FEATURING: Ruth Roman, Anjanette Comer, Marianna Hill, Suzanne Zenor, David Mooney [as David Manzy]

PLOT: A social worker becomes obsessed with a case involving a family with an adult son

with the intellect of a one-year old, who sleeps in a crib and wears a diaper.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The Baby‘s infantilism premise, which is handled with an almost disconcerting matter-of-factness, is outlandish, but the film is fairly conventional in its execution.

COMMENTS: Although it has a minor cult following, for the most part The Baby is a fairly ordinary thriller with low production values.  Director Post had previously worked extensively in television, and his direction here shows it: it’s efficient, competent, but unexciting.  But the colorful material overcomes the pedestrian direction, and you can see why this one stuck in people’s memory: the film “stars” an actor in his twenties who sucks his thumb and sleeps in a crib, and no one in the movie seems to think this is the slightest bit odd.  His teenage babysitter even changes his adult-sized diapers without a second thought.  That The Baby is also filled with hints (and often more) of psychosexual perversity—infantilism, sadism, pathological possessiveness—doesn’t hurt its memorability quotient a bit.  And despite the movie’s made for TV feel, there are a couple of things that it does very well.  The acting is uneven, but Ruth Roman brings verve to her role as the bitter old matron who’s willing to do anything to keep her Baby.  She channels Joan Crawford’s looks, Suzanne Pleshette’s voice, and Shelly Winters’ orneriness; by the end, she’s become a Ma Barker-style family queenpin, masterminding plots and directing her two oversexed girls on kidnapping and rescue missions.  (Perhaps coincidentally, and perhaps not, the family’s “two sexually predatory sisters and a nonverbal idiot brother” sibling structure replicates the even weirder clan from Jack Hill’s Spider Baby [1968]). Roman provides so much bitchy fun that you wish she’d thrown all restraint out the window and gone into full bore Mommie Dearest histrionics (if she had, the film really would be the undisputed camp classic it claims to be).  The downside of Roman’s charisma is that she sets off the soap opera-level talents of the pretty but vapid actresses hired to play against her.  Speaking of bad acting, though, nothing beats David Manzy’s head-lolling, mouth-breathing performance as Baby.  His attempts at infantile mewling and babbling are embarrassing.  Maybe that’s why (some viewers report) in earlier television screenings of the film, Manzy’s voice was overdubbed with the cries of a real baby!  It’s hard to say Manzy’s performance is bad—we don’t really have any other adult infant characters like Baby to compare it against, and maybe this is exactly how a twenty-year old with the brain of a one-year old would act—but it is ridiculous-looking.  Besides Roman’s performance, the other thing that stands out about The Baby is the twist ending.  For most of its running time, the movie does the minimum necessary to keep you interested.  There will be long sequences of the social worker visiting Baby, lightly fencing with Roman and her daughters over the best interests of the child, and just when you start checking your watch and wondering whether this is all the movie’s got, bam—Baby will do something wrong and need to be punished, providing another kinky plot development that gives the film life again for a few more minutes.  The twist ending operates in the same way, coming after the movie has taken an unexpected but unsuspenseful detour into slasher movie territory for the climax, with characters being picked off one by one in a too-dark house.  Then, just as you’re about to yawn and put The Baby to bed, there’s a pleasantly perverse little jolt at the end that wakes you up and makes you look at the film with new eyes.

Severin Films re-released The Baby in 2011 in a widescreen version remastered from the original negative.  The movie had previously been available on DVD in a couple of inferior incarnations, one from Image Entertainment and in a no-frills full screen version from the now-defunct Geneon, a company specializing in anime.  Severin’s release  adds only a few extras—the original trailer and telephone interviews with director Post and “star” Mooney—but it’s the best presentation the film’s fans are likely to see for an almost 40-year old camp thriller.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a strangely interesting little curio. If you’re in the mood for something unabashedly off-the-wall, then it should be worth your while to check it out.”–porfle, HK and Cult Film News (DVD)

(This movie was nominated for review by our own Eric Gabbard,who called it “weird but well constructed.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Alejandro Jodorowsky

FEATURING: Alejandro Jodorowsky, Horacio Salinas

PLOT: A thief, who looks like Jesus Christ, silently wanders through a bizarre and depraved city with an armless and legless midget companion, participating in a lizard circus where toads are dressed like conquistadors, bearing a crucifix through the streets and eating from Jesus’ body, and meeting a prostitute with a chimp.  He comes to a giant tower in the middle of a busy highway and rides up a hook to the top, where a mystic with a menagerie introduces him to seven companions and purifies him by burning his feces and turning it into gold, among other rituals.  After preparation the assembled nine set off the find the Holy Mountain where the immortals are said to live, so they can displace them and become like gods themselves.

