An Intimate Stare

Author: phil

  • DUST DEVIL

        Dust Devil comes from a long tradition of stories with basic plot elements in common.

       They share these things:  Modern, well-educated people find themselves up against something straight out of an ancient legend/ folk-tale/ mythology.   These people must  overcome their
    disbelief,  then turn to traditional or ancient weapons.  Not contemporary science, which proves to be powerless.

        They must look to someone who knows the old legends…or perhaps, to some native shaman, wise man or magician who is familiar with the magic tradition in the myth.   Only they know what to do next.

        Dracula, The Exorcist, Curse of the Demon, Poltergeist, and The Last Wave all have subplots similar to this.   Remember the
    intimidating medical tests Regan must suffer through, in
    The Exorcist… none of them doing her any good.  Modern science has great powers… but not over everything.

        But this formula is no guarantee of success—think of The Sentinel (1977) and Blacula, and lots, lots more.

        You get the broad outline of the
    Dust Devil mythology in voice-over as the movie begins.

        “The desert wind was a man like us; then grew wings and flew like a bird.  He became a hunter, like a hawk, and took refuge in those far corners of the world where magic still lingers.  Having once been a man, he still suffers the passions of a man…”

         How real will this legend feel to you?  That depends on another question.  It depends on how well you can accept the Dust Devil in human form; a man sounding and looking something like a young Clint Eastwood (High Plains Drifter, Pale Rider for example), wearing a long coat decorated with human bones.

      He is photographed in a way that reminds you of Eastwood in Sergio Leone’s films and later, in Eastwood’s own.

    image

    Listening for signs of life in the desert

    You see him first alongside a highway in a desert resembling the inferno–inside the nation of Namibia.  He is pressing his ear against the highway, which seems so empty that he is in no danger.   Soon a car driven by a lonely woman stops; she offers him a.ride.  Then… not much later, the chance to stay at her
    house.  The gardens and house feel like a speck of color in an endless wasteland.  Soon they are in her bed.  The Dust Devil breaks her neck, killing her it seems, in mid-orgasm.

    image

    Lovemaking abruptly cut off by killing

        He stops long enough to light several candles
    in her bedroom.  Then he uses her blood to sketch ritualistic drawings on the walls.  He cuts off several of her fingers then carefully saves them.

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    One of the drawings the stranger leaves

        Next, he finds a can of gasoline and sets fire
    to the house.  Much of it burns but definitely
    not all.

       The phone rings for Detective Ben Mukurob.  First he ignores it, thinking it is one of his sad,  frightening dreams.  He has had a lot of those dreams recently.  Except for a large dog sleeping close-by he appears painfully alone.

       Soon after, Ben gets another call, describing the burned house.  Your first impression may be (as mine was) that he is too cynical to care.   But that impression is very wrong.  He takes his job most
    seriously.

        Meanwhile, in the neighboring country of South Africa, Wendie, a home-maker in her twenties is arguing with her husband, Mark.  She makes up her mind to leave him and drives away.

        At the dead woman’s house, Ben speaks to his supervisor.  The boss is sure that this is the work of terrorists.

    image

       Ben–determined to bring in the killer

    Ben is equally sure it is not.  The political situation in Namibia and South Africa had changed recently, stabilizing in some ways.  Terrorists are less common now.

        Dust Devil does something uncommon:  voice-over is used to
    continue telling the unfolding plot.  As Wendie keeps her word about leaving, the narration continues:  “Out of the flatlands she came.  Into the drylands…He had been calling her…drawing her to Bethany…”

        Bethany, the Namibian town is indeed dying: no rain for seven years, its one major industry already shut down.  Wendie, in her car, and the Dust Devil in a train, have both picked Bethany as their next stop.

        More narration: “He sifts the human storm for souls.  He can smell a town waiting to die.”  You feel that Wendie and
    Dust Devil inevitably will meet;  it is only a matter of
    time.

         At the same time Ben talks to the coroner about the victim’s remains.  Neck broken, the drawings on the walls sketched  in her blood, probably mixed with body fat, iron ore, and kaolin (clay).   The coroner, a white woman, tells Ben who is African, that the
    killing is tied in with witchcraft.  She recommends he speak to a sangoma, an expert on witchcraft rituals.

       Ben has an old friend Joe who is a sangoma.   But the detective has turned his back on magic and rituals.  He aims to be more like Sherlock Holmes, or one of the CSI team, staying with rational,
    purely scientific explanations.

        As if it was fated, Wendie and the Dust Devil cross paths.  Wendie gives the stranger a lift, and immediately you feel the mutual attraction. They talk on and off; suddenly Wendie sees him on the road and realizes he is no longer in the car.  Hours later, alone in a motel room she takes a bath.  She makes a sudden
    decision to slit her wrists with a razor then abruptly changes
    her mind.

    image

    Ready and waiting for Wendie

       The Dust Devil can sense her wish to die.  He waits in the motel bedroom.  Wendie knows he is out there.  Next morning, as she prepares to drive away, he is already sitting in the car.

        Their attraction continues to grow.  They stop at another motel, dine in an outdoor café and dance to country and Western music played on loudspeakers.   In the motel room, they have sex.

        But afterward, the Dust Devil talks–more than he ever has before.  “You don’t understand…This wind keeps blowing me on and on…You don’t know who I am…”

        He showers and Wendie looks through his collection of snapshots.  They seem harmless enough. Then she finds severed fingers and knows she is in grave danger.  The Dust Devil tries to comfort her with the truth—“all these people wanted to die…I was only the midwife…”

        But Wendie no longer wishes to die.

         “You picked the wrong one this time, you bastard!” She drives off.

         Ben changes his mind; he talks to his old friend Joe despite his own doubts about magic.  Joe tells Ben that this is the work of a
    shape-shifter.  He adds, “You’ve got to stop thinking like a White man and start thinking like a man instead.”  He pleads with Ben to
    take a carved stick  with him, and keep it close. The stick has the power to bind the Dust Devil, to root him to the ground.

        Ben, with his strong faith in science and logic, has trouble believing this.   “You’ve been watching too many drive-in movies,”  he says, but does let Joe give him the stick, before leaving for
    Bethany.

          Wendie wanders out into a seemingly endless desert, followed by the Dust Devil, Ben, and Mark. All but Mark catch up to each other in a ghost town, every building with floors covered ankle-high in sand.

         Dust Devil deserves praise for originality in several  elements.   The music by Simon Boswell takes on many forms.  At times it feels reminiscent of Ennio Morricone’s work in Sergio Leone movies like The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West.  Other times it is like a vocal chorus without words, as if the Earth itself is humming.  The photography is
    outstanding, showing the desert  barren, endless, devoid
    of color, a place where death is never far away and life is
    precious.  Check out the shot in the desert with the Dust Devil sitting absolutely still on a rock outcropping, and thirty feet higher up, vultures waiting calmly.

        Zakes Mokae, so good in movies like A Dry White Season and
    The Serpent and the Rainbow, is excellent a  the haunted Ben, and John Matshikiza equally good in the tricky role of Joe.  (He is also effective as the narrator.)  Robert Burke (Rescue Me,Munich) strikes most of the right notes as the Dust Devil.  To
    avoid leaving out anyone, the entire cast does the job.

        You may find still more influences that I missed out on, that have been borrowed by Dust Devil.

     Having said that, I still find this movie highly original and unusual.  I can’t recommend this one enough.

  • ONIBABA

       Japanese horror movies have become big box office in
    many countries now, including the USA and Europe.  Movies
    like The Ring have become household names.    Video stores stock the American-made English-language versions, and in many cases too, the Japanese originals.

       Onibaba is a much older movie (1964).  Some would argue that it really doesn’t belong in a site on horror films; that it is more of a war film or possibly an art film about the effects of war.

       In some ways those people would appear to be right.  It is not easy to find another movie in this site similar to Onibaba.  For example, it seems light-years away from The Ring.  Off the top
    of my head, I would probably say it is closest to Deliverance, shown from the crazed backwoods people’s point of view.  Onibaba, like Deliverance, shows people at their simplest and
    most savage.  It is not an optimistic outlook, to put it mildly.  The characters in Onibaba are in desperation.  The men have been forced far away, to fight a war that means nothing to them.  The old men, women and children left behind are finding it impossible to work their farms anymore. They are close to starving.  Already they have seen much bad weather. Strange omens of doom are signs of worse things to come.

       Onibaba takes place in a remote part of Japan, in land covered in grass taller than any of its human characters.  At night, especially, the grass sways wildly in the intense wind.  The movie starts by introducing two of the main characters, the Woman, and the Young woman, who is married to the woman’s son, now gone to war.  You never learn their names.

    For a long while, it has been just the two of them. They have done what they had to in order to stay alive; killing soldiers and selling their weapons and armor in exchange for food.  Killing has become as familiar to them as washing clothes, eating and going to the bathroom.  It is just something you do.  All their humanity appears to be gone.

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    Brutal times; the only way to stay alive

         Hachi, an old neighbor returns out of nowhere from the war.  He tells them that the man they have waited to hear about, son to one, husband to another, has died.  The man’s death was just one of a long series of horrors Hachi has seen.

          Almost right away, Hachi’s return creates a tense triangle between the three people, with each struggling for ultimate power.   All Hachi wants now is his old house, food to survive, to stay out of the war, and to be with the young woman.

          And that is enough to throw everything that existed out of balance.  The woman sees Hachi’s desire for her former daughter-in-law, and she is terrified.  Not because she cares about her, she is past caring for anyone.  But she absolutely needs her daughter-in-law, to help with the killings now that she cannot farm.  If Hachi takes her away, she feels that her life will be over.

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     Hachi’s return; a rapidly growing competition

         When Hachi first returned, he described a war
    with sides that meant nothing to any of them.  But now Hachi
    has started a new war; only three people, but they cannot live
    side by side.  Someone has to win; someone has to lose.
    At first the older woman seems to be the loser.  Strangely
    enough, it is sex that determines the battlefield.  Hachi and
    the younger woman are attracted to each other almost
    immediately.  When they start their affair, you can feel the
    heat; maybe it is their desperation, possibly more than that.

          For the older woman, intimidation is the only weapon left.  She tells the young woman stories about purgatory and a hell that sounds right out of Dante’s Inferno, with the most intense physical pain saved for those who indulge in extramarital sex.  The young woman is afraid but Hachi is not.  He tells her that he would risk hell to continue having sex with her.  And despite her talk you know that the older woman is tempted too by Hashi’s sensuality. She tries unsuccessfully to seduce him, and not just to break up the affair.  She desires him too.

          Things change one night the old woman is alone.  A samurai appears, wearing a grotesque mask.  All he wants is to find his way out of the sea of tall grass.  The old woman refuses at first, then seems to be intimidated into helping him.

          And here is where Onibaba finally starts to feel like a traditional
    horror movie.  The samurai talks about his mask, and how he
    needed it to protect his handsome face during combat.  The
    old woman has trouble believing him, the same way she has trouble
    believing anything positive anymore.  More and more, you feel
    the bitterness eating her up from the inside.  It’s no big surprise when she lures him into the same deep pit where she has
    thrown the bodies of the other men they have robbed.

         To get his armor and weapons, she needs to climb down to the bottom.  Piles of human skeletons cover the ground around his body.  Seeing them, wading through them, does not seem to bother the woman.  She talks to the dead samurai in a sarcastic way about his handsome face; she feels no sympathy.  He is just one of the many faceless samurai who dragged her son away to his death.   To her horror his face is not handsome beneath the mask but horribly scarred, possibly war wounds, there is no way to know.

          The samurai mask now becomes a weapon in the war between the three survivors.  The older woman puts it on, and uses it to play the role of a demon. In this way, she hopes to keep the Young woman home and afraid to leave.  Each time the Young woman leaves for Hachi’s hut, she. finds the demon waiting for her.  Knowing nothing about the dead samurai and fearful of hell, she does not suspect the other woman yet.

          But other forces (Black magic? Karma? The list is endless.) have been brought to life. Whatever powers the mask may have, each of the three must now pay a price.  As you would expect you are left with a lot more questions than answers:  Why won’t the mask come off the woman’s face?  Is her pain while she wears the mask only physical pain or is she feeling her terrible loss of humanity at last?  Has the mask been cursed by the dead samurai?  As the old song goes…Nothing is revealed.

        Well, maybe a little.  The director, then in his 90’s when Onibaba was re-issued on DVD, did talk about some of his ideas in an interview included on it.

        For one, he hoped to show that sex was more than just basic animal need.  It was the one spiritual experience available to these people in their ravished land.
    A brief scene of Hachi and the young woman running naked in a
    downpour shows this.  Its tone screams of freedom; it is so
    different from what has come before: the endless cycle of work,
    the voices with no expression.  The lust of the older woman
    too (which she spells out clearly to Hachi) is a need for love as
    well.  Only she cannot express this (a need for love, as well as the sex) until much later.  Her anger masks everything else about her.  Why wouldn’t she want to tear her inner mask of anger away, the way she longs to tear the real mask off her face?

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     A mask; and perhaps a look inside a soul

         But this is only one of many interpretations; people will find many other insights of their own, based on their own experience.  Onibaba may or may notscare you in the sense of making you jump out of your seat.   That is an individual thing.  But this is not all you can judge it by.  For a lot of people, Onibaba will stay with them a long time:
    Outside forces stripping you of pieces of your life and people you
    once loved.  Realizing those forces mean nothing to you; That
    your losses have been for no reason you can  understand. The
    theme of losing your humanity in a savage world.  The
    additional pain when another person finally makes you realize the
    pain of that loss.

     The word “important” has a bad sound to a lot of people…like
    a teacher saying , “This should be important to you.”  Still,
    Onibaba is an important movie, much more than
    just a good story.

  • HALLOWEEN

       A lot has been written and argued about Halloween.  It generated loads of controversy.  The main reason for the
    controversy:  Halloween was soon followed by a huge number of “slasher” movies.  It’s hard to write about Halloween simply for itself, apart from what came after it.

    Three things cannot be disputed, though.   This movie
    was made cheaply. And it was extremely successful.   Third, Hollywood producers knew a good thing when they saw it.

    Its cast was unknown then, except for Donald Pleasence, best known as an off-beat character actor in The Great Escape and Fantastic Voyage.

       Halloween’s sequels tried to explain the mysteries with characters and past relationships. The original explained practically nothing.   I’m not sure if the filmmakers intended this, but these unanswered questions added to Halloween’s power.  Fear of the unknown can be devastating, and Halloween takes great advantage of our fears.

       The movie begins in 1963.   All seems fairly conventional; a typical teen couple makes out in the girl’s empty house.   They walk upstairs, the room goes dark.

        You realize that things are not normal, though.  You are watching these events through a third person’s eyes, a person wearing a mask. This unknown figure stops in the kitchen, and takes out a
    large knife.

       He/she stops a moment and watches the boy leave, then
    goes upstairs.

       A girl sits, brushing her hair, wearing only panties.  She only has time to say “Michael…!” before being stabbed to death.

       The masked figure goes downstairs.  The parents are just getting home.   “Michael?” they ask. The mask comes off.  You see a boy, about six, blonde hair, angelic face, somewhat dazed, mystified expression…

        Fifteen years later, a different town. Hard rain pours down as Dr. Loomis and a nurse drive the last stretch of road towards a hospital for the insane. Loomis’ voice is entirely cold, clinical, “He hasn’t spoken a word in 15 years.”  You know who he is talking
    about.  In the downpour, figures wander aimlessly across hospital grounds.

       Suddenly a dark shape jumps onto the car roof, then throws both of them out of the car and drives away.  It is one of those totally unexpected moments that makes you jump out of your seat and wonder how it all happened so fast.

       This is your introduction to Michael Myers, more a force of nature than a human being.  Nothing,  no one, can stop him for long.  What is equally scary; he is beyond communicating with.

       Loomis later describes Michael this way:“I first met Michael when the boy was six. After eight years, I was convinced he was pure evil.  I spent the next seven years making sure he could never escape.”

        You know that Michael will return to his hometown for Halloween.  Not knowing why makes it even scarier.   You cannot
    figure out what he wants.   But you must expect the absolute worst.

       Meanwhile, his hometown of Haddonfield appears to
    have forgotten Michael.  Another Halloween; everyone
    pretty much knows the drill.  You’re introduced to Laurie
    Strode and her friends Annie and Lynda.  None is sketched out in detail.

       You feel you know Laurie well enough, though. She is shy but has her feet planted firmly on the ground.   She has common sense, she is resourceful, loyal to her friends, and to the kids she babysits for.

        She is more reserved than Annie and Lynda.   A major difference between them: Laurie has no boyfriend.  But Laurie is no 70’s hardcore feminist.  At times she reveals her loneliness, her wish to
    find a boy she cares about.

