15th October 2009

A Month Of Malevolence Part 3.

October 15th “The Ninth Configuration” (mad scientist): This is, it must be said, a profoundly odd film made up of about, as Blatty himself might colourfully put it, three heads and a basketful of fucking assholes. As with Blatty’s own “Exorcist” threequel, it’s a vital, idiosyncratic and defiant film, one that demands attention and rewards immeasurably as a horror film, thriller, mystery, psychological character study and off-beat institutional comedy the type Hal Ashby and Milos Forman campaigned the 1970s on. It won Best Screenplay at the 1981 Golden Globes and has one of the most amazing genre casts of all time: Jason Miller, Ed Flanders, Stacy Keach, Joe Spinell, Neville Brand, Robert Loggia, Tom Atkins and Richard Lynch. Stoic stuff.

In a dark, gothic castle in the middle of the Pacific Northwest lies a psychiatric facility for ravaged minds torn apart by the absurdities of man’s inhumanity to man or simply by man’s desire to break his earthly bonds. Amongst a parade of genuinely odd-ball Vietnam vets -- comedians all, theatrical to a man and as sharp and witty as anyone Joseph Heller ever dreamt up -- resides inmate and former astronaut Captain Billy Cutshaw who once manned a space mission, aborted before it left earth because Cutshaw thought he’d see God staring down at him on the face of the moon.

Sent to quell the fevered egos of this entertaining asylum is Colonel Vincent Kane, a man with a past as dark and churned as any of the insane residents he’s been sent to placate. Kane’s radical rehabilitation technique involves allowing the men to play out their deranged fantasies to some kind of cathartic culmination. However, the picture’s alternate U.S. title and the title of Blatty’s own original novel, “Twinkle, Twinkle ‘Killer’ Kane”, suggests the not unexpected conclusion that good might not find its rightful place anywhere amid the chaos of this castle. As Kane’s visions of bloody war escalate, as revelations that his own brother might have died under suspicious circumstances emerge and as the fear that someone in the asylum is puppeteering events toward catastrophe reach their zenith: then it gets really weird.

Blatty’s style is very literate -- like Mamet mugging Pinter at knife point in a comedy club on open mic night. While this style that might seem initially off-putting, it manages to draw you in, via its intricately and surreally layered characters, with an incredible, immersive power. Like Sam Fuller’s “Shock Corridor”, nothing can prepare you for the experience of meeting a madman as much as the lucidity with which he begins to talk. These men are terrifyingly lucid, mordantly funny and ferociously wilful. They know more than Kane’s educated man about what really sends men to the brink.

This really is a film that erupts from a collision between the consciousness of the 1960s and the passionate activism of the 1970s: from guilt over Vietnam; from the shattering, scabrous images of Peter Davis’s “Hearts & Minds”; the bombing of Cambodia; the scars that American imperialism has etched in the psyche of the 20th century. Like Blatty’s “The Exorcist” it confronts the notion of “evil” with the promise of “God”, if for no other reason than there must *be* a reason for, and a relief or deliverance from, all the things which evil puts us though; otherwise is there any point in our existence at all?

If all of this sounds heavy, well, it is. It’s distilled pulp existentialism that pulls you along in a maelstrom of angst, questions of faith and quest for our soul’s salvation. It’s a film about compassion, about redemption, about acceptance and sacrifice, things that Blatty seems to believe are the basic tenets of human decency and something, at least, to start building *some* kind of faith upon.

During one scene, Cutshaw demands Kane give him an example of the purely unselfish act which Kane hypothesizes would prove the existence of a “God”. It’s a theme Blatty would explore in his more famous straight horror film and one that haunts long after the credits have rolled here.

There are a handful of horror pictures that make its audience truly work to reveal their rewards. This picture takes that handful and makes it into a fist.

Shock That Rocks: the opening scene as a rocket prepares for launch, the moon emerging chaotically and with terrifying menace as if from nowhere as Cutshaw’s nightmare plays out once more

Would Go Well With…: “Jacob’s Ladder”

October 16th “Phantom Of The Paradise” (revenge): no one does a cover version like Brian De Palma. From “Vertigo” to “Rear Window” to “Psycho” to “Battleship Potemkin”, the irrepressible, tyrannical stamp of audacity, in both intent and execution, makes him both darling and demon to film devotees everywhere. A tipping-point between his freewheeling anarchic comedies of the 1960s and his opulent, grandiose masterworks of the mid-70s onward, “The Phantom Of the Paradise” is perhaps the least openly baiting of his liberal adaptations. As it flips effortlessly between satire and pathos, it’s easy to forget that this is only the second non-independently made picture from this Science-major-turned-film-enthusiast; it oozes as much confidence as it does radical style and is as brave as any studio picture from the 1970s. Even then just in his early 30s, De Palma was plainly one of cinema’s master craftsmen.

