 |
 |
|
 |
||
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
||
|
|
|
 |
Friday, October 24, 2008The Dunwich Horror Release Year: 1970Country: United States Starring: Sandra Dee, Dean Stockwell, Ed Begley, Lloyd Bochner, Sam Jaffe, Joanne Moore Jordan, Donna Baccala, Talia Shire, Michael Fox, Jason Wingreen, Barboura Morris, Beach Dickerson, Michael Haynes, Toby Russ, Jack Pierce Writers: Curtis Hanson, Henry Rosenbaum, Ronald Silkosky Director: Daniel Haller Cinematographer: Richard C. Glouner Music: Les Baxter Producers: Roger Corman, Jack Bohrer H.P. Lovecraft may not be one of the best writers in the world, but he's certainly one of the most fun to read -- not to mention imitate. For this reason, I got it in my head that it would be a great idea to read The Dunwich Horror aloud to my wife. She not only loves to be scared, but is so committed to the endeavor that she's even on occasion been willing to meet Hollywood remakes of Japanese horror movies halfway. That's a perfect attitude to bring to Lovecraft, in my opinion, because he's an author you really need to be willing to work with. In cracking open one of his stories, you're making an implicit agreement to be scared; otherwise it's just not going to work. Of course, Lovecraft does his part to help you along in that regard, always letting you know exactly how afraid you're supposed to be, even when the object of that fear remains somewhat sketchily defined, and also modeling the desired behavior by populating his stories with characters who launch into paroxysms of terror at the faintest fetid odor. With the combination of my wife's gameness, Lovecraft's semaphore-like emotional cues, and the fact that the mildewed pages of the 1970s paperback edition of Dunwich I'd found gave off a scent that, with a little imagination, could be interpreted as being primordial, we were, as far as I was concerned, all set. However, after five solid pages describing the blighted landscape of Dunwich town, my wife made clear that she wasn't having it, saying something to the effect of, "What is this shit?" All of which is not to discourage you from reading Lovecraft to your own spouse or significant other; but it's certainly important to make sure you've done the proper amount of prep work.     By the way, the old Jove paperback of The Dunwich Horror that I purchased features a cover illustration that is a very literal depiction, based on Lovecraft's description in the story, of Wilbur Whateley in his true form, which looks like the upper half of Golem from Lord of the Rings grafted onto something that looks like a cross between the lower half of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, a pineapple, and one of those cat-shaped wall clocks whose eyes move from side to side with the second hand. I imagine that Lovecraft's tendency to devote more words to telling his reader how scared he or she should be than to describing the thing to be feared posed a problem to those filmmakers initially assigned the task of bringing his work to the screen. After all, until the advent of modern J-Horror -- whose sensibility is pretty much right in line with Lovecraft's -- the common wisdom would have been that you were supposed to scare your audience by showing them something scary, rather than by just showing them a bunch of people being scared, or, even worse, showing a bunch of people talking about how potentially scary some vaguely defined thing might be if it it actually existed. Furthermore, such filmmakers might understandably conclude that a film whose every character was in a constant state of near-wordless cowering for no clear reason might quickly forfeit audience interest.     It is this last conviction that might explain the casting choices made in connection with director Daniel Haller's first Lovecraft adaptation for AIP, Die, Monster, Die!. A veteran art director, Haller had also worked in that capacity on AIP's initial Lovecraft outing, The Haunted Palace, directed by Roger Corman. While by no means a close adaptation of its source material, Die, Monster, Die! did an admirable job of achieving Lovecraft's patented mood of mounting dread and creeping, formless horror. The only departure from that -- and it's a radical one -- was the placement of American actor Nick Adams at its center, probably the most un-Lovecraftian protagonist imaginable, who would be much more likely to call the great Cthulu a "jerk" and punch him in the nose than to simply be driven mad by the impossibility of his existence. When it came time for Haller to make his second Lovecraft adaptation, 1970s The Dunwich Horror, he and screenwriter Curtis Hanson chose to add another very un-Lovecraftian element to their quintessentially Lovecraftian tale with the introduction into the mix of a sweaty dose of eroticism. Lovecraft's stories, with all their references to tentacles and other undulating protuberances coming out of things at all angles, were certainly sexual -- if in a repressed/hysterical way -- but they were far from sexy. In fact, judging from the man's writings alone, I'd imagine that any attempt by him to describe any normal type of human sexual congress would be one of the most excruciatingly awkward, squirm-inducing things you could possibly read. If there does not exist somewhere a porn parody written in Lovecraftian prose, or myriad examples of erotic Lovecraft fanfic, then the internet truly has no right to exist. It's not for me to put the effort into finding out, though. Of course, the concept seems less strange when you consider that it was no doubt partly a result of AIP fulfilling their early Seventies mandate to serve up at least some explotational content with every offering. But the whole enterprise rockets back into the realm of the unnamable when you consider that the actors they chose to place at the center of all this heat and steam were Sandra Dee and Dean Stockwell.     The Dunwich Horror was something of a landmark for Sandra Dee, in that the Gidget star was required by its action to spend much of her screen-time writhing and moaning orgasmically on a sacrificial altar while in a state of near undress, and even to treat the audience to a brief flash of her -- possibly body-doubled -- breasts. Of course, Dee was at an unavoidable crossroads in her career by this time. The wholesome, girl-next-door image that had propelled her to stardom in the early sixties was now not only hopelessly out of sync with the times, but also impossible to maintain now that she had undergone a very public divorce from her husband Bobby Darin. Given these factors, that she would slam her knockers out in an AIP picture was probably as inevitable as it was surprising. On the other hand, Dean Stockwell's transition from sweet-faced to unsavory had been accomplished long before he arrived on the Dunwich set, with any memories of the adorable child star he used to be forever tainted by roles such as that of the effeminate child murderer in 1959's Compulsion. To say that Stockwell comes off as a "little" creepy in The Dunwich Horror would be the Mona Lisa of understatement. From the nervous sidelong glances, to the unwavering hushed monotone, the speech riddled with odd pregnant pauses, and the intent, wild-eyed staring, his performance is, in fact, the whole creepiness package, without one unsettling tick left behind. Of course, given he was charged with portraying a character who, in the original story, was depicted as being a goat-like, preternaturally intelligent, prepubescent eight foot giant who conceals beneath his garments a body that is part T. Rex , part pineapple and part cat clock, you could forgive him for over-compensating.     By the way, my writing this review gave me the opportunity to allay a misconception about Dean Stockwell that I've been entertaining for quite some time. I've long had this vague notion, which I had the nagging feeling wasn't true, that he had some kind of strong Walt Disney affiliation. This turns out to be due to me confusing him with that star of countless, animal-themed, live action Disney movies from the sixties, Dean Jones, a man who is creepy in his own right, though in a quite different, more Disney-like way than Dean Stockwell. Now, thanks to Teleport City's stringent research standards, I can tell you with utmost certainty that Dean Stockwell absolutely, positively did not star in That Darned Cat!, The Ugly Dachshund, Monkeys, Go Home! or The Million Dollar Duck. In fact, during this period in Dean Jones's career, Dean Stockwell was playing roles like that of an acid-tripping Haight-Ashbury hippy in Psych-Out. So, how wrong can you be, really? Aside from being the movie that tried to generate sexual heat between Sandra Dee and Dean Stockwell, The Dunwich Horror is notable for being one of the AIP Lovecraft adaptations that -- like The Haunted Palace, but unlike Die, Monster, Die! -- directly addresses the author's much vaunted Cthulhu Mythos. Granted, it may not do so with enough authenticity to satisfy fans of the author, but much lip service is indeed given to such touchstone concepts as "Yog-Sothoth", "The Old Ones" and the "The Necronomicon". However, as alluded to above, both the Old Ones -- that ancient race of unimaginable non-human creatures who, according to Lovecraft, once ruled the Earth and are itching to return -- and their followers are portrayed as being much hornier than in any of Lovecraft's tales. Their most fully-formed emissary in the human world, the unnamed "thing" locked up in a mysterious upstairs room in the Whateley house, seems to be most concerned with first ripping off all of its victim's clothes when it encounters its first human prey. Similarly, the rituals that Wilbur (Stockwell) must perform in order to summon the Old Ones back into our dimension seem to mostly involve him feeling up a drugged and prostrate Sandra Dee and reading incantations while standing between her splayed legs.     There is a familiar feel of that smarmy, late-to-the-party seventies version of hippie free love to all this, though, of course, in a much more overtly sinister form. It's a tone that's driven home even by Les Baxter's main theme, a narcotically swooning swinger's revelry with a decadent European sensibility that could just as easily have come from the mind of Serge Gainsbourg or Michel Legrand. Mind you, I don't think this quality detracts from The Dunwich Horror. I think that an adaptation of Lovecraft's work for a more permissive age would have no choice but to address the creepy sexuality that underlies it, and Haller's take here is indeed suitably creepy. That this imperative was put in the hands of a studio like AIP, who was more than happy to deliver on the required nudity and implied sexual shenanigans, just represents a fortuitous dovetailing of interests. The potent sex magic that Dean Stockwell wields in The Dunwich Horror -- at least as it applies to Sandra Dee -- is shown to be pretty much in full effect from the very opening moments of the film. It is at this point that we meet Dee's character, Nancy Wagner, a student at venerable old Miskatonic University. Her professor, Dr. Armitage, has entrusted her with the between classes errand of returning his surprisingly crisp looking copy of the ancient book of forbidden knowledge, The Necronomicon, to the school's library. The mention of the book's name attracts the twitchy attentions of the proximately lurking Wilbur Whateley (Stockwell), a visitor to the university from the nearby town of Dunwich whose consummate creepiness is matched only by his single-mindedness. Wilbur follows Nancy to the library and asks her to let him see the book before she replaces it in its case. She resists at first, but it is only a matter of Wilbur making whammy eyes at her for a few seconds before she relents, despite the objections of her obviously unaffected friend Elizabeth (Donna Baccala). Wilbur makes off to hungrily devour the tome's contents, only to be intercepted by Dr. Armitage, who rents it from his grasp with a stern rebuke. This bit of awkwardness does not preclude the four of them from going out for a drink at the pub later, at which time Wilbur engages Dr. Armitage in a conversation that goes more or less like this: Wilbur: Can I see the book? Armitage: No. Wilbur: Can I see the book? Armitage: No. Wilbur: Oh, Okay, but... can I see the book? Armitage: No.     Dr. Armitage, by the way, is portrayed by the veteran character actor Ed Begley, a man who played supporting roles in almost as many classic film noirs as Elisha Cook Jr. He's a great, if unusual, choice for the role, because, while he's appropriately gray and distinguished, his history of playing tough guy roles gives him a two-fisted air decidedly at odds with the tremulous demeanor of the typical Lovecraftian academic. That may not make his character authentic to the text, but it certainly makes him a more credible opponent to the forces he's up against, and when he and Wilbur face off to shout incantations at one another at the movie's conclusion, you get the sense that you're seeing a dramatic showdown between more or less equally matched adversaries -- a markedly more satisfying and movie-like conclusion than if the makers had stuck with the finale as presented in the book, in which a bunch of frightened old men cower in the rain while shouting spells and praying that Yog-Sothoth doesn't kill them. Wilbur eventually manipulates circumstances so that Nancy has to give him a ride back to his creepy old house in Dunwich, and, once there, sabotages her car so that she has no choice but to spend the night. Nancy is already falling increasingly under Wilbur's sway by this point, so she raises little objection to this turn of events, but Wilbur still drugs her drink just to be on the safe side -- possibly because, in her chemically-induced stupor, she will be less likely to notice the ominous gurgling sounds coming out of the locked room at the top of the stairs. That night, as she slumbers, Nancy dreams that she is being groped and chased by a bunch of hippie mud people who caper around and mug at the camera as if they were auditioning for the Broadway production of Yog-Sothoth: Superstar. This experience seems only to increase Wilbur's hold over her, and the one night's stay extends to a series of days, as, all the while, it becomes clearer that Wilbur is grooming her for a very specific purpose, a purpose that is more than hinted at when Wilbur shows Nancy the ancient sacrificial altar perched atop a desolate hilltop near his home.     Once Wilbur has finally gotten his mitts on the Necronomicon and set in motion the rituals necessary to bringing the Old Ones back into the world of men, The Dunwich Horror, like the story it's based upon, sees out its final act as a pretty sweet little monster on the loose story. The film is helped greatly in this regard by the fact that Lovecraft described the unnamable thing locked up in the Whateley house, once freed, as being mostly invisible to human eyes. This enables the filmmakers to represent it through some pretty effective shots of trees being rent about by unseen forces, an interesting use of negative effects, and reaction shots of the monster's horrified victims (one of whom is played by a very young Talia Shire). All in all, it's a satisfyingly apocalyptic payoff to the slow-burn piling on of unease that makes up the film's first hour, and even survives the fact that, once we do catch a fleeting glimpse of the beast, it appears to be Dean Stockwell wearing a mask made out of plastic snakes. While the sleazy, swinger's leer that The Dunwich Horror affects certainly dates the picture -- and may go some way toward undermining its scare factor for modern audiences -- the film in most respects still holds to the high standard set by AIP's earlier gothic horrors drawn from the works of Poe and Lovecraft. As with those films, the modest budget is compensated for by both a handsome production design and a studious attention to the creation of a pervasive atmosphere of dread and foreboding. Bolstering that is a range of reliable, if somewhat over-the-top, performances by a cast made up of stolid old troopers, among them Sam Jaffe as Wilbur's grandfather and Lloyd Bochner as Armitage's ally, Dr. Cory. Only Sandra Dee, out of all the performers, seems to be holding back, but the fact that she comes off as a bit narcotized is actually in keeping with her character's situation. Still, it's a bit odd that Dee, who had not all that long before been a fairly major star, agreed to take a part in a film in which she really ends up being more of a prop than a character.     And pondering that image of Sandra Dee, lying prone and half-conscious while being the subject of all kinds of uninvited groping, I might be inspired to reconsider my previous statement about what might constitute The Dunwich Horror's true source of horror for modern audiences. After all, isn't the thought of being groped by a leering, permed and mustachioed Dean Stockwell really the definition of horror at its most profound and unnamable? More courageous souls than I have doubtless been prompted to tear off and eat their own faces at the mere thought. In fact, if that's the only way to purge that image from one's mind, I recommend that we all do that right now. See you on the other side of madness!  Labels: Horror: HP Lovecraft, Studio: AIP, Year: 1970 posted by Todd at 9:55 AM | 16 Comments Sunday, October 19, 2008Haunted Palace Release Year: 1963Country: United States Starring: Vincent Price, Debra Paget, Lon Chaney Jr., Frank Maxwell, Leo Gordon, Elisha Cook, John Dierkes, Milton Parsons, Jabez Hutchinson, Cathie Merchant, Guy Wilkerson. Writer: Charles Beaumont and Francis Ford Coppola Director: Roger Corman Cinematographer: Floyd Crosby Music: Ronald Stein Producer: Roger Corman Availability: Buy it from Amazon  In 1960, AIP's go-to director for cheap, quickly produced science fiction and horror double bills convinced the powers that be to gamble on letting him make a stand-alone film, in color, with double the production time and more money. Granted that, compared to other studios, this still meant an incredibly lean budget and an incredibly short production schedule. The result was Roger Corman's Fall of the House of Usher, a landmark film in the history of American horror and one of the best Gothic horror films from any country. Although more sedate and slower paced, finally the United States had an answer to the wild, Technicolor horror films from England's Hammer Studio. With the runaway success of House of Usher, Corman found himself free to direct a rapid succession of follow-up films that all relied on the same basic formula. They would be based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe, directed by Corman, starring Vincent Price, and scripted by Richard Matheson or Charles Beaumont, with a score by either Ronald Stein or Les Baxter. For the most part, AIP and Corman stuck to this well-tested formula, with Premature Burial being the only departure from the plan (because of a bizarre chain of events, Price was unavailable to star and so was replaced by a game but less memorable Ray Milland). In 1963, however, flush with success and probably more than entitled to do so, Corman asked if he could do something just a little bit different.
Most of the key elements would be in place. Corman would direct. The film would be widescreen and in vivid color. And, naturally, it would star Vincent Price. But this time, rather than relying on Poe once again, which was becoming increasingly challenging as the studio quickly gobbled up and used his longer stories, Corman wanted to adapt something by another American horror author, H.P. Lovecraft. Writing a full history of Lovecraft and the effect he had and continues to have on fantastic and horrific literature, cinema, and even music, is somewhat beyond the scope of what we have time for here, though I will do my best to summarize. Lovecraft was a pulp writer in the early 20th century, a contemporary and frequent penpal of Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, Solomon Kane, and a host of other memorable pulp fiction characters. Lovecraft's stock in trade was a somewhat bizarre mix of horror and science fiction, and the majority of Lovecraft's story take place more or less int he same universe and revolve around the same pantheon of fictional creatures, the poster child for which was Cthulhu. Many of you are probably already familiar with Lovecract and far more acquainted with his body of work than I am. In fact, when preparing to reviewing a number of films based upon the works of Lovecraft, I realized that I was not so much experienced with Lovecraft as I was in the general vicinity of people vaguely knowledgeable about the fact that the guy existed and created his own bizarre mythology revolving around an elder race from the very beginning of time and the various ways in which they cause trouble for the people of New England and other locations. When I was in fourth grade, I got a collection of H.P. Lovecraft stories through those Troll book order things that were so awesome back then. Man, nothing was better than the day those Troll book orders show up. You'd be sitting in class, and all of a sudden a guy would show up and drop off a big ol' box, and you knew it was full of the books you ordered a month ago. You'd have to sit through the rest of the lesson, usually, but it was worth it. Getting the books, back then, was actually even better than when kids had their birthday and had to bring in cupcakes for the class. Queue long digression...
In fact, other than my mom encouraging me to watch old horror movies when I was little, those elementary school book order things are probably the single biggest influence that steered my down the cinematic path that finds me, today, fervently defending the likes of Jess Franco and Alfonso Brescia. My friends and I used to order all sorts of monster books from that thing. They had this one series of paperbacks with black covers, featuring a photo of a famous monster of filmland. Each book, of course, was focused on a particular type of monster, so there was a book for vampires, one for werewolves, one for Frankenstein monsters, one for mummies, and one for space aliens. The things I remember most vividly about them was that the vampire one had a scary picture of venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee on the cover, the Frankenstein one had a picture inside of venerated horror film icon Christopher Lee as Frankenstein which really scared and enthralled me, and that in the space alien one there was a promotional still from The Mysterians that showed a massive and largely out of perspective battle between the Mysterians, the Japanese military, and a huge army of Mogeras. Needless to say, when I finally saw The Mysterians, I was disappointed to find out that there was no army of Mogeras anywhere in it, and no battle like the one in the book. I have since made my peace with The Mysterians, though, and like it despite the absence of such a conflict. Anyway, I wonder if they even let kids order books like that anymore. Or are they too threatening and controversial for today's sensitive children? I mean, I was in second grade and marveling at gory photos (in black and white, admittedly) of vampires with stakes in their hearts and that famous wood cutting of Vlad the Impaler (oh, you know the one). I wonder sometimes if mine is the last generation to have such an affection for the classic monsters. I currently work in a university, and not one of the students with whom I interact knows who Frankenstein is. Some of them know Dracula, and no one knows the Mummy other than through the more recent mummy movies -- which they aren't aware grew from a series of old black and white films. My friends and I were obsessed with the famous monsters. We loved them. They scared us the first time around but then quickly became like old friends. One of my favorite comedy bits of all time was listening to Bill Cosby talk about walking home at night after trying to watch an old monster movie, or how some kids stole a life-size statue of Frankenstein and used it to scare Fat Albert. But I think we were a transitional generation. Every kid knew the classic monsters, but not everyone had seen the movies. The population of classic horror film fans dwindled. Now that my generation has had their children and many of us are old enough to have kids that would be near the end of their high school careers, the number of kids who know the old monsters is even lower. Not only have they not seen the movies; they don't even know the monsters. Even the kid in my office who liked giallo and modern horror only vaguely recognized the iconic Karloff monster. Of course, I accept that this sort of thing happens. Outside of a core group of fans, the classics and near-classics of the past tend to be forgotten. So it goes, and we who appreciate the old things become curators of a sort. Still, it's weird for me to think that there's a whole crop of kids who go to Wal-Mart during the Halloween season, see all those Frankenstein cut-outs, and just see some random, generic monster with no connection to anything from the past.
