The Premature Burial (1962)

Posted on March 2, 2018 at 1:54 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

On the Kino Blu-ray of The Premature Burial (1962), there’s an entertaining interview with Joe Dante in which he recalls that Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe series brought the kids out to the cinema not just because they were reliably quality horror films, but because it was Poe: that one writer you studied in school whose work seemed unwholesome for the classroom. These films profited from walking that fine line, with a literary veneer and pedigree (though sometimes just the Poe title would be used) stretched thinly over Gothic excess, Corman’s trademark psychedelic dream sequences, the occasional suggestion of necrophilia, shamelessly recycled footage, and campier touches of the macabre. The Premature Burial was the third of these films, following the very successful The Fall of the House of Usher (aka House of Usher, 1960) and The Pit and the Pendulum (1961). What makes it stand out is that Vincent Price, the series’ star, is nowhere to be found. After a dispute with American International Pictures over distribution of profits, Corman decided to go it alone with a modest budget provided by Pathé Labs. This meant that Price, under contract with AIP, was off limits, so Corman sought out another Hollywood star, the distinguished Ray Milland (Dial M for Murder, The Lost Weekend), to play the central role of Guy Carrell, whose greatest fear is being buried alive. Milland was a few years older than Price and brought a distinctly different presence: a Cary Grant-like combination of British dignity and detached charm. As Price returned again and again to his Gothic horror roles, it became easier in each film to chart all the waypoints in his descent into psychosis or sadism; with Milland, his third-act turn from haunted shell into angel of vengeance feels genuinely surprising, and he’s clearly having fun in the role. Ironically, AIP purchased Pathé just as production was getting started, and so this might have been a Price picture all along; but instead it becomes one of the more unique entries in the Poe cycle.

Guy Carrell (Ray Milland) and his wife Emily (Hazel Court) confront his darkest fears.

As with the other films in the series, The Premature Burial is not set in anything resembling reality. Guy Carrell’s manor is surrounded not just by a dark forest out of fairy tales but tombstones and a monolithic mausoleum, all of it forever blanketed in fog. It’s Hollywood Gothic, and by necessity disguises the limited sets (as in many of Corman’s other films, notably 1957’s The Undead). Similarly, Carrell’s descent into mania, spurred by his obsession with his belief that his father was buried alive after a cataleptic fit rendered him paralyzed – and his certainty that the same fate awaits him – leads to a scene which is both deliriously wonderful and completely absurd. Having spent long hours away from his new wife Emily (The Curse of Frankenstein’s Hazel Court, transitioning from British horror roles into a Hollywood career), Guy proudly showcases the modifications he’s made to the family mausoleum. It brings to mind one of James Bond’s visits to Q’s workshop. In case of premature burial, Carrell will now have a trigger mechanism to open his coffin at all angles (we can also see that he has attached tools to the lid to pry his way out if the trigger malfunctions); he also has numerous methods to break free of the building including a rope ladder that drops from the ceiling and a secret passage. But should all else fail, he’s prepared a goblet of poison to allow a peaceful demise. Appropriately, Emily and their friend Miles Archer (Richard Ney) look at him as though he’s gone completely insane. Corman works this tricked-out tomb into a surreal dream in which Carrell is buried alive and can’t get free, leading him inexorably to that goblet of poison – which is filled with teeming worms. (At one point, the “Conqueror Worm” of death is invoked in the dialogue, a reference to a Poe poem which would later become the U.S. title of Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General.)

Carrell, still alive, is lowered into his grave.

The film’s true tour de force scene is more subtle. Haunted by the tune “Molly Malone,” which he gradually realizes was whistled by one of the gravediggers at his father’s burial, he is pursued into an abandoned room by the melody; just as it seems to go silent, the wind takes up a “Molly Malone” whistle. When he goes to shut the window, one of the gravediggers is standing there, leering horribly at him – an Innocents-style shock that packs a real jolt. (Incidentally, the gravediggers are played by well-traveled character actors John Dierkes and Dick Miller, the latter’s presence being a given.) Despite entertaining scenes such as these, The Premature Burial drags for a long while because we know where it’s going – we’ve read the title. Milland can also seem one-note, not through any fault in his performance, but because he’s a typical Poe protagonist, morbidly, suffocatingly obsessed; there’s a feeling of marking time until the finale. But then dream-team screenwriters Charles Beaumont (who wrote some of the best episodes of The Twilight Zone) and Ray Russell (writer of the classic horror tale “Sardonicus”) pull a third-act twist that makes the whole enterprise worthwhile. As expected, Milland succumbs to catalepsy, is mistaken for dead, and sealed in a coffin; worse still, he had taken his wife’s advice and destroyed his precious mausoleum, and is thus buried with no means of escape. But his much-loathed gravediggers actually free him, and he’s transformed into a hollow-eyed figure of Death, obsessed with revenge, having realized that his wife has actually been plotting his destruction from the start. Though one might predict this in the Diabolique-style thrillers that William Castle and Hammer’s Jimmy Sangster were crafting in the early 60’s, it’s a bit more unexpected in a Corman Poe Gothic, and gives a delightfully bloodthirsty energy to the climactic scenes of electrocution – Milland giving a sinister grin as he flips a switch – and a second premature burial, one with the coffin still open (poor Hazel Court and her mouthful of dirt!). This film, lacking Price, has been treated as the ugly duckling of the series, but Milland nonetheless infuses the familiar decrepit atmosphere with an admirably committed performance, making The Premature Burial worth a second look. Price fans, at any rate, didn’t have to wait long – the superb Poe anthology Tales of Terror was released the same year.

