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
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
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)
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 13TH (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 13TH 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
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
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
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’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.
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