Anyway, where was I? Oh yes, I bought a book of H.P. Lovecraft stories from Troll Book Club in the fourth grade. And I'm pretty sure I read some of them. At least The Dunwich Horror. But if I read much more, I don't really remember it, and the only thing I remembered about The Dunwich Horror was some professors climbing a hill and reading a book during a windstorm or something. In the ensuing years, though, I was around so many references to Lovecraft that I fooled myself into thinking that I was knowledgeable on the subject just because I knew there was a big squid monster thing called Cthulhu and the stories were full of horrors described as being so horrifying that to merely glimpse them was enough to warp a man's mind beyond all repair. In the mid-eighties, there was a revival in Lovecraft's popularity among horror fans when Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna released The Re-Animator, based very loosely on what is considered by most to be one of Lovecraft's lesser stories. I think I'll table the discussion of Yuzna and Gordon until a later review. Suffice it to say that, even though I got more interested in Lovecraft than ever, I still didn't get interested enough to actually read any of the stories, and continued to cruise along on nothing more than Lovecraft hearsay. And so things remained for a good, long while, until a few months ago, actually. When I decided that I wanted to spent at least half of October, 2008 reviewing the oft-problematic film adaptations of Lovecraft stories, I had to admit to myself that I didn't know a thing about the man's writing other than what I had picked up second-hand. It was time to dust off the accursed tomes and acquaint myself with the stories personally. And while I haven't gotten through everything yet, I've gotten through a lot, including The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, the story upon which this movie is based. Now here's the thing, at least for me, about reading Lovecraft. You have to willingly give yourself over to the idea. His stories are full of academics and gaunt men who are struck dumb with fear beyond the capacity for human comprehension after reading a book of occult secrets. Everyone is always scared of everything, and rarely does a guy show up who isn't terrified beyond belief and, instead, just grabs a shotgun and a six pack and says to people, "Well, if you assholes are so scared of those goddamned crab monsters from outer space, I'll go take care of 'em myself. Buncha Miskatonic University eggheads. Go University of Alabama!" You have to willingly surrender yourself to the world he creates and the people who inhabit it. A healthy fear of gambrel rooftops doesn't hurt.
Now for those of us who buy into Lovecraft's style, the rewards are considerable and often chilling. Although far from his best-known work, I found The Case of Charles Dexter Ward -- a tale about a colonial era necromancer and the descendant who becomes obsessed with or possibly possessed by the man -- thoroughly engrossing. Like most of Lovecraft's longer tales, it is stuffed to the gills with detailed descriptions of the surroundings and creates a wonderful sense of an aged place in which long forgotten horrors are once again being stirred to life. When Roger Corman and screenwriter Charles Beaumont (who did the screenplay for Premature Burial and would go on to script one of the absolute best of Corman's Poe adaptations, The Masque of the Red Death) set about the task of adapting Lovecraft for the screen, they did basically what they did with Poe: graft the fundamentals of the story onto something of their own creation, designed to look as much as possible like something Lovecraft would have come up with. Much is made about the inherent unfilmable nature of most of Lovecraft's stories, though I think to some degree this is overstated. The number one stumbling block is always the question of how you depict nightmares so foul that they become incomprehensible, or how you create a color that does not exist in our universe, or a structure with geometry that does not adhere to the laws of physics as define our space. I think a deft filmmaker can work around those things, more or less, though how much the end result would appeal to a modern, mainstream audience is probably a more questionable gamble. Can you get away with not showing a monster? Can you design a monster scary enough to capture the basic idea of a creature too terrifying to behold? Tackling these obstacles has always made Lovecraft, for most filmmakers, not worth the effort. But still, several have tried, with varying degrees of success. I think Haunted Palace is one of the successes, largely because it uses Lovecraft as a springboard and does its best to work around the aforementioned issues. What we end up with, in essence, is one of Corman's Poe films with considerably more menace. The basic plot structure is similar to both The Fall of the House of Usher and The Pit and the Pendulum. Vincent Price is a nice guy who moves with his lovely wife to the inherited home of an accursed distant relative. Almost immediately, the house begins to exert an eerie hold over him, as the long dead necromancer Joseph Curwen vies for control of noble Charles Dexter Ward's mind. There's about a 99.9% chance that Vincent Price will be the spitting image of his infamous ancestor, and an equal chance that the whole thing will end with the home catching on fire and people darting about the flames as it all burns to the ground. But while it follows the Corman Poe formula to a T, something is still just a little bit different.
For starters, in the previous Poe films, it is never made fully clear whether the malevolence assaulting our protagonists truly exists, or whether it is simply the symptom of an unhinged mind. In the case of Haunted Palace, there's very little doubt that Curwen is indeed returned from the grave and attempting to possess his ancestor's mind. And the secrets he possesses are far more sinister than anything that may have haunted Price's other characters. Although the Cthulhu mythos isn't invoked as often as it is in the stories, there is plenty of talk about creatures born of nightmares from before the dawn of man (the movie throws in bits and pieces from various other Lovecraft stories to fill in various gaps). There is plenty of talk about The Necronomicon, the Elder Gods, and Yog-Sothoth. Steeping the film in the arcana of the occult rather than in mere psychological madness and possible haunting makes Haunted Palace less the peer of Fall of the House of Usher and something more along the lines of later occult films like The Devil Rides Out. In the end, the true danger doesn't end up being within the mind of a tortured protagonist; it ends up being a big-ass monster in a pit in the basement. Obviously, there is much in the original story that does not make it into the running time of a low-budget 90 minute movie. Much of the narrative of Lovecraft's tale revolves around the ghoulish life of Joseph Curwen in the 1700s and the bizarre experiments he seemed to conduct. Although this in and of itself would make a fine movie, there simply isn't enough space in a movie of this nature for it, and so Curwen's life is summarized in a brief prologue that sees his home stormed by angry, fearful villagers and Curwen himself burned alive while yelling out a curse in classic witchy/warlock fashion. After that, however, the film switches to the present day, or however present day the early 20th century may be. Although the history of Curwen is recounted via the exposition of which these films are so fond, it's considerably less detailed than what you get in the story. But such things are necessary when one is making a commercial film, especially one for AIP. What is present, while still not a strict recreation of the Lovecraft tale, is powerfully good stuff. Vincent Price is at the top of his game here, convincing both as the loving and kind Charles Ward and as the evil Curwen. The changes are subtle at first, and Price needn't overplay the transformation. He already had practice with it in The Pit and the Pendulum, where he plays another good man grappling with an evil ancestor for control of his own mind, but that movie lent itself a little more to playing the transformation over the top. In that case, he was supposed to be insane. In The Haunted Palace, Curwen is merely phenomenally evil. For my money, it's one of Price's best performances. He really gets you to root for Ward to prevail in this supernatural battle of wills.
Assisting the diabolical old necromancer is Lon Chaney, Jr., in the middle of a rather small but welcome career renaissance that saw him star in a few exceptional horror films (which, in addition to this, include the wonderful Witchcraft). Chaney, Jr., is a guy I've always rooted for, struggling as he did for most of his career to either emerge from the shadow of his famous and respected father or ride the coattails of the family name (something he actively tried to avoid for a long time, even fighting to use something other than the Chaney family name). After a strong start with The Wolfman, however, Chaney's career faltered, and he soon found himself working in films that were cheap and shoddy even when compared to cheap, shoddy films. He rarely hurt for work -- cheap b-movies and television appearances were more than enough to keep him employed in between the occasional appearance in a higher profile project -- but it wasn't exactly the career he had hoped for. In addition, drinking problems had dogged him for quite some time, culminating most infamously in a 1952 live television series in which Chaney, as Frankenstein's monster, was noticeably drunk and screwed everything up. When you're too far gone to play a monster who stumbled and grunts, that's a bad sign. I don't know if I'd go so far as to say The Haunted Palace was a chance for redemption, but it was certainly a chance for him to prove that he still had it, and I think he succeeded. As the keeper of the Curwen/Ward manor, he exudes considerable creepiness and, for one of the first times, seems like a genuinely threatening presence. Chaney was a big guy, but one rarely got a sense of just how big he was. His imposing presence would be put to even better use the following year in Witchcraft, a film that truly made me believe that at any moment I might open a door and find Chaney standing there like a raging bear, ready to beat me into a gory mess. It's great to see him energetic and in action alongside Price in such a classy affair. Well, as classy as a movie can be when it contains a gang of shambling, deformed mutants menacing people on mist-shrouded streets, or a scene in which poor Debra Paget gets strung up over a pit to another dimension that contains a beast presumably intending to rape her. Which brings us to the lovely Ms. Paget. This movie must have been quite a trip for her. She already logged some time in one of AIP's Poe films, the previous year's Tales of Terror, but other than that, she was not well acquainted with appearing in horror films. I don't think anything in that film could have quite prepared her for the bizarre nature of The Haunted Palace, especially the gruesome finale. Tying John Kerr to the pit and pendulum device pales in comparison to stringing up a beautiful, innocent young woman in hopes that she will be raped by a demon beyond the limits of human comprehension in order to create some wretched new race of abominations that will devour the world. The heroines in these AIP films are surprisingly engrossing most of the time, and I say "surprising" because the Hammer films upon which these films were modeled rarely featured female characters of any real note beyond the size of their heaving bosoms. Many of the Hammer actresses were accomplished, but they were better actresses than they were characters, if you understand. In each of Corman's Poe films, on the other hand, the women were far more involved with the action of the film. Debra Paget is no exception, and while she can't quite stand up to Myrna Fahey getting to run around absolutely batshit insane as Madeline Usher, Paget still makes you feel for Ann Ward.
Corman's direction here is much the same as it was on the Poe movies. Lovecraft's writing lends itself to a grim, subdued color palate, so full is it of crumbling houses and sinister old cobblestone streets and windswept New England farmland. But color was still a luxury at AIP, so there was no way Corman was going to wash out his entire picture. Instead, he strikes a keen balance between darkness and color. Much of the film is far more somber in its color palette than previous Poe films, and it's certainly more subdued than the vividly candy-colored The Masque of the Red Death. Not everything is dark and shadowy, though, and when the color does show up, it's a welcome splash in an oppressively menacing atmosphere. Corman also opens up the film a bit with several scenes taking place on village streets crawling with mutants (remnants, some say, of Curwen's mad experiments or of his dying curse), in addition to his typically deft widescreen handling of lavishly appointed interiors. The dungeon beneath the Curwen estate rivals the similar chamber in The Pit and the Pendulum, and while it always looks like a set more than an actual underground cavern, it's still stylish and spooky. Stylistically, this film is a comfortable addition to Corman's Poe cycle, even if it's not based on a Poe story or poem. Or isn't it? Here's where things get silly. After agreeing to let Corman direct a Lovecraft film -- possibly the first one explicitly based on the writings of Lovecraft -- AIP apparently had second thoughts about the marketability of such a film. Did anyone other than a few pulp fiction freaks even remember who H.P. Lovecraft was? Such was their thinking, and so without input from Corman, AIP decided that H.P. Lovecraft's The Case of Charles Dexter Ward was going to become Edgar Allen Poe's The Haunted Palace. Poe's short poem was a dubious work to which to connect the film, but AIP was certain that making the connection to Corman's previous Poe films completely clear was the way to go in order to secure distribution. So at the last second, and in the final frame of the film, they had Price read a couple lines from the poem, which have very little to do with anything we'd just watched. And that was that. So was born, amid protests from Roger Corman, another Poe film. Years later, once Corman had moved on and AIP had started a second cycle of Poe films, they would do the same thing, changing The Witchfinder General into The Conqueror Worm, and having Price read a few lines from the poem that had nothing at all to do with the movie. But final minute queasiness over lashing themselves to Lovecraft's name doesn't change the fact that The Haunted Palace is an exceptionally good horror film. Price is magnificent, backed by a strong supporting cast and a script that knows when to adhere to Lovecraft and when to make a few things up on its own. It's easy to say that the reveal of the monster in the pit is a bit of a letdown, but it's hardly enough of a letdown to spoil the film. In fact, I don't even think it is a letdown. I think it looks pretty good, all things considered, and if it doesn't at first glance seem horrifying to the point of driving you mad, Debra Paget certainly sells you on it and makes you believe. But this is, as is so often the case, Price's film, and his performance is without a doubt one of his very best. He makes Charles Ward a believably nice and sympathetic guy in one scene, and then with a few tweaks and without going hammy, can turn into Joseph Curwen, oozing spite, menace, genius, and darkness. The film also shows marked progression in terms of scale. The Fall of the House of Usher had only four characters and a single location (albeit a rather sprawling one). The Pit and the Pendulum added a couple characters, but still stuck to one location. With The Haunted Palace, Corman follows the path he began with Premature Burial. There is an entire town here, a few different locations, and much more variety. This progression would continue until, by the time we reach The Tomb Of Ligeia, Corman has left the studio set and is shooting in actual locations. Of all Corman's "Poe" films, I like this one the best (though I don't dislike any of them). Its unique air of menace, its slight tweaking of the Poe world to turn it into Lovecraft, and a genuine sense of spookiness all come together perfectly.
And it's not as if forcing Poe into the mix was entirely out of the realm of acceptability. Obviously, both authors share a common sense of the macabre, although Lovecraft seems much more terrified of his own creations than Poe ever was. And heck, Lovecraft's At the Mountain of Madness draws directly from Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. There are, naturally, sundry stylistic and thematic differences (Poe, for example, seemed terrified of nothing so much as he was being buried alive). I think Corman creates a satisfying hybrid. Though one can sit and nitpick the divergence from the source material with relative ease, this movie still remains one of the most faithful adaptations of a Lovecraft story and one of the most successful applications of that overpowering sense of dread upon which Lovecraft so relied. AIP must not have stayed entirely terrified of Lovecraft. Hot on the heels of the success of this film, they adapted The Color out of Space into Die, Monster, Die (in which star Nick Adams undermines the lurking fear of Lovecraft's style by being more like one of those guys I talked about earlier, less likely to be terrified by the unknown ancient evil and more likely to just haul off and punch it in the face). Not too long after that, they tackled one of Lovecraft's best-known stories, The Dunwich Horror. This time, they didn't change the name, try to make you think it was a Poe film, or anything else. And while I like Die, Monster, Die and absolutely adore The Dunwich Horror, I don't think either of them are as successful as The Haunted Palace. Corman really outdid himself, and the extra layer of the macabre he achieved in this film would carry over into subsequent films in the Poe cycle, including The Masque of the Red Death, which is very nearly as brilliant as The Haunted Palace. Once AIP flung open the doors and let lose those ancient, lurking atrocities, there were plenty of other filmmakers ready to produce their own Lovecraft adaptations. Most of them stink. A few of them are good. Many have nothing to do with Lovecraft as the source material but depend on a similar "cosmic terror" to achieve their mood (for example, Event Horizon). Lovecraft may have been too obscure a name for AIP to bank on in 1963, but since then his name has only become better and better known. While he's not exactly mainstream (everyone knows Poe, but you still get plenty of puzzled looks when you name drop Lovecraft), within the realm of pop culture and horror fans, he's probably as well known today -- perhaps even better -- as he has been at any point in history. "Lovecraftian" is a common adjective among people discussing flavors of fear, and so pervasive is his influence that I spent most of my life thinking I'd read everything he'd ever written when, in fact, I hadn't read anything. Were it not for The Haunted Palace, I probably never would have gotten around to reading it, either. Of course, now that I have, I can do nothing but curl up in the corner of a padded cell, yelling obscene revelations about the darkest subjects as some trembling academic listens with a growing sense of uncontrollable terror to the facts I have uncovered. And yet, as we shall soon see, there was so much more yet to learn. Yog Sothoth, y'all!  Labels: Director: Roger Corman, Horror: HP Lovecraft, Horror: Poe, Stars: Vincent Price, Studio: AIP, Year: 1963 posted by Keith at 3:56 PM | 8 Comments Sunday, June 08, 2008War Gods of the Deep Release Year: 1965Country: United States and England Starring: Vincent Price, David Tomlinson, Tab Hunter, Susan Hart, John Le Mesurier, Harry Oscar, Derek Newark, Roy Patrick. Writer: Charles Bennett, Louis Heyward Director: Jacques Tourneur Cinematographer: Stephen Dade Music: Stanley Black Producer: George Willoughby Alternate Titles: City Under the Sea Availability: Buy it from Amazon  Promote It: Digg | del.icio.us If the world was just and kind, then the sentence, "It's a movie where Vincent Price stars as a madman who rules over an underwater society of fishmen prone to kidnapping scantily clad beautiful women," would indicate the existence of probably one of the greatest films ever made. But the world is often cold and heartless and it often enjoys toying with us mere mortals as did the petty and jealous Greek gods of old. Therefore, the sentence, "It's a movie where Vincent Price stars as a madman who rules over an underwater society of fishmen prone to kidnapping scantily clad beautiful women," does not indicate the existence of one of the greatest movies of all time, but instead, indicates the existence of a shocking dull film in which Vincent Price sits in a cave while a couple stiffs run around in tunnels, and then some stuff blows up at the end. This, sadly, is the fantasy world conjured up by the lackluster War Gods of the Deep -- a modestly entertaining film in spots, but a tremendous letdown given the talent in front of and behind the camera. By 1965, the year this film was released, American International Pictures had enjoyed considerable success mining the works of Edgar Allan Poe for a series of films starring Vincent Price (and Ray Milland, once) and directed by Roger Corman. The streak began with Corman's low-budget but lavish looking adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher and continued with The Premature Burial, The Pit and the Pendulum, Tales of Terror, The Haunted Palace, The Raven, Masque of the Red Death, and The Tomb of Ligeia. These films represented something new and relatively risky for AIP, then a studio that specialized in making cheap, fast black and white double features. Corman, inspired by the work that was happening at England's Hammer Studio, convinced AIP to let him shoot in color, a single film, with a bigger budget (though still tiny) and longer shooting schedule (though still incredibly fast). The resulting film, The Fall of the House of Usher, did big time box office for AIP, is considered one of the all-time great horror films, and convinced AIP of a couple things. First, that color films with more money put into them were a worthwhile investment, especially when someone as good as Corman at turning out expensive looking results for pennies was on board. Second, that they should tack Edgar Allan Poe's name onto everything and plumb his works mercilessly.
