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Another Troubling Sign

Mon, 01 Jul 2024 21:27:30 GMT

The little Antichrist was at it again in 1978's Damen - Omen II. William Holden takes over from Gregory Peck, playing Peck's brother, and has adopted Damien. As a horror film, it's better than the first, featuring a series of effective scenes of people getting killed by a supernatural force.

I liked how there was absolutely no moral element to the killings. A doctor who wanted to do tests on Damien is killed in a fallen elevator. There's no indication he was an alcoholic or an abusive parent. Satan just doesn't play by the rules and it's great. Every time someone gets killed it contributes to the impression that the sinister crows, accompanied by a guttural, vocal theme by Jerry Goldsmith, could come from anywhere.

The film has a really impressive cast. It seemed like almost every supporting character had a familiar face. Lew Ayres, Sylvia Sidney, Lance Henriksen, and a for some reason uncredited Leo McKern. McKern appears in an opening scene at an archaeological dig that's one of the best scenes. But it's an altogether satisfying film.

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Ups and Downs of Wishing

Sun, 16 Jun 2024 03:39:13 GMT

A girls' art school is cast into turmoil when some students start using a magical staircase in 2003's The Wishing Stairs (여고괴담 3: 여우계단). Sometimes, I see a movie and I get the impression the screenwriter and/or director passionately hated all the characters. All the girls in this movie are assholes, giving one a sense of general misanthropy. Combined with the pretty standard Japanese and Korean horror effects (the girl with black hair covering her face, the weird crawling, etc) nicked from The Ring and David Lynch, it was kind of a tedious film to get through.

The plot primarily concerns three girls; Jin-sung, So-hee, and Hye-ju. Jin-sung and So-hee are best friends but Jin-sung is starting to find So-hee's manic behaviour kind of annoying. So-hee's possibly heartfelt affections are oddly aggressive and she seems to delight in frustrating Jin-sung. So-hee crawls into Jin-sung's window uninvited, gives her an unflattering hairstyle, and takes a picture. When Jin-sung idly walks along a stair railing, So-hee grabs her ankle from behind, nearly causing her to fall.

So-hee and Jin-sung are studying ballet and So-hee is the better dancer, meaning Jin-sung won't get a chance to get into a good ballet school. Meanwhile, Hye-ju, whose chubbiness is played for broad, obnoxious comical effect, discovers the magic wishing stairs; if you ascend the stairs while counting them, an extra step appears at the top and your wish will be granted. Hye-ju wishes to lose weight and she does. Hearing this, Jin-sung wishes to get into a good ballet school. But as with the monkey's paw, the wishes come at dreadful costs. Hye-ju gets bulimia and So-hee falls and dies.

The whole school becomes jealous of Jin-sung and starts pulling pranks on her. Meanwhile, the ghost of So-hee possesses Hye-ju. Pranks turn into murders. I mainly came away with the feeling that it would be exhausting being around these people.

Wishing Stairs is availableon Bilibili.

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The Reasons for Chill

Thu, 13 Jun 2024 21:27:48 GMT

A girl and a guy get stuck on a haunted road in 2007's Wind Chill. Although the conception of the film seems like it was mainly motivated by a kind of incel resentment, it has some genuinely creepy qualities before the final act unfortunately decides to explain too much.

Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes play the two unnamed leads, credited as just "Girl" and "Guy", which gives the sense of the two standing in for a broader commentary on men and women. They're college students in Pennsylvania and she wants to go home to Delaware for the holidays. Magically, she finds a note on a bulletin board offering a ride to Delaware.

As the two embark on their long journey, she reluctantly starts talking to him and starts to suspect he might not be telling her the truth about himself. This problem pales in comparison, though, to the trouble they get into when the car runs off the road and they get stuck in a snowdrift for the night. At first, she's so freaked out she locks him out of the car but as they start to see increasingly weird supernatural occurrences, she realises she was being silly for not cuddling with him for body warmth.

I think the whole movie began as a metaphor for the writers' grievances with "frigid" women. However, I'm not one to broadly paint incels as terrorists. I've certainly been in the position of a guy who wants a girl who doesn't want him back and it's actually really difficult to come to the point where I feel like not everything about the problem was my fault. The ambiguity and the cultural uneasiness about the problem contribute to the tension in the film and it is perfectly credible to think a lot of people have died on this lonely stretch of road in the winter. When the ghosts are just shadowy figures who won't answer their questions, they're pretty effective, but, as is often the case, they lose a lot of their power when their backstory is exhaustively explained.

Both Emily Blunt and Ashton Holmes give good performances and they're both very well cast.

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Fire on Six Legs

Thu, 30 May 2024 21:28:15 GMT

An earthquake occurs in the middle of a sermon and unleashes a horde of fire-breathing cockroaches from the depths of the earth. 1975's Bug depicts these traumatic events and those that follow. It's cheesy, the screenplay was co-written by William Castle, but a cheap '70s horror flick sometimes can feel like a balm.

The insects crawl up from a big crevasse opened by the earthquake. They bag their first kills in the form of an old man and his son who try to get their truck started, not knowing some of the fateful cockroaches have crawled into the tailpipe. So they explode.

As is often the case with '70s movies these days, I want every single shirt the men are wearing in it. You know that western style shirt with the pointy pockets and the yoke on the shoulders, they're usually plaid? I saw John Foggerty on Club Random a couple weeks ago wearing one. He said his wife makes them because they can't buy them anymore. Actually you can find a few on Amazon. I have two. One of them was a very lucky find at a Sears that was closing six years ago, it was less than ten dollars.

Anyway, bugs keep attacking. There are two scenes of them preying on young women. In one case, the bug camps out on a telephone receiver and when she unwittingly puts it to her ear the bug latches on. She runs around screaming, for some reason not even attempting to pull the bug off while it starts to set fire to her ear canal. "Make an effort," I said to the screen.

Much of the film follows a professor (Bradford Dillman) who tries to preserve this quirky new species in spite of everything. He's pretty good, he has slight Herbert West vibes.

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Goyer Wants to Be Born Now

Sun, 26 May 2024 03:16:37 GMT

Some folks in Hollywood compel one to marvel at their continued ability to get work despite continually producing mediocrity. One of the most infamous is David S. Goyer, who manages to hide his lack of imagination by befriending genuine talent. When he stands on his own, with a movie like 2009's The Unborn, which he wrote and directed, the truth becomes painfully clear; the guy's got nothing.

Casey (Odette Yustman) is a pretty girl with no personality that the film can think of mentioning. She has scary dreams of dogs and dead people with twisted heads resembling monsters from Japanese horror and David Lynch movies. She keeps hearing "Jambi wants to be born now" which of course brought to mind the genie from Pee-Wee's Playhouse. Unfortunately, the truth is not so entertaining.

Her investigation leads her to an old woman who informs her the ghost child pursuing her is a dybbuk and recommends that she see a rabbi named Joseph Sendak (Gary Oldman). God knows why she recommended him in particular since he basically tells Casey he doesn't believe in this stuff. But he finally agrees to help and since getting rid of the dybbuk is an exorcism of sorts, he enlists the aid of an episcopal priest played by Idris Elba. It's kind of sad Goyer, who's Jewish himself, thought this was necessary. It's not like Max von Sydow brought in a rabbi in the Exorcist. Maybe it's part of a postmodern, all religions are equal, compulsive plot point.

