, Tubi for one more day). The film is about as effective as the relaunches of THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2003) and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET (2010), meaning not very, and shares one common element with the AMITYVILLE HORROR (2005) remake — a generous helping of beefcake. Of course, with its summer-by-the-lake setting for most entries, the FRIDAY THE 13^TH franchise has always had a healthy taste for male pulchritude. But I can’t remember an earlier installment with quite such a combination of hot men and sexually exploited women. There’s even a topless death that’s so mechanically timed it’s almost comic. You’re not sure if you’re laughing at what Henri Bergson called “the encrustation of the mechanical on the physical” or at the filmmakers’ shameless efforts to shoehorn one more pair of breasts into the film. This version combines elements of the first four. The original is dispensed with quickly with a pre-credits sequence in which a young woman decapitates Pamela Voorhees (Nana Visitor). Later Jason (Derek Mears) appears with a burlap sack over his head (II) before discovering the iconic hockey mask (III). At least this version has two of the better actors in the series. In between murders, Jared Padelecki, as a man looking for his sister who’s been missing since a Jason attack, and Danielle Panabaker, as the resident virgin, have a charming scene as she decides searching for his sister sounds like more fun than giving into the privileged jock (Travis Van Winkle) she’s been dating. That scene is an oasis in the drek about horny young men, buxom young women and slasher murders. The film was the second-highest grosser in the series (behind FREDDY VS. JASON), which gave rise to sequel talk that never came to fruition. At least we’re spared new takes on faux Jason, back-from-the-dead Jason, Jason fighting Carrie, Jason traveling to Manhattan and Jason flying off into space.

Bay of Angels

Losing it all has never been as glamorous as when Jeanne Moreau

taught Claude Mann the thrill of gambling.

Jacques Demy’s second feature, BAY OF ANGELS (1963), is almost a lightweight retread of themes from his first, LOLA (1961). Once again, a feckless young man (Claude Mann) finds his life altered by a chance encounter with a mercurial woman (Jeanne Moreau). The film’s plotting seems to demonstrate how the idolization of the female is a form of misogyny. Moreau’s character could easily be seen as a mere device for changing the man’s character. What raises the film above its sketchy plot is Moreau’s performance as Jackie, a compulsive gambler who’s sacrificed everything — husband, child, jewelry — to her addiction. Jackie is a multi-faceted character so adept at posing she’s not always sure who she is, and somehow Moreau manages to dig through the layers of artifice to turn her into a compelling human being. And when she’s on a high, she’s almost painfully glamorous. During the gambling scenes, Demy’s cutting and Michel Legrand’s Mozartian score capture the thrill of staking your life on chance. It’s little wonder Mann gets swept up in Moreau’s folly. Were she a drug, she’d be the most addictive on the planet.

Decoy

Jean  Gillies masks her true intent throughout DECOY.

If the science underlying Jack Bernhard’s DECOY (1946, TCM, YouTube) were any loopier, the film would be a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. High-living moll Jean Gillie comes up with a plan to save boyfriend Robert Armstrong from the gas chamber so she can find out where hid the loot from an armored car robbery. Knowing that methylene blue is an antidote for cyanide poisoning, she seduces gang leader Edward Norris into arranging to have Armstrong’s body stolen after the execution and doctor Herbert Rudley into administering the drug. Miraculously, it not only cures Armstrong but helps get his heart beating again. At one point Rudley injects it into the dead body as if the non-beating heart could circulate it to his failed organs. With skills like these, he could run a YouTube channel for anti-vaxxers. The craziest thing about all this, however, is that the film works. It’s a Monogram picture, so Bernard didn’t have the money for any great photographic effects, but he keeps it moving quickly and gets in some nice character details. And the script — by Nedrick Young from a story by Stanley Rubin — has some fun digressions, like a medical prison orderly who’s reading the dictionary to improve his mind (though he can’t figure out how to pronounce “dichotomy”). It also has Sheldon Leonard as a police detective attracted to Gillie. He has a way of growling out tough-guy dialog so even a howler like “Don’t let that face of yours go to your head” has the ring of authority. Best of all is Gillie, a British actress in her first of only two U.S. film roles. Her Margot is one of the most cold-hearted femmes fatales in the genre, a worthy companion to Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson and Ann Savage’s Vera. The film’s ads warned, “She’s the kind of woman who treats men the way they’ve been treating women for years,” which makes her a murderous Mae West. That’s reflected in the film when Leonard saves a young innocent from a lech pretending to be a producer, and the doctor dumps his nurse (the very good Marjorie Woodson) for Gillie, who really is turning the men’s tactics against them, though in the eyes of 1940s morality, she still has to be punished. As Leonard warns her, “People who use pretty faces the way you use yours don’t live very long anyway.”

