Category: Miscellaneous

   The fury of a mother believing her son was stolen from her…later, left to die.  Her endless search for justice—or maybe endless vengeance… going way past an-eye-for-an-eye.

A young father dealing with the loss of his wife in childbirth.  He struggles to crawl out of the place he has escaped to…he knows his son needs him.   But the pain of feeling is nearly unbearable.   Now he is threatened with losing his job—his work record has been poor since her death. He knows he and his boy stand on the edge of disaster.The last thing the young man needs is to enter this woman’s world—yet he has no choice, if he wants to save his
job.  The house where this woman hanged herself needs to be
sold, and his law firm demands he settle the paperwork. “This is your final warning,” is how the head of the fir
puts it.

The man, Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe, veteran of the Harry Potter series) comes to a town haunted by unending tragedy.  All Arthur wants is to take care of legal business but he is unwelcome.   He cannot understand the reasons all at once.  Everyone in town wants him to gather the papers he needs—and get out—now.

But Arthur can’t do what is necessary without staying a while and investigating a house no one wants any part of.  Everyone in town fears that the vengeful woman’s spirit haunts this house.  If her spirit is disturbed in any way, the town will suffer more tragedy; they already have suffered deeply.

Arthur needs to spend time there, with only a small dog for company.  Some of these stretches will feel like your standard generic haunted-house movie: the mysterious noises, the ghostly figures emerging in silence, the white faces of dead children standing motionless in the rain, the creepy wind-up toys banging cymbals or shakingtheir tambourines at the most suspenseful moments.

Arthur–no choice but to deal with the house and its legacy

Yet Arthur’s character takes this story in some new directions.  His personal tragedy (the death of his beautiful young wife) gives him courage.  Whatever spirits and ghosts he runs into, they can’t do much more to him than life already has.  The house hasn’t got much that can really scare him—he has a job to do, and he is already numb.  You don’t expect him to run screaming out of this house unless it’s something really serious.

Personal tragedy has left him with little else to fear

The irony is that people in town are exactly right—any time the lady has a reason to appear, children will die. And anyone who sees her (Arthur the most likely)—spreads death like a contagious disease.  Her presence at the house is unmistakable—Arthur sees her again and again.  Just glimpses, but enough.  The first child Arthur sees face to face in town dies that day; she drinks lye before anyone has a chance to save her.

Everyone is positive this girl won’t be the last to die—Arthur has seen the woman,and this makes him a sure messenger of death.

Three more children, swept up in Jennet’s spell

You learn that the vengeful woman in black, Jennet, lost her son to her sister, Alice Drablow.  Her son Nathaniel never got the sweet, loving cards Jennet sent him—Alice hid them.  Alice even got legal papers signed to keep Jennet from visiting.  Later on, Jennet came to believe that Alice left Nathaniel to die when their coach sank into mud on the causeway between the house and the mainland.

You watch the movie, and wait to see who in town conspired with Alice the most.  On whom the vengeance needed to strike the hardest.  And ironically the answer is no one—there are no more dirty secrets.  At least none that the movie tells you.  The
Woman in Black’s plot actually reminds me less of an English ghost story than those of recent Japanese horror movies
such as The Grudge or The Ring—where an avenging spirit will hurt anyone it comes across, guilty or innocent.  All it wants to do is lash out—at everyone and anyone.

Arthur doesn’t understand all of this yet.  He knows that Jennet’s spirit has found no rest…and how the deaths of children in town took place.  All of them appeared to be under a deep spell.  They suddenly stopped whatever they were doing, and walked out of windows, or walked into the sea.  The second girl Arthur saw dies by setting herself on fire. What he does believe in is justice, and
bringing the deaths to an end.

He is searching for a way to make everything right.  His wife’s death could have affected him in radically different ways.  He could have become uncaring…believing the Universe is uncaring; why should he care about anyone.

Or his pain could have made him determined to do the best he can, whenever he can, even when he is tempted to slide back into not caring, to escape his own pain.  Watch him put a tiny bird back into its nest while he explores the creepiest room in the house.   Then a crow screams, making him jump.  It lands on a bed.  But Arthur means to do the right thing and let it escape—and he makes sure he does.

Eventually he decides he must re-unite the woman’s spirit with the body of her dead son…even though he must risk his life pulling the child’s body free from the thick black mud surrounding the causeway.  Many of us who have experienced sorrow will later make a similar decision–we need to do the right thing.

The film-makers tried to find a middle ground between the quiet, subtle, almost mannered approach of The Innocents, or The Others, and the loud, slam-shocks and close-ups of Drag Me to Hell or Se7en.
The shocks do tend to be loud in volume, but with hardly any blood, let alone body parts getting chopped off.  Their goal
was not gore. But they did not want a stuffy period piece either.
This is no Masterpiece Theater.

One of the few movies I remember close to this one was the much underrated 1979 film The Changeling, with George C. Scott.  Like
Arthur, John Russell (Scott’s character) is grieving family deaths, and like Arthur, he has no intentions of confronting any ghosts.  But his exploring an old house frees a spirit looking for justice over a past wrong.