        Laurie is the focus of Michael’s return to town.  Why Laurie, the movie never explains.

        A lot of the criticism of Halloween revolved around the connection between active sex and being killed by Michael.   The
    promiscuous characters seemed the ones much likelier to die.
    Strangely, Michael appears fixated on Laurie, someone who has
    never had an intimate relationship.

        You realize for sure that Michael is back when Laurie stops by the old Meyers house to drop off a set of keys there.  (Her father is a realtor who thinks he can finally sell this property again.)

         You see someone’s point of view from inside the house.  A figure suddenly emerges from the right side of the screen—a sign of things to come

       Meanwhile, Dr. Loomis is on his way, trying to warn
    the police about Michael.  The police don’t take him very
    seriously.  On the highway, Loomis finds an empty pickup
    truck, but in his hurry, misses the dead body of its driver,
    thrown into nearby bushes.

       For Annie and Lynda, Halloween is a chance to combine
    babysitting, sex with boyfriends, and socializing with
    friends.  Only Laurie is beginning to suspect that someone
    has other plans for them.

       In 1978, Carpenter’s direction appeared to over-use
    certain conventions… to the point of breaking cinematic
    rules.  Watching Halloween 30 years after its release, its camera work no longer seems so shocking.   Perhaps because many other directors adopted styles similar to Carpenter’s.

      One example is to show someone in danger, such as Laurie,
    in a close “one shot,” then show another character suddenly appear next to her.  The first time this happens is 25 minutes into
    the movie.  It turns out to be Annie’s father, the town’s sheriff.  A harmless meeting.   Yet you still find yourself jumping; it comes only seconds after Laurie has seen the stranger facing her directly, then abruptly vanishing.image

    Laurie’s early glimpses of Michael–still an unknown to her

    Laurie gets to Tommy’s house to babysit; Annie is also sitting, at
    a house across the street.  Meanwhile, Michael stalks the
    peaceful streets in a mask, but is ignored; masks on Halloween are expected.

       Slowly the story tightens the circle around the four characters:Laurie, Tommy, Annie, and Lindsay, the girl Annie sits
    for.  Tommy’s dog goes outside, confronts Michael, squeals
    and dies.  Annie goes to use the washing machine and gets
    stuck in a doorway.  Lindsay goes to Tommy’s house so Annie
    can drive her boyfriend Paul over to the house.

       Through much of these events, the camera appears to
    taunt you, to play with your fears.  When Annie talks to Paul
    on the phone she moves continuously, left-right, right-left,
    forward-back, back-forward. The camera follows her but much
    of the time, Annie seems to be in “two-shots.”   In other words, she is framed so that there is room for another person; you expect another person (Michael)… yet there is no one.  Your adrenaline slowly but surely reaches unbearable levels…image

                image

    Laurie’s friends–expecting only the same old
    Halloween

         Annie tries to take out the car, finds it is locked, walks back for her keys.  When she returns, the doors are unlocked; she never notices the mist on the inside of the windows.  She gets in.  Immediately she is.strangled, then stabbed.

        I still remember my reaction the first time I saw Halloween.   It was the first time I can ever remember being relieved when a character was murdered.  At least you can breathe again, I
    thought   That’s how suspenseful the moments before had
    been.

       From here on, the action comes fast and furious.  But describing the events in sequence gives only a hint of the power you experience onscreen.  You’ve seen women before pursued by a maniac, and finally forced to fightback.  (One example is the under-rated Wait Until Dark.)

       But Carpenter uses Michael (also called The Shape) in
    a new way.  You see him appear, seemingly out of the void, as
    he did inside the deserted house earlier.  Much later, Laurie
    tells the two young children, “There’s no Boogeyman.  I killed him.”

       Then without a sound, he is abruptly visible, holding
    the knife again, in the right side of the frame.  Has
    Carpenter over-used this device?  It doesn’t feel that
    way.  Somehow he has made it work, like the repeated use of
    one-shots to set us up for the kill, mixed with the two-shots with
    a character missing…until it is too late, and Michael is at our
    throats.

       I remember seeing Halloween, by myself, in Flushing, New York, the Friday night it opened.  I had a girlfriend, but she didn’t like horror movies.  A group of about ten teenage girls sat near me, screaming their heads off for the last 30 minutes.  A man was seated just in front of them.  As the movie ended, he turned around, smiled at them, and said, “I gotta see if my ears still work.”

       Other box office smashes, such as Deliverance and The Exorcist were soon followed by many bad imitations.  It was the same story with Halloween, only worse.  A new series, Friday the 13th followed, and also made huge profits.

       I don’t think Halloween had any message (for example, a girl having premarital sex will die violently, or deserves to die) or even any great social significance.  But its style affected  horror films in
    general; that feeling of the camera playing with you, almost
    taunting you in a mean way.  Once you had a chance, you could
    finally find some holes, some inconsistencies in the story.

      How could a child as psychotic, as evil as Michael have
    passed himself off as normal for six years?  Why wasn’t his
    sister more scared of him?  What did he see in Laurie that
    made him focus on her?  How did he learn to drive?

       Halloween’s raw power makes all these questions irrelevant.  It pounds you into a place where rational questions have no meaning.  I don’t think Carpenter has ever done anything equal to it yet.

  • NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968)

        In the uncertain days of 1968 a new, low-budget independently-made zombie movie was released.  Reviewers (the few who bothered) mostly wrote it off as violent junk.  It was soon forgotten.

        But in a few years, people began hearing about a strange movie with cannibals/cannibal zombies.  The movie sounded like it went to places few others dared to go.  Especially at that time.   A little
    girl eats her mother. That’s one of the all-time cultural taboos, I remember my sister saying. Especially on campuses, this movie picked up momentum as a midnight feature.  Of course, it turned out to be that same 1968 movie.

         Night of the Living Dead deserved the acclaim.  It delivered the goods.  Although the actors were unknowns, they held their own.  The action sequences kept you squirming and jumping.  The plot, simple as it was, was highly absorbing.  And the idea of everyday, ordinary folks trying their best to break into your house and eat you (for reasons you barely understood) was about as disturbing as you could get.

        Sixty or so years later, it’s easier to sit back and make sense of how this movie fit into the culture then.  A war was heating up that divided the country like none other before.  A president decided not to run again.  Recent diaries of Lyndon Johnson show a man who saw his country headed into quicksand (Vietnam), yet going straight into war because he simply didn’t know what else to
    do.  A new president was elected, largely for saying he had a
    secret plan to end the war.  (Actually he would keep the war
    going another four years, then announce a peace settlement the
    week before the next presidential election).

        Every summer starting with 1964 had seen violence in the Afro-American sections of big cities.  Drugs, especially the psychedelics such as LSD, STP, mescaline and psilocybin were changing people’s lives.  The “changes” formed a spectrum from a beautiful new vision, as some described the psychedelics to, in other people’s minds the ultimate nightmare.  (How many people had heard the urban legend about the babysitter telling the baby’s mother:  “ …and the turkey is in the oven…” told as a true story?)

        That sense of the unknown swooping down on us was exactly what this movie delivered.  Being attacked and killed by a grizzly bear might make sense.  But a bland middle-American guy suddenly going berserk in a peaceful cemetery and killing your brother for no reason at all—nobody was ready for this.  Suddenly
    your world has changed, and you’re doing your best to take action
    you never dreamed was necessary.

        This is the situation Johnny and Barbara, an ordinary 20-something brother and sister from Western Pennsylvania find themselves in one late Sunday afternoon. Johnny is killed right away.   Barbara escapes into a country home, and waits for someone to save her.

     .image

     Johnny and Barbara–their world about to change
    forever

         But there’s no Steve McQueen, John Wayne, Sean Connery or any other 1968 heroes around here.  There’s the old lady of the house, already chewed up more than a bit.   And another lone survivor trying desperately to clear his head enough from the insanity in order to protect himself.]

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    The first of many zombies

         Ben, this other survivor uses all his common-sense and imagination to protect the house and the people who have run there for safety.  He’s got plenty to deal with; an army of zombies soon surround the house.  In moments they are doing all they can to break in.  Soon, Ben and Barbara find out that these zombies are actually eating the flesh of the people they kill.  And unlike the many Westerns.that American audiences grew up on, there doesn’t seem to be any cavalry on the way to rescue them.  They are in this alone.

             image

     Iconic image for the 60’s; living dead surround the house, then move in for the kill

         No doubt the violence alone made this movie memorable in 1968.  But what made it more thanjust a crude, sensational shocker were some memorable characters.  Ben is clearly a courageous man, doing his best to deal with overwhelming events.  Tom and Judy, a likable young couple, try hard to use their ingenuity and strength to figure out the right escape plan.

       Then there is Harry and his family.Harry is played by Karl Hardman. Hardman, like Russell Streiner (Johnny) was one of the principal filmmakers/movers behind this movie.  You may have thought Harry was a kind of sit-com character, grouchy on the outside, but warm on the inside when you got to know him.  He’s not. He is a selfish bully in an unhappy marriage who does not know how to change.  The movie may be black and white but this is not your standard primetime TV comedy.  His daughter has already been bitten by a zombie.  No one can figure out what medicine she needs; not that any is likely to be there anyway.

       Tom and Judy do their best to work with Ben to come up with an escape plan.  Harry is in it only for himself, and is only concerned for his family.  Helen, Harry’s wife, is left in the middle between them as they debate the possible ways of staying alive in the house.

       The story breaks away again and again from expectations for a Hollywood picture.  The escape plan figured out by Ben, Tom and Judy fails with gruesome results.  And it is nobody’s fault or nobody’s backstabbing that causes it to fail.  It fails because…as one perceptive writer put it, gasoline can spill and then get ignited when things don’t go exactly right.

        Also, Barbara never gets over the shock of seeing her brother Johnny die.  You keep expectingBen to slap her or find another way to snap her out of it, but he is never able to do this.  Perhaps the filmmakers took the safe route in this; Ben is Afro-American, Barbara is white, and any close relationship between them was too much of a risk in 1968.  But equally likely—someone like Barbara was simply not going to bounce back from all the horror going on around her.

       Even worse, Kyra, the bitten girl, dies, turns into a zombie and goes right after Helen and Harry. Both of them (with good reason) are too devastated to save themselves.   (Kyra Schon, the actress playing this girl, later had her own website, including a favorite tattoo of her in  zombie make-up and some kind words about Duane Jones, who played Ben.)

        Perhaps the least hopeful sign is when a crowd with guns finally shows up and destroys the army of ombies.  You learn that bullets can take them down but only with a head shot.  A TV reporter asks one of the men withguns about dealing with the zombies.  His answer (no irony intended):  “Yeah, they’re dead…they’re all messed-up.”  Not exactly reassuring.  The movie ends with a look at the zombies being burned.  The ugliness feels like it’s spilling right off the movie screen till it is all around us.

        Night of the Living Dead worked well as a straight-ahead action movie.  Although most of the actors had limited experience, they were convincing.   With a few exceptions, the dialogue worked well too.  According to director Romero, friends and neighbors of the filmmakers who played the zombies were given all the beer they wanted and making the movie turned out to b enjoyable.  They too were convincing—they certainly did not look Hollywood or even like wannabes of any kind.  Their ordinary looks worked in their favor.

        Like Psycho, The Exorcist, and in other ways, Deliverance, Night of the Living Dead had a strong resonance in the USA and many European countries at the time.  All of these movies. changed the film-going experience in a big way.  You can get a general idea of these changes bycomparing each of these movies to blockbusters at that time, then looking at those that came soon after.

        Things would never be the same.  Despite the low budget I consider this movie one of the 10 best of its kind.  I hope I can do it justice by pointing out some of its effects on those that came later.

    image

    Another iconic image–average American girl, turned cannibal
    zombie

  • SCARY STORIES TO TELL IN THE DARK

    Scary Stories is much more than a movie about naive but adventurous teenagers exploring a haunted house In their hometown. It re-creates an intense atmosphere of place and time; the Rust Belt, 1968.  Major changes coming, though just a few people in town notice them yet.  Some heavy emotional themes;  you watch them slowly revealed one by one.  

         Small-town people forced to change.  Sharp curves in the road ahead. Changes that will make it hard just staying on the road. Teenagers on the edge of a cliff.  Hardly suspecting they’d have to decide which way to turn. But hard decisions they need to make; real soon.  

         A presidential election (Nixon-Humphrey) that will slowly but surely end in sorrow.  A deserted house full of dirty secrets.  Kids barely out of childhood…poised on the edge of a cliff.      

         A warning though; most of the reviews I read (after writing this) were only slightly better than average.  People born after the baby-boomer generation did not seem affected by it with the same impact..  The movies’s second half throws in some (partly) unexplained creatures and drags a little.  

           But you get a sense of deep emotional changes in the narrator, Stella, and in her friends starting with a voice-over which the movie will deliver on;  “Stories can leave deep scars.  This I learned.”

         Whoever she learned from was dead right.  

         “The last autumn of my childhood, ” Stella goes on.  The movie shows you how that autumn changed her .

         Donovan on the radio; Season of the Witch. Its sinister, overpowering organ.  We would hear a similar organ theme a few years later; even more ominous, more threatening: Led Zeppelin,  Your Time is Gonna Come.  A tough, mean kid telling two friends he just enlisted in the military.  They get ready to go out and kick some ass.  After all it’s Halloween night.

         Stella alone in her bedroom. Its walls full of horror movie posters.  An aspiring writer, a good soul.  Her two best friends, Auggie and Chuck finally persuade her to hang out. Ramon, a stranger in town, alone in his car.  He watches her ride her bike.

         Auggie and Chuck have a longstanding grudge against the tough kids.  The hoods chase them into a drive-in. Night of the Living Dead.  One more indication of big changes to come in our country.  (Watch it now, then try to imagine watching it in1968). The tough kids chase them into the town’s only truly haunted house, the Bellows place.  But you’re not watching a Scooby-doo episode.

         Inside the house; no big surprises.  The one exception; a dusty old book that Stella finds and takes home.  Only a quick flash of the ugly reality still to emerge.

         Kids in the town start to die.  Stella and Ramon read stories in the book.  No mistaking the connection.  They try to burn the book; it won’t burn.  The book is a pandora’s box.  No magic word, amulets, silver bullets to use against it.  The law enforcement they once had faith in— only makes things worse.

    Scarecrow With Unexplained Powers

        Even baby boomers who survived the Vietnam war/student protests/Watergate/Nixon Impeachment era may not sense the symbolism the book reflects.  How we got here…and what the fuck do we do about it.

         Stella and her friends stare at the open book as it writes its own new stories and their town slowly begins to die.  Their search for answers takes them  into a corrupt, savage mental hospital then to a jail without mercy. Then back to the Bellows house.  As she feared she would, Stella finds a monster…one that their own family de-humanized.  Only one hope for a girl (not yet out of high school):  Face the monster. Explain. That the people who died so far were innocent, that they never hurt the monster.

                                       

         Stella’s opening words. The town will never go back to what it was.  But some sense of hope may have survived, for those people able to find some compassion in their heart.  Watch this movie, then…watch it again.  I doubt that most of us will catch all of it the first time.  But I think some of us will open themselves to the experience Stella has to go through. 


    An Incarnation of the Daughter the Bellows Committed for Life?  A   Mystery Never Revealed 

  • THE BRIDES OF DRACULA

          After the great success of. Horror of Dracula, Hammer studios wanted badly to make a sequel.

         However, Christopher Lee, so effective as the count in Horror, refused to star.  Lee was afraid of being typecast forever as Dracula.

       Hammer’s answer was to use a misleading title and then state in a prologue that Dracula is dead, but his many disciples live on.  Brides of Dracula is the story of one disciple, Baron Meinster.   You get a sense throughout this movie that Hammer did not want to change a successful formula.  They used the same director,
    Terence Fisher, writer Jimmy Sangster (along with two other
    screenwriters) and the other star of Horror, Peter Cushing, again playing  Dr. Van Helsing.

       What they got was the same intensity, possibly more.  The music tended to be melodramatic, over-the-top at times.  But it adds to the atmosphere.  And you feel a sizzling tension between the vampire, Baron Meinster, and his mother, who has kept him prisoner for years.

    In Brides, you feel right away that the countryside is a dangerous place, especially after sunset. Everywhere is mist, but it has a foul appearance to it, especially where it hangs over ponds and swamps. (In Horror of Dracula, Jonathan Harker notices the silence surrounding Dracula’s castle:  No birds sang.)

       Even at the inn, the atmosphere is tense.  The student-teacher, Marianne feels like an outsider the minute she enters.

