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.