Quatermass 2 (1957)

Posted on January 7, 2012 at 9:06 am by Jeff Kuykendall

Hammer Films quickly followed up on their breakthrough success of The Quatermass Xperiment (1955; US title, The Creeping Unknown) with two films: the gory SF quickie X the Unknown (1956) – with no relation to Professor Quatermass, but just as prominent an “X” on the poster – and a proper sequel, Quatermass 2 (1957; US title, Enemy from Space), adapted from Nigel Kneale’s six-part television serial. A greater budget, thanks to co-financing from United Artists, allowed for a more ambitious science fiction thriller. While The Quatermass Xperiment was a modest but exciting variation on the Frankenstein story (with an outer space twist), Quatermass 2 – surely one of the first movie sequels to use a number to denote its place in the series – is a first-class alien invasion film. It’s just as unpredictable and intriguing as you’d expect from a script by Nigel Kneale, creator of Quatermass and author of Hammer’s superb The Abominable Snowman (1957). Despite his bitterness over the casting of American actor Brian Donlevy in the title role of the first Quatermass film (Donlevy played the character less as a scientist and more as a belligerent drill sergeant), Kneale returned to the franchise and adapted his own teleplay. Then they cast Donlevy again, to Kneale’s great frustration.

Publicity still: Professor Quatermass (Brian Donlevy) leans over the body of Broadhead (Tom Chatto), killed by an alien toxin.

Kneale would be more pleased a decade later with Hammer’s belated Quatermass and the Pit (1967, with British actor Andrew Keir taking over the lead), but visiting Quatermass 2 for the first time on DVD, I have to say the film is an achievement, as significant to Hammer’s rising status as The Curse of Frankenstein would be the same year, though the latter film would have the greater cultural impact. Director Val Guest keeps Donlevy’s bullying approach largely in check – amusingly, the opening scene features Quatermass yelling at his research team for no good reason, then swiftly apologizing to them – with the tactic of keeping him constantly on the run from zombie-like minions and machine-gun fire. Donlevy’s emotional range is limited, clearly. But there’s so much going on here that it’s difficult to complain. The plot begins with an innocuous tediousness: Quatermass is overseeing another rocket to be launched into space, essentially picking up where the last film left off (a subtle but effective matte shot places a mammoth Atom Age rocketship just outside the professor’s window). But his radar crew keep detecting mysterious objects falling out of the sky and landing in the same general area not far from his base. He drives out into the country with one of his men and discovers a top secret military base surrounding giant domes. Happening upon one of the apparent meteorites just outside the base, the professor’s assistant immediately becomes infected upon contact, sprouting a mark like a massive boil upon his face. Then armed men in gas masks appear, seizing the infected man, and pursuing Quatermass with jeeps and gunfire. A visit to a nearby, newly-constructed town named Winnerden Flats only uncovers a small population of villagers who have been commanded to ask no questions about the military installation, and refuse to assist Quatermass in any way.

Publicity still: a village girl becomes infected by an alien intelligence spread by a meteorite.

Now, this distance into a 1950’s B-movie, we’d expect to have the whole plot mapped out (as in, what kind of animal has been affected by atomic radiation, and how big is it going to get?). But a common trait of Kneale’s Quatermass series is to keep the audience guessing; his plots are science-fiction mysteries which shapeshift from one subgenre to the next. Just as you suspect that the British government is up to something nefarious, it becomes apparent that we’re actually in the territory of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and It Came from Outer Space (1953). A liaison for the military base – who has the mysterious boil on his wrist – claims that it’s a top-secret project for manufacturing synthetic foods, and offers to conduct a tour for Quatermass and Vincent Broadhead (Tom Chatto), an MP sympathetic to the professor’s concerns. But when the two break free of the guided tour, Broadhead falls into a vat of the “synthetic food,” an oil-like substance which burns his skin and eventually kills him; once more, Quatermass is breaking free by dodging bullets. He becomes convinced that an alien menace is infesting the Earth, and Winnerden Flats is ground zero for the invasion, traveling by meteorite from a mysterious orbiting asteroid, spreading through the populace like a virus, and commanding the construction of this base – but what’s inside those towering domes? Quatermass returns with a mob of villagers to find out.