       As thunder crashes, the tension increases with the
    arrival of a strange, severe-looking, aristocratic old woman
    dressed all in red and black.  She speaks one word to the old
    couple, “Wine.”  She is the Baroness Meinster, and immediately invites Marianne to share a drink, then to spend the night in her castle.  The landlord and his wife are clearly shaken and abruptly offer Marianne the chance to stay at the inn.  But Marianne has already accepted the baroness’ hospitality.

       You first see the castle in a low-angle shot, showing
    it perched on a mountainside.  Inside, it is exquisitely decorated, suggesting a great family. fortune.  Yet somehow Marianne still appears to be in danger.  Greta, the baroness’ one servant, gives off suspicious, controlling vibes; you get the impression that
    she will bully anyone who lets her.  For a moment, Marianne
    steps onto her balcony.  From there she can see a man standing outside in another wing of the castle.

       Instead of denying what Marianne saw, or trying to avoid it, the baroness speaks freely about the man, her son.  “My son is ill,” she says.   When Mariann asks if he is ill in his mind, the baroness does not deny it.  She says that he has caused her endless pain.  Once the castle was a place of grand parties and gatherings, but those days are long-gone, because of her son.  You canl hear a mix of great sadness, regret, and bitterness in her words.  She has not seen him or spoken to him in years, she says; he is fully in Greta’s care.

       Marianne goes to sleep then wakes suddenly, her mind on the man she glimpsed before.  She finds her way to his room.  For a long time he does not step out of the shadows.  He asks Marianne to come closer, explaining that he cannot come to her.  It is then that Marianne sees he is held prisoner by a long silver chain.

       The baron says that his mother has kept him chained
    and told people that he is dead; that she is motivated to
    keep the fortune, land, and castle that would be his inheritance.  As Marianne does, you wonder now if the baroness is the insane one, the monster.  Marianne agrees to find the key to the chain.  As Marianne walks from the baroness’ room back to the baron, his mother seems to stalk Marianne, the lighting on the baroness’ face making her look truly evil.  But Marianne is able to throw the baron the key.

       As Marianne finds the baron, his mother condemns her, “You little fool, you don’t know what you’ve done.”

      The baron speaks with quiet assurance, “She can’t harm you
    now.”  Then,” Mother, come here.  Now mother, come along with me.”

       Like Marianne, you can only guess what happens next.   But you get a clear enough idea when Marianne speaks to Greta, now hysterical.  Greta tells her that the countess is dead. “He’s free, the cunning devil… She’s dead and he’s free.”

    image

    Baron Meinster (David Peel)  

    Marianne leaves. Greta, still hysterical, speaks a long while to
    the dead baroness.  She is able to sum up her twenty years with the family into a few minutes of monologue.

       Keep in mind this movie was made in 1960, with many limitations in effect on what movies could not show, not mention, only hint at.  I think any aspiring screenwriter could do a lot worse than to listen to Greta’s words, for the way they hint at family dysfunction, with so many suggestions, implications, so much between the
    lines.  “Twenty years…You encouraged him.  You drank with him and his friends, laughed at their wicked games…brought women to him…”

        Critics have read many suggestions in these words:  Bisexuality, procuring victims after the baron became a vampire, just for starters.  But the more subtle suggestion: an incestuous relationship between mother and son (in all senses of the word).  Whatever the relationship was like once, it degenerated into hatred and a vicious struggle for power, stalemated for years until Marianne’s arrival.  The contempt the Baron feels for his mother is
    obvious in his voice.  Their years of separation have only made the situation uglier.

       Next morning, Marianne is found unconscious on the road by Dr. Van Helsing.  The story now takes a new turn: Van Helsing matching wits with Baron Meinster.  As in Horror of Dracula, Van Helsing is a man of great courage, knowledge, and dedication.  In absolute contrast, Baron Meinster is ruled by his passions.

       But you soon learn that he has an ally; Greta’s devotion to the Meinster’s is unchanged, even after the baron has turned his own mother into a vampire.

      After the baron kills a woman from the village, she is buried in the churchyard.  In a truly chilling scene, the undead woman struggles to get out of her coffin and through the soil above it.  Greta stands above her, and like a sinister midwife, urges her to push herself free.  Even Van Helsing’s eyes open wide.

       As in Horror, Van Helsing is dedicated (some would say, fanatically) to wiping out the plague of vampirism.  Though not a particularly pious man, he sees this struggle as one between absolute good and absolute evil.  He calls staking the dead village woman, “an act of healing.”  When he meets the baroness, now a vampire herself, she asks Van Helsing if he knows who she is. “I know who you were,” he tells her calmly.image

    Van Helsing–again, the only one to offer protection from
    the Undead

    She has become a tragic figure, telling Van Helsing she now must
    do all the wicked things her son tells her to do; there is no
    salvation for her.  Again, Van Helsing tells her salvation is still possible.

    image

    Marianne sees Meinster’s powers–former friend, now a
    vampire 

    In the end, Van Helsing must face the baron, along with Greta and
    two other vampires: the woman from the village, and Gina, another student-teacher at Marianne’s school.  Van Helsing
    shows true courage after Baron Meinster bites his neck, cauterizing the wound with a red-hot iron, then cooling it
    with Holy Water.

       At least one critic has called Brides of Dracula the best movie Hammer ever produced.  I wouldn’t quite go that far, but the
    direction, acting, and especially the screenwriting are all excellent.  As big a Hammer fan as I am, I seldom remember much of their dialogue.

         Here, there are some memorable lines.   Marianne says good night to the baroness, adding, “God bless you.”

        “If only He could,” the Baroness replies.

       David Peel, better known on-stage than in movies, is excellent in a demanding role, requiring (among other things): charm, vengefulness, pleading, gloating, bloodlust, pain, viciousness, even vulnerability.  Terence Fisher’s direction underlines Marianne’s struggle to find the truth behind the family’s masks.  Marianne is trusting, probably too much so, and her ability to judge from intuition is limited. Fisher shows you the anguish in her confused search to find the truth.

       It’s hard to believe now, but at the time, the director Fisher, and Hammer films were widely attacked forthe violence they showed onscreen, the sexual innuendo they hinted at.  Years later, Fisher, and screenwriter Jimmy Sangster’s work was put into clearer perspective, and many critics began to praise them.

        Both Sangster and Fisher wanted to show just how corrupt and foul vampirism was.  Here, the evils of vampirism are often overshadowed by the festering illness of the the Meinster family.  In Brides, you get the feeling this illness must be disinfected, or cut out like a cancer.

    . image

                                       Baron Meinster’s disciples   

    Fisher made a point of showing what that surgery was like, without much subtlety.  He believed that suggestion cannot show this visceral ripping, this tearing out.  Long before TV had er, Fisher and Sangster showed you the operating room, up close and personal.  Ultimately this is what Van Helsing meant when he tells the dead girl’s ( bitten by the Baron) father that unearthing her body and staking her will be “an act of healing.”

  • THE HILLS HAVE EYES

         After Night of the Living Dead began to make big money,
    many low-budget filmmakers tried a similar approach.   Small cast, few special effects or none, and a tight story.  But most are bad rip-offs of Night, or of another movie about that time, Deliverance.

        Deliverance asked disturbing questions.  Basically this: You and your middle-class friends/ family are alone in the wilderness when you run into a savage clan of strangers doing their best to kill you.
    You’re too far away to get help from anyone.  How much violence will you take on to stay alive?

        This movie is one of the exceptions among those
    inspired by Deliverance and Night.   One of the real good ones.  (Another is the hard-to-find Canadian movie Rituals starring
    Hal Holbrook.)

        The Hills wastes no time getting started.  The Carter’s, the typical American middle-class family in The Hills Have Eyes
    must make these life and death decisions—real fast.

       An accident has left them stranded in the middle of the desert;   too far away to get help on their CB radio.  The family seems in danger from the beginning—the rocks and mountains look bleak
    and threatening.  You can believe that anything could live up there.  Stuck on this dirt road (after swerving to avoid a rabbit) the Carter family seems to be exposed and vulnerable.  Not a place where you want to be stuck for the night.

       Little do they know that a cannibalistic family is about to close in on them.  This family, with names like Jupiter, Pluto, Mars, and Mercury, actually kills and eats one of the Carters’ dogs (named Beauty) and captures their one grandchild for their next meal. image

     Pluto (Michael Berryman)

    In a night and day, the Carters’ will lose three family members to
    the cannibal clan.  Now it is their turn to fight…and they’re soon prepared and ready.  Just one example; Doug tells the surviving dog, Beast, do your job– kill these people.  And the Beast is ready to give it his best shot.

       But it’s not only The Beast who is forced into action.  The two youngest Carter family members, Bobby and Brenda must use their wits to survive.  Not only that, they are forced to kill at close range with an axe after their booby trap fails to complete the job.

      Was Wes Craven trying to do more than to create a low budget action/horror movie?  Without question, the movie works real well on that basic level.   You just watch and enjoy it for its plot and characters.  I don’t know if he had something more to say, on a symbolic level, or if he was just looking to create a gripping story.

         Critics have suggested the idea that the families reflect or mirror each other.  Each does have a father, mother and four “children.”  (The Carter’s have two daughters, a son, plus a son in law; the cannibals have three sons, Mars, Pluto, Mercury, and a daughter, Ruby.)

       Ruby is the one member of the cannibal clan who wants
    a different life.  She will go to the point of killing a family member to get free.   And she returns Doug’s baby to him.  Otherwise there is nothing good about her family…or at least none that the movie shows you.  And yes, the Carter family does get caught up in the violence and becomes part of it.

         But the screenplay and direction never show you anything to suggest the Carter’s are bad people, (except for some racist comments by the father) or that (apart from Ruby) the cannibals are good people.  It is more like a documentary showing a family of buffalo (or some other basically peaceful animal) fighting back to protect their young against some predator.

      No doubt, this could have been a better movie with more sympathy for the cannibals and less for the Carter’s. But I don’t think this was what Craven had in mind.  More on that later.

        The movie Deliverance was one of the first to dump one more question in your lap before walking away with no answer.  That question is this:  Can you go into the wilderness and kill people and then return to your old, middle-class life?

        At the end of the excellent novel Deliverance, you get a little of the hero’s long-term reflections about what he was forced to do, years back.  The movie simply ends, with no flash-forward. The Hills Have Eyes also stops short after the violence is done; you are left wondering what will happen to the survivors.

        Maybe Craven’s point (if he has a point) is that the answer is yes.  If you can deal with what you did, and convince yourself there was no other way, then you can return to your old life.

      But you will be a changed person.

      We hear the story of the Vietnam vet who says, even at
    a birthday party where a dad hugs his young kid and helps them open presents; the vet can still see a man who is capable of random killing, maybe torture, in the jungle.

        The vet has been there with people, and seen what they can become under the right conditions.  Especially when it comes to protecting our families, almost all of us are capable of this kind of
    violence.  But we pray that we’ll never be in a situation where we have to make that choice.  The Hills Have Eyes is at its center, about bonds between family members.   With both of the
    older generation in the family killed off, then their oldest
    daughter, it is left up to Doug to save his newborn daughter.  As much as you have gotten to know him, Doug is a quiet guy, not particularly macho.  But with his daughter’s life on the line, he is ready to turn to violence.

        When I first saw this movie, I thought it made kind of a positive statement about the typical American family.  How they stick together in a crisis.  If they (the Carter’s) had any other choices, I sure couldn’t see any.

        Like so many Vietnam veterans were forced to do, these survivors will try to put their lives back together again.  (Craven had once been a war correspondent in Vietnam, and more than likely the experience stayed in his subconscious.)   To me, the movie has done its job when you sit there at the end, overwhelmed.   Simply not ready to give the future any thought.  That’s for another day.

    ·   i had a lot of fears about being objective in reviewing the re-make of The Hills.  First, because people have a special feeling about a movie they saw before any of their friends, family and co-workers—you tend to over-rate it a little.  It feels like your
    baby.  Because you get the privilege of turning people on to it.

       That was my experience with the original.  I remember not finding a VHS or DVD tape of it for years, then finally spotting one and telling my son, “You’ve got to see this.”

            When I saw that the remake was produced by 20th Century Fox I got worried too; Bigger does not always equal better.

        But the remake is exceptionally true to the spirit of the original.  Not that the story and characters are exactly the same; they are not.  What I am happy to say though; none of the changes are false steps, just about every one works.

        Set in New Mexico, the remake focuses more than the original on the atomic bomb legacy of the 1950’s. The monsters here originated from the generation of miners who were ordered to evacuate the area , but refused to leave when atomic bombs were tested.  They survived the radioactive fall-out but paid a heavy price.  Each was deformed physically; most became cannibalistic maniacs.

    WORK IN PROGRESS

  • THE NIGHT STALKER

    A made–for-TV movie on a top-100 horror list.  Hard to believe, for sure. The Night Stalker is peculiar in some other ways too.  At times it is more of a newspaper movie than a horror movie.   Or an expose story about a police cover-up, that happens to have a vampire in it.

           But still it more than holds its own as a horror movie.  Even though, made for TV in the early 70’s,it could only show a limited amount of violence. (Remember, this is years before CSI or
    Law and Order SVU, let alone Criminal Minds.)  An excellent screenplay by the veteran writer Richard Matheson (The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Devil’s Bride, to name just a
    few) is one key.  When the suspense starts to come, you get
    some truly creepy atmosphere.  This is a credit to the
    director, John Llewellyn Moxey who had previously directed a movie in England with even more of a sinister atmosphere,
    Horror Hotel.

         Horror Hotel was set in present times, but in a lonely little town, looking like it had barely changed in years.   The filmmakers realized they needed to use a radically different approach for
    The Night Stalker.  Here, the setting is Las Vegas, with no fog and few lonely places.  It is bright lights, 24 hours a day.  Nothing Gothic about it.  More people working night shifts than day shifts.  Everything about it screaming–Modern.

         But when the reporter Carl Kolchak (Darren McGavin) learns about a possible serial killer, evidence definitely points to a maniac who thinks he is a vampire. Victims drained of their blood.  Killed only during the night.  Soon afterward, a hospital is robbed of its blood supply.  Kolchak, an intelligent, intuitive man, immediately senses a connection.

    You may find it hard to take a reporter as the main character in a
    horror movie, especially someone as full of himself as Kolchak
    is.  He is arrogant, believing himself to be the most insightful guy around.  And he is never shy about letting people know this.  His mouth and his attitude have caused him to lose one job after another.  But he has not changed.

         Yet at the same time, he follows the courage of his convictions.  In addition, he gains some sympathy due to this; He is forced to deal with law enforcement officials who are at least as egotistical as Kolchak is.  And more selfish.  They think like politicians, obsessed with making themselves look good, whatever the cost.   If other people have to get hurt in the process; too bad.  That’s the way it goes.  Kolchak is the last guy they want around,
    someone who is not only in your face, but steps ahead of them.

    image

    Carl Kolchak–his ego is infuriating to people in power

         Kolchak’s lady friend Gail finds him a book on vampire lore, and he educates himself real fast.   What Kolchak finds out about a vampire’s powers is not so different from what the heroes in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula find.  Kolchak learns the necessary weapons: a crucifix, a wooden stake and a large mallet/hammer.  Stoker’s book mentions the vampire’s sensitivity to daylight.   It emphasizes too something that few or none of the Dracula movies had mentioned—a vampire’s physical strength at night.  Already you have seen the killer taking on a guard dog, a Doberman, and killing it with his hands, with barely a struggle.

    image

    A crowd of police is unable to stop the killer

         Kolchak’s intelligence lets him match the law enforcement people step-for-step, and later gets him a few steps ahead.  The police are stuck at a point Kolchak already got past; they think their suspect is insane, with vampire delusions.  Kolchak has seen enough to believe their man truly is a vampire.  He has already gotten a good look at this man, identified as Janos Skorzeny, said to be over 70 years old.  Yet Skorzeny has fought off several police
    officers and survived nightstick blows to his head.  He has
    also survived numerous gunshots, not just from handguns but from a shotgun as well.  Unless every shot missed him, very
    unlikely.

    image

    Gail believes in Kolchak and has the instincts to point him
    in the right direction

         Your perception of Kolchak changes once he decides to go into Skorzeny’s house alone.  Not every smart-ass narrator would have the nerve for this.  The scenes inside the house don’t grip you as hard as for example, similar scenes in Silence of the Lambs or the original Psycho.   Some, but not a lot of music is heard.  There is little use of editing for shock. Instead of Skorzeny suddenly jumping out and grabbing Kolchak, the movie simply shows him pulling into the driveway.

              Yet these scenes still carry their share of tension.  You already know what Skorzeny is capable of doing, in scenes at the blood bank and in the backyard and pool.  And Kolchak is not experienced in dealing with vampires—he’s no Buffy.

