October | 2015 | drfreex.com

F: Frankenstein 1970 (1958)

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So I’m what you would call a Boris Karloff fan. One day I’m going to run out of Karloff movies to watch, and that is going to be a sad day. General availability is going to render that sadness difficult to achieve, perhaps. I can’t think of any circumstances bizarre enough that I’ll get to see him play an Indian in Tap Roots, but hey, I’ve been wrong before.

Frankenstein 1970 starts out strong, with a clawed monster chasing a peasant girl through dark, fog-shrouded woods. This is damned effective movie-making. So effective that you start thinking, wait, this is just the opening, something is up, and sure enough, somebody yells “Cut!” revealing it all to be part of a movie being shot.

You will remember one of the things that will turn me against a movie is an attempt to treat me like an idiot. The movie crew is distressingly tiny – five people, and two locals – and this stick-bound tripod just shot a scene covering several hundred feet, with cuts. It’s a blatant cheat, and I’m not going to be in the movie’s corner for the next 80 minutes.

This less-than-skeleton crew is making a movie about… well possibly Frankenstein, who knows, because the director (Don “Red” Barry) keeps changing that (hell at one point he’s even decided it’s going to be a television show – who’s funding this idiot?). He rented out the actual Castle Frankenstein for his set, because the current Frankenstein (Karloff, yay!) is impoverished and needs the money to buy an atomic reactor. This is why its Frankenstein 1970, not Frankenstein 1960, as was originally planned. Obviously, it was unrealistic to expect people could buy their own atomic reactors until then.

Frankenstein has a reason to put up with those odious showbiz types, the same reason he needs the atomic generator: he’s building a monster, and this time, he’s going to get it right. After his manservant gets too nosey and finds the underground laboratory, Frankenstein uses the poor man’s brain and then proceeds to work his way through the movie people for more spare parts as needed. The Monster is fairly cost-effective, too, basically a mummy with an oversized head.

As ever, Karloff is worth watching; his Frankenstein bears the scars of Nazi torture, because he would not use his skills for their cause (considering the absurd changes the Breen Office enforced on the script, a time-lost copy of Frankenstein’s Army would have resulted in a lot of soiled trousers in that Office). Karloff gives the role his all, even injecting some creepiness toward the women in the crew. It’s more dimensional than the picture deserves, really.

The movie crew is solid enough, but annoying. It’s like there are two different movies going on, using the same set, but one is a tragic horror story and the other is an unfunny comedy. I kind of wish everybody had been working on the tragic horror story.

There are two reasons this movie got made: one was the Shock Theater package that re-introduced the Universal horror movies to television audiences, and the other was the success of the Hammer Curse of Frankenstein. This is a handsome movie, at the very least; it uses a Warner Brothers set built for an Errol Flynn movie, and it’s shot in CinemaScope, for God’s sake, using the same cinematographer as that Flynn flick, Carl E. Guthrie (clever of producer Aubrey Schenck – Guthrie already knew how to best light the set). I honestly do appreciate that the Warner prop crew put the Maltese Falcon in Frankenstein’s library.

Frankenstein 1970 doesn’t fall into the “for Karloff completists only”, but there isn’t a whole lot here to reward the casual viewer, either.

That opening is still killer, though.

October 11, 2015
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: boris karloff, frankenstein 1970, hubrisween . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

E: eXistenZ (1999)

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eXistenZ was David Cronenberg’s first completely original script since 1983’s Videodrome, my personal favorite of his many movies. It’s a bit disheartening that the two movies share themes, but then, Cronenberg hasn’t exactly hidden his obsessions over the years, and it only makes sense that he returns to those themes employing a different medium, a different Macguffin. In Videodrome, it was TV; in eXistenZ, it’s video games.

Jennifer Jason Leigh is Allegra Gellar, a rock star among game designers. eXistenZ is her new game, and the movie begins with a focus group gathered in what appears to be a rundown church. The people are there to play-test eXistenZ, and here is where we get the first of the Cronenbergian buzzconcepts, as each participant is assigned a “gamepod” made of “meta-flesh” which they will plug in to their “bio-ports”.

Sorry, I really am taken by that bizarre gun.

