Film #175: Witchfinder General (aka The Conqueror Worm)

Among the horror genre’s most criminally overlooked classics, 1968’s The Conqueror Worm, which was US distributor American International's Corman-esque way of linking the film to the classic, long dead horror writer Edgar Allen Poe, in a bid for US box office success. Poe was then a big movie ticket seller and the inspiration of many Hammer horror and Corman-led vehicles like The Pit and the Pendulum, House of Usher, The Raven, and The Tomb of Ligeia, among many more (though the author's connection to this film is tenuous at best; his words are present only as some snatches of opening and closing poetry). Better known in the U.K. as Witchfinder General (the title under which it was eventually released on an MGM Blu-Ray box set including the Poe-connected anthology film Tales of Terror, the raucous two-film Dr. Phibes series, and the superb, Shakespeare-tinged horror black comedy Theater of Blood).

Reeves' version of this extraordinarily downbeat tale is a jaw-dropper. Despite its inobviously low budget, it succeeds in placing viewer right in this ornate but life-cheapening era. In it, Vincent Price leads as Matthew Hopkins, the real-life henchman for Cromwell's war-torn 17th century Britain who's assigned to locate and prosecute witches hidden within the country’s tiny townships. He’s an intriguing character because, with his obvious intelligence, he should be equipped to mitigate his dark side with common decency. Yet Hopkins is so consumed with lust and power that he can’t help but take advantage of the vulnerable, especially in a time where almost everyone was mad with fear and ignorance.

Rest assured, Price plays all this to the hilt in one of his very finest non-tongue-in-cheek horror performances. Without even the briefest moment of relief from the terror gripping the UK in this period of its history, the film is smartly helmed by long-depressed director/co-writer Reeves who, before accidentally overdosing in 1969, spearheaded two more dire, similarly-flavored pictures (The She-Beast with Barbara Steele, and The Sorcerers horror legend Boris Karloff). In keeping with those unsparing works, Witchfinder General is disturbingly set in a Hell where all moral boundaries have been violently erased, and all its subjugated inhabitants are capable of atrocities against even their closest confidants. No walk in the park, it is seriously distressing--the utter definition of horror.

2012 Atlanta Film Festival review: THE CABIN IN THE WOODS

Okay, don't worry: there aren't going to be any spoilers here. And if you know what I'm talking about, that also means I don't have to go into much plot detail regarding The Cabin in the Woods, the fantastically smart new horror comedy from director/co-writer Drew Goddard (who wrote Cloverfield) and producer/co-writer Joss Whedon. Given Whedon's involvement, I was hoping for a Buffy-like jaunt with brash dialogue and a genre-busting mission...and I got what I wanted. Giddy while watching it unspool as the closing night offering for the 2012 Atlanta Film Festival (where I got to shake hands with its star, the extremely charming Kristen Connelly), I tried to remember midway through when I'd last had such a high time at a movie. Actually, I couldn't come up with a competitive title...surely, I'd had fun at other blockbusters recently. But, no, I can't really even think of one even now (many genre hits of the past decade have been rather dreary). Meanwhile, The Cabin in the Woods is an insanely exciting, resoundingly new kinda hoot all the way through.

I had a friend recently say he hated the movie because it was too cliched. Wondering what, exactly, this person was expecting, I quickly came to the film's defense: "Don't you realize that the movie's ambition is to tear down the cliches while giving them a hilariously gigantic reason d'atre?" The film isn't just about five kids who go off to party by the lake, and all the "horror" that premise entails. It's a full-on spoof of movies, audience expectations, the video-game culture, the reality TV boom, and the labeling of personalities (some viewers might look towards the Scream series as a reference point, but this movie is much cleverer than Scream ever was). Also, in the wry scenes that feature Richard Jenkins and Bradley Whitford as smart-assed scientists (and I'm not giving anything away there, because they're the first characters we see in the film), Cabin freely mocks conspiracy theorists and big-picture seers while admitting that they might indeed be on to something. With every turn of this outlandish riot of a plot--if you choose to read its deeper intentions--there is a new skewer or challenge directed at something occurring in the culture. Or, if you're not into picking your movies apart, you can just sit back and be amazed at where this labyrinth takes you.

The cast is almost uniformly terrific, with Fran Kranz taking the lovability award here with his meek, scratchy-voiced, conspiracy-minded stoner. I really took to a little throwaway moment with Kranz as he's sitting on a bed, anxiously reading a collection of Little Nemo comics and pleading with Nemo to wake up (I laughed hard at this, but almost no one else in the theater did, which shows I'm a real geek). The resourceful Kristin Connelly makes a pretty nifty virgin girl (who's resolutely not a virgin), and Anna Hutchison gets some hot points for her smoldering dance moves and ability to tongue-kiss a wolf's head. The other two guys, Chris Hemsworth and Jesse Williams, are ciphers as the jock and the brain, respectively, but that's okay because they do what's required of them: they make you sort of not care about how this story treats them. And the presence of the wired. scuzzy Whitford and the dutiful Jenkins ups the film's acting gravitas quite a bit. Any time Jenkins, in particular, shows up in a movie, you can feel that film getting better by the second.

The Cabin in the Woods isn't trying to be all that scary (though it has a few moments, particularly in its astounding final third) but it's unfailingly exciting throughout. But, primarily, it IS funny--all the way from its shocking, improbably-placed red-lettered title card (its appearance made me laugh so hard, I had to endure a headache afterwards) to one particular blood-spattered special effects shot unlike any on-screen massacre I've ever witnessed (sure to be talked about as the film's WTF apex). I could go on and on about the film's most hysterical moments, but you deserve to see them for yourselves. So it's not a frightening horror film, but it is an important genre entry nonetheless--and that's a real rarity. Most satisfyingly, The Cabin in the Woods is the sort of undemandingly intelligent, rollicking movie fun best experienced in the company of an unprepared audience. And it's not often I get to write THAT sentence.