That story was probably a more traditional one—revenge is visited on the guilty—and only on the guilty. Too many of the concrete facts are left out in The Woman in Black. You are never told for sure, but it appears that Jennet never had the chance to revenge herself on her sister.  In some way, Alice was able to escape Jennet’s reach, her hatred.

Jennet’s spirit became the proverbial bottomless pit—no amount of vengeance could ever satisfy her.

Many say there are no new stories to tell…and they have some convincing arguments.  But there are not many stories like this one; a spirit of pure hatred, face to face with a character who has almost gone past fear.  An individual struggling to find meaning in the death of someone they loved deeply. You don’t get a twist ending, at least not the kind you have grown to expect the last twenty years or so.  Instead, this story brings you to a conclusion that clearly shows you what each individual carries with them.  Many American Buddhists are taught some variation on the following: Don’t look at the notion of karma as simply, We all get what we deserve.  There’s a lot more to it.  You can look at
the ending as plain and simple…or something more subtle, that you need to think more about.  I really don’t want to give anything more away, to risk ruining it.  See it, judge for yourself.

    Dead Silence sets its aim high, especially for a recent movie.  The filmmakers clearly wanted to tell an original story, not something re-hashed from bits and pieces of other plots.  They wanted the characters to be more than obnoxious people having lame conversations and casual sex before dying.
Dead Silence also tried to blend a rather subtle, ghostly, haunted house atmosphere with a scattering of violence severe enough to give the movie an R rating, and an optional Unrated version.

    This is asking a lot—making a blend like that.  But Dead Silence achieves many of its goals. It wasn’t a big box-office hit, although it didn’t bomb either.  Still, this lack of success is saddening,
considering how many uninspired sequels…and even Parts #3-4’s to various routine stuff are being made recently.

    What are some of the major goals that Dead Silence succeeds at?  Let’s go through some.  Story.  Characters.  The swings in
atmosphere mentioned previously.  Then the acting. Ryan Kwanten, the Australian actor playing the hero Jamie, never overdoes it.  Yet his love for his wife and his unwavering search to bring her killer to justice give him courage which shows in all his scenes.  In just a few minutes near the beginning of Dead Silence, you get a sense of two people (Jamie and wife Lisa) who have truly bonded.

Miles away, many years later, the curse still reaches Jamie and Lisa

     After her death, Jamie is willing to go straight into Hell for answers, whatever his journey may bring.  (A good example: the scene where the clown says to him, “Come closer…”)

     Jamie and his wife Lisa had found a dummy delivered to their apartment.  No return address. Thinking nothing of it, Jamie goes downstairs for take-out food.  When he gets back, Lisa is dead.   And suddenly Jamie is convinced the dummy killed her.

    Dummies started showing up in movies at least as far back as Dead of Night (1945), possibly earlier than that.  Even Anthony Hopkins, more than 30 years before taking on Dr. Hannibal Lecter, made a movie with a dummy, Magic.  Fortunately, Dead Silence is not a slow build-upleading to a dummy gradually taking over someone’s mind, with one person after another telling that same character, “Oh… you’re just letting your imagination get the best of you…”

    Jamie returns to his home town, Raven’s Fair, a small, quiet, isolated place.  Years ago it was prosperous, now it is rundown for the most part.  He already has a good idea of what and who he is looking for.  As a kid, he and his friends had heard stories and scary rhymes about a lady named Mary Shaw.  Jamie believes there is a connection between her and the dummy that killed his wife.

    Mary Shaw, a resident of Raven’s Fair, had disappeared years before, but she had been famous in the town for her dummies and dolls.

     For years now, Jamie had been out of touch with anyone in the town.  He never got along with his father, had no idea that his father had remarried. (Bob Gunton, so powerful in The Shawshank Redemption as the corrupt warden, is effective as
the father.)  His new wife, much younger than Jamie’s dad, hardly mentions Jamie’s grief, and generally seems a little too friendly to him.

    Mary Shaw’s memory still holds a power in this town, especially for the undertaker and his wife.  As frightened as the undertaker is, his wife is much worse—talking to herself, or to someone else only she can see… hiding from time to time in the crawlspace and basement.

   A New York City detective (Donnie Wahlberg) has followed Jamie to Raven’s Fair.  He doesn’t have enough evidence to arrest him yet but he is sure Jamie committed the murder.  He also doesn’t want Jamie to bury the dummy. (Something  the undertaker’s wife tells Jamie he must do.)

Jamie–Lisa’s death makes him follow the clues, even if he
must die to do it

     At last, the undertaker is willing to reveal what he knows about Mary Shaw.  His story is similar to what Jamie remembers hearing as a boy.  Mary lived alone with her dolls and dummies, and was a skilled ventriloquist. Occasionally she did an act at a stately theater located on a lake.

    But there is more.  The undertaker still has intense memories of the last show that Mary did.  He was a sensitive young boy then, very polite, very respectful.

    But another boy at that show was the opposite—rude and disrespectful.  This boy criticized Mary’s skill (he yelled out he saw her lips move while she did her act).  Not long after, the same boy disappeared and was never seen again.  Then several others from Raven’s Fair disappeared too.  Shortly after, Mary  disappeared.  Later, you learn that it wasn’t the boy’s rudeness so much that angered Mary.  It was his suggesting that her dummy Billy wasn’t real.