Quatermass, infiltrating one of the domes, gazes upon the hideous thing inside.

In addition to the aforementioned matte shot of Quatermass’s rocket, there’s some superb matte work for the military base. Location shooting was performed in an oil refinery, but wide shots reveal the ominous domes, resembling a futuristic moonbase. In an eerie sequence, one of the villagers agrees to be led by the gas-masked soldiers into the dome, so he can prove its function to be harmless; as Quatermass watches through a window in the neighboring building, we see the man being led into the shadow of the great black structure, and a minute later his screams can be heard echoing through the connecting pipes. The special effects finally show their seams in the climactic sequence. I wish I could go back and carefully trim a few of the shots, because there’s a fine line between mile-high monsters of slime and two men stumbling about with blankets over their heads. Still, for late 50’s science fiction horror, this is top-drawer stuff; once the story gets going, it never lets up (surely that’s the benefit of cramming a six-part serial into 90 minutes). Hammer would quickly turn its attention to horror, and make an international name for itself; but Quatermass 2 sets the stage for a rich tradition of thoughtful British science fiction, notably those adventures of a nameless Doctor and his cosmic police box.

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Double Feature: Silent Night, Bloody Night (1974)/Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

Posted on December 16, 2011 at 10:31 am by Jeff Kuykendall

It was finals week at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In the newly-built Union South, replete with fireplaces, restaurants, a convenience store, an ice cream vendor, and a concert stage, students were at every table, in groups or alone, staring at their laptops and studying intensely. But upstairs, the Cinematheque’s new director of programming, Jim Healy – formerly an assistant curator at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY, and a programmer for the Chicago International Film Festival – was warmly welcoming a small collective of brave souls into the Union’s Marquee movie theater for a double-feature of bloody, bloody Christmas cheer. The crowd was the usual Madison film buff mix: some older folks, but some students too, either taking a break from studying or writing off finals week altogether, plopping down into a plush seat with beer in hand. Then the mayhem ensued – first, with a Tom and Jerry Christmas short (only slightly less violent than what would follow).

Lunatics on the rampage in the sepia-toned flashback sequence of "Silent Night, Bloody Night."

Okay, 1974’s Silent Night, Bloody Night is misleadingly titled. For one thing, it’s not particularly bloody, despite a few brief shots of severed hands; and it’s not particularly chock full of Christmas, either, though ostensibly it takes place over the holidays. Released during the heyday of 70’s exploitation and drive-in horror, but before all the tropes of the “slasher picture” had fixed the genre just a little too firmly, the chief appeal of this low-budget effort (associate-produced by Troma’s Lloyd Kaufman) is its loopy, untethered script. Mary Woronov, exile of Andy Warhol’s Factory and on her way to the land of Roger Corman (Death Race 2000 was next), stars as young Diane, the daughter of a small-town mayor, who teams up with a stranger named Jeffrey Butler (James Patterson) to investigate mysterious disappearances around his grandfather’s house over the course of one night. That house was the site of crimes and madness dating back to the 1930’s, and Butler’s attempts to sell it off lead to the deaths of various elderly townsfolk at the hands of a mysterious killer, and a climax which emphasizes a long flashback involving homicidal mental patients from the local asylum running riot (one cuts out a man’s eye with a broken bottle). The flashback is stylistically shot, but much of the film, directed by Woronov’s husband of the time, Theodore Gershuny (Kenek), is a bit plodding, the victim of a script that keeps its characters away from the old dark house as long as possible, to ludicrous extremes; the film’s running time would be cut in half if our two protagonists would just make the short drive to the house to see what’s going on. Roger Ebert calls these “idiot plots.” Still, at least there is a plot, a bit more advanced than your later school of slasher film, since it depends on Faulknerian tortured pasts (read: incest). Patrick O’Neal plays one of the first victims, and John Carradine has a small part as a man who can only communicate by ringing a bell (shades of Breaking Bad). Candy Darling, another ex-Warhol associate, has a cameo (in the flashback); the film was shot in Long Island, and was re-released under various titles. The print screened at the UW Union South bore the title DEATHOUSE, which could really use an extra “h.”