BACKGROUND:

• In preparation for making the film Jodorowsky studied with two a Zen master and with a disciple of Gurdijeff.  Part of his training involved sleep deprivation (he claims he went a week without sleep) and taking LSD for the first time.
• During filming, the Catholic church in Mexico was not happy with The Holy Mountain because of its apparent blasphemy, and the President Luis Echeverría’s regime was also angry with Jodorowsky because soldiers in Mexican uniforms were depicted massacring civilians.  There were public marches protesting the filming.  Per Jodorowsky’s DVD commentary, he left Mexico with the footage he had already shot to finish the movie in New York after receiving threats from government officials and paramilitary groups.
• John Lennon partly financed the film.  The budget was $750,000, a fairly extravagant sum for a film largely made in Mexico in 1973.
• According to Jodoworowsky’s DVD commentary, George Harrison wanted to play the role of the thief, but balked at playing a nude scene where the character has his anus scrubbed.  Sources at the time reported that it was Lennon who wanted the role and that he could not follow through due to scheduling conflicts.
• Jodorowsky dubbed the voice of the thief.
• Various “masters” the characters meet as they prepare for their ascent of the Holy Mountain were played by actual Mexican shamans and witch doctors.
• Due to disagreements between Jodorowsky and producer Allen Klein, The Holy Mountain did not receive any sort of legitimate home video release until 2007.  The same issues plagued Jodorowsky’s previous film, El Topo.  According to Jodorowsky, Klein became angry and vindictive when, thinking it was too commercial, the director abandoned a project to adapt the erotic classic The Story of O with the producer and instead pursued an opportunity to make George Hebert’s cult science fiction novel Dune (a project Jodorowsky never completed—David Lynch was hired instead to film Dune, which ended up as a flop and an embarrassment).

INDELIBLE IMAGE: There are so many candidates—the apocalyptic toad and chameleon circus with amphibians dressed as conquistadors and missionaries, the giant mechanical vagina art installation stimulated by a nude woman with a probe, the hermaphrodite with leopard head breasts that squirt milk onto a proselyte—that choosing a single representative image seems like an almost arbitrary exercise.  Still, there is one trick so stunningly beautiful and effective that Jodorowsky essentially uses it twice: the live birds that fly from out of the gaping wounds of corpses mowed down by fascist soldiers.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: The Holy Mountain plays like a cut-up version of the world’s sacred

Short clip from the “Neptune” sequence of The Holy Mountain

texts.   If you tore out pages from the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, The Golden Bough, and a dozen other esoteric works from the Kabbalah to Gurdijeff—throwing in a couple of sleazy pulp novels for good measure—and put them together in a giant cauldron, stirred them up and pulled out sheaves at random and asked a troupe of performance artists, carnival freaks, and hippies tripping on peyote to act them out, you might come up with a narrative something like The Holy Mountain. Here, the cauldron is Alejandro Jodorowsky’s skull, and the stirrer was LSD, and an ex-Beatle gave the director and master visual stylist a small fortune to bring any elaborate and depraved fantasy he could dream up to shocking life.  The singularly bizarre results—the pure, undiluted essence of mad Jodorowsky—are unlike any film that has ever existed before, or ever shall be, world without end.

COMMENTS: The first thirty or forty minutes of The Holy Mountain are as astounding, intense and hallucinatory an experience as anything any weird movie alchemist has ever conjured.  It contains imagery so sacrilegious it would make Buñuel spontaneously give the sign of the cross, and so confusing it would make David Lynch throw up his hands in frustration.  This extended opening segment may be as fine a work of surrealism as has ever been filmed; for pure passion, audacity and agonizing irrationality, the thief with Christ’s face’s journey through a depraved, nightmarish Mexican city is hard to beat.