2012 Atlanta Film Festival review: V/H/S

The very concept of the new horror anthology film V/H/S is intriguing enough: a group of thugs, out to sell their video finds to an internet site, have been tipped off that a local house has a tasty stash of VHS tapes to mine for their "business." After running roughshod over the place, the guys come across a long-dead body in a room filled with television monitors. Even though the corpse supposedly stinks, one guy is commanded--for some ridiculous reason--to stay in the room while the others search the place for the tapes. This is a good way to split up the group because, you know...this is what horror movies do. So, in the meantime, this guy whiles time away by popping in a few tapes to review, and here we get into the bloody meat of the movie:

Episode one, "Amateur Night," is directed by Atlanta's David Brucker, one of three at the helm of 2007's quasi-zombiefest The Signal, and he's lucky he gets the first spot here because, as we get into V/H/S, we realize most of its stories are strikingly similar, so this first outing begins at a point of freshness. A group of hard-partying guys hit some Atlanta nightspots (including the legendary Star Bar), with plans to pick up a couple of girls and whist them away to a hotel room where they can videotape each having sex with them. The footage here is supposedly being shot through a pair of spy glasses that one reluctant predator is wearing. You can predict that things won't turn out so well for them, but I'm trying mighty hard to avoid spoilers here. Let's just say that this extremely well-edited segment stands as one of V/H/S' most entertaining (if rarely scary) offerings. Performance-wise (as with most of the acting in the film), there's not much to be said. All throughout V/H/S, we only see white, mostly male twentysomethings, so all the actors tend to blend together as they hit two notes: annoying wise-ass and screaming freak-out. On the other hand, the actresses in the movie tend to stand out, and here, one of the film's wide-eyed female victims (Hanna Fierman) seems like obvious trouble from the start. It's a fun if thinly-written piece, with an extremely short but memorable series of culminating shots that very well may be V/H/S's most frightening images.

Mumblecore progenitor Joe Swanberg stars in the next segment (but does not direct--this is a Ti West production). Titled "Second Honeymoon," it stars Swanberg and Sophia Takal as a troubled couple out to re-spark their romance via a trip to the Grand Canyon. This is one of V/H/S' most fascinating segments precisely because its horror elements are introduced rather late in the game. For me, though, the push-me/pull-you sexual dynamics at play here are the segment's greatest asset. Swanberg and Takal are pretty much perfect, especially in one scene that has Swanberg humorously admit to a scantilly-clad Takal that, as the man with a video camera, he has "a great idea" (we know what THAT is). Takal's piercing reaction is a fun moment of stinging non-horror joy. This is the one segment that could be considered more of a noir piece than a member of the horror genre.

The third segment is the least effective. Directed by I Sell The Dead's Glenn McQuaid, "Tuesday the 17th" is nothing more than a variation on a kids-in-the-woods slasher movie, with its only truly inventive element being a killer who can only be seen through the camera's viewfinder. The well-worn video effects here are smart, but that's its only positive (the acting in this segment is, also, quite pedestrian, which at least gives the viewer some way to judge the acting in the rest of V/H/S).

Swanberg reappears as the director of the fourth and unquestionably best of the bunch. "The Sick Thing That Happened To Emily When She Was Young" is posited as a series of Skype-like conferences between a wide-eyed innocent (a superb Helen Rogers) and her far-away boyfriend (who appears, of course, only in a little box in the bottom right corner of the frame). She's in a house that she insists is haunted, and she appeals to her guy to accompany her in finding out if she is indeed right. Not only is this the most frightening of the stories, it's the most filmically inventive (one complaint: who would transfer a Skype conversation to VHS in this day and age?). Still, it's no surprise that this piece is as good as it is; while Swanberg's not really known for his horror output, he's still the most accomplished director here. Whatever complaints one might have with the unfairly-named mumblecore movement, his collaborations with Greta Gerwig Nights and Weekends and Hannah Takes The Stairs are nonetheless laudible films. This segment also proves to be a welcome break from the hyperactive shaky-cam antics in V/H/S (Warning: this is EXTREMELY shaky shaky-cam territory here, which would probably account for the misleading reports of viewers throwing up during screenings).

Finally, after an unfortunate intrusion by Adam Wingard's largely useless wraparound piece, we get "10/31/98," which feels like an urban myth set to film. Yet ANOTHER group of asshole guys go out in costume to a Halloween party and find themselves at exactly the wrong address. Blended into this overlong piece is a climax which features extended digital effects that look quite fetching blended in with all the low-fi stuff. Still, by the time the filmmaking collective Radio Silence contributes this tale, my patience with V/H/S had worn away. The movie, at nearly 2 hours, is easily 20 minutes too long. There are only so many cookie-cutter shitty dudes I can watch in one sitting, even if most of them meet violent ends. This gimmicky gross-out has some notable moments and scares, but don't believe the hype: cripplingly light in the screenplay department, V/H/S hasn't reinvented a genre that, I feel, offers returns that diminish with each title released. But what the hell does it matter what I say? Horror fans will nonetheless scarf up this outing, as well as every other average-to-below genre title that's thrown their way.

Film #149: POLTERGEIST

The summer of 1982 was virtually dominated by the spectre of Steven Spielberg, first with his mammothly successful E.T. The Extraterrestrial, and then with Poltergeist, a now-classic, sometimes sappy, sometimes genuinely frightening horror film, officially directed by Tobe Hooper (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) but with identifiably Spielbergian touches (he produced and co-wrote the film). The film ends up being sort of comparable to a Beatles song where you can pretty clearly tell which part was written by Lennon and which by McCartney. It's a oil-and-water solution, Hopper and Spielberg, and it doesn't always work, but when it does, it's super-charged (in a way, it feels like their take on William Friedkin's The Exorcist). Unfortunately, the baggage of a few really bad sequels (stay away from them) and a weird behind-the-scenes backstory have often obscured how really entertaining this 30-year-old movie is on its own.


At 2:37 a.m., little Carol-Ann (Heather O'Rourke) is lured into a darkened room where, against the static-filled, blue-blinking light of the TV screen, she begins to perceive voices talking to her from "the other side." Concerned parents Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams discover Carol-Ann touching the TV screen and famously warning: "They're heeeeere..." And so begins a spiral into terror that finds an average suburban California family getting slimed upon by some pretty pissed-off ghosts. No one is off-limits...even, as we soon find, the poor kids (Oliver Robins and Dominique Dunne are Carol-Ann's older siblings). At first, there's just some chairs moving about and the like. But when the cute li'l tykes end up getting swallowed up by their strangely-overlit closet and almost choked to death by a stuffed clown, well, something has to be done.


So when things escalate, the parents call in some experts: Network Oscar-winner Beatrice Straight as a doctor of parapsychology ambles by with her posse to record the events, and the diminutive Zelda Rubenstein, in a unique performance, blows in as a kindly super-medium set up to communicate with the ghosts. Rubenstein, with her honey-flavored southern accent and darkened glasses, is really the heart of the movie. She's was a fascinating character actress who still pops up occasionally, mostly on TV (however, she was part of the huge cast in Richard Kelly's bizarre Southland Tales, her final big-screen role before she passed away early in 2010). At four feet or so, Rubenstein was technically a "little person," having played a Munchkin in 1981's god-awful Under The Rainbow (with Chevy Chase and Carrie Fisher, about the wild goings-on with all the little people hired to be in The Wizard of Oz). At any rate, Poltergeist is largely stolen by her.