Before the next feature started, Healy ran some vintage horror trailers: Death Screams (1982), Eat and Run (1987), Q: The Winged Serpent (1982), and Mother’s Day (1980). All of which set the mood perfectly for Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984), a film that’s actually much more of what you’d expect from a Christmas-themed horror picture. That is, a man dresses in a Santa suit and kills people (often naked women) for being “naughty”…what more could you possibly want? Directed by Charles E. Sellier, Jr. – producer of In Search of Noah’s Ark (1976) and the Grizzly Adams TV series – the film is a shameless cash-in on the 80’s slasher craze, delivering sex and violence at a pace to hold the teenage audience’s rapt attention. In a hysterical prologue, we meet young Billy (Danny Wagner), who’s visiting his seemingly-catatonic grandfather in a nursing home. But we quickly learn that gramps is faking the condition; as soon as Billy’s parents are out of earshot, he leans over and tells Billy that Santa Claus is a man to be feared – and if you’ve been naughty, he’s coming to punish you. On the drive home, his parents make the unwise decision to stop for a hitchhiker in a Santa suit. Turns out the man is a violent criminal, fresh from robbing a convenience store and shooting the clerk. Billy’s mom and dad are brutally murdered, and Billy and his baby brother – somehow escaping from the killer – are sent to a Catholic orphanage. The trauma of seeing his parents killed by Santa Claus is bad enough, but enduring the torments of the Mother Superior (Lilyan Chovan) pushes Billy even further into a psychotic state. When she forces him to sit on Santa’s lap, he’s so horrified at the experience that the kid lays the poor guy flat with a punch. But he’s also learning a skewed sense of what’s “naughty.” When the Mother Superior catches two teenagers having sex in an upstairs room (Billy watches through a peephole), she beats them with a belt. So, you see, when Billy does finally go over the edge and begin murdering people in a Santa suit, he must go after sexually-active teens. This isn’t slasher-movie cliché, this has to happen – or so the film has wasted half its running time explaining to us.

Billy (Robert Brian Wilson) demonstrates he's really good at lifting things, in a musical montage about lifting things, in "Silent Night Deadly Night."

But before the killing starts, how about an 80’s music montage set in a toy store, in which the full-grown Billy (Robert Brian Wilson) lifts heavy things in the stock room and smiles a lot? Actually, I was lost in nostalgia during the toy store scenes – I hadn’t seen the Star Wars Jabba the Hut throne room action figure set since I was a kid (and played with it endlessly). And there’s Smurfs merchandise, and there’s a sad-looking G.I. Joe Halloween costume! The joy must end, though: when Billy’s crush is assaulted by her boyfriend, our deranged protagonist – wearing the Santa suit that he’s been forced by his employers to wear – kills both of them in his “you’ve been naughty” rage (the girl’s boyfriend is strangled with Christmas lights). He slays another employee with a bow and arrow, frequently found in toy stores. Billy, who – disappointingly – can’t quite keep his face covered with his Santa beard, has a Jason Voorhees-style superhuman strength. Later he visits a cabin in the woods and kills a naked babysitter by impaling her on the antlers of a mounted deer – never mind that the antlers seem to have very rounded tips. And in the film’s most satisfying death scene, he decapitates a bully coasting down a bunny slope on a sled. I only noticed one actual Christmas carol in the film, “Deck the Halls.” To get around those sticky copyright issues, most of the Christmas carols are custom-made for Silent Night, Deadly Night. These include “Sweet Little Baby,” “Christmas Flu,” “Santa’s Watching,” and “Slayrider.”

Billy takes a hammer to his boss's skull in "Silent Night Deadly Night."