Crashing the Faust and “Phantom…” stories together in a riotous, rock opera cocktail of glamour, gore and gallivanting slapstick, De Palma cast diminutive music maven Paul Williams as the satanic svengali, Swan, who double crosses maverick composer Winslow (William Finley), stealing not only his music but his new-found muse and potential lover, Phoenix, played by Jessica Harper. As Swan gears up for what will be his greatest ever theatrical performance, Winslow vows his revenge an Swan’s grip on both the satanic pact he made to prolong his success and on the power of Winslow’s music begins to slip, leading to a fiery climax of retribution and redemption for all concerned.

Interestingly, for Harper, this kicked off an incredible triple run: following De Palma’s film she went straight into “Suspiria” for Argento, then onto one of Woody Allen’s best, “Love & Death”. She remains one of the brightest points in all three movies, radiant and innocent in equal measure, an understandable object of desire for evil (and Woody Allen).

From the fist seconds of “Phantom Of The Paradise”, De Palma uses a dazzling array of cinematic tricks which, by that point, had become his stock in trade: split screen, speed-ramping and complex camera moves that transform what could have seemed flippant spoof into something hilariously epic and operatic. It’s one of De Palma’s strengths that you never know quite what is presented with sincerity and what is presented with scorn. Paul Williams’ score certainly gives nothing away: songs are by turns savagely ironic, mocking the music world’s asinine excesses and then on a dime as sweet and earnest as one of the 70s’ real-world classic ballads.

The world of cinema, and trash/exploitation/horror cinema in particular, is littered with comedy musicals which spray little but trite in-jokes across the screen, fit for barely a laugh, let alone any kind of longevity. But De Palma, though providing an hysterical, garish send–up of all that is pompous and pious about self-satisfied creators of art, has the intelligence and creative sensitivity and brazen talent to let us glimpse some of that genuine artistry in the film he’s making. In doing this, he demonstrates that the use of song or cinema or theatre can enlighten, indulge, analyse and disclose human truths and the truth about us humans in any way a creator desires. But, ultimately, it’s got to be about a bloody good show and the essential substance of the entertainment (yes, it’s a grand irony recognised by many De Palma fans). Get that right, and you can smuggle in anything you want.

Shock That Rocks: Swan’s date with destiny after he reneges on his contract and his true face is revealed to the world.

Would Go Well With…: “Angel Heart”

October 17th “The Fly II” (creature feature): Some sequels understand the complexity of mirroring the original story’s descent into tragic inevitability; some take great pains to extrapolate the overriding psychology of the original characters and their motivations and try, in some way, to redeem them for their future generations. And some simply understand the awesome, spectacularly messy consequence of having the heavy mechanism of a goods lift collide with the soft shell of a man’s skull. Such is the allure of Academy Award-winning special effects artist Chris Walas’s sequel to David Cronenberg’s incredible 1986 remake.

Taking its narrative cue from the original film’s birthing sequence, Walas’s sequel -- from a script by, amongst others, Frank Darabont and Mick Garris -- does, in some way, show the devastating consequences and tragic inevitability of the original story as Seth Brundle’s rapidly maturing son, Martin, becomes first plaything and then experimental cash-cow for the infamous Telepod’s financial backer: the oleaginous Anton Bartok and his corporate machine.

It’s a slight set-up which basically treads water and sets up a few carefully manipulated plot beats all in the name of selling a final act in which Martin’s startling, hugely imaginative and gruesomely over-the-top rampage of bodily destructive revenge, on behalf of himself and daddy Seth, takes hold. “In the name of the father”, indeed.

As played by Eric Stoltz, Martin’s transformation from innocent to inevitable medical martyr is pretty conventional mad-scientist stuff, a rather convenient ending also taking the edge off the pathos. Yet that ending also provides the sequel with its structural backbone: you realise that it’s not simply a retread of a heartbreaking monster movie it’s actually a body-horror rendition of a classic E.C. Comics story of gleefully guignol retribution and revenge. Despite and wild bombast and impeccable skill of composer Chris Young and some awe-inspiringly lurid effects work, for that E.C. Comics-vibe to work you need a great villain. In veteran actor Lee Richardson, the picture gets an unexpected treat.