The special effects here, by Richard Edlund, Bruce Nicholson, and Michael Wood, are quite a draw, too. I'll never forget the red gaping mouth that the kids' closet morphs into, nor that hallucinatory, lengthening hallway that JoBeth Williams darts down, nor the white billowy demons of the undead and the epic implosion that climaxes the movie. And the makeup, by Dorothy Pearl, really highlights perhaps the films most terrifying scenes as the dead begin to pop up out of the ground (the gloppy sequences in the neighbor's muddy swimming pool will have you grimacing--by the way, those are REAL skeletons there, which definitely seems like a Tobe Hooper touch). Perhaps my favorite moment in the film is a maybe a quieter scene that explodes into fright: a photographer on Straight's team decides to retire to the bathroom and sees something NO ONE should see in the mirror.

Let's not forget Jerry Goldsmith's score, which sometimes thickly ladles on the sweetness with a memorable theme, but is always more effective in the film's scarier portions. And, finally, it should be mentioned, I guess, that there's supposedly a curse on the Poltergeist family of actors, with a few of the principles in this and the sequels dying premature deaths. But most of the cast is alive--geez, Rubenstein, Nelson, Williams, Robins, Spielberg and Hooper are with us, and even Nelson's screeching, unscrupulous boss James Karen keeps on appearing in things like Mulholland Dr. and The Pursuit of Happyness . So why believe in some silly old curse? Unless, of course, it makes Poltergeist more fun for you somehow. That I understand.

Film #143: Dead Ringers

There was a time, in the '70s and very early '80s, in which David Cronenberg was one of cinema's lurid if talented filmmakers. It wasn't that his films were poor; they were often elegant to look at and were always memorable. But the images I took from them left some with a sour taste: Marilyn Chambers frothing at the mouth in Rabid, the slimy slugs from They Came From Within; the famed exploding heads in Scanners; the guts-packed TVs in Videodrome, and, most horribly, Samantha Eggar biting into her external birth sac and licking her embryo of rage clean in The Brood. a lot of this stuff made Cronenberg famous, but delayed his entry into "respectability."

But, starting with 1983's The Dead Zone, Cronenberg decided to go a little lighter on us. This didn't diminish his films' power one bit; they just made it easier to eat our dinner after the movie. Yes, he still gave us The Fly in 1986, which had more than its share of gross-outs, and the buggy assholed typewriter in 1991's Naked Lunch. But movies like M. Butterfly, Crash, Spider, eXistenZ, Eastern Promises, and A History of Violence belong to a section of Cronenberg ouvre that's still interested in the biopsy of body and mind, but which is less (but not un-) interested in seeing how queasy it can make its audience feel. His 1988 film Dead Ringers is perhaps my favorite of this bunch.

The film was based on the sad exploits of Stewart and Cyril Marcus, twin brothers who ran a gynecology clinic in '60s/'70s New York City. I first read about the Marcus twins in Linda Wolfe's excellent 1986 true crime anthology The Professor and the Prostitute. In the Marcus-oriented chapter of her book, she detailed the standoffish, snooty twins' rise through the ranks of the gynecological field after the publishing of their landmark textbook on the subject. However, their shared belief that they held some sort of supernatural twin powers resulted in an inability to connect to a world of singletons, and it led them down a dark path that ended in disaster. Having developed a strong addiction to uppers and downers, the twins began to abuse their colleagues and, most shockingly, their female patients, for whom they could not hide their sexual contempt (they often demeaned their pregnant patients for getting themselves "in trouble", and even damaged one woman physically in an examination). This led to their resolute dismissal from their hospital residency and directly into an extended period of isolation and intense drug use. When they were both found dead in their Upper East side apartment in 1975, the place was littered with trash, rotted food, empty prescription bottles, and feces (including an armchair used as a toilet when they were too incapacitated by drugs to reach the commode). Theirs was a sobering, mysterious fall from the heights of industry acclaim to the depths of deformity.

So when Dead Ringers came out two years after I read Wolfe's book, I was pumped up for it. The story of the Marcus twins was perhaps the most notable yarn in a book filled with bat-shit shocking tales of madness. And, even though the film diverted crazily from their story, the basics were certainly there. In Dead Ringers, Jeremy Irons played both Mantle twins, introverted Beverly and man-of-the-world Elliott. The two share everything: their education, achievements, medical discoveries, bylines, medical practice, meals, fancy apartment, and even their women (often synonymous with "their patients").

As attached as the two are ("Whatever goes through my bloodstream," the domineering Elliott says, "goes through his, too"), there's dissention afoot when famed actress Claire Niveau (Geneviève Bujold) intervenes. Visiting the twins' OB/GYN practice while on a movie location, Claire falls in love with the aggressive Elliott without ever realizing that he's routinely switching himself off with the shaky, nervous Beverly, whom Elliott prods into participating in the deadly pranks which he thinks will HELP his brother connect more with the outside world. Claire continues on with the affair, thinking she's in love with a he. But really she's in love with a them. She begins to suspect that her new lover is a schizophrenic, and when she decides to terminate the relationship, the first great schism between the Mantle twins manifests itself in terrible ways. A devastated Beverly (with his obviously more feminine name) decides he's in love for the first time in his life, and decides on a trial separation from his brother. But neither can function well without their second half. What happens should not be repeated, but rest assured, it ain't the picture postcard of the month.

Dead Ringers is the medically-minded Cronenberg's only film with actual doctors as lead characters (that is, until his newest movie, A Dangerous Method, arrives later this year, with Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud and Michael Fassbender as his professional and romantic rival, Carl Jung). As such, the 1988 movie finally took the director's fascination with body horror--infection, disease, surgery, parasites and genetic mutation--and reconciled it with a peculiar type of mainstream cinema (there IS a dream sequence in Dead Ringers that revisits vividly Cronenberg's more dismally visceral concerns). With Dead Ringers and its core subject matter regarding the womb and what happens in it, and what it can produce, Cronenberg gets deeper into his obsession with mapping the contents of the human body. He has his Mantle twins exploring it, poking at it (sexually and surgically) and, ultimately, desiring to once again seek a long-abandoned refuge in it once again. There's a superb prologue in the film, where we see the twins as kids. It contains this marvelous, chilling bit of dialogue, which I've never forgotten for its logic and creepiness; it's written by Cronenberg and his co-scripter Norman Snider:

Elliot, Age 9: You've heard about sex...

Beverly, Age 9: Sure I have.

Elliot, Age 9: Well I've discovered why sex is.

Beverly, Age 9: You have? Fantastic!

Elliott, Age 9: It's because humans don't live under water.

Beverly, Age 9: I don't get it.

Elliot, Age 9: Well, fish don't need sex because they just lay the eggs and fertilize them in the water. Humans can't do that because they don't live in the water. They have to...internalize the water. Therefore we have sex.

Beverly, Age 9: So you mean humans wouldn't have sex if they lived in the water?

