Lost in America (1985)

Posted on August 7, 2017 at 12:56 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

David Howard (Albert Brooks) has a plan. He and his wife Linda (Julie Hagerty) have boxed up their belongings, anticipating a move to a bigger home, potentially one with a tennis court. He’s in extended negotiations with a Mercedes salesman and debating whether the interior should be leather or the faux “Mercedes leather” (vinyl). He has a big meeting in the morning with his boss, in which he expects to receive a promotion to senior vice president of his marketing firm. When his wife almost accidentally expresses her pent-up frustration that they’ve become too responsible – and, it’s implied, boring – he reassures her that the promotion will provide more responsibility which will give him the opportunity to act more irresponsibly. As a marketing expert, this is how he speaks. He prides himself on his pitches. It’s only as Lost in America (1985) unfolds – beginning with his spectacular meltdown when the meeting with his boss doesn’t go as planned – that we begin to realize that David isn’t particularly good at selling. Time and again, he will try to talk his way out of a jam, which sometimes results in an even worse jam. David, like so many characters portrayed on screen by Albert Brooks, is a neurotic narcissist, and Lost in America is one of Brooks’ most scathing (and hilarious) portraits of a uniquely American self-delusion.

David Howard (Albert Brooks) learns that he’s not getting promoted to Senior Vice President.

Lost in America was Brooks’ third film as director, and once again he shares screenwriting credit with Monica Johnson. The premise is straightforward: What if some upwardly mobile Yuppies, hung up on dreams of shedding their careers and living “like Easy Rider,” actually lost everything and were forced to scrape by? Brooks is a satirist, which is a rarity in comedies today. He starts with a satirical premise and commits to it, whether that means depicting just how destructive the reality TV director is toward his subjects in Real Life (1979), or underlining how irredeemably self-defeating the protagonist is in the anti-romantic comedy Modern Romance (1981). Following those films, Lost in America completes a rough trilogy. His subsequent movies Defending Your Life (1991) and Mother (1996) would soften the blows by adding more heart, but there is something refreshingly merciless in these three initial films. In the early scenes, there isn’t much that’s appealing about Brooks’ David Howard, other than the fact that he’s played by the always-engaging Brooks. David feels entitled to a high-profile promotion that his boss has never intended to give him, and his petulant, overblown response is both cathartically funny and mesmerizing because we’re watching him metaphorically douse another building with gasoline a la Real Life. Turning down an opportunity to handle an important new account with the Ford Motor Company and a move across the country to New York City, he insults his boss, gets fired, and enthusiastically charges into his wife’s department store office to propose having sex on her desk. He wants her to quit her job immediately. They’ve saved up a “nest egg,” enough to downscale and live comfortably for the rest of their lives, wherever they want. They’ll buy a motor home and drive across the States and “touch Indians.” They can be irresponsible, now that they’ve responsibly managed their finances and can cash out.

David urges Linda (Julie Hagerty) to quit her job.

During this scene, watch Julie Hagerty’s body language – back straight, stiff as a board, eyes wide, looking like she’s just taken a client into her office who’s proving to be a psychotic. (Brooks hops around the office restlessly and climbs the desk in his misguided romantic overture.) But Hagerty’s Linda Howard has already been quietly voicing concerns that her marriage is stagnant. She’s confessed to a co-worker that nothing ever changes no matter how many promotions David earns; her friend shrugs and points out that divorce is always an option. Linda has been near the end of her rope, and David is too wrapped up in himself to notice. So she gives in to his Easy Rider dreams: they buy a motor home and head out on the highway while “Born to Be Wild” plays on the soundtrack (a genuine-article biker gives David the finger). Their first stop is Las Vegas to get remarried – a symbolic new beginning for the next phase of their life. Hagerty, whose memorable debut was Airplane! (1980) and who had appeared in Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy (1982), gives one of my all-time favorite film performances in Lost in America. While Brooks blusters, Hagerty is all frayed edges and wide eyes and passion that’s been bottled for so long that we wait for it to explode. And it does. After meekly suggesting that they put off getting married for a day so they can rent a honeymoon suite and watch a porno together, instead David falls asleep in the room and she goes downstairs to the casino. In the morning, Linda is not the Linda we have known.