Richardson’s Anton Bartok isn’t the smarmy young tycoon of say, “Darkman”, an Ellis from “Die Hard” working his way up the corporate ladder. He’s not even Dick from “Robocop”: he’s the Old Man himself. Guarding a corporate empire built on Cthulhu knows what extent of self-justified experimental horrors, Bartok becomes the ultimate boogeyman for animal lovers and anti-vivisectionists everywhere and “The Fly II” suddenly finds itself to be a wicked, pot-boiling morality tale. Richardson’s a wonderfully vile presence, all his simpering, fatherly concern hiding the duplicitous black heart of a capitalist, malevolent monster no less warped than a concentration camp doctor, is the key performance of the film. Fans of “The Exocist III” will be aware of a wonderful gag that film, where Lee Richardson, playing a grim-faced priest is asked by one of his colleagues if he has a favourite film. Fully aware the alert horror fan will have seen his glorious comeuppance in Chris Walas’s film, he replies with deep, dead-pan relish: “The Fly”.

Shock That Rocks: before the infamous head-pop underneath the lift, there’s an even more extravagant moment of anti-security guard prejudice as Martin, fully transformed, repeats the famous Stathis Borans scene from the original film. Only this time, it’s a Bartok minion’s entire face which is coated in viscous and vastly caustic vomit.

Would Go Well With: Jill Schoelen creature feature “The Bite”

October 18th “Frankenstein” (1910) (silent): An oddity this: short, loose and starkly theatrical, it’s notable less for what it does than for when it did it. For this is, truthfully, the first horror film.

Made by inventor Thomas Edison’s own studio in 3 days, at barely 13 mins in length, it’s a one-reel, Cliff’s Notes journey through the familiar beats of Mary Shelley’s classic tale. Frankenstein goes to school, the first title card tells us, and suddenly, two years later he has “discovered the mystery of life”. This cursory, 35 second leap to the meat of Mary Shelley’s story belies, perhaps, the real reason for the film.

Seven years previously, Edwin S. Porter’s “The Great Train Robbery” had made a significant leap amongst pioneering filmmakers desperate to blow audience’s minds. During the climactic robbery, Porter had turned a villainous cowboy’s gun toward the screen and fired straight into the audience’s faces. That one shot (seen, if not around the world, then across most of America and Western Europe) categorically proved to filmmakers that there was more that could be done with this medium than simply parading images across it like some moving postcard.

Edison (and his director J. Searle Dowley), would no doubt have seen Porter’s film and would be thinking, as one of the world’s most notable technicians, how to experiment with this technology further. In 1910, he created something of vast interest to future horror filmmakers: basically a primitive fascinating f/x reel.

Like a primordial rendition Bob Keen’s ‘Ressurrection’ scene in “Hellraiser”, the creature rises and reforms itself, in what looks like some weird fusion of puppetry/stop-motion, from a smoking cauldron. It’s quite a moment. As is the climactic sequence with Frankenstein’s enormous mirror, a charmingly tricksy piece of film grammar that makes this picture, once thought lost and only found again in a private collection in 1953, absolutely essential for devotees of genre history.

The Public Domain status of the film means you can watch it for free, here. I’d ask that in symbolic payment, you do your bit for genre history and tell people about it. Respect for these cinema forebears is vital to perpetuate, now more than ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aps6RAbt3Pg&feature=PlayList&p=7131DC4F3799DC53&index=13

Shock That Rocks: looking like some spectral prog-rocker, the shock-haired creature sneaks up on his distraught and repentant creator as he lies prone on his bed, sliding through the black curtains above him like an Asian ghost.

Would Go Well With…: “Der Golem”

October 19th “The Monster Squad” (Universal): Fred Dekker’s deeply arch comedy-horror-adventure is a joyous celebration mostly of the allure that horror possesses to an impressionable young audience fresh to the genre. It’s a story that could be about all of us when we were too young to see the horror films we wanted to, back when they still held that mystical grasp over our imaginations, when these events could, possibly, perhaps, actually come true.

Reading back on some of these reviews, I realise they have the rapidly increasing tone of a grumpy old man rhapsodising about terrific it was when *WE* were young, not like kids today, what with all their technology, remakes and post-modernism. But the difference is, I believe, quite marked. From kids who loved comics in the 50s to even kids of the slasher of the 1980s, the type of generation depicted in “The Monster Squad”, and to a more winsome degree in “The Goonies”, is, sadly, a generation the likes of which we’ll probably not see again in an age of irrepressible post-modern irony. The kids of “Scream” now know exactly how to deal with malevolent movie creations and they do so with identical pristine hair and tiring insouciance, right up until the point at which the supposedly unreal monster nails them in the gullet and, too late, it suddenly becomes less of a benign fiction to them.