         In addition, Barry Atwater, who plays Skorzeny, creates a sinister, powerful presence.  An actor vaguely familiar from guest shots on a wide variety of TV series and three years on one soap opera, Atwater is up to seizing his big opportunity.  And without saying a single word. His expressions, his  intense hisses and sighs make up for the missing dialogue.

    image

    Barry Atwater as Janos Skorzeny

    As unlikely as it sounds, The Night Stalker may  have influenced Silence of the Lambs.  One small, brutal detail, the vampire keeping a woman captive, tied to a bed, hooked up to a blood bag.  Her face pale as a ghost, she is barely alive, her mouth sealed closed with adhesive tape.  Like Catherine, the Senator’s daughter in Silence, she is on schedule to die.  But not
    until she has served her purpose, for a killer who has no concept
    whatever of her as an individual.  Kolchak wants to save her but knows he must deal with Skorzeny first.  You feel for her and for Kolchak too, in this insane house.  You hope he is ready to deal with all he has gotten himself into, much the same as you feel for Jodie Foster, trapped in the pitch-black of Buffalo Bill’s basement.

         One more unique feature in regards to The Night Stalker.  It was the inspiration for a brief TV series, also starring Darren McGavin.

  • THE REVENGE OF FRANKENSTEIN

         The Revenge of Frankenstein was the second of seven movies that Hammer Studios produced featuring Baron Frankenstein and his many creations.  Six of them starred the remarkable Peter Cushing as the baron.  The baron turned out to be one of the most memorable characters not only in Hammer history but in movie history.  Revenge shows you many of his multiple facets, his contradictions as a human.

       The Curse of Frankenstein, the first of the series, was a major money-maker in Britain, the USA, and in several other countries.  The money it earned gave Hammer a great deal of freedom to explore their vision. This was especially true for one director, Terence Fisher, previously unknown except in Britain.

       In general, Curse got terrible reviews from movie critics, who were horrified, scornful, contemptuous.  Looking back, this is no big surprise. Horror movies, like rock and roll and comic books, were treated like an embarrassment by the mainstream; as if they
    deserved no place in culture.  Probably the most appropriate word for their status would be “marginalized.”

       Remember too, that in 1956 people were a lot more frightened by other things.  Atomic bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just 11 years before.  Not only the USA but the Soviet Union too, now had nuclear capability.  Movies like The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Them!  had a strong emotional pull on
    audiences frightened about bombs being tested, possibly used in
    war.  A wave of “giant” movies followed: giant wasps, grasshoppers, a praying mantis, spiders, a scorpion, a Gila
    monster, even crabs and lots lots more.  Never had Frankenstein or Dracula seemed so irrelevant.

       But Hammer had the insight to realize that they had something worth sticking with, in the character of Baron Frankenstein.  His contradictions kept you from judging him guilty—just when you were sure he had committed the unforgivable, he had the capability to make you change your mind…or at least reserve your judgment.  You never doubted his superior intelligence or his skills as a doctor. Often you admired his lack of pretense, his no-bullshit
    attitude that few characters around him shared.

       Yet none of that could blind you to his arrogance, his self-centered motives.  He was more than willing to use people, then throw them away with no regret.  He viewed his personal success as more important than the lives of the unenlightened.  And for the baron, “the unenlightened “was a group that included practically everyone.

       The Curse of Frankenstein ends with the baron checkmated, condemned to death for the killing his monster did.  Revenge picks up the story soon afterward, with him awaiting execution.  But you notice a new character along with the priest and the executioner.  A man with a paralyzed, contorted arm and leg but something in his expression revealing native intelligence and calm under stress.  This is Karl, a man the Baron has gotten to know well in prison.  Karl’s eyes meet those of the executioner; you hear sounds of a struggle.  Soon afterward, you find the baron healthy and free.

       Months later, the baron, now calling himself Dr. Stein has re-invented himself, far better than anyone could have imagined.  Not only has he become the most respected (and best-paid) doctor in his town, he has established a clinic for the poor which allows him to cover a multitude of sins.  The charity work makes him a teflon man; it is impossible to criticize a humanitarian like Stein.  Other doctors in town are jealous of his money and reputation, but have no way to bring him down.

       The truth is far more ambiguous.  Though Dr. Stein is dedicated to his moneyless patients, these same patients serve as organ banks for the new creation he intends to show the world.  He dreams of the glory that awaits him for his achievement.  But he is obsessed too, with all who have condemned him in the past.  Almost as important as the admiration of fellow scientists is the fantasy of shoving his creation in the faces of everyone who have ever called him arrogant, crazy, or blasphemous.  “I will
    have my revenge,” he predicts.

       Karl has dreams too.  For long stretches of
    Revenge, they overshadow Dr. Stein’s plans and
    schemes.  Karl is someone you relate to—you feel for him
    a lot.

         Not that the idea of putting someone’s brain in a new body was anything original.  This theme was used several times in the Universal Frankenstein series of the 30’s and 40’s. But I cannot recall any scene from Universal with the power of this one in Revenge: the contorted Karl looks upward, longingly, at the body he dreams of inhabiting. It’s not a long scene, but you find it sticks in your consciousness.

     

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    The body Karl dreams of inhabiting

         Anyone who has ever felt a dislike or hatred about the way they look can understand what is in Karl’s heart.  You find this theme in
    The Glass Menagerie, Cyrano de Bergerac, Mask, the Ray Bradbury short story The Dwarf, even the Springsteen song Dancing in the Dark (“I wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face.”) and countless others.

       To Stein, his plan seems simple enough: remove Karl’s brain, place it into the new body he has constructed, wait for Karl to recover from surgery, and receive his due credit from the world’s scientific community.  But outside forces will take this quest in a different, horrible direction.  It is as if the world means to stop him cold.  As brilliant as Stein is, he is helpless to control all the variables in his complicated world.

       Margaret, a beautiful woman of much wealth, insists on volunteering at Stein’s clinic.  Stein, afraid of alienating her powerful father, allows her to do this, within his limits.

       But Margaret’s presence sets off a deadly chain-reaction.  A sneaky, manipulating servant at the clinic (Richard Wordsworth, so powerful in Curse of the Werewolf) tries to impress her.  He tells her Stein is doing surgery in secret on clinic patients, and shows Karl to her, in his new body.  To complicate things more:  Stein’s assistant, Dr. Kleve, talks to Karl about how famous he (Karl) will be as a result of Stein’s scientific triumph.

       Karl had met Margaret once before, in the days when he thought of himself a cripple and nothing more. Immediately he felt a strong infatuation.  Now, the chance he has for a real relationship blinds him to every other possibility.  He is genuinely afraid that Stein will use him, like a personal trophy, in the victory celebration for his
    achievements.  A basically shy man, Karl has no desire to show off his new body (“I’ve been stared at all my life.“)

     

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    Karl–His surgery goes according to plan–but complications he
    never planned on

         Without much advance warning, Stein finds everything he worked for slipping away.  You feel his disappointment, then your own guilt for feeling that disappointment.  But the real loser is Karl, who kept his end of the bargain (saving Frankenstein/Stein from the executioner) and finds that his new body fails him
    painfully.

     

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    The aristocrats’ world abruptly stunned; Karl’s plea for help
    exposes Frankenstein

         It’s not a surprise that the Baron’s failures make him more bitter as he ages.Frankenstein Must be Destroyed and
    Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell show him as meaner, less caring, even more of a user.  But part of us somehow continues to root for him.  At least one critic has written about the scene in Psycho where Norman waits desperately for Marian’s car to sink into the swamp.  Suddenly there we are, like Norman hoping that it sinks too.  At its best, Hammer’s Frankenstein series has a similar effect.

  • WENDIGO

    CAUTION–SPOILERS NEAR END

         Like so many movies I wrote about, Wendigo sets its sights high.   It refuses to follow commercial formulas.  Not that it
    succeeds at everything it tries to do.  Many of its special effects are unconvincing.  The story may seem confused, or too ambiguous. Others will find it pretentious.

         What does Wendigo hope to accomplish, that makes it stand out?

          It shows us a frightening series of events, coming hard and fast.   You feel their effects on an upper middle-class Manhattan family, especially their young child.  This young boy, Miles is too bright, too imaginative not to try to put these devastating events into perspective.  It is a chilling process to watch Miles do this.

       As Wendigo begins, Miles is sitting alone, in the back of a large, well-furnished car on a dark country road.  He is absorbed in some private game; in one hand he holds a plastic model of a wolfman slightly resembling the character from the 1940’s movies.  In the
    other hand, a figure resembling a transformer.

       George and Kim, Miles’ father and mother, talk quietly in the front seat.  Upscale Manhattan talk, high-power careers.

       Then in a second, everything changes.  The car slams into a male deer.  The deer propelled over the roof, leaving a trail of blood across the windshield. Then it is lying by the side of the road, motionless but not dead.  The car is trapped in snow and mud.  Three local hunters approach the car.  All carrying high-power
    rifles.  Two have that “same shit, different day” look on their faces.  The third has a look of quiet fury—a walking time bomb.

       George is able to keep it together.  “You mind putting that thing down?” he asks calmly.  But you see Miles’ face, literally twitching as he takes this in.  It’s not as if his family ignores him; when one hunter shoots the buck, Kim gets out of the car and screams at him for using the gun in front of Miles.

       The family has a long wait for a tow truck.  The hunters, not asked to stay, remain at the scene. The angry one, Otis, suddenly walks over to the car and tells George he busted one of the buck’s antlers.

       Finally the tow comes.  The driver knows the hunters, and they convince him to let them pull the car free.

        George refuses to pay them, saying, no one asked for your help.  Kim gives them money; Otis thanks her sarcastically.

       Your first impression:  things could have worked out much worse.  Like in Deliverance.

       But keep in mind, Miles is a young child who’s never heard of Deliverance.  He’s just seen an innocent creature killed, his car stuck in the middle of the wilderness, and his parents confronted by men with guns.  Not exactly The Velveteen Rabbit.

       At first, the house where they’re spending the weekend looks safe and comfortable.  Miles never sees the bullet holes in the windows and wall, but George notices. And without a doubt, Miles picks up on his father’s anxiety.

          Miles draws pictures of what he remembers. The buck. All the blood. Unable to sleep, he looks through the illustrations in his book of Native American History.  The (appropriate and realistic) violence in the pictures means more to Miles than ever before.  He falls asleep but dreams of Otis coming in the room and shooting
    him.

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    Miles’ drawing–so much fear he needs to let out

         The next morning is sunny and bright. They drive to town; the landscape is stark, but not grim. In fact, beautiful at times.  Kim and Miles stop at a thrift shop.  From Miles’ point of view, many
    close-ups of antique toys and illustrations.  Frontier violence. Men tough as nails and animals larger-than-life.  No doubt Miles is still trying to make sense of last night.

       He stares at a wood carving in one case.  A strange but gentle Native American man describes the figure to Miles.  The Wendigo,  a truly powerful spirit, capable of taking on many forms.  “It can fly at you like a sudden storm…without warning.”

        “Always hungry, its hunger is never satisfied.  The more it eats the bigger it gets, the bigger it gets the hungrier it gets.”

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    The figure Miles finds

         Miles is more intrigued than frightened.   He appears to view the legends as another form of super-hero story.   He has frames of reference for those.

        But the buck’s violent death is different for him.  Back in the car, he is recalling the Native American’s words, “there are spirits that are angry” as they drive by Otis’ house and see the buck hanging on a rack.  Miles imagines the buck’s angry spirit and is terrified.  He may well feel responsible; he was riding in the car that hit it.

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    Otis–not satisfied till he gets vengeance

         You see a dramatic change in Miles when George takes him sledding.  The father does most of the talking as they walk up a long hill. He recites a little bit of Robert Frost’s poetry, exactly right for this snowy day.  Miles asks his dad if he’s heard of the Wendigo.   George answers in a reassuring way: probably it only eats the bad guys, not good kids like you.  He speaks a little about
    people’s need for mythology.    Telling his son: don’t disbelieve it, but don’t view it literally.

          These moments represent a near-perfect father and son bonding.  The father points the way for the son growing up and viewing the world.  He doesn’t tell him, look at it my way, but gently introduces him to his perspectives.  Miles is more than willing to listen; not a clone of his father, but able to integrate his viewpoints.

       Only seconds after they start downhill, George falls backward off the sled and lies motionless.  Miles is afraid his father is dead.  The wind picks up suddenly; the snow blows in circles.  Miles abruptly
    is frightened and runs.

       Hours later, Kim finds Miles asleep in the snow, in shock.  They search for George; he seems to have walked away.  After a long search they finally find him near the house.  Although he is conscious and talking, they can see he has lost a lot of blood.

       Kim sends Miles inside to bring out a blanket; Miles does it, stopping to pick up the wooden figure. Standing next to his bleeding dad, Miles momentarily sees something—perhaps the real Wendigo, two or three times as tall as George, made up entirely of bare, dead branches.  He recalls the words, “It can fly at you…and devour you…”

       As they drive to the hospital, George is in a delirious state and talks a lot.  You imagine Miles’ struggle, processing all of it, on top of knowing that his father was shot.  George asks him about the
    wooden figure, tells him, “See?  I was listening to you…Give me your hand, Miles.”

       In the car and waiting in the hospital corridor, Miles hears a much-condensed tale of life and death from his dad.  Not that Miles is anywhere near ready for his initiation, but it is forced on him,  like it or not.  Every word deeply powerful in its own way.
    “Miles, I want you to take care of your Mom…Such a
    beautiful day…You’re my family…I’m always gonna be with you…”

       Then his dad is rolled into the OR; Miles is alone and he knows it.

        No one notices Miles entering the room while his father is prepped for surgery.  He doesn’t see much blood but it is clear his dad’s life is hanging in the balance.  Miles imagines in graphic detail his dad sitting up, screaming for help.  Miles faints.

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    Miles sees the wooden figure as his protection

     

     

    SPOILERS AHEAD

    *********************************************************************

       Sometime later, Kim finds Miles on the floor. Later still, Miles watches his mother in the corridor while a woman from the hospital talks to her, and ominously drops his dad’s boots.  Seeing Kim’s expression, Miles probably knows already.   His dad is dead.

       Only a few minutes later, Otis is wheeled down the same corridor.  His eyes meet Miles’ for a moment, then Otis is gone, too.

       You never find out what goes through Miles’ mind, seeing Otis.   That Otis is about to die too? That the wooden Wendigo protected him and his mom, but not his dad, not Otis?  That he himself willed the Wendigo to kill Otis?  That the angry spirit of the buck, working somehow through the Wendigo, killed Otis?  So many questions, so few answers, especially for a city kid; the Catskills may as well be Siberia for him.

       To many, an ending like this must be unsatisfying, a reason not to like Wendigo.  Too much ambiguity, too much not explained.

       But think about a movie like The Emerald Forest,(1982) and you may get some additional perspective.

       In that film, Tomme has grown up among adults who have taught him long and hard about his world.  They can. sense exactly when he is ready to become a Man.   They not only give him the appropriate ceremony, they send him on a vision quest to ensure he finds his own way.  Miles is much younger, and lives in a society which has lost touch with most of its rites of manhood.  This is the real horror of Wendigo;  imagining yourself in Miles’ shoes.

       With only the little bit of learning he has had, he now must face life without a father.

       I can see plenty of negatives people will find with this movie.  Too ambiguous.  It jumps around, telling too many stories at once.  Amateurish special effects at times.  Shock-editing with no clear
    purpose. All valid complaints…to some extent.

       But look at Miles and all he is forced to go through.  His struggle to put any of his strange journey into perspective makes a story that cuts deep.

  • WITCHFINDER GENERAL

        Witchfinder General comes close to being the ultimate revenge fantasy.  It is unique in other ways too.  Vincent Price gives possibly his all-time best performance, working with a director who didn‘t want Price to start with.  Third, it is about as grim as movies get. Not as bloody as a few, but bleak.

          For years, it could only be found in a version prepared for the USA, retitled The Conqueror Worm, to make it sound like an Edgar Allan Poe movie.  (That version ended with Vincent
    Price reading the last lines of Poe’s poem The Conqueror Worm.)  Because of extreme violence, it was often shown with massive cuts.

         Price’s reading is effective and the lines of poetry do complement the story you have seen.   But actually the story has nothing to do with Poe’s fiction. Instead, it was based on a novel by Ronald Bassett. Bassett’s novel is loosely based on a real man, Matthew Hopkins who worked as a witchfinder in England during the 1600’s.

         One of the people who produced this movie describes Hopkins as a bad man who makes the people around him bad too.  You could argue that Hopkins only takes a festering situation and exploits it.