     Some of the plotting seems a little far-fetched.  You generally didn’t see that much rudeness in small-town America at that time, except where people had big class differences.  Another thing; after all these disappearances in Raven’s Fair, wouldn’t the FBI or at least the state police be called in?

    But as unlikely as you would expect, two scenes here are the strongest in the movie.  First the undertaker’s memories of going down to his father’s workroom to get another look at the dead Mary (his father was also an undertaker). Second, the old photos of Mary’s victims seated grotesquely next to each other, their mouths mutilated.

    The undertaker is afraid to help Jamie more than this.  Jamie goes to what is left of the theater where Mary did her last show, and to Mary’s home near-by.  Here he finds some of her  sketchbooks, featuring designs for more realistic dummies (very creepy, although the pages look way too clean, considering  their age).  Jamie’s father also fills in some of the story from years ago.   The rude kid at the show was Michael Ashen,  Jamie’s great-uncle.
Jamie’s family and their friends killed Mary Shaw.

Mary and one of her children 

   Plenty more plot twists and turns are still to come.  But
perhaps the most frightening scene is only a brief suggestion;
that Michael was not killed right away, but slowly turned into a
doll by Mary.

   Again, it is sad that Dead Silence did not do better in theaters (I need to check out how the video has done).  Meanwhile, the same director’s Saw, a much cruder, less imaginative movie, has already been followed by one sequel after the next.  I found it original, but not much more than that.  I’m thinking I need to watch it again, and then figure out if I missed something.

     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. 

 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 20^th 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

    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.

.

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.

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

  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.

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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

   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.”

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

    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.

   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.

   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.

.

   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.

   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.

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.

    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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

    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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gage

     Deliverance is not a movie
you find in the horror section of the video store.  My
feeling though; if this isn’t a horror movie, what is.

My arguments would be these. First, the
violence, the degree of violence the characters must
experience.  Two strangers suddenly appear into your life.
You can’t get them to listen to a word you say.  They
pull out a shotgun, point it at your face and demand…now drop them
pants.  They are not kidding.  One of them rapes you up
the ass, then and there.  As he finishes, the other starts to
tell a friend with you, you are going to blow me right now.

The second argument; In the 70’s, you saw
movies about Vietnam veterans, forced to deal with violence back
home. The sadly-forgotten Gordon’s War (Paul
Winfield), and Rolling Thunder (William Devane,
Tommy Lee Jones), then a few years later, the much more popular
First Blood (Stallone).  These characters
can slip back into a soldier’s role easily; almost like putting on
an old sweatshirt. I can understand people grouping these movies
in the ‘action’ category.

Ed, Deliverance’s main character is
not a guy like that.  If he was in the military
(even peacetime) the movie never mentions it.  Violence is
thoroughly unfamiliar to him; watch his scared face time and
again.  Yet in the space of several hours he realizes he
needs to kill someone, or he and his friends will never see home.
This is horror for sure.

Lewis, a good friend of Ed, is different, an adventurous
man who loves the wilds, the risks you take in the wilderness.
He has tried to bring that out in Ed.  Lewis is angry
and sad about government plans to dam the largest river in
Georgia. Where there was wilderness for thousands of years, there
will be a “dead lake” in a few months.  He convinces Ed and
two other friends to take a canoe trip; to experience this river
before it is gone.

The irony is this; they want to grip hold of
the present before the future grabs it away.  But the reality
they find is actually a remote past: the worst of the Middle Ages,
where everyone carried weapons and precious little law enforcement
existed.  Or maybe the prehistoric age pictured in the
prologue of 2001. Or the chimpanzee societies you
watch in documentaries, where tribes go out raiding, find monkeys
for food and literally tear their arms and legs off.

Ed–perceptive enough to sense they have entered
another world

In just a few hours, four suburban people realize
they have entered another reality.  And the door back to
suburbia, to civilization, has been slammed shut behind them.
To open that door, they need to do some killing themselves.

Lewis told Ed and their friends Drew and Bobby
to expect a weekend trip; they will be back Sunday in time to
watch the football games.  No problem there.  But Ed has
seen enough, and heard enough from Lewis, about disrespecting the
mountain people they will run into.  That can get you hurt.
Watch his face when Lewis offers a man forty dollars to
drive their cars, and the man says he’ll do it for sixty.
“Sixty, my ass,” Lewis says casually.

Ed’s eyes go wide.“Lewis, don’t play games
with these people.”

This same man is okay with compromising at
fifty dollars.  But you see enough of these isolated people
so you understand; walk softly.  At least two
children who appear to be results of inbreeding; cousins marrying
cousins already married to cousins. Noone else around to marry

Local people–not shy about telling Lewis he is a fool

The first day and night, almost the way Lewis
promised they would be.  Mild rapids, excitement enough—good
times for everyone.  Comfortable camping—Ed and Bobby drink,
Drew plays guitar; he loves to play.  Lewis stays in the
moment; getting a sense of this wilderness doomed to extinction.

xxxxxxxxxxx

Ed wakes early next morning.  Dressed
only in sweats, he takes his bow and arrow and wanders away.
What is he looking for?  Ed is no kid anymore, but he
is young in experience—he is searching for who he is, what he is.
Not far away, a young deer stands.  Ed places an arrow
in the bow and pulls the string back.  You can see he has had
plenty of experience shooting at targets.  He knows how to
prepare himself for a shot and he has the physical strength to
pull the string and hold it still.  But fear overcomes him.
He is barely able to shoot and when he does at last, the
arrow never even comes close.