In contrast, like proper horror protagonists, the kids of “The Monster Squad”, when faced with larger than life villains, first stare in awe, then quickly scream, then run for their lives long enough to formulate a cunning and ingenious strategy to vanquish their foe.

Without the dilution of the horror in endless DVD releases or internet hagiographies, the monsters of “The Monster Squad” – Frankenstein’s monster, the nard-possessing Wolfman, Gill Man, Mummy and Dracula -- still have a certain power for these kids. Dekker and Shane Black’s screenplay has a charmingly old fashioned respect for the power of cinema and celluloid, for the ritual of embracing a film. Just as in Stephen King’s “It”, these kids are versed in the lore of evil as much from the films they watch as from the apochryphal urban legends they, and all children, share with each other. What’s important though, what marks these kids out as different from post-modern teens, is that they respect the awesome power of both a story and its iniquitous characters who, though implausible on our physical plain, might very well materialise one day in an innocent small town, such is the indelible potency of their creation.

Compare that with the ‘Scream’ generation: just because they know the rules, doesn’t mean they are safe, smirking in the power of that knowledge. Like all good horror stories, from Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’ to Clive Barker’s ‘The Forbidden’ and everything in between: you have to believe.

Shock That Rocks: less a shock than a performance of minor key radiance -- Tom Noonan’s sensitive portrayal of the Frankenstein creature.

Would Go Well With..: “Mad Monster Party”

October 20th “The Seventh Victim” (RKO): Producer Val Lewton did as much to enhance and enrich the genre as Alfred Hitchcock. Of course, being resolutely “b” in stature and attitude (and this is no flippant slur; given the choice to work in A-pictures, Lewton happily chose the relative freedom afforded the kinds of budgets with which he had already produced bona fide masterpieces) much of this flew under the radar of the studio and the censors. Unlike Hitchcock, Lewton’s every move wasn’t monitored by studios looking out for their headline investments. Perhaps Lewton’s unit at RKO wasn’t able to smuggle anything quite as dark and staggeringly perverse into their productions as Edgar G. Ulmer had with Universal’s b-picture “The Black Cat”, but the disposition of this exceptionally well-read and worldly producer was anything but sunny, pat and in search of happy endings. His worlds were as potent as anything seen in the genre before or since.

Coming hot on the heels of the jaw-dropping 1-2-3-punch of “Cat People”, “I Walked With A Zombie” and “The Leopard Man” with director Jacques Tourneur, “The Seventh Victim” marked editor Mark Robson’s feature debut as a director. An associate of Robert Wise since they worked together on Orson Welles’ “The Magnificent Ambersons”, Robson would take the classical aesthetics instilled in him in that position and create what is perhaps Lewton’s most literate and elegant production.

A tale of tragic and sinister inevitability, “The Seventh Victim” is told through the eyes of the titular victim’s sister, Kim Hunter, future Academy Award-winning star of “A Streetcar Names Desire”, ”A Matter Of Life & Death” and the “Planet Of The Apes” saga in her first role. Leaving her slightly arcane prep school (an institution surely at the back of Argento and Nicolodi’s minds when they were conjuring “Susirpia”) after her sister Jacqueline’s apparent disappearance, Mary Gibson heads to New York to discover the reason behind the mysterious vanishing act. There, Mary encounters Jacqueline’s similarly anxious new husband and the erudite but chilling world of a disconcertingly blithe and sinister high society, corralling a series of young women into their dark and clandestine organisation. This shady group seems intent on perpetuating a new and diabolical social order that spurns the good and the pure in favour of all that is perverse and materialistic. Or perhaps simply perversely materialistic.

Polanski was certainly fan of this picture: during the opening moments in the almost sacred school hallway, strains of a young female singer practicing her scales echo though the sequence with the same chilly compulsion as the pianist that plagues Mia Farrow’s Rosemary Woodhouse in her apartment. Similarly profane details pepper the story and set decoration, alluding to the slowly transforming world of the unnatural in which Mary is becoming embroiled. One of the first places Mary sets foot in New York is a restaurant called Dante’s; children clump around the streets as if their feet are as heavy-set cloven hooves; significant attention is given is by Dr Judd, a shady companion of Jacqueline’s whom Mary encounters, to a particular left handed staircase they must climb -- the left-hand, of course, being the ‘sinister’ side (from the Latin ‘sinistre’), a less than subtle allusion to the diabolical path Judd regularly takes in life. The screenplay is layered with such business, deceptively measured and considered for what was, as with all Lewton’s pictures, essentially a quick, thriller programmer. It’s the key to its unassuming brilliance.