Although all the films in the first AIP Poe cycle were good, and most of them were great, several of them had very little to do with the Poe poem or short story from which they took their name. The Raven, for example, uses the Poe poem for its opening scene, with Price being plagued by a mysterious raven. But as soon as the raven starts wisecracking in Peter Lorre's voice, you can guess that the Poe material is out the window. The Pit and the Pendulum takes the Poe source material and extends it with a number of subplots original to the screenplay or snatched piecemeal from other sources. And in the case of The Haunted Palace -- one of the very best films in the Poe cycle -- it wasn't based on Poe at all. It was actually based on The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H.P. Lovecraft. But AIP felt that audiences wouldn't know who the hell Lovecraft was. Distributors agreed. And so, despite Corman's protests, it became an Edgar Allan Poe movie. Dubious connections to the source material not withstanding, all of the films were very good (well, I'm not that fond of Tales of Terror, but that's because I don't care for anthology films), thanks to the line-up they enjoyed: Corman as director, Price (and Milland once) as star, and Richard Matheson as the screenwriter (most of the time). Matheson was to AIP horror what Jimmy Sangster was to Hammer horror: consistently wonderful. In 1965, AIP decided to stretch Poe's connection even further, tapping one of his short tales called The City in the Sea as a source for War Gods of the Deep. But other than having Price read some of the story for the opening credits, War Gods of the Deep has very little to do with Poe. AIP would take a similar approach during it's second round of Poe horror films, with The Witchfinder General being retitled Edgar Allan Poe's The Conqueror Worm -- a title justified by having Price read some of the original poem before the film launched off into a plot that has pretty much nothing to do with the poem or Poe. In that case, however, the movie was good. In the case of War Gods of the Deep, the results were...not as impressive. But it isn't for lack of trying. Although Roger Corman wasn't directing, AIp assigned Jacques Tourneur to the film. Tourneur is perhaps best known as the director of such films as Night of the Demon and the Val Lewton produced films Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man. All of them are considered classics, and deservedly so. On top of that, he directed one of the all time great noir films, 1947's Out of the Past starring Robert Mitchum. And then there was the classic Burt Lancaster swashbuckler epic The Flame and the Arrow. By the 1960s, however, Tourneur's best years were perhaps behind him, and he found himself working in television and at AIP, first as director of the Poe-esque Comedy of Terrors which features one of my all-time favorite idiotically hilarious scenes (when awful opera singing causes Vincent Price's undertaker top hat to pop off wit a "boop!" sound effect), and then as director on War Gods of the Deep.
And while the film isn't written by Richard Matheson (most famous for being the author who penned I Am Legend, the book that inspired everything from Night of the Living Dead to Last Man on Earth to The Asylum's I Am Omega), AIP did get Charles Bennett, who was no slouch in the screenwriting department. Among his sundry credits are the very first filmed version of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, the black and white version made as part of the Climax! television series, where James Bond goes by Jimmy and was played by Barry Nelson. Bennett also wrote plenty of classic scripts, including work for Hitchcock (Sabotage, Secret Agent, and Foreign Correspondent), the adventure classic King Solomon's Mines, and Tourneur's own Night of the Demon. He was also frequently tapped by producer Irwin Allen both for movie (The Lost World, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) and television (Land of the Giants, the Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea series) scripts. Of course, there are a few turkeys in his resume, including the epic misfires The Story of Mankind (Irwin Allen's attempt to tell in sweeping epic fashion the complete history of mankind, from caveman times to the present and starring pretty much every B lister and has-been ever, from the past their prime Marx Brothers to Cesar Romero, Peter Lorre, John Carradine, Heddy Lamar, and of course, Vincent Price as Ol' Mr. Scratch) and Cecil B. DeMille's sweeping and often dull tale of piracy and romance on the 19th Century Georgia coast, Reap the Wild Wind. On the other hand, that's the movie where Bennett was smart enough to write a scene where John Wayne battles a giant squid, so that counts for something. Still, that's a basically solid resume, especially for this type of film. Despite the presence of Vincent Price and the shaky Poe tie-in, War Gods of the Deep isn't considered part of the Poe cycle, not so much because it wasn't directed by Corman, but more because it plays out less like a gothic horror film and more like the Clif Notes version of a Jules Verne fantasy adventure film. Of course, Disney had already made pretty much the be-all and end-all Jules Verne fantasy adventure film in 1954 with 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Anything else was going to pale in comparison to a film that had the benefit of Disney's vast financial resources and Kirk Douglas shaking his bon-bon while singing sea chanties and wearing a jaunty little cap. But that never stopped AIP, or anyone else for that matter. And so, in 1965, Tourneur, Bennett, Price, and AIP took us under the ocean for what we all hoped would be a really cool adventure film.
And things start off well enough. Beautiful Jill Tregillis (Susan Hart, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, Pajama Party) is minding her own business in her castle by the coast bedroom when, all of a sudden, she is attacked and kidnapped by a hideous gillman who looks like that dude who helped Lando fly the Millennium Falcon in Return of the Jedi. Perturbed by the kidnapping of his beloved by this uppity haddock, square-jawed hero Ben Harris (reliable Tab Hunter) and his nebbish, ferret-faced sidekick Harold Tufnell-Jones (Disney live-action film regular David Tomilson) follow in leisurely pursuit. And for some reason, Tufnell-Jones (presumably an ancestor of legendary heavy metal guitarist Nigel Tufnell) insists on bring along his trusty pet: a chicken in a basket. Why exactly, this guy goes everywhere with a chicken is a mystery. Why he is a bachelor, of course, is not. Tufnell-Jones and his chicken are there to provide frequent comic relief. Guess how many times you will laugh at their shenanigans! Ben and the chicken lover soon find themselves in a maze of sub-aquatic (but never the less dry) caves inhabited by a population of long-lived men ruled over by the mad Captain Hugh (Vincent Price). It seems that Price and his men were once smugglers and, while fleeing from the authorities, stumbled upon this network of sub-aquatic caves leading to the remnants of a city constructed by a highly advanced civilization. By the time Price arrived, however, the society was centuries into decline, the secrets of their technology being lost and the former inhabitants being reduced to nothing more than animalistic gillmen. Price and company made themselves at home amid the decaying remains of the city under the sea, and something about the air down there and the lack of exposure to UV light has resulted in them living for hundreds of years. Price commands the gillmen, for they consider him their god for one reason or another (no problem -- I sort of consider him a god as well) and he had them kidnap Jill for the usual reason: she is the exact spitting image of the captain's long dead true love. When our heroes arrive to rescue her, they promptly get captured but stave off execution by pretending to be geologists who can help Price out with the big problem: the volcano. Everyone spends some time stalking around the cave-palace, which like pretty much every undersea kingdom in the history of movies about undersea kingdoms, is threatened by a nearby underwater volcano that is going to erupt any moment now. Eventually, Ben, Jill, and their comic relief load are forced to don unwieldy Victorian-style scuba gear (which, for some reason, demands gigantic helmets into which you can fit a man's head and his accompanying chicken) and flee for their lives with Hugh and his murderous followers in hot pursuit. And by hot pursuit, I mean...well, let me explain this in detail. You see, everyone is underwater. When you are in water, you swim. It's really the best way to get around. That's why all fish do it. That's why pretty much everyone does it except for those sprinters who practice by trying to run underwater. That established, we then move on to the fact that watching people swim in movies is usually boring. The pitfalls of scuba scenes in cinema are well documented. So how could you take a scene -- scuba diving underwater -- that could be really boring even if properly done, and ensure that it's even more boring than you could possibly imagine? Well, instead of swimming, the people could be walking underwater. Yes, indeed. War Gods of the Deep is one of the only movies that thought what people really wanted to see was a foot chase on the floor of the ocean, with people flopping about awkwardly and moving incredibly slowly. But that's not really enough, you also have to make the scene go on for like ten minutes, and pad it out with dialog-free close-ups of Tufnell-Jones and his chicken looking around.
Now keep in mind that I have a pretty big tolerance for underwater scenes, owing largely to my fascination with what Cousteau referred to as "the silent world" and my love of diving. So trust me when I tell you that this underwater foot chase scene is one of the most horribly boring scenes I've ever seen. They try to spice things up by having guys shoot crossbows from time to time, but since no one ever actually gets hit, that never pays off. And every now and then, some of the gillmen swim up and mess around with Ben and the crew, presumably confused by the fact that these humans are walking underwater instead of swimming (thus the ability of the gillmen to swim circles around them). Despite the fact tat the gillmen can swim, breathe underwater, and aren't weighed down by cumbersome iron helmets, they aren't very effective at attacking our slowly fleeing heroes. You can pretty much defeat them by swatting at them in that slow-motion way that occurs when you are underwater. It's a tremendous relief when everyone resurfaces inside some weird temple. The volcano explodes, a giant hand falls on Vincent Price, and a singularly terrifying moment occurs when the heroes put their scuba gear back on. Dear God, no! Please! No more scenes of people awkwardly walking around underwater! This time, however, we're in luck, because the good guys crawl out of the water and the movie ends. I'm not sure what went wrong. Good director, good screenwriter, a good cast. I mean, Tab Hunter is no Doug McClure, but he's fine in this role, even though a lot of people pick on his performance. He's a one-note character, but so is everyone else. And Hunter proves adept at singing the note "stiff straight man." Susan Hart is vapid and has nothing to do, but she does that nothing well. There's no chemistry at all between her and Hunter, and once again, as I did with Arabian Adventure, I can't help but think that this movie would have been greatly improved if our lovers were played by Doug McClure and Caroline Munro. But Hunter and hart are acceptable. Heck, even comic relief guy is unfunny but relatively inoffensive and easy to ignore. To some degree, the blame for this misfire falls on the producer, Louis Heyward, who insisted on monkeying with the script endlessly and much to Tourneur's annoyance. But AIP sided with Heyward in the conflict, and his changes remained despite the protests of Tourneur, Vincent Price (who had great respect for Tourneur and very little respect for Heyward), and original screenwriter Bennett. But that can only go so far in explaining things -- the nail in the coffin of an already flawed work, as it were. And you know, if I'm replacing cast members, we might as well get rid of David Tomlinson and replace him with Terry-Thomas.
Maybe the whole thing played out better on paper, and no realized how boring it was going to be when actually committed to film. Actually, let me alter that. This movie really isn't terrible up until the underwater foot chase. It's no classic of fantasy adventure cinema, but it's harmless enough. But the underwater footage deep sixes the rest of the movie, which just isn't buoyant enough to stay afloat with the dead albatross of the underwater foot chase around it's neck. Is that enough seafarin' allusions for ya? Then let's stop beating that dead seahorse and move on to some of the film's other problems. First and foremost is, and I never thought I'd say this, Vincent Price's performance. We've seen Price play it cool and reserved before to great effect, but the decision for him to play mad Cap'n Hugh with Fall of the Hous eof Usher style reserve was, in my opinion, a tremendous mistake. This movie could have survived its dreadful underwater chase scene if Price had been hamming it up and playing Hugh as crazy and nutty as the script alludes to him being. Instead, Price's Hugh comes off as dull. The script is too thin to lend the character a sense of gravity, so there's no real emotional reaction to him. He's a villain you hate, or love to hate, or relish, or grow to sympathize with. He merely exists on film for a duration of time, and then a big stone hand falls on him. I mean, this is a mad sea captain living in an undersea city that looks like a crumbling Victorian castle and commanding an army of mutant gillmen while giving speeches about the end of the world. Why on earth would anyone think to play that character with quiet reserve? Vincent Price is, as I think I've written before, one of my favorite actors. Quite possibly, he's my most favorite actor. He never gives less than 100%, and he doesn't give less than 100% here. But the character is so boring, and Price plays it so straight, that War Gods of the Deep becomes perhaps the only film in which Price is upstaged by a irritating guy with a chicken in a basket. Speaking of the chicken -- what the hell was that about? It's not like the chicken ever does anything wacky, or like it jumps out and pecks Price on the foot or something. It is simply carried around for the entire movie, having no point at all. Even within the realm of unfunny comic relief, surely no one thinks the mere presence of a chicken is hilarious. A monkey, sure. But a chicken? I don't get it. This was apparently one of Louis Heyward's most important contributions t the script, and it's obvious why everyone else involved with the film thought the guy was a jack-ass. It's just another way to pad out a really threadbare script. It seems like Bennett got a great concept but quickly wrote himself into a corner, possibly because of budgetary constraints -- but I'm not going to buy that considering how many exciting and imaginative films were done with as little or even less money. Not being able to come up with anything for anyone to do, the movie falls back on repetitive dialog scenes in which Vincent Price explains to us that the glowing,pulsating volcano is a threat (because we wouldn't have figured it out after the first warning) or in which Tab Hunter and the guy with the chicken ask other people if they remember how to get to the surface. The sudden presence of a beautiful woman who is to be the sole property of the captain amid an undersea kingdom populated entirely by men lends itself to potential conflict, but that's never bothered with. Or the use of the dim-witted gillmen as thugs and sacrificial lambs who perhaps begin to resent the captain's manipulation of them? But no, it never goes in that direction either. Like the characters in the movie, it just sort of half-heartedly wanders around the same caverns over and over, until the volcano finally erupts.
Still, as dull as this film turns out to be, there are some redeeming qualities. Well, there's one. The sets are really nice. And the gillmen are kind of cool looking, even if they end up having very little to do. Tourneur -- accustomed to working in black and white and employing shadows to great effect -- turns out to be equally adept at manipulating th candy colored Technicolor hues. Although War Gods of the Deep isn't a good film to watch, it's a great film to look at. Tourneur's direction coupled with cinematography by Stephen Dade is gorgeous to behold. And as with the sets, War Gods of the Deep has excellent costumes and the look of a much more expensive production than it actually was. But that's precious little to go on, especially when you could be spending your time with far superior aquatic adventures, like the aforementioned Disney version of 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea or the Japanese film Atragon (from which this film steals some scenes, incidentally). This is also a sad film to end up being the last in Tourneur's career. If only a giant squid had attacked the city or something, but no. That would have been something interesting, and this film is committed to making sure nothing interesting happens. It's all, as I said, a tremendous disappointment given the talented cast and crew assembled. But it's one misstep after another, making War Gods of the Deep the extremely rare crappy fantasy film I actually can't recommend. Well, maybe watch it once...but just once.  Labels: Fantasy, Netflix Diary, Science Fiction, Series: Oceans Against Us, Stars: Vincent Price, Studio: AIP, Year: 1965 posted by Keith at 11:45 AM | 1 Comments Sunday, October 21, 2007Count Yorga, Vampire Release Year: 1970Country: United States Starring: Robert Quarry, Roger Perry, Michael Murphy, Michael Macready, D.J. Anderson, Judy Lang, Edward Walsh, Julie Conners, Paul Hansen, Sybil Scotford, Marsha Jordan, Deborah Darnell. Writer: Bob Kelljan Director: Bob Kelljan Cinematographer: Arch Archambault Producer: Bob Kelljan and Michael Macready Music: Bill Marx Alternate Titles: The Loves of Count Iorga, Vampire Availability: Buy it from Amazon  .So far, our examination of old fashioned vampires in modern day settings has covered Dracula, in the Hammer Studios films Dracula AD 1972 and Satanic Rites of Dracula, and some guy named Count Sinistre, from the previously obscure British horror film Devils of Darkness. But this trend of placing traditional vampires in a modern (well, 1970s) setting actually started in America, with a low-key film called Count Yorga, Vampire. At the time of Yorga's release, there were very few people making vampire movies. Hammer was pretty much the only game in town, and they were still setting their vampire films in the Victorian era. Devils of Darkness was one of the first vampire films to transport a vampire into the current era, at least since the 1932 Tod Browning production of Dracula, which was set in what was then modern-day London. However, one can argue that the differences between the London of 1870 and 1932 is markedly less than the difference between 1870 and 1970, and so for our purposes here, Devils of Darkness is more substantial to our little foray than Dracula. It's also less substantial because almost no one saw Devils of Darkness, and without a dedicated distributor or studio, it quickly faded from memory and was almost totally forgotten until it finally found its way to DVD (its first home video release) in 2007. Which means that Count Yorga, Vampire, is really where we can say this short-lived trend began. There was obviously still interest in vampire films. Hammer's late 60s Dracula films still made money, even if it was obvious that the foundation was beginning to crumble. All it would really take was finding a successful way to modernize the monster without completely divorcing it from its Victorian roots (that would come later, after this transitional stage). Leave it to American International Pictures to step up to the plate and take a swing. AIP is a familiar studio for anyone who follows the world of cult films. They were a B-movie behemoth, and a testing ground for a host of directors and actors who would go on to superstardom. But the real linchpin in their creative machine was a guy named Roger Corman. First as director, and later as producer, Corman proved to be amazingly adept at scouting talent, stretching a dollar, and compacting a shooting schedule. One of his specialties was shooting a film, wrapping it early, then realizing that he still had three days left on a rented set or a contract for Boris Karloff. So he'd make another movie, from concept to script, to final shooting, in those three days.
AIP's standard operating procedure was to crank out cheap, black and white, double feature movies, and it worked well for them. In 1960, however, most likely heavily influenced by the surprising success of Hammer's big three of Horror of Dracula, Curse of Frankenstein, and The Mummy, Roger Corman approached AIP executives and pitched them the idea for a more lavish color film with a longer shooting schedule and more ambitious scope. AIP didn't exactly jump at the prospect, but the combination of Hammer's success with serious, color horror films and Corman's proven track record as a director who could crank out decent films that always turned a profit for the studio eventually swayed them, and Corman was given a whopping three weeks and the services of Vincent Price to shoot The Fall of the House of Usher. It was designed very much in the style of the Hammer Gothics, full of vivid colors and costumes placed against a bleak and crumbling backdrop. It was a huge hit for AIP, so much so that Corman was given free reign to shoot a whole series of similar films, each starring Vincent Price and based --often extremely loosely -- on the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Despite their modest roots, Corman's Poe films remain some of the best written, most sumptuous American horror films ever produced. By 1970, however, the tables had turned. Hammer was starting to resemble one of the crumbling old castles they so loved to set their movies in, while AIP was increasingly nimble and able to adapt to changing tastes and trends in pop culture. When they felt their Hammer style horror films were becoming too old-fashioned, they started spicing things up with more cynical scripts and more liberal displays of nudity. They successfully branched out far beyond horror to produce a massive array of drive-in and B-movie fare, as well as a second series of Poe films, still starring Price but this time directed by Gordon Hessler. It was AIP that decided the vampire film could find new blood by being adapted to a modern setting, and this time, it was Hammer who ended up following AIP's lead. AIP, at least in the realm of horror, was a child of Hammer, but Dracula AD 1972 would never have existed if not for AIP's Count Yorga films. Of course, many would argue that we would have all been better off without Dracula AD 1972, but I'm not one of those people. Point is, this was a classic "student becomes the master" reversal.