          A civil war in England filled with great religious persecution already rages.  Different religious groups (mainly, Protestants and Catholics) are anxious to destroy other groups.  Hopkins gives them an easy way to do this, by denouncing their enemies as witches.   Again and again, you see Hopkins and his assistant Stearne dragging people away, then torturing them or killing them, while others look on, some with satisfaction, some with blank looks.

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    A world with all decency gone   

        Hatred, jealousy, religious intolerance all contribute to what Hopkins is allowed, and encouraged to do. But is he truly a bad man?

       You can’t possibly see him another way.  The movie never gives you the least reason to justify anything Hopkins does.   He is only for himself, torturing anyone he’s able to, and using the torture for whatever money, power and women he can get along the way.  The script does not go very deep into any psychological motivation for his actions; all he knows is inflicting pain.
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    Matthew Hopkins–man without conscience

    Hopkins’ effects are seen most on the hero, a farmer-turned-soldier, Richard Marshall.  The script does not try to analyze Marshall deeply either.  He is more of an Everyman in a Hell-ish place and time than someone you get to know deeply.

        Hopkins is responsible for the death of Marshall’s old friend John Lowes.   Lowes is also the guardian of Sara, Marshall’s bride- to- be.
    Marshall is torn between his love for his wife, and his vow to
    kill Hopkins.   He doesn’t know yet that he actually may have to choose between the two.   The civil war is changing his life…too fast.  He has just killed for the first time.  By doing this (shooting a sniper) he saved his superior officer and became a hero.

         But clearly, soldiering has brought out the violence in him too.  He tries his best to resist this; when Sara says to him “The army has taught you rough manners,” he struggles to be tender with her.   But hatred for Hopkins will make that impossible.

         One of the reasons Witchfinder General works so well is that it
    sweeps you up into this deadly desire for revenge…then clearly
    shows you  the actual revenge.  It’s the classic case of: Be careful what you wish for…

         Reeves’ outlook is a bleak one.  Marshall is someone who truly wants to do the right thing.  He wants no harm to come to Sara and to Lowes.  When Hopkins deceives Sara into having sex with him, then has Lowes killed, Marshall promises Sara to take revenge.  But again and again, you get the sense that the world is not a just universe.  Already it’s clear that it is not a safe place.

          In directing, Reeves works hard to show the contrasts between the calm, serene beauty of nature, and the brutality of people.  The movie starts in a pristine forest—sunlight actually creating a cross between the trees.  All is quiet.

         Then, the sounds of hammering.  It is a man putting together a gallows to hang a witch.  Soon she will be dragged into this scene, with not a soul doing anything to protect her.  Many in the crowd look happy to see her die, many seem totally uncaring.  Nowhere do you see the least sign of compassion.

           Lowes’ neighbors hate him and are willing to see him die because of their religious differences.  But if he has wronged them in any way, the movie never shows it. Later, Marshall tells Sara she will be safe in another town, Lavenham.  They find the same hatred and bigotry exist there too.

         To get his revenge on Hopkins, Marshall is willing to put Sara’s life in jeopardy, actually see her tortured.  It is as though his love for her has been held in suspension; revenge must come first.  Sara gets a long, intense look at the man Marshall has become…with devastating results.   At the end of the movie, both Sara and
    Marshall seem lost to insanity—possibly forever.

         Witchfinder’s director, Michael Reeves, was forced to use Vincent Price as Hopkins in order to get financial backing from the American film company AIP.   The movie was actually produced by a small English company, Tigon.  Reeves wanted an English actor,
    Donald Pleasence, ( Dr. Loomis from the mental institution in
    Halloween I and II).

         I am a big fan of Pleasence.  If you can find it check out the obscure Charlton Heston movie Will Penny  (one of Heston’s personal favorites) for Pleasence’s incredible performance.  A truly scary portrayal, a man you pray you’ll never run into.  I caught myself more than once, picturing Pleasence doing some of the scenes Vincent Price was doing, and very effectively.

         Having said that, I think that Reeves got most of what he wanted out of Vincent Price. Price’s tendency to ham it up, that slight wink to the audience; these are nowhere to be found.  Price is cruel, unprincipled, cold as ice.   But he never overdoes his performance.

           A lot has been written about Reeves’ outlook, which is bleak, especially for a movie made in 1968.  As in Night of the Living Dead, you find few heroes able to follow their ideals and show people a path out of prejudice, festering jealousy, and apathy.  In this climate, the few good people are swept away in the flood.
    They are quickly turned into victims, or blind seekers of revenge.

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    For a long while, Hopkins can corrupt all who listen to him

  • REANIMATOR

      In 1984, a brilliant theater director and playwright made the jump from the stage into movies.  Stuart Gordon was virtually an unknown outside Chicago.  Out of all his choices, he decided to make a horror movie, a decision based most on money factors.

    Reanimator got a standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival as a midnight feature.  American movie critics had good things to write about it too.

    Gordon’s movie (co-scripted with Dennis Paoli and Brian Yuzna) deserved all this word of mouth.  Although cheaply made, the writing, directing and acting were professional and more.  You probably won’t think about this until later—watching this picture is like riding a roller coaster.  But to make the absurdly crazed story work, everyone involved had to play it straight.  To the nth degree.  If you’ve seen Reanimator, I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.

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    Stuart Gordon; Despite a “too much ain’t enough” approach to
    style, he is generous and thoughtful in his interviews

    The plot is loosely based on an H.P. Lovecraft short story.   It’s not easy to describe Lovecraft’s fiction briefly.  His great strength was his imagination—to see further and deeper.  Edgar Allan Poe had a
    similar gift.  The years that passed between Poe and Lovecraft were filled with scientific discoveries and advances.Lovecraft used some of these as a jumping-off point. For example his fascination with other dimensions. Invisible to virtually all, but still there nevertheless; strange forces, strange creatures awaiting a chance to break free.

    Another gift Lovecraft had– the insight to see
    the limitations of science.  In other words,
    scientists might say– this stuff you’ve dreamed up:
    survivors of the Old Gods, creatures from other worlds,
    other dimensions, black magic, witchcraft, cannot be proved
    scientifically.

    I think Lovecraft would answer this way: Science has its own limitations, it can’t account for everything.  No way can our science disprove it either.

    Lovecraft’s biggest weakness?  Probably, his characters.  Although many of them narrate their stories in an overstated, borderline-hysterical tone, Lovecraft doesn’t develop them much.  As generous a person as he was said to be, he doesn’t seem that interested in the people in his stories. He married and had women friends but few female characters—the only memorable woman I can remember appeared in ashort story called The Thing on the Doorstep.

    Gordon, Paoli and Yuzna had the imagination to ask:  What if Lovecraft had pushed the sexual limits in his stories as far as they could go, along with everything else? What would that look like?  As far as I know, no Lovecraft adaptations before had asked that question.  The Reanimator team tried something taking real courage:  Take Lovecraft’s vision/imagination and flesh out the characters including their sexuality.

    Hardcore Lovecraft fans may not necessarily like what the writers came up with.  But I think they would admit that to interpret Lovecraft in any way that does him justice, you need great imagination.  I think this movie does that…at the very least.

    And briefly:  For all his ‘overstatement’ Lovecraft knew how to use a story to set you up.  Go back and re-read The Rats in the Walls…how flat, how mechanically the narrator tells the story…till the last page. Crazy things happen–much earlier in Reanimator, yet slowly but surely its story is also setting you up for an out of control finish.

    You meet Herbert West right away,  a student in a European medical school, unsuccessfully trying to bring a dead man back to life.  The authorities have a strong suspicion West killed the man.  But they let him go, in return for his promise to get out and never come back.

    The next time you see him, he’s a student in Arkham, Massachusets.  The staff at the new school is unsure; is he is a genius, or a psycho?  What they don’t know is that West is like a silent avalanche coming straight at you.  He’s picking up right where he left off, and they may as well try to stop a tidal wave.

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    West (Jeffrey Combs)–egomania that rolls over everyone in sight

    West doesn’t even bother sucking up to the people in power at Arkham.  He’s about as far as you can get from a people person.  West is interested in one thing and one thing only—a compound he’s created that can bring the dead back to life.  All it takes is an injection of the bright electric-green liquid.  The substances West used are never explained—you have to take his brilliance for granted.  But for all his genius, he is the ultimate accident about to happen.

    The first to be swept up in the tidal wave is Dan Cain, a bright, kindhearted, dedicated medical student. Dan is already in a difficult situation.  He is in love with Meg, the beautiful daughter of the medical school dean.
    Dean Halsey is a basically good man, but over-attached to
    Meg, and an arch-conservative.  He’s always gotten along with
    Dan, but would go ballistic if he knew his daughter was having sex
    with him.  And Dan has no money; he is on scholarship, a
    scholarship totally at the dean’s discretion.

    From out of nowhere, West barges into Dan’s life.  (To ease his money problems, Dan has placed an ad for a roommate.)  In no time, West sizes up the situation with Dan and Meg.  He blackmails Dan into letting him stay. Meg feels intuitively that Dan is in deep deep shit already.

    The reality is even worse.  Dan’s cat goes missing.  Meg finds the body in West’s refrigerator. West denies everything.  But days later, Dan hears ominous noises and follows the sounds down to the basement. There he sees West, struggling to get the now-crazed cat off his back.

    West talks about his discovery.  His formula will work on lifeforms dead less than 12 minutes, and their brain not traumatized.  He mentions overcoming the “6 to 12 minute brain death,” something Dan knows well.  (He lost a patient, only days before; someone he was sure he could revive.)  West’s words strike a deep chord in Dan: “We can defeat brain death.”

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    Dan–in awe of the possibility of defeating death

    Dan is torn between disbelief, disgust, and an overwhelming wish to give mankind this great discovery.  He allows West to
    inject the cat—again.

    “Don’t expect it to tango,“ he tells Dan. The cat screeches quietly, then loud.  “Birth is always painful,” West says.

    Dan sees that West is out of control—anyone with a pulse can tell.  But West’s self-confidence, his dream of  defeating death—all this touches something in Dan.  He doesn’t want to lose another coded patient when he could be using this weapon.

    West reminds me of Hitler—a man who believes in the purity, the ultimate greatness of his vision.  He will let nothing stop him.  Humanity, individual lives are minor factors compared to the supreme force of his will, translated into heroic deeds.

    Dan is like the German people who followed Hitler.  They took a leap of faith in the man’s character, because they wanted so much to believe in the greatness of his vision.  They were desperate for someone who told them…You want glory?  I can give you glory beyond anything you’ve ever dreamed.

    Again and again, Dan does his best to clean up the mess that West (actually both of them) has caused.   He ignores what he sees; that reality means little to West. That West sees every obstacle life throws them as one more chance to use his liquid and observe the results.

    If you have never seen Reanimator, you may be getting the wrong idea—that this is a tragic story, a grim experience.  A plot
    about missed opportunities, like the Hammer Frankenstein series. But the movie changes; slowly but surely its irony, its twisted sense of humor begins to show itself.   Speaking just for myself, horror and comedy are usually a miserable combination.  But every once in a while, adding subtle comic elements does work.  The Howling (I) is a good example.

    The humor starts to bubble up to the surface at just the right moment—West and Cain have reached the point of no return.  West is confident again after bringing the cat back.  Ready for the big enchilada…human beings.  But you can’t perform this experiment without some major risks.

    Their plan to minimize the risks means sneaking into the morgue.  Then look for the best possible subject—a body recently deceased, the least amount of head trauma.

    And still, things go wrong…big time. Their cadaver of choice, a big muscular guy, is suddenly awake, psychotic, throwing the two men around like rag dolls. Dean Halsey shows up at the worst possible moment.  By the time the cadaver is dead again, it has strangled Halsey to death.

    West may be crazy, but he can think on his feet.  And he has a plan—his usual.   When in doubt, whip out the liquid and his syringe.  He injects the dean.

    Halsey is back…insane but alive.  West somehow creates an explanation made-to-order.  No criminal charges (yet) for West and Cain.

    They don’t realize yet they have a problem as serious as criminal charges.  Turning Halsey into a lunatic has opened the door for a sociopath who’s waited a long time for this.  Dr. Hill.  Only Halsey held more power than Dr. Hill, whose quiet, thoughtful manner hides a devious, sleazy core. Hill sees West and Cain as enemies he must stamp out.

    image

    Dr. Hill–even his severed head is dangerous

    Cain’s dream of benefiting mankind is already evaporating fast.  What started as a quest for progress has now turned into duel between West and Dr. Hill.  For Hill it’s all about power and fame. Lobotomize Halsey so that he can never be cured.  Force Meg to marry him—he has always had a secret obsession with her.  And steal West’s formula. Two egos the size of Mt. Everest, about to butt heads

    Much of Reanimator’s humor is the “did he just say what I thought he said?” variety.  In one scene, West injects his liquid into a severed head.  The head lies silent on West’s table.  West taps it impatiently with a pencil. The eyes struggle to open.  West’s  scientific curiosity is unending.  “What are you thinking?  How are you feeling?” he asks the head.

    image

    West–unending curiosity

    It’s easy to forget how well-done the characterization and acting
    are, in the midst of so much bizarre, nonstop action. Gordon’s creative view includes this:  A movie can’t scare you if you don’t care about the characters.  Meg, played effectively and more by Barbara Crampton is one example. You definitely care about her.  She searches for some way to stop the madness that the man she loves—Dan, is getting pulled into.  And her father becomes a near-zombie; you feel her desperation.

    On the DVD’s commentary, Gordon does not come off as I expected… chuckling like crazy over his own ingenuity. Instead he is gracious in praising the acting of Crampton and David Gale  (Hill) under trying circumstances. Paoli talks about the creative process; how attached he became to West’s character.  How he (Paoli) could move his story ahead, based on how alive West had become, in his mind. I think the filmmakers’ decision to leave out
    any tongue-in-cheek attitude was absolutely right, the only way to play this.  They got what they wanted and I am grateful.

  • FROM BEYOND (UNRATED DIRECTOR’S CUT)

       Note—From Beyond was released in 1986 with an
    R rating.  Years later, the deleted material was
    rediscovered and edited back, into the unrated DVD.  This
    is the version the filmmakers originally hoped to release.

    Unfair as it may be,
    From Beyond will likely be compared with director
    Stuart Gordon’s earlier movie,
    Reanimator.  Reanimator may well be better
    but don’t let that blind you to what’s good in
    From Beyond.

    People may feel–not much of a story.
    From Beyond feels like more of a rush
    job–not enough time available to develop the plot, the characters.
    But that’s not such a big deal; Its focus isn’t plot so much as
    breaking down barriers.

    What sort of barriers?  First, barriers
    in the scientific sense; the search for new dimensions, hidden
    sensory awareness, concealed worlds.

    Second, breaking barriers simply by creating
    its outrageous plot and characters.

    Like a peeping tom, you get to watch people
    change, as they surrender to forces from their subconscious.
    As Bubba Brownlee the streetwise detective says, “It’s
    changing us…and not for the better.”

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    Detective Brownlee; streetwise but unprepared for the
    Resonator’s effects

    Like
    Reanimator, this movie is based on a short story
    by the horror/fantasy/science fiction writer H.P. Lovecraft.
    Lovecraft died fairly young in 1937.  Unlike most of
    us, he was alive when Einstein published his Theory of Relativity,
    the Wright brothers flew the first plane,  physicists gained
    insights into energy levels within the atom, and many more
    scientific ideas came to light.

    Like another excellent writer of that era,
    Algernon Blackwood, (The
    Willows, The Wendigo), Lovecraft became intrigued
    with other dimensions.   People are still fascinated with
    these questions years later—remember the
    Little Girl Lost episode on
    Twilight Zone, (1962) expanded in 1982 as
    Poltergeist.

    Like Poe and Ambrose Bierce, Lovecraft
    ventured deep into dark, grotesque environments.  A cynic
    could say that Lovecraft’s fiction is not ideal movie material
    because it’s virtually lacking in sex and humor.  Both
    Reanimator and From Beyond add
    sex by the shovel-full, and also a bit of humor.  Still,
    these movies (and Gordon’s later Dagon) manage to
    capture Lovecraft’s spirit better than anything before or since.

    From Beyond is not
    particularly strong on ideas.   I doubt very much this is
    what the filmmakers had in mind. In one revealing interview,
    Carolyn Purdy-Gordon, the director’s wife, summed it up:
    “Stuart’s approach is: ‘Too much ain’t enough.’”   The
    filmmakers are fixed on being as outrageous as possible.
    Aiming more at a series of shocking scenes than a well-told
    story.   This approach is not that different from Dario
    Argento’s, although its style is quite different.