Though many find The Holy Mountain‘s narrative weak (if not frustratingly obscure), the story does easily break into three acts: the Thief’s adventures in the city, his apprenticeship to the Alchemist inside the tower, and the trip to and ascent of the Holy Mountain itself.  Each segment has its own aesthetic sensibility, while retaining their essentially demented Jodorowskyness, and together they form a loose allegory about the soul’s quest for enlightenment: from living in a corrupt world to the first stirrings of a spiritual sense to the actual climb towards enlightenment.

The film begins with a prologue featuring the Alchemist (played by Jodorowsky), his downturned face hidden by a ludicrously broad-brimmed sombrero, as he shaves the heads of two nude women.  The episode has nothing to do with the main narrative but imparts a ritualistic air to what follows.  The credits then roll, over a series of reverse zooms revealing flamboyant dioramas decked out with cryptic symbols—a blue eyeball surrounded by azure peacock feathers and shiny turquoise beetle shells—before the view shifts and the camera alights on the face of a bearded man covered in flies.  A dwarf with stumps for arms and legs drags himself to the sleeping body and wakes him; after some adventures involving a mock crucifixion and stoning by a group of boys with green genitalia, the pair wander from the desert into a city.  The metropolis is a riot of perversion and decadence: brown-skinned soldiers parade in the streets carrying crucified, gutted goat carcasses, and execute dozens of civilians in the city square while white faces laugh and take pictures from inside the air conditioned comfort of a tour bus.  The Thief gets a job working in the “Great Toad and Chameleon Circus,” where costumed reptiles re-enact the conquest of Mexico in a bloody spectacle, and then serves as the model for a wax Christ made by four obese entrepreneurs, three of whom dress as Roman centurions and the fourth as the Virgin Mary (in drag).  Angered by his experience, the Thief first eats the face off his likeness, which is filled with dough underneath the wax visage, then ties balloons to the statute’s legs and releases it to fly to the heavens.  Uniformed prostitutes (including a child) prowl the streets and cathedrals; they follow the Thief, and the one who carries a pet chimpanzee with her is particularly attracted to him.  He comes to a large red tower in the middle of a highway, before which peasants are holding a banquet; a large fishhhook descends from the tower. On the end of the hook is a bag full of gold, and the peasants place food on the hook.  The Thief, spying the gold, throws the food off and climbs on the hook itself as it rises to a hole at the top of the tower.  And those are just the main highlights of the tour; there are two or three stunning, never-before imagined scenes per minute during this astounding first half hour, whose never-ending stream of images assault the viewer like a swarm of surrealist bees.

There is an inconsequential amount of dialogue during this amazing, lysergic sequence, which makes the proceedings all the stranger.  The soundtrack (by Jodorowsky and free-jazz legend Don Cherry) consists of Hindi drones and percussion, Tuvan throat singing, pan flutes, gongs, buzzing insects, classical dirges, a bit of melodious cornet improvisation by Cherry, a German march for the conquest of the chameleons, and a waltz with muted trumpet and xylophone to which the soldiers slow dance with each other.  The vast, eclectic, exotic instrumentation changes form almost as often as Jodorowsky changes visions—we find ourselves bathing in a new and unique musical environment every minute or so—and the orchestration is always in perfect harmony with what’s going on onscreen.  Like the imagery, this musical invention can’t quite sustain itself for the picture’s entire running time, but it’s a masterful achievement while it lasts and adds immensely to the sensory saturation.

The magic continues as the Thief enters the Alchemist’s abode: first, in a magnificent rainbow room where the master waits on his throne of goats with a camel and a naked Nubian woman tattooed with Hebrew characters and astrological symbols.  The remaining sets in the sanctuary are equally opulent.  The Alchemist’s marble pool comes complete with a bathing hippo.  He has a hall of mirrors with an obelisk.  Rooms are decorated with occult symbols on the floor, and they spin; everything is painted in vivid primary colors.  One circular room is lined with Jodorowosky’s surreal interpretations of Tarot cards.  In this section’s centerpiece scene, the Thief is encased in a glass bowl on top of a brick apparatus with braziers and copper tubing; the Alchemist burns his excrement, tuning it into gold while the fecal smoke flows into the bulb and chokes the thief.  Meanwhile, the nude woman plays a cello and a pelican strolls around the machine.  More rituals ensue, as the Thief is further purified and absorbs obscure Zen lessons at the feet of the Master.