Elliot, Age 9: Well, they'd have a kind of sex. The kind where you wouldn't have to touch each other.

Beverly, Age 9: I like that idea. Have you heard of scuba diving? It's just new.

Elliot, Age 9: Self Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus.

Beverly, Age 9: Exactly.

Elliot, Age 9 [noticing a girl on a porch, Raffaella]: Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Beverly, Age 9: Yeah. You ask her. [they approach Raffaella]

Elliot, Age 9: Raffaella, will you have sex with us in our bathtub? It's an experiment.

Raffaella: Are you kidding? Fuck off, you freaks. I'm telling my father you talk dirty. Besides, I know for a fact you don't even know what fuck is. [she retreats into her house]

Elliot, Age 9 [to Beverly, walking away]: They're so different from us. And all because we don't live under water.

Of course, in the previous scene, the more shy Beverly has his more forward brother ask the girl for sex; in a world where we only needed water to procrate, the game and dance wouldn't be necessary, and thus the risk would be minimal--unless EMOTIONS came into play. This lesson is one of the things I truly adore about Dead Ringers; the film can often seem like a class on sociobiology. Adorned with Carol Spier's cold production design--with lots of glass, halogen light, and steely blue surfaces (which are perfect to illustrate underwater doings)--the Canadian Cronenberg absolutely reveals his DNA. Dead Ringers is clearly a Canadian production; it screams "Toronto!" In that way, it diverges from the story of New York City's Marcus twins considerably (and suitably; Toronto seems to me to be a much haughtier town). And the melodrama with Bujold, who's extraordinary here in one of her best roles, is really only a way to illustrate how these two boys, fearful of where they came from, ultimately find women to be inscrutable, over-emotional mutants. Given this, I wonder if telling the real story of the Marcus twins was something Cronenberg thought he couldn't slave his audience to; even HE had his limits, and the studio execs wouldn't brook that kind of story. It just wouldn't make money.

With all the chilly blues in Dead Ringers, one sequence is really supposed to stand out: the surgery scene, with doctors donned in blood red robes, trying out the twin's newest inventions: a terrifying array of Cronenbergian appliances (the director makes a masked cameo in the scene). The appliances are designed for the application against "female mutants" (crafted after the twins discover that Bujold's character, ironically, sports twin vaginas). This sequence stands as the film's centerpiece, in horror and in color. Its tension is amped up further by Peter Suschitsky's extra-sharp cinematography and Howard Shore's ominous score--one of many that he's composed for Cronenberg, and also for the likes of David Fincher's Seven and Tarsem Singh's The Cell. Lastly, the instruments themselves are pure Cronenberg, through and through.

But, finally, it is Jeremy Irons who is the film's MVP. Often times, it's more difficult to tell Irons apart from the Mantle twins than it is the tell the Mantle twins apart from each other. He handles what could have been a tired and cliched pair of roles with breathtaking aplomb. Though the makeup, costuming, hairstyling, subtle special effects (seamless and groundbreaking even for this heavily digital age), and cinematography help his characterizations to the tee, it's Irons' grappling with the marrows of each brother that makes the film succeed. Perhaps my favorite scene in the movie has the sickened Beverly being administered to by the still vital Elliott, who's still not willing to let his brother go his own way. Notice how Irons has Beverly deliver his lines here in a loopy, singsong voice that underlines both his greater humanity and his utter disconnect from reality. I also love, in this scene, how Cronenberg has his characters fittingly struggle over the separation of the famed "Siamese" twins Chang and Eng Bunker; it perfectly illustrates the illusion that the Marcus twins had with their perceived superiority over the majority of us who are not "connected," and how they couldn't envision living apart from one another:

Irons won the Academy Award for Best Actor--but not in 1988. He had to wait one year later to win for his portrayal of another insane doctor, Claus Von Bulow, in Barbet Schroeder's respectable but much-less-compelling 1989 film Reversal of Fortune. When he was up on the stage receiving his Oscar, Irons rightfully gave a shout-out to David Cronenberg, whom he probably believed was the REAL reason he'd won (he was probably right; the Academy didn't even nominate Irons in 1988, even though his lead performance was surely the top among the five best of that year). Often, Cronenberg's strongest films seem to be acute collaborations with his lead actors: Eggar in The Brood, Jeff Goldblum in The Fly, Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises and A History of Violence, Peter Weller in Naked Lunch, Ralph Fiennes in Spider, and most especially Christopher Walken in The Dead Zone. I still think his work with Irons remains the film collaboration closest to each other artist's hearts. Without either the writer/director's acute, exacting words and visuals, or Irons' hearty twin performances, Dead Ringers might have had all the effectiveness of the average episode of The Patty Duke Show. Instead, it still remains an gripping wince of a thriller, laced with downbeat biopic undertones.

Film #142: Theater of Blood

When I was a kid in the 1970s, I spent much of my time at my grandmother's modest yet spectacular post-war house on Franklin Circle in Atlanta, GA. It was located only about two minutes away from my elementary school, so I'd amble down the hill when school was out and she'd watch after me until my parents came to pick me up. My grandmother was a funny, sweet, unique individual--I really loved her. But perhaps one of my favorite parts about visiting her house was the opportunity to hang out with her next-door neighbors, an intelligent and friendly (and childless) couple named Jane and Howard Schneider.

I always like to say that it was Jane who taught me how to read. She always counters by saying I already knew how to read when she met me (I must have been five or six at the time). She's right, I suppose; I had already started in on my movie obsession by pouring over the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's movie section (I remember asking my parents what sex was after seeing the ad for Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask). By the time we met, I was already a confirmed horror movie fan; my mom and dad had long been allowing me to purchase of Forrest J. Ackerman's legendary Famous Monsters of Filmland. And I was also a devoted Sesame Street and Electric Company disciple, so I guess I did have some pretty fierce reading skills at a young age.

So if I ultimately have to agree with Jane in that I knew how to read, even she would have to agree that it was she who introduced my to my first, real meaty literature. Knowing that I was a horror fan, she decided to pull an Edgar Allan Poe collection off her well-stocked bookshelves. She helped me go through Poe's "The Raven" first. When I had trouble pronouncing or understanding words, she'd help me through it. Of course, the poem's mood, cadence and drollery had a tremendous effect on me. I was henceforth a die-hard Poe fan.

So when I found out that so many movies had been made from Poe's works in the 1960s, I gobbled them all up (they were playing on TV, and as second features at drive-ins a lot in those days). And, as a result, I then also became a Vincent Price devotee. I watched The Raven, House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, Tales of Terror, The Masque of the Red Death, The Tomb of Ligia, and The Oblong Box all because I recognized the titles as being Edgar Allan Poe stories. Sometimes, as with the

case of The Conqueror Worm or The Tomb of Ligia, the titles were the only things the movies had in common with Poe's works, but this didn't register with me until much later in life. What I really loved about these movies is that they all starred Vincent Price.