Linda the gambler.

It’s the Linda that’s been silently screaming for years, now bursting out in a completely unexpected, latent gambling addiction that destroys David’s beloved nest egg. Repression gone, those huge eyes now look like a wild animal’s; as a bathrobe-wearing David tries to leave her alone in the casino restaurant so he can talk to the manager, he orders her not to touch the Keno card by the salt and pepper shakers. “Why are you talking to me like I’m an animal?” she protests. “I’ll tell you later,” he says. “Now – stay.” His subsequent talk with Desert Inn manager Garry Marshall has become one of the great bits in Brooks’ career – a vain attempt to explain that giving the Howards all their money back will make a great marketing campaign for the casino. He lets his pitch evolve, spitballing, each time bumping up against Marshall’s very logical point that if he refunds the Howards, everyone will expect the same treatment. It’s a winding exchange leading to the inevitable conclusion: “We’re done here.” On the desert highway, David finally explodes at Linda when she uses the words “nest egg.” “Don’t use that word, it’s off-limits to you. Only those in this house who understand it might use it. And don’t use any part of it either. Don’t use nest, don’t use egg. You’re out in the forest, you can point. The bird lives in a round stick. And you have ‘things’ over easy with toast.” Just note that for as much as David prides himself on his salesmanship, it’s Linda who talks them out of a speeding ticket when she asks the motorcycle cop if he’s ever seen Easy Rider. 

Easy Riding.

Structurally, Lost in America is centered around the disaster in Las Vegas; the film has a number of funny scenes later as the Howards settle arbitrarily in a small Arizona town (highlights include David’s introduction to “Skippy,” the teenager who’s Linda’s manager at Wienerschnitzel). But there is no climax per se, no comic crescendo that builds – nothing with more comic energy than Linda in Vegas screaming at the roulette table “Twenty-two! Twenty-two!” Brooks is more interested in landing his satirical observations. The small-income humiliations the Howards encounter are actually quite minor; there is nothing inherently wrong with Linda’s new job or David’s (as a crossing guard), except that it looks nothing like their touching-Indians dreams, and that it draws out their epiphany that their old life was actually quite nice in the first place. If they were leading shallow, empty, unfulfilling lives, they did have luxuries. One of the recurring jokes in Lost in America is that David’s grasp of Easy Rider elides some key points – that the characters played by Hopper and Fonda were not in the upper income bracket, and carried almost nothing (a mobile home is a vehicle that brings everything with you); that they were actually shot dead at the end of their journey. It’s Linda who points out that she’s done more to bring them closer to the Easy Rider dream by losing all their savings. But marketing superman David always has the last word. They didn’t have nothing: “They sold cocaine.” So there’s the American dream for you.

Lost in America is now available on Blu-ray and DVD from the Criterion Collection.

 

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Mystery Science Theater 3000: 11 Episodes for 11 Seasons

Posted on August 2, 2017 at 9:46 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

This week Shout Factory announced that the forthcoming DVD box set of Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes, Volume XXXIX, will likely be the last (“Girls Town,” “The Amazing Transparent Man,” and “Diabolik” will be included in the set out November 21, along with a disc of comprehensive host segments culled from the 12 remaining unreleased episodes from its cable TV run). The cult TV show, which introduced “movie riffing” to the world, has enjoyed a major revival this year with an eleventh season on Netflix. Under the aegis of creator Joel Hodgson and featuring an all-new cast, the series was brought back thanks to a record-setting Kickstarter campaign, and is currently touring the States as a live show, the “Watch Out for Snakes Tour.”