I'd like to say something nice about the movie. Gary Oldman and Idris Elba are always great. Odette Yustman looks really good in her underwear . . . That's all I got. Like I said, the jump scares don't work. The lighting is bland, there's not much going for the production design. I kind of liked the outfits worn by Meagan Good, who plays Casey's friend.

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The Killer's Mirror

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 21:06:32 GMT

High school kids have to deal with a serial killer and their own hidden connexions to him in 2010's My Soul to Take. The last film to be both written and directed by Wes Craven (Scream 4 was his last film as director), it seems clearly intended to be his magnum opus, like he was just throwing everything he could into the pot. I kind of loved it but it's honestly a train wreck.

The influence of Lost Highway is pretty obvious right from the start. We meet a man working on a hobby horse in the basement who hears a news story about a local serial killer with a distinctive knife. Almost immediately, he trips over that very knife and is confused by the familiar way he picks it up and puts it in his pocket. This is all part of a rapidly told prologue segment that ends with the killer apparently meeting his end--but of course he didn't really.

Sixteen years later, seven high school kids who were born at the time of the killer's death supposedly somehow inherited aspects of his personality or are just considered cursed. The dialogue has lots of references to identity and how identity is defined. The main character, Bug (Max Thieriot), for instance, has some amusing dialogue with his best friend, Alex (John Magaro), about how being a man means pretending to enjoy pain and that being a man is entirely defined by pretense.

Where the departures from plain logic in Lost Highway always work as possible delusions of the protagonist, there are many lose threads left in My Soul to Take that just feel like sloppiness, particularly the many little suggestions that Bug has killed people and his memories have somehow been repressed. The movie totally forgets to explain or follow up on that. I kind of liked, though, how Craven doggedly avoided a lot of exposition, leading to a sometimes bewildering experience, as in one scene late in the film when we suddenly learn two characters had been siblings all along and it wasn't even a secret.

For all its faults, the movie has a sense of an artistic identity you don't often see in movies anymore. It definitely has the distinct flavour of Wes Craven.

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Look Not Beyond the Shroud

Sun, 25 Feb 2024 01:45:08 GMT

That's Roger Delgado, the original Master from Doctor Who, in brown face as the Arab villain in 1967's The Mummy's Shroud. Though Delgado's skin was pretty dark and all the actors were caked in layers of greasy foundation back in the '60s so maybe he wasn't in brown face at all. His father was Spanish so he may well have had Arabian ancestry.

Friday was a holiday here in Japan, the Emperor's birthday, so I spent the day being lazy and watched The Mummy's Shroud in the afternoon. Not considered one of the best Hammer films, it's nontheless better, in my opinion, than some of the ones that are considered among the best. The story's not wildly exciting but there's no real false step in it, there's no "Oh, come on" moments. Sure, it's cheap. The deserts of Egypt were clearly the same English quarries regularly visited by Doctor Who productions. The biggest star in the film is Andre Morell and he dies less than halfway through. But the movie does have surprisingly good cinematography. The lighting is creative without being as garish as it sometimes can be in Hammer films and the compositions are well constructed. I love the sense of awe and wonder the filmmakers try to convey as the explorers first uncover the mummified remains of the exiled young pharaoh.

The full movie is available on YouTube.

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A Level Dracula

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 03:03:59 GMT

What seems at first a perfectly innocent lesbian romance turns into naked girls screaming in convents, covered in blood. Such is the fate of characters in 1977's Alucarda, one of the many movies based on Le Fanu's Carmilla. This one has some amazing sets and beautiful girls but becomes overburdened with people screaming and running around.

Tina Romero plays Alucarda, this movie's version of Mircalla/Carmilla, and her first lover/victim is Justine, played by the beautiful Susana Kamini. They're terrific to watch, particularly Romero who infuses her role with reckless teenage passion. Many of the early scenes seem to be borrowed from Hammer's The Vampire Lovers, particularly a funeral scene, but from there the influences seem to be more Satanic nun movies like Mother Joan of the Angels and Ken Russell's Devils as the convent that raised Alucarda is overtaken by hysteria.

The sets are by no means realistic but sort of expressionistically grisly, like they were designed by Goya. It's a fantastic movie to look at but it becomes a bit cacophonous. I kind of like how Alucarda and Justine's pact with Satan means they're in a state of constant psychological torment from then on, so much so they have to constantly scream and writhe, but it does get slightly monotonous.

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The Dummies are Always Watching

Sun, 18 Feb 2024 21:22:37 GMT

We can sometimes go five or six years without a horror movie about a ventriloquist's dummy. But then a movie like 2007's Dead Silence comes along and the world is normal again. It's a James Wan movie so the script is ridiculous and the cinematography is terrible. I kind of enjoyed this one, though, for some reason.

I swear, Wan must employ the laziest cinematographers in the industry. The interior sets are always conspicuously, unrealistically massive so it must be easy to move the camera and equipment around, yet the lighting is all over the place, like they didn't want to adjust anything between shots. This is despite the fact that this movie repeatedly uses the "flashing shadows" gimmick, where something stationary suddenly changes when it's briefly hidden by a rhythmically passing shadow.

The jump scares work and I kind of like how the victims get their tongues cut out if they scream when the monster is present. Though it relies on the idea that everyone screams when they see something scary. I'd have been really safe, I don't even know how to scream.

The movie also features the idea of human corpses being turned into ventriloquist dummies which leads to one of the most spectacularly stupid twist endings I've ever seen from the era of twist endings.

I kind of enjoyed the cheesiness of this movie, though. It's like the Taco Bell nachos of horror movies.

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When No Bad Dream is Just a Bad Dream

Sat, 17 Feb 2024 06:53:24 GMT

A young woman narrowly survives a cult suicide and the ghosts of the other cultists won't let her forget it in 1988's Bad Dreams. There are a lot of nice jump scares in this one.

Cynthia (Jennifer Rubin) lives in a hospital after recovering from a coma caused by the failed suicide. She's haunted by dreams and visions mostly involving the cult leader, played by the reliably menacing Richard Lynch.

The other headcases in Cynthia's therapy group are soon also beset by nightmares that drive them to grisly deaths. The movie's pretty creative in how it mixes reality with phantasm attacks. I liked one male patient with anger issues who first cuts through his hand and then starts tearing up a room, hoping that by expressing his rage he can fend off the ghosts. No such luck, but the weirdness and violence amps up the tension in a nice way.

Jennifer Rubin is pretty good as a vulnerable, beautiful young woman at the centre of this hurricane of carnage.

X Sonnet #1818

No second ghost could use the syrup bar.
With pleasing dremas we open shop at eight.
But next we push a hand on lazy tar.
And so we locked the only child's gate.
A crimson hood was bobbing over shrubs.
Persistent knights were labelled naught but geese.
Romantic lyrics change to stupid blubs.
Prospective mayors swap a rancid fleece.
The crazy word was placed in normal spots.
When people say they're sane, the rootless run.
The kings would force a meaning onto blots.
But all would fade beneath this blazing sun.
Across the forest, hunters track the vamps.
The drinkers hide in mouldy forest camps.