Posted in Theater Caligari | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The Premature Burial (1962)

25 X-Files for 25 Years

Posted on February 22, 2018 at 8:51 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

2018 marks the 25th anniversary of The X-Files, an occasion being marked by the airing of the eleventh (and possibly final) season, as well as X-Fest, a one-day festival with special guests being held in LaSalle, Illinois. The FOX TV show has left an indelible mark on the television landscape which is easy to take for granted 25 years on. Creator Chris Carter, drawing inspiration from childhood memories of the short-lived horror series Kolchak: The Night Stalker, took the “FBI investigates small town spookiness” element of Twin Peaks, applied the UFO and paranormal themes from concurrent FOX reality shows like Sightings (and older programs like In Search Of…), and added an irresistible believer vs. skeptic dynamic with the two leads, Fox Mulder (David Duchovny, who had appeared on Twin Peaks) and Dana Scully (a very fresh-faced Gillian Anderson). Scully’s expertise in forensic medicine leads to graphic autopsy scenes the likes of which were rare on television at the time; decades of forensically-oriented crime scene investigation shows would be birthed as a result. At the height of its popularity it moved from Friday nights to the more competitive Sunday night timeslot, brought in blockbuster ratings, and saw the leads appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone.

The show spawned a fun, All the President’s Men-with-aliens feature film in 1998, but – as happened to The Simpsons a few years later – remained on the air without making a permanent big-screen transition. Unlike The Simpsons, The X-Files, which relied upon a serial “mythology” plotline of alien invasion and government cover-ups, couldn’t be sustained indefinitely, and with Duchovny and Anderson anxious to move onto other things, a failed attempt to transition the show to new leads (Robert Patrick and Annabeth Gish) led to a sputtering out of the series in its 9th season, and a hastily-conceived, unsatisfying conclusion to its long-running storyline. A very belated second feature film, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, followed in 2008, but was poorly received, and the franchise went dormant until its two most recent “event” series, a (last?) reunion of Mulder and Scully, as well as hard-nosed but loyal Assistant Director Skinner (Mitch Pileggi), the nefarious Cigarette-Smoking Man (William B. Davis), and a handful of the show’s original writers, on a wave of nostalgia.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary, here are 25 essential X-Files cases (“cases,” so I can group multi-part episodes together and also include a feature film) for fans old and new.

  1. DEEP THROAT | Season 1, Episode 2 | Written by Chris Carter | Directed by Daniel Sackheim

In the first season, the conspiracy plotline was fairly simple: aliens are among us and there’s a plot within the government to cover up their existence. “Deep Throat” represents this concept at its purest: Mulder & Scully investigate UFO sightings near a military airbase, and when Mulder climbs a fence for a closer look, he learns that he’s in way over his head. Jerry Hardin plays “Deep Throat” (after Woodward & Bernstein’s Watergate insider), who becomes an ally of Mulder’s and delivers the episode’s final chilling line: “Mr. Mulder, ‘they’ have been here for a long, long time.” It was a line that birthed an epic mythology, but it’s much more evocative when you feel like you’re just glimpsing the tip of an iceberg.

  1. EVE | Season 1, Episode 11 | Written by Kenneth Biller & Chris Brancato | Directed by Fred Gerber

An exsanguinated corpse leads Mulder to believe he’s onto something extraterrestrial, but several twists later and the FBI agents are investigated a cloning experiment whose subjects, the “Eves,” are both brilliant and homicidal. A chilling and witty outing which is among the best “Monster of the Week” episodes from the first season.