The film would have come and gone as another modestly successful horror film, but for a TV commercial depicting the murderous Santa Claus holding an axe, which – surprise, surprise – caused an uproar from concerned parents. Presumably, those parents had freshly-traumatized kids; and, if the film’s logic held true, those kids all grew up to be killer Santas. (I’m sure there was an outbreak of Santa-themed murders in recent years, and I just missed the news reports.) Siskel & Ebert jumped on the bandwagon of condemning the film, Siskel going so far as to say that the film’s profits “are truly blood money.” That would have made a good title for one of the film’s many sequels, actually: Silent Night, Deadly Night: Blood Money. But the critics and the protest groups didn’t pay much attention to those sequels, and the furor died down; revisiting the film in 2011, it’s just another cheesy relic of the 80’s, tasteless but harmless, in which the intentional and unintentional humor blend seamlessly together. One generation’s outrage is another’s camp classic; go figure. Here’s the At the Movies segment, thanks to YouTube:

Merry Christmas! See you in 2012.

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The Devils (1971)

Posted on December 14, 2011 at 5:00 am by Jeff Kuykendall

By far Ken Russell’s most controversial work, The Devils (1971) is not merely content to be sacrilegious and shocking; it seeks a state of hysteria that cinema rarely achieves. Though the film is now four decades old, it hasn’t lost its power. Edited versions of the film have turned up on home video over the years, and bootlegs abound, but it has never been issued on DVD in the United States, and a forthcoming official release in the U.K. will not contain the full uncut version. Given the transgressive nature of so much that is readily available these days, and the status of The Devils as a major cult film, the reticence on the part of Warner Bros. seems somewhat old-fashioned, if not ridiculous. It ought to be widely available to film students everywhere, for though it’s a flawed film, it’s also a significant one in many ways. Oliver Reed and Vanessa Redgrave deliver career-high performances. The memorable sets were designed by filmmaker Derek Jarman. The screenplay, by Russell, is based on a famous play of the same name by John Whiting (adapted from the book The Devils of Loudun by Aldous Huxley), and borrows material from an opera by noted avant-garde composer Krzysztof Penderecki. And, most of all, this is a Ken Russell movie made during his early-70’s prime. It’s wild, raw, and taboo-busting. People will object to it, but people will also want to see it; and the more you suppress the film, the more you inadvertently add to its legend. The Devils is nothing if not legendary.

Father Grandier (Oliver Reed) proudly speaks of his power to Father Mignon (Murray Melvin) before a pit of plague-ridden corpses.

Reed plays Father Grandier, a priest of the walled town of Loudun whose prominence approaches celebrity status. When the governor dies of the plague, Grandier virtually replaces him, and quickly comes to enjoy his newfound power. He impregnates the daughter of the magistrate, then quickly scorns her. He falls in love with a pretty young woman named Madeline de Brou (Gemma Jones), and marries her in secret. When Baron De Laubardemont (Dudley Sutton) acts on behalf of King Louis XIII (Graham Armitage) and attempts to tear down the city – part of Cardinal Richelieu’s plans to consolidate power throughout France – Grandier takes control of Loudun’s forces and threatens his life unless he withdraws his men. Laubardemont retreats, but soon hatches a plot of revenge. He terrorizes the nuns of the “Enclosed Order,” led by the hunchbacked and sexually deranged Mother Superior, Sister Jeanne of the Angels (Redgrave). After Sister Jeanne is brutally “exorcised” by a psychotic witch-hunter named Barre (Michael Gothard) – she’s raped with an enema – and the nuns are threatened with execution, they’re spared under the condition that they fake a mass possession by devils, with Father Grandier as the source of the evil. The convent is reduced to a chaotic and violent orgy, and Grandier is arrested, placed on trial, tortured, and sentenced to be burned at the stake.

The deformed Sister Jeanne (Vanessa Redgrave) and her order of sinful nuns.