But MST3K has always been difficult to release on home video because the film featured in each episode would need to have its rights negotiated individually. Rhino launched the effort in the late 90’s with VHS releases of episodes like “Pod People,” “Catalina Caper,” “Red Zone Cuba,” and more. They transitioned to DVDs beginning with “Eegah” in 2000, and launched the current box set series (4 discs each) in 2002. Though Rhino had its share of rights issues over the years – including releasing and quickly withdrawing “The Amazing Colossal Man” (on VHS) and “Godzilla vs. Megalon” (in a DVD box set) – they championed the series and kept it alive as a cult property in the years following its Sci-Fi Channel cancellation. Beginning in 2008, Shout Factory licensed the MST3K property and resumed the box set series using the same numbering – even instituting a standard release schedule of three volumes (or 12 episodes) per year. Episodes which no one thought would get released, such as the “Sandy Frank” films including all the MST3K Gamera movies, finally received official releases. It’s no small achievement that in the end, Rhino and Shout Factory have been able to release 164 of its original 197 episodes, in addition to Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (1996). (The first 21 shows, for the Minneapolis station KTMA, have never been seriously considered for release given that Hodgson views them as just a training ground for the series proper. However, the first two were released digitally earlier this year as an exclusive to Kickstarter backers.)

So let’s celebrate what has been done to get classic MST3K back in the public eye by looking at some of the best episodes from the series’ run, one for each of its eleven seasons (excluding KTMA). Each of these episodes received an official DVD release, with the caveat that some may be out of print, and Season 11 has not been released on physical media yet – though if you have Netflix, you can watch it now. One more thing – I am avoiding the more obvious episode choices and the popular-consensus classics (“Pod People,” “Manos: The Hands of Fate,” “Space Mutiny,” “The Final Sacrifice,” etc.) – in favor of “deeper cuts.”

SEASON 1 (The Comedy Channel, 1989-1990)

Women of the Prehistoric Planet
Experiment #104
Host: Joel Hodgson
Year of Film’s Release: 1966
Genre: Space voyage
DVD Release: Volume 9 (2006)

If KTMA was the proving grounds for MST3K, its debut season on The Comedy Channel presented a more disciplined show (they now wrote the riffs in advance, for one thing) that was just a little rough around the edges. Although the jokes are much more frequent than on KTMA, for many episodes the pace is considerably slower than seasons to come. The hosting segments feature Josh (“J. Elvis”) Weinstein as Dr. Erhardt, assistant to Trace Beaulieu’s Dr. Clayton Forrester; Weinstein also co-wrote the theme song with Hodgson and provided the voice for Tom Servo, but would depart before the second season. (He was later  part of Hodgson’s live MST3K reunion project, Cinematic Titanic, where he was consistently one of the funniest performers.) Late in the first season, the show finally begins to hit its stride. Don’t let the low production number fool you – “Women of the Prehistoric Planet” was actually the last episode to be produced for this season, which explains why it includes callbacks to episodes like “Robot Holocaust.” The film’s plot is one that would be featured time and again in the series: a spaceship full of two-dimensional pulp archetypes crash lands on a primitive alien world. Separated from the rest of the crew, officer Linda (Irene Tsu) becomes a scantily-clad Jane to the planet’s Tarzan (Robert Ito). This is the episode which gave us the recurring riff “Hi-keeba!” – an inexplicable phrase that accompanies a clumsy karate chop, and which became a favorite of staff writer/performer Frank Conniff. Note: The Rhino DVD is currently out of print, but Shout Factory has been re-releasing the Rhino sets one at a time, with Volume 6 due in October.

SEASON 2 (The Comedy Channel, 1990-1991)

Rocket Attack U.S.A.
Experiment #205
Host: Joel Hodgson
Year of Film’s Release: 1961
Genre: Cold War doomsday thriller
DVD Release: Volume 27 (2013)

I started watching the show while the second season was airing, so this season has always had a special place in my heart (my first episode was “Jungle Goddess”). The second season introduced Kevin Murphy as the voice of Tom Servo and Frank Conniff as “TV’s Frank,” second banana to Dr. Forrester. Though some have argued that it would take another year before the show would come into its own, I really think all the elements come into place here – specifically, with “Rocket Attack U.S.A.,” the first episode to feature a “stinger” after the end credits. The stinger was a moment – just a few seconds – highlighting one of the more bizarre moments from the film, and the first is memorable: a blind man wandering through a street that’s been evacuated in advance of a nuclear attack. Without a drop of passion he delivers the line, “Help me.” It’s awkward, sad, shameless, and very funny. The film itself is an apocalyptic downer – much like the season 6 episode “Invasion USA” – beginning as an espionage thriller behind the Iron Curtain and ending with widespread nuclear holocaust. But doses of sleaze, terrible accents, and abrupt changes in tone provide plenty of fodder for classic MST3K. For other wonderful episodes that received an official release, you can check out “King Dinosaur,” “Wild Rebels,” or “Lost Continent.”