Oddly, the initial idea for updating the vampire tale was to make it a saucy softcore film. Many people claim that the original version of Count Yorga, Vampire -- then bearing the title The Loves of Count Iorga, Vampire -- was meant to be a porno film. Not so, though it was meant to flaunt the bare breasts and other things you could get away with thanks to the increased liberalness of the 1970s. When AIP picked up the independently produced film for distribution, they demanded that the sauciness be trimmed in order to achieve a more teen-friendly GP (PG to you young bloods) rating. Some remnants remain, at least in the current version of the film (which is slightly longer than the original theatrical version), but there must have been a considerable amount left on a cutting room floor somewhere, though some production stills of the unused scenes remain in circulation. With increased sexiness out, Count Yorga's next and far cleverer method of updating the vampire film was to approach it with a more cynical attitude. All of these movies have to feature a variation on the, "Vampires? You must be joking! This is the 20th century!" line, but Count Yorga takes the line to heart. You really must be joking. A vampire, cape and all, in 1970's California? Ridiculous! And Count Yorga's attitude is basically, "Yes, isn't it?" even as the film is biting you on the neck. It's a tricky tightrope act, to both poke fun at and respect the classical vampire film, but what makes Count Yorga special is that it manages to pull it off.
We first meet Yorga, played with acerbic perfection by Robert Quarry, as he presides over a seance attended by a typical group of jaded young couples. As with Sinistre in Devils of Darkness, the long-lived vampire is able to adapt to modern times and fit in by traveling in small circles where quirkiness and strange behavior is easily dismissed. Yorga himself is a bit of a prick, though it's entirely understandable given the fact that the guy has been alive for hundreds of years and probably had to suffer all manner of fools. Quarry is great in the role, mixing this biting sarcasm with a world-weary melancholy to create a character that is undeniably a villain yet oddly sympathetic. Hammer attempted, with far less success, to inject this same sort of world-weariness into Dracula in The Satanic Rites of Dracula, but they didn't study Yorga's game plan close enough to really pull it off. Christopher Lee's Dracula was always a presence but rarely an actual character, even when he was on screen. Yorga, on the other hand, is much more complex and much more human, and thus his attitude is far more understandable. His disillusionment with pretty much everything around him in the "normal" world is an interesting counterpoint to the same disillusionment the modern couples have with the supernatural. "What a bunch of pointless nonsense," both sides seem to be thinking. Nonsense or not, the supernatural bears its fangs when one of the couples gives Count Yorga a lift. The movie's humor is very subtle, very dry, and best characterized by things like a vampire having to bum a ride home after a seance or Yorga's wonderful, "I believe I had a cape" line as he prepares himself to leave. These moments aren't entirely played for laughs, and the film doesn't desperately scream at you and point out things that are supposed to be funny. It's really up to you to decide whether or not you think it's amusing.
Yorga continues to chew his way through the women in the circle of friends, just as the men struggle to come to grips with the idea that there really could be a vampire praying upon them and their girlfriends. This culminates in a bout of verbal sparring in which our principal heroes, Michael and Dr. Hayes, visit Yorga at his estate and attempt to engage the count in one of those battles of double entendres and "I don't know what you really are...or do I?" types of conversations. Yorga is visibly bored and irritated by the whole thing, and the confrontation ends just before sunrise, with Yorga basically doing nothing more than kicking the guys out. The proper finale follows shortly thereafter, in which Yorga's home is raided in an attempt to recover the kidnapped and hypnotized Donna, and Michael and Dr. Hayes discover a bit too late that Yorga's pad is crawling with hungry vampire chicks. As with any low-budget productions, Count Yorga, Vampire has a number of obstacles to navigate in an attempt to turn budgetary limitations into assets. For starters, the concept of an old world vampire in a new world setting is very limited in its scope. There are no scenes of Yorga hitting the town or going to a club. Instead, the film is limited to a few sets, revolving around Yorga's mansion, creating a feeling of claustrophobia and timelessness despite the intrusions of modern trappings like vans and telephones. Yorga is keen to control his environment and keep himself in a setting over which he can exercise more effective control. In the same sense, it allows him to survive in modern times but surround himself with comfort items from his past, like an old fart sitting in his den listening to pre-Rollins Black Flag records and complaining about how punk rock is so crappy now. Yorga can survive because he has learned how to shrink the modern world into a controllable sphere where he can exist on the very fringes, reaching in to pluck out a victim every now and then but generally remaining below the radar of modern society. He relies additionally on the jaded nature of modern people -- obviously, a vampire attack is utterly preposterous. Like all vampires in these movies, though, he eventually screws up and picks on a group of people who are slightly more open to the possibility and also happen to have one of those doctor friends who happens to know a lot about the occult.
Despite the low budget, Count Yorga, Vampire manages to succeed based on the wit of the script and the strength of Robert Quarry in the lead. There are bumps in the road with the script, most likely because of the quick rewrite from softcore titillater to GP horror film, but overall they are pretty easy to ignore. As I said, some remnants of the softcore version remain. Yorga whiles away boring nights by sitting on a throne in his basement and watching his vampire brides make out with one another -- a scene that was probably considerably longer and didn't cut away right before the lip lock and fondling in the original vision of the movie. Additionally, there's a make-out session in the van, because what else are you going to do when you get your van stuck in the mud on someone's private property if not go at it in the back? I mean, that's what you got a van for in the first place, right? Ultimately, and despite erroneous claims that this was originally going to be a porno film, I assume The Loves of Count Iorga, Vampire would have ended up looking like Hammer's saucier 70s vampire fare like Twins of Evil and Vampire Lovers. It wouldn't have harmed the film any, I don't think, but ultimately, I think it works pretty well in the final form, as a very low-key, slow-moving, but hypnotically entrancing study of a jaded vampire that doesn't lapse into either self-indulgent pity or over-obvious satire. How you ultimately react to such a film depends entirely on how you feel about such movies, whether you consider them engrossing or just boring. I really liked it, and I thought that it was wonderful at creating a sort of weird, claustrophobic, and moody atmosphere.
Not that the movie is entirely comprised of guys sitting around debating vampirism. This is a low-budget horror film distributed by AIP, after all. So in between the soul-searching and pondering and Yorga sneering at the mere mortals around him, you get scenes like a woman eating her own cat and plenty of vampire attacks. It’s just that ultimately you come for Robert Quarry's performance as Yorga. Everything else is just dressing. Sweet, bloody dressing. Quarry was a steadily employed television actor before being cast in the role of Yorga, and he really shines here in what is probably his most triumphant role. Many people among the population of those who tend to rank such things, rank his portrayal of the bored and always somewhat irritated Count Yorga as one of the best on-screen vampires of all time. Casting an older, solid actor in the role is a prime example of what movies like this to right that so many modern movies do wrong. When Quarry plays Yorga as a long-lived and jaded vampire, he is able to lend the character the appropriate sighing surrender mixed with annoyance. Yorga has an abundance of life (or afterlife) experience, and Quarry communicates that in a way the current crop of much younger actors cannot. Quarry continued to work well through the 80s and 90s, often in low-budget horror and exploitation fare, before more or less retiring in 1999. however, it looks like his services are being called on once again, as he is apparently appearing in a movie called The Tell-Tale Heart, which also stars scream queen staple Debbie Rochon and another legend of 70s vampire films, Ingrid Pitt, who starred in 1970's Vampire Lovers from Hammer, which contained the nudity and softcore content that was nixed from Count Yorga.
Writer/director Bob Kelljan, whose only directing credit before Count Yorga was the naughtily titled Flesh of My Flesh (he had previously been an actor in both television and low-budget drive-in fare), crafted a tightly framed minor horror classic that manages to be well-paced despite the dearth of action. He used Yorga to become a successful television director, working steadily until his death in 1982. He makes Yorga into a creepy little film that never sacrifices its downbeat atmosphere and general creepiness in the pursuit of comedy, and yet manages to produce a number of -- if not funny, then certainly witty -- moments that will make you smile. It's wicked, and at times, it's even kind of scary, especially if you're watching it late at night -- which is more than can be said for most horror films. Count Yorga, Vampire ended up being a solid money-maker for AIP, and so a sequel was commissioned with a slightly larger budget. Kelljan and Quarry returned, as did some of the rest of the cast, despite the fact that the original's downbeat ending pretty much leaves everyone dead. The Return of Count Yorga is more or less the same movie, only with Craig T. Nelson as a cop. It's quite enjoyable as well, even if it is a rehash but with Craig T. Nelson. Count Yorga's greater effect was to launch that mini-revival of vampire fiction that saw everything from Hammer's two Dracula movies, Marvel Comic's Tomb of Dracula, and two Blacula films that put a blaxploitation spin on the modern vampire story (the second Blacula film was actually even directed by Kelljan). Although largely forgotten and relegated to the back waters of cult film fandom today, Yorga was influential and successful during its time, and DVD has helped a lot of new viewers rediscover this unique twist on an old tale. Labels: Horror: Vampires, Series: Vampires in the 70s, Studio: AIP, Year: 1970 posted by Keith at 2:46 PM | 3 Comments Sunday, July 23, 2006Beach Party Tonight!
Not really sure what was going through my mind when I puffed out my chest, slapped it in a hearty manly fashion, and proclaimed to the world that I was going to review not one, not two, but all of the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello beach party movies from the 1960s. Maybe I was tired and delirious, Maybe the heady days of summer, with their swinging hammocks and nubile women wearing bikinis and running down white sand beaches with surf boards, with the sweet smell of honeysuckle wafting on balmy breezes as I lean back in my bamboo chair on my beachfront veranda and raise a tumbler of rum on the rocks to a passing surfer girl, who stops long enough to smile at me as she pushes a wave of sandy blonde hair from her face and motions with a subtle jerk of her head that I should join her in the water. Maybe I was one too many into my bottle of rum, which would explain why I was seeing surfer girls and beachfront verandas in the middle of Brooklyn -- and which would also explain why I thought sitting through all the beach party movies would be a keen idea.
As some of you may have gathered from the number of Elvis movies I've reviewed, I have a remarkably high tolerance for bubblegum sixties fare, especially if it involves car racing or surfing or go-go dancing. And the beach party movies include all of the above, and usually top it off with a couple musical numbers by surf guitar pioneer Dick Dale, plus a cameo from Vincent Price or someone else who was under contract to AIP. These movies are full of fake beatniks, "hep" lingo that is just a year or two out of date, and motorcycle gangs that wield all the imposing toughness of Paul Lynde. And the sad thing is, they were still hipper, sexier, and more daring than any of the movies starring Elvis. I mean, here he was, the king of rock 'n' roll, looking like a grade A square while teenie bopper chumps like Frankie and Annette got to shake their bums and smoke cigarettes and hang with beatniks. Elvis didn't meet any beatniks in his movies until 1968 or so, and by then beatniks were a good fifteen years past their prime. Who would have every thought that former mouse-keteers Frankie and Annette would be more daring and more cutting edge than Elvis? BEACH PARTY: 1963, United States. Starring Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Bob Cummings, Dorothy Malone, Morey Amsterdam, Harvey Lembeck, Eva Six, John Ashley, Candy Johnson, Jody McCrea, Dick Dale, Andy Romano, Jerry Brutsche, Bob Harvey, John Macchia, Alberta Nelson, Vincent Price. Directed by William Asher. Written by Lou Rusoff. Buy it now from Amazon.com  .The frolicking begins with Beach Party. Summer's here, and the kids are out of college with only one thing on their minds: the beach, and more specifically, surfing and sex. Yes, that's right. Though these films are very much in the "good clean American fun" vein, it behooves me to remind the prudes out there that surfing and sex are two of the best forms of good clean American fun (I've never been one to ascribe all that "grand spiritual union between two perfectly matched souls" mystic mumbo jumbo to sex). Other forms of good clean American fun include skateboarding, drinkin', hollerin', freakin' out the squares, checking out cheerleaders, and blowin' shit up. If you can work that all into one weekend, well then you truly do deserve that precious American citizenship. And if you also manage to jump a speedboat over a moving train or a muscle car through the open boxcar door of a moving train, well then you got my vote for President.
Frankie's into all of the above, but Annette? Well, she's kind of...you know. A drag. So while Frankie is looking forward to a nice holiday at the beach house with his sweetie, she invites along "the whole gang," which irritates Frankie to no end, at least until the surfing starts. Even then, while all the guys and gals are out having a blast, Annette sort of pouts around on the beach. How did these two end up together? While this little drama plays itself out -- interspersed with some great vintage footage (watch the film grain change!) of real California longboarders -- a perverted old scientist is hidden away in his bungalow watching the sexy young thangs cavort down on the beach. This ostensibly his anthropological research, working as he is on a thesis that popular youth culture is no different than the primitive pagan sex rites of old. Hey man, do you get grant money for researching that kind of thesis? I bet all those people who write their dissertations on the "Microstructural and Electronic Transport Properties of PtxSi/p-Si(100) Metal-Semiconductor Composite Films and Their Potential as IR Detection Devices in the 3-5 Micron Range" feel like world class suckers when they learn they could have written a thesis that required them to hide out in a beach bungalow with a gorgeous assistant and watch chicks in bikinis through a telescope all day. So Annette won't surf. She won't imbibe in the devil's brew. She doesn't smoke the reefer. She won't go-go dance or hang with the freaks at Big Daddy's. Who can blame Frankie when his eyes start to wander to other girls who will shake and shimmy and have a good time? I'm not sure if we're supposed to feel bad for her or what, but I don't think it's just because I'm a man that I sympathize with Frankie a little more. He wanted a romantic vacation with just her. She invited everyone else along, And when Frankie makes due and twists the night away, she's upset at that too. Women, huh? Can't a guy have a little fun? I mean, if she came to the beach to sit in the corner and huff at everything, what can you do? Even the professor eventually learns to stop analyzing the kids and just cut loose and have some fun. And then there's Eric Von Zipper's madcap slapstick biker gang. And Candy Johnson go-go dancing so furiously that you will actually fear for her well-being and marvel at the fact that her arms and head don't just go flying right off her body. Of course, no beach party movie is complete unless it ends in a big rumble with the bikers that turns into a pie fight. There's no defending Beach Party. It's corny. It's a crass cash-in on the popularity of surfing. It's full of ripe dialogue. And I love it. Truly, and not on an ironic level. It's got surfing. It's got Dick Dale and his big, weird pirate's earring. It's got lots of girls go-go dancing in bikinis and Capri pants. It's got fightin'. And for a family film, it's surprisingly sexual. Not really a big surprise. Folks were loosening up after the Eisenhower years drove everyone batty, and by the 1960s, films like the Doris Day bedroom comedies had turned innuendo and double entendre into an art form. Beach Party would, ironically, probably enrage modern parents. Not only do the leads drink and smoke and think about sex, there's even one scene where it's strongly hinted that Frankie and his buddies are partaking of what the kids at the time referred to as the reefer. Annette is a drag, but Frankie puts a lot of energy into his role, even when he crosses the line into just being sort of a prick. The supporting cast is really just there to yell, "Well shoot, let's go surfing!" or "Cuckoo, man, real cuckoo!" And then at the very end of the film we get to meet Big Daddy himself, which begins a long tradition in these films of AIP forcing their otherwise respectable old guard to appear in teenie bopper fare.
The film was a hit, needless to say, though Walt Disney was supremely pissed that his little Annette was cavorting about in such scandalous garb -- even though she spends the film in the most modest of swimwear. Walt felt that having his prize mouseketeer in such filth reflected bad on the title of mouseketeer and the Disney brand in general. Good thing he didn't live to see former Mouseketeer Britney Spears. The supporting cast is comprised mainly of character actor stalwarts and AIP workhorses, which helps a lot in making the movie tolerable, since you're not really going to have much to say about Jody McCrae's turn as Deadhead, the big guy with one of those weird crown-style hillbilly hats I think were only ever worn by characters in Archie and Li'l Abner. I don't know if any actual hillbillies ever wore them, just like I'm not sure any sexy hillbilly women ever wore those ratty dresses where the bottom was cut into a bunch of triangles. But I hope they did. Robert Cummings plays the creepy voyeuristic Professor Sutwell. As sleazy as his character tends to come off now that the veneer of "innocent curiosity and research" has been worn off forty-year-old men watching teenage girls on the beach through a telescope, his performance is fine -- though this movie is a long, long way from his roles in Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder or The Saboteur. Harvey Lembeck plays foppish leather-clad motorcycle gang leader Eric Von Zipper, predating Judas Priest's "Head out on the Highway" by a couple decades. I don't know why a teen motorcycle gang is being lead by a guy in his forties, but I guess that does mean he's the only rebellious young man actually old enough to have been a beatnik. His performance is ludicrous and over the top, which is about all he can do with the material, and he does it pretty well, though I wouldn't pretend that his shenanigans (Oh, he crashed his bike again! Eric Von Zipper, will you ever learn?) had me in stitches. The final elder statesman of the cast is Morey Amsterdam as Cappy, the beatnik-is manager for Big Daddy's. Morey was a former vaudeville performer and a recognizable face to anyone who watched comedy in the early half of the 20th century. Director William Asher's career up until this movie had been confined primarily to television, with his most notable accomplishment being a stint as a director of I Love Lucy. After this movie and its multitudinous sequels, his career would, not surprisingly, still be confined primarily to television, and teenie bopper television at that, including episodes of Gidget and The Patty Duke Show, The Paul Lynde Show, The Dukes of Hazzard, and Harper Valley PTA. He seemed to really be into directing spin-offs or television series adaptations of popular movies (back when it was done that way, instead of how it is now, where every television series gets a movie). Among his smattering of feature film work beyond the beach party movies is another Frankie and Annette movie, Fireball 500.