    The story’s message, perhaps:  Until you
    really get your shit together, there are places you need to stay
    out of.

    Two scientists, Pretorius and Tillinghast had
    created a resonator, with the power to expose them to another
    dimension.  Pretorius, the more reckless, has had his head
    twisted off, and returns as a slimy mass able to change his form
    at will. (Most of the special effects are quite good, especially
    given the limited budget.)

    But Pretorius, like so many people you’ve
    known, finds that his massively increased powers don’t solve his
    sexual and ego problems. Despite all he’s seen and his new powers,
    Pretorius is still the same loser as before.  Tillinghast,
    who knows him best, describes Pretorius as sexually impotent and
    fixated on S&M.

    Now Pretorius has monstrous powers, but he has
    remained an abuser.  He only talks a better game.

    Dr. McMichaels is a psychiatrist assigned
    custody of Tillinghast, whom the authorities believe murdered
    Pretorius.  Her brief journey into black leather doesn’t
    teach her much either.  Probably she managed to keep her
    sexuality in check before.  Now she is unable to control her
    wilder urges.  But as you would expect, being touched by
    someone as slimy as Dr. Pretorius brings her only disgust.

    I don’t want to let ourselves, the viewers,
    off the hook so easily either.  The bizarre, sleazy sexuality
    we view allows us to indulge our idle curiosity, our morbid
    fantasies.  Remember how innocent Dr. McMichaels looks at
    first, in her white dress and large eyeglasses.

    Hard as it is to admit, I bet many of us have
    tried to picture sex between such a woman, and a shapeless, slimy
    creature from another dimension.   That lots of us, riding a
    train, perhaps sitting at a business meeting, have had similar
    fantasies about someone dressed in perfect style and revealing no
    emotion.   The more sophisticated, out of reach, and straight
    out of Elle or GQ  they
    look, the more intense our daydream.  I suspect that we’ve
    had fantasies of being Dr. Pretorius for a day (remember his
    classic piece of dialogue:  “Humans are such easy
    prey.”)

    So many of Lovecraft’s short stories begin or
    end in insane asylums, with a character’s mind blown-out,
    overwhelmed by the enormity of their experience.  In
    From Beyond, Tillinghast (the closest thing to a
    traditional hero) is accused of murdering his colleague, then
    diagnosed as schizophrenic.

    Dr. McMichaels’ professional reputation gives
    her the authority to take Tillinghast back to Pretorius’lab.
    The only condition; they go accompanied by a police
    detective, Bubba Brownlee.

    Here’s where you get a taste of
    the bizarre imaginations of Gordon and screenwriter
    Dennis Paoli.  In a scene worth the price of admission, Dr.
    Pretorius, believed dead after having his head torn free of his
    body, reappears.   Transformed into a mass of unknown life
    form.

    Pretorius tells them he did not die…only
    “passed beyond.”   Adding   “I am master here.”
    Then changing the subject, “Who’s the lovely woman?” The same
    imagination and flair that made Reanimator such a
    revelation.

    image

    Dr. Pretorius–not dead, but…passed beyond

    Unfortunately, Dr. McMichaels has developed a real
    taste for the resonator’s effects.  Tillinghast and Brownlee
    are convinced it is dangerous, much like a physical addiction.
    But McMichaels’ interest in the pineal gland, and in the
    resonator’s ability to erase sexual inhibitions overcomes her
    caution.  While the two men sleep, she turns the
    resonator back on, its force blowing her dress away from her.
    When Tillinghast comes upstairs, she kisses him
    passionately.

    Then Pretorius is back, part human,
    part…something from the next dimension.  He pulls her against
    him, licks her cheek, feels her breasts with slimy, elastic,
    elongated

    image

    Dr. McMichael’s sex fantasy… turned really ugly

    Tillinghast runs down to the basement to
    disconnect the main power source but is attacked by a huge
    worm-like creature.  Pretorius transforms into an organism
    with an orifice that envelopes McMichaels’ head.  Both
    creatures seem inspired by incarnations of
    The Thing, made only a few years before.
    Finally Tillinghast is able to cut the power, shut down the
    resonator.

    While Suspiria is well known
    for its bright blues and reds, From Beyond uses a variety of
    pinks, magentas, violets and purples to underline its atmosphere.
    These shades do the job, lending each of these scenes a
    bizarre, out-of-control feel.

    What other scenes make
    From Beyond such a powerful experience?
    Take a look at the scenes where the pineal glands take
    people over.  (This gland is not fiction; it is a
    small structure located in the brain.  After much research,
    its functions became understood, but not until the 1950’s.)

    But in this movie, the pineal gland functions
    like an id running berserk.  Pretorius and Tillinghast’s
    enlarged pineal glands actually resemble small snakes poking out
    of holes in their foreheads.

    Tillinghast wakes up in the hospital and
    begins to stagger around with a sudden appetite for human brains
    (best served raw).  At first, he has to settle for getting
    diseased brains he finds in hospital waste bins.  Shots from
    Tillinghast’s point of view show things around him in bright,
    iridescent colors— more vivid because the real corridor is
    practically all black and white–it looks like a cheap video game.

    image

    Dr. Tillinghast–craving brains  

    You sit there thinking–it can’t get much weirder than this.
    Then it does.

    Again, don’t be in a hurry to compare this one
    with Reanimator.  Just be thankful for
    Gordon, Paoli and their sick minds.

  • DEAD ALIVE

         Dead Alive is an easy movie to dismiss.  It features non-stop humor, most of it over the top and too camp-y to believe.  But its approach to the humor is similar to Reanimator; It doesn’t try to be cute in its attitude and give you a lot of knowing winks. This is
    one of many signs of the still-developing, but enormous talent of
    its director, Peter Jackson, later to direct Heavenly Creatures, then the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

    The basic story seems simple, but there’s more going on than you notice at first.  Lionel, one of the two main characters, will probably strike you as the ultimate mama’s boy, a complete nerd.

    Owing to that, you expect him to react in some horrible way to a different woman.  That another woman will treat him well, then pay the price.  Several times in the story you expect him to snap completely.  Anthony Perkins all over again.

    The charm of this movie is watching how differently things work out.  You are primed for this moment where he loses it, where we get the real Lionel; he is off on the serial-killer express.

    It doesn’t turn out this way.  The other main character, Paquita, senses the good in Lionel.  She is not the woman you think she is: a good-hearted but hopelessly naïve person; not able to see how damaged the guy is, until it’s too late.  Paquita may not be book smart but she is brave, loyal, and has learned a lot from the folk-wisdom her family gave her.

    To be fair, Lionel is no Norman Bates either. Again and again, he tries his best to be kind to his mother, Vera.  She is unable to return kindness to anyone, though.
    All she knows is selfishness and a desperate desire to keep
    up appearances.  Things fall apart when mother is bitten by a
    rare monster-monkey while she visits the zoo.  Instead of heading off to the ER, she calls a nurse to treat the wound. Big mistake.  The toxins from the monkey will soon kill her and turn her into a zombie.

    image

    Lionel’s mother–bitten    

    Dead Alive will no doubt be fun for people who enjoy its many tributes to earlier movies.  Most of us enjoy that.  What you may miss though, is a strange sort of back-and- forth between Vera, in a feverish delirium with her festering wound, and her fantasy about Lionel and Paquita having sex. Vera’s infected wound, swelling and pulsing, is contrasted to the increasingly hot sex; the wound finally bursting and spitting out liquid like some foul ejaculation.  Except for David Cronenberg’s movies I can’t remember ever seeing sex associated with a festering wound before.

    You get a hilarious dinner scene, complete with obnoxious, boring conversation, while suddenly Vera’s ear falls into custard dessert.  Then Vera is dead from her infection.

    Remember Norman Bates cleaning up after his mother?
    Lionel seems headed in the same direction.  He seems
    more concerned with getting the blood off the floor than in his
    mother’s death.  But Paquita doesn’t just stand there watching.  She suddenly remembers her grandmother’s prophecy about the man she, Paquita, loves—”Dark forces are amassing against him.“  She is still unable to help him right away. But you get the feeling that she will do more, later on.

    Sometimes, you can watch a movie, and find yourself asking, for example, “What if this character had made the opposite decision 15 minutes ago?” or “How would this scene look if this movie was a heavy drama instead of a light comedy?”
    Questions like these went through my mind, about this point in Dead Alive—so many of the situations reminded me of Psycho.  Lionel, like Norman Bates, is clearly trying to do the right thing.  He does not want to reveal his mother’s death and tries to hide all traces of her.

    But “doing the right thing” works out better for Lionel than for Norman Bates.  You don’t expect this mama’s boy to do what Norman could not—ask for outside help and get it. Lionel  moves  away from the bad mother’s spell, and reaches out to Paquita  (and her grandmother) for help against the “dark forces.”  And she helps him by giving him an amulet which will save him over and over again.

    image

    Paquita–always there for Lionel through all the horror

    No doubt about it, Lionel does need plenty of help. In no time, he has a whole houseful of zombies to take care of.  Besides his mother he soon has her nurse, the minister, a monster baby (inspired partly by It’s Alive and by Baby Herman from Who Framed Roger Rabbit) and a gang of thugs he met while digging up his mother’s body.  He feels that all of them are his responsibility to care for, and he does all he can. Yet he is also trying to escape his Joan of Arc martyr tendencies.  He wants more from life than just a second dysfunctional family.  When his sleazy uncle shows up and wants the house, Lionel says he can have it.   And he means it too.

    image

    Monster baby

     

         Dead Alive finds outrageous humor in these plot twists and turns.  Much of the humor is camp-y.  Check out Lionel’s armor as he enters the basement to tranquilize his mother.  And the overhead light swinging crazily, as it did in the Psycho basement when Lila (Vera Miles) finally learns Mrs. Bates’ secret.

    Lionel needs to tranquilize his zombie-mother just to keep her quiet at her own funeral.  Mother and son wind up in a bizarre embrace during the service.   Lionel can’t even dig up his mother’s body without aggravation.  He is surrounded by thugs who taunt him.  Ironically, his mother shows up to save him (a brief but effective tribute to the original Carrie).  This lucky break permits
    him to bring her back to the basement, the first of many other
    zombies to hang out there.

    Meanwhile, his uncle has invited a whole bunch of his friends over to party.   The worst kind of rowdy trash. You get a bad feeling you’re going to see a train wreck where the party people run smack into the zombies. The situation is not so different from the wind-up in the original Dawn of the Dead, one of the most violent movies ever at the time it was released (1979.)
    Peter Jackson deserves a lot of credit for dealing with this nonstop splatter with a surprisingly light touch.  Making it
    disgusting without any real viciousness is a task that somehow he manages.

    Dead Alive is one of the goriest, over-the-top movies you will ever see.  But it is also fun (and not just for real sickies).  And it could be most affecting for anyone who has ever had a crush on someone, but was held back by a dysfunctional family of origin and their own shyness.

    This may sound hard to believe but take my word for
    it.  This is a true original.

  • SUSPIRIA

        Sometimes you have to accept a movie on its own terms.  Many critics would mention I Walked With a Zombie as an example.  Like these critics, I feel that the mood it creates is what is important.   Mood is more important than the plot, at least
    as important as the characters. Suspiria is even more of an extreme case, with characters and plot not well developed at all.

       But in many ways these two movies could not be more different.  It’s like comparing Mozart to Foxey Lady (Jimi Hendrix).  One is subtlety itself, one grabs you by the throat.  Both movies have their share of faults and both have the courage of their convictions, something I respect.

       If you were forced to pick a category, you could say that Suspiria is about witchcraft. Yet the movie barely scratches the surface of history, practices, and folklore in witchcraft. This won’t come as a big surprise if you’ve seen other movies by its director, Dario Argento.  You might describe some as “murder mysteries” but you’d be disappointed if you watch them for the detective work.  Finding out the murderer’s identity and their dark secrets isn’t a big deal. Not much explanation for anyone’s “motivation.”

       What you do get is a beating, from the pounding, surging music, from the endless bright red and blue colors, from the voices veering wildly from soft conversation to screaming, from the facial expressions, especially the eyes wide with terror.

    image

       Not just the brilliant red and blue colors, but the way Suzy is made to look tiny; her courage is even more memorable

     

         Suspiria was said to be an influence on John Carpenter’s original Halloween and it probably was.   But while these  movies were made about the same time, there are serious  differences.  In Halloween, the frequent, jumpy camera movements and close shots of people standing alone and vulnerable keep you on the edge of your seat.  Most of the time these are false alarms.   Only
    you can’t relax because enough of them are the real thing.

       Suspiria, too, sets you up for some major violence.  Unlike Halloween, it’s no great surprise that the violence comes.  When and how it comes is the big surprise.  (You do get some
    false alarms too.)  In my opinion, both of these movies broke
    rules when they came out.  Halloween appeared to over-use the false alarms, Suspiria appeared to over-use both the lead-ups
    and the scenes of gore.  Both changed film styles. Neither movie is for everyone.

       For instance, it’s not easy to take Suspiria’s plot seriously.  Suzy Bannion, an American ballet student, travels all the way to Germany to attend one of the world’s best dance academies.  The night she arrives, a student is killed inside the school. The police find few clues to the murderer’s identity.

       Suzy has no interest in living at the school and immediately finds an apartment to share near-by.  But during her first dance practice, she passes out.

       She wakes up in a room at the school.  A medical “expert”, Professor Vertegast, says she must rest for a week and take a specially prepared diet, including red wine with every meal.  The headmistress tells Suzy that her roommate Olga has generously brought all her things over, so that Suzy can move in.  (Exactly what Suzy did not want to do.)

        That night, fly maggots drop from the ceilings by the hundreds in each student’s room.  The headmistress, Madame Blanc, blames a shipment of spoiled food stored in the attic, the floor above the rooms.  Not exactly what you expect at a world-class school you have travelled 3,000 miles to attend.

     

    image

       Maggots force the ballet students into temporary sleeping quarters

       It sounds far-fetched and it is.  But the plot does the job.   Suzy is the only character you have a chance to identify with, and she never gets the opportunity to plant her feet on the ground.  From the minute she walks out of the airport into a driving rain, she moves from chaos to…more chaos.  Her hair tangled from rain and wind, she hails cab after cab.  They pass by as if she is invisible. The driver who finally stops for her appears to be sealed off like a tomb.

       When she arrives at the school, no one will let her inside.  A girl runs by her in terror.  The only words Suzy catches are  “secret flowers.”

       Next morning, Suzy returns to the school. The headmistress is friendly enough, but you sense something false about her.  She announces that the student murdered last night was Pat, the girl Suzy saw running away.  For most of the remaining story, it is clear that Suzy’s special diet is drugged, as though the school authorities want her as sedated as possible.

       Okay, clearly not the best of story lines. But what is so memorable about Suspiria’s style?

       You already sense it the minute the airport door opens.  The wind blows Suzy’s clothes so hard they rise insanely; she looks as though a ghost has literally grabbed her. Intense music begins to play.  The sound is like a harpsichord, possibly synthesized.   Seven notes repeated over and over, loud.  Then whispering voices, La la la la la la la, in time with the melody, even louder.

       Suzy’s cab reaches the school, as the rain still pours down.  The outside walls an intense red color. You see Pat run past Suzy.  Suddenly Pat is in a forest, with endless thin white trees.

       Then Suzy is gone in the cab, and Pat is
    somehow back inside the school.   She is dressed in white,
    but the bright red walls and lighting all but turn her clothes the
    same red.  The style of the lobby is like some exaggerated
    art-deco.

       Pat is alone again in her room.  She stares out the window at a bright blue night.  Just as the red color in the hallway practically drowned out every other color, now blue does the same here.   Pat looks further out, then sees a pair of eyes in the blue night.  Nothing else, just eyes.  Then madness…chaos.  You will want to see it for yourself

       No doubt, critics have analyzed the roles of the bright reds and blues, and the use of white in Suspiria.  Blue dominating the screen definitely highlights many violent scenes, such as Sara’s (Suzy’s best friend) desperate attempt to escape a room on the top floor. While a killer tries to use a razor to lift the latch, Sara
    focuses in on a lone white window in the upper right part of
    the screen.  White appears to represent peace, salvation… a
    way out.  Another, much quieter scene shortly before this:
    Suzy and Sara, both in white suits, alone in the school’s huge,
    ancient swimming pool.  Like the window in the later scene,
    they are virtually the only white parts of a scheme that would
    otherwise be solid blue.  In this overwhelming blue, they float like white angels.