Plunging the viewer into the story in media res and filling in the details of this world is a trick Cronenberg knows well, and as 12 random volunteers plug themselves in to their borrowed gamepods and are networked to Allegra’s pod with cables that look suspiciously like umbilical cords, a latecomer arrives with an older gamepod. He takes a seat in a pew, takes out the older, larger gamepod, and from it pulls a bizarre looking gun, which he uses to shoot Allegra. A security guard shoots and kills this would-be assassin, and the wounded Allegra is entrusted to the care of a PR intern (Jude Law). They escape in the panic and go into hiding until they can figure out who wants to kill Allegra and why.

Besides the gamepods, which are flesh-colored and seem to pulse and breathe while they are being operated, the assassin’s gun is the only clue you need that this is a Cronenberg movie: to get past the metal detector at the door, the gun is made of bone and meat and fires human teeth instead of bullets. That is the Cronenbergiest thing ever.

To continue coining new words, things get Cronenbergier when Allegra discovers that her new guardian, Ted Pikul, doesn’t have a bio-port, and we learn these sockets that run directly into the spinal column are installed routinely in shopping malls. “It’s like getting your ears pierced,” says Allegra.

Her gamepod was injured in the attempted assassination, and apparently has the only copy of eXistenZ, which has so far cost $38 million to develop. She has to access the game to make sure it has survived, and for that she needs a partner, and they seek out a black market bio-port supplier for Pikul. That this supplier is played by Willem Dafoe should raise red flags.

Once Allegra and Pikul do access eXistenZ is when we start traveling through Cronenberg mindfuck territory. Pikul turns out to be really good at this new virtual reality experience, though his perception of what is real and what is game begins to get very soft. Allegra is surprised at developments in her own game, which seem to be the work of the people trying to kill her, the Reality Underground.

I admit I approached this with some misgivings; near future science fiction has a tendency to get very embarrassing very fast (Johnny Mnemonic‘s cyberspace sequences were embarrassing out of the box). Cronenberg sidesteps the whole thing pretty neatly with his body horror version of the future; hell, even Jude Law’s cell phone is some sort of glowing lump. So the most jarring thing about this future is that Leigh, Law, and Christopher Eccleston are so freaking young. (not to mention that Law’s American accent is really good.)

eXistenz is probably the closest we are ever going to get to a decent film version of Philip K. Dick’s trippier stuff, like The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch or Ubik (I would love to be proven wrong on that). Creepier stuff like synthetically mutated amphibians being harvested to provide the meta-flesh for gamepods put aside, it uses nestled realities with an effectiveness that wouldn’t be seen again until Christopher Nolan’s Inception, and, like its older brother, Videodrome, it leaves the viewer, like the characters, unsure of what truly is reality.

October 10, 2015
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . Tags: david cronenberg, eXistenZ, hubrisween, jennifer jason leigh, jude law, philip k. dick . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

D: Don’t Look Now (1973)

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The Brits have a very layered way of moving up in the world of performing arts: you start at the bottom, and work your way up. I rather prefer that over the hope-you-get-noticed-and-rocket-to-fame model of American show business. One of the more interesting of these rising through the ranks stories is Nicholas Roeg, an intriguing cinematic voice who managed to keep his extremely singular nature in his ascent to the director’s chair.

After his debut feature, Performance, and its follow-up Walkabout, Roeg directed this mind-bending movie, described by himself as “an exercise in film grammar”. Based on a Daphne du Maurier short story, it’s the tale of Laura and John Baxter (Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland), a couple in the months after the accidental drowning death of their daughter. They’re currently living in Venice, where John is supervising the restoration of a decaying church. At dinner one night, they encounter a pair of vacationing English sisters (Hilary Mason and Clella Mantania) , one of whom is blind, but psychic. The blind one tells Laura she can see her dead daughter, who is attempting to warn John he is in danger if he stays in Venice.

There is a lot to what she says: there has been a series of unsolved murders, and John keeps seeing a tiny figure darting about in the shadows of the winding streets, seemingly wearing his daughter’s favorite red raincoat – which she was wearing when she drowned. John himself also has the Second Sight, a notion which he vigorously denies, until he has a vision which sets in motion his doom.

Roeg is messing with the viewer from the beginning, presenting the daughter’s death in a early morning scene snipped into several converging, simultaneous storylines, separate realities that eventually merge into one harrowing whole. John’s psychic ability is foretold as he spills a drink on a slide of one of the Venetian churches he’s researching, his daughter in one of the pews; the drink causes the red dye of the slide to run (she is, of course, wearing the raincoat in the picture), bringing a dreadful premonition to him as he runs out the door to the nearby pond, too late.