The tone abruptly changes from mystical to satirical/absurdist when the script introduces seven new characters, fellow seekers like the thief, each associated with a planet.   The previous segment featured some incisive, blackly comic moments—as when a soldier begins to rape a tourist’s wife, and the enthralled man tries to capture the amusing native antics with his camera—but these were tiny pointed shards of ridicule poking out from an illogical, nightmare mass.  The segments here are blades, forged for cutting.  In voiceover, each of the initiates describes their backstory on their home planet: they are Important People. Mars is an arms dealer, Jupiter a millionaire, Neptune an enforcer, and so on.  Jodorowsky uses these segments to take scattershot aim targets including militarism, consumerism, modern art, political propaganda, fascism, and even the modern art and architecture scenes.  There are many memorable images in these mini-movies.  Mars designs a line of munitions targeted at the various religions (Judaism gets a multi-barelled gun shaped like a menorah).  Saturn is a toy designer who develops her product line with future wars in mind; her computers predict a conflict with Peru in the coming generation, so she designs a series of anti-Peruvian amusements for kiddies.  The castrating chief of police for the autocratic Neptunian despotism gets perhaps the film’s best line: “Your sacrifice has completed my sanctuary of 1,000 testicles.”  Weirdness continues to permeate these sequences, and the planetary excursions allow Jodorowsky to broaden his already wild palette.  But the comic tone is a jarring change from the formerly mystical atmosphere and themes, and the constant narration is a significant stylistic departure from the near wordless silence that came before.  Perhaps Jodorowsky meant these digressive excursions to provide a lighthearted breather from the intense surrealism that came before; it feels like, halfway through the film, he’s drifting off point.

One of the minor issues with The Holy Mountain is that each successive sequence becomes slightly less surreal and less intense than the one that came before it; which is not to say that the final act isn’t astoundingly weird, by ordinary cinematic standards, but just that what came before is so dreamlike that Jodorowsky faces an impossible task trying to top himself.  After some more purification rituals, the group, under the direction of the Alchemist, leaves the tower and ventures out toward the Holy Mountain, where they intend to displace the Immortals.  This journey is shot entirely out of doors, with the cast, now with shaved heads, dressed in dull brown robes or Olympic jogging suits (when they aren’t nude, that is).  This new naturalistic style (Jodorowsky calls this portion a “documentary” of the group’s spiritual quest) robs the film of two of its greatest strengths: set design and costuming.  Previously, whether we were in a depraved urban dystopia, an arcane alchemists lair, or an art exhibit on Jupiter, there was always some amazing detail to draw the eye, some Hermetic symbol or freak or weirdo wandering around the frame.  Now, things are relatively restrained; Jodorowsky spends more time tossing out aphoristic bonbons drawn from Buddhism or rabbinical literature than he does conjuring menacing visions.  There are only two sections that truly liven up the weirdness here.  The first is the Pantheon Bar sequence, where the questers meet a drunken carnival of fellow seekers who began following the path of enlightenment but were distracted by a weakness of their own ego and stopped at the base of the mountain, abandoning their ascent.  The most notable of the caricatures is a gentleman in a feathered hat with a stoned expression who informs them that “the cross was a mushroom–and the mushroom was also the tree of Good and Evil.”  (Jodorowsky mocking acidheads seems to be the definition of biting the hand that feeds you).  The second manic sequence occurs when each of the members of the team has a dream just before reaching the summit.  The director goes all-out grotesque here: the visions include animal sex, hermaphrodism, castration, ejaculation, and lactation.

Jodorowsky’s finale is notoriously controversial, but ending this movie was an impossible task.  If the Thief’s journey is an allegory for the soul’s journey towards Ultimate Reality, then how could the director film God?  What could he do that would exceed the fractured visions that started the movie?  Jodorowsky doesn’t even try; what he does, instead, is basically to topple his entire house of cards with a wave of his hand.  The Thief discovers that he could have ended his quest an hour ago, when he met a nice girl.  Everyone goes home.  With this ending, Jodorowsky seems to be saying that the character’s search for metaphorical enlightenment was itself an illusion.  Of course, all the blood, sweat and cerebral juices the cast and crew spent bringing this bewildering and extravagant spectacle to life belie that conclusion.  But, unable to drop an enlightenment bombshell at the film’s climax, this was the best the director could do.

