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
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
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 19ththan 15th 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 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
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
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
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
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.
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