This fragmented vision of reality, strings flailing about in an effort to wrap themselves into the cord of fate, runs throughout the movie. John wandering lost in the alleys of the seedier side of Venice, stopping suddenly and saying, “I know this place,” unaware that he is foreseeing his own eventual death; the final shock that we see coming from a mile off (like John, if he would only let himself see as the blind sister does) which is nonetheless so visceral, so shocking, (and it must be said, Christie and Sutherland are so good in their roles) it burns itself into your mind, even though you thought it prepared.

This movie was a bit of a cause celebre amongst my classmates at the time, probably as much for the sex scene as the horror story (oh, hush, you were in high school, too, at some point). Don’t Look Now presents a universe where everything is connected, but it is still a chaotic, uncaring place, full of danger and terror. I’m actually kind of glad I didn’t receive that message in high school; I’m a little better prepared for it now.

October 9, 2015
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . Tags: criterion, don't look now, donald sutherland, hubrisween, julie christie, nicholas roeg . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

C: Carnival of Souls (1962)

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It’s strange to see Carnival of Souls so venerated now – it’s even out on the Criterion Collection. A quickly-produced low-budget movie meant as a calling card to the movie industry, now acknowledged as a classic. Well, okay, there are more than a few of those in the Collection, but it’s rare that we get to watch one during Hubrisween.

Just in case you recently switched living arrangements from underneath a rock, Carnival opens with a drag race gone wrong, as a car carrying three women plunges off an old bridge into a river and sinks immediately. While the river is being dredged for the car and the bodies, one of the women – Mary Henry (Candace Hilligoss) stumbles from the muddy river, unable to remember anything since the crash.

Mary’s a skilled organist taking a position at a church in Utah, though she denies being particularly religious. On the way to this new life, she is stricken by the sight of an abandoned pleasure palace on the shore of a lake. Her increasing obsession with the place becomes a problem, though not as much as the ghoulish, silent white-faced man who seems to be stalking her.

Since we’re dealing with a movie half a century old, I think we can stop being so precious and just say that Mary died in that car wreck, and she’s only been pretending to be alive all this time. It’s something that anyone who’s read “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” or seen an episode of Twilight Zone has already figured out by the first half hour mark, if not ten minutes in. The difference is in the delivery of that revelation, which is where Carnival manages to edge itself into the realm of actual art.

There are two times in the movie when Mary finds herself in a silent world, unable to interact with any of the people bustling around her, as if she’s ceased to exist. It’s amazing how affecting something like killing the ambient sound in a sequence can truly be. These segments, and the scenes taking place in the decaying Saltair Amusement Park (an amazing setting that was only waiting to be discovered), its downbeat denouemant, are what give the movie its power to chill.

Producer/director Herk Harvey (who also plays the ubiquitous dead-faced man) was a veteran of numerous “mental hygiene” and industrial shorts, and went into his two-week shoot with a budget of $17,000 and a five man crew. Years of quick production put him in good stead as the shoot proceeded guerilla-style in Salt Lake City (offering a man in a van twenty-five bucks to “nearly” run over Hilligoss, for instance). Much of the movie was shot in Lawrence, Kansas, where Hervey and his cohorts were well-known and respected (“You need to shoot in my church? Sure!”).

The oddest note in the movie is struck by Hilligoss’ portrayal of Mary; judging from interviews with her and Harvey, the cold, non-social aspect of the character is a choice by the director, which Hilligoss struggled with. It may be good for the story – Mary is a character that never truly lived, and now desperately wishes to, but doesn’t know how. It does, however (and as Hilligoss feared) limit viewer sympathy for the protagonist.

Faring better is Sidney Berger as the only other occupant of Mary’s boarding house, John. John is a realistic, horny working guy, equal parts good humor, sexual bluntness and desperation. Mary acquiesces to his constant efforts to get close to her simply because her fear of the Man and the call of the abandoned park are beginning to terrify her. Even the horndog, though, is unwilling to expose himself to her increasing instability. Berger went on to a sterling career as head of the drama department at the University of Houston, and had to put up with some frequent razzing about the role, but honestly, he is, in many ways, the best actor in the movie.

Carnival did not fare well on its initial release, and was, as is so often the case, screwed over by a con man masquerading as a distribution company. It was also cut by as much as eight minutes, and since I saw the original, uncut version, that might have actually been an improvement – it does drag in parts. But when it was sold to TV, frequent airings allowed its strengths to be appreciated, and a cult grew. And this is why, even knowing the Twilight Zone properties of the script, it is possible to still watch this small, well-organized picture and still be able to pick up a chill or two.