Is Jodorowsky a Surrealist?  The tableaux he creates are shocking and appear irrational, but to him each image has a particular, specific symbolic meaning.  The key part of that sentence, perhaps, is “to him,” because he rarely provides his audience the necessary clues to divine the meaning he’s propounding.  Viewers pick up bits and pieces of his intended message; it’s easy to see, for example, that the transvestite Virgin Mary selling crosses to tourists represents the Catholic Church distorting the true meaning of Christ’s message.  When the Thief goes on a rampage and wrecks the crucifixes, most will catch the reference to Jesus overturning the tables of the moneychangers in the Temple.  But in a film where the director references nearly every mystical or occult tradition the world has ever produced, scrawling Taoist symbols on the hide of a passing elephant, how could he expect anyone to catch all the details and follow his overall argument—if, indeed, he has one?  Listening to his commentary on the DVD helps explain what he had on his mind on a scene-by-scene basis, but his exegesis only confirms that he isn’t consistent with his symbolism.  At one point he tells us that the Thief’s legless and armless friend represents his divine spark within (when he first awakens his body from its drunken coma).  Later, we are informed that the very same character represents the monstrosities of the ego (when the Alchemist demands the Thief throw the freak over the side of a boat to cleanse his soul).  How are we supposed to follow along if the author won’t even keep his own symbolism constant?  A thirtieth degree Mason couldn’t decipher a third of the symbolism of The Holy Mountain.  Jodorowsky’s method is to flit about from concept to concept as the mood strikes him, like a schizophrenic doctor of comparative religion, and he never paints a consistent portrait of the soul’s progress to enlightenment.  The result is that, although it he intends each image to have a precise symbolic meaning, the key to unlocking their meaning is locked inside the author’s mind.  The Holy Mountain is meant as a Symbolist work, not as unconscious nonsense; but the end user, unable to decipher the film, experiences it as Surrealism.

Is Jodorowsky a mystic?  He tosses every esoteric reference he can think of into The Holy Mountain, and the breadth of his knowledge of cabalistic traditions of the world is truly impressive.  But you can’t make a lush, sensual, psychedelic film and promote authentic mysticism at the same time.  True mysticism, what Aldous Huxley called “the perennial philosophy,” involves asceticism, the denial of the body and even the imagination, an absolute abnegation of the ego and the senses.  It seeks and longs for what appears to be nothingness.  Along the journey Jodorowsky pays lip service to the necessity of dissolving the ego, but it would be hard for a novelist to conjure up a more narcissistic character than this director.  After all, here he casts himself in the role of an ascended master and spiritual teacher (admittedly a step down from his role as a messiah and demigod in El Topo).  The contemporary Jodorowsky reveals that his earlier self was convinced that this film would change cinema and change the world, hardly the position of an ego-less master who has transcended pride.  Most of all, Jodorowosky is obviously intoxicated by his own superlative creativity and imagination—and rightfully so.  But a true mystic views imagination as a relic of the ego and an enemy to enlightenment; imagination can only work on things brought to it through the senses, which obscure the Divine.  Consider the words of another mystic who wrote about a spiritual journey up a metaphorical mountain, St. John of the Cross in The Ascent of Mount Carmel, who asserted that those who wished to ascend must rid themselves of imagination and visions:

All these imaginings must be cast out from the soul… Whether beginners or more advanced, all must learn to abide attentively and wait lovingly on God in a state of quiet, and to devote no attention either to imagination or its working…  the soul must take care not to lean on visions that take place in the mind… they perturb it, and for this reason the soul must renounce them and strive not to have them… If the spiritual director has an inclination towards revelations of such a kind that they mean something to him, or satisfy a delight in his soul, it is impossible for him not to impress that delight and that aim on the spirit of his disciple… From his inclination toward such visions and the pleasure he takes in them, he develops a certain kind of esteem for them… In this lies a great delusion.  Ascent of Mount Carmel, BOOK TWO, Chapters 9-13.