Is he disgusted with the idea of killing an
animal…or afraid of how he will feel?  Maybe the age of the
buck strikes something in Ed; no doubt it is a young animal, with
small, velvety antlers.  And Ed has a young son at home.

So much in the wilderness he is ambivalent
about.      Being with Lewis is always an
adventure, yet Ed wonders how adventurous he really is.
When Lewis bargains with the tough-looking mountain
guy about driving the cars, Ed’s comment: let’s play golf instead.

An uneventful start to the day.  The day
before, Ed paddled with Drew.  Today he is with Bobby.
They wind up ahead of Lewis and Drew, and stop on the bank
for a short rest.

Standing on the shore, they can see two men
walking fairly close.  The strangers don’t appear with a
shock like Freddy Krueger or Norman Bates’ mother; they simply
walk up slowly.

Yet you are about to witness one of the
all-time brutal scenes in American—or World, movie history.
Truly men without positive emotions.  People who make
you question your feelings about capital punishment.  They
tie Ed to a tree, pull out his knife and test it by cutting his
chest.  A small man does most of the talking.  Ed tries
to reason with him, appease him with talk about money.  The
answer is short and direct: “We want your money, we’ll
take your money.”  He tells Bobby to drop his pants.

.

Not people anyone can reason with

Bobby, whose business is sales, desperately
searches for a way to reach them.  He is realizing fast… you
can’t.  The only question is how much humiliation they want
before raping him.

The small man finishes with Bobby.  The
other man stares at Ed, makes a comment about his mouth, and
starts to unzip his pants.  First he tells Ed to drop to his
knees and pray, “and you better pray good.”

He starts to pass the small man his shotgun.
Suddenly, an arrow tears through the small man’s chest.
It passes all the way through him, extending about equally
out of his front and back.  Lewis’ arrow.  The other
stranger runs for his life into the woods.  The small man
stands paralyzed, dying.

Drew is dead set on taking the body back with
them, and giving the whole story to the sheriff tomorrow.
Lewis points out that any jury judging them will be local
people—all or most, related to the man he killed.  His idea–
bury the man here, and the lake will take care of the rest.
“That’s about as buried as you can get.”

Lewis respects Drew’s attitude, though, and
agrees to go by a majority decision—everyone gets a vote.
First Bobby, then Ed, vote with Lewis.  They bury the
man in the wet riverbank soil, then run back to their canoes.

They paddle mindlessly—everything feels wrong
now.  Drew never even puts on his life jacket.  You
may hear (probably only if you pay attention), a deep,
soft thud sound, just before they reach the rapids.  Seconds
later, Drew slumps straight forward.  No one has time to
react—the rapids sweep them up, then down hard.  They fall
out of both canoes—one canoe is snapped in half completely, front
from back.

The river has changed, no more wooded banks;
rocky cliffs now.  The three men are lucky to pull themselves
onto rock.  Lewis’ leg is broken badly—a bone sticks out of a
hole in his clothing.  He tells Ed and Bobby, Drew was
shot.  The river noise is intense.  They can’t
see Drew, even hear him.  Seconds later, Drew’s battered
guitar floats by, then…nothing.

Right off, you see a different look on Ed’s
face.  “He killed Drew.  He has to kill us.”
“Now you’re gonna have to play the game,” Lewis
answers.

“We sure as Hell know where he’s gonna
be…right up there,” Ed points to the top of the cliff.  In
that moment, he has realized what he needs to do.

Once darkness falls, Ed’s struggle begins; he
needs to climb the face of the cliff alone, carrying the bow and
arrow and some rope  .A dangerous, exhausting ordeal.
Endless chances to rest but endless moments he can give it
up to his exhaustion.  At one point, he takes his wallet from
his pocket.  He needs to see the photo of his wife and son to
find the strength to go on.  Then the wallet falls from his
tired hand.  He wonders if he will have anything left if he
ever reaches the top.

What will come next is terrifying—facing the
beast inside you.

We all have gotten ourselves a good look at
the beast already.  In 1972, the homosexual side of the rape
scenes was devastating.   All I can compare it to before, was
Dov’s (Sal Mineo) short description of concentration camp
experiences, before he joins the Irgun terrorists, in
Exodus.  And you don’t see any flashbacks.

Here, you sit through the whole thing.
Christopher Dickey, the 19-year old son of the screenwriter
and novelist James Dickey, worked on the movie crew, doing
whatever was needed.  One job was going over this scene to
help the technical people—who would be standing where, how far
they would move… etc.  None of the actors were there yet, but
he still found it terrifying.  He also mentioned the
lighthearted, good-natured atmosphere early in the shooting.
But once they shot this scene, things were never the same.