October 8, 2015
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . Tags: candace hilligoss, carnival of souls, criterion, herk harvey, sidney berger . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

B: Bedlam (1946)

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Here’s a movie that kept cropping up on late night horror movie slots, causing some consternation amongst fans expecting crepe hair werewolves or cardboard robots going berserk – a reasoned, almost stately historical drama. The station’s programmers couldn’t really be blamed – this was produced by Val Lewton, who similarly produced Cat People, Curse of the Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, you know. It starred Boris Karloff, for pete’s sake. Similar reasoning/excuses held for Tower of London (though Camp on Blood Island was a little less forgivable).

This was the last of Lewton’s movies produced at RKO, the most expensive, and the first one to ever show a loss at the Box Office. In 1945, as Bedlam was being filmed, America was dropping atomic bombs on Japan. Small wonder that horror movies were on the wane; there’d been enough horror to go around in the real world, no need to visit it in our entertainment. Lewton would only produce three more movies in his life, and when you look at what he accomplished with remarkably small budgets, you wonder how the heck that ever happened.

It’s probably Lewton’s intellectual bent, as Bedlam is pretty much derived from an engraving by William Hogarth in his Rake’s Progress series. Quick views of other satiric Hogarth art is used for scene dissolves, and I can just imagine studio execs scratching their heads over that. The artwork was, in fact, excised for the TV version.

Bedlam is short for St. Mary of Bethlehem’s Hospital, an insane asylum in 1761 London. Our story concerns the Apothecary General of the hospital, George Sims (Karloff) and his increasing clashes with the protege of the Tory Lord Mortimer (Billy Law), the quick-witted Nell Bowen (Anna Lee). Horrified by the conditions in Bedlam – especially during Bedlam‘s most famous scene when an inmate, gilded to portray Reason in a show to honor Mortimer, suffocates (two decades before Goldfinger!) – Nell becomes a crusader for reform, eventually losing all her standing with the politically queasy Mortimer, and finally committed by Sims and a kangaroo court to become an inmate herself at the very asylum she is attempting to reform.

Nell still manages to reform Bedlam from the inside out, turning the huge common room into a much safer, healthier place. A Quaker stonemason (Richard Fraser), who had inspired her, is meanwhile working with the Whig reformist John Wilkes to get her another trial. Seeing that this new trial would be disastrous to him, Sims decides to give Nell the 18th century equivalent of a lobotomy, but the inmates rise against him, and while Nell escapes, hold a trial for their abusive warden, with surprising (but ultimately horrifying) results.

The Breen office hacked the script to pieces before it ever started filming, and it is still surprising what got through. Director Mark Robson recreates several of Hogarth’s prints in real space, often on hastily improvised sets (in fact, that enormous commons room in Bedlam is the church set from The Bells of St. Mary’s!). If Lewton could get this much period accuracy out of a tiny budget and some painted flats, it’s incredible he had to fight to get any work afterwards. Robson often said that he wouldn’t have been able to make movies like Earthquake if not for the lessons he learned under Lewton.

Karloff’s three movies with Lewton were probably the last of the classy horror movies he would make until he teamed with Richard Gordon in the late 50s. He always rankled when Bedlam was termed a horror movie, claiming it was historic drama. So it is… but nonetheless, here we are, talking about it during Hubrisween, because honestly – sometimes there is nothing so horrible as truth and history.

October 7, 2015
Categories: Movies That Do Not Suck . Tags: bedlam, boris karloff, hubrisween, mark robsonrloff, val lewton . Author: drfreex . Comments: 1 Comment

A: The Awful Dr. Orlof (1962)

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Oh, God, it’s Jess Franco.

Now, a lot of people whose opinion I respect like Jess Franco. I have yet to find that movie that will win me over to his camp, however. It may actually happen someday, but in the meantime, I ain’t holdin’ my breath. The Awful Dr. Orlof is described by some as “Franco’s masterpiece”, which means in a career spanning around 200 movies, he hit his high point on his fifth movie. Contemplate that upon the Tree of Woe, and let us begin.

France, 1912: Four beautiful women have already disappeared, and as the movie starts, number five is killed by a disfigured, caped man, who then carries her body out, guided by the tapping of a cane. The man doing the tapping is our awful title character (Howard Vernon, here beginning a lifelong friendship and collaboration with Franco), clad in opera cape and top hat. The killer is Morpho (Ricardo Valle), whose scarred face and bulging, unblinking eyes are the classic stuff of monster movies.