  1. BEYOND THE SEA | Season 1, Episode 13 | Written by Glen Morgan & James Wong | Directed by David Nutter

One of the very best hours the series ever produced, the raw and emotional “Beyond the Sea” springs from the typewriter of childhood friends Glen Morgan and James Wong, whose scripts are the highlights of the first two seasons (they returned for half of season four as well as the two most recent reunion seasons). Here Mulder is a skeptic, while Scully, still grieving the death of her father, comes to believe that a death row inmate (Brad Dourif, bringing his “A” game) has a psychic connection with a serial killer the FBI is hunting.

  1. THE HOST | Season 2, Episode 2 | Written by Chris Carter | Directed by Daniel Sackheim

After the X-Files have been (temporarily) shut down, Mulder and Scully nonetheless find the means to collaborate on the case of a humanoid fluke lurking in the sewers of New Jersey.  You will want to shower immediately after watching this one.

  1. DUANE BARRY/ASCENSION/ONE BREATH | Season 2, Episodes 4-5, 7 | Written by Chris Carter (“Duane Barry”), Michael Lange (“Ascension”), Glen Morgan & James Wong (“One Breath”) | Directed by Chris Carter (“Duane Barry”), Paul Brown (“Ascension”), and R.W. Goodwin (“One Breath”)

Anderson became pregnant between seasons 1 and 2, but Carter resisted network pressures to replace her, instead working her pregnancy – and brief absence – into the series’ mythology storyline. The decision reaped bountiful rewards. This three-parter (which was interrupted by a stand-alone Mulder episode that isn’t very good) sees Scully kidnapped by Duane Barry (Steve Railsback), an alien abductee who wants to trade her body for his at the site of his abduction. Except that aliens might not be involved in this case at all – and to find Scully, Mulder and Assistant Director Skinner must work an inside track, uncovering a mole along the way.

  1. DIE HAND DIE VERLETZT | Season 2, Episode 14 | Written by Glen Morgan & James Wong | Directed by Kim Manners

One of Morgan & Wong’s most enjoyable “Monster of the Week” episodes also has one of the best cold opens in the show’s history: a high school faculty meeting late at night touches on such topics as whether the theater group should do Grease instead of Jesus Christ Superstar, fretting over the strong language in Grease; then candles are lit, a teacher shuts a door, and Satanic chanting can be heard as the camera retreats down the hall…

  1. HUMBUG | Season 2, Episode 20 | Written by Darin Morgan | Directed by Kim Manners

The first episode written by the brilliant satirist Darin Morgan (younger brother of Glen Morgan, and the man in the “Flukeman” costume in The Host), “Humbug” takes the FBI agents behind the scenes of a carnival sideshow to investigate the murder of the “Alligator Man.” Morgan constructs his hour like a walk through a funhouse; in almost every scene, there is at least one unexpected reveal or reversal of expectations. He also tackles issues such as an outsider’s isolation and loneliness – represented by the strained relationship between Vincent Schiavelli and his fetal, crawling, killer mutant brother – and the unseemly desire for social conformity – as seen in the handsome, straight-laced Mulder, whom Morgan sends up relentlessly.

  1. ANASAZI/THE BLESSING WAY/PAPER CLIP | Season 2, Episode 25; Season 3, Episodes 1-2 | Written by Chris Carter (from a story by David Duchovny and Chris Carter) | Directed by R.W. Goodwin (“Anasazi” and “The Blessing Way”) and Rob Bowman (“Paper Clip”)

The first epic mythology multi-parter. Honestly, the first two parts are not the show at its best: “Anasazi” wastes a lot of time with a plot involving Mulder behaving erratically (he’s being unknowingly drugged in his apartment), and “The Blessing Way” has way too much of Carter’s indulgent overwritten monologues, as a comatose Mulder is visited by his deceased loved ones. But “Paper Clip,” the essential conclusion, is a mythology high point: thrilling and awe-inspiring, the perfect blend of 70’s paranoid political thriller and Close Encounters of the Third Kind that X-Files always aspired to be.

  1. CLYDE BRUCKMAN’S FINAL REPOSE | Season 3, Episode 4 | Written by Darin Morgan | Directed by David Nutter

Peter Boyle guest stars as Clyde Bruckman, who has the psychic ability to see how each person he meets will die. He also forms a psychic connection with a serial killer targeting fortune tellers, which leads him into the company of a too-awed Mulder and a very unimpressed Scully. What unfolds is predicted from the start (well – mostly), which allows us to understand Bruckman’s melancholy fatalism, and the ending manages an astonishing balance between wistful humor and profound tragedy. Written by Darin Morgan, this is the best episode of the entire series.