MUSCLE BEACH PARTY: 1964, United States. Starring Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Luciana Paluzzi, John Ashley, Don Rickles, Peter Turgeon, Jody McCrea, Dick Dale, Candy Johnson, Peter Lupus, Valora Noland, Delores Wells, Donna Loren, Morey Amsterdam, Stevie Wonder, Peter Lorre, Buddy Hackett. Directed by William Asher. Written by William Asher and Robert Dillon. Buy it now from Amazon.com  .A sequel was a foregone conclusion. So AIP rounded everyone up again for Muscle Beach Party. This follow-up follows pretty much the same format, with our intrepid band of sex-crazed surfers led by Frankie Avalon discovering that they are being muscled off the beach -- literally! Don Rickels, the man everyone thinks of when they think fitness trainer, arrives with his traveling band of bodybuilders, who hog the beach all day long as the flex and preen and oil up their biceps. Peter Lupus, a familiar face to anyone who might be familiar with some Italian Hercules movies or episodes of Mission: Impossible, is the top star. Meanwhile, a beautiful European heiress (Lucianno Paluuzi, from Thunderball) is moored just off shore with her sidekick Buddy Hackett. She takes a liking to Frankie, much to Annette's annoyance, since it is Annette's job to be forever annoyed in these films. Sadly, she doesn't hook up with either Rickels or Hackett to make Frankie jealous, and somehow, they got those two in a film and prevented them from making lots of penis jokes. Buddy and Don, I mean. Once again, I find that the film is pretty enjoyable for what it is, and sadly, a couple jokes got me to laugh out loud -- specifically Lupus becoming overjoyed about protein, and Lupus, upon discovering there is not enough room for a massive he-man like him in the heiress' private helicopter, grabbing onto the landing runners so he can just dangle off the copter as it flies out to the boat -- and then topping that by insisting on doing pull-ups for the duration of the ride. The rest of the film is the usual mash-up: Frankie and Annette snipe at each other, Candy Johnson go-go dances uncontrollably, and real-life surfers stand in for the cast in some nice old-school surfing footage. BIKINI BEACH: 1964, United States. Starring Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Martha Hyer, Don Rickles, Harvey Lembeck, John Ashley, Jody McCrea, Candy Johnson, Danielle Aubry, Meredith MacRae, Delores Wells, Donna Loren, Stevie Wonder. Directed by William Asher. Written by William Asher and Robert Dillon. Buy it now on Amazon.com .That same year, Frankie, Annette, and the whole gang returned in Bikini Beach, a film which features the truly genius tagline "Where every torso is moreso." Frankie really gets to flex his acting muscle this time around as he stars not only as Frankie, the ever-impish boyfriend of straight-laced but cute as a button Annette, but also as Potato Bug, the mop-topped sensation from England that has all the beach bunnies hearts a-flutter. Avalon's characterization of a British guy consists mostly of saying things like, "Smashing, old chap! I say, I could use a spot of tea!" in a really bad fake accent. Potato Bug is supposed to be a riff on the British Invasion that was exploding across America at the time, but I don't recall any of the Beatles saying things like, "Oh jolly good, sport!" Maybe Ringo, but that's it. The Brit-speak sounds like whoever wrote this knew as much about writing dialogue for British rockers as they knew about writing dialogue for hep teens and beatniks. At the same time, they do have the foresight to give Potato Bug bad teeth, predating the popular Austin Powers joke by a good thirty-plus years. And he does wear safari gear much of the time, and he's named Potato Bug, so as stupid as it is, some of the Potato Bug jokes are at least a little funny. Maybe he could tour with The Mosquitoes from Gilligan's Island. Eric Von Zipper is, naturally, on hand again to muck things up, as is another stuffy professor, this one trying to prove that the youth of today are no smarter than a trained monkey. So he has a monkey (the usual guy in a cheap monkey suit) following him around, going surfing, go-go dancing, stuff like that. The doctor should think less about proving kids are dumb and more about the fact that he has a hyper-intelligent chimp who can surf, perfectly understand English, and knows enough to know he should jump up and go-go dance with Candy Johnson. Whatever happened to Candy, anyway? I can only assume that she eventually severed her own spinal cord by dancing too furiously. For the most part, any of the first three beach party movies are all right on their own, though I'm beginning to seriously question the wisdom of watching them all in a block, especially in light of the fact that there are two more to go. You can really only take so much of Jody McCray wearing his Jughead hillbilly hat and shouting, "Shucks!"
But three wasn't enough for the sun, surf, and sex crazed teens of the 1960s, so therefore it wasn't enough for AIP. While they were busy making their truly classic Edgar Allen Poe films with Vincent Price and Roger Corman on one end of the lot, they had the beach party machine cranking furiously on the other. Beach Blanket Bingo: 1965, United States. Starring Frankie...oh come on! By this point you should have the cast memorized. Directed by William Asher. Written by William Asher and Leo Townsend. Buy it now on Amazon.com  .Beach Blanket Bingo hit screens in 1965, and if you can believe that a series like this can actually start to decline in quality, this is where it happens. Or maybe not. I guess it's no stupider than the others, but things really start to fray around the edges when you've watched so many of these things in a row. They are, sadly, still more cutting edge (for the time and audience) than the Elvis movies, and more daring with the amount of bare flesh, wiggle, and jiggle they're willing to put on screen. Once again Frankie and Annette head to the beach to act catty and petulant toward one another. You'd think that by now they'd either give up on each other, or all their friends would give up on them. I mean, for the most part, everyone is doing nothing but having fun and watching Candy Johnson flail about like a possessed woman at a voodoo ceremony, but then Frankie and Annette always have to start arguing and trying to make each other jealous, and well -- you'd think the rest of the bunch would start entertaining the thought of maybe going to the beach without the two endlessly bickering sweethearts. For this go-round, Frankie's ever wandering eye is caught by a skydiving bombshell, and the only way Annette can retain proper ownership of Frankie's heart is by finally doing something other than sitting on the beach and pouting. So it's into the air for Annette, as she skydives her way back into Frankie's love. The jokes were really starting to wear thin by this point, and the formula had been pretty much flogged to death. Having nothing better to do, director William Asher throws a decrepit Buster Keaton into the mix for absolutely no discernable reason. It's not like the kids were going to go, "Well, I'm pretty tired of beach party movies, but this one has 1920s superstar Buster Keaton in it! Cuckoo!" and it's not like any senior citizen was sitting around reading the papers and suddenly yelled, "Martha! There's a new Buster Keaton movie playing down at the bijou! Why, this is one of those movies that also stars Morrey Amsterdam. I loved his vaudeville act. 23 skidoo!"
HOW TO STUFF A WILD BIKINI: 1965, United States. Starring Frankie...oh come on! By this point you should have the cast memorized. Directed by William Asher. Written by William Asher and Leo Townsend. Buy it now on Amazon.com .Apparently, I wasn't the only one growing tired of the retread antics in Beach Blanket Bingo. The next film, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini was the final film in the series, and rightfully so. By this point, even Frankie Avalon had lost interest, and while he and Annette rehash their never-ending lovers' quarrel in exactly the same fashion, the main story here, horrifyingly enough, focuses on Jody McRae's Deadhead character, who falls in love with a mysterious and beautiful woman who turns out to be a mermaid. Yep, that's right. A mermaid. Not that it's all that weird when you consider one of the previous films featured a hyper-intelligent go-go dancing ape. I have very little to say with regards to How to Stuff a Wild Bikini except that there's not much to say about it. The laughs are few and far between, if indeed there are any laughs at all. But don't mourn for the death of the beach party movies. AIP managed to sustain the series for several films, plus they managed to crank out a number of spin-offs. Annette returns to her beach party role in the film Pajama Party, which Frankie Avalon more or less opted out of (his character is said to have joined the Army, leaving Annette free to receive the advances of teen heartthrob Tommy Kirk, who here is a Martian. Look man, I didn't write it). Frankie shows up in Ski Party, which is basically just a beach party movie on the ski slopes. He also pops up in another goofball AIP bikini film, Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine, also starring Vincent Price at his absolute hammiest. And "the whole gang" returns years later for the 1980s film Back to the Beach, in which Frankie and Annette, now married, must content with being old squares while their kids discover punk rock. And yes, in case you're worried, the punk dialogue is every bit as on-target as the previously displayed beatnik and biker dialogue. Truth be told, any one beach party movie by itself can be fun. They're ridiculously campy, occasionally funny, and surprisingly freewheeling about the drinking, smoking, and sex. As a group, they're a little much to bite off all at once, but only an idiot like me would do that anyway. And they have much hipper music than you might think -- once again, much hipper than the Elvis movies, which is sad given Elvis' history. You know, as the king of rock and roll and all. The songs by Frankie and Annette are cornball bubblegum pop fare, but you can't beat appearances by Donna Loren, Dick Dale and the Del Tones, and even a very young Stevie Wonder. Plus the score for the films was created by AIP house composer Les Baxter, who always does good work. At the very least, you should see at least one beach party movie just to behold the phenomenon that is Candy Johnson's go-go dancing. Labels: Beach Party Tonight, Musicals, Studio: AIP, Year: 1963 posted by Keith at 7:51 PM | 0 Comments Saturday, September 18, 2004Murders in the Rue Morgue Release Year: 1971Country: United States Starring: Jason Robards, Herbert Lom, Christine Kaufmann, Adolfo Celi, Maria Perschy, Michael Dunn, Lilli Palmer, Peter Arne, Rosalind Elliot, Marshall Jones, Maria Martin, Ruth Plattes. Writer: Christopher Wicking and Henry Slesar Director: Gordon Hessler Cinematographer: Manuel Berenguer Music: Waldo de los Rios Producer: Louis Heyward Director Gordon Hessler is back for another AIP Poe adaptation, this one cleverer than most in the way it incorporates the Poe elements into the film. As we saw with The Oblong Box and many others, it was common to take the title of a Poe short story or poem, apply it to the film, then have not the slightest thing to do with the Poe story of the same title in the plot. Murders in the Rue Morgue takes the title from Poe's story, but instead of adapting it or discarding it, sets its action around a theatrical production of Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue that becomes plagued with murders and yet another vengeful disfigured madman who was buried alive. According to Hessler, this was done because Murders in the Rue Morgue had already been made into a movie, and everyone knew how it ended. Thus there was no suspense in the film - not that Hessler was all that great at creating suspense anyway. Murders in the Rue Morgue is also a good example of how important Vincent Price was to the success of these films. His special talent was making bad movies good, and making boring scenes interesting simply because he's so much fun to watch. Even The Oblong Box, which is heavy on Price sitting there and talking, is made more enjoyable simply by virtue of the fact that Price is doing the talking. By all accounts, he should have been the man in the lead for Murders in the Rue Morgue as well, but contract disputes led to him taking time away from AIP, or so the story goes. The contract dispute was settled, but Price came back and went to work on The Abominable Dr. Phibes rather than on this next Poe adaptation with Hessler. For all I know, though, he could simply have been to busy with Phibes to do this picture, and contract negotiations never came into it. Whatever the case, The Abominable Dr. Phibes is considered by many including myself to be a deliciously macabre horror classic. Murders in the Rue Morgue, on the other hand, is regarded as something less than classic, when it is regarded at all. It's another in that long line of "not bad, not great" films that manage to satisfy people who are predisposed to like a particular type of film (in this case, gothic horror) but certainly won't win over any new fans.
With Price unavailable, AIP went shopping for a new leading man and hooked Jason Robards, fresh off his stint with Sergio Leone in Once Upon a Time in the West. Robards was a real catch of a lead at the time, but he looks about as thrilled to be in this film as I would be to find myself the winner of Celine Dion's complete discography. That is to say, not very. I like Jason Robards a lot, but it seems that he considers Murders in the Rue Morgue to be the type of film that was beneath him. I'm never a big fan of the "this type of film is beneath me" attitude. Hey man, work is work, and it's not like the people who sport this attitude have artistically impeccable resumes. Instead of just giving it their all and turning in a memorable performance - the kind that can make a bad movie good, the kind we'd expect from a man like Vincent Price - too often these stars half-ass their way through the film just to collect the paycheck. Robards is never bad in this film, but neither is he ever engaging. He looks bored, and his performance lacks the conviction and enthusiasm it requires to work. He plays Cesar Charron, the most American Frenchman you'll ever hear. Didn't Robards know that when playing a foreigner -- any foreigner - you're supposed to fake a British accent? Cesar is the lead actor and manager of a Parisian theater troupe performing their stage version of Poe's ghoulish tale. Things get going quick. If nothing else, Hessler could make an interesting start of his films. The actors discover that the man who was supposed to be playing the ape in the play was murdered, and the murderer himself had donned the costume and done the entire performance himself. You'd think a backstage murder followed by the murderer going on stage to rave reviews would be enough to cause a postponement, but I guess the show must always go on. It's soon revealed that the murderer is Rene Marot, played by Herbert Lom, who starred in Mysterious Island and Hammer's version of Phantom of the Opera, which is fitting since this film has more to do with Phantom than with Poe's story. It could be that Lom got the role because he already had himself a mask. Yes, as with The Oblong Box, our murderer is an unhinged madman with a disfigured face. It turns out that Marot was once a member of Cesar's acting troupe, but after an accident resulted in real acid rather than prop acid being splashed on his face, he ended up killing himself. Or did he? Well, no, of course he didn't, because there he is a-killin' his former stage mates. But why? And how did he survive burial? And how does all this tie in to the bizarre nightmares Cesar's wife, Madeline (Christine Kaufmann) has been having, in which a masked man whirls an ax around and around before chasing her down a hall until she sees a corpse fall from the rafters? And what's with the midget? Answering these questions is how the film passes its running time.
As was often the case with Hessler's Poe films, the story is either complex or convoluted, depending on your mood, and there are a lot of disparate plot threads that have to be woven together by film's end. The film's ambitions perhaps outreach its ability to deliver, but it still makes for an interesting experiment and attempt to do something just a little bit different. There are a lot of dream sequences. Well, no. There's one dream sequence, repeated over and over, sometimes with a little more information added here and there as the film attempts to unravel the central mystery. Murders in the Rue Morgue has fewer scenes of people sitting around talking about the plot than previous Hessler Poe adaptations. The nightmare is effective, and the strange slow-motion scenes of the masked tuxedo-wearing killer whirling a giant medieval ax over his head is suitably spooky. Hessler also makes good use of the shadows and all the billowing cloaks and capes one is afforded in a period production, but overall the film is too brightly lit and lacks the chilling atmosphere of AIP's better Poe films or Hammer's gothic horrors. Outside of the dream sequence and a few shots around a carnival, Hessler's direction lacks direction, if you know what I mean, and it really fails to create any sort of impact or identity for the film. European genre regular Adolfo Celi (Thunderball, Danger: Diabolik!) is on hand as the captain of the most useless police force in France. I mean, Marot manages to stroll up and kill a man with a vial of acid while Celi and the the cops are standing not more than three feet away and looking right at him. Then they can't even catch the man, presumably because he does "billowing Jack the Ripper cloak" running to confuse them. One would think that an acid-scarred madman in all black and wearing a ceramic mask would attract attention, even in France. On several occasions, the police prove utterly incompetent at catching Marot, even though all it seems like they'd have to do is stick their hand out and grab him. He doesn't exactly keep a low profile. He keeps coming back to the theater. He keeps murdering members of the cast. How hard can it be? He even manages to evade police while dressed as a monkey despite the fact that they knew from the beginning of the play that he was on stage yet again as the ape, having murdered yet another cast member who was supposed to play the ape. And still he manages to escape. In another scene, police corner Marot and his assistant, the diminutive Pierre Triboulet (an excellent Michael Dunn) in an old crypt/theater. Marot escapes yet again, and then they just seem to sort of let Pierre go free despite the fact that he's obviously an accomplice, an accessory to murder, a kidnapper, and also guilty of perpetrating annoying Punch and Judy puppet plays on the citizens of Paris. If one is going to worry about the inability of the police to catch a dwarf who is standing right next to them or successfully nab an acid-scarred murderer kneeling before them, one may as well go on and wonder why, as monkey actors keep getting strangled, no one ever thinks to cancel the show or, for that matter, post any sort of security back stage even when they know Marot is going to be back there skulking about. I mean, it's really not that good of a play they seem to be putting on, so what's the harm in taking a few nights off while your cast is being stalked and killed?
You may be worried that the change of venue from England to Paris (although the film was actually shot in Spain) means no bawdy ale house shenanigans. Well, you'd be wrong. Have faith in AIP. Jason Robards still finds time to visit a brothel full of can-can dancers and, yes, patrons hollerin' and groping women and waving mugs around in the air. Unfortunately, the brothel scene showcases another of the film's many weaknesses, in this case it timidness. No gratuitous nudity? Not even in the bawdy ale-house scene? In France? Are you telling me those repressed Brits are willing to doff their blouses in the peasant pub, but those liberated French women are going to remain modestly clothed? What crazy kind of world is this? For that matter, Marot's murders are fairly tame in comparison to other AIP and Hammer films of the time. I guess there's only so much you can do with acid, but even when the ax comes into play, the camera is atypically shy in lingering over the grue. The goriest setpieces come in Cesar's stage show, where they're firmly established as Grand Guignol and "just part of the act, folks," thus lacking any real sense of shock. If I'm going to be pretentious enough to use the term Grand Guignol, then I want to apply it to the film itself, not to the play within the film. The film's twist ending is telegraphed about half an hour too early, but it's still a decently interesting ride before you arrive at the big revelation. Once again, the horribly scarred face of the killer is not all that terrifying, but it's not built up as such as much as Edward's face in The Oblong Box, so that's no real disappointment. No, the only real disappointment in Murders in the Rue Morgue is how substandard the whole thing ends up being, thanks largely to Jason Robards' disinterest in everything around him. His boredom infects the viewer and makes an already dubiously boring film even more so. As I said, this is the sort of film that could easily have been saved by Vincent Price, but without his services, and with a leading man who couldn't care less whether or not he was on screen, Murders in the Rue Morgue is dragged down by the weight of its own plot. With no conviction, with no sense of horror communicated by Robards, the movie is sapped of any tension it might have otherwise generated. All of Hessler's Poe films suffered from the same problem: his inability to pace a film or keep the entire thing interesting. With Vincent Price in the lead, you could cover, more or less, for that deficiency. Without Price, you mostly just spend the entire movie missing Vincent Price. It's a shame, too, because despite Robards throwing his little fit, the rest of the cast is pretty good. Celi is as he always is, only this time with one of those fake upturned Poroit mustaches the French so adored at the time. Michael Dunn is wonderful and mysterious as Pierre. He's actually more interesting than any of the principal characters, and one wonders more about his never-told back-story than the story that becomes central to the plot's resolution. The French period costumes are good, and the carnival-theater setting is sometimes interesting, but never as sinister or effective as is should be. Despite some promise and some quality moments scattered throughout more mundane events, Murders in the Rue Morgue is really nothing more than a good example of something that might have been. It's not good or bad enough to be striking in any way, and so remains a minor effort in AIP's Poe canon, and if it is remembered at all, it will be as "the one that would have been good if Vincent Price had starred in it." Labels: Director: Gordon Hessler, Horror: Poe, Netflix Diary, Studio: AIP, Year: 1971 posted by Keith at 11:38 PM | 0 Comments The Oblong Box
1969, United States. Starring Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Alister Williamson, Peter Arne, Hilary Dwyer, Rupert Davies, Uta Levka, Sally Geeson, Maxwell Shaw, Carl Rigg, Harry Baird. Directed by Gordon Hessler. Available on DVD from Amazon
Hessler and Price are together again (for the first time) for a Poe adaptation that actually has a little something to do with Poe, or at least as much as any AIP Poe film has to do with Poe. Poe's short story, "The Oblong Box," has to do with a man who witnesses the obsession of an artist friend on a ship with an oblong shipping crate. So committed is the man, seeming delirious and mad, to this box that when the ship is wrecked during a storm, he sinks to the bottom of the ocean with the box rather than abandon it. Not to spoil the surprise, but it was a coffin containing his dead wife, though no one knew of the contents lest they refuse to travel overseas with a corpse. Hessler's film does indeed contain a coffin that is referred to as an oblong box. And there is an artist, though he himself has no coffin. Beyond that, and this film has as much to do with Poe as does the average movie in which someone inherits a wily, diaper-wearing ape that solves a crime. Vincent Price stars as Sir Julian Markham, a wealthy member of the British gentry who we first meet in Africa as his brother, Edward, is strung up and disfigured in a voodoo ritual for some horrible transgression he has committed against the native peoples. Upon their return home, Edward's sanity deteriorates and Julian must keep his mad, hideous brother locked in an upstairs room while Julian himself attempts to lead a normal life with his bride-to-be, Elizabeth (Hilary Dwyer, once again). Edward, though losing his mind, is scheming with the family lawyer, Trench, to fake his own death using more voodoo so that he can be free of the confines in which his brother has placed him. Nothing goes as planned, however, and rather than being freed, Edward ends up buried alive and abandoned by Trench. Luckily for Edward, his grave is robbed by body snatchers working for the local surgeon, Dr. Neuharrt (none other than Christopher Lee), who is always in need of fresh cadavers for his experiments. Edward vows revenge on those who left him to die in the grave, just as he vows to find a black magic cure for his affliction and the truth behind why he was disfigured in the first place.