It’s the classic big city cautionary tale as horror film. The same breed of story would become all pervasive in the latter, more self-aware part the corrupt and capitalist 1980s. In that decade’s films, the very real Mephistophelean bogeymen stood in braces and striped shirts forging their black souls by risking millions of other people’s hard earned dollars. Here, Mary’s innocence is exposed to the more cryptic allure of high society with its ermine, pearls and facile cocktail gatherings -- things alien and to a simple small town girl like Mary. Jacqueline, with her punishingly severe fringe that more than one reviewer has suggested is as much an archetype for the whole Goth movement as Louise Brooks was for free-thinking mid-century proto-feminism, has fallen into that world completely.

Surprisingly, Mary discovers her sister alive in a supremely unsettling early scene in New York and the journey of the film becomes less one in which Mary saves her sister, than one that would be become mirrored by the like of George Sluizer’s incredible “The Vanishing” where the hero follows in the footsteps of a beloved in the hope of finding out just what hideous fate has befallen her.

“The Seventh Victim” falls short of such nihilistic disdain for hope as that movie, but offers little solace in the guilt-ridden, entwined fates of the characters left behind. All are led into temptation, the picture tells us; death beckons and we must accept what it brings to us before the inevitable strikes. In its quiet, literate way, beautifully filmed though it is, this is the most cruel and unforgiving of Lewton’s tales of terror.

Shock That Rocks: a silent, protracted sequence that culminates with a dead body in a subway carriage.

Would Go Well With…: “Satan’s Slave”

October 21st “The Phantom Of The Opera” (Hammer): What list of rather excellent horror pictures would be complete without an entry from the studio which practically defined the modern horror film? John McCarty’s essential reference book, called, funnily enough, ‘The Modern Horror Film’, is practically a hagiography of Hammer producer Anthony Hinds’s contribution to the way Technicolour horror was splattered across the screen with surprising vigour and effortless grace and panache. McCarty is an astute commentator..

Perhaps no film in the Hammer canon, save perhaps “Hands Of The Ripper”, was as graceful, elegant and full of genuine humanity as this, from Terence Fisher, arguably the studio’s greatest collaborator (a case could be made for both Freddie Francis and Jimmy Sangster, not to mention James Bernard and a host of below the line talent, but hat’s for another column). Taking the classic tale by Gaston Leroux, Hinds himself adapted it pseudonymously to a London of murky alleyways, loquacious rat catchers and diabolical aristocrats whose sole purpose is to defile ingénues and impede the creative process of true artists and gentlemen: if it wasn’t written by a producer, it would make for great subtextual dissection, indeed.

It tempers, to quite moving effect, the diabolical nature of the Phantom’s character, transforming him from obsessive defiler and murderous musical depot, the monster of previous adaptations, into a sensitive, beleaguered artist, undone by infidels and double-crossers: a man who simply wants to make music and hear it soar.

Herbert Lom takes what could have been a simpering victim and gives him nobility and poise: you really believe his Phantom’s devotion to the notes: he no longer wants to get into Christine’s pants, it’s her vocal chords that arouse him. Her love interest, theatrical impresario Harry Hunter, is no love rival: it’s truly her talent they fight over, something which leads to a conflation of chandelier, unmasking and tragic comeuppance all in one sweeping, extended literally operatic sequence so brave for a pulp horror outing. This very different sort of horror film emerges as the missing link between “Dracula” and Michael Powell’s “The Red Shoes”.

Yet all the exquisite melodrama segues at regular intervals into some divinely grotesque horror. Patrick Troughton’s rat catcher is given a delicious and brutal (not to say expertly edited for maximum impact) demise. But the picture belongs to Michael Gough as the philandering, duplicitous Lord Ambrose, avaricious not just for money but for fame, adulation, success and youthful chorus girl booty. He’s the real villain of the piece, someone against whom a masked spectre of terrifying renown and awful legend cannot hope to compete. He makes the tragedy of the Phantom utterly palpable with a piss-hole eyed glare, grin smug as an insatiable tomcat and ill-manner as vile as the slop-bucket contents flooding the cobbled streets of London town – he’s one of the great Hammer scoundrels.

Shock That Rocks: the rat catcher goes to the great burlap sack in the sky: a genuinely nasty piece of business, expertly executed (if you’ll pardon the excruciating pun).

Would Go Well With..: “I, Madman”

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