SEASON 3 (Comedy Central, 1991-1992)

Gamera vs. Guiron
Experiment #312
Host: Joel Hodgson
Year of Film’s Release: 1969
Genre: Kaiju movie
DVD Release: Volume 21: Gamera vs. MST3K (2011)

Comedy Central showed faith in one of its flagship shows by renewing it for a sprawling 24-episode third season. It says something for this season’s quality that the first three episodes are all regarded as classics of the show’s entire run: “Cave Dwellers,” “Gamera,” and “Pod People.” Gamera, a giant fire-breathing turtle that can fly, might be considered the goofier, less popular cousin of Godzilla. MST3K had first riffed Gamera movies at KTMA, and took them out of their back pocket to help fill out this longer-than-usual stretch of original episodes. Gamera vs. Guiron was the fourth of five Gamera films they would do this season, and it’s the most absurd and entertaining. (Honestly, other Japanese movies they riffed this season – Time of the Apes, Fugitive Alien, Star Force: Fugitive Alien II, and Mighty Jack – all feel like part and parcel of the same series.) In Gamera vs. Guiron, two kids stowaway on a space ship to a world on the far side of the Sun and match “wits” against two beautiful female aliens. Gamera faces off against this planet’s monster Guiron, which has a serrated knife for a head. This episode is an excellent example of the colorful sets, nonsensical plotting, and surreal giant monsters of the Gamera series, as well as the atrocious dubbing by Sandy Frank’s company. (Unfortunately, the Gamera box set is currently out of print.)

SEASON 4 (Comedy Central, 1992-1993)

Monster a-Go-Go
Experiment #421
Host: Joel Hodgson
Year of Film’s Release: 1965
Genre: Monster movie (but…”there was no monster”)
DVD Release: Volume 8 (2005)

No, there’s no monster in Monster a-Go-Go, but the true genre for this isn’t “monster movie” but “the worst movies ever made.” Bill Rebane (who also made The Giant Spider Invasion and still lives in northern Wisconsin) directed this atrocious act against celluloid, the kind of “film,” like Manos: The Hands of Fate, The Creeping Terror, or Red Zone Cuba, that MST3K would drag out of obscurity to remind viewers that, you know, Battlefield Earth isn’t that bad. A space capsule crashes back to Earth and an irradiated astronaut (Henry Hite) goes on a rampage. Many people have conversations about things. Non sequiturs abound, including a telephone ring that is clearly just someone making a telephone noise. A narrator talks over the characters and generally wages war with the viewer: after a long build-up to a confrontation with the monster, the film suddenly ends, the narrator telling us, “Astronaut Frank Douglas was rescued alive, well, and of normal size, some 8,000 miles away in a lifeboat, with no memory of where he has been, or how he was separated from his capsule. Then who or what has landed here? Is it here yet, or has the cosmic switch been pulled?” Reportedly Rebane ran out of money before the picture could be completed, and Herschell Gordon Lewis (Blood Feast) re-edited and “finished” the film. Some find this movie punishing, but it’s so bad that it flips round to perfection, in my opinion. To top it off, the short that accompanies the feature – “Circus on Ice” – is one of MST3K’s best.