This warning from a certified mystic that imagination is a false path to enlightenment could have been specifically addressed to Jodorowsky, the great magician and alchemist of cinema who hopes to change the world through the elaborate symbolic visions he constructs for the masses.  St. John of the Cross would likely see Jodorowsky as one of those stuck in the Pantheon Bar at the foot of the Holy Mountain, believing he has already reached the peak and found the answer when he has not even begun to ascend the slope yet.  Perhaps it was his knowledge of texts like this that explain Jodorowsky’s apparent, sudden rejection of mysticism at the end of the film.  If the mystics say that imagination can only take you so far, well, then, the creative soul can play the same game and turn it around; mysticism can only take the imagination so far, and then it must abandon it and follow creativity’s own path.

Jodorowsky uses the techniques of the Surrealists and the symbolism of the mystics, but he himself is neither a Surrealist nor a mystic.  He’s more of a madman and a Fool, trusting and delighting in his own deranged visions.  And cinema is enriched by his injection of his own singular brand of madness.  No one else could have made the astounding, narcissistic, and utterly beautiful The Holy Mountain.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“All the classic surrealist techniques are called into play, like when a young woman is shot down by police, and doves fly out of the wound. But finally, ‘Holy Mountain’ is all surface and very little meaning.”–M. Goodwin, Take One (contemporaneous)

“…an extraordinary visual concoction, loaded with stunning primary colors, anti-religious caricatures drawn from Diego Rivera and a succession of dreamlike, grotesque vistas worthy of Dalí at his most deranged.”–Andrew O’Hehir, Salon (2007 rerelease)

“…suggests what might have resulted if Luis Buñuel, Michelangelo Antonioni, and George Romero had all dropped acid and made a movie together.”–Mark Deming, All Movie Guide

OFFICIAL SITE:

ABKCO Music & Records, Inc. – Films – The Holy Mountain – the closest thing to an official site, this is the homepage for producer/distributor ABKCO.  It contains a long synopsis of the film and a couple of stills, but there is also a five minute documentary featurette mixing scenes from Fando y Lis, El Topo and The Holy Mountain with an interview with Jodorowsky

IMDB LINK: The Holy Mountain (1973)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

The Holy Mountain – The Holy Mountain page at “The Symbol Grows,” a Jodorowsky fan site, contains little specific to this film, but search the site for images of vintage posters and a relatively extensive Jodorowsky bibliography

The Holy Mountain (1973) at Mubi – the trailer, synopses, and links to forum discussions involving the movie

DVD INFO: The Anchor Bay DVD (buy) features a typically fascinating (Spanish language, so be sure to turn on the subtitles) commentary by Jodorowsky, who at times seems affectionately bemused by the passion of his younger self.  Other extras include deleted scenes, also with commentary, and a five minute feature where Jodorowsky explains the philosophy and symbolism of the Tarot, and the original trailer.  Joe Byrne, who worked on restoring the film, gives a technical but nonetheless very interesting explanation of the restoration process; segments of the film are shown in split screen, with the original print shown on one side and the restored version on the other to dramatize the improvement.  One final extra shows photographs of the working script, which is itself almost nonlinear; it’s full of markups, notes, crossouts, scrawled amendments and doodled alchemical symbols.

The Holy Mountain is also available (with all special features listed above) as a key component of Anchor Bay’s The Films of Alejandro Jodorowsky (buy).  Also included in this collection are Fando y Lis, El Topo, and the documentary The Jodorowsky Constellation.  Soundtrack CDs for El Topo and The Holy Mountain round out this very cool collection.

Anchor Bay plans blu-ray releases of both The Holy Mountain (pre-order) and El Topo on April 26, 2011.

(This movie was nominated for review by too many readers to list individually. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

FEATURING: Paul Naschy

PLOT: The head of a medieval warlock possesses the bodies of young people staying at an

isolated country estate, turning some into zombies and causing them to kill each other.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Horror Rises is a worthwhile, but not quite exemplary, illustation of the tendency of 1970s Eurotrashy fantastique horror  to elevate atmosphere and effect over sense and logic.  Made out of equal parts camp, decadence, and incoherence, it’s a decent choice for a midnight viewing some evening when you don’t want to think too hard while getting some pre-bedtime chills.