Hessler, working with a script from frequent AIP writers Lawrence Huntington and Christopher Wicking, has crafted a complex tale with multiple plot points that must be woven together. It's ambitious for a horror film and for AIP to launch into such a labyrinthine narrative, doubly so when it is injected with all the civil rights politics that surround the movie's African prologue. The Markhams are plantation owners in Africa, keeping a host of slaves. Upon his return from the so-called Dark Continent, Julian seems to have had some sort of social and racial awakening and comments on the evils committed by the white man in Africa. Horror and science fiction films have often been at the forefront of tackling tough social and political issues in the guise of a tale about some monster or invading aliens. Throughout the 1950s, much of the rhetoric was decidedly one-sided and conservative, motivated as it was by the Cold War and Red Scare. The Oblong Box is a product of its time, the late 1960s, and reflects a more liberal and open-minded view of race and the need to own up to the atrocities committed during the colonial era - which, remember, had really only ended twenty or twenty-five years earlier - and then only to pass from colonialism by a nation-state to a sort of pseudo-colonialism perpetrated by large businesses. The Oblong Box' more progressive politics are similar, then to the same director's more liberal take on good versus evil, Christianity versus Paganism in Cry of the Banshee. Of course, it's still an AIP gothic horror film, so whatever politics may be on offer are wrapped in a tale about a disfigured madman coving his face with a crimson mask as he slits the throats of those who wronged him. And now that you mention it, why yes there is a scene of drunken, bawdy revelry in a lower class inn where people wave beer mugs about and buxom wenches dance on the tables and have their bosoms revealed. After all, AIP knows what people want, and people want buxom wenches dancing on tables. AIP's gothic "Poe" films are often compared to Hammer Studio's gothic films, which obvious influence heavily the look of AIP's films. Those comparisons were bound to get more common in the late 60s, early 1970s when the two studios teamed up for the first time in what would seem to be an obvious good match. The result was Hammer's superior vampire film, The Vampire Lovers, the first in the Karnstein vampire trilogy (which continued with the vastly inferior Lust for a Vampire and wonderful Twins of Evil) and the first Hammer film to feature nudity. Apparently someone at AIP told the reserved Brits that hey, it's the 1970s and it's okay to show some boobs. AIP, for their part, found themselves with the services of Hammer legend Christopher Lee, and it doesn't take a genius to know that the first thing they should do with the man is team him up with Vincent Price. Unfortunately, AIP seemed lost as to exactly how to use Lee, and so this screen pairing of two of the great icons of horror is more an exercise is wasted opportunity than it is the celebration and masterpiece it should be. Lee's doctor possesses very little character. We know he pays to have corpses delivered to him so he can expand his craft, but considering the fact that just about every doctor in a gothic horror movie does the same, that's hardly a defining characteristic. All in all, he's very dull despite Lee bringing his usual air of authoritative dignity to the role. What's worse, however, is that he and Price have only a single scene together, at the very end of the film, and it lasts for but a few brief seconds. Really, now! Why put Lee and Price together in a film then not put them together in the film? Lee is wasted in a throw-away role, and the film fails utterly to capitalize on this historic meeting of horror superstars. Or lack of meeting, I suppose I should say.
The film's other major mistake is ever bothering to show Sir Edward's horrible disfigurement. I mean, I know they have to do the big reveal in the final showdown between he and Julian, but the result is decidedly less than it should be. When you build a character up throughout the entire film as being the very picture of nightmarish terror, you have to come up with something better than some oatmeal on the cheek and a silly piggy nose. He looks like the doctor in that episode of The Twilight Zone where the beautiful woman thinks she is ugly because she doesn't have a wretched piggy face. Up until this point, the crimson mask has been effective and even a bit eerie. It winds up being much more frightening than the face beneath it despite attempts at the contrary. I guess it's the old Lovecraft conundrum, meaning that any adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft tale is doomed to failure because his stories revolve around beings so absolutely horrifying that simply looking at them will drive the sanest man completely mad. There's no way to adequately realize that on screen, and so film adaptations are inevitably letdowns when the monster makes its appearance. Likewise for Edward's monstrous face. The film would have been better off to never show it. Cry of the Banshee was wise enough to never show the werewolf creature in its entirety, because it knew it looked silly. Wrapped in shadows, it was rather effective, however, and The Oblong Box should have kept Edward's face a mystery. The Oblong Box has some other problems, as most of AIP's post-Roger Corman films tended to have. It's a very talky movie, though unlike Cry of the Banshee, the conversation is more interesting if for no other reason than much of it involves Vincent Price. This is one of the more subdued films in the AIP gothic horror canon. The murders are directed with style and are fairly tame by the standards set in other films. There's blood, sure, but not much blood, and the camera lingers only slightly over the carnage. In addition, there are no torture scenes and, excepting one would-be robber-prostitute, the women of the film are mercifully free from the cruelty being perpetrated. Hessler's direction, like much of the film, is reserved. Maybe even a tad uninspired though perfectly competent. His biggest problem, as it would be in many of his AIP horror films, is the pace. The Oblong Box has several good moments. No great ones, but plenty to satisfy. Unfortunately the stretch between those moments seems much longer than it is or should be. There is also a fair amount of padding, more than one would want in a film that runs just over ninety minutes. The bawdy alehouse sequence goes on for too long, and conversations seem to drag on for a few minutes more than they need to. There are very few surprises in the film, so watching the lead-up get drawn out "in anticipation" is irritating at times. That said, the twist ending and revelation, though also not exactly a surprise by the time you get to it, is still effective. Though it has nothing to do with Poe, Poe probably would have approved. Both Price and Lee give good performances, but both of them also seem to betray a certain lack of enthusiasm. Price, in particular, is uncharacteristically subdued, playing as he is the more or less "straight" man. But it's not his fault. His character, like Lee's is given very little of interest to do. His job consists mostly of syrupy "let's begin our lives anew" scenes with his wife-to-be or moderately aghast, "but surely that can't be!" scenes that are never as urgent as they should be. Hessler simply can't sustain the film through the doldrums, where as a director like Hammer's Terence Fisher could make down-time in his films every bit as interesting as the parts where Peter Cushing was driving a stake through someone's heart. There is no real tension in the film.
With Lee is a tiny role and Price confined to looking forlorn in his country estate, the bulk of the film's action falls onto the shoulders of Alistair Williamson as Sir Edward. And since he spends most of the movie with a bag over his head, it's difficult to connect with him. The best scene involves his being taken awkwardly by two friendly drunks to the local brothel for the aforementioned rowdy alehouse scene that every AIP film had to have. It's a moment of humor in an otherwise humorless film. I didn't realize that so many beautiful women would be so willing to bed a guy walking around with a red sack over his face. Maybe it's worth trying sometime. Williamson, like Lee, appeared in a number of Hammer productions including The Evil of Frankenstein, Curse of the Werewolf, and The Gorgon. He also went on to a smaller role alongside Vincent Price in The Abominable Dr. Phibes. His character in The Oblong Box, like the movie itself, is too reserved to be fully effective. He manages to be a charmer even with a hood covering his wicked voodoo face, but his fits of homicidal rage are not effectively actualized. He ends up being rather dull for a hooded maniac suffering a voodoo curse. As you know by now, I have a soft spot for gothic horror films from this era of filmmaking, as well as for anything with Vincent Price. The Oblong Box is certainly not the zenith of his collaboration with AIP for the Poe cycle. That came in movies like Masque of the Red Death, Haunted Palace, and The Conqueror Worm (aka The Witchfinder General). Compared to those, The Oblong Box and Price's other outings with Hessler definitely fall well into the range of "lesser" works. That said, The Oblong Box is not without its charm. Price's character is complex even though he's more reserved that usual, and the revelation about what happened to him and his brother in Africa is a nice twist that makes the film's criticism of colonialism and racism something more intelligent than a simple black and white (if you'll excuse me) morality call. For most of the film, Julian is a likable character, though his willingness to snatch a body in order to hide the fact at a funeral that his brother was turned into a creature hints at a darker tendency that is further exposed in the film's excellent (minus the pigface make-up for Edward) finale. The supporting cast buoyed by Peter Arne (Khartoum, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Straw Dogs) as Trench is solid, and the music is effective. Set design and art direction is also typically good. AIP may not have been quite as good at this stuff as Hammer, but they were no slouches, and everything looks authentic and gorgeous. These positive elements conspire with my innate love of these kinds of movies to push The Oblong Box just into the lower end of my "like it" column. Seasoned fans and completists like myself will roll with the film's slower portions and appreciate the positive aspects. It's certainly not the first AIP gothic horror film I'd recommend, nor the first Vincent Price film. It's not a film about which one should get especially excited, but I certainly didn't mind spending some time with it. Labels: Director: Gordon Hessler, Horror: Poe, Netflix Diary, Stars: Vincent Price, Studio: AIP, Year: 1969 posted by Keith at 11:34 PM | 0 Comments Cry of the Banshees
1970, United States. Starring Vincent Price, Hilary Dwyer, Carl Rigg, Patrick Mower, Essy Persson, Marshall Jones, Elisabeth Bergner, Stephen Chase, Sally Geeson, Hugh Griffith. Directed by Gordon Hessler. Available on DVD from Amazon
I'm guessing child protection agencies today would cringe at the thought of a wee sprout staying up until two or three in the morning just so he can thrill as Boris Karloff lurks in some shadows or Vincent Price bugs out his eyes at some fantastic and horrible sight. But for you Teleport City readers, such behavior should be par for the course, and I figure its healthier than watching Nelly swipe a credit card through some stripper's ass cheeks. The first AIP horror films I remember seeing were Cry of the Banshee and The Terror. I would see Cry of the Banshee pop up once every couple of years, and then when I got cable television, The Terror seemed to pop up every other night. Cry of the Banshee, as I recounted back in my review of Plague of the Zombies, I first saw on a wildly enjoyable night that also boasted broadcast of the Hammer version of The Hound of the Baskervilles and Darby O'Gill and the Little People, from back when children's movies used to be fun and imaginative and sometimes even dark, scary, and not filled with sassy pre-teens driving go-carts and having sleepovers. Ironically - at least, I think it's ironic -- Darby O'Gill and the Little People not only featured the leprechauns you would expect, but also featured a banshee, and a fairly chilling apparition it was to my young eyes. Cry of the Banshee, however, did not feature a banshee, or even a regular ghost who simply fond of howling. It did feature some crying, but with a title like Cry of the Banshee one expects a banshee. That didn't stop me from loving the movie, however, and as the years passed I mistakenly thought that the banshee I was remembering was from Cry of the Banshee. I mean, that makes sense, right? After all, I was young and it was already pretty late. I also remembered a weird glowing dog that I assume was something out of The Hound of the Baskervilles, though now that I think about it, it probably wasn't. I guess I'll find out soon enough, since The Hound of the Baskervilles is coming up soon.
But anyway, a few weeks ago I was watching Darby O'Gill and the Little People on TV and well, what do you know? There was that banshee! I figured it was abut time, then, that I sat down and refreshed my memory as to the actual contents of Cry of the Banshee despite the fact that I'm always a bit hesitant to revisit childhood favorites - not because I'm afraid I'll realize how awful they are, but because I still won't realize how awful they are and will thus go right on praising the merits of a film like Cry of the Banshee even when the whole of the free world has pronounced it rather on the shabby side. But Cry of the Banshee doesn't just have nostalgia on its side. It also has Vincent Price, and a film has to phenomenally bad before Vincent Price can't make it watchable. He's one of my five favorite actors of all time, sitting on his thrown alongside the likes of Cary Grant, Peter Cushing, Robert Mitchum, and Michael Caine. In the case of Cry of the Banshee, he's sitting on his thrown while also wearing huge poofy Henry VIII robes. Price more than any other actor understood exactly how far over the top he had to go for every film he was in. Movies like Laura proved he was an accomplished and well-trained dramatic actor who, had he been given the chance, could have become known as such. But it was horror for Price, and horror is all the better for his participation. He knew when a film was could and thus could be played straight, but more importantly, he knew when a film was bad and required that he chew some scenery. The worse the film, the more Price would escalate his character, though he never crossed over into the realm of intentional wink-at-the-camera irony unless it was specifically called for. What made him so good was that even at the height of his hamminess he always made you believe the character. As we've discussed in relation to Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and all the actors at Hammer, Price goes about portraying each character with gusto and total conviction. He was also one of the most well-respected intellectuals that acting ever saw, which puts him in the company of Christopher Lee, among others. Believe it or not, there was a time when you could go through movies and still find some gentlemen who cherished intelligence, culture, and wit. Price was reportedly a startlingly well-informed man of the world who could discuss with authority any number of topics from art history to the arcane. It'd be nice if there were more stars around today like him, but I reckon the fact that there aren't makes men like Price and Lee all the more impressive. The fact that they were in movies like Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs and Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf respectively, didn't keep them from being men of dignity, refinement, and sophistication. So remember, when you get up in the morning, to try and live your life a little more like Vincent Price and Christopher Lee. Another similarity between Price and Lee is that both men were so, so damn good at being evil on screen, and in particular and playing evil figures of authority. Price was the defining figure in just about all of AIP's Poe films, and he spent much of the time relishing his role as a thoroughly horrible figure of menace who, despite how horrendous he is, you can't help but kind of like since Price injects each character with his own undeniable charisma and glee for the macabre. His most famously rotten villain is perhaps that of the witchfinder general in AIP's wonderful Conqueror Worm, a film that is criminally MIA on DVD at the moment. Following not too far behind is the vile Lord Edward Whitman in Cry of the Banshee, a character so totally devoid of even the faintest trace of likeability that he inhabits a film constructed entirely around the anticipation of seeing this right bastard get his comeuppance. Whitman and his aristocratic family lord over a small Scottish town with an iron fist. Whitman is particularly fond of tracking down Scotland's few remaining pagans and either forcing them to convert to Christianity or simply torturing them to death. It doesn't really matter which, as long as he gets to burn someone alive. As is par for the course, many innocents suffer at the hands of Whitman and his thuggish bunch, but when they cross an actual group of witches with actual dark and mysterious powers, the Whitmans find themselves suddenly under a curse that sees the family members dying off one by one in the most spectacularly gory of fashions, generally at the hands, or paws, or claws of a hideous werewolfy sort of thing played in human form by Patrick Mower, who we last saw on Teleport City in The Devil Rides Out. The guy just can't seem to keep himself from getting involved with witches, can he? He worms his way into the Whitman family by romancing young Maureen Whitman, played by AIP regular Hilary Dwyer (aka Hilary Heath), who also starred alongside Price in The Conqueror Worm and The Oblong Box. She plays the closest thing this film has to a sympathetic character in the Whitman family, though her willingness to turn a blind eye other father's brutality flaws her character, just as her more enlightened and educated brother, Harry (Carl Rigg, also in AIP's The Oblong Box), seems at first to be a sympathetic character, right up until he starts slitting witch throats in defense of his father's reign of terror. You may be asking yourself one of two questions. First, what does this have to do with banshees? Second, what does this have to do with Edgar Allen Poe? The answer to both is that it has about as much to do with banshees as it has to do with Poe, which is very little, if anything at all. The "Poe films" was the blanket term applied to all of AIP's period horror films, even though quite a few of them had nothing to do with the works of Poe. For that matter, the ones that did often did little more than borrow the title and maybe throw up a convenient quote from Poe. Sometimes it would even be from the same work as that used for the title of the film! But the plots rarely bore any resemblance to the source material. I'm not unfamiliar with the works of Poe, as any self-respecting fan of horror and chills should have read at least a portion of the man's work, but I'm no student of Poe. I don't think he ever wrote anything called "Cry of the Banshee," at least not that I could find.
So a Poe film that isn't a Poe film is par for the course when it comes to AIP gothic horrors. It was just easier to relate all the movies to Edgar Allen Poe and be done with it, sort of like making all Italian sword and sandal films about Hercules. But what about the whole lack of banshee thing? That just doesn't seem proper for a film whose title primes you for some serious banshee action, or as much action as a banshee can afford. I reckon for my non-Scottish brethren who are also unacquainted with the various types of spooks and spirits we have haunting the moors in our homeland, I should tell you what a banshee is. It's a ghost, a female ghost, who appears and howls out the name of some unlucky soul, signifying that within 24 hours of hearing the banshee's howl, that person will meet their demise. If banshees do much more than that and scare Darby O'Gill, then I missed that part of Scottish supernatural heritage class. But it doesn't matter so much for this movie, in which there are no banshees. One scene pays lip service to banshees when a howl of the damn arises from outside. Someone says, "Hmm, must be a banshee. That sucks." Maybe that isn't the exact quote, but it's close. Anyway, anyone who has ever been locked in mortal or immortal combat with the forces of the supernatural will recognize that the howl isn't from a banshee' it's a werewolf's howl, an identification seemingly confirmed by the fact that a killer wolf creature shows up to dispense witch's justice. The reason Cry of the Banshee is called Cry of the Banshee even though it doesn't have any banshees in it is because AIP was in the practice of coming up with a title, selling the film based on the title, then drumming up a script to go with the title after the fact. According to director Gordon Hessler, who shot many of AIP's most sadistic gothic horror films, the original script for Cry of the Banshee was awful, so he and an associate set about doing rewrites. By the time they were finished, it was an entirely different picture, and AIP was upset since there was no banshee in the film. Some more rewrites were done to work in a mention of the banshee, and that was that. How bad the original script was and what sort of banshee quotient it contained remains a mystery. But frankly, given his track record and the evidence of his rewriting, Gordon Hessler was hardly the guy to be criticizing scripts. I like a lot a Hessler films (The Oblong Box, Scream and Scream Again, Murders in the Rue Morgue, and even his foray into ninja cinema, Pray for Death), even love a few of them (Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park). But it's not like he was making high art. The script for Cry of the Banshee as it is filmed isn't exactly a stunner. As with lots of AIP films, there is a lot of talking. Some of it interesting, some of it less so. An uneven pace hampers the film, made worse by the fact that you either hate or don't care about any of the characters, meaning the only thing you have to look forward to is their inevitable death at the hands of Itchy the Werewolf Thing. Cry of the Banshee does manage to contain everything you need to have a successful "burn the witches!" movie. You have the dirty peasants. The rack. The hangings. The random accusations of witchcraft. And as was de rigueur for all AIP gothics, the random "bawdy ale house" scene where patrons shout a lot and spill their ale as busty wenches dance on the tables and have their blouses ripped open for the requisite gratuitous boob shot. What sets Cry of the Banshee apart from other similar period witchcraft movies is that, first, it ends up containing actual witches instead of just a bunch of hot but innocent women accused of being witches, and second, the witches are the nominal good guys. Oona the head witch, played by Elizabeth Bergner (who worked mainly in German and Austrian productions) looking kind of like Debbie Harry does now but with wilder "crazy witch woman" hair, wants nothing but to be left alone so her and her coven can frolic semi-nude in the woods like a bunch of rejects from some community theater production of Hair. As far as pagan rites go, theirs are pretty lame and consist mostly of sinewy extras thrashing about and doing "jazz hands!" The whole thing reminds me that I want to start a "take back paganism" movement meant to reclaim the Old Religion from the bunch of crystal-wearing hippies and new age sweetness and light freaks who have turned it into the most gutless and goofy pseudo-religion around. I mean, look at the old pagans. Scottish highlanders. Vikings. You think these cats pranced about all blessed out and talking about Goddess and greeting everyone with a hug and a "Blessed be!" Hell no! They ate each other, for crying out loud! Now I'm not saying that we need to start eating each other, but paganism really does nee dot get back to its pre-hippie roots. Except, umm, except for those cute goth girls who are into it. They can stay. Silly though they may be, Oona and her crew don't bother anyone. In fact, most of the villagers seem nominally Christian at best, forced into paying lip service to the belief but not-so-secretly still sympathetic to their native religion with its camping trips, drunken revelries and nudity. Who wouldn't be? You gonna willingly trade that in for a religion full of dour-faced old men with bulldog jowls barking on about how sinful you are as they whack your knuckles with a ruler and tell you to stop showing so much ankle in your dress? But the Whitmans and their sidekick priest will have no pagans in their territory. They harass Oona and even murder the guy who leaps about as if joyously proclaiming, "Behold! I am a fawn! A spriteful fawn!" Thus, you know, the curse and all.