  1. NISEI/731 | Season 3, Episodes 9-10 | Written by Chris Carter & Howard Gordon & Frank Spotnitz (“Nisei”) and Frank Spotnitz (“731”) | Directed by David Nutter (“Nisei”) and Rob Bowman (“731”)

Until I recently rewatched this two-parter, I’d forgotten just how exciting it is. Beginning with an intentionally funny riff on the then-popular “alien autopsy” exposé which had aired on FOX, the story quickly propels the agents down a rabbit-hole involving Japanese experiments, another government cover-up, a leper’s colony, and finally a train carrying a time bomb (and just maybe a living alien).

  1. PUSHER | Season 3, Episode 17 | Written by Vince Gilligan | Directed by Rob Bowman

Writer Vince Gilligan of Breaking Bad fame came to The X-Files late in its second season. Here, in his second script, he comes into his own. Robert Patrick Modell (Robert Wisden) has the ability to “push” his will onto others as a form of mind control; he sees himself as a samurai, and thinks he’s finally found a worthy opponent in Fox Mulder. The climax is gut-wrenchingly suspenseful.

  1. JOSE CHUNG’S FROM OUTER SPACE | Season 3, Episode 20 | Written by Darin Morgan | Directed by Rob Bowman

Darin Morgan’s final X-Files script before the recent reunion seasons is a fascinating, endlessly rewatchable exploration of elusive truths, a Rashomon take on a worn old paperback in the paranormal section of the used book store. The author Jose Chung (Charles Nelson Reilly) interviews the survivors, witnesses and investigators of what may or may not have been an alien abduction, but the more details he receives, the less he thinks he knows. For one thing – who’s Lord Kinbote?

  1. HOME | Season 4, Episode 2 | Written by Glen Morgan & James Wong | Directed by Kim Manners

After the cancellation of Glen Morgan & James Wong’s Space: Above and Beyond, they returned (reluctantly) to The X-Files and immediately earned a new level of notoriety for this disturbing, broadcast-standards-testing hour. It has rightfully earned comparisons to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre with its portrayal of a self-isolated family, inbred to an almost supernatural extreme, who defend their property against the unwelcome intrusion of modernity – and Mulder & Scully.

  1. PAPER HEARTS | Season 4, Episode 10 | Written by Vince Gilligan | Directed by Rob Bowman

Mulder’s quest for the truth has always been fundamentally driven by the childhood abduction of his sister Samantha. In “Paper Hearts,” Gilligan suggests that perhaps the abduction wasn’t extraterrestrial in origin after all. The great Tom Noonan (Manhunter) guest stars as a child molester and serial killer who claims that Samantha was one of his victims; Mulder, tormented by dreams that reveal actual clues to his crimes, begins to confront the horror that this claim might be the truth. The pivotal final minutes once again prove that Gilligan could seldom be bettered for sweat-inducing tension. Both Duchovny and Noonan are superb in this.

  1. SMALL POTATOES | Season 4, Episode 20 | Written by Vince Gilligan | Directed by Cliff Bole

Gilligan writes Darin Morgan – literally, as Morgan here plays Eddie Van Blundht, a shapeshifter who has been impregnating the local women by impersonating their husbands (he also becomes Luke Skywalker for one woman’s wish-fulfillment). Uncomfortable sexual assault theme aside, “Small Potatoes” really soars when Van Blundht ties up Mulder and takes his place, leading to a number of meta-insights into Mulder’s life, beginning with: why doesn’t his apartment have a bed? His subsequent attempt to seduce Scully is wonderfully acted by Duchovny and Anderson. Gilligan’s script acts like a tribute to Morgan’s season 3 episodes, asking a “Humbug”-worthy question of the porn-addicted, extraterrestrial-chasing, basement-office-dwelling Mulder: why does he choose to live the life of a loser?

  1. DETOUR | Season 5, Episode 4 | Written by Frank Spotnitz | Directed by Brett Dowler

There are two installments which I consider great “hang out with Mulder and Scully” episodes. One is “Quagmire,” written by Kim Newton in Season 3 (with obvious re-writing by Darin Morgan), which is enjoyable throughout, but contains one of the most pleasurable scenes of the entire series when Mulder and Scully, escaping a sinking boat in the middle of the night, become trapped on an island in a lake stalked by a carnivorous monster. With nothing else to do, they just talk. And it’s fantastic. An echo appears in this episode, “Detour,” written by the underrated Frank Spotnitz – the agents become lost in the middle of the Florida backwoods, and Scully sings Three Dog Night’s “Joy to the World” to keep herself awake while a shivering Mulder falls asleep. It’s beautiful. But the episode is just as creepy as it is fun, as the two dodge camouflaging creatures with glowing red eyes.