Times were different.In 1972, the idea of
being turned into a homosexual (as irrational as that might sound
now) was a devastating one.You have probably heard stories about
boxers trying to psyche each other out before a fight: one says to
the other, “I’m gonna make you my wife.”

Now I think, most men have a clearer
understanding of women, straight sex and gay sex, than in 1972.
The sheer brutality is what devastates you now,
like the scene in Cape Fear where Max Cady
literally bites a chunk out of Lori’s face.

Or even Tom’s (Nick Nolte) horrifying
childhood memory in The Prince of Tides where
three escaped convicts broke into his house and raped him, his
mother and his sister.  The words of one convict say it all,
better than any of us could.  “Fresh meat.”

That’s all Tom’s family was, and all that the
four suburban men would ever be.  I don’t want to spend much
time on the argument: was the rape about sex, or was it about
domination.  To use another over-worked word, I think it was
about dehumanization, something that cuts right across
heterosexual/gay/bisexual lines.

Look at the average straight porno site, the
descriptions of the women: fat slut, MILF, whore.  A
disconnect between your sexual attraction and any signs of
compassion.  People may say, these sites are for guys
dissatisfied with their wives; these women are fantasies.
Maybe, but what about those feelings for women you see only
in photographs?

It was rarer to see characters like the two
mountain men in 1972.  You might say they are beyond feeling,
yet they definitely enjoy the humiliation that goes along with the
violence.  And though you never find out for sure, they
probably have homes and families to go back to.

Yet you say to yourself—Ed is making the right
decision, the only decision.  During the video
extras James Dickey says, this is one of the themes I wanted to
look at.  Any of these guys might have done what Ed
has to do.  It just happens to fall on him this time.

     Deliverance was a big
box-office hit.  It was one of those movies that come out at
the right time to reflect a lot of fears people had.  For
example, Lewis talks about the wilderness disappearing as
developers grab it, build over it.

“They paved Paradise/put up a parking lot.”
Most college kids knew the line, knew the song, related to
the message.  People were beginning to realize that the
1950’s concept of “progress” might not only be hollow, but
destructive.

Another important change: migration of baby
boomers to the promised land—back to the country.  Big-city
conditions were reaching an all-time low; many people felt it was
too late to repair the damage.  And many baby-boomers had no
use for suburbia, the “little boxes on the hillside/ little boxes
made of ticky-tacky.”

In the country, they saw possibilities of
clean air and water, cheap land for sale, safe schools for their
children, and opportunity to be their own boss.  They
imagined the people would be the opposite of the jaded, uncaring
folks around them.  The ones who routinely walked by someone
passed out on the sidewalk and didn’t know the name of the people
next door.

But who were their new neighbors, really?
Maybe they didn’t fit that polite, welcoming, tolerant
stereotype.  People started admitting to themselves they
might not know what they were getting themselves into.
Deliverance tapped into that fear–running
into country people with rigid ideas about outsiders—you were
guilty till proven innocent.

And maybe you’d never get the chance to prove
your innocence.Those two men from the woods were our ultimate
nightmare—nothing you said made a difference.
Travel agents got questions they had seldom heard before.
Foreign-born executives, engineers, scientists, whose first
American jobs had been in Northern cities.  Now their
companies were asking them to relocate to the South.  A
common question: how many hours will it take me from New York to
Memphis if we drive straight through?  These people had seen
Deliverance or heard about it, and imagined
people like the nameless mountain men behind every tree in the
South.

Small towns outside the South could
be dangerous too.  Thomas Tryon’s novel
Harvest Home was made into a TV-movie.
Another “small town hiding a deadly secret.”  At least
in the big city, you knew how to get a cop when you needed one.

That was probably the bottom line.  What
are you, alone, going to do when no cop is coming?  Ed, Lewis
and Bobby all bring terrible secrets back with them.  Secrets
they can never forget.  All of us hope we won’t have
to carry around secrets like that.  One of Deliverance’s many
themes: forget about “you hope.”  It’s strictly a
matter of chance; you’d best be ready when the shit comes down.

 If you’re a fan of Suspiria, Reanimator,
and other movies where filmmakers show no fear of going too
far, you might love Phenomena.
Phenomena takes loads of chances, and
mostly succeeds… if you’re willing to take it on its own terms.

But don’t get the wrong idea.  You may
have never seen Suspiria, or not give a shit
whether the movies you watch take chances or not.
Phenomena is good, simply for what it is…a movie
with the grip of an angry bear.

If you’re familiar with director Argento’s
movies, (I mention Suspiria because it’s another
of my favorites) you probably won’t expect much plot or
character development. You’d be right, even though both its stars,
Jennifer Connelly and Donald Pleasence, are excellent actors.

Many of Argento’s movies feature a character
forced to track down a murderer, without much training or
experience.  Circumstances force them into this.
Jennifer, the hero of
Phenomena, finds herself in that exact
position.   Way in over her head, the way Suzy
(Jessica Harper) was in Suspiria. 

But Jennifer turns out to have a guardian
angel—in fact, thousands of them.  By some unexplainable
destiny, she was born with a deep bond with insects.  She
protects them, every chance she gets, even a bee trapped inside a
car with her.  In return, they do their best to watch over
her…and save her from danger.