SEASON 5 (Comedy Central, 1993-1994)

The Painted Hills
Experiment #510
Host: Joel Hodgson
Year of Film’s Release: 1951
Genre: Lassie movie
DVD Release: Volume 31: The Turkey Day Collection (2014)

Season 5 may be the most significant season in the show’s history, for at its halfway point, host Hodgson left (with a quote from The 7 Faces of Dr. Lao) and head writer Michael J. Nelson took his place. It was the moment that proved the series could endure without Joel’s endearing, sleepy-eyed comedy or Gizmonic inventions. But the season was also significant for being consistently strong: “Warrior of the Lost World,” “The Magic Voyage of Sinbad,” “Eegah,” “I Accuse My Parents,” “Mitchell,” “The Brain That Wouldn’t Die,” and “Santa Claus” were here unleashed upon the world. More quietly spectacular is this Lassie vehicle, The Painted Hills, a kids’ movie that goes to some very dark and inappropriate places. For some reason, the filmmakers decided to go full-on film noir. Lassie’s master is murdered and she deliberately plots her revenge, her reactions and motivations given hilarious voice throughout by Joel and the Bots.

SEASON 6 (Comedy Central, 1994-1995)

Zombie Nightmare
Experiment #604
Host: Mike Nelson
Year of Film’s Release: 1986
Genre: Zombie movie
DVD Release: Volume 15 (2009)

With former Deep 13 janitor Mike Nelson sent to the Satellite of Love, the invention exchange was phased out over season 5, and Mike confidently settled into his role in season 6 as a more sardonic movie riffer who, in the hosting segments, finds the power balance severely in the Bots’ favor (he’s constantly being tricked or tortured, it seems). Zombie Nightmare is an 80’s Canadian heavy metal-driven slasher/zombie movie. Jon Mikl Thor, the iron-pumping frontman of the band Thor, plays a gold-hearted fellow killed by teenagers and brought back as a revenge-seeking zombie by his mother and her voodoo priestess friend. The film also includes a young Tia Carrere and Adam West as a corrupt police detective, because why not?

SEASON 7 (Comedy Central, 1996)

Escape 2000
Experiment #705
Host: Mike Nelson
Year of Film’s Release: 1983
Genre: Post-apocalypse
DVD Release: Volume 37 (2016)

This truncated, six-episode season marked MST3K’s abrupt end on Comedy Central. The channel’s interest in the long-running show had declined, and the crew were a bit distracted by the production of their first (and last) big-screen outing, Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie (riffing This Island Earth), directed by Jim Mallon. The movie came and went with barely a whisper, and with the series canned, it seemed for a while that MST3K had stumbled to a close. But that last episode was something: “Laserblast” featured a perfect feature to riff (Charles Band’s post-Star Wars exploitation movie), and the host segments parodied 2001 to end the series on an epic note. But if you’ve played “Laserblast” too many times, put on “Escape 2000,” which has Mike and the Bots tackling one of those Italian Mad Max/Escape from New York rip-offs. Almost the entire film is gunfire and (the same) extras falling down over and over again. Oh, there’s also a jovial man named Toblerone Dablone, and the repeated, repeated command to would you please just leave the Bronx. With Frank Conniff having left the series the previous year (and bowing out of MST3K: The Movie), this episode, like all in season 7, includes Dr. Forrester’s mother Pearl (staff writer Mary Jo Pehl), who will have a much larger role in the years to come…

SEASON 8 (Sci-Fi Channel, 1997)

Revenge of the Creature
Experiment #801
Host: Mike Nelson
Year of Film’s Release: 1955
Genre: Monster movie
DVD Release: Volume 25 (2012)