    .image

       Suzy and Sara; angels in a sea of evil   

       One advantage of using the witch theme in the under-developed plot:  it gives Argento the freedom to allow anything to happen with no explanations.  The maggots. A faithful, peaceful guide dog suddenly turning on his blind owner.  A room at the top floor of the school filled thigh-deep in razor-wire, wall to wall.  An evil figure, his or her identity never revealed, stalking the school, carrying a straight razor.

    image

       Again, a vulnerable creature in a landscape with unseen predators

     

     

       I don’t know if Argento wanted, or chose the American actress Jessica Harper (Inserts, My Favorite Year) for the role of Suzy.
    But Harper turns out to be very good.  Her voice doesn’t betray much of her feelings; it remains calm throughout most of the craziness she goes through.  For a long time, you aren’t sure if that calm voice reflects Suzy’s passivity, or her strength to endure all she is forced to go through.  In contrast, her large, expressive eyes provide most of the clues to her soul.

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    Suzy–overwhelmed, terrified…but unwilling to be intimidated

       But when Suzy finally finds herself without help and alone, you
    see her courage.  Not only is she ready to venture into the
    forbidding top floor, (where she imagines her one friend, Sara,
    either captive or dead) she is willing to take on the witch whose
    spirit still controls the school.    Like John Carpenter soon afterwards, Argento was willing to take his style into uncharted waters.  This movie has its faults but it is an original vision.  And it grabs you by the throat as he intended.

     

  • NIGHT OF THE HUNTER

        Even before the credits finish, you can tell Night of the Hunter won’t be your average western…or thriller…or anything else.  You hear music—straight out of the most savage  westerns.  Music that screams out: a killer’s coming—Lee van Cleef… maybe Robert
    Mitchum?

    And facing the killer down–John Wayne… Gregory Peck?
    No, a young boy alone, really alone, in a world of chaos.
    Abruptly, the music changes into a child’s lullaby, “Dream Little One, Dream.”  You can’t figure out what’s going on, but if you have a pulse, you are getting curious.

    Night of the Hunter is now ranked as an American classic, a world classic.  Yet when it was released (1955) it did not make money.  Its director, the great actor Charles Laughton worked long and hard to get everything the way he wanted.  He dreamed of directing more movies.  But the poor showing at theaters stopped him cold—he never directed another.

    One problem–the movie was hard to put in a category.
    Second, maybe 50’s audiences felt it was too creepy—they had
    enough anxiety in real life, thank you.  Soviet Union moving into Eastern Europe.   Atomic bomb tests.

    Most of us wanted something reassuring— something telling us basically, if you go to church  every week, then things should be okay.  One good example–The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.

    But in this movie, almost everyone believes in God and the church… at least they claim to. Yet the most devoted man of God—the self appointed preacher Harry Powell is a serial killer. Many are taken in by him.

    People are narrow-minded, often mean-spirited. Most 50’s movie-goers were looking for escape… and this wasn’t it.

    No one can forget Harry Powell, the fanatic with one hand tattooed “LOVE” the other “HATE.”  The riveting sermon using his hands that he preaches at a minute’s notice.

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    Robert Mitchum’s iconic role–sociopath posing as a man of God

    But overshadowed by this great character and Mitchum’s great
    performance is an under-rated character and performance—the boy John Harper, played by Billy Chapin.   His career shorted out
    before the 60’s even began; he was still a teenager.

    He is a kid forced to be a man.    People around him want to help but they are useless.  His world is in free fall.  John becomes hard as nails—by necessity.Yet later you see his need for love…his acceptance of love—it hits you like a mule’s kick.

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    Billy Chapin as John; a forgotten actor giving a much under-rated performance

    The story begins with an overhead shot of a small town on a river.  Far from the noise and stress of the big city.  The good old days…

    Not for long.  A group of young kids approach cellar stairs behind a house.  Sprawled on the stairs the dead body of a woman.

    Next, Harry Powell driving through the countryside and small towns.  Loudly asking God what’s next for him. He says he hates women wearing anything provocative.
    But when you see him next, he’s in a burlesque theater.
    You have a bad feeling—a religious fanatic with some heavy
    compulsions.

    image

    Harry Powell watches the burlesque show

    Meanwhile a young brother and sister sit quietly, not knowing their peace is about to be shattered—forever.

    Suddenly their dad appears, on the run after a bank robbery: he killed two people. Only a minute to tell his son John everything.

    I’m hiding the money I stole.  Only you will know where. You can’t tell anyone where it’s hid.  From that moment, John is thrust into an adult’s world.  Again and again, the movie reminds you he has no choice.

    The father, Ben Harper is sentenced to hang.

    Sharing Ben’s cell is the same fanatic, sentenced to
    30 days for car theft.  Ben talks about the money in his sleep; Harry is desperate to know where the cash was hidden. Ben quotes the Bible; “a child shall lead them.”

    You see John’s new life—all quiet desperation. Kids sing a nasty song about a guy being executed—they don’t care if John and Pearl hear them.

    The movie goes out of its way to make Harry seem a
    force of nature.  The proverbial wolf in lamb’s clothing that
    eventually finds us.  You see his shadow as a train speeds
    by; he sings a hymn loudly.  A man mentions meeting him.
    Next the preacher is in town.  Doing the dramatic ‘Love
    and Hate’ parable again.  John stares at him with pure
    dislike; he knows bullshit when he hears it.

    But John is finding out fast that no one else can see through Harry.  The store owner Mrs. Spoon is taken with the preacher from the beginning, and she is someone people listen to.  She is shallow, vain, ignorant…and sure about her small-minded opinions.  Her words are important in getting Harry to stay, and in getting Willa, John’s passive mother to marry him.

    Maybe this was the biggest reason people disliked
    this movie in 1955, for not  taking that populist attitude.
    That down-home, salt-of-the-earth people may not be
    educated, but they have instincts; they can spot a liar by
    intuition.

    Here, they often come off like Mrs. Spoon.  Not
    just foolish but self-assured in their foolishness.  A good
    talker with Bible-knowledge can sucker them.

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    A facade no one sees through

    Once again, you watch John, unable to control what
    happens around him.  He can only try to stay strong.
    His mother, without much will of her own, soon agrees to
    marry the preacher.  John snaps at Harry: “You’ll never be my
    dad.  You’ll never make me tell—“

    He catches himself a second too late; he knows Harry
    knows.

    The honeymoon is painful for Willa.  Not so
    much that Harry says sex is disgusting, but the way he throws it
    in her face.  Telling her—look at yourself in the mirror (she
    is not even  dressed slutty).

    Willa becomes a powerful speaker at Harry’s prayer
    meetings.  But even she can finally realize Harry wants more
    than preaching.  The subject of the stolen money will not go
    away.

    Willa has a realization.   A strange one. She tells Harry the Lord brought him into her life to deliver her from sin.  The money is gone but that no longer matters, only her soul being saved.

    Harry’s reaction is quick and brutal; he stabs her to death.   Next day the grieving preacher tearfully tells Mr. and Mrs. Spoon that Willa drank, took the car and ran away. But he will do the right thing by his kids.  All the while, the hand tattooed HATE stares right in your face.

    Here, the movie goes furthest into horror film territory.  The next time the children see Harry, they watch him through a filthy basement window.  John suspects (correctly) that nothing can stop Harry now from hurting them.

    So much of the next stretch is shown from the kids’ point of view—watch the shot where Harry talks to them from the
    top of the basement stairs.  For the first time he shows them
    his knife…and mentions using it on ”meddlers.”  Both kids
    know he means it.

    John’s plan is to say the money is in the basement—and somehow get the time to escape.  But Harry’s not stupid—he tells both kids to come down with him.

    You see Harry put a hand on John for the first time;
    forcing his head against the top of a barrel.   Harry pulls
    out his knife—like someone about to make a ritual sacrifice.
    Pearl can’t take anymore; she tells him the money is inside
    her doll.

    Before Harry can move, John drops a heavy shelf on
    him.   For a second it looks like both are within reach of a
    furious monster…then Harry’s foot slips on a glass jar. Terrifying; you remind yourself, these are children.

    They get a rowboat.  The look of the movie is suddenly different.  Dark sky, large bright stars; more like an illustration from a kid’s book.  Almost as if the children have left the everyday world and entered a fantasy. But ‘fantasy’ is not the same as ‘safe.’  You see a shot of their rowboat far off, and much closer, a thick spider web—the boat seems to pass right through it.The message is clear—Harry is part of this dream world.  On a stolen white horse, he patiently follows the river road.  Days pass.  Once in the dead of night, John hears him singing a hymn as he rides by.  “Don’t he
    ever sleep?”  John asks himself.

    Exhausted, half-starved, the children reach a muddy
    riverbank and sleep a long time after sunrise.  A shot of the
    daytime sky; dark clouds but a holy light breaking free.  A woman calls to them, sounding tough, like a disciplinarian. But lighthearted music makes you feel that first impression is wrong.  And the words she speaks tell you for sure: “Gracious, so I’ve got two more mouths to feed.” Unconditional love.

    Pearl is more than happy to find a new family. (Four other kids live with Rachel Cooper, this gracious older woman.)  John is afraid to trust anyone.

    Slowly, you feel him open up, risk trusting Rachel. When she takes the kids into town, people know her eccentric ways.  But they definitely like and respect her…John can see it.

    Rachel tells a Bible story.  Everyone faces her except John.  But he listens to every word. When the two of them are alone Rachel tells John to get her an apple.  A long pause.  “And get one for yourself too.”

    Not for the first time, she asks him about his parents.  Hesitantly, John puts his hand on top of hers.
    It’s a powerful moment.  His need for love was not dead; only frozen inside him a long time.

    But it was certain Harry would find John and Pearl. He rides up to the house on the white horse.  You want to believe he has finally met his match; someone who sees him for what he is, who will risk everything to protect her children.

    You want to believe that John’s time in Hell may finally end.  Life has taught him the world is not a safe place.  He has met bad people, actively ignorant people. His mother was passive she failed her kids.  His (real) father made a decision too, one that left his kids alone. Much later in the movie, you see an owl looking for food, then a rabbit.  From inside, Rachel hears the rabbit’s scream.  “It’s a hard world for little ones,” she says.

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    Rachel (silent film star Lillian Gish)–the first to protect John and Pearl

    Rachel is special, unlike anyone John knew before. Not that she knows everything.  Her oldest foster child Ruby fools her a long time, sayings she goes to town for sewing lessons.  She is actually hanging out with town boys.

    But Rachel never claims she knows everything.
    More important, she knows how to forgive.  Watch the
    scene where Ruby tells her she’s been lying.  Rachel
    understands what Ruby was looking for– love.  Ruby thinks
    Rachel will hit her.  “Did I ever—“   Rachel starts to say– you know right away she never has.  A “Christian” in the best sense of the word.

    John finds Rachel after a long time drifting. Without a father, with no one to guide him.  A cynic could say it was actually John who caused a lot of his own pain by keeping his word about the money.

    They have an argument.   But remember, John is just a kid.  A kid trying to function as an adult…but still a kid, with a kid’s emotions.  You can’t judge him like an adult.

    Like so many other child actors, Billy Chapin (John) crashed to earth and never came back.  Watch this movie and judge for yourself how much we lost.

  • CARRIE

        The years spanning the mid 60’s and the early 70’s saw some major changes in American movies, and in movies worldwide.  Barriers on nudity (The Pawnbroker, Women in Love) violence (Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch), sex (Barbarella, I am
    Curious Yellow) and language (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Tropic of Cancer) were smashed… dramatically and rapidly.  Not to say this new freedom meant  everything in those years was better than before—it was not.  Watch Mandingo, or Zardoz, and judge for yourself.

    But many adventurous filmmakers took advantage of what was given them—with startling results. Carrie, written by Lawrence D. Cohen, and directed by a young Brian De Palma, is a good example of such a daring attitude paying off—big time.  Carrie was based on the first novel published by a young unknown named Stephen King—soon to become the best-known writer in the field of horror.  Its plot is rather simple, its characters not all that deep.  The
    dialogue is nothing great.

    But dialogue is not what Carrie is about.  It features some deeply intense acting from Siss Spacek (Carrie).   Other stand-outs are the up-and-coming John Travolta, Amy Irving, and Nancy Allen.  Not to mention the first movie in years by the veteran actress Piper Laurie.And Carrie is loaded with images that add
    up to the impact of a tidal wave.

    You know this only a few minutes into its story. As the credits roll, you become a privileged viewer in a high school locker room.  In slow motion, girls walk, fully nude out of a steamy shower.  The effect is more sensual than pornographic—you sense their freedom, their confidence. Their whole lives are ahead of them and they know it.  They seem comfortable with their bodies, and have a sense of belonging.

    Something else too.   As the excellent commentary to the new Carrie DVD points out, the nudity has another purpose.  Generally, films of this period saved nude scenes for late in the story.   This scene tells you you’re dealing with filmmakers not afraid to do anything. Be very afraid.

    One girl, Carrie is left to shower alone, and the contrast with the others is painfully obvious.  Carrie is an outsider, rejected by all.  She is not comfortable with her body.  During the shower, Carrie gets her first period, and unlikely as it sounds, she has never learned what to expect. Her reaction is pure terror.  She runs, nude into the locker room, desperately seeking help.

    image

    Intense fear and shame

    None of the girls shows the least bit of compassion.  Instead, they throw a shower of tampons at Carrie, chanting “Plug it up!  Plug it up!”

    Only the gym teacher Miss Collins understands what Carrie is experiencing.  The way Carrie reaches out for her makes this obvious.   But in order to calm her, she must slap Carrie in the face—hard.  At the same moment, a light bulb abruptly shatters—a sign of worse things to come.

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    Miss Collins wants to help but has only a clue how deep the
    family problems go

    Carrie is taken to the principal’s office. The administration appears to understand that Carrie never learned about periods.  But they don’t know where to go with this.  In addition to their lack of concern (they call her “Cassie” three times in a row) Carrie senses, correctly, that they simply wish to get rid of her.  An ashtray on a desk begins to vibrate intensely—then breaks.

    You follow Carrie home.  You expect the ultimate
    dysfunctional family, and you’re right.  Carrie lives alone
    with her mother, a religious fanatic in the worst sense of the
    word.  Not only does she show her daughter a complete lack of
    love, she is obsessed with sin and sinning.   Someone who
    rules totally by force–not one to be reasoned with… and proud of
    it.

    She is convinced that Carrie is filled with sin. Later you will find out her reasons.  But looking back on the story, it’s no real surprise.  Mrs. White slaps her several times, then locks her in a closet.  In this closet, Carrie is forced into close range with a statue of St. Sebastian, body pierced by arrows.

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    Mrs. White; Abuse she justifies as doing God’s will

    That week, Miss Collins announces that the entire gym class will be punished for their treatment of Carrie. Most of the class accept this matter–of-factly, but one girl, Chris (Nancy Allen, who later married De Palma) defies the teacher, and begins to plot her revenge.  At the same time, prom announcements go out, and students begin making their plans.

    One girl, Sue Snell, decides to make things right with Carrie.  Sue asks her boyfriend Tommy to take Carrie to the prom.  Carrie accepts.  Sadly, Sue’s plans are on a collision-course with the violent revenge thought up by Chris and her boyfriend Billy.

    For the first time in her life, Carrie stands up to Mrs. White, over the issue of  the prom. You already know that Mrs. White sees the prom as the Devil’s work, a place for evil doings.  But Carrie stands her ground, and goes ahead, despite her mother’s warnings of doom and damnation.

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    Carrie’s yearning for love is unmistakable

     

    Without giving away too much of the plot, the prom starts out like a dream come true for Carrie.  Then suddenly, all Hell breaks loose.  The trap set by Chris and Billy does its deadly work.  Sue is helpless to stop it.

    Amy Irving, who played Sue, mentioned that
    many viewers misunderstood what went on, thinking that Sue was part of the revenge plan too.  On a second viewing, you can
    see clearly that Sue is not.   But the first time you watch, things happen too fast—the action is hard to follow.

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    Brief moment of pure happiness away from home

    Carrie lets her powers loose and people die. The gym, with its perfect prom setting, is turned into chaos, then into an inferno.  In seconds, people are crushed to death, electrocuted, burned alive.  Those who die are bad people, good people (including Miss Collins who always did her best to protect Carrie), and indifferent people—it is strictly a matter of chance who survives.image

    Carrie’s world destroyed   

    Carrie walks slowly home, her face filled with expressions of agony and terror.   Desperate for comfort. You may remember Robert Frost’s famous line of poetry;

    “Home is the place where, when you have to go
    there/ they have to take you in.”

    That is all Carrie gets from her mother, to be taken in.  To Mrs. White, Carrie is now a lost soul. Even Carrie’s pleas to her mother to hold her, are in vain.