Jennifer–a kinship with all insects

Jennifer shows up at a snobby, clique-ish new
school.  Friends are hard to come by.

But Phenomena is not a movie
about friendship.  It’s a story of survival—a young,
vulnerable character trying to navigate a sea full of danger,
heading straight into the path of the most insane shark in the
ocean.  Jennifer finds herself looking for a serial killer.
But she’s no Sherlock Holmes.

Her weapons?  Courage, ingenuity.  And the
guardian angels mentioned previously.

But that’s all.  You expect that she’ll
be put to the test…big time.

Phenomena  immediately
shows you Jennifer’s danger.  You’re in a wild, mountain
area—right away, “ the picturesque Swiss Alps” comes to
mind.  A school bus, state of the art in appearance, stops to
pick up students.

One girl is a moment too late.   She goes for
help, into a house that looks like a ski chalet.   Not the
least spooky.

But little bits of hard rock begin to sneak into the
bland music soundtrack.  You get a point-of-view shot from
inside the house…very creepy.  The girl goes inside, calls
out to see if anyone’s home.  She gets no answer but you see
a quick shot of chains bolted to a wall, then shaken hard, as the
music turns to full blast rock and roll.  Someone pulls the
chains free.

Suddenly the chains are around the girl’s neck…
tight.  She’s unable to open the door and run.  Scissor
points stab through her hand.  Finally she gets the door open
and runs onto a walkway over a fast mountain stream.  She
follows the path between mountains into a clear plexiglass
passageway.  Even surrounded by mountains, a feeling of wild
Nature, of endless freedom …

Then suddenly she is stabbed again with the
scissors.  You watch a long shot of a severed head plunging
into a cold mountain stream, and realize crystal-clear, that
things are not what they look to be.
This is the Universe where Jennifer, the lonely hero, now finds
herself.

Critics have described Argento’s movies as flimsy
plots used to link a series of shocking scenes, some as violent as
the one just described.  Others just teasers.

On the surface, Phenomena has a more
realistic setting than Suspiria, which played out
like an ultra-nasty fairy tale, a nightmare version of Disney’s
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  What is
similar?  A teenage girl, trying desperately to deal with
chaos around her.

Like Suzy, Jennifer tries to get her bearings in a
new environment, but is forced instead to react, barely
getting a chance to function pro-actively.   People at her
new school are mean, snobbish to her from the first; the only
exception her new friend Sofie.  And oh, by the way,
someone’s been killing people on the campus.  Welcome to our
school.

And Jennifer carries yet another cross; she’s a
sleepwalker who finds herself outside her building, just when the
murderer could be stalking their next victim.

But one time, this curse turns out to be a
blessing.  Alone in the woods, Jennifer is actually led to
safety by a pair of ladybugs.  More unlikely, she then meets
a gentle young chimpanzee.

Inga with Professor MacGregor

The chimp, named Inga, leads Jennifer to the
man she takes care of, Professor McGregor, a biologist confined to
a wheelchair.  He has taught Inga to follow an electronic
pointer, and to assist him around his house.   His field of
study is insects.  A reserved, gentle individual, McGregor
bonds with Jennifer.  Inga too, soon responds to Jennifer’s
kind nature.

Jennifer and McGregor have a lot in common:
great chemistry with Inga and deep interest in insects.
McGregor is concerned about Jennifer’s sleepwalking and shows her
a way she can wake herself to avoid danger.

Jennifer and MacGregor–unexpected common ground

She  has to be grateful for this
friendship.   The school faculty is so misguided, it places
Jennifer in danger.  They send her to a doctor to investigate
the sleepwalking.  His expert opinion?   “The first step
toward schizophrenia.”

Thanks a lot, doc.  The harassment by the
other students (and the teachers) only grows worse.

Then Sofie, Jennifer’s only friend at school, is
murdered.  Jennifer, sleepwalking close by, escapes narrowly.

But Jennifer is able to find an important clue—a
glove small enough to fit a child.  Inside the glove are
maggots, and (if I understand her expression correctly), the
maggots can communicate to her–that the glove was the
killer’s.  She explains this to McGregor who, rather than
doubting her sanity, trusts her intuition.

McGregor can sense the circle closing fast on the two
of them.  He believes that the killer does
not dispose of the victims’ bodies, but likes to keep
them around.   He proposes a bold plan, using the “two
greatest detectives” he knows.  One is Jennifer.  The
other…an insect known as the Great Sarcophagus Fly.  This
insect is the mature form of the maggot found in the child’s
glove, and has a strong attraction to dead flesh.  And, like
all insects, the fly develops an instant bond to Jennifer, as you
see when it immediately lands on her, then stays still.

McGregor tells Jennifer he’s sure more bodies are
close by; it won’t take long to sense their presence.   She
will know right away by the fly’s behavior.  Like Suzy in
Suspiria, Jennifer is frightened but finds
courage to bring a close friend’s killer to justice.

You watch Jennifer and her companion, the fly, riding
a bus on a mountain road, through an area like the one in the
opening scenes.  Argento seldom gets credit for bringing
performances out of his actors (I tend to agree) but these scenes
are exceptions.  Without any unintended laughs, he is able to
show the bond between Jennifer and the fly; actually make you
believe it, as hard as that sounds.  When the fly suddenly
goes into a frenzy of activity, Jennifer knows that this is where
they begin their search.