When the Sci-Fi Channel picked up the option on MST3K, the series experienced another soft reboot – a sign of just how versatile and resilient the show’s concept is. Mike Nelson, Kevin Murphy (Servo), and producer Jim Mallon (Gypsy) returned, but Trace Beaulieu (Crow/Dr. Forrester) did not. Bill Corbett (later of Rifftrax) stepped in as the voice of Crow, and would soon embody the Observer, who keeps his brain in a dish. Pearl Forrester (Mary Jo Pehl) also returned to continue the experiments of his son Clayton, but now she was a vivacious, sadistic megalomaniac, a more fully realized character than the Midwestern mom from season 7. Murphy would soon join her as the Planet of the Apes-inspired Professor Bobo. Season 8 was a long, healthy, and varied season, and I could pick from a number of classics – “Space Mutiny,” “Time Chasers,” “The Giant Spider Invasion,” “Jack Frost” – but I’m going with the season premiere because its release on DVD, which I never thought I’d see, spotlights just how tenacious Shout Factory has been in chasing down movie rights. Revenge of the Creature is the first sequel to The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), and the Gill-Man is one of the iconic Universal monsters. MST3K had developed a relationship with Universal through MST3K: The Movie, and the eighth season included a number of Universal-licensed films. As Rhino and then Shout chipped away at episodes, the first half of the eighth season remained untouched for years, largely for this reason. Then Shout negotiated Revenge of the Creature, and the gates opened to other “untouchable” episodes like “The Mole People” and “The Leech Woman.” Revenge of the Creature isn’t a bad film, but like This Island Earth, it offers plenty of silly moments that make 90 minutes pass with ease (it also includes a cameo from Clint Eastwood). The hosting segments establish the new stakes for the Satellite of Love, as Mike and the Bots find themselves above a planet where apes evolved from men. As Professor Bobo succinctly explains, “Human civilization is dead and apes rule the world; everything you ever knew and loved is no more. Well, your movie this week…”

SEASON 9 (Sci-Fi Channel, 1998)

The Touch of Satan
Experiment #908
Host: Mike Nelson
Year of Film’s Release: 1971
Genre: Satanic horror
DVD Release: Volume 5 (2004, reissued 2017)

The Sci-Fi Channel imposed an ongoing storyline for season 8, and insisted upon Best Brains using SF-themed movies as much as possible. But those restrictions began to relax by the ninth season (thankfully, as the plot of season 8 doesn’t make any sense when viewed out of order and only weighed the comedy down). The Touch of Satan, from the director of The Babysitter AND Weekend with the Babysitter, is the kind of post-Rosemary’s Baby occult horror that filled the drive-ins in the early 70’s. A young drifter (not a babysitter) falls for a farm girl (also not a babysitter) whose deranged great-grandmother murders people with a pitchfork. At one point the girl brings the boy to a pond, points to it, and says “This is where the fish lives.” That’s a line that someone actually wrote for this film. I have spent almost twenty years now trying to figure out why someone would type those words onto a page and hand them to an actress to deliver. I am still tortured by those words.

SEASON 10 (Sci-Fi Channel, 1999)

Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders
Experiment #1003
Host: Mike Nelson
Year of Film’s Release: 1996
Genre: Horror anthology
DVD Release: Volume 5 (2004, reissued 2017)

Like The Painted Hills, Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders is an incredibly inappropriate children’s film – and this one features the death of two beloved pets. Actually, it’s not truly a children’s film – it’s not truly anything except a direct-to-video disaster editing together scenes from a 1984 film called The Devil’s Cat alongside a new story about a couple, unable to conceive(!), visiting Merlin the Wizard and stealing his spellbook, which wreaks horror-movie havoc. All this is a story read (for some reason) by Ernest Borgnine to his young grandson. The 1984 scenes are obviously from 1984, yet we’re supposed to believe that the Merlin storyline is seamlessly part of the same tale. At one point, Merlin goes in search of his possessed toy monkey, and asks strangers on the street – dressed in full wizard regalia – “Have you seen my monkey?” It’s the movie that will have you singing, “Rock and roll Martian/Rock and roll Martian.” Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders was the last episode of MST3K to air on the Sci-Fi Channel, though it was intended to be the third (rights issues caused the airing delay). And then that was it…for eighteen years.