None of the pagans save Oona have much of a character, so even though we're allowed to identify with the oppressed indigenous religion, we can't really identify with them. Even Oona is pretty one-dimensional, and you can't side with her entirely since she choreographed such lame pagan rites. Luckily, the Whitmans and The Church TM are so vile, so reprehensible, so thoroughly corrupt that Oona doesn't have to do much to be better than they. The casting of the witches and pagans as the good guys, and Christianity as the murderous oppressors seems bolder than it actually was for the time. Looking back from an era in which being negative about any organized religion is once again a taboo, Cry of the Banshee's pro-witch agenda seems daring. But remember that the 1970s were a time in which people were actually willing to make risky political and social statements. The late 1960s had paved the way via a series of films that cast Satanists in a more sympathetic, if not entirely heroic, light, and witch movies in which the church is portrayed as vicious and corrupt were a dime a dozen in the 1970s. Even so, it's nice to see the underdog represented and, for a change, even victorious over the wretched forces of the Inquisition. The other thing Cry of the Banshee has in common with the witch hunt movies that would come before and after it is a sadistic vicious streak a mile wide. Interrogations are extreme and the witches' vengeance doesn't stop to consider that some members of the Whitman family are not as evil as their father. Cry of the Banshee doesn't revel in or sexualize torture to the point of the most infamous title in the witch hunt sub-genre, Mark of the Devil, but the torture is still plenty explicit and manages to work in a couple gratuitous bare breasts. Everything is augmented by the film's nasty demeanor. The acting is uniformly good. Price's character lacks the depth and nasty appeal of his best villains, Matthew Hopkins from Conqueror Worm and Prospero from Mask of the Red Death, but he's suitably evil and Price is always a joy to watch as he scowls, sneers, and makes his bug-eyed "aghast" face. The supporting players are all good as well. Mower as the bestial Roderick shows suitable menace and, in line with the film's nasty streak of cruelty, never shows any remorse over the fact that he transforms into a hideous beast that claws out throats, even though he's mostly murdering the Whitman women before getting down to extracting a vague but undoubtedly deliciously gory vengeance on Lord Edward during the film's eerie finale. There's also a great score by famed exotica composer Les Baxter, who aside from writing tunes about pyramids and Polynesia and various sorts of globe-trotting adventure, was also an accomplished compose of music for films. AIP used him frequently either to score their own films or provide replacement scores for imported and dubbed films like Black Sunday, Baron Blood (both films by Mario Bava), and a pile of sword and sandal epics. Baxter's score sets the mood perfectly, as do the bizarre animated opening credits by none other than Monty Python's resident animator and future director Terry Gilliam. The main problem with Cry of the Banshee is that all of this should be a lot more interesting than it turns out to be. With naked witches, pagan rites, vengeful landlords, corrupt priests, witch burnings, and a ratty werewolf tearing out throats, Cry of the Banshee should be a thrilling, chilling, grotesque affair. It manages a few chills, a fair deal of grotesqueness, but definitely no thrills until perhaps the very final shot. As I said earlier, too much of the film is taken up with unlikable characters saying uninteresting things. If I was coming into this film without a bias toward Price and costumed gothic horror films, it would probably be less enjoyable and a whole lot more boring. But those biases are firmly in place, as well as my own nostalgia over watching the film as a kid, so Cry of the Banshee is still an entertaining film for me. Not Price's best, by far, and not AIP's best gothic horror or even their best witch hunter movie. But good enough and mean enough to satisfy the darker, more malicious parts of my brain. Labels: Director: Gordon Hessler, Horror: Poe, Netflix Diary, Stars: Vincent Price, Studio: AIP, Year: 1970 posted by Keith at 11:26 PM | 0 Comments Tuesday, September 14, 2004The Premature Burial Release Year: 1962Country: United States Starring: Ray Milland, Hazel Court, Richard Ney, Heather Angel, Alan Napier, John Dierkes, Dick Miller. Writer: Charles Beaumont and Ray Russell Director: Roger Corman Cinematographer: Floyd Crosby Music: Ronald Stein and Les Baxter Producer: Roger Corman Availability: Buy it from Amazon  After the runaway success of House of Usher and Pit and the Pendulum, Corman was growing dissatisfied with his AIP contract. He had proven to be a profitable director, and now he was a critically acclaimed director as well. His two films had more or less single-handedly lifted the reputation of AIP out of the realm of the drive-in circuit and established them as a genuine studio that made genuine movies with genuine class. Corman's two Poe films also lifted the flagging reputation of horror, which since its heyday at Universal during the 1930s had sunk lower and lower until it was basically considered schlock, then almost replaced entirely by science-fiction and Communist paranoia films. Hammer's Dracula and Frankenstein movies had gone a long way to revitalizing the horror genre, but Corman's Poe films undoubtedly contributed a great deal to solidifying the resuscitation, at broad but especially in the United States where theater owners were proud to see that yep, we could make 'em just as good here as they could over there. So while Corman was basically getting along with AIP head honchos Sam Arkoff and John Nicholson, he thought that maybe in light of his more or less revolutionizing the way he, the studio, and horror films were regarded in America, he might be entitled to a better contract. AIP politely disagreed with him, and so Corman took himself and his idea for the third Poe film elsewhere. Because Vincent Price was under contract to AIP, he couldn't cast Price in the lead role, and so he set about looking for a new actor to fulfill the spotlight in his production of The Premature Burial. Corman eventually came up with Ray Milland. Milland was blissfully ignorant of the fact that one day in the future AIP was going to graft his head to Rosie Grier, and so he agreed to take on the Poe-perfect role of a man obsessed with the belief that he will be buried alive, as was his cataleptic father. Because Richard Matheson was also under contract to AIP, Corman turned to screenwriters Charles Beaumont (7 Faces of Dr. Lao) and Ray Russell (X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes).
The essence of the films, however, came with Corman. Like the previous two films, The Premature Burial would come steeped in the signature atmosphere of the Poe films: billowing fog tumbling across eerie landscapes, tormented souls, a psychedelically-tinted nightmare sequence, creepy old houses, brooding characters, and as is obvious from the title, a thing or two about being buried alive. The day Corman was to begin principal photography, he was pleased to see Arkoff (or maybe Nicholson, or maybe both of them) show up on the set to wish him good luck despite the differences they'd had over Corman's new contract. Differences, hell! It turned out that AIP had just purchased the studio for which Roger Corman was making the picture, so it was going to be an AIP film after all. Granted it was too late to recast the lead, but Milland was still thought of as an Academy Award winning actor, and not as "the white guy from The Thing with Two Heads," so his casting in the lead was something to crow about, even if the part, like all other leads in the Poe films, was tailor-made for Vincent Price. Milland plays Guy Carrell, an upstanding and intelligent member of the gentry who has a small quirk in the form of a near crippling fear of being buried alive. Now no one wants to be buried alive, except maybe show-off escape artists and people competing for fifty bucks and a burger on the latest reality show, but Guy's fear of being entombed while still among the living goes way beyond the usual healthy fear of having dirt piled on top of you. So obsessed is he with the concept that it threatens to ruin his newly minted marriage to Emily Gault, who is played by Hammer Studios veteran Hazel Court (The Curse of Frankenstein, and she would appear later in two more Corman AIP Poe films, The Raven and The Masque of the Red Death) - and if you know Hazel Court, then you don't want to derail anything involving her in your bedchamber. Guy shuns his wife and friends in favor of building the most elaborate tomb ever devised. I'm not exactly certain what Guy's occupation is, but it must have something to do with being an architectural, engineering, and mechanical genius, because the failsafe tomb he constructs for himself is a marvel. If I set out to build my own premature-burial-proof tomb, it would probably end up looking like a couple of pieces of plywood nailed together with a hole cut in the back so I can crawl out if I should happen to find myself mistaken for a corpse. Buy Guy's tomb is utterly lavish. In fact, it's seems even nicer than his home. It's comes stocked complete with a break-away coffin so that should one wake up and find oneself in such a pine box, one need only tap the side to have the whole thing spring open or fall to pieces. A variety of levers sound various alarms to let everyone know he's been mistakenly buried, just in case the half dozen or so escape hatches don't open. And should that happen and he has to wait for someone to her the bells, he can while away the hours reclining in plush overstuffed chairs, drinking brandy, and flipping through the tomb's selection of reading material. And should these ten thousand redundant escape plans all fail, he's also stocked the tomb with poison, so that when he's finished all his sausages and books, he can just kill himself rather than be bored. I've seen fewer failsafe devices on the nation's nuclear arsenal! Not that I've seen the nation's nuclear arsenal, but I can't imagine it's as well thought-out as Guy's crypt.
You'd think that would be the end of it, but various things keep happening to keep Guy preoccupied with being buried alive. Additionally, his wife and the local quack think that if he's ever going to make any progress in combating his phobia, he needs to, among other things, ditch the tomb. You'd think that since the tomb has brought him an unparalleled peace of mind, they'd just let it be. I mean, it is a nice crypt, after all, so why not keep it around? Even if he isn't buried alive, it'll be a swell place to just be buried regular and dead. This being a Corman Poe picture, it's no great leap to figure out that someone is plotting to use Guy's fear of premature burial to drive him mad and thus achieve some small sort of financial or property gain that hardly merits such a lavishly complex and psychologically difficult scheme. Some people would just whack him on the head with a candelabra and blame it on Colonel Mustard, but these people always have to construct intricate "drive them mad" intrigues that are as complicated as Guy's crypt. Like the previous two Poe films, The Premature Burial has a tendency to get bogged down beneath the weight of its own exposition-heavy plot. Unlike the previous two films, however, it doesn't have Vincent Price on hand to liven up the material. Milland gives it the ol' college try, but he seems lost with this type of material. Where as Price would have had no problem taking the script and making it work for him, Milland's portrayal comes across as excessively whiny at times and dreadfully dull at others. Still, at least Milland put effort into the role and manages a few strong scenes, which is more than could be said for the shameful display put on by Jason Robards when, some years later, he too found himself filling in for Vincent Price in a Poe film, that one being Gordon Hessler's Murders in the Rue Morgue. If nothing else, The Premature Burial proves that it wasn't just fan bias toward Vincent Price that kept Milland and the movie from earning a more cherished spot. Price was more than a fan favorite: he was an integral ingredient in making the films successful. Without him, it wasn't just that "things just aren't same." His absence from the Poe films very nearly causes them to cease being Poe films. Exactly why Price is so indispensable to Corman's Poe pictures is a little difficult to explain, but if you see them, well then you just understand. Part of it, naturally, has to do with the fact that Price was a marvel at turning a bad script into a good movie, and while the script for The Premature Burial isn't bad per se, it is perhaps something much worse: dull. Corman pours on the atmosphere - there is more fog here than in the previous two films combined, and believe me those films had a lot of fog in them - but Ray Milland simply doesn't have Price's knack for making you want to listen to him talk even during the slow spells. He never manages to invest the character with any sort of spark, and as such no real sympathy for him or his story ever develops in the viewer. It's a perfectly serviceable performance, and Milland has nothing to be ashamed of (unlike you, Jason Robards!), but, well -- just watch the end, when Guy emerges from his inevitable getting buried alive scene and has thus gone completely bonkers and launches into a gleefully mad bout of revenge. Milland is OK, but you just can't help thinking how great the whole scene would have been if Price was given a chance to do it. The rest of the cast performs with the usual competency one has come to expect by this point from both AIP and Hammer films, though some of the characters seem to be involved in subplots that never really go anywhere or get fully explained (why was Guy out there helping steal a corpse in the beginning of the film anyway?). Besides Hazel Court, who gets more of a chance to act here than she did in Curse of Frankenstein (and has one of the best scenes in the movie, during which she explains to Guy that he's already dead, and his obsession with being buried alive has, in a way, already buried him alive), familiar faces like Alan Napier (Alfred the butler from the old Batman television series) and Dick Miller (The Terror, Truck Turner, Gremlins, and about ten million other movies) are on hand to round out the cast with their solid character acting. Unfortunately, the script tends to let the performers down, and almost all the characters are either undeveloped, underdeveloped, or just plain unlikable. Without Price around to liven things up, the weakness screams at you like one of those screaming skulls. You know the ones. The ones that scream. I don't know enough to know how closely the movie clings to the original 1844 story, but by all accounts, it sticks to the source material pretty tightly. Poe himself was possessed of a very similar fear of being buried alive, which is why it figures so frequently into his stories and thus so frequently into the Poe movies. Still, after seeing a buried alive plot in both of the previous films, one can't help but hope for something a little different the third time out. Instead, we get the "total package" buried alive movie, one in which interment of the living isn't just a part of the plot, but the entire plot. And speaking of plots, did I miss the part where they tell us exactly why shadowy characters are attempting to drive poor Guy insane? Plus, you'd think that after the guy has gone on and on about catalepsy for the whole movie, when he actually does lapse into a cataleptic state, they'd do more than just shrug and go, "Well, looks like he's dead. Let's get to burying'"
The lack of freshness combined with some gaping lack of explanations keep The Premature Burial situated firmly around or maybe, if I'm feeling good, slightly above the mediocre mark. Plus, it's just not scary. Even with the gnarled old trees and fog, there are never any chills, and certainly nothing on par with the rampaging sister Usher in House of Usher or any number of scenes in Pit and the Pendulum. As such, Premature Burial remained for a long time the ignored entry into Corman's cycle, more or less skipped over as people hastened to get from Pit and the Pendulum on to Tales of Terror, Masque of the Red Death and The Raven, when everything was back as it should be and Vincent Price was once again stalking across the screen in period costumes. Premature Burial feels like a misfire - not a dreadful misfire, or an entirely unwatchable one, but a misfire never the less. The pieces -- Corman, Poe, Price, Matheson, and musical composer Les Baxter -- clicked so perfectly in the first two films that it becomes obvious something is amiss in The Premature Burial. The film does have its moments -- chief among them Milland's exquisitely enthusiastic tour of his "buried alive-proof tomb" -- but the whole thing never fully gels. It was obvious that there just shouldn't be any tinkering with the formula, so AIP made sure everything was back in place for the fourth film, the anthology Tales of Terror. Labels: Director: Roger Corman, Horror: Poe, Netflix Diary, Studio: AIP, Year: 1962 posted by Keith at 11:30 PM | 0 Comments Friday, September 10, 2004The Pit and the Pendulum
1961, United States.Starring Vincent Price, Barbara Steele, John Kerr, Luana Anders, Antony Carbone, Patrick Westwood, Lynette Bernay, Larry Turner, Mary Menzies, Charles Victor. Directed by Roger Corman. Available on DVD (Amazon).
In 1960, American International Pictures - well-known for being a low-budget film production house possessed of some genuine talent - released The Fall of the House of Usher. It was something entirely new for the company: a color picture, released by itself instead of as part of a black and white double-feature package as was standard operating procedure for AIP. Director Roger Corman, one of the studio's most valuable assets, had pushed for AIP to extend their usual shooting schedule (from ten days to fifteen!) and shoot the film in color. AIP was wary, but Corman had proven his ability to deliver profitable results for the company over and over, so after hearing his pitch, they were willing to give the benefit of the doubt to his risky venture. With Corman as director, Vincent Price as the star, and Egdar Allan Poe as the source material, it seemed like it would be a decent enough success. House of Usher was more than just a hit; it was a smash, and critics and fans alike suddenly had to reassess the way they thought about Roger Corman, Vincent Price, and AIP. It was a grand accomplishment of American horror, full of imagination and wit and ambiance. It's arguably one the best American horror films ever made, and certainly one of the top five or six gothic horrors from the period, ranking alongside the very best from Hammer, Mario Bava, or Antonio Margheriti's own Edgar Allan Poe film, 1964's Castle of Blood. It certainly convinced AIP to invest more time and money (relatively speaking) in Roger Corman and a second entry into the gothic horror film drawing from the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Corman's initial idea for a second film was to do Masque of the Red Death, but the then recent release of Ingmar Berman's Seventh Seal bore several very similar images to what Corman was planning for Masque. Considering the reputation Seventh Seal was building for itself as one of the great films of all time, Corman felt it prudent under the circumstances to shelve the idea for Masque for a while and go on to film one of Poe's most famous short stories, The Pit and the Pendulum. There was just one small problem: the story was really short.
That's why they call them short stories, after all, and no matter how you sliced it up, there wasn't enough material in the original story to account for a feature length film. But never fear! Corman and Matheson decided to employ the approach that would work for this and plenty of other subsequent Poe adaptations (especially those directed by Gordon Hessler after Corman's departure from the world of direction). They wrapped Poe's story up inside a story of their own design, written to the best of their ability to feel like Poe material. In the case of Hessler's later films, as we shall see, this didn't work too terribly well. For Pit and Pendulum, however, Matheson and Corman hit one out of the park, or at least got a triple. If it's not a home run, it's only because it bears a number of similarities to House of Usher, those these similarities are there primarily because they're ever-present in the works of Poe. Price, playing Don Medina, once again stars as the tortured head of a family cocooned within the walls of a crumbling estate that he believes to be the architectural embodiment of evil itself. In the case of Usher, it was because so many of the relatives who lived in the palace were evil. In Pit and the Pendulum, the sole reason for the lurking sense of dread is Don Medina's father, a former Grand Inquisitor who used the palace basement as his torture and interrogation chamber. When young Barnard (Johnathan Kerr) receives a vague letter from Medina informing him that Barnard's sister - Medina's wife - has died, Barnard sets out for Medina's crumbling villa to uncover the details of his sister's untimely passing. Though frustrated initially, he eventually learns that Medina believes his wife was literally terrified to death by something she saw in the house, and presumably, something inside the off-limits torture chamber. Medina is also haunted by the belief that his wife was actually alive when they interred her in her tomb, something the local doctor swears cannot possibly be true. Barnard is slow to buy into Medina's "scared to death" explanation, and with no small amount of due reason. Medina, either out of grief, encroaching madness, or dishonesty is consistently aloof and vague in his explanation of things, and though he eventually lets Barnard see the taboo torture chamber, he absolutely refuses to open a sealed door that leads to what Medina pegs as a device of unspeakable cruelty and evil. And as one might surmise, strange and inexplicable spooky goings-on start plaguing the household, so much so that Medina becomes convinced that his dead wife, angry at having been entombed alive, has returned from the grave to seek unholy revenge.