They find the same house where you watched the first
attack.  The fly is able to find a severed hand, but Jennifer
is interrupted, then forced to leave.

She doesn’t know yet what you, the viewer already
have seen.  Her last friend, McGregor, is dead.

You watch the killer, face never shown, as they enter
the house and slam the door shut, as Inga plays outside.
Inga screams, watching through the window as McGregor is stabbed
in the chest.  A moment too late, she finds a door open,
races inside, touches his wound, knows immediately he is
dead.  For a long moment, she shows her devastation…then true
fury.

You remember the killer’s black leather gloves as you
see them again on a steering wheel, the car accelerating.
Inga suddenly leaps onto the windshield and struggles to get
inside, her expression one of pure vengeance.  But she has no
chance; swept off the car as it speeds away.

Jennifer returns to find the police taking McGregor’s
body away.  She knows her only hope now is to run.   As
the old cliché goes, the hunter has become the hunted.

From here on, Argento is able to do what he does
best—pure action.  Desperation leads Jennifer to accept help
from a woman she finds out (too late) is probably the
killer.  Trapped in the woman’s mansion, she finds more than
enough fly maggots to confirm her fears.  The detective
Jennifer met the day before comes to the house.  Jennifer,
locked in a bathroom, overhears part of the story.  The woman
may have been raped years before at a mental hospital and given
birth to a child, then raised it herself.

From here on come a rapid-fire series of nightmare
scenarios: the detective trying to help Jennifer but instead
chained to a wall, only escaping the cuffs by hacking off his own
thumb.  A telephone she tries to use to call the police, only
to watch helplessly as it falls into a hole in the stone
floor.  A plunge into a pool full of dead bodies.
Escaping the pool, to find a child, sobbing alone in his
room.

Jennifer, convinced this boy has been abused by the
woman for years.  The child turning toward her, his face a
monster’s.  The monster-child pursuing Jennifer, following
her onto a motorboat…

I won’t give away any more.  One review on the
imdb website actually called the ending the all- time best in any
movie, period.  I wouldn’t go that far, but I definitely see
where he/she is coming from.

For the record, several of Argento’s movies have
disappointed me; I am not someone who loves everything he
does.  There may be a lot in Phenomena that
makes you say, “Yeah…I’ve seen this before.”

Never mind all that.  This is the real deal…an
angry bear coming after you, not knowing the meaning of the word
‘stop.’  Don’t miss this one.

(Caution—Spoilers near end.)

In 1959, a French director, known mostly for
documentaries, was offered the chance to make a horror movie.
He could make it as scary as he knew how…but with some major
restrictions.  Tight limits on the amount of blood shown
onscreen.  (Due to censorship in France.)  The main
character could not be portrayed as a typical “mad scientist.”
(Censorship in Germany.)  No cruelty to animals.
(Censorship in England.)

Some excellent writers worked on the story, but did
not come up with much that was truly original.  Still, the
director, Georges Franju, had a vision as to what he wanted.
He came up with a cult favorite, with images you won’t
forget—a bizarre mix of hideous and poetically beautiful.  It
showed real guts on Franju’s part—only a handful of people had
ever attempted to combine such extremes before.  And keep in
mind, this movie came out before the freedom given to filmmakers
by
Bonnie and Clyde, The Wild Bunch, and Night of the Living Dead.

To make things even more challenging, Franju wanted
his characters to be as ordinary as possible.  Not larger
than life figures like Dr. Frankenstein, Count Dracula, Hannibal
Lecter.  How could anyone combine all these different
elements in one movie?

Making the murderers feel like ordinary
people was probably the easiest part.  The more movies, TV
shows, nonfiction books and articles we read about serial killers,
the easier it is to accept Dr. Genessier and his associate Louise
as “average people.”  By now all of us have heard about
people working nine to five, living day-to-day, even boring
existences, but with double-lives.   Killing whenever they
can.

Dr. Genessier was driving with his daughter when
their car crashed, destroying her face.  But the doctor is
convinced he has the knowledge and skill to remove the faces of
young women, and then transplant these onto Christiane.  Make
her beautiful again, as she was.

This is where
Eyes Without a Face begins.  Louise, a woman
completely devoted to the doctor, is dumping a woman’s body in the
countryside.  The woman’s face is gone, used unsuccessfully
to graft onto Christiane’s.  Meanwhile, Christiane had been
reported missing four months previously.

Dr. Genessier and Louise are prepared to go on
kidnapping, operating, and dumping bodies until they succeed.
So far none of the bodies have been found, but the doctor
has a plan in case one turns up.  He will look at the body
and identify it as Christiane’s.

This time, Genessier needs to play that card.
The doctor’s fame as a surgeon and a skin graft researcher
gives him power.  When the real victim’s father shows up and
wants to look at the body (after Dr. Genessier has already
identified it as Christiane), the authorities tell him he cannot.

Louise has the job of finding the women, and
bringing them to the doctor’s estate in the outskirts of Paris.
She knows what she’s doing.  Find a young woman, new to
the city and act friendly and helpful without coming on too
strong.  Louise has the right balance; I’ve been around, I
know what you’re going through, I know what Paris is like for a
newcomer.