  1. KILL SWITCH | Season 5, Episode 11 | Written by William Gibson & Tom Maddox | Directed by Rob Bowman

By Season 5, the show was popular enough to start attracting celebrity writers. Though Stephen King was the biggest “get” this season (with his killer doll story “Chinga”), the stronger guest-written episode comes from cyberpunk authors William Gibson and Tom Maddox. “Kill Switch” is an Artificial Intelligence story that vastly improves on the first season’s take on the subject, “Ghost in the Machine,” by infusing it with more sophisticated and knowing SF ideas – along with explosions, martial arts, and virtual reality freak-outs.

  1. THE X-FILES | Written by Chris Carter (from a story by Chris Carter & Frank Spotnitz) | Directed by Rob Bowman

The series becomes a big-budget summer popcorn movie. The X-Files (subtitled on the posters as Fight the Future) was intended to reach audiences beyond those who tuned in weekly – the script “introduces” us to Mulder and Scully, and following the conspiracy storyline here doesn’t necessitate having seen any of the show’s mythology episodes (though it helps, since there are connections). Nonetheless, it didn’t make as big a splash as Twentieth Century Fox hoped it would; when I saw it on opening night, the theater only saw a modest crowd. (Fast forward ten years later to the opening night of The X-Files: I Want to Believe, and my wife and I are astonished to find there’s only one other couple in the theater!) Looking back on this twenty years later, the film is a very enjoyable representation of what the show always set out to be, leading from the streets of D.C. to a glacier-set climax with killer aliens and a vast alien ship, director Rob Bowman doing a very admirable Spielberg impression all the way. This ought to have been the climax of the franchise proper. In my idealized alternate timeline, it was.

  1. TITHONUS | Season 6, Episode 10 | Written by Vince Gilligan | Directed by Michael Watkins

But, alas, the show went on. Season 6 picked up where the film left off, and served up a number of quality episodes; in particular, Gilligan’s voice began to dominate during the non-mythology episodes, which could only be a good thing. “Tithonus,” named after an immortal figure in Greek mythology, follows a police photographer (Geoffrey Lewis) tormented by the fact that he cannot die. Though similar to Gilligan’s fourth-season “Unruhe” with its psychic photography, the themes at work here lead to something profoundly melancholy – and magical.

  1. MONDAY | Season 6, Episode 14 | Written by Vince Gilligan & John Shiban | Directed by Kim Manners

Mulder and Scully find themselves trapped in a Groundhog Day-style time loop surrounding a shootout in a bank. The only person who remains aware through each rebooted reality is Pam (Carrie Hamilton), the bank robber’s girlfriend, and she desperately tries to enlist the aid of the FBI agents. It may not be a fresh concept (and it’s still being mined for its possibilities, such as in the recent film Happy Death Day), but it works gangbusters, in part because we’re seeing Mulder and Scully from the outside, hoping that they’ll wake up to what’s happening and change the cycle of events.

  1. ARCADIA | Season 6, Episode 15 | Written by Daniel Arkin | Directed by Michael Watkins

Mulder and Scully go undercover in a gated community where anyone who doesn’t keep their lawn perfectly manicured gets eaten by a garbage-monster. Writer Arkin might as well be teasing the “shippers” who would only be too happy to see Mulder and Scully as a married couple, but he also finds a rich target in those who dream of their little neighborhood being perfect – to the exclusion of anyone who doesn’t conform to their particular standards of beauty.

  1. X-COPS | Season 7, Episode 12 | Written by Vince Gilligan | Directed by Michael Watkins

By Season 7, the Mythology was repeating itself and had long since run out of steam, but the show’s format still proved durable for stand-alone tales. “X-Cops” is exactly what it says it is: a mash-up with FOX’s long-running Cops reality series, with Mulder and Scully tagging along in pursuit of a mysterious monster. Airing not long after The Blair Witch Project was released, in retrospect the episode seems to be an early example of found-footage horror, which wouldn’t really explode until Paranormal Activity came along many years later. Of course, since it’s written by Gilligan, it’s also funny as hell.

  1. ROADRUNNERS | Season 8, Episode 4 | Written by Vince Gilligan | Directed by Rod Hardy

Let’s face it, the show never should have made it this far – the staff had actually been planning to wrap everything up in Season 7, but FOX wanted more, and here we are. Duchovny began to back out of the series, with only minimal involvement in this season, leaving Scully to team up with a new partner, Agent Doggett (an underrated Robert Patrick) – who is more skeptical than she is, illustrating just how far her character has come. “Roadrunners” is a Season 8 highlight, an unsettling creepfest set in a small town in the Utah desert where a religious cult hides a bizarre secret. The climax is harrowing.