Russell’s previous effort was The Music Lovers (1970), but for all of that film’s scandalous touches, there were only hints – in particular his treatment of Glenda Jackson’s unhinged Mrs. Tchaikovsky – that a greater madness lurked just round the corner. The Devils kicked wide the asylum gates, and let the inmates run riot. The sexuality is graphic; the violence is horrific; and any regular church-goers should really keep a wide berth. It’s interesting how Russell lets this unfold. At first Reed’s Father Grandier seems to be the heart of the corruption, and his treatment of the pregnant Madeline is shockingly callous. A scene in which he strides the length of a pit of the dead (all ravaged by the plague) while speaking casually of the satisfaction he takes from power and lust is equally shocking. But none of this compares to the perverse imagination of Sister Jeanne. While praying to a statue of Christ, she fantasizes that the object of her lust, Grandier, is hanging from the cross with a crown of thorns upon his head. Then he descends to her for an erotic embrace, and she kisses the stigmata and plunges her tongue down the spear-wound in his side. When she awakens from this blasphemous reverie, she discovers that she’s stabbed a bloody hole into her palm with a crucifix. The nuns she oversees behind the bars of the convent are no more holy. They stage a mock wedding in parody of Grandier’s not-so-secret ceremony, a minor prelude to the later orgy in which they all-too-passionately indulge. Their sin is matched only the sadism of Baron De Laubardemont, Father Barre, and those they command, including two maniacal physicians whose supposedly-professional expertise is lethal. Russell films every taboo in the most sensationalistic manner he can dream up – like a Surrealist’s experiment in provocation. In the notorious “rape of Christ” scene (cut from most prints of the film) – when the nuns climax their orgy by taking down a statue of Jesus before humping it, while one unclothed nun swings spread-eagled from the ceiling – Russell turns the camera on one of the instigators of this madness, the corrupt Father Mignon (Murray Melvin), and spasmodically zooms in and out on his face while he masturbates. The phrase “over the top” does not do justice. (As pointed out in Mark Kermode’s documentary “Hell on Earth,” the scene is deliberately juxtaposed with Father Grandier’s personal communion with God, making clear that his own spirituality is becoming more genuine, while his accusers have submitted to complete corruption.)

Sister Jeanne, faking demonic possession under the command of Father Barre (Michael Gothard), kisses the hand of the disguised Louis XIII (Graham Armitage).

Critics did not react kindly to The Devils, some decrying it as pornography and a pointless exercise in sadism. It was cut in the States, but still received an X-rating on its initial release (it was later cut down further, to garner an R). Some countries banned the film outright. At least Russell could see the immediate result of his experiment in extremes: censorship and suppression. He’d made a film spectacle that was increasingly difficult for anyone to see. But visiting the film forty years later, and placing it in the context of the late director’s now-completed body of work, we can see it as a defining moment. The Devils made it clear to everyone, forevermore, what “A Ken Russell Film” really meant. He had made a name for himself with Women in Love (1969), but now he was an auteur that the film world had to reckon with. From here on out, he would be either scorned or adored; no middle-ground could be struck. But The Devils, behind its heavy curtain of shock value, is still a good story wittily told. The script is full of little jokes and sharp characterizations (it helped that Russell’s screenplay had a firm foundation, from the historical reality of the events to Whiting’s vivid players). The film’s final scenes, in which Grandier is dragged through the ringer, succeed in evoking righteous outrage in the viewer as well as – hat-trick here – enormous sympathy for Father Grandier, the very man who inspired such loathing early on. He repents and comes to peace with God, but it is not the confession that Laubardemont is seeking. We feel the injustice viscerally; everything, of course, is delivered at the visceral level here. Finally, all that intensely-felt sacrilege committed by those wearing holy robes not only demolishes the divine authority of The Church, but all of that institution’s awe and power. To this end, the film is part of a long, rich tradition – once literary (such as in M.G. Lewis’ The Monk), now cinematic (Buñuel’s ouvre). The Devils offends and disturbs, but as a film and an important piece of art, it succeeds magnificently.

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