    Life for Carrie has become ultimate emptiness.No one to sympathize with her, much less be a friend.
    The world, that her mother warned her about again and again, has turned out to be as just as bad as Mrs. White promised.

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    An insane response to insane events–Carrie lashes out

    But the true horror; Home is every bit as bad as the outside world.

    Sissy Spacek, no longer unknown by 1975, but not famous yet, was a revelation in Carrie.  Her large eyes and face full of expression keep you riveted to her. To say that you feel her pain is the ultimate understatement.  How many of us as teenagers let ourselves trust someone we didn’t know that well, and suffered deeply for trusting them?  How many of us, feeling unloved and hopeless, wanted to act as Carrie does?

    You may be a teenager, recently a teenager, or someone with memories still fresh in your heart; memories of wounds that cut you to the bone. Carrie may well reopen the pain of those old
    wounds, whether you suffered them out in the world, or behind
    closed doors where you lived. I can’t speak for everyone.But I feel a lot of us have a part of ourselves that longs (if only for one second) to take the revenge Carrie did. This movie allows you to experience the mix of joy and horror in that revenge.

  • (REC)

     For most of us, The Blair Witch Project (1999) was the first
    horror story we experienced that tried to disguise itself as real-life events.  (A few novels had actually done this, hundreds of years earlier.)

    It claimed to be an unfinished documentary shot by three students.  The three had disappeared in the wilderness, never seen again.     In other words: We’ll never know where they went, but this seems to be what happened.  It was an exciting idea, rarely used before. Lots of imitations followed, not just in the USA, but in places like Japan and Korea too.

    Like some of those movies, (REC) presents itself as a live TV program. A reality series, all its footage shot live on location.
    An attractive newscaster, Angela, covering the lives of
    people doing exciting jobs after dark.  You don’t get to know
    Angela well, apart from her on-the-scene life.

    But you know she can do her job.  You watch her switch on a glowing smile, like clockwork each time she needs to. She understands that interruptions and delays are part of
    the job—you need to turn the smile back on, the second the camera rolls again.

    She has the perfect face, a million-dollar smile, large expressive eyes.  The camera operator Pablo doesn’t say much.  He needs to stay in the zone; stay close to Angela, give her the shots she wants. To know what she wants without her talking.

    Their show is called While You’re Asleep.  Tonight they are covering Barcelona’s fire department.  Angela makes a smooth
    introduction as she meets the firefighters.  She is a people person, enjoying the back-and-forth.

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    Just another exciting night; Angela introduces the latest
    While You’re Asleep episode

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    Hanging out with firefighters; Angela knows how to have fun
    during down time

    The filmmakers know we are familiar with reality-TV.  We have seen our share of shows with people doing dangerous jobs: police, animal cops, corrections officers. And professionals filming the action or shadowing these people; we are familiar with them too.

    But all this familiarity works in the movie’s favor. We sit there, not expecting anything worse than usual. Then we get more than we bargained for. In (REC), the heroes (like Manu, the firefighter you get to know best), are put in a situation foreign to them…alien.  The same with Pablo and Angela. They are out of their element, cut off from the people and equipment they need.  Instead of the usual help, they get orders, warnings, threats. Not to say they haven’t dealt with emergencies before.   Far from it.

    But they are quickly realizing this situation is much worse, many levels up, from anything they have experienced. They enter an apartment building and get the basic story: an old lady in danger.  She lives alone, no family, barely any friends. They enter the apartment.  A long hallway, making it hard to see her well.  She stands at its far end. Her nightgown is covered with blood; her expression is a crazed one.

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    The old lady—more than they bargained for

    In one second, everyone’s expectations transform…totally.  She jumps at the closest firefighter and bites his throat.  The others can’t get her off him for a long while; she draws a lot of blood.  They rush the injured man to the lobby.

    A second huge change from everyday reality—the
    building is sealed off—you can’t leave.  Only a short
    announcement:  Health authorities made the decision for
    everyone’s safety. Instead of trying to do a lot of things and
    none of them well, the people making (REC) decided to stick to a few themes, keep it simple, and do those well.

    Okay… so what did they succeed at? Most obvious, they show you a devastating downhill slide, from the everyday, generally routine life of newscasters to…the opposite.  A small piece of Hell on Earth, full of human dogs with rabies.  You’re locked in, no help is coming.

    Second it shows the reality we usually don’t get to see— people locked in, for everyone else’s good. The ones numbered underneath the headlines: 32 Feared Dead.

    Not to get melodramatic, but our TV remotes make us a little like gods on Mt. Olympus.  We sit watching from the outside with that freedom; if the news is too depressing we can turn it off, or flip the channel to American Idol.

     (REC) shows us the reality we choose to turn off. A message on the loudspeakers; someone will come inside in a few minutes to run blood tests.  The man enters, dressed in a sterile suit.  (You never find out if he’s an MD, nurse, M.A. or a tech.)  The medic gives the lobby more bad news.  This unknown disease is spread in saliva.  Authorities believe it started with a dog in a veterinary hospital. It awoke in a state of rage.  But that’s all we’re telling you.

    Jennifer is a quiet little girl that Angela was drawn to, spent a while talking to.  She mentioned having a sick dog.  The man tells them the crazed dog had the same name as Jennifer’s dog, Max.

    Since the interview, Jennifer has remained quiet in her mother’s arms, expressionless.  The whole lobby stares at them.

    Without warning, Jennifer whirls around and bites her mother in the face.  She leaps to the ground, stands snarling a second at the crowd, then like a blur, is up the stairs and gone.   The medic and Manu go upstairs looking for Jennifer.

    The next few scenes were the ones attacked most often by critics.  Lots of sarcastic comments about “incredibly stupid, typical horror-movie characters” and things like that.  It is hard to disagree.

    You might argue that these people are not so much stupid as they are caught in an adrenaline rush. But the nasty comments have some truth.  The two men wear no protection, not even gloves.  No reason to think Jennifer will let them do anything to her.

    image

    Jennifer— likely infected; not one to be treated without precautions

    Another long dark hall.  Nobody. But as Manu steps back into the hall, Jennifer is suddenly there.  A true jump-out-of-your-seat moment, intense as any you have seen.  You get a good look at Jennifer. Blistery lesions on her face, discolored skin.  No one would bet that you could get near her without getting bitten.

    Screeching, she is all over the medic.  Manu has to try to pull her away.  She makes noises like a crying baby, only more shrill. Downstairs, less survivors than when they left.

       (REC) has been in two chapters so far.  Chapter One;  everyday TV-reality show. Chapter Two; on-the-spot emergency news coverage. The third chapter has just started; pure personal survival in a building full of crazed people.  In no time, Pablo and
    Angela are the only ones not bitten.

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    Angela—her world in a rapid slide downwards

    What happens afterwards may not be logical, but you won’t have time to think about it till later.  (REC)’s story has some minor holes in it, but the rest of the movie is brilliantly shot, directed, and edited.  Its style feels radically different from before.

    That makes sense.  It is not a familiar TV show any longer, or even a breaking news story.  What you have are two people on the run, desperate to stay alive.

    They find themselves in the building’s only vacant apartment.  One room once used as a medical laboratory. Old newspaper clippings.  A girl in Portugal, originally thought to be possessed. Gradually—people suspecting she was ill with an unknown virus.   A higher-up giving an order; terminate this girl now for everyone’s safety.

    Nothing original;  But imagine it a moment from Angela’s point of view.

    (REC) has that power to pull you in… out of your neighborhood-mall multiplex theater into…her world. The acting is that good.  The way it is shot makes you feel it—a TV newscast gone terribly wrong…straight into Hell. You are right there with the last two survivors in those festering rooms.

    If you can spare a second, you may remember Angela as she was, earlier.  The contrast is devastating.

       (REC)is short for a main feature, less than 80 minutes. But you can only guess how much is packed into these moments. A roller coaster.

    Blair Witch left most of the terror in its ending to your imagination. Many walked out of the theater mystified, either not getting it, or convinced the whole story was a bad con job.  I have to admit; at that point, I was in the first group.  (I remember others saying simply—Don’t waste your time.)  But like the old cliché, this movie is up close and personal.  Not much story to remember, but action that hits you like a freight train.

  • PET SEMATARY

    Some of us are fortunate enough to experience a novel, poem,
    painting…or movie, that strikes us as perfectly planned, all the
    way from the outline in the artist’s soul.

    Maybe you felt it right away.   Or maybe you read about it, or learned about it from someone who loved it too.   A friend, a review, a teacher.  Someone who could interpret the artist’s vision.  What they dreamed of creating… how they went about doing it—going from a simple idea to a finished piece of work.

    Don’t expect this from Pet Sematary.

    You won’t feel the filmmakers, especially Stephen King (who wrote the novel and the screenplay) knew exactly where they were going.   Not everything fits together… not by a long shot.

    Yet not only is this a pretty scary movie, it may leave you with unanswered questions you think about a long while.  Disturbing questions.

    The DVD commentary mentions that it took King a long while to publish the novel Pet Sematary.  Not much explanation, but
    strong hints that the book’s themes hit close to home.  Like  the novel’s family the Creed’s, King and his wife had young
    children then, and lived in a house close to a highway with trucks
    speeding by.  Like the young Ellie Creed, King’s daughter had
    a cat killed on that road.  Writing it had to take a toll on King.

    The movie starts out bland.  The Creed family moves from Chicago to small-town Maine.  Louis, the father starts a job in a small-college infirmary.  Rachel, a home-maker, daughter Ellie, full of life; perceptive, endlessly curious, and subject to strange dreams.  Their son Gage just starting to walk, and as full of life as Ellie—a sweet, sweet child.

    Their new house a dream-come-true, in every way but
    one.  It’s located just off a busy highway, filled with huge
    trucks travelling from a local manufacturing facility.  Day
    and night these monsters speed by.

    The Creed’s bond right away with their new neighbor, Jud Crandall.  A huge, gruff looking guy, Jud is actually full of kindness and warmth.  The Creed’s are neighbors he has longed for.

    Right away the Creed’s ask Jud about a path near their house.  Jud shows them where it leads, a cemetery (misspelled by a child) for dead pets, many of them killed on the road.  Most of the markers are hand-written, in phrases a young child would write.  Only Rachel finds it frightening. Jud’s take?  Not a scary place, but a place of rest.

    His first day on the job, Louis encounters death.  A student, out jogging, hit by a truck, killed instantly.

    Ironically the dead student, Victor, becomes a sort of angel for Louis, doing his best to steer him away from danger.  The first night Louis sees him in the bedroom, he is sure he is dreaming.

    “Who said you were dreaming?” Victor says. He leads Louis down the path to the pet sematary, then warns him.  “The barrier is not meant to be crossed.”

    Thanksgiving.  You learn about bad blood between Louis and Rachel’s family.  No explanation, but bad enough that Louis refuses to visit.  While his family is away, Louis takes a phone call from Jud.

    Ellie’s cat, Church, on the road, run over.

    Louis and Jud know how much Church meant to
    Ellie.  It’s Jud who gives Louis the idea to bury the cat in the other pet sematary—actually a Micmac tribal burial ground.

    Church is back the next day.  Not physically changed much, but…different.  Real mean. image

    Church–brought back to life

    Finally Louis gets the story from Jud. As a boy, Jud had a dog he loved.  When the dog died, Jud was heartbroken.  A ragman, half Micmac, told Jud about the burial ground.  Jud buried the dog there.   The dog returned—as savage as Church is now.

    Louis and Jud hoped to spare Ellie from the pain of
    death.  The plan works better than expected.  Church is
    vicious with most people, yet treats Ellie pretty much the same.

    Ironically, the Creed family experiences death nevertheless.  Missy, their housekeeper, diagnosed with terminal cancer.  Unable to deal with the unending pain, she chooses suicide.

    Ellie finds some peace in talking to her dad about life after death.  Louis does not follow any organized religion, but has faith just the same in an afterlife.  “I believe we go on,” he says to Ellie.

    But Missy’s death reminds Rachel of her sister Zelda; her slow painful death from spinal meningitis.  Her family never explained why, but her sister got no outside medical care.

    “…like a dirty secret,” is how Rachel describes her situation.The burden fell on Rachel, still a child. Many felt that the scenes of Rachel caring for Zelda were the scariest in the movie, and I can’t argue with that. Could her family have experienced some kind of inappropriate shame about Zelda?  No one will say.  Clearly they had money to spare.    Rachel has never asked them about it.

    When Zelda finally died, Rachel was relieved…to the point of joyfulness.  The guilt about her gladness still haunts her.

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    Zelda–memories Rachel wants to forget

    But worse tragedy will strike the Creed’s; the worst misfortune a family can suffer.  No big surprise; death seems to follow them.  Jud’s words:  The road, the road, the road.  A beautiful breezy fall day, a kite soaring in the sky.  Jud and the Creed family in harmony
    with the season, with their world.

    A few miles away, another monster truck.  Thedriver blasts loud, primal music, Ramones music.  A bringer of sure death.  The Creed’s lose sight of Gage for just a few seconds.   But enough time.  Gage never has a chance.

    You know what happens next.  Louis, unable to face his grief, will wait until after Gage’s funeral, dig up his body, and bury him where he buried Church.  Already knowing the odds; Gage will come back a monster.  Louis ignores Victor’s warning about crossing the barrier.

    You expect this movie to deliver on its promises of terror, and it does.  I won’t throw in many spoilers.

    Leave it at this:  The excellent directing, screenwriting and acting succeed at a difficult job– making the horror in this story believable.

    Why is the story so unlikely to be believable? Think about it.  A sweet young kid, returning from the grave, now a demon… These scenes should have been unconvincing, could easily have been embarrassing, if handled badly.  Give everyone credit.

    I remember renting Pet Sematary when it first came to video stores. My own kids were young.   My feelings then; the story
    played dirty.  Any time you use a child’s death this way, you are playing dirty.

    Two brief insights 25 years later:

    First, none of us gets to say what someone can or
    cannot write about.  Neither can we cannot limit where
    writers get their inspiration.  On the DVD extras, you see
    King watching the movie being shot.  King is all smiles.
    But what he went through in creating the book is another
    story.

    Second, if you hold up older movies as measuring
    sticks for comparison, saying Pet Sematary crosses the lines of decency.  You may be forgetting the savage beating movies like
    Horror of Dracula, Peeping Tom, and Freaks got when they were released.  People then, convinced these movies played dirty.

    Speaking as a fan of all those movies, I don’t ever want to get old and talk about the good old days.  I want  people free to experience barriers smashed, the way I did, watching Psycho, Night of the Living Dead, The Exorcist.

    Still, by mainstream standards, this is a grim, pessimistic, ugly story.  Louis’ decision comes from love, not evil motives.  He only wants a chance to get back the life his family had, for Gage to experience growing up.

    To a fundamentalist Christian, for example, Louis probably sinned deeply; interfering with God’s plan.

    But I doubt that’s where King was coming from. The story of a sinner getting his just desserts would not be as scary as this.

    Scarier still, King possibly had no point to make at
    all.  Maybe the real-life death of his own cat simply created
    a story inside him, and he followed where it went.  The cat’s
    death made him imagine something worse.

    We can be amateur psychologists and ask if Louis “loved too much.”  Not likely.   Not enough evidence.  I think King wanted all of us to be dragged into Louis’ agony—to make it a universal experience.  You would lose that by making Louis over-possessive, a bad father, a workaholic.

    One way I think the story does play dirty.  It forces every parent of a child who died accidentally to re-live that agony.  Part of the American Dream is the universal human dream—the joy of watching your kids grow up.  In a different way, movies like Ordinary People make you feel the impact of having that
    dream grabbed away.

    Ordinary People shows you a family’s struggle to get over a boy’s death; his older brother, his father and mother.   Father and son finally deal with the pain and survive the grieving process.

    The mother had never learned to deal with pain; she retreats.  First by pulling back into herself, second by literally leaving the family she loves.  She has to turn away, to stay alive, to keep her sanity. Many saw her character as empty…or worse.   Always smiling, always capable of saying the right thing, yet giving no nurturing to her son Conrad.  One fairly negative review described her as a monster.

    But watch the movie again; she is not a monster. She is someone with no other way to deal with death.

    I don’t want this to sound like a paper for a literature course.  To say:  The resurrected Gage symbolizes this or that.  But I will for a moment.

    Gage the monster may be the quiet horror the mom, Beth, feels in Ordinary People.   The horror of what can happen to your life at random, with no one to blame. No one responsible.   No one to say, “It’s not your fault,” in a way you believe it.

    In fact, no one can say anything that can ease your
    pain…those words don’t exist.  You feel that you have failed,
    that your life will never be the same.  By giving you a taste
    of these feelings; that probably is the way Pet Sematary plays dirtiest.

    image

    Gage

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