SEASON 11 (Netflix, 2017)

Yongary: Monster from the Deep
Experiment #1109
Host: Jonah Ray
Year of Film’s Release: 1960
Genre: Giant monster
DVD Release: TBD

After taking his movie-riffing project Cinematic Titanic on the road for a couple years, Joel was encouraged by the enthusiastic response and realized there was a market for a revival of MST3K. Joel and Shout purchased the rights from Jill Mallon and launched a Kickstarter, which met several stretch goals to ultimately fund 14 new episodes. But Joel didn’t want to return as host; he has said that he always envisioned the show being passed from one host to another. So acting as producer (and occasional guest star), Hodgson recruited a whole new cast: Jonah Ray as the new prisoner on the SOL, Hampton Yount as Crow, Baron Vaughn as Tom Servo, Rebecca Hanson as Gypsy, Felicia Day as Pearl’s daughter Kinga Forrester, and Patton Oswalt as TV’s Son of TV’s Frank, or Max for short. Following the Netflix streaming model, all fourteen episodes were available simultaneously. The benefit is that binge watchers could quickly watch the new cast settle in and improve as the series goes on: the riffing, which is much too fast (though still funny) in early episodes like “Reptilicus,” has a more relaxed and natural pace by the time you come to “Yongary: Monster from the Deep.” (Ironically, in the early seasons the riffing was too slow. There’s an art to this.) This unusual film is basically a kaiju movie for South Korea, and it feels like one of the classic Gamera episodes from the Joel era; there’s even an annoying kid in short-shorts who loves his giant monster while it kills everyone in sight. An unexpectedly grisly end for the monster Yongary has Jonah and the Bots asking if Werner Herzog directed the ending. As of this writing, fingers are still crossed for MST3K to get a twelfth season (optimistically, they end on a cliffhanger), but episodes like “Yongary” make it clear that the show can stick around for a very, very long time.

 

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Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971)

Posted on July 30, 2017 at 11:18 am by Jeff Kuykendall

I first saw Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971) in high school, screened by a very lazy English teacher who, intentionally or not, drew an equivalence between literature and its film adaptation: she insisted on showing us a movie of whatever we had just read (or, in some cases, had not read at all). This was a particularly bizarre choice in the case of director Gordon Hessler’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptation for American International, because the film has almost nothing to do with Poe’s story. I just recall being very confused at what an odd film Murders in the Rue Morgue was. In this case I had read the original: a grisly murder mystery that introduced Poe’s brilliant French detective C. Auguste Dupin, a character who was a clear influence on Sherlock Holmes. But Gordon Hessler (Scream and Scream Again, Cry of the Banshee) and screenwriters Christopher Wicking (Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb) and Henry Slesar (Two on a Guillotine) make the decision to present the Poe story as a Grand Guignol style play performed in Paris. The framing device is dispensed with quickly: after an ape goes on a rampage and is pursued with an axe, we see the audience watching from their seats. Hessler then reveals a corpse hidden in a dressing room, and the real murder mystery begins – which will neither feature an ape nor Auguste Dupin. What unfolds is a twisty psychological horror film with elements of the post-Psycho slasher interspersed with surreal dream sequences reminiscent of Roger Corman. I wonder if my English teacher had watched this film beforehand. I don’t think she did, and I can only speculate what she was thinking as the tape played. Regardless, we watched the whole thing, and the class left very confused. Revisiting it as an adult, it holds up much better, though it is still a prickly and unusual film.

A carnival performer who’s been buried alive is welcomed by an acid-wielding assassin posing as a doctor.

In high school we would have been watching the butchered version of the film assembled by James H. Nicholson and Sam Arkoff. For its 2003 DVD release as part of MGM’s now-defunct Midnite Movies line, Hessler’s original, more coherent edit of the film was restored, and this is the version present on Scream Factory’s 2016 double feature Blu-ray (the DVD paired Rue Morgue with Hessler’s Cry of the Banshee, whereas Scream pairs it with Daniel Haller’s fine Lovecraft adaptation for AIP, The Dunwich Horror). The plotting and characters are such a tangled knot that it’s a pretty delicate film to rearrange; the convoluted approach to narrative is both a strength and a weakness. A Poe film for AIP cries out for Vincent Price, and indeed the main character of Cesar Charron seems to have been written with him in mind. Price had worked with Hessler on three previous films written or co-written by Christopher Wicking, The Oblong Box (1969), Scream and Scream Again (1970), and Cry of the Banshee (1970). But Price refused to sign another long term contract with AIP, and although he’d be lured back for The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971), in the meantime Murders in the Rue Morgue, the last of AIP’s Poe series, would proceed with Jason Robards in the lead role. Robards was a distinguished actor who wasn’t identified with horror: his prior films included Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), Sam Peckinpah’s The Ballad of Cable Hogue (1970), and Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), among many others. Robards delivers an indifferent performance, avoiding camp but also failing to portray the charisma necessary to believe that his character, the actor Cesar, could romance and marry the play’s young leading lady, Madeleine (Austrian actress Christine Kaufmann, who had recently divorced from Tony Curtis). In retrospect, a more seductive genre star like Christopher Lee might have been a better fit.