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Between the Devil and Amarillo

Sun, 04 Feb 2024 21:29:17 GMT

Satanists pursue an RV across Texas in 1975's Race with the Devil. If you successful forget about an impressively nonsensical plot and don't mind poorly edited action scenes, the film does build some nice tension and features good performances from Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, and Loretta Swit.

The film also stars Lara Parker as Fonda's wife (Swit plays Oates'), rounding out the group of four vacationers. Her performance isn't as good but she's a lot prettier than Swit which director Jack Starrett sees as reason enough to give us closeups of her frightened face that linger just long enough to be a little confusing.

Swit, of course, was Hot Lips on MASH and, while she does give a good performance, it feels very much like a TV performance, bound by TV smarminess a little smaller than the scope of horror the film tries to invoke. However, Fonda and Oates as old buddies who stumble on a Satanic orgy that ends in human sacrifice, are pretty great.

It's for witnessing this orgy the Satanists decide to ruin the quartet's vacation, so begins the pursuit. The four try to make it to civilisation, the city of Amarillo, before the Satanists can finally kill them. If you stop at any point to ask questions like, "Why don't the Satanists just shoot them?" or "How did the Satanists track them to the middle of an empty desert?" a lot of tension is lost as the film's ill-considered manipulative techniques fall apart. But some of the quieter scenes where there characters interact with suspicious townsfolk are pretty effective.

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The Unholy Present Perfect

Wed, 01 Sep 2021 08:05:44 GMT

Will Dracula rise again? With a title well ahead of you is 1968's Dracula has Risen from the Grave. A Hammer horror film directed by Freddie Francis, it features Christopher Lee as Dracula but no Peter Cushing this time around. His adversary is a steadfastly honest young baker played by Barry Andrews, a dead ringer for Roger Daltrey.

I kind of hoped it was Daltrey when I saw him, despite not seeing Daltrey's name in the credits. The Who versus Dracula? I'd be down for that. But Andrews is charismatic in his own right.

The story feels suspiciously like a screenplay originally written without Dracula or even supernatural horror in mind into which Dracula was inserted. Screenwriter Anthony Hinds seemed preoccupied with the worth of honesty. Paul, Andrews' character, wants to marry the daughter of the Catholic Monsignor (Rupert Davies) who's just gotten home from putting a big crucifix on Dracula's castle, to make sure the Count never, ever rises from the grave. Along the way, he inadvertently attracts the eye of Dracula, who has already risen from the grave.

Paul's father is played by Hammer regular Michael Ripper, once again playing a tavern keeper. He advises his son that honesty isn't always the best policy, that he should know when to play things close to his chest. Unfortunately, Paul wants nothing to do with tact, and when the clergyman he hopes will be his father-in-law asks his religion, Paul happily owns himself an atheist.

You'd think the rest of the film, in which Paul's fiancee (Veronica Carlson) and the buxom tavern wench (Barbara Ewing) are both bitten and enthralled by the famous vampire, would cause him to reexamine his beliefs. But the plot proves to be more about the monsignor accepting Paul as his daughter's chosen.

Freddie Francis delivers the goods again as one of the better Hammer directors. I particularly like a rooftop set/matte painting combination he uses repeatedly throughout the film, making it the choice location for battles or even just the routine route for clandestine young lovers.

Dracula has Risen from the Grave is available on HBOMax, one of four Hammer films, the others including Hammer's first Dracula film, their first Frankenstein film, and the Hammer version of The Mummy. I'd say The Mummy is the best of the group with Frankenstein in second but, despite loving Hammer movies, I've never been fond of their first Dracula entry. It's a shame Warners doesn't have some of the better Hammer films on HBOMax, like Frankenstein Created Woman, Rasputin the Mad Monk, The Brides of Dracula, She, or The Vampire Lovers.

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The Sinister Decent from N to Z

Tue, 10 Mar 2020 16:22:28 GMT

The newest Sirenia Digest brings Caitlin R. Kiernan's conclusion to her Cerulean Alphabet, an intriguing set of vignettes covering the letters N through Z. Many of these vignettes may remind the reader of her Agents of Dreamland books as cops, investigations, and strange violent crime come up quite a bit.

The sequence begins with "N is for Nude" which, in its contemplation of a deeper kind of nudity than "unclothed", kind of reminded me of Mike Leigh's Naked but turns out to have more to do with weird murder than that film. Several of the stories deal with phenomena that covey a sense of amorphous threat, including "O is for Ogre", which is a very nice variation on the standard childhood nightmare about a monster in the closet. "R is for Red", meanwhile, makes respectable strides towards rivalling H.G. Wells' "The Red Room" in terms of horror and menace.

Twitter Sonnet #1336

The finless fish returned with questions asked.
Tormented tips advance the fingers west.
The fire sprites have ever entered masked.
The entry route was ranked as seventh best.
Afforded captains blot the check with ink
A stack of wood is books to open eyes.
A healthy rinse defrosts the frozen sink.
And all we sought and wanted, lots of pies.
Reversing steps announced the constant air.
In fleets of gloves the hands could pilot home.
Convenience starts behind the eyeless bear.
An ostrich lamp decides to slowly roam.
A puzzle sleeps, it's draped across a truck.
Entire skies reside inside the duck.

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Ghostly Conveyance

Sat, 09 Nov 2019 06:45:29 GMT

Despite the Halloween season being over, I've kept up reading H.P. Lovecraft Selects, a collection of stories drawn from Lovecraft's famous essay on supernatural horror. To-day I read Rudyard Kipling's "The Phantom 'Rickshaw". Lovecraft describes Kipling as approaching greatness despite "omnipresent mannerisms". These may be the pervasive bits of local colour Kipling is famous for and it is a great and subtle addition to the story of a man seeing his dead lover stalking him in a 'rickshaw. That one element of strangeness is made the more striking for the abundant evidence of the author's casual familiarity with the reality of the place.

This piece of window dressing even comes to the fore as the story's narrator tries to use it as a tool to keep himself sane;

Two or three times I found myself saying to myself almost aloud: “I’m Jack Pansay on leave at Simla—at Simla! Everyday, ordinary Simla. I mustn’t forget that—I mustn’t forget that.” Then I would try to recollect some of the gossip I had heard at the Club: the prices of So-and-So’s horses—anything, in fact, that related to the workaday Anglo-Indian world I knew so well. I even repeated the multiplication-table rapidly to myself, to make quite sure that I was not taking leave of my senses.

As for the story itself, the poetic justice of a man undone by the ghost of a woman he so cruelly spurned isn't as satisfying as it is horrific. There's a surface of a basic, functioning morality--man does wrong, man gets punished--but the strangeness of it against the authenticity of the location emphasises a dreamlike quality in the proceedings. She may indeed be a manifestation of the narrator's conscious or self-loathing. It's an effective story at any rate.

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Strangest Things

Tue, 16 Jul 2019 21:23:04 GMT

I finished the third season of Stranger Things on Sunday. In general, I liked it better than season two and I liked season two. But three's climax is much better, visually and storywise. Though I love how the outcry regarding the kiss between Eleven and Mike at the end of season two seems to have led the Duffer Brothers to having them make out constantly at the beginning of season three. It's so satisfying whenever a creator rebels against the peanut gallery moralising now.

Speaking of the political lens, I was sort of fascinated how Stranger Things 3 at turns reflected or rebuffed this year's morality model. I remember during the Bush era, depictions of torture as an effective means of interrogation were the domain of relatively right wing productions like 24. Now here's Hopper (David Hopper) beating the crap out of Alexei (Alex Utgoff) and Mayor Kline (Cary Elwes) and it proves to be a perfectly sound strategy.

This is part of how Hopper has emerged as an even more solid reproduction of the 80s action hero than he was in the previous two seasons. In his climactic fight against the Soviet assassin (Andrey Ivchenko), it's hard not to think of Harrison Ford when Harbour says, "I'll see you in Hell!"

There's another political shift--it was boring when the Soviets were the villains in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, now they seem relevant again because of Putin's sinister machinations and exploits. Nevermind Putin's mobster regime has no fondness for the Soviet era or ideology, it still works. That one assassin guy is a pretty effective heavy, wherever he's from.

Spoilers ahead, after the next screenshot

I've already said how much I love shopping malls and therefore loved that setting in the new season. It also made for a terrific finale, much better than the anonymous office corridors of season two. Instead we have environments bathed in contrasting neon light and showers of firecracker sparks in the background.

And, like season two, one of the most satisfying pieces of the climax was a conclusion of a bully redeemed or seen sympathetically, in this case Billy, played by Rob Lowe lookalike Dacre Montgomery. He doesn't quite get the complete turnaround Steve (Joe Keery) did in season two, but the fact that he's allowed only the tiniest opportunity to show a shift or another aspect of his personality makes it all the more effective. Even Darth Vader had time to talk after turning on the Emperor. But it's probably for the best that Billy's return to a primal sense of protectiveness isn't disappointed by some articulated explanation.

More than anything, the season left me feeling very satisfied at having gotten a good, well developed story. A lot of people have been talking about all the movie references this past season so I thought I'd conclude with my own ranking of ten of them, in case you wanted some advice on which to watch first:

10. Day of the Dead
9. The Thing from Another World
8. Fast Times at Ridgemont High
7. The Neverending Story
6. Return of the Jedi
5. The Thing
4. Back to the Future
3. The Apartment
2. Children of Paradise (available on The Criterion Channel)
1. The Hidden Fortress (available on The Criterion Channel)

Yes, the top three are all Robin's (Maya Hawke) picks. She really does have great taste. Ironically, none of these movies are on Netflix, at least in the U.S.

Twitter Sonnet #1256

The pieces changed to putty worms at once.
A time for section grids removed the fear.
A signal hat explodes the cornered dunce.
A number bucket claims our ev'ry tear.
Receding sod could fill the kitchen yet.
A spinning Slinky sliced the ragged stairs.
A burglar makes a safe and metal bet.
The healthy milk was filled with breakfast bears.
The care behind a picture puts it back.
As ice'll melt the cubes contain the spheres.
A thousand monkeys race inside the sack.
For ev'ry nose a hundred thousand beers.
A standard takes the shape of smithy feats.
Reminders take the form of standard streets.

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Detoxifying Dr. Jekyll

Fri, 30 Mar 2018 21:52:52 GMT

Can the quest for moral perfection lead to the creation of a perfect monster? Or is the idea of such a quest indicative of a monstrous nature from the outset? One way in which Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is discussed is in how truly either persona reflects the central character's essential nature. It's a story that both pays tribute to and counters the ideas of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Both stories warn of the dangers of man imitating God through scientific experiment but where Mary Shelley clearly has a lot of sympathy for her monster, Hyde is presented as more thoroughly repulsive. And yet it's not quite so simple as that.

Jekyll at first describes the temptation of the Hyde persona as a kind of "slavery" but in the very next paragraph he uses the word "liberty":

Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter. I was the first that ever did so for his pleasures. I was the first that could thus plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete. Think of it—I did not even exist! Let me but escape into my laboratory door, give me but a second or two to mix and swallow the draught that I had always standing ready; and whatever he had done, Edward Hyde would pass away like the stain of breath upon a mirror; and there in his stead, quietly at home, trimming the midnight lamp in his study, a man who could afford to laugh at suspicion, would be Henry Jekyll.

It almost sounds like the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory and the sort of freedom Jekyll describes would be familiar to the average Internet troll. But is "liberty" an altogether accurate term here? John Milton once wrote, ". . . none can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but licence." Like Elster in Vertigo, the freedom that Jekyll describes is dependent on his licence or, to use the preferred term of to-day, privilege. Hyde knocks over a child in the street or even murders a man because he disregards the right of his victims to walk safely in the city. Meanwhile, Hyde himself greedily clutches at protection, hiding behind the wealth and facade of Jekyll.

Of course, Mary Shelley saw Milton from a very different perspective. Her monster is obsessed with Milton's Paradise Lost, identifying with the figure of Satan in it. No surprise given Mary Shelley was influenced by the general love the Romantics had for Paradise Lost, leading to the creation of the "Byronic Hero". Figures like Lord Byron's Manfred who threw off the influence of good and evil to assert their own minds and powers. The idea holds an undeniable appeal but between the publication of Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the concept of asserting personal passions without regard to others was criticised in a diversity of great works from Moby Dick to The Masque of the Red Death to Madame Bovary to Crime and Punishment. But the effectiveness of these works is in their complexity; the fascination we feel for Ahab, the horror we feel of the Red Death, the sympathy we feel for Emma, and the stimulation we feel from Raskolnikov's argument. The revelation isn't that these seemingly good ideas turned out to be bad after all but that the consequences of true insight into human nature are tragic and horrifying.

We don't see much of Hyde in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, what we learn about him is mostly from characters discussing their impressions of him. We learn more about Jekyll's internal life and his feverish efforts to not be Hyde. Most of the story is told from the perspective of Jekyll's friend and lawyer, Utterson, who until the end believes Hyde and Jekyll are separate entities. Utterson worries about Jekyll's association with the infamous Hyde and after the murder Jekyll says to Utterson, "I cannot say that I care what becomes of Hyde; I am quite done with him. I was thinking of my own character, which this hateful business has rather exposed." No real thought to the victim of the crime anymore than he had real sympathy for the other victims, only a horror at what damage there might be to his reputation. When one considers Jekyll's original motive when he created Hyde, to separate and therefore somehow purge all his negative impulses, it seems all of Jekyll's supposed goodness is but vanity. His interest is more in crafting his purity than in any action that might do effective good. This is a product of the idea of good and evil as abstractions--where they are two concrete states that one can be, then one can focus on them instead of evaluating individual actions based on their real merits. It's the ultimate indictment of Puritan psychology. Of people who can't look directly at their own preoccupations with self-image because fundamental to the drive for salvation is to be worthy rather than to attain worthiness through achievements that can be measured empirically. And this cuts both ways. Jekyll describes the aftermath of his decision never to be Hyde again:

I resolved in my future conduct to redeem the past; and I can say with honesty that my resolve was fruitful of some good. You know yourself how earnestly in the last months of last year, I laboured to relieve suffering; you know that much was done for others, and that the days passed quietly, almost happily for myself. Nor can I truly say that I wearied of this beneficent and innocent life; I think instead that I daily enjoyed it more completely; but I was still cursed with my duality of purpose; and as the first edge of my penitence wore off, the lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for licence.

Not only do the good acts seem worthless to Hyde who doesn't attempt them, they seem worthless to Jekyll after he's done them. The good acts Jekyll refers to are never sufficiently satisfying because he's always aware he's motivated not by the actions themselves but for how those actions might reflect on him, in terms of his reputation and his self-image. When he defines his goodness in terms of an abstraction made concrete by two physical states then no number of positive acts will ever be sufficient. Hyde is naturally a more satisfying persona because Hyde casts off this moral preoccupation entirely. The phoniness of Jekyll's motives make Hyde's base motives seem more legitimate. As a system designed to regulate indulgent, destructive behaviour, the moral sphere to which Jekyll belongs begins with a crack that widens to complete destruction when put into practise.

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The Inexorable Appointed Time

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 20:37:28 GMT

The path of damnation must be one where all things held beautiful and good are each in turn deprived of significance and wholesomeness until all things signify guilt or nothing at all. The demons that plague Johan in Ingmar Bergman's 1968 film, Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen) don't seem to be tempting him so much as processing him for a fate that's already been decided and are assisting him in dismantling his capacity for affection and reverence. His wife and muse, Alma, present to witness the process in horror, doesn't seem an agent assigned by God to offer him an alternative as much as someone who, through some strange chance, has ended up where she's not supposed to be. It's an eerie, frightening, and deeply sad film.

Johan (Max von Sydow) and Alma (Liv Ullmann) have taken up residence in a small house on a remote island. He's a famous painter who has fled the world due to some kind of terrible event or scandal. Alma is selflessly devoted to him and we see most of the movie from her point of view, in fact the film begins with her directly addressing the camera, recounting the events.

Bergman frequently illuminates her face more than Johan's, concealing his face in shadow and by blocking, which, together with Von Sydow's often solemn and listless performance, suggest someone who's no longer struggling against his doom. He tells Alma about the demons he encounters on the island, the eeriest among them an old woman (Naima Wifstrand) who, he says, "Is always threatening to remove her hat." The implication that something horrible will happen if she removes her hat is one of the ways the demons give the impression of an entirely superficial reality behind which there is only destruction or void.

Alma then encounters the woman with the hat and she encourages Alma to read Johan's diary. Since the diary reveals Johan's thoughts are dwelling on his former lover, Veronica (Ingrid Thulin), maybe this is one of the things that leads Alma to conclude the demons are trying to drive them apart. I never got the impression that the demons were worried Alma's love, however beautiful and compelling, would divert Johan from his path to damnation so much as they were mildly uncomfortable entertaining a guest who simply didn't belong. When Johan and Alma are invited to the demons' castle, where they're presided over by one calling himself Baron von Merkens (Erland Josephson), in their laughter and incessant mockery they seem like the catty, shallow Hollywood crowd that can't tolerate someone as sincere and ordinary as Alma.

One of the demons, Lindhorst (Georg Rydeberg), puts on a puppet show in which Bergman uses forced perspective to put a full sized actor on the tiny stage, something that reminded me of the Sultan's mechanical players in the 1940 Thief of Bagdad. In the Criterion DVD commentary for that film, Francis Ford Coppola talks about how much that image haunted him as a child and I wonder if it had the same effect on Bergman. In Hour of the Wolf, it's one of the things that make art itself seem sinister and demonic.

The demons continually endeavour to trivialise and demean art. Johan tells them he's fully aware that art isn't that important, he says the insight comes from being an artist and knowing that it's only a selfish compulsion that keeps him painting. They congratulate him on the insight and in the film's climax they go further, demeaning and mocking his reverence for the beauty of women.

A final sequence where the characters are lost in a wood is effectively horrific, as is a flashback in the middle where Johan tells Alma about an act that may have been the cause of his damnation. The former is shot in unnatural darkness and the latter with unnatural brightness, both methods stripping detail and nuance from the image, emphasising the world of hard, inflexible meaning tightening further and further around Johan.

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Intolerance can Swim

Sun, 11 Mar 2018 22:02:03 GMT

The question was always there but few have dared to ask it: what if Nazis could breathe underwater? This is the nightmare realised by 1977's Shock Waves. It's elevated from simple, entertaining schlock by cool locations and very good performances, particularly from John Carradine and Peter Cushing.

Carradine plays the captain of a small boat taking tourists sight seeing in the Caribbean. I love his character--the way he scoffs at the beliefs of the ship's cook (Don Stout) in paranormal phenomena at sea is so strident that you get the impression he knows all the stories are true but he's wise enough to know people are better off not believing. Carradine is just the right actor for this part, his aged face reflecting his depth of experience along with the tone of flawed authority that made him perfect as Aaron in The Ten Commandments and as preachers in John Ford movies.

Among the tourists, Brooke Adams as Rose is presented as the protagonist but mainly she's relegated to following along as the men make all the decisions or running in terror. A natural enough reaction when encountering water breathing Nazi zombies--as they do when they shipwreck on an island. Also in residence is Peter Cushing, sole occupant of a great abandoned luxury hotel.

He has top billing but not a lot of screen time. Playing a former Nazi commander about whom we learn little he's around long enough to make a monologue on genetically engineered, aquatic Nazi super soldiers sound gravely serious.

They're pretty menacing though the tourists' worst enemy, as is often the case movies like this, is their own foolishness, particular a couple of them who do really stupid things when they panic. But the best death in the film comes courtesy of sea urchins. This movie was a real pleasure to watch.

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A poacher's plate advanced along the Rhein.
Announcements fell beneath the azure cloud.
A pair of pumpkin eyes betrayed the mine.
It's thought the written note was something loud.
Entire bottles face a plot returned.
Away to office lunch a cable's sent.
A lesson stacked in woods was swiftly learned.
Occasion told antennae too were bent.
The alternating green accepts.
A face ingests the proffered wine alone.
Detect the taste of brain on clean forceps?
The vinegar and lemon *can* atone.
A citrus shoe delivers feet to C.
An hour shaved delivers time to sea.

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A Good Home for the Circulation

Sun, 25 Feb 2018 21:16:37 GMT

Just once I'd like to be offered money to spend all night in a haunted house, though preferably more than the ten pounds offered to the man in 1964's Castle of Blood(Danza Macabra). A gorgeously shot film from directors Antonio Margheriti and Sergio Corbucci, it goes for the classic haunted house vibe with gusto. The beautiful Barbara Steele gives an intense performance in the lead role.

The 1960s saw several films from Roger Corman that played fast and loose with adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories but I haven't seen any that take quite as many liberties as Castle of Blood. The opening titles say its based on an Edgar Allan Poe story and even features Poe as a character (played by Silvano Tranquilli) but there's not one aspect of the film that bears any significant resemblance to anything Poe wrote. In this version of reality, Poe's stories are all based on his real experiences and they all seem to be about people returning from the grave, an idea scoffed at by a journalist named Alan Foster (Georges Riviere). He's interviewing Poe in a pub when another man, Lord Thomas Blackwood (Umberto Raho), proposes the fateful ten pound bet that Alan can't make it through a night in his castle.

Thomas seems confident because several other people have tried and died, something the men discuss in an oddly casual manner. Alan laughs and accepts the challenge because he doesn't believe in ghosts, kind of missing the obvious fact that people really have died, whatever the cause.

Once alone in the castle, Alan spends some time wandering around and the filmmakers take the opportunity to pile on with shadows, cobwebs, candelabra, all the good things in life, before people start showing up in the supposedly abandoned place. The first one Alan meets is the beautiful Elisabeth Blackwood (Barbara Steele) who's wandering about in her nightgown. She tells him how her brother, Thomas, tells people she's dead only because she's dead to him.

As more and more people manifest, Alan is made privy to the juicy details of the love polygon that mostly involved beautiful men, and one woman, fighting and killing each other for the love of Elisabeth. Elisabeth, in turn, falls for Alan which, whatever might become of him, has got to be good for his ego.

There's something in the portrayal of spirits trapped in a place, forced to continually dwell on their pain and unfulfilled desires, that has a real resonance but mostly this film is just a nice soak in wonderful atmosphere.

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Crazy for Blood

Thu, 01 Feb 2018 19:36:08 GMT

1958's Blood of the Vampire has lots of blood but not much of a vampire. This is despite the fact that it was written by Jimmy Sangster, stars Barbara Shelley, and has some classic horror fantasy visuals. Also in spite of these facts, it's not a Hammer film. It's not bad but it suffers from a lack of strong performances apart from Shelley's.

Dr. Callistratus (Donald Wolfit) runs a prison for the criminally insane in Transylvania. He conducts secret experiments involving blood transfusion in the hopes of curing his own mysterious blood ailment, presumably something like vampirism, since we witness his resurrection from the grave early in the film with the help of his Igor-like assistant, Carl (Vincent Maddem).

Callistratus arranges for the film's protagonist, Dr. Pierre (Vincent Ball), to be wrongly convicted and sent to his prison in order to help with blood research. Pierre is a complete drip--played by Vincent Ball he has all the dynamism of the owner of a discount furniture store appearing in his own commercial.

Somehow he's managed to win the heart of Madeleine, his fiancee, played by a far superior Barbara Shelley. The film picks up a lot in the last third when she suddenly turns up posing as Callistratus' housemaid. It's a scheme that makes very little sense and there are a lot of questions completely ignored as to how it happened--how did she know Callistratus lied about Pierre dying in a prison break? How did she know he needed a housemaid?

Unfortunately, Callistratus' collaborator is a prison official named Auron (Bryan Coleman) who recognises her and tries to blackmail her into sleeping with him. Fortunately, Carl, like many a disfigured henchman in many horror movies, has fallen into an utterly selfless love for the female lead and helps her.

With a stronger actor in Ball's place, this might have been a really good movie. As it is, the mixture of bizarre medical fantasy mixed with vampirism still functions kind of well. It manages to make something slightly weird out of the too familiar monster.

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The Perfect Horror Triangle

Tue, 30 Jan 2018 21:40:27 GMT

Zombies are known for being pretty slow movers but apparently if you put a topless woman and a shark in front of one he perks right up. You can see this in the best scene of 1979's Zombi 2, which isn't actually a sequel to anything. It was put out as a sequel to Dawn of the Dead but there's nothing in Zombi 2 to explicitly connect it with George Romero's film. Zombi 2 reintroduces Voodoo to the zombie story, a classic component of zombie films that Romero's movies broke ground by moving away from. Most of the virtues of Zombi 2 are in that one incredible action sequence, the rest of the film is mostly a bit silly and lazy.

Well, this fellow has some nice screen presence. A boat drifts into New York Harbour and a couple cops board it to find no-one aboard but a big zombie who chomps the throat out of one of them. This movie's zombies really like to go for the jugular and there are a lot of shots of ripped neck with blood splurting out.

The boat belongs to the father of Anne Bowles, a young woman played by Tisa Farrow who gets top billing despite being little more than a wide eyed, swooning sack of potatoes throughout the film. If you want a textbook example of women and minorities getting short shrift in a horror film, this one covers the bases.

The zombies originated from an uncharted Caribbean island where Dr. Menard (Richard Johnson) is trying to save everyone despite the furious verbal abuse from his wife, Paola (Olga Karlatos). He also has to deal with the childlike superstition of the film's only black character, Lucas (Dakar), whose fearful dependence on the white man's wisdom makes him seen retrograde for 1934 in this film from the late 70s.

Anne meets a man named Peter (Ian McCulloch) she can unwisely tag along with into dangerous situations and allow to make all decisions for her and the two head to the Caribbean. They hitch a ride with a couple of vacationers played by Al Cliver and Auretta Gay. Auretta Gay really deserved top billing for this film.

Swimming practically naked with a tiger shark, she's part of the film's three way action sequence when a zombie taps in, springing from a mass of coral.

She fights off the zombie by grabbing a handful of coral and smashing it in his face, something which seems like it really shouldn't work but this guy is far from your average zombie. Using clear strategy and agility, the fellow actually wrestles with the shark.

If all the film's zombies were like this guy we'd have had 28 Days Later twenty three years early. It's a great scene, I certainly hope the poor shark wasn't traumatised by it. Both Auretta Gay and the actor playing the zombie--Ramon Bravo, who was also the shark's trainer--deserved the salaries of every other actor in the film put together.

Otherwise, the film has a really convincing shot of someone's eye getting pierced by a piece of wood, but you're better off watching Un Chien Andalou if you want to see something like that. There's a really ridiculous sequence where a car goes off the road after hitting a zombie and Peter, sitting in the rear passenger seat, somehow breaks his ankle when the car gently butts up against a tree. It's like the man's ankle burst in a nervous reaction or something. There are a few scenes of dopey, standard zombie fight choreography where characters inexplicably back into the slow moving corpses that come from nowhere and women, of course, can't seem to handle guns and tend to freeze up when faced with reanimated dead. Which makes it all the more remarkable that Auretta Gay is so dynamic in that underwater sequence--nothing else in the film equals it.

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The Dangers of Cats, Ravens, and Pianos

Fri, 19 Jan 2018 23:54:10 GMT

Happy Birthday, Edgar Allan Poe. My favourite anthology horror film from Amicus has a great deal to do with him--1967's Torture Garden. Directed by Freddie Francis with a screenplay by Robert Bloch, based on four of Bloch's short stories, each segment has keen fantasy logic with some lovely cinematography and wonderfully weird production design.

I love this room for the killer piano in the third story. It's like a Man Ray painting. And yes, I said killer piano, and it is a bit silly, but it's also kind of a fun exploration of the subtext in the muse versus the lover type of story. The piano is named after the muse Euterpe and she seems to be murderously jealous of her player's (John Standing) lover, Dorothy (Barbara Ewing).

I like the build up with him seeming increasingly distracted and Dorothy finding it increasingly unreasonable that he has such an emotional investment in the thing. The pianist's manager (Ursula Denham) thinks it's Dorothy who's being unreasonable though, if you ask me, just wanting her lover to have dinner with her now and then is pretty low maintenance. I doubt Dorothy thought she'd have her fears confirmed by being chased around the room by a piano with a lid chomping like great mouth.

The framing story has the four protagonists at a side show run by an effectively satanic Burgess Meredith--he's so sinister in this movie I forgot all about his Penguin. He invites each person to stare into the shears of a mechanical Atropos figure (very obviously an actress sitting very still) to see into a future where their own wrongdoing leads to their downfall. Unlike in Dr. Terror's House of Horror, a big part of Meredith's spiel is that the individual can use the foreknowledge to prevent tragedy. It's a warning to each person to mend their ways.

And yes, it doesn't quite make sense because nothing Dorothy did seems all that bad. The other female protagonist, Dorothy's American cousin Carla (Beverly Adams), is at least a little mischievous and ruthless. She pretends to accidentally burn a roommate's dress so she can steal her date with a movie star (David Bauer).

Carla also makes it clear she's willing sleep with anyone to get ahead in show business and easily moves from Charles onto another movie star (Robert Hutton) when it seems the latter might be easier to manipulate. The story has an amusing Sci-Fi twist that nonetheless is a sharp, disquieting revelation on the illusion of the Hollywood dream.

All of the stories have something to do with art or entertainment industry except first story about a young man (Michael Bryant) who allows his rich uncle (Maurice Denham) to die in the hopes of inheriting his wealth. Matters are complicated when said wealth turns out to be buried chests of antique coins guarded by a mind controlling murder cat.

I suppose it fits into the other stories in that achieving the aims of avarice can introduce weird, unexpected problems. The story bears some resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe's The Black Cat, which ties it to the final story of the film.

Jack Palance, with a very unconvincing English accent, plays an obsessive collector of Poe artefacts named Ronald Wyatt. Peter Cushing plays another obsessive, and far more successful, Poe collector named Lancelot Canning. The two meet at an exhibition of Canning's collection where Ronald covets a rare edition of one of Poe's works. Canning won't part with it for any price but invites his fellow collector to his home in the U.S. so he can rub his face in the rest of his collection.

As in Dr. Terror, the transition from England to the U.S. is a little abrupt. With no exterior shots, we basically go from one interior that could be anywhere to another interior that could be anywhere, but with this décor I'll forgive anything.

Palance plays his character slightly over the top, almost feverish, like he's ready to bludgeon Canning at any moment and I wonder why the more reserved Canning would dare even invite the other man into his home around such delicate artefacts. Cushing seems to be having fun, though, playing his character as very drunk most of the time, subtly bobbing his head and smiling placidly while Palance gets worked up over a manuscript.

Watching these two actors talk about Poe in this environment is much more satisfying than the resolution of the story but Torture Garden never really lets you down.

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A Weird House for Weird Humans

Thu, 18 Jan 2018 00:59:03 GMT

Sometimes in a really bad storm the only place you can rely on is the creepy house filled with murderers, madmen, and Boris Karloff. 1932's The Old Dark House is a sterling example of one of my favourite kinds of stories--the one where a bunch of people get trapped in an old house or hotel. In this case, director James Whale conjures some breathtakingly spooky atmosphere perfectly balanced by light comedy from a good ensemble cast.

This effective mixture of tones is introduced in the first scene as a car bearing three people pushes through a very convincingly constructed special effects storm. Sheets of rain, cascading mud, and a landslide are all so effectively created it makes it even funnier when Melvyn Douglas, sitting in the backseat, gamely starts singing "Singin' in the Bathtub", much to the irritation of the two newlyweds in the front, Philip (Raymond Massey) and Margaret (Gloria Stuart).

There's more to Douglas' character, Roger, though, than peculiarly steady nerves. We later learn that he's a World War I veteran and offers a slightly glib psychological profile of himself over a glass of gin: "War generation slightly soiled, a study in the bittersweet, the 'man with a twisted smile.' And this, Mr. Femm, is exceedingly good gin."

Horace Femm (Ernest Thesiger) is in charge of the titular old dark house, an intensely nervous man who is terrified by the idea that the storm will cause a landslide that destroys the house. His ill tempered sister, Rebecca (Eva Moore), scoffs at her brother's fears, telling him she knows this house better than he does.

She takes Margaret to her bedroom so the young woman can change clothes in a scene of brilliantly, subtly escalating tension. Once in the room, Margaret strips to her underwear without thinking, half listening to the old woman rambling her condemnations of electric light and hedonistic youth. Gradually, though, Margaret realises there's something more than a little threatening about the woman who in her religious fever seems about to attack her. The old woman leaves, though, without harming her--there's still an emotional undercurrent to the scene that builds and explodes when Margaret opens a window without thinking and the room is immediately dominated by the storm.

All the same, it seems rude for her to just leave the room like that and it prompts mixed feelings when the old lady later complains at the state Margaret left the room in without even mentioning it when she came to supper. Margaret is an uninvited guest, after all.

And then Charles Laughton shows up, in his first film role, as a boisterous Welshman named Sir William Porterhouse. He's accompanied by an equally carefree chorus girl named Gladys (Lilian Pond) who's delighted when the handsome Roger helps her change her wet shoes.

The only flaw in this movie is the rapidly developed romance between Roger and Gladys. When the two go out to the car for a bottle of whisky, they much too quickly start talking about marriage. The performances from the protagonists which had been so delightfully natural up to this point suddenly take on the worst, stiffest characteristics of silent film acting. But the scene does have an interesting moment where she tells Roger how Sir William won't mind at all about the two of them--William's a widower but, although he likes to sit on Gladys' bed with her telling stories, he's shown no sign that he wants to have sex with her. Gladys even says that Sir William tries to come off as "gay"--it's uncertain if the audience would've picked up on this word as meaning homosexual or if it was intended to. I would argue that Cary Grant's use of the term in 1938's Bringing Up Baby was definitely meant to mean homosexual but it was not known well enough for the censors to have caught it.

If Porterhouse is meant to be homosexual, though, it's nice that he's in no way sinister or a villain in this film. It would fit in, too, with the dialogue establishing both Roger and Gladys as misfits--Roger for his war trauma and Gladys because she's a chorus girl, something she spends a lot of time talking about with a defiant lack of shame. In this context, the moralistic condemnation from the old woman takes on a new significance. As does the name "Femm", the fact that the gender roles between Horace and Rebecca seem reversed, and the fact that the Femm patriarch, Roderick, is played by a woman (Elspeth Dudgeon).

On top of all this, the film has Boris Karloff as the deaf butler, Morgan. Karloff plays him as someone who performs his duties on automatic and is mentally cut off from everyone else, something that becomes really sinister when you see has no sense of guilt about the violence he might inflict.

This film has terrific atmosphere, great performances, and some really intriguing characters. And it already had me with the people trapped in the house concept.

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The plate collates a dozen gobs of rice.
In glowing space the number turned to blue.
The first tomato pulled us homeward twice.
No glancing beam could prove the car was true.
Inverted hooves have pushed a sky to turf.
A hidden stone absorbed a shock to good.
Surprising steps alert the sickened Smurf.
Sapphire gnomes'll always count and should.
A spacious temp'rature unwraps the shoot.
The stars are masks for oxygen above.
A flying tube conveys the human boot.
A mirror hall creates the multi-dove.
The table welcomes butlers, ghosts, and souls.
A storm disrupts the laces, heels, and soles.

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The Unluckiness of Frankenstein

Tue, 09 Jan 2018 23:41:15 GMT

1964's The Evil of Frankenstein really ought to be called The Evil of Zolton the Hypnotist. Frankenstein himself isn't quite a passive character but calling anything he does evil would seem a bit of a stretch--at worst he's negligent and rash. The film gets too caught up in shuffling plot chairs but it's one of the most visually beautiful Hammer movies I've seen.

Directed by Freddie Francis with cinematography by John Wilcox, the movie has exteriors that almost look like Caspar David Friedrich paintings.

The interior shots can be pretty gorgeous, too. This beautifully shaded close-up of Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) turns into a tracking shot. The shot wanders through the wonderfully decrepit rooms of his chateau as he recounts the familiar events from adaptations of Mary Shelley's book.

Although this is a Hammer film with Peter Cushing in the role of Frankenstein, the flashback that starts here introduces a completely different version of the story than the one we see in the first Hammer Frankenstein film with Cushing in the role. We see nothing of any supporting characters from that movie, Frankenstein apparently working alone in his lab to create life, and the creature, instead of Christopher Lee, is played by a New Zealand wrestler named Kiwi Kingston. Thanks to Hammer entering a distribution agreement with Universal, this version of the monster is intended to resemble the Boris Karloff version.

The main plot of the film follows Frankenstein's attempt to return to his old home after the villagers had driven him to exile. He frequently complains in this film about people not leaving him alone wherever he goes--the film starts with a local priest (James Maxwell) wrecking his lab after learning the Baron had been snatching bodies. Not killing people, mind you. The priest bursts in on a wonderful scene where sparking electrodes, tanks of water, and dusty bellows are assisting Frankenstein in getting a human heart to beat.

But after this he needs money to replace the equipment wrecked by the priest so he heads home hoping to get paintings and ornaments he can sell. The village is in the middle of Carnival celebrations and the filmmakers take the opportunity to put people in masks. This is also how Frankenstein and his assistant, Hans (Sandor Eles), meet Zolton (Peter Woodthorpe).

It's Zolton who later hypnotises the monster into wreaking havoc on the town without Frankenstein's knowledge--though, oddly, Zolton seems to have exactly the same enemies Frankenstein has--the burgomaster and the chief of police. It makes me wonder if in an earlier draft of the script Frankenstein was meant to order the monster to commit crimes of vengeance but it was decided it was more interesting to make the Baron a less obviously villainous, misguided man of passion.

His assistant, Hans, is a pretty boring henchman but the two enlist the aid of a far more intriguing character, a deaf beggar girl named Rena (Katy Wild).

She and the monster start to develop signs of sympathy for each other, maybe on the grounds that neither quite understands what's going on and both are used to being abused and forced to serve the whims of others. I almost wonder if this was an influence on Guillermo Del Toro in making The Shape of Water though the relationship is never anywhere near as developed as the one Del Toro portrays in his film.

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The Amphibious and Amorphous

Mon, 01 Jan 2018 02:53:54 GMT

Reinterpreting classic monster stories as sympathetic portrayals of misfits is nothing new but Guillermo del Toro reaches new heights with 2017's The Shape of Water. An unabashed ode to Creature from the Black Lagoon and, to a lesser extent, King Kong, The Shape of Water teases out the hints of erotic and romantic subtext in those films into a lovely, full blown fantasy romance film.

Arguably Del Toro's most political film, even more than The Devil's Backbone or Pan's Labyrinth, the action is set in 1962, rather than Black Lagoon's 1954. The civil rights movement, the Red Scare, and the Cold War are all integral aspects of the film's backdrop and occasionally its plot. The film's two central protagonists are a mute--but not deaf--woman named Elisa (Sally Hawkins) and a gay man named Giles (Richard Jenkins). Their thematic connexion to the "Amphibian Man" (Doug Jones), trapped in a lab by the white, Christian, heterosexual men of the U.S. government is not ambiguous. Giles agrees to help Elisa rescue the creature after he's cruelly rejected, in an effectively brutal scene, by a man in a cafe. He understands then why Elisa might feel some camaraderie with the beast.

Thankfully, the movie doesn't simply render the monster a thoroughly safe and passive version of the Gill Man from Creature of the Black Lagoon. One scene that will be especially unpleasant to cat lovers shows the Amphibian Man is, like the Gill Man, a wild animal capable of killing with little discrimination. I also liked that Giles was surprisingly understanding about it. Jenkins is very good in the film as the often put upon and mildly exasperated voice of reason.

Creature from the Black Lagoon is already a film that puts much more blame on human arrogance than on any ideas the monster might have. The true villain of the 1954 film is arguably the one scientist who wants to kill or capture the creature for his own glory. The other humans are pretty vocal about not wanting to kill it and wanting to allow it to remain in its natural habitat. I watched Creature from the Black Lagoon again last night and I was surprised how many little things Del Toro references in Shape of Water. Even the odd idea that study of the Gill Man can somehow be utilised for space travel. Like the male protagonist of Black Lagoon, a Russian spy working under the name of Hoffstetler (Michael Stuhlbarg) in Shape of Water voices the assertion that it would be more valuable to study the creature alive than dead. His adversary is Colonel Strickland played by Stuhlbarg's Boardwalk Empire co-star Michael Shannon.

Shannon's great talent for playing violent men is further emphasised by two severed figures that were reattached early in the film. They become more and more discoloured over the course of the film and work nicely both to add to tension and to add the sense that the colonel himself is becoming monstrous.

Doug Jones is fantastic as usual as the Amphibian Man and his make-up and costume pay homage to the great Gill Man costume with the addition of more expressive eyes. But it's Sally Hawkins as Elisa at the heart of the film.

Quite fearless in scenes depicting her masturbating in the bath, Hawkins helps the film express fully the erotic undertones of Black Lagoon by providing more intimacy with the female protagonist's internal motives and needs. Her vulnerability and determination in her identification with the monster are also beautifully expressed resulting in a surprising, and surprisingly effective, musical number.

Octavia Spencer plays a kind of a stock character as Elisa's friend and coworker. Spencer's comedic timing is nice enough but Colonel Stickland's casual racism talking to her doesn't quite make up for her unimaginative character. Her and Elisa being the cleaning women adds kind of a nice remark on classism, though.

It almost goes without saying, but really, it's worth repeating--the film is visually stunning.

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