When the Journal-Constitution announced, in 1974, that Vincent Price was coming to Emory University to give a talk, Jane immediately bought two tickets and revealed to me that we were going to see my idol, live and in the flesh. I was flabbergasted. I wonder now if this wasn't my first realization that these were real people up on the screen--people with their own lives and experiences outside of what they did for the movies. I can remember the rainy night's drive to Emory's White Hall, and thinking that it was a fittingly spooky fall night to be seeing Vincent Price.

Before we got there, Jane asked me "Don't you think it would be nice if we got him a gift?" The thought hadn't occurred to me, but I immediately agreed. We decided to stop at a book store. I had read that he was a cook (a gormand, really) and Jane knew that he was an avowed Anglophile with a special interest in the Victorian Era. So we went to the cooking section and, amazingly, found a cookbook devoted solely to Victorian recipes; I can still remember the book's regal cover, with a portrait of the young Queen Victoria on it. It was a perfect, thoughtful gift.

We took out seats in the exact middle of the packed hall and at 8 pm sharp, Mr. Price was brought out on the stage. In his dark grey suit and bright tie, he looked like a giant, even from sitting this far back (he stood at around 6 foot three). He then proceeded to give a thrilling talk. I can recall his hearty recitations--by memory, no less--of an Oscar Wilde poem, and then an even more spirited one of my favorite "The Raven." And I can remember laughing at one tale he told about going to see House of Wax at an Los Angeles theater upon its 1953 release. With much sinister glee, he said that he decided to take a seat behind two teenage girls who sat screaming and squirming throughout the entire film. When it was over and the lights came up, he put his hands on their shoulders and asked them, in THAT voice, "Did you like it?" He said they almost soiled themselves.

Afterwards, Jane and I took our place in a line of people waiting to meet Vincent. He was very patient, and short-shrifted no one. When it came time for our visit with him, I was quite nervous. I was holding the book, and Jane did a lot of the talking. She shook his hand and introduced me as one of his biggest fans. He looked down at me and put his hand on the back of my head, and I said "We got you a gift." He took the book and thanked me profusely, saying that he'd never seen this particular tome. Jane told him that I was a huge movie fan, and very precocious. He then bent down and looked me in the eye and asked "Which picture of mine do you like the most?" I immediately answered Theater of Blood. He registered a bit of surprise and said "Well, you have excellent taste. That's my favorite, too." He handed me a sheet of paper, which he had signed and dedicated to me, "With gratitude and love." Jane shook hands with him and led me off. I waved to Vincent Price as we left the stage, and my first meeting with a celebrity was over. I was in a daze on the way home, and a passel of lifelong loves were sealed--for Mr. Price, for the movies, and for Jane, who has remained a strong influence (really, she's my other mother).

I still adore Theater of Blood to this day, way after I first saw it with my parents at the Northeast Expressway Drive-In in 1973. Price's role as the steadfastly Shakespearian actor Edward Lionheart, who refuses to abandon the past just for the sheer sake of keeping up with the times, seems ridiculously well-suited for him. But on top of that, I can now see that it's a skillfully directed, acted, and written film all around.

Theater of Blood begins with a brilliantly clever credits sequence that peppers the title cards with clips from silent film adaptations of Shakespeare's works. All of the scenes we see are murder sequences that will reoccur in the film we are watching. The sequence is backed by Michael J. Lewis regal theme music (his score is still one of the best ever written, filled with loss and longing). We are then treated to the film's first shot: a truck that's wryly marked "Shakespeare's Removers" barreling down the throughway, as the camera pulls pack to reveal one of the film's victims, stage critic George William Maxwell (Michael Hordern) reading the newspaper and complaining that his editors have massacred his newest scathing review. He answers the phone and is off on an errand to get some squatters out of a tenement building which he and a redevelopment committee are trying to tear down. His wife warns him vociferously not to go, because she had a bad dream the night before, and his March horoscope says he's to avoid difficult situations. "Ahh, the Ides of March," he comments before poo-pooing his wife's concerns, and he's on his way.

Here the horror begins, with Maxwell being cut to ribbons by a band of terribly scary vagrants a la Julius Caesar. He stumbles around and comes face to face with our hero, Edward Lionheart who, disguised as a constable, uses this opportunity to launch into some lines from Shakespeare's play. Hordern's character can only manage one last sentence as he looks into Lionheart's unmasked face. "You--but you're dead!" "No. No. Another critical miscalculation on your part, my boy. I am well. It is you who are dead."

And so the rhythm of Douglas Hickox's film is set up, as we are introduced to the members of the London Critic's Circle as a whole. They are, ironically, played by an exquisite set of actors with some hilarious character names: Robert Morely (the gluttonous Meridith Merridew), Harry Andrews (lustful Trevor Dickman), Ian Hendry (Peregrine Devlin, the youngest and most level-headed member of the crew), Arthur Lowe (henpecked Horace Sprout), Coral Browne (the vain Miss Chloe Moon), Robert Coote (the wine-crazy Oliver Larding), Dennis Price (the sneering Hector Snipe), and Jack Hawkins (jealous husband Solomon Psaltery, who's married to a licentious cow played by Diana Dors)  Now I'm seeing that they each and all represent the Seven Deadly Sins.

Through the investigation of the redoubtable Inspector Boot (played by Irish thespian Milo O'Shea), and through the amateur detective work of Hendry's Peregrine Devlin, we discover that the critics are being targeted by Lionheart because they continually murdered his performances by words and deeds. Lest you think that I'm giving away too much of the plot, this becomes very clear early on. The joy in watching Theater of Blood comes not in revelatory plot points--we know most of these despicable critics are doomed from the start. Said joy instead comes in seeing the inventive ways in which all murders are transposed from the pages of Shakespeare's iambic pentameter and into the modern world, all right under the noses of a grievously clueless Scotland Yard, who can't even garner leads from Lionheart's daughter, played with a witty coldness by Diana Rigg.

Chiefly, of course, Theater of Blood gives us an opportunity to see a fine and often equally misjudged actor like Vincent Price deliver some of the Bard's greatest words in a winkingly hammy fashion. The film, while being wonderfully grungy and gory, is a diabolically adroit compilation of many Shakespearian monologues from works like Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Titus Andronicus, Richard III, and Cymbaline. But, if that sort of thing doesn't float your boat, and gore is what you're after, then gore is what you get, in bright red strokes. There are stabbings, drownings, draggings, beheadings (oh, how the scene with Arthur Lowe being murdered in bed has me in stitches-pun intended--each time I see it), electrocutions, and a memorable gorging that's saved for last. Almost all of them are completely horrifying while also being keen and jolly, thanks to the superb script by Anthony Greville-Bell, Stanley Mann and John Kohn.