Cesar Charron (Jason Robards) speaks with his wife Madeleine (Christine Kaufmann), while Inspector Vidocq (Adolfo Celi) lurks in the background.

The new plot draws heavily from The Phantom of the Opera, and perhaps as a nod to that story the film casts Hammer’s Phantom, Herbert Lom, as this film’s acid-disfigured and caped killer Marot. The Phantom’s name is Erik in Gaston Leroux’s novel, and Erik is also the name of the ape in Rue Morgue‘s play, one of the disguises which Marot dons. But the name Erik also calls back to the ape Erik in the 1932 film Murders in the Rue Morgue. (Poe’s orangutan did not have a name.) Like the Phantom, Marot stalks the backstage in secret. He even climbs the buildings of Paris, peeking through windows and stealing into rooms to toss acid into the faces of his victims, in an apparent connection to his own disfigurement. The police pursuing him are led by Inspect Vidocq, played by Adolfo Celi (Thunderball). Meanwhile, Madeleine receives flowers from an anonymous admirer, who eventually reveals himself to be a dwarf with a leering smile (Michael Dunn, You’re a Big Boy Now). Madeleine is also haunted by dreams or visions of a masked man pursuing her with an axe and a body dropping from a great height. An eventual flashback reveals some crucial backstory: her mother was an actress in Cesar’s theater company, in love with her fellow actor Marot. During a performance in which she was to throw acid in Marot’s face, someone swapped real acid for the prop. Marot was hospitalized and heavily bandanged, and, driven mad, murdered Madeleine’s mother with an axe before killing himself.  Vidocq comes to believe that Marot faked his death, freeing himself from his coffin after being buried alive. As the resurrected Marot begins to exert pressure on Cesar and Madeleine, the secrets which Cesar has been keeping from her are finally revealed.

Madeleine is held captive during the performance of the “Murders in the Rue Morgue” play.

Shot on a bigger-than-usual budget of $700,000 in Toledo, Spain (when Nice proved too expensive), Murders in the Rue Morgue is handsomely mounted, with teeming costumed extras for the theater and carnival sequences. Hessler also pulls off a few stylish moments of horror, including a continuous shot of the pursuit of Marot on a carousel which reveals the bloodied body of the police officer as the ride spins round. But the chief novelty of this adaptation is its unusual structure, sometimes stumbling but always digging deeper into its characters and the past, even continuing the story for a few more paces after any other horror film would have climaxed and been done with it. (At 98 minutes, the film feels much longer.) To the credit of screenwriters Wicking and Slesar, it subverts expectation and conveys a real sense of moral corruption from the past generation pursuing innocent youth, symbolized by Madeleine and her slow-motion, ritualistic dreams of running into a crypt. On the commentary track, critic Steve Haberman frames this as a pet interest of Wicking’s, a “true voice of the counterculture of the late 60’s.” He states, “The horror film, and the British horror film in particular, traditionally reinforced conservative values such as the moral superiority of family, church, and state over the monsters and madmen that threaten them. Wicking, along with Englishman Michael Reeves [Witchfinder General] and American filmmakers like George Romero deliberately went against this tradition, reversing the moral polarity of the genre.” Murders in the Rue Morgue also pairs well with Hammer’s Taste the Blood of Dracula (1970), in which children pay back the sins of their wicked fathers. No doubt, it’s a lumpy, sometimes leaden film, and Robards is miscast, but as Gothic horrors tried to find relevant means of expression against the tide of more explicit and harder-edged horror films, it’s an example of a thoughtful, at times experimental response. It’s just definitely not Poe.

 

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