  1. MULDER AND SCULLY MEET THE WERE-MONSTER | Season 10, Episode 3 | Written and Directed by Darin Morgan

We’ll skip Season 9 – though it has its moments, particularly a little gem called “Scary Monsters,” and a Brady Bunch homage by Gilligan called “Sunshine Days” – and go straight to the first of the two revival seasons. Fans were ecstatic to learn that Darin Morgan would be returning to the series, alongside Glen Morgan & James Wong. His episode, predictably, is the strongest. Rhys Darby of Flight of the Conchords and What We Do in the Shadows plays a hapless human being who’s actually a lizard that’s been turned into a man after being bitten by one – in other words, it’s being human which is his “monster” form. And yet he’s able to do a reasonable job selling cell phones by speaking gobbledygook. When Mulder tells him that his story is unconvincing because it has no internal logic, he replies with exasperation: “Internal logic? It has no external logic!” – a line I now quote regularly.

  1. THIS | Season 11, Episode 2 | Written and Directed by Glen Morgan

Though the eleventh season is currently airing, it’s so far been a marked improvement from the spotty Season 10. I could easily include Darin Morgan’s latest, “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat,” which returns to Jose Chung-style slippery truths (a deliberate, wry response to the age of Trump and “fake news”), but I’d like to highlight Glen Morgan’s episode instead. Staged like one long, breathless chase into the night, “This” begins with a visitation from a dead member of the beloved Lone Gunmen, some surf music by The Ramones, and lots of gunfire, with Mulder and Scully chased out of their home, into the woods, and finally into towering anonymous skyscrapers and a room full of servers that just might contain the Singularity – the key to virtualized immortality. And yet it all feels like a dream – by design. Blink and you’ll miss clues (some a bit cryptic) that Mulder and Scully might actually be inside the simulation that they’re trying to uncover, including a reference to a character from “The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat” (which hadn’t aired yet!). And the episode ends where it began – with another chase, as though Mulder and Scully are characters doomed to forever be rebooted and sent back on another mission. Let’s hope that’s not the case, and we can finally allow this groundbreaking franchise a well-deserved rest.

Posted in Late Night TV | Tagged | Comments Off on 25 X-Files for 25 Years

Capsule Reviews: February 2018

Posted on February 19, 2018 at 8:35 pm by Jeff Kuykendall

I usually don’t write capsule reviews on this site, but I’ve been away for too long while working on a different writing project (and now that I have a young son, writing time is more precious than ever). I’ve been on a 70’s British horror kick these last few weeks and any one of the below films would be worthy of more in-depth analysis than I’m going to provide here, but I thought it might be worth posting my brief thoughts nonetheless:

Asylum (1972)/–And Now the Screaming Starts! (1973)/The Beast Must Die (1974)

These three Amicus films were released over the holidays by Severin Films as a box set, bundled with a bonus disc of Amicus-themed extras (of those extras, so far I have only watched the hour-long reel of Amicus trailers, which was very entertaining). Although the announcement of this box set was greeted with enthusiasm from classic horror fans on both sides of the ocean, on release it’s taken a drubbing from those keenly studying the A/V quality. In particular, The Beast Must Die has been deemed by many to be “unwatchable”; at least one online comment claimed it is “worse than VHS,” but take it from somebody who has spent much of the winter transferring VHS tapes to digital: that’s irresponsible hyperbole. In fact, all three just look like old unrestored prints, though it’s true that The Beast Must Die is the weakest-looking of the three – with some scenes demonstrating real softness in the detail while other scenes, unaccountably, looking fine.

I split the box set over two nights, first watching Asylum and The Beast Must Die as a double feature, which was a good decision since the latter is truly a B-movie and should be watched as late into the night as possible. Asylum is regarded as one of Amicus’s best anthologies (they made a lot of them – see my next two reviews), and it’s easy to see why, since the stories here – by Amicus’s go-to horror writer, Robert Bloch – are all decent, and the linking material cleverly becomes the closing tale (“Mannikins of Horror,” with A Clockwork Orange’s Patrick Magee and Phantom of the Opera’s Herbert Lom). “Lucy Comes to Stay” is slight but benefits from performances by Britt Ekland (The Wicker Man) and Charlotte Rampling (right before The Night Porter). Best of the segments is the Peter Cushing one, unsurprisingly; he orders a suit tailor-made to occult specifications. The Beast Must Die has a William Castle gimmick that was ridiculously outdated by 1974: it’s a whodunit which stops the action pre-climax for a “Werewolf Break” to allow the audience a full minute to guess who the killer werewolf might be. (For the record, I guessed correctly, though there was a twist I didn’t see coming.) This is a wonderfully ridiculous “thriller” with some recognizable faces, including Cushing again and Charles Gray (The Devil Rides Out, Diamonds are Forever, The Rocky Horror Picture Show), though notably the lead role is given to the enigmatic Calvin Lockhart, black and born in the Bahamas, as a wealthy hunter who wants to add a werewolf to his trophy room.