To satisfy Medina's terror and Barnard's demand for some sane story of his sister's passing, they decide to open the tomb. Things, as you would guess, only get worse from there, driving Medina to the point of insanity, then right over the edge of the cliff. The action culminates in the titular pit as Medina, his mind shattered, begins to believe he is his own Inquisitor father, and that it's high time he got some use out of the old torture implements. It won't be much of a surprise to fans of Corman's Poe films to discover that there is a dastardly conspiracy behind the ghostly occurrences. Despite the obvious similarity to House of Usher -- the evil palace, the wretched ancestors, the premature burial of someone's sister, and Price as a man at the edge of his sanity -- Pit and the Pendulum doesn't feel like a rehash as much as it does feel like a variation on a theme. Indeed, most of the Poe films would involve, in one way or another, the concept of premature burial and the torment of a man by specters from beyond the grave. But Matheson's script manages to make it all feel, if not completely different, then at least looked at from a different angle. Different enough so that the movie still feels fresh. In many ways, in fact, Pit and the Pendulum emerges as an even better film than its predecessor. There is something even more clinging, eerie, and nightmarish about the atmosphere. If Roderick Usher's house was the very picture of decaying elegance, then Don Medina's cliffside palace takes it to the next level. A sense of dread lurks in every corner. The set decoration is, as with House of Usher, extremely detailed and quite gorgeous. Corman departs from the previous film, and from the Hammer films that inspired him, by setting his tale not in the Victorian era, but instead much earlier. During the 1600s, I believe (Hammer's Twins of Evil would later place itself during the same era, though in a much different setting). The costumes, like the sets, are superb. And like the first film, the ultimate success or failure of the movie rests on the shoulders of Vincent Price. They prove most capable shoulders. Where the character of Roderick Usher was quiet, soft-spoke, and sinister, Don Medina doesn't suffer from Usher's peculiar sensitivity to loud noises, and so Price is allowed a little more freedom in his depiction of the main character. Price was an actor who was able to gauge more or less perfectly just how far over the top he has to play a character to make it successful. Medina allows him to push things a little further than the previous film, but his performance is infused with an amazing degree of pathos. Medina lacks any of the sinister tendencies of Roderick Usher, and so our sympathies are completely with him as we watch him struggle first with the fear that he buried his wife alive, and later that she is haunting him as revenge. Price's performance is nothing short of brilliant, and his inevitable breakdown (it is a horror film, after all) is wrenching because he's such a decent guy. Countering Price's noteworthy turn is his co-star, the relatively inexperienced Jonathan Kerr. Kerr's delivery is stiff and at times awkward, and I believe he sets some sort of record for use of the word, "sir" in a single film. I don't know if I'd go quite as far as calling it a bad performance, but compared to the rest of the cast, he's the obvious weak link. And speaking of the rest of the cast, now would be a good time to mention that Pit and the Pendulum marks the America film debut of Italian horror queen Barbara Steele. Steele first came to horror prominence with her career-defining role in Mario Bava's Black Sunday, and she quickly became one of the icons of the horror genre. She appears here, in flashbacks and during the finale, to torment Price's Don Medino with her beyond-the-grave beauty. Truth be told, it's rather a limited role, similar in scope to later horror icon teaming like Price-Lee in Hessler's Poe films, but then any Barbara Steele is good Barbara Steele as far as I'm concerned.
As with House of Usher, the cast is relatively restricted, though Corman does allow himself one or two more extra characters for a grand total of six -- seven if you count the carriage driver from the beginning of the film who has no lines. With such a small cast, each actor counts, even in a relatively small role, and with the aforementioned exception, everyone is up to the task. In addition, they're given gorgeously spooky sets to inhabit, and the script affords some real chills that I found to be much scarier than anything in the previous film. Of particular note is the scene in which they open the tomb of Medina's wife to find her corpse contorted into a hideous shrieking pose. It's quite a striking and terrifying image that relies less on being gross and more on playing to our basic fears, for though we may not obsess about it like Edgar Allan Poe or the characters in these movies, I doubt really that anyone takes too much comfort in the thought of being buried alive. The scene in the tomb capitalizes perfectly on our dread. Whispering voices add to the chills, and when the pit and pendulum torture chamber is finally revealed, it is a marvelous sight the likes of which wouldn't really be topped until some of the wonderfully phantasmagoric scenes in Masque of the Red Death. The revelation of what exactly is going on isn't a complete surprise for us looking back, now that so many films with a similar twist have been made, but it's still decent if not a little underdeveloped in the motivation category. Whether or not Pit and the Pendulum is a better film than House of Usher is a moot question. What is important is that it's not a disappointment. It maintains the lofty standards set by the first film and proved the success - both artistically and financially - was no fluke. That Corman showed he could do it again at the same level and with the same results at the box office and from critics practically guaranteed that he would be making Poe films for AIP for as long as they could get away with it. Labels: Director: Roger Corman, Horror: Poe, Netflix Diary, Stars: Vincent Price, Studio: AIP, Year: 1961 posted by Keith at 11:23 PM | 0 Comments Thursday, September 02, 2004The Fall of the House of Usher Release Year: 1960Country: United States Starring: Vincent Price, Mark Damon, Myrna Fahey, Harry Ellerby. Writer: Richard Matheson Director: Roger Corman Cinematographer: Floyd Crosby Music: Les Baxter Producer: Roger Corman Availability: Buy it from Amazon  So this is the one that started it all, so to speak, so long as you consider "it all" to be the first cycle of films based, sometimes extremely loosely, on the works of Edgar Allen Poe, and directed by low-budget legend Roger Corman. Prior to this film, Corman had made a name for himself slapping together drive-in quickies while Price had become a beloved horror film icon working with William Castle. Film production company AIP had specialized primarily in black-and-white genre pictures, made two at a time with ten-day shooting schedules. Everyone came together for this historic meeting of elements that remains, to this day, one of the best examples of American-made gothic horror films. Corman's Poe films for American International Pictures became to the United States what Hammer films were in England: low budget, wonderfully acted, gorgeously designed horror films dripping with atmosphere and literary tradition. It was Corman's first picture in scope, and one of AIP's first color films to be sold as an individual movie rather than as part of a package. It also had an extended shooting schedule - a whopping fifteen days as opposed to ten. For this initial venturing forth into the murky waters of Poe's imagination, Corman stuck fairly closely to the original story - something they'd not always do. By the time Gordon Hessler inherited the role of house Poe director from Corman, the movies were Poe adaptations in title alone. But here we get a pretty close adherence to the source material as we meet young Philip Winthrop, played by genre film regular Mark Damon (Mario Bava's Black Sabbath), not to be confused with Mark Harmon (Summer School, not directed by Mario Bava), a Boston gentleman who is paying a visit to his most beloved Madeline Usher (Myrna Fahey), who has herself returned from Boston to her ancestral home in Nightmaresville, USA, or some other similar New England locale. Philip's plans to sweep Madeline off her feet and into the welcome arms of marriage are stymied by Madeline's elder brother, played with delicious menace and sympathy by Vincent Price, who also sports a head full of blond hair. But the shocks don't end with the locks.
It seems Price is convinced that his sister is possessed of that ol' Usher madness that has caused so many of the ancestors to go on to lucrative careers as swindlers, murderers, rapists, adulterers, slavers, and any number of other unsavory pursuits. Price's Roderick Usher is himself something of an eccentric. He has hypersensitive eyesight and hearing, can only bear the touch of the softest materials, and plays the lute on a regular basis. He's also committed to eradicating the evil curse of the Usher family by seeing that neither he nor his sister ever get a chance to have children. Roderick considers this the least he can do to atone for the madness and suffering the Ushers have inflicted on the world. Philip thinks the guy is a loony, especially when Roderick begins speaking of how the very house itself has absorbed the madness and become a living creature of pure evil. The conflict, then, arises between Roderick and his desire to quell the Usher name and Philip and his desire to marry Madeline, then go forth and propagate. From time to time, the house itself does seem to exert a certain will, hurling about bits of flaming charcoal and letting drop the occasional big, gaudy chandelier as the stonework of the house cracks and threatens to collapse. When Madeline seems to die of heart failure, Philip discovers that Roderick's determination to keep her cloistered in the house can take on sinister proportions. The Fall of the House of Usher represents so many things to the genre of horror. For starters, it is really the beginning of both Roger Corman and Vincent Price being taken with a greater degree of seriousness than anyone had ever invested in them before. People in the industry knew that Corman could be depended on to do a job and do it competently. In fact, find fault with the man and his body of work where you will, but the fact remains that was Corman was able to do is nothing short of a cinematic miracle. With budgets far smaller than average, and shooting schedules that would make even the sturdiest director weep, Corman managed to make movies. Not great movies, most of the time, but entertaining ones that delivered the goods. I mean, the man could make a film in three days, from writing the script to doing the filming. And while a movie like The Terror may not be a classic, it certainly doesn't feel like a three-day movie. Corman also had a wonderful eye for selecting and fostering new talent, which is why the list of his assistants and actors includes the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, James Cameron, Peter Fonda, Johnathan Demme, and Peter Bogdanovich, among others. Coppola in particular would come into play later in the Poe cycle as a script doctor and dialog director for The Haunted Palace.
So all this was known about Roger Corman. By 1960, however, he was growing weary of the black and white quickies and wanted to do something a little more complex. He must have looked to the east and seen what hammer had done the previous couple of years with Curse of Frankenstein, Horror of Dracula, and The Mummy (all made with very low budgets as well) and thought to himself, heck, if they can do it, why can't I? The further success in Italy of Mario Bava's Black Sunday was all Corman needed to convince him that the time was ripe for the Americans to enter the Gothic horror game, and heck, what better author upon which to base one's stuff than America's own homegrown master of the macabre, Edgar Allen Poe? So he pitched AIP the idea for The House of Usher, and they went along with it. Afforded a whole five more days than usual to shoot the film, plus a chance to work in color and scope, Corman proved that he wasn't just a reliable workman director; when given the chance, he was also a reliable artistic director. It brought newfound respect to AIP in general and Corman in particular, who needed a does of respectability after directing films like The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Journey to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent. Likewise, Vincent Price was recognized as a horror movie stalwart with proven marquee value, but few people had ever really taken him seriously as an actor even as they saluted his ability to make even the worst material enjoyable. In particular, his role in 1944's Laura was proof of the untapped dramatic ability in the man, but for all his power in that role, short-term memory meant that he was primarily known as the hammy millionaire dancing around with his impossibly complex skeleton marionettes in House on Haunted Hill. But Roger Corman believed that there was more to Price, and so cast him as the brooding, tortured, and quite possibly insane Roderick Usher. Price was more than up to the challenge and turns in a spectacular, moving performance as the melancholy heir to the Usher curse. The script by Richard Matheson doesn't allow Roderick to become the easy-to-hate hand-wringing villain of the piece. Though we're appalled at some of the things he does, Price and the script invest in the character an air of intelligence and sensitivity that makes him impossible to hate even when he's going about the business of entombing people while they're still alive. It's obvious that, mad or not, he sincerely believes that the purpose of his life is to end the Usher curse, and Price's agonized performance make him less of a villain than he is a fallen hero. Not to mention that Price looks positively exquisite in the role. He appears initially in a long, fitted red robe that makes him look almost like some sort of deranged Catholic cardinal. It's no real surprise, looking back, that Matheson's script is so clever with the characters. He was fresh from writing for The Twilight Zone and went on to pen three more of Corman's fine Poe adaptations: 1961's Pit and the Pendulum, 1962's Tales of Terror, and the comedic send-up The Raven in 1963. In addition, he wrote the script for another Gothic black comedy with Vincent Price, 1964's Comedy of Terrors, wrote the novel I Am Legend which served as the basis for George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston, and Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price. He'd later go on to provide another AIP-Corman/Hammer link by writing the script for one of Hammer's very best films, 1968's The Devil Rides Out. Hammer also had plans to film their own version of Matheson's I Am Legend, a tantalizing project which, unfortunately, never came to pass.
His script here is, like just about all the Poe films in both this and the later Hessler cycle, heavy on dialog, which means in order to keep moving forward, the film has to be equally heavy on atmosphere and strong performances. In terms of atmosphere, Corman and cinematographer Floyd Crosby hit one out of the park. The opening shot -- the only exterior location in the entire film -- is of Philip riding through a mist-choked dead forest. Roger Corman had heard about the fire in the Hollywood Hills and sent a film crew up there to shoot the scene. The result is an overpowering eeriness, really one of the finest moments of atmosphere in any Gothic horror film as our hero is dwarfed amid this haunting landscape of skeletal trees, mist, and barren, lifeless earth with the menacing gray-black hulk of the house looming above it all. It sets the tone perfectly for the film, and Corman maintains this hypnotic sense of decay and something just beyond the shadows. The film becomes such a mood piece, such a visual banquet, that one scarcely notices that there's precious little action and a lot of talking. When the scares do come, they're usually quick and melodramatic. A startling entrance, a sudden death, the collapsing of a railing. The film draws its frightfulness not so much from the shock as it does from the overarching sense of dread that permeates every corner of the house. Whether there is some evil force lurking within its walls, or whether that evil force is simply Roderick's madness, is inconsequential. Corman makes sure you can feel that something is out there. That isn't to say, however, that the film is not without its shocks. Madeline's entombment is particularly harrowing, as is the finale in which she and her brother struggle to come to grips with the madness that engulfs them as the entire house catches fire and rumbles thunderously to the boggy ground. The score by AIP's resident composer and exotica pioneer, Les Baxter, further enhances the mood with its creepy blend of orchestral bombast, haunting soft spots, and occasional use of "the tortured howls of the damned." Corman's philosophy for the Poe films was that they shouldn't necessarily reflect the familiar or the real world, that Poe was a psychological writer and so any films based on his work would have to inhabit a different world from the one we see everyday. Thus the limited number of exteriors and locations. Apart from the initial scene, the entirety of The House of Usher takes place within the house. The scope photography creates an odd sensation of wide-open claustrophobia, if that makes any sense at all. In the commentary for the DVD, Corman states that he didn't really think it was worth shooting in scope for a film set almost entirely indoors. What was the point? Well, it works out for the best. The house, which the script turns into a character, becomes this sprawling beast, immense and overshadowing and threatening to swallow up the human characters lost in its decaying opulence. Crosby's cinematography meshes perfectly with the production design by Daniel Haller, which follows in Hammer's footsteps by draping every inch of the set with gorgeous, vibrant props. His greatest achievement is that nothing looks like a prop. It all has an aged, lived-in appearance, which not only makes things more believable but also works in thematically with the notion that this is a house and a family whose existence, sanity, and very foundations are crumbling. Exactly what is going on in the house is never fully realized. We're certainly led to think that Roderick might be right, that there is some malevolent supernatural force at work. But we're just as likely to believe that he's simply insane. Kindly at times, intelligent, and caring, but thoroughly mad to the point of committing unspeakable atrocities against himself and his sister to keep the Usher name from venturing forth to commit even greater atrocities against mankind. While Corman's Poe films are, production-wise, on par with Hammer's, the one thing that makes them different is that Hammer had a policy that stated no matter what sort of devilry took place in the film, good had to obviously triumph over evil by the end credits. The Poe films were never so forgiving to the forces of good, and often the "winner" is unclear, if indeed there is any winner at all. Subverting expectations was the fact that evil - or madness - was just as likely to conquer all as was good - perhaps even more so. With the mood of the film firmly established, the rest of the weight of such a dialog-heavy film falls on the cast. It's a small cast, which undoubtedly allowed Corman to move fast and cheap while maintaining a high standard. Aside from a dream sequence in which some infamous Usher ancestors menace Philip, there are only four humans in the film: Philip, Roderick, Madeline, and the butler Bristol (Harry Ellerbe). Myrna Fahey's Madeline spends much of her time doing what the women in these films so often do, which is hugging the hero and collapsing on the bed. Her big scene doesn't come until the very end when the Usher madness begins to run rampant through the house. She's quite terrifying. Most of the film's lines come from Price and Damon, and since Damon is the hero of the film, that means he is essentially more boring than Price and confined to the "Good God, man! You can't be serious!" and "Good God, man! Are you mad?" before he finally gets to stagger around a burning set in the end. He's as serviceable a hero as any Gothic horror film hero who isn't played by Peter Cushing. Damon just can't stack up next to Price, but that's not really a fair comparison since Price is really turning in one of the most elegant, emotional and non-hammy performances in his career. As said, the only supporting hero who could have ever hoped to match him would have been Cushing and, well, even with his impressive skills he would have been a little old to pull off the role of a romantic twenty-something.
Our remaining supporting character is Bristol the butler, a man who seems much saner than Roderick but also seems to believe the same things as his more flamboyantly mad employer. Bristol's character, like all the Ushers, is cloaked in mystery. He's only partially explored, and his more tempered belief in the Usher curse and in the sentient evil of the house helps us understand and have more compassion for Roderick. All of the characters deliver Matheson's eloquent, perhaps overwrought at times, Victorian prose, and everyone takes yet another page from the book of Hammer by checking any sense of tongue-in-cheek camp at the door. Price, in particular, has some "creature of unspeakable horror" type of gloom and doom dialog that might have undone the whole film if it had been delivered with any hint of irony or anything but the greatest sense of sincerity and gravity. No matter how outrageous the claims may be, no matter how melodramatic the language, you never once fail to believe it. Price makes you believe it. It's easy to see how, if indeed the supernatural force is just a figment of his twisted imagination, he could have convinced his sister and butler to believe in it as fervently as he does. House of Usher was a deserved hit, and critics and fans alike suddenly had to reassess the way they thought about Roger Corman, Vincent Price, and AIP. It is a grand accomplishment of American horror, full of imagination and wit and ambiance. It's arguably one the best horror films ever made, and certainly one of the top five or six Gothic horrors from the period, ranking alongside the very best from Hammer, Mario Bava, or Antonio Margheriti's own Edgar Allen Poe film, 1964's Castle of Blood. It certainly convinced AIP to invest more time and money (relatively speaking) in Roger Corman, resulting in several more Gothic horror films drawing from the stories of Edgar Allen Poe. All of Corman's Poe films are good, and a few are, quite frankly, absolutely brilliant. Masque of the Red Death and Haunted Palace run neck and neck with House of Usher, and together the three represent the paramount of American Gothic horror, not to mention showing how elegant and sumptuous a film can look even with a meager budget and blink-of-an-eye shooting schedule. The Pit and the Pendulum and The Tomb of Ligeia don't trail too far behind, for that matter. For anyone who appreciates the history of horror, House of Usher is a treat. It creaks and creeps with menace and is crawling with intellectual angst and doom. It is a poetic, delicately crafted masterpiece of the macabre that fuels itself with atmosphere and an inspired performance from Vincent Price. Reality fades away completely as the movie pulls you in the way the plot pulls the characters into the downward spiral of insanity. In an age of disposable films, especially horror films, that have nothing to over beyond an action-packed visceral punch that abandons you as soon as the credits roll, House of Usher is something to treasure: a literate, patient, poetic horror film that will stay with you long after you've finished watching it. Labels: Director: Roger Corman, Horror: Poe, Stars: Vincent Price, Studio: AIP, Year: 1960 posted by Keith at 12:45 PM | 0 Comments |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