The Slumber Party Massacre

It's sisterhood vs. slasher in the female-written and -directed THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE.

Amy Holden Jones’ THE SLUMBER PARTY MASSACRE (1982) is so much a part of the 1980s slasher craze that it took critics years to discern how it differs from horror films with male directors. Nor does it help that one can’t describe all the feminist elements without giving away the ending.  The opening scene, in which Trish (Michelle Michaels) goes through her bedroom throwing out her more childish toys seems to fit as a rite of passage, and the dialogue between Valerie (Robin Stille) and her kid sister (Jennifer Meyers), along with their shifting emotional rapport, rings true. The plot is simple genre stuff: Michaels and the other girls on her basketball team have a party that’s invaded by an escaped psycho. Unlike so much serial-killer kibble on screen, these young women fight back. There’s also a joke in the killer’s revelation that he dispatches women with a power drill because he loves them, a not so subtle commentary on the patriarchy. The first kill, with a telephone repairwoman pulled into her van while surrounded by preoccupied teens, anticipates Jaime Kennedy’s death in SCREAM 2 (1997). And Jones — who’s only made four films, the others romcoms and all of them money makers — gets credit for later creating THE RESIDENT, a series that has given a lot of my Atlanta colleagues jobs.

The Masque of the Red Death

Roger Corman takes some leaves from Ingmar Bergman's book in

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH.

Roger Corman’s early films often achieved a kind of dime-store surrealism, mainly because his low budgets required him to recycle shots from other films and even within the same film (see the chase scene in his neglected NOT OF THIS EARTH from 1957). With the larger budgets accorded his Poe adaptations, he started moving in the direction of genuine surrealism, which reached its apotheosis in THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (1964, Criterion through month’s end). Shooting in England gave him access to British film subsidies, which increased his budget, and sets from the recently completed BECKETT (1964), redressed by Daniel Haller to make this one of the most sumptuous of Corman’s films. The screenplay by Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell pads Poe’s slender story by making Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) a satanist with a jealous mistress (Hazel Court) and a yen to corrupt innocent peasant girl Jane Asher. The film also has a subplot based on Poe’s “Hop-Frog,” with court jester Skip Martin (a really marvelous actor) seeking revenge when courtier Patrick Magee mistreats Martin’s girlfriend. There are flaws. Asher’s innocence is nowhere near as charismatic as Price’s corruption, and the then 17-year-old actress doesn’t know what to make of pious lines that thud in the midst of Price and Court’s more acerbic dialog. She’s the Christian turd in their Satanic punchbowl. And the costumer should have paid attention to the number of times Price forbids his guests to wear red to the big masquerade at the end. It doesn’t make a lot of sense for him to be upset at the mysterious figure wearing red (John Westbrook, though it’s rumored his lines were dubbed by Christopher Lee) when you can see three or four partyers around him in the same color. But Price wisely underplays his lines (because Magee is doing enough acting for two, even though he presumably only got one paycheck), and it’s worth the price of admission just to hear the way he says “Christian.” There are two eerie dream scenes, and the climactic masque, with dancers in slow motion surrounding Price, is a surrealistic delight. Some may complain that the ending cribs too obviously from Ingmar Bergman, but I find the image of the Red Death playing cards with a little girl more of an homage. Corman’s film may not be as iconic as the Bergman, but it sure is entertaining.