–And Now the Screaming Starts! (as it’s punctuated onscreen) is not, in fact, a sequel to the Amicus film Scream and Scream Again (1970). It’s a thriller that manages to accommodate ghosts living in old portraits like something in Disney’s Haunted Mansion ride, a crawling severed hand (a gadget that appears so often in Amicus films that it should get its own credit), an extended flashback revealing dark family secrets reminiscent of early Hammers The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) and The Curse of the Werewolf (1961), Stephanie Beacham’s formidable décolletage, and more roles for Cushing, Magee, and Lom. In other words, it’s a Gothic hodgepodge, doesn’t quite hold together, and is shamelessly entertaining.

Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors (1965)

To scratch more of my Amicus itch, I checked out the Olive Blu-ray release of the first anthology from “the studio that dripped blood,” Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors. The screenplay is by Amicus co-founder Milton Subotsky, whose enthusiasm for this genre was not matched by his writing ability, frankly. Nonetheless, this is one of my favorites of the studio’s films thanks to (a) the palpable atmosphere in the framing scenes, straight out of a Mario Bava film, and (b) the perfect cast. Academy Award-winning cinematographer-turned-horror director Freddie Francis helms this one (he became an Amicus standby), and the stories are linked by a Tarot card-wielding doctor (Cushing) who reveals the fates of his increasingly alarmed fellow passengers. The cast includes Christopher Lee, Michael Gough, Donald Sutherland, musician/comedian Roy Castle, Bernard Lee, Neil McCallum, and Isla Blair. Granted, the segments are rudimentary and feel like the beginning of a good tale rather than its entirety (you may find yourself saying more than once, “Wait, that’s it?”), but highlights include a Triffid-like story of a murderous vine, a creepy, high-energy segment involving jazz and voodoo, a surprisingly brutal vampire yarn with Sutherland, and Lee battling that familiar old severed hand.

From Beyond the Grave (1974)

This, the last of the Amicus anthologies, is truly special; it was the first time I’d seen it (I recorded it off TCM last year), and it’s clearly one of the strongest, if not the strongest, portmanteau film they ever did. The stories this time are based on the work of R. Chetwynd-Hayes, and are strung together by Cushing’s antique shopkeeper, who might as well be Dr. Terror in retirement. The antiques themselves become the stars of each story, the best of which is an almost devastating tale of an unhappily married middle-aged war vet (Ian Bannen) whose connection with another vet (Donald Pleasence) whom he passes on the street leads to an invite to a comically awkward dinner and a gradual obsession with the man’s eerily detached daughter (played by Pleasence’s real-life daughter Angela, who is superb). The young woman’s unquestioning willingness to serve the henpecked, sexually frustrated Bannen strips away at his British middle-class complacency, passive-aggression, and general worry of making too much a scene until his destructive, sublimated desires are revealed. Other stories include evocative tales of portals to ghostly dimensions – one an ornate door which, when installed, opens to a mysterious blue room; another a mirror whose dead occupant drives David Warner to slasher-style murders – and a lighter tale of domestic exorcism by means of a very eccentric medium (years before Poltergeist). Highly recommended!

Horror of Frankenstein (1970)

Loathed among most Hammer fans, this reboot of the studio’s Frankenstein series (decades before anyone would use that term) sets Cushing aside for a tale of a young Victor Frankenstein, introduced being called out in front of the class for drawing surgical dotted-lines through a nude etching. The brilliant young man is now played by Ralph Bates, whom Hammer was grooming to be its newest horror star (see: Taste the Blood of Dracula). Written and directed by Jimmy Sangster, who wrote Hammer’s original Curse of Frankenstein (1957) – an odd choice to provide a fresh new take on the series, to be sure – the key difference here is that the film is played as a black comedy. The monster, as crudely rendered by future Darth Vader David Prowse, is almost an afterthought, not appearing until two-thirds of the way into the picture. Instead, the plot focuses on Frankenstein’s scheming for the freedom to conduct his experiments, which leads him not only to murder, but a bona fide killing spree; he even takes the castle housekeeper (Kate O’Mara) into his bed to literally take the place of his father (who also bedded her). Veronica Carlson, who had, oddly, just appeared in the most recent entry of the main Frankenstein series, here is relegated to a thankless role fawning after Frankenstein, and Jon Finch (Frenzy, Macbeth) makes a welcome addition to the supporting cast, though he isn’t given much to do, either.