Director Hickox had previously delivered a passable 1970 adaptation of Joe Orton's Entertaining Mr. Sloane, and a notable 1979 prequel to Stanley Baker's 1964 war epic Zulu, called Zulu Dawn. But most of his output was forgettable, so it becomes even more remarkable that Theater of Blood is as fine a film as it is (though critics, predictably, savaged it upon its 1973 release; many were probably offended, I guess, that they were being targeted as villains). Hickox makes the wise choice to shoot entirely on location, making the film a grand tour of both the sumptuous and decaying sides of 1970s London (he's helped along by cinematographer Wolfgang Suschitzky, whose favoring of wide-angle lenses and colorful contrasts enlivens the movie considerably).

Still, when I watch Theater of Blood today, I am bowled over by Vincent Price's performance; it looms over everything else in the movie. Decked out in a myriad of inventive costumes (by Michael Baldwin) and make-up applications (by the deft George Blackler), his Edward Lionheart is at once dramatically compelling, darkly hilarious, and easy to love. The film must have appealed to him on so many levels (Price got to explore his Anglophilia, his acting roots, his love of good food and wine, and he even gets to murder his wife, actress Coral Browne, on screen). It's a terrific film. I'm so glad to have met Mr. Price, and to have agreed with him, for that one wonderful moment, that Theater of Blood provided him with his greatest screen triumph.

Friday, May 27, was the 100th anniversary of Mr. Price's birth. I celebrate it here, but also at The Flaming Nose, where I delve into his many television appearances, and deeper into the man's charming personality.

10 Scary Possibilities for Halloween

For Halloween, 2010, I offer clips (and, thus, suggestions) of the most mortifying cinematic offerings out there. Gird your loins, and here we go (and spoilers abound so BE WARNED):


JIGOKU (Nobuo Nakagawa, 60).
It's scarier without the subtitles, this unbelievable preview for a bloody tour through Hell. Watch it only if you're brave.


QUATERMASS AND THE PIT/FIVE MILLION YEARS TO EARTH (Roy Ward Baker, 67).
This trailer chronicles the path to an ultimate destination for the Brits' famed Professor Quatermass, finally faced with more than he can handle in this masterpiece of sci-fi/horror from the recently deceased Hammer veteran Roy Ward Baker. This is a must for any horror fan.


THEATER OF BLOOD (Douglas Hickox, 73).
A truly magnificent fan-made trailer for Vincent Price's greatest performance on screen. Michael J. Lewis' brilliant theme music takes center stage here. See this one for smarts, laffs, and scares.


HOUR OF THE WOLF (Ingmar Bergman, 68).
A brilliantly constructed trailer for Bergman's one true horror film. As you might expect, there's nothing like it out there.


RINGU (Hideo Nakata, 98).
The incredible cursed videotape, in its entirety.


THE OLD DARK HOUSE (James Whale, 32).
Houseguest Gloria Stuart is put through the ringer by nasty Eva Moore in this radical scare scene from horror master James Whale.


TARGETS (Peter Bogdanovich, 68).
Boris Karloff, as near-retirement horror star Byron Orlock, tells a frightening tale. In its last moments, director/writer Bogdanovich told Karloff to concentrate on the idea of his own death. Karloff did the scene in one take, to crew applause. His final seconds here, pondering his own upcoming time in the grave, cemented Karloff's standing as the continuing King of Horror.


AT MIDNIGHT, I'LL TAKE YOUR SOUL (Jose Mojica Marins, 64).
An opening credits sequence that'll curdle the blood before the story even begins. That Coffin Joe! What a character!


PHANTASM (Don Coscarelli, 79).
While prowling the Morningside Funeral Home, Michael Baldwin tries to escape from the mysterious, evil Silver Sphere. It may look funny here, but it's horrifying in the context of this relentlessly unsettling film.


IMAGES (Robert Altman, 72).
Susannah York won Best Actress at Cannes in '72 for playing this extremely unbalanced author on holiday with her husband...or...whoever it is. You'll know immediately this is a horror film: simply listen to John Williams' singular, Oscar-nominated score. This movie, and York's screams, will prevent you from sleep.

Film #132: An American Werewolf in London

In the early 1980s, there were few American directors whose style was as crunchy as John Landis'. It's difficult to explain what I mean by the term "crunchy"--I just know it's the correct word to describe many of the movies Landis made from 1977 to 1992. The only times he failed us were with the unbearable Spies Like Us, the equally awful Sly Stallone vehicle Oscar and his merely bland but hugely costly episode for Twilight Zone: The Movie. But the period's good stuff far outweighs the bad: Kentucky Fried Movie, National Lampoon's Animal House, The Blues Brothers, An American Werewolf in London, Trading Places, Michael Jackson's Thriller, Into the Night, Three Amigos, Coming to America, and Innocent Blood. All are primo American comedies of the 1970s and 80s. Actually, along with Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Albert Brooks and maybe Zucker/Abrams/Zucker (Airplane, Top Secret) and Ivan Reitman (Meatballs, Ghostbusters), he's one of the era's top comedy autuers. But, honestly, if we're to look closely at Landis' work, he's as much a director of musicals as comedies. Of course, Michael Jackson's Thriller is his purest musical, and now with the death of the King of Pop, it may be his most pored-over film. But then consider Otis Day (in real life, he's Lloyd Williams) and the Knights singing "Shama-Lama-Ding-Dong" and "Shout" in Animal House; James Brown rocking the cathedral, Aretha Franklin tearing apart her diner, and Ray Charles moving the crowds in The Blues Brothers; the tuneful Randy Newman numbers Steve Martin, Martin Short, and Chevy Chase perform in Three Amigos; and the energetic African dance number in Coming to America. With this, and the colorful music-based sequences in many of his other films (including American Werewolf), Landis is very much a musically-minded director.

I guess if I'm to look into my heart, the word "crunchy" really refers primarily to Landis' cutting methods. Whether working with editors George Folsey Jr. or Malcolm Campbell, his films always display the unmistakable branding of post-production expertise. Landis' editing, more so than that of most directors, has a palpably mathematical quality about it. It swiftly gets us in and out of scenes, often with a barely registered punchline or an extra shock to the system before we go. And it thrives on juxtaposing chaos with calm. Look at the insane ending to The Blues Brothers--that off-screen clicking of a hundred guns, and then we cut to that quiet shot of Jake and Elwood at the firing end of an impossibly well-placed number of gun barrels. Or look at Animal House, where we have all this wackiness ensuing outside and then we get a quick, calm look at Flounder (Stephen Furst) asking a store cashier "Can I have a thousand marbles, please?" Or how, right in the middle of the horrifying transformation scene in American Werewolf, Landis humorously cuts to a short insert of the scene's only witness: a grinning Mickey Mouse figurine.