We are quickly introduced to Inspector Tanner (Conrado San Martin) and his ballerina fiancee, Wanda (Diana Lorys). Tanner is put in charge of the missing woman epidemic and will prove mostly ineffective (it is, in fact only due to a comic relief drunk played by Faustino Cornejo that Tanner solves anything). Orlof is trying to restore his daughter’s face, scarred in a laboratory fire years before – after his most recent failure (an unfortunate drunken woman trapped with Morpho in an empty house, a very effective scene), he determines that his next victim must be living when he attempts the skin grafts. Then he notices that Wanda and his daughter are played by the same actress…

Okay, we can stop right now and examine the obvious, that this is the same plot as Eyes Without A Face, released only two years previous. In this instance, Franco has an excuse: he was denied a permit to film his intended fifth movie by the Spanish State Censor, and he already had a cast and crew ready to go. He wrote Orlof in a week, figuring – as is often the case – that a horror movie would be perceived as having no particular political message. This doesn’t necessarily excuse his return to this particular trough over and over again through the years, however.

Franco was a cinematic omnivore, and this really shows in this version of Les Yeux Sans Visage through the filter of a 1930s Universal monster movie (it’s a possibility that Orlof is a tribute to Bela Lugosi and his blind henchmen in The Human Monster), or one of the more contemporaneous Hammer gothic horrors. It’s certainly lacking the poetry of Franju’s film – the tormented nature of the daughter, the recipient of her father’s increasingly horrific attempts to restore her face (Lorys as the daughter is called upon to do little more than loll her head about on a uncomfortable-looking bed). There is some tribute paid to Orlof’s agony over what he’s doing, but it feels more like filler here. I’m sure the dreadful English dub is not helping out there, either.

The character of Wanda the ballerina is a new addition to the story, using herself as bait when she realizes Orloff is becoming obsessed with her. The final twenty minutes of the movie, with Wanda in the clutches of the mad scientist and her worthless boyfriend the Inspector finding every excuse possible to not read her hastily-written note, is pretty compelling, though the viewer finds himself wondering why she thinks taking such a hazardous course without notifying her policeman boyfriend in advance is going to turn out alright.

If nothing else, you have to admit that the original title, Gritos en la noche, or Screams in the Night, is a great title for a horror movie. Exactly when it became The Awful Dr. Orlof is opaque to me; I had assumed the change was made so it could occupy the lower half of a double bill with Ricardo Freda’s The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, but my Image DVD bears the french title L’horrible Docteur Orlof. I need more coffee before I can begin to untangle this, and I’m inclined to believe it’s just not worth it.

For some – like, for instance, me – it’s an okay way to kill an hour and thirty minutes. For others it’s going to be an unforgivable slog, though a couple of instances of shocking (for 1962, anyway) female nudity employing an obvious body double might wake them up.

October 6, 2015
Categories: The Wonderful World of Crap . Tags: howard vernon, hubrisween, jess franco, the awful dr. orlof . Author: drfreex . Comments: Leave a comment

Look, In The Trees! It’s Coming!

As promised, here it is, October, and you are going to get terribly, terribly tired of me. That is because October 6, this will begin:

Yes, a re-run of last year’s Hubrisween. Twenty-six days, a movie a day, A through Z. Last year it was the originator – Checkpoint Telstar – The Terrible Claw Reviews, and myself. This year, Web of the Big Damn Spider and Microbrewed Reviews will join the “fun”.

That banner at the top of each review will take you to Hubrisween Central, a collection of links to each review as they post. And yes, there will be a 2015 version of last year’s Letterboxd page. Here’s a preview:

I haven’t been exactly idle while I’ve been gone. Though I haven’t been posting here, I’m still watching movies for that 100 Films Challenge I suckered myself into. The need to comment on movies I watch runs deep, it seems, because I’ve still been reviewing them, but on the Letterboxd site, where I feel a little better about engaging in what Warren Ellis calls “first draft writing”. I don’t know why that is, but it’s enabled me to get them off my brain and still leave time to bank Hubrisween reviews and take care of my other writing projects. Almost. (but it was a good plan)

Here’s what you’ve missed (yes, yes, this is all on my List 2015 page, but we’re all here now):

Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion

In the Realm of the Senses