The film is actually rich with witty dialogue, though how much you laugh depends on how receptive you are to Sangster’s (very) black humor. The film is so aligned with its callous antihero that the satire might fairly be called mean-spirited. More unfairly, many critics, focusing on a single brief scene in which Frankenstein makes a severed hand give a rude gesture, have inaccurately called the film’s humor juvenile. But the real problem here is the third act. Having propped up Frankenstein as a man who never loses, the introduction of the creature should set up a comic catastrophe of everything going wrong for him: I want to see Bates scrambling to cover up a massacre, flustered and desperate as his creature goes on the rampage. This would justify all the time spent establishing the doctor as something of a master criminal, and imagine what a showcase that would be for Bates, who is very good in this film regardless. Instead, the doctor’s only comeuppance comes in the film’s final gag – and it’s nothing more than a mild setback before he resumes his experiments. It would take Young Frankenstein to fulfill the potential of sending up the old Gothic laboratories.

Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (1971)

A year later, Hammer tried something different for Bates: a more sympathetic role (though he’d still commit murders willy-nilly), and a more interesting screenplay, this coming from Brian Clemens of the Avengers TV series (and soon to write Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter for Hammer). Bates’s Dr. Jekyll takes his potion to become Martine Beswick’s Mrs. Hyde, and the best part of the film is this uncanny casting decision; they truly look like they came from the same gene pool. Tasked with coming up with a script to flesh out the tossed-out joke of a title, Clemens further indulges by including Burke & Hare and Jack the Ripper (Jekyll/Hyde, in this case, are the Ripper), and Jekyll’s search for eternal youth echoes Dorian Gray. Beswick chews the scenery nicely, and Clemens generates some real drama (and welcome humor) as Jekyll’s experiments catch the interest of the upstairs neighbors, a brother and sister who are attracted to Hyde and Jekyll, respectively. The sexual confusion leads to some intriguing, and surprisingly forward-thinking, comments about gender fluidity. But it also leads to narrative and thematic confusion, as both Jekyll and Hyde are killers, thus dampening the point of the transformation from the original novel. (The quest for immortality, through injecting female hormones, also doesn’t land because we don’t really see Jekyll benefiting in that regard. The killings don’t feel like they have any real impetus.) Unfortunately, the film is also too long, and drags terribly in its third act, despite a visually impressive chase along London rooftops. If this concept is “so crazy it just might work”…well, it almost does.

Prey (1977)

Norman J. Warren (Satan’s Slave) directed this offbeat British film, a thematically rich science fiction/horror hybrid, now available on Blu-ray from Vinegar Syndrome. The concept is essentially a tale of “the fox in the hen-house”: a carnivorous, shapeshifting alien (Barry Stokes), whose true form resembles a fox with rows of sharp teeth, infiltrates the domestic bliss of a lesbian couple in the secluded country: a young Canadian woman (Glory Annen) and her older, jealous companion (Sally Faulkner). The longer the stranger remains in their presence, the more erratic Faulkner behaves, distraught at the slaughter of her chickens (which is blamed on a fox), furious that she might lose the affections of Annen to this odd young man, and slowly suspecting that he might not be what he seems.

Prey, produced on a paltry budget during the British film industry’s lowest ebb, wears its art house pretentions on its sleeve, from rendering the alien’s transformations through Godardian jump cuts to a private party in which the women dress their male guest in a black slip and adorn his face with makeup, and finally to a most bizarre, interminable slow-motion scene of all three thrashing about in a muddy pond while electronic music thrums on the soundtrack. Undermining all this are not the exploitation-ready sex scenes or flesh-eating gore, but rather the absurd contradiction that the alien, who speaks in broken English and doesn’t understand common words like “swim,” can speak in casually perfect English when communicating in secret with his (also British) fellow E.T.’s via a radio. (This leads to a very silly final line, which makes one think that Warren wasn’t aiming for the art house, but for Twilight Zone parody.) This one’s a big miss, though it’s undoubtedly an interesting one.

Posted in Theater Caligari | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Capsule Reviews: February 2018