COMMENTS: Most of the plot developments in Horror Rises from the Tomb need to be prefaced with the phrase, “for unclear reasons…”  When invited to a seance with a medium, swinging playboy Hugo suggests they contact an ancestor of his who was hanged for practicing witchcraft (and vampirisim and lycanthropy), then decapitated so his head and body could be laid in separate graves to prevent him from rising from the tomb.  The same warlock ghost has been haunting Hugo’s artist pal, dripping blood from his severed head on his canvases.  After successfully contacting the spirit, Hugo, the painter and their girlfriends travel to Hugo’s isolated country estate to go digging for the head but are waylaid by bandits, then rescued by vigilantes who execute the criminals on the spot.  Upon arriving the foursome hires village locals to dig up the head, or buried treasure, whichever they find first.  Halfway through the movie, after the cast is mostly dead or possessed, the caretaker’s daughter remembers that her father hid a magic talisman that would protect them from any evil spirits that would rise from the nearby tomb in a well.  Besides possession, the warlock also creates a mini-army of walking corpses, and when daylight comes Hugo goes to dredge up their corpses from the river (where he dumped them earlier—for unclear reasons) and burn the bodies, even though he already incinerated them the night before.  And so it goes. The storytelling is jumpy—characters are killed off before you even realize who they are—and awkward editing exacerbates the problem.  According to legend, star Naschy took anywhere between two days to a week to write the script, and it’s easy to believe.   You go into every story segment presuming it’s not going to make sense, and you’re surprised when, on reflection, there’s a hidden logic to some development.  Besides writing the script, Naschy is also credited as playing three roles (the warlock and Hugo are two of them, but somehow I missed the third one). Horror Rises gets by on atmosphere—beautiful, misty Spanish scenery; gorgeous doomed women in gauzy nightgowns; floating heads; zombies; Paul Naschy flinging his black cape about and keeping his bushy arched eyebrows flying at full mast.  There’s also a screechy organ score that is irritating but effective in keeping you on the edge.  The decadent exploitation, in combination with the disjointed storytelling and jittery editing, produces a comic-nightmarish effect typical of 1970s Eruohorrors; it’s a style that can become addictive if you give yourself over to it wholeheartedly.

The version of Horror Rises from the Tomb reviewed here is the edited, full frame version, likely compiled for television broadcasts, that’s commonly found in multiple-movie bargain packs.   This edition cuts out the abundant nudity and most of the gore (including, reportedly, heart-eating) and runs 10-15 minutes shorter than the uncut film.  The frequent edits to produce a TV-friendly, PG-rated product likely increase the incoherence factor, but given the movie’s edited in the purely expository scenes, I don’t believe the complete version makes significantly more sense.  The out of print but widely available BCI/Eclipse DVD contains both cuts of the film, along with a third “clothed” version intended for European distribution that substitutes alternate takes for some of the nude scenes but keeps the blood and guts intact.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…there was no denying the strange, unsettling otherness of this film as I watched it in a dark room, illuminated only by my portable black-and-white TV set.”–Troy Guinn, Eccentric Cinema (remembering a 1970s TV broadcast)

DIRECTED BY:  Robert Aldrich

FEATURING:  Ernest Borgnine, Lee Marvin, Keith Carradine

PLOT: A maniac conductor sadistically stalks hobos along his Depression era freight,

smashing their skulls with a club hammer when they try to ride the rails.  NO ONE rides his Number 19 train for free.  Evil incarnate, he exists only to hunt men.

WHY IT SHOULD MAKE THE LIST: Emperor Of The North Pole may not have the requisite look, feel, or scary music, but it is very much a horror movie.  Instead of the supernatural, the monsters are men.  The killer is no cloaked slasher striking by night, but a crazy-eyed, obsessed railroad man, insane with twisted rage, filled with frothing blood lust, armed with cruel and unusual instruments of punishment.  He gets his kicks by smashing in skulls and he strikes in broad daylight unrestrained, with complete impunity.  This incongruency—a horrifying film that masquerades as a suspense drama by telling an unconventional, real-world story—makes for an unusual viewing experience.  Add larger-than-life archetypal characters; bizarre, colorful monologues; and a deceptively simple plot about a symbolic evil vs. slightly-less-evil struggle, and the result is a riveting, weird movie.

COMMENTS:  Pