setsuled | Entries tagged with peter cushing

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.

Twitter Sonnet #1092

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.

Current Mood: groggy
Current Location: A hotel
Current Music: "Mischievous Ghost" - Elvis Costello and Mary Coughlan

How do you spot a werewolf in human form? Would it look like Peter Cushing, Charles Gray, Michael Gambon, or someone else? 1974's The Beast Must Die poses the question so the wealthy Tom Newcliffe (Calvin Lockhart) can decide which of his guests to hunt and kill. With a werewolf that is clearly a large and very friendly dog and a peculiarly funky soundtrack, this movie is heavy on cheese but it's still a lot of fun.

It begins with this title card and a narrator informing us we'll be given a chance near the climax to stop and give our answers, to see if we've figured out who the werewolf is. For the record, I came up with two solutions--the person I thought it would be if the movie was playing fair, and the person I felt like it would be if the movie was deciding it entirely on narrative construction. I thought it would go with the latter but I was happy it went with the former.

Every one of Tom's guests could be fairly suspected for one reason or another. Paul Foote (Tom Chadbon) is a strangely hairy man, an artist who paints murder victims; Arthur Bennington (Gray) seems reluctant to touch the silver candlesticks and is indignant at any suggestion there's something odd about him; Jan Gilmore (Gambon) tries to flee the estate when he finds out what Tom's up to; Arthur's wife, Davina (Ciaran Madden), has the suspicious name "Davina"; and Peter Cushing plays Professor Lundgren, a lycanthropy expert who fervently insists at the dinner table that werewolves are as much victims as the people they attack.

Rounding out the cast of famously sinister actors is Anton Diffring as Pavel, Tom's assistant who monitors the cameras placed throughout the estate from a special control room. He and Tom politely debate the existence of werewolves--but Tom is thoroughly convinced.

Tom's wife, Caroline (Marlene Clark), gets into arguments about it, too, at the dinner table in front of the guests. These escalate a bit artificially and both actors seem to be delivering their lines with passion that really isn't in the material. Any time Cushing or Gray is on screen, though, the material is elevated by two actors who know exactly the right moments to be over the top or subtle with this kind of material. Gambon is good, too, with naturally good instincts as an actor but he doesn't seem to have learned how to hit the oversized notes for this kind of material yet.

As for the wolf? He's a good dog, yes he is. I felt kind of bad for him when the helicopter pilot was hugging him so that we'd think the beast was attacking him.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: The hunt
Current Music: "Hold On" - Tom Waits

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.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: On set
Current Music: "The Day the World Went Away" - Nine Inch Nails

A man returns to his hometown in Bavaria after years spent growing up in England, the years during and after World War II. He identifies as English now and doesn't think he cares that much about his German father until he finds a weirdly tangled mystery around him in 1963's The Man Who Finally Died. Based on a television serial I suspect made a lot more sense than the muddled plot of this film, it's still entertaining with some nice performances and cinematography.

Stanley Baker as the protagonist, Joe, bears a weirdly strong resemblance to Morrissey, a not unpleasant distraction (apparently I'm not the first person to notice this). And he does a decent job as the point of view character, undermined a bit by the soundtrack's tendency to give a big menacing sting for every revelation in this mystery.

Joe thought his father had died years earlier until he received a phone call in England from a man claiming to be his father and claiming to be in need of help. Arriving in the small Bavarian town, he discovers his father had apparently died weeks before the phone call was made and inhabiting the family manor now is a perfectly pleasant, slightly sinister, and quite delightful couple played by Peter Cushing and Mai Zetterling.

No, no, nothing suspicious here. I only wish these two were in the movie more.

Joe uncovers one odd detail after another--his Protestant father was apparently taken to a Catholic church, there's an insurance agent apparently stalking Joe, and there's a grave where the name seems to have been swapped with another. The movie throws out more weird clues, in fact, than are quite supported by the solution given in the climax but there is some fun getting there.

Also in the film are Eric Portman as an irritable police inspector and an adorable Georgina Ward whose dead father may or may not have been swapped with Joe's dead father. It's not really clear why she starts wanting to help Joe, who's a bit of a jerk to her. Maybe it was clearer in the serial.

Twitter Sonnet #1074

Distracting squares arrive to spin the board.
Arranged on kitchen shelves were tiny trees.
A sudden cable stopped the breaking cord.
A face emerged composed of cheddar cheese.
On legs as thin as bars the metal stood.
In webs of ceiling fans the Shadow knows.
In hearts of lacing root and branches wood
The source of cloud and lightning slowly grows.
The moon's mistaken on the line of thugs.
In twisting flame a cherry vine awaits.
The lesser candy's sold for gummy pugs.
The tide of sour hooves at dawn abates.
Forgotten cushions hold a mess of pins.
Confusion tables list bouquets of sins.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: Bavaria
Current Music: "The Jean Genie" - David Bowie

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.

Current Mood: hungry
Current Location: The lab
Current Music: "Alice's House" - Psychedelic Furs

Christmas doesn't technically end until the Feast of the Epiphany on January 6 and Eastern Orthodox Christians won't even have Christmas Day until the seventh so I think I'm in my rights to review a Christmas movie now. 1961's Cash on Demand is a surprisingly subtle variation on A Christmas Carol from Hammer centred on an incredible performance from Peter Cushing.

As the film's resident Scrooge, the fastidious Harry Fordyce (Cushing), lords it over a small group of employees at a bank, his insistence on precise observation of protocol putting him on the verge of firing a kind man named Pearson (Richard Vernon) two days before Christmas. But then Fordyce finds himself at the mercy of a bank robber identifying himself as Colonel Gore-Hepburn (Andre Morell).

Gaining entry to Fordyce's office by pretending to be a security agent for one of the bank's insurance companies, the Colonel makes it clear that Fordyce must comply with his every whim. A phone call reveals the Colonel's accomplices are holding Fordyce's wife and child as hostages. If the Colonel doesn't signal his accomplice every fifteen minutes, the woman and child will be subjected to torture and death.

Unlike the Christmas spirits who visit Scrooge, the Colonel seems to have no particular interest in reforming Fordyce but he does take sadistic pleasure in how especially painful it is for Fordyce to participate in committing a crime of any kind, even worse in the workplace where he prides himself on professionalism. Cushing conveys the excruciating pinion in which Fordyce finds himself with brilliant instinct, letting just the right amount of his anxiety slip through among the employees and hitting bigger notes of anguish when appropriate.

The focus remains on his situation rather than on any self-reflection which leads to a surprisingly poignant moment when Fordyce says desperately that his wife and child are all he has in the world. It's clear to others that this is because of how Fordyce has walled himself off from everyone else but Cushing shows just how tragically unaware Fordyce is of it himself. The beginning of the film obviously sets him up as an unsympathetic character so the surprise in how sorry you feel for him once the Colonel gets his hooks in is very nice. Cushing's peculiar mixture of sensitivity and coldness makes him singularly suited for the role.

The film's set almost entirely in one room, which is all it needs. Andre Morell gives a very good performance, too, and just watching him and Cushing work this material is a real pleasure.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: The vault
Current Music: "Chew's Eye Lab" Blade Runner OST - Vangelis

If you're looking for a film that embodies many of the negative preconceptions people might have about old movies, 1954's The Black Knight fits the bill in a lot of ways. A big Hollywood star who couldn't be bothered to do much work; a screenplay lacking any sense of research, heavily reliant on well-worn formula; a pro-Christian bias that seems there more by default than any deeply held feeling. The Black Knight does have some beautiful location footage and a great supporting cast that includes Peter Cushing, Patrick Troughton, and Andre Morell but in too many ways it feels like it has less than half of what it needs to be a real movie.

Alan Ladd stars as John, castle smith to the Earl of Yeonil (Harry Andrews) in Arthurian England. John decides to become a knight on the recommendation of his friend, Sir Ontzlake (Morell), after the Earl banishes John when the smith's love for his daughter, Linet (Patricia Medina), comes to light.

This movie is not an example of Alan Ladd at his best. I guessed that he must not have been present for any of the location shots--every scene set in the woods has his character wearing a face concealing helmet with an occasionally very obviously process shot close-up of Ladd thrown in.

Then I read on the Wikipedia entry this quote from Donald Sinden who had a dressing room near Ladd's during the film's production: "(Ladd) brought in his entourage a double-cum-stunt man who bore an uncanny resemblance to him. The double did all the long shots, most of the medium shots and even appeared in two-shots when the hero had his back to the camera. The 'star' only did eleven days work in the entire film." And as for the few times you do see Ladd, I couldn't agree more with a critic quoted on Wikipedia as saying Ladd played the part "like a tired American businessman prevailed upon to take the lead in a revival of Merrie England." The movie clearly aims to be in the Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power mould of exhilarating swashbuckler but Ladd doesn't muster an ounce of the requisite pluck.

Adopting the persona of the Black Knight for reasons not entirely clear while searching for proof that Sir Palamides (Cushing) conducted a raid on Yeonil's castle disguised as a Viking, John seems to be aping Zorro a little bit. Palamides is a Saracen, a real character from Arthurian legend, though even Thomas Malory doesn't portray the Arabian knight as such a two dimensional villain. But he's still one of the film's high points for Cushing's quietly intense, fiery performance. His dialogues with the film's other villain, King Mark (Troughton), are great fun to watch.

Another character actually from Arthurian legend, the film takes a lot more liberties with King Mark, rendering him a crypto-Pagan complete with a secret headquarters for human sacrifice at Stonehenge. This leads up to a big set piece where the need for a "flaxen haired" sacrifice bizarrely calls for Medina to wear a blonde wig, presumably meant to be a scalp.

The cheesy Stonehenge set is okay but it pales in comparison to several shots of real castles in Wales and Spain used for the film.

Though the movie has no idea how things worked in mediaeval castles--Palamides storms the Earl's castle in the beginning without any resistance due to a total, inexplicable lack of guards.

The movie has a lot of great location shots, including a really cool joust between Ontzlake and John in a wood with little ground foliage.

And Andre Morell, the weirdo, actually showed up for work at the location shots. He looks and acts every inch the romantic mediaeval knight. How nice it would've been if he were the lead.

Twitter Sonnet #1070

In placid jello faces light emerged.
Unshaking mass engulfed the glassy ice.
In time the many feet in lines converge.
The splitting sand collects the movers twice.
Behind a pallid flame the floor descends.
A novel sun awakes in vanished eyes.
Through hers on tape a biker's ghost suspends.
The mountain grants the mice a thousand tries.
Eleven days a double knight assayed.
A speeding station filled electric clouds.
No faster thing than static posts invade.
About the dust there grew the dizzy crowds.
Eleven lads escort the active noon.
Surprising breakfasts greet them on the moon.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Location: The woods
Current Music: "All I Ask of You (Reprise)" - Andrew Lloyd Webber

The final Amicus anthology horror film was 1974's From Beyond the Grave. Once again featuring a framing story starring Peter Cushing it has some of the best imagery of the series as well as some of the most moralistic subtext.

Cushing plays the owner of a little antique shop in which each of the protagonists of the film's four stories eventually finds himself. Each one who tricks Cushing in some way ends up meeting a horrible fate. Cushing is nice and subtle as the Proprietor, showing just a hint that he's consciously aware of the supernatural vengeance his merchandise is exacting on his behalf.

The first story stars David Warner as a yuppie who buys a mirror from Cushing. After holding a seance with a group of equally posh and shallow friends, he discovers there's a demon presence in the mirror which compels Warner to commit a series of murders. It's a pretty effectively creepy mirror effect.

Warner nicely conveys the grief and horror of his actions as bodies begin to pile up.

The second story involves a stiff necked employee named Christopher (Ian Bannen) frustrated by his marriage to a fractious Diana Dors. Which already makes me dislike him--anyone who gets to be married to Diana Dors should thank his lucky stars every damned night, I don't care how she acts.

But the story concerns Christopher's encounters with an impoverished war veteran selling matches on the streets played by Donald Pleasence. Christopher buys a medal from Cushing to trick Pleasence into thinking he's a fellow vet and soon the poor man invites Christopher home and introduces him to his daughter, played by Pleasence's real life daughter Angela Pleasence.

The family resemblance is clear and somehow makes the two of them even creepier. Why is that? Is it the reminder of the biological nature of human reproduction?

The third story is more of a comedy, starring Ian Carmichael who inadvertently brings home a demon along with a snuff box he swindles out of Cushing. He enlists the aid of a witch played by an amusingly dishevelled Margaret Leighton. The story ends up being both effectively light hearted and sinister.

The final story involves a young man in the second brown corduroy sport coat of the film (it is the 70s, after all) named William (Ian Ogilvy) who buys a whole, huge, ornately carven door from Cushing. He brings it home and attaches it to a closet, an odd place for such an ostentatious item, as his wife (Lesley-Anne Down) remarks. But she needn't have worried because very quickly William discovers that sometimes the door leads to a room from the 17th century covered with cobwebs.

In many ways, this story is similar to the one with David Warner but it is very effective. The time and place distortion is played gradually enough to build suspense and eeriness and combines well with the over the top, haunted house quality of the strange room.

Current Mood: awake
Current Location: 古物屋
Current Music: "The Hawk Talks" - Duke Ellington

I'd think it difficult to be led astray by the title of 1964's Dr. Terror's House of Horrors. Though as a matter of fact we never see Dr. Terror's house--but it is a satisfyingly lurid horror anthology film, the first of a series for which British studio Amicus would become famous for in the 1960s and 1970s. Like most of those films, it features Peter Cushing, joined in this case by his friend and frequent Hammer co-star Christopher Lee. Both effectively play against type and the film's greatest flaw, its thoroughly illogical screenplay, even kind of contributes to how good it is. It's almost nightmare logic.

The framing story takes place on a train, not a house, where Dr. Schreck, played by Peter Cushing, tells the fortunes of five men in the car with him, one after another. Each story ends in doom for its subject, one of the movie's logical problems being that no-one asks if they can't avert fate now that they've been given foreknowledge. Though an unsurprising and effectively strange conclusion to the film arguably solves this problem.

Schreck's name means terror in German and Cushing plays the character with a thick accent and a lot more hair than is usual for him. A bigger departure, though, is Christopher Lee as one of the compartment occupants.

His story, the penultimate, is about revenge in the art world. "Disembodied Hand" bears a lot of resemblance to a story from the Tales from the Crypt comics, "The Maestro's Hand". Lee plays a vicious and conceited art critic named Franklyn Marsh who's embarrassed when an artist named Eric Landor (Michael Gough) tricks him into praising a painting by a chimpanzee.

It seems meant to prove a point he'd been making when Marsh had been publicly bashing an exhibition of Landor's paintings--Landor makes the argument that art is totally subjective and that its power resides in the viewer. Marsh's view of art as a measurable skill is rocked by the revelation of the chimpanzee artist so thoroughly that he goes quiet and literally runs away whenever Landor enters a room. As such, a disembodied hand that tries to strangle Marsh later in the story might be interpreted as a manifestation of repressed psychological issues.

And that's supported by Lee's nervous, fussy performance and it's really a highlight of his virtuosity to watch this alongside his natural and exuberant performance as Rasputin in Rasputin: The Mad Monk. Though I wonder if it really would've been so hard to say maybe a chimpanzee has talent. The fact that the ape's art is better than Landor's might have been a nice way to turn the insult around, Marsh really had to put his foot in it to make Landor's prank work, a slightly unlikely scenario, another thing that seems dreamlike.

Maybe the most dreamlike story in the film is the second one starring Benard Lee as a scientist trying to save a man and his family from a carnivorous vine inexplicably attacking his house.

There's no explanation for it, the plant just seems to've gone crazy one day. It's also difficult to understand why it's so hard to defeat.

The final story features Donald Sutherland as a doctor who brings his French wife (Jennifer Jayne) home to New York with him. The story is about vampirism and makes absolutely no sense, filled with motivations that turn on a dime. Sutherland is weird to watch, contemplating the murder of his wife with a wooden stake with only vague, mild distress.

There's absolutely nothing in this story to make you think it was shot anywhere near New York--apart from Sutherland, all the American accents are unconvincing and every scene was clearly shot on a sound stage.

But I like the look of it, the Technicolour in this movie is sort of gorgeously brash, particularly in the first story which is a sort of combination werewolf and haunted house story set in Scotland (again, mostly sound stages).

The film also features a story about a musician punished by supernatural forces for stealing a melody from a Haitian Voodoo ceremony, the weakest story in the film but weird enough to be enjoyable. The whole film is slightly unhinged fun.

Twitter Sonnet #1053

Two rivers make an absent third alive.
A sibling text appeared in pairs of notes.
A quiz delayed'll fade the brain's archive.
A grey and quiet crew deploy their boats.
Descending sizes stretch the cauldrons out.
In boiling clocks the hands are useless oars.
The gentlest tree contorts for leafy gout.
And ev'ry eve a cat conducts the tours.
The shadow horns replaced the scales in mind.
Ouroboros in human hearts decayed.
Expanding lungs of darkened walls rewind.
And slowly lids of metal eye cascade.
As straw inside investors try to birth.
A metal ice revisits corp'rate Earth.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: 電車
Current Music: "The Reflex" - Duran Duran

By the mid-70s, Vincent Price was already known well enough for horror roles that he could star in a tongue in cheek murder mystery homage to them, 1974's Madhouse. The film's awareness of its own camp never amounts to the joy of a Rocky Horror Picture Show or Little Shop of Horrors serving instead merely to undermine tension. It amounts to a soft serve vanity piece for Price but it has some fun in its way.

Price basically plays himself, an actor named Paul Toombes known for his roles in horror films from the 50s and 60s, particularly for a recurring character named Doctor Death.

Unlike Price--or at least, so I suspect--Toombes is constantly beset by beautiful young women trying to get into his pants and advance their careers. The novel on which the movie is loosely based, according to Wikipedia, has Toombes in a more predatory role regarding women, familiar to to-day's headlines about powerful men abusing women in Hollywood. Maybe Price objected to playing a character so close to himself behaving so apprehensively though the film does retain an almost uncannily Harvey Weinstein-ish producer named Oliver Quayle (Robert Quarry) who's trying to revive Toombes' career.

Toombes career had stalled some years before because, as we see in the prologue, his fiancée was decapitated by someone in a Doctor Death costume. Toombes has spells of memory loss but there are also several likely suspects in the film for the crime that, of course, is soon repeated as other girls are murdered once Quayle brings Price back onto the scene. Did Toombes commit the murders? Was it Quayle? Was it Faye Carstairs (Adrienne Corri), his former costar whose love he rejected? Or was it former Doctor Death screenwriter and wouldbe actor who warmly invites Toombes to stay with him in his weird mansion, Herbert Flay, played by Peter Cushing?

It's not hard to figure out, really. The film does a lot of silly things to keep us off the trail, though. One of the murders takes place on set of the new Doctor Death movie where the director is crushed to death by a slab of metal that lowers over a bed, something meant to be a device of Doctor Death. It's weird how often movies about movies portray filmmaking in such an unrealistic way--why would some goofy effect actually be lethal?

The movie's attempts at ghoulish fun mostly made me feel impatient. I longed for a more sincere vehicle where Cushing and Price had more screentime together.

Twitter Sonnet #1052

A mountain like a puppy placed a call.
In scrawling inks of hist'ry signals float.
Above the rains now shining down the wall.
The snowy tops with steps're surely wrote.
In cordless mazes fit for phones we walked.
Approaching beams appeared to hold the car.
Facades in shades of marble sweetly mocked.
Discursive pipes could not the throatless mar.
Reminding ghosts of screens the sand arose.
In timing roofs to hit the store they built.
From amber dust horizons were composed.
From massive forts and castles came the silt.
A giant foot eclipsed the canopy.
In sleep, the ghost reversed an entropy.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: 家
Current Music: "Thunder Road" - Bruce Springsteen

You have to figure insane asylums are filled with stories. Robert Bloch wrote five featured in the 1972 Amicus anthology film Asylum. Solidly directed by Roy Ward Baker and featuring a great cast that includes Patrick Magee, Charlotte Rampling, Peter Cushing, Herbert Lom, and Britt Ekland, it's a morbid pleasure with plenty of nice, lurid atmosphere. It also contains some rumination on identity and the validity of sanity as a concept.

The framing story involves a young, confident doctor named Martin (Dr. Martin) interviewing for a job at an asylum now being run by Dr. Rutherford, played by Patrick Magee, who was forced to take over the place recently after the previous head of the asylum went mad and joined the inmates. As a test to see if Martin is worthy of a post at the asylum, he's tasked with interviewing each patient and figuring out which one is the previous head of the asylum--he or she has invented a whole different name and past. I enjoyed this device a lot--it adds another spur for the viewer's attention as one is forced to contemplate not only if the subject is the one Martin's looking for but if the story they're telling has any truth to it. And, of course, it's always possible Rutherford is an inmate who's taken over, it wouldn't be surprising given that Rutherford is Patrick Magee with his idiosyncratic twitchy performance.

The first interview is with a woman named Bonnie (Barbara Parkins) whose story is mostly about her lover, Walter (Richard Todd), who murders his wife for her. This was the least effective story of the group, its tension derived from dismembered body parts coming back to life in a not entirely convincing manner.

The second story is very nice, featuring Peter Cushing as a mysterious Mr. Smith who comes to the subject of the interview, a tailor named Bruno (Barry Morse), to hire him to make a suit out of strange glowing fabric. Bruno is only too eager to accept the job because he's behind on his rent. The story is filled with wonderful gloom from the darkness of Bruno's shabby store to the rain-slicked exteriors and it plays nicely on economic tension as Bruno, faced with the loss of his livelihood, is dependent on the bizarre, weird, fanciful, and what turns out to be ghoulish, needs of the bourgeois Mr. Smith.

The third story is good mainly for Charlotte Rampling's performance. She plays the subject of the interview, Barbara, and she recounts a story of her life being upended by her relationship with a woman named Lucy played by Britt Ekland. Ekland and Rampling are a very strange pair, Rampling giving a complex performance of a woman sinking in feelings of addiction, dependence, and abandonment and Ekland not managing much more than a pretty flutter of her eyelashes. But it makes sense for the story which partly seems to draw on anxieties related to the stigma of homosexual relationships at the time and it's another way the movie subtly pushes against prevalent notions of what constitute insanity.

Herbert Lom plays the last subject, Dr. Byron, who makes weird little mannequins in his room. Inevitably, he brings one to life in order to exact revenge, this story not quite as effectively creepy as the Doctor Who serial Terror of the Autons from the year before, ironically because the inferior special effects on Doctor Who were in this case much creepier.

Twitter Sonnet #1047

We wake as breezes stop in subtle light.
As coats in thinning fog conduct a song.
The silent push attends to guide the sight.
A rippling grass remains and moves along.
The sun returns on reddish days to watch.
Behind a fork of jelly beans it burns.
The distant tops of fossil trees are notched.
What leaves'll dream the highest flower learns.
In plain developed film a dress appeared.
A turning hail could not sustain its wrath.
In iris shot a motor car's a tear.
In silver steps the snow aligned a path.
Imposed beyond the furnace flames array.
Withdrawing shreds of cloud concede the day.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: 病院
Current Music: "Jokerman" - Bob Dylan

The traditional idea of beastly behaviour involves unrestrained lusts without regard for the bonds of human affection or society. 1975's Legend of the Werewolf convincingly presents an opposite view where the uncontrollable animal urges of one man run contrary to a less severe morality in the culture. The film presents a surprisingly positive view of prostitution as an institution and is a nice werewolf movie from director Freddie Francis.

The film might deserve criticism for avoiding some of the more negative aspects of prostitution--the prostitutes in the film are presented as without families and there's no thought given to the fact that many of the women shown would likely have been forced into the occupation for a lack of other options. In this light, the werewolf's attack on their clients could almost be seen as a good thing except that he's motivated by a sense of possessiveness and not any desire to respect the wishes of Christine (Lynn Dalby). It's nice to see that it's this that is shown to be the disease.

David Rintol plays Etoile who became a werewolf after he was raised by wolves, his status as an orphan subtly paralleling Christine's life. After his first years were spent with wolves, he was taken in by a travelling circus as a child and shown as an attraction in a cage, a role he's oddly shown to enjoy eventually. Both Etoile and Christine are forced into occupations at a young age that might be rough, exploitive, and unpleasant to many people but both come to enjoy their lives.

But all is not well in the psyche of Etoile. After he's forced to flee the circus when he transforms and accidentally kills a man, he ends up in Paris where a series of murders begin to occur at the same time. With his guilelessness when he first meets Christine, along with a few of her fellow prostitutes, at the zoo where he gets a job, he doesn't even understand from their innuendos what their profession is. Etoile presents the figure of a country bumpkin exposed to the realities of city life for the first time.

Peter Cushing plays the film's protagonist and narrator, Paul, a police forensic surgeon who decides to investigate these new crimes on his own. Rather than a morally strident Van Helsing, Paul is presented as someone who takes some mischievous pleasure in bending the rules and discomfiting his police supervisors a bit, showing off some pieces of a corpse to a fussy administrator who comes in to chastise him at one point. Paul is quite pleased with himself when the man is forced to leave the room, unable to stand the sight of exposed internal organs. Although Paul is shown to be a man who does not visit brothels--scenes where he interviews the madam and prostitutes of a brothel are played for comedy with his mild embarrassment--he clearly has no moral disapproval for them. He presents a contrast to Etoile in that he is at ease in a world populated by people who are different from him while Etoile is compelled to respond with violence.

It becomes clear that the filmmakers had only one small exterior set to stand in for all of Paris but mostly the film is well put together, Paul's investigation building nicely with the amiable character created by Cushing. The climax shows his ability to empathise pitted against Etoile's psychological disability in his compulsion to respond with violence. There's a sense of how rare and difficult it is for such differences to resolve peacefully.

Current Mood: groggy
Current Location: A brothel
Current Music: "Gotta Serve Somebody" - Bob Dylan

If anyone ever tells you the poor aren't good for anything, remember the story of the 19th century Doctor Robert Knox and remember the corpses of those who died in poverty can always be used for medical experiments. 1960's The Flesh and the Fiends is the second film to be based on the true story of the Burke and Hare murders, the first being the wonderful Boris Karloff and Henry Daniell 1945 film The Body Snatcher, in turn based on a story by Robert Louis Stevenson. The Flesh and the Fiends is a far less compromising film and creates a wonderfully grimy, chaotic atmosphere in 19th century Edinburgh where the wealthy medical men practice and study surrounded by a sea of ragged beggars, prostitutes, and the variously miserable unemployed.

Peter Cushing plays Knox this time, for most of the film with a more prickly demeanour than Henry Daniell before him. One of the reasons this story keeps being adapted is because it presents such a provoking dilemma, a dilemma which reflects the philosophical conflict at the time between pragmatic progress and sensitivity for the exploited underclass. Knox argues that the laws regarding what bodies may be used to advance medical science are too strict, and indeed, with such a shortage of fresh bodies it's difficult to find the necessary models with which he can instruct his students. The other side of the issue is argued by the circumstances that occur--by paying well for fresh bodies, he indirectly encourages the likes of Burke and Hare to acquire corpses that are just a little too fresh.

In this adaptation, instead of plaintively, desperately arguing the justifications for his actions like in The Body Snatcher, Cushing's version of Knox is stiff and firmly convinced of a need to maintain composure at all times. His main tactic of defence is offence and whenever he sees the men on the medical board who might chastise him for acquiring illegal corpses he shows he's well up on every minor infraction of medical ethics perpetrated by his accusers and throws them back in their faces.

George Rose plays Burke and a young Donald Pleasence, unrecognisable with a mop of dark hair, plays Hare, both actors doing a great job of making these men utterly repulsive. They inhabit a world of people at the ends of their ropes, barely surviving and getting dead drunk whenever possible. The two run a lodging house, which is where they ensnare most of their victims.

A subplot involves one of Knox's students (John Cairney) and his love affair with a prostitute, Mary Patterson (Billie Whitelaw). Patterson was one of the real life victims of Burke and Hare. The film's portrayal of the frequently topless women cavorting in dingy taverns is surprisingly unrestrained even for a relatively low budget British horror film from the time.

The relationship between the student and the prostitute helps to bring out the contrast between class attitudes. A chance encounter between the couple and Knox's niece (June Laverick) with her beaux shows the upper and lower classes were so different as to easily convince themselves they were separate species--a handy state of affairs when the better off need to exploit the less fortunate.

My review for 1945's The Body Snatcher can be found here.

My review for Medicinal Purposes, a 2004 Doctor Who audio play based on the Burke and Hare murders, can be found here.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: An alley
Current Music: "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" - Sinead O'Connor

If there's another film that better showcases Peter Cushing than 1962's Captain Clegg I've yet to see it. He's surrounded by a good cast with Patrick Allen, Oliver Reed, Michael Ripper, and Jack MacGowran, but in addition to the acting talent on display this movie has one of the most satisfying scripts of any Hammer film. Creating a real sense of a world with complex characters who have layers of motivations, Cushing's character in particular shows the perfect confluence of elements that make this a wonderfully engaging mystery.

The film weaves together threads of different genres including mystery, western, and pirate film to make something really fine. Most of my favourite pirate stories, like Treasure Island, have an element of mystery to them. I love the film version with Robert Newton who gets a lot of mileage by seeming perfectly honest and open with Jim even as he's certainly absolutely duplicitous. Cushing's character takes this kind of mystery to another level.

Introduced as the fussy, gentle hearted parson in a small town in the late 18th century, we soon learn he's involved in smuggling liquor, not unlike the smugglers in Fury at Smugglers' Bay. But is that his only secret?

Cushing's character is the sort that holds the viewer's attention because there are so many questions about him, his motives and identity, and Cushing runs with the opportunity in ways many actors wouldn't have the talent for. His routine as the parson has all the assurance of an actor whose played that role many times before, and then you catch a devilish smile on his face and sense there's so much more underneath.

The film has a pretty commonplace romantic subplot about young lovers, played by Oliver Reed and Yvonne Romain. Romain plays a barmaid named Imogene with whom Reed's character, Harry, son of the magistrate, is in love. Of course, Reed's delivery adds a lot of dimension to his fairly average lines about his love and devotion to her. He adds depths with his restrained and relaxed energy that nonetheless burns through his eyes. Romain is decent enough, her breasts maybe drawing more attention than her performance. I'm certainly not complaining. They are really a presence in this film--the other actors keep accidentally bumping them, including Reed with a wide gesticulation in one scene.

Patrick Allen plays a captain in the Royal Navy, former arch enemy of Captain Clegg, and now intent on busting the smugglers with a passion that well outstrips the magistrate's interest in the matter. His character, along with Cushing's, helps add to the sense of moral complication to the film, much greater and more satisfying than most Hammer films. Even Reed's relatively simple lovestruck young squire character is more complicated than average when the extent of his participation with the smugglers is in question. This complication is best manifested, though, in the subtly expressed adversarial relationship between Cushing's and Allen's characters.

And on top of all this, the film opens with mysterious skeletal riders and a living scarecrow that terrorise the marsh. All of these elements might seem like too much in other films but this one ties them altogether beautifully, with Cushing as an intriguing centre of gravity.

Twitter Sonnet #987

The hair that seeps between the split'll drain.
A captured chemical equips the breeze.
A flound'ring corpse amends the shape of sane.
In sockets shaved in rinds she always sees.
In pale constructions carved to swim they go.
The folded birds observe as stars descend.
The egret signs adorn the spreading crow.
A ceiling saw what shaking coins upend.
A chomping C engraves the tomb all night.
Forever canvas blanks opine to eat.
Engagements corked remain in bottle sight.
Along the circuit band she sparked a beat.
The rain of muppet worms enriched the air.
On particles they danced like Fred Astaire.

Current Mood: hungry
Current Location: The marsh
Current Music: "C'Mon Billy" - PJ Harvey

The world may seem like it's controlled by powerful, invisible, malevolent forces. Much of this impression may be mere paranoia, so the best answer is investigation and illumination. This is what Peter Cushing believes in 1965's The Skull, a simple but pleasantly garish horror film directed by Freddie Francis based on a story by Robert Bloch.

It may come as no surprise that eventually Christopher Maitland (Cushing) bites off more than he can chew in the form of a skull, supposedly the skull of the Marquis de Sade. The filmmakers don't seem particularly interested in the particulars of De Sade's life beyond the fact that his name is the origin of the word sadism. So the skull is cursed, possessed by a demon that makes its owners commit murder.

Cushing is a collector of bizarre, demoniac paraphernalia from all over the world, surrounding himself with these items and books about them in his study where he spends most of his time alone with the things. Naturally, he neglects his wife (Jill Bennett) in the process.

When a dealer (Patrick Wymark) from whom Christopher purchases many objects stops by, she pleads with Christopher to give up his obsession. She's worried he's tampering with dangerous forces. He smiles indulgently and patiently explains, "It's because people, all through the ages, have been influenced and terrorised by these things that I carry out research to try and find the reasons why."

We frequently see Christopher at ease in his study, relaxing amidst his nightmare sculptures, completely assured of his control. With the introduction of the skull, this sense of control is undermined in different ways. In a possible hallucination, he's dragged out of his study by two men who claim to be police and taken to a place where he's forced to undergo some simple, sadistic trials.

This movie mostly works on atmosphere and performances. In addition to Cushing, Wymark is great as his shady dealer and Patrick Magee is memorable in two brief appearances as a police surgeon. But next to Cushing, of course, Christopher Lee makes the biggest impression, despite being only credited as "guest star"--he's actually pretty prominent in the film as the former owner of the skull who cautions his friend to stay away from it. It's just great watching these two talk about this while playing billiards. I could listen to them discuss occult artefacts while playing and drink cognac all night.