There are a lot more moments like this in American Werewolf, a movie that registers as Landis' best. It's funny, but it's also extremely terrifying--often very much in the same frame. Length-wise, at 97 minutes, it's the director's most economical work (his movies tend to run a little longer than necessary). American Werewolf tells a simple story, effectively, and then gets right on out of there. With its dismaying final shot, and the bouncily-scored credit crawl that instantaneously follows it up, it's a movie that delightedly sucker-punches us and then darts laughing down the street.Perhaps American Werewolf's most surprising element is its sweetness. In fact, one could say that Landis movies often take us aback with moments of unexpected sentiment. My favorite scene in The Blues Brothers has Jake, recently released from prison, falling instantly asleep on Elwood's tenement bed. Elwood hollers "Hey, you sleaze! That's my bed." And then Elwood, glad to see his brother again, covers him up and continues cooking toast over a Sterno flame. And I'm always soothed by how much I adore the romantic elements in Animal House, Coming to America, and Trading Places. However, even within this pantheon, the connection enjoyed by the American Werewolf leads is really something special.

Former Dr. Pepper spokesman and star of ABC's disco-themed sitcom Makin' It David Naughton plays an average guy wandering through the British countryside with his best friend Jack (Griffin Dunne). They're first seen getting off a truck with a bunch of sheep on it ("Goodbye, girls!" Jack says as the truck pulls off). It's telling--thought the boys sadly don't get it--that the only establishment they spot to duck into is called The Slaughtered Lamb. Taking refuge from the cold moors, David and Jack instantly suss out that they're unwelcome outsiders here, particularly when they ask about the creepy pentagram painted on the walls. This stuns the rowdy crowd of British townies into silence, and the two friends feel prodded into escape (after they're gone, the pub's patrons argue about whether they should have insisted they stay, even though they DO warn them to keep to the roads).

It's after they start hearing pained howls underneath the light of a full moon that David and Jack notice they haven't stayed on the roads ("Oops," Jack says). In a sickening, disorienting sequence, the friends run round directionless for a few minutes before realizing they've been spotted by something (the camera eerily sets itself in front of them). And then the carnage begins. For a movie that's billed as a comedy, this scene--like many more that will follow it--is brutal and unsettling, and gamely lets the horror movie element take hold. (SPOILER ALERT!) Jack's death is sudden, bloody, and frantic. But David survives, passing out after the townies pump buckshot into this gigantic wolf that's attacked them.

David wakes up in a London hospital with Alex (Jenny Agutter) as his instantly smitten nurse. He is feverish and slashed up, and drifts in and out of fitful sleeps where he has some potent nightmares (these are some of the film's best scenes, and if you haven't seen it, I'll do you a favor by shutting up). David also starts getting visits from the dead and decaying Jack (to me, Rick Baker's oozing, meaty work on Dunne's once-pretty face is really what won him the Oscar, the first competitive one for makeup, in 1981). Jack pleads with David to off himself, to spare the lives of others he's bound to kill, because now he is a werewolf, and we all know what that means. But David thinks he's merely going crazy, and he doesn't take Jack's advise to heart. In fact, upon his release, David finds he has something more to live for when Alex saucily invites him to stay with her for a while. This sparks a relationship that's tender and sexy--we like these two people together--and this inclusion of a bit of heart in the story pays off later in unexpectedly touching ways. David Naughton only appeared in a few more forgettable movies after American Werewolf, but he makes an brave impression here as a complete innocent to whom fate has been unkind. This may be the best portrayal of a lycanthrope ever (his piercing screams during the demanding transformation scene--set incongruously to Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising"--convince us that turning into a werewolf is quite a bit more painful than the serene lap-dissolves we were once familiar with from movies like the Lon Chaney Jr. Wolf Man of the 1940s). Of course, Baker's work here is magnificent, and inventive (the close up of the hair sprouting from David's skin was achieved by pulling on the strands from behind the patch of flesh-like latex and then running the footage backwards). But it's Naughton's performance that terrifies us (I love it when, in mid-transformation, David's human side makes a final appearance when he apologizes to the dead Jack for calling him "a walking meat loaf"). There are many amazing set pieces strewn about here: the stalking of a London businessman in a deserted tube station; the lovely, lathery shower David and Alex take together, set to Van Morrison's "Moondance"; the convention of the dead in a Leicester Square porno house (which plays a funny sex film called "See You Next Wednesday," a title phrase that's strangely appeared in numerous Landis movies); the aformentioned nightmares; the morning after, when David finds himself in the buff and penned up with a pack of wolves at the London Zoo (a scene that culminates with the immortal line "A naked American man stole my balloons"); and, perhaps most stultifying, the visceral car-crash chaos that erupts when the werewolf hits the busy British streets. These scenes, plus the perturbing, over-too-quick finale and the gorily amusing moments featuring the rapidly rotting Dunne (who should have gotten a Supporting Actor Oscar nomination), help insure An American Werewolf in London won't be sinking into obscurity any time soon.

Film #123: Bigger Than Life

Bigger Than Life, released in 1956, is Nicholas Ray's masterpiece starring James Mason as a milquetoast elementary school teacher named Ed Avery, struggling economically at home and at work, and newly diagnosed with a rare, dooming affliction. The cure is a hormone--cortisone--that the menacing doctors advise him to take indefinitely. Once he's out of harm's way, the physicians also warn him to look out for any emotional changes, because cortisone often results in extreme manic-depression for its takers. But he's not listening. Immediately we get the feeling that only bad things are going to happen (Ray first has us glimpse Mason from behind, his camera looming ominously behind the character as he massages his stinging neck).

The journey Mason embarks on is a veritable nightmare, pure and simple (I'm now wondering if 50s-movie-fan Todd Haynes got a little inspiration here for his 1995 film Safe, with Julianne Moore, because it features a similarly lifeless lead character who's propelled into turmoil due to a difficult disease). It's not long after he begins the cortisone treatment that Mason becomes a thoroughly offbeat person. Feeling "ten feet tall" after the treatment, he soon wants to feel even taller, and begins abusing the drug. First, he's physically manic: he's oily and sweaty as he throws his old college football around--inside a 50s-immaculate house--with his adoring son (Christopher Olson). Early in the movie, before the affliction really takes hold, Mason's character genially describes himself as "dull" to his wife, played by Barbara Rush (he says she's dull, too, and we can feel this exquisite yet housebound woman wilt at the description--she doesn't know how "exciting" her life is about to get). Reacting to this malaise, Mason forces his happy-as-is wife and son's accompaniment on an ill-advised spending spree that's not in line with his income as a teacher (also, Mason rashly ditches his at-one-time thoughtful but demeaning = second job as a taxi dispatcher, which he has kept secret from his wife and child).