You probably have seen some variation of this story
in a recent movie, or on the TV show
Criminal Minds.  The brutal facts of real
life.

But the movie takes a strange turn, giving a
much different feel, when you meet Christiane.  The doctor
needs to walk a long way, through strange doorways and up narrow
staircases to the room where his daughter stays hidden.

All that distance–not a coincidence.
Christiane lies on a couch, face completely hidden.
Something about her makes you think of an angel with a curse
placed on her, maybe of a princess from a fairy-tale, under a
spell.

Not that you could never picture her before in
everyday Paris, getting caught in the rain for example, having to
stand on a crowded bus or someone accidentally spilling coffee on
her dress.  But that world is cut off from her now.

Dr. Genessier is over-protective, self-righteous,
controlling.  He tells her he is this way because he loves
her.  He is angry because she has taken off her mask.

Christiane never blames her father for the accident.
But she hates how “he needs to control everything.”
The doctor leaves.   Christiane waits awhile then walks
through the huge house.  In her featureless mask, there is a
beauty to her; long graceful body and limbs, hair combed
perfectly.   In one room, she stops to look at her portrait.
The style of painting is tacky, even corny.  Far from a
great piece of art.

Yet looking at it, you still feel a tragic irony,
because of what Christiane has become.  She walks into a room
full of caged dogs.  Each of them doomed, certain to be used
in her father’s experiments.  She stops to kiss each
one.

Christiane’s inner beauty

But Christiane is more than dreamy images; she
is a real person.  The movie won’t let you forget that.
Christiane knows that her father is not just a controlling
man; he may well love his research as much as he loves her.
Later on, she suggests that he is ambivalent about her
surgery.  He wants her beautiful again, but if this operation
fails, he will get more chances to experiment, to get more
firsthand experience with grafting.

Lonely prisoner

Her fiancé, Jacques, works with her father, but he
is more than a clone of Dr. Genessier.  You don’t see any
signs that Jacques idolizes him, or that Christiane wishes that
Jacques did.

The movie is unclear about how much surgery
Christiane has already seen her father perform on women Louise
kidnapped.  But this time she sees the latest victim,
sleeping.

Again the movie’s style changes radically.  You
are forced to watch, in graphic detail, a woman’s face literally
being detached.  Slowly, with great care, Dr. Genessier makes
his incision, following lines he’s drawn earlier.  Dangerous,
precision work.  You see a few drops of blood trickling down;
somehow it feels more painful to watch the trickle than a steady
flow of blood.  The procedure takes a long while.
Finally, “Here we go,” Genessier says, literally lifting the
face free of the tissue beneath it.  Imagine what it was like
seeing that in 1959.

For a precious few days Christiane is beautiful
again.  But the doctor knows the warning signs, and at the
first hint, he tells Louise he has failed again.  Christiane
is without her face once more.

A
precious few days of looking as she did once

Unmistakable signs the surgery is not a success

For the second time, she calls her fiancé and
he answers the phone. The first time, Christiane was satisfied to
wait in silence, to only hear his voice.  This time she
speaks his name quietly, “Jacques.”

Jacques believes Christiane may be alive.  The
police launch an investigation, including a sting operation using
a woman they caught shoplifting.  They force her to check
into Genessier’s clinic; they wait to see if he will kidnap her.

SPOILERS

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

Louise and Genessier take the bait.  The woman
is someone they want: young, beautiful, blue eyes.  When you
see her next, she is already in the operating room, strapped down.

But here is where the movie really delivers.
Before the police have a chance to act, you see the
princess, placed under a spell, transforming herself into someone
real.  Someone who says, in effect, “Enough.  This is
where the bullshit stops.”

Yet at the same time, her appearance is still
otherworldly, ethereal; an angel of vengeance but still an angel.
Slowly she raises her father’s scalpel, but as the
restrained woman screams in terror, Christiane cuts the straps,
freeing her.  Louise suddenly walks in.  One stab with
the scalpel deep into Louise’s throat.  Louise has enough
time to ask “Why?” before she dies.

Christiane opens the dogs’ cages and each is
free.  Not far away, cages full of white doves.  She
frees them next.  They swirl about Christiane; one seems to
actually hesitate, stop to kiss her on the lips.  A single
dove stays quietly on her hand.  Outside, she sees her father
dead, half his face torn away by the dog pack.

A bizarre mix of brutality and unexpected beauty

(Probably the one serious piece of damage from the censorship
Franju had to deal with. Franju definitely needed to show
Genessier’s past cruelty to the dogs for this scene to make sense.
But due to censorship the movie could only show him being
stern with them.)

Christiane keeps walking slowly into the night….

Not everyone will appreciate the sudden
changes in moods…in styles.  I can imagine comments like
“discordant” and “jarring” and these are understandable.  The
movie makes some fast gear-changes from a graphic operating room,
to surreal poetic images, to dreary black and white (daytime
Paris), to plain realistic police story, among its many styles,
its many moods.

But give Franju credit for making the movie he
wanted.  He was forced to accept some serious limitations.
Yet he still came up with a unique vision.