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: My study
Current Music: "Zessei Bijin" - Zetsubou Shoujotachi

Most people don't see any drawbacks in trying to cure cancer, many don't consider the process might produce a new species of rapidly multiplying slime creature that sucks all bone matter from human bodies with its proboscis. For the edification of the scientific community and sober contemplation of the general public 1966's Island of Terror presents the possible nightmare resulting from what many presume is a perfectly innocent and noble endeavour. This Terence Fisher movie starring Peter Cushing not produced by Hammer actually features a moralising coda warning the viewer against the dangers of science gone to far. You have to love such sincerity. Less charming is the film's misogyny but the film's mainly enjoyable for its odd succession of cosy, chatty scenes and Cushing in a very affable mode.

After establishing a super high tech lab hidden on a small island off Ireland's east coast, the film becomes a mystery unravelled in scenes of people going to visit other people who in turn go to visit yet more people with their own questions. This sort of relay of concern is kicked off when one of the villagers on the island visits the constable (Sam Kydd) complaining that her husband is three hours late getting home and he's not at the pub. The constable investigates and finds the man's body turned into a squishy, rubbery mass.

So he pays a visit to Dr. Landers (Eddie Byrne) who is confounded after doing an autopsy of the boneless body. So Dr. Landers goes to England to pay a visit to Dr. Stanley (Cushing), one of the leading men in his field.

Stanley doesn't know what to make of it so the two of them go and pay a visit to Dr. West (Edward Judd) who's even more of a leading man in this field it seems. He's also a sort of knock-off James Bond, trading corny sex jokes with a beautiful woman named Toni (Carole Gray) who's wearing only a shirt.

This was the only truly insufferable part of the movie. To get to the island on short notice, Toni offers her rich father's helicopter on the condition, imposed with a mischievous smirk, that she be allowed to come along. Throughout the film, she insists on joining the men for every adventure and then panics and cries and fouls up everything every single time. It occurs to me the wrong way to write women might be exactly the right way to write children.

By contrast nearly all the men are uncannily cool throughout the film, which is sort of fun. I liked the cosy, relaxed vibe of Peter Cushing and Edward Judd poring over notes in an inn after finding a massacre of boneless scientists at that lab. It's a little while before they meet the creatures.

It's not the most inspiring special effect--not quite having as much fascinating weirdness as the creatures in movies like Fiend Without a Face to make up for being unconvincing but they are pretty fun. I liked how they seemed to slowly secrete spaghetti whenever one creature divided to become two.

Twitter Sonnet #984

Pineapple juice adorns the leaden brick.
The vault's computer dust's too full to-day.
As runners tread like graves they'll slowly stick.
In thoughts triangles pin a bad delay.
In batt'ry temples acid sips the scalp.
Condemned for plastic hair the men retreat.
Repeating slogans captured Pez for help.
The webs of wardrobe finalise the street.
A bubbling counterfeit collects a car.
Divested hands compose an itch to sleep.
A fading laugh obliged the comic's bar.
In radios the signal carries deep.
Forgiving paws disrupt the leaves outside.
When phones make ghosts our hearts'll coincide.

Current Mood: tired
Current Location: An island off the east coast of Ireland
Current Music: "Le temps du tempo" - France Gall

The ends and outs of virtuous crime may have gotten more complicated four hundred years after the time of Robin Hood, but the eighteenth century set 1961 Fury at Smuggler's Bay is a pretty satisfying swashbuckler. Featuring two effective rogues, one handsome lad, three comely maidens, and Peter Cushing, the film's surprisingly morally shaded plot is an intriguing enough garnish for a fun landlocked pirate adventure.

In late eighteenth century Cornwall, it seems virtually everyone's livelihood is dependent on smuggling so Squire Trevenyan (Cushing), the local magistrate, has always looked the other way. But then a group of rogues lead by the vicious Black John (Bernard Lee) become "wreckers"--luring ships to wreck so they can steal their cargo.

The Squire's son, Christopher (John Fraser), is in love with Louise (Michele Mercier), the daughter of a Frenchman and smuggler named Francois (George Coulouris). Francois finds he's helpless to combat the threat posed by the wreckers--he can't complain without exposing the fact that the wreckers are a problem because they're impeding his own criminal activity.

There's also a virtuous highwayman called simply The Captain (William Franklyn).

The film takes these basic elements and uses them to find excuses for Christopher to wield a sword, for the Squire to brood in moral conflict, and for Louise and a barmaid (Liz Fraser) to be menaced by Black John, while each is on desperate missions that require them to run alone through the forest. Harry Waxman's cinematography is a gorgeous mix of shadows and lurid colour and the performances are all good. John Fraser looks like a young Jean Marais but a little leaner; Michele Mercier is absolutely luscious, particularly in red.