The film's second act deepens the conflict. Now, not only is Mason overactive in body, he's overactive in mind as well. He holds court at a school PTA meeting, telling adoring parents that "Childhood is a congenital disease--and the purpose of education is to cure it. We're breeding a race of moral midgets!" (Interestingly, this splits the parents into factions: one thinks this man is a monster, one thinks he should be the school's principal.) Mason becomes a true terror at home, goading his once-loving son past achievement and into hatred, threatening to deny him dinner if he doesn't catch the next football pass or solve the math problem put to him (both scenes are terrifying, especially today; modern parents will find the sequences absolutely abhorrent). Mason, overdosing on the cortisone (he thinks something supreme is happening to him, and here the film becomes a drug-addiction parable), even comes to the conclusion that wife and son are trying to undermine his authority, and thus--in a sickening dinner-table sequence--he summarily disowns them.

SPOILER ALERT: The utterly mortifying third act has the son--who now knows the pink-bottled drugs are transforming his dad into a ghoul--rummaging through Mason's belongings in order to find and destroy the cortisone (the unbelievably well-directed scene results in the film's one true JUMP moment). The scene occurs just as Mason is turning his newly-cynical worldview to religion as well (we can see Mason shrinking into despair during dinner-time grace and church outings). After Olsen's "betrayal" (in which the boy says, amazingly, "I'd rather see you dead than see you like you are now"), Mason picks up the Holy Bible and refers to Abraham killing his son after he sins. Rush--who delivers a strong, superb performance--tries to dissuade Mason who, scissors in hand, is bound to kill Olsen. She tries to remind him that God was merciful with Abraham, but Mason emotes, in the film's most famous moment, as he slams the Bible shut, "GOD WAS WRONG" (the Bible is then noticably relegated to the floor). This movie's final twenty minutes will have you on biting your nails, as Rush calls on Mason's co-worker and athletic best friend Walter Matthau (terrific, as always), to come to their rescue. SPOILER ENDED.

Director Nicholas Ray (left)--with other films like On Dangerous Ground, The Lusty Men, In A Lonely Place, King of Kings, and Rebel Without A Cause--has consistently pleaded the case for out-of-bounds, truth-telling characters. But with Bigger Than Life, he's staked higher, more rocky ground. After reading Gavin Lambert's tell-all memoir Mainly About Lindsay Anderson, I now know that Bigger Than Life is Ray's confession about his own deadly addiction. His film makes us aware of the causes of Ed Avery's faults, but it nevertheless compels us to despise him first and pity him second. Written by Cyril Hume and Richard Maibaum (the latter most famous for being the scribe of many James Bond pictures), with contributions from Clifford Odets, Ray, and Mason himself, the movie is stultifyingly photographed in scary, shocking contemporary lights and shadows by Joe McDonald. This is especially so in scenes where Rush and Mason clash over the run of the house (these moments often take place on the home's staircase which, by the end of the film, is brutally demolished). Though I don't care for David Raskin's overemotive score, or for the movie's too-comforting final seconds, Bigger Than Life is an overlooked, influential stunner that deserves much more adoration.'

Film #120: Play Misty For Me

I have a vague idea why Clint Eastwood's Play Misty For Me is such a sentimental favorite of mine; I think it was one of the first horror movies I ever caught on the big screen (its original title, by the way, was The Slasher). But, seeing it now, Play Misty For Me is really only decent in very limited ways--a rarity among Eastwood-directed projects. The iconic actor debuted as a feature filmmaker with this 1971 horror movie that's obviously a progenitor to Adrian Lyne's more famous (and classier) Fatal Attraction. To wit: Eastwood plays a successful man--a smooth jazz disc jockey in Carmel, California--who finds himself bedeviled by a lovestruck wackadoo (Jessica Walter).

Here's where the problems begin--for the film's characters, and for the film itself. Eastwood's Dave Garver is supposed to be a player in the bedroom, but somehow he can't see that it's a mistake for him to ever get involved with this crazy woman. Evelyn begins their relationship mired in deception; this should have been his warning sign #1. Though they meet as "strangers" at his local watering hole, she conceals her identity from him--recognizing her voice, he finds out quickly she's the woman who's been calling him at the station, requesting Errol Garner's "Misty" every night. Okay, that's weird enough right there...but Davey-boy can't help letting the little head think for the big one. So they sleep together. Big mistake.

Soon, she's showing up unannounced at his hep, 70s-ed-out seaside pad, ready to make elaborate steak dinners for him. She lurks around in the seaside brush, following him on dates with his true love (Donna Mills), and even bursts in angrily as he's conducting an important business lunch (in one of the movie's best scenes; the film really perks up when Walters lets Evelyn get GODDAMN angry). Dave's pretty much had enough of her quite early on but, dammit, she won't get a clue. I guess this is before the time the law had the concept of "restraining orders" down, but Dave's reluctance to report her insanity to the police is nevertheless frustrating for the viewer. Eventually, things have to get much more nasty before Eastwood takes hold of the situation; when he does, the revenge is tasty but is meted out too quickly to be satisfying (SPOILER: Clint exposes of her with one punch). But Jessica Walter does such a yeoman's job of creating this clingy, frothing monster that we wanna see her get a little more stinging torture dealt to her.Still, Jessica Walter is superb in it; she makes you really wanna choke this woman's guts out (she's the film's star attraction, although the screenplay is not fair to her character; we never really get to know anything about her). The movie has other merits. Bruce Surtees' inky black photography is, as always, superb, and Alexander Golitzen's art direction is shabbily fancy (I love Dave's confusing, slightly sloppy place). We get to see footage of Carmel, the town which Eastwood called home for many years, and for which he was, in fact, elected mayor in the late 1980s. It's novel, also, seeing director Don Siegel (Dirty Harry, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, pictured right) being given marching orders by his famous protege; Siegel portrays Dave's favorite bartender (they humorously play an inscrutable--and wholly imaginary--game at the beginning of the movie called "Cry Bastion"). Also, Roberta Flack's Grammy-winning "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" makes for a backing track to a pretty, if inconsequential, love scene between Eastwood and Mills. Finally, I really get a kick out of seeing Eastwood in late-nite DJ mode; in another world, he would've made a excellent record-spinner, equipped with that FM-lite whisper of his. A thorny look at 70s sexual politics, Play Misty For Me has its pluses, but its implausible screenplay isn't one of them (it was co-written by Dean Riesner, who probably only polished Jo Heims original script; he authored better work on three other Don Siegel productions: Coogan's Bluff, Dirty Harry, and Charley Varrick). Still, it has enough of that good ol' 70s charm to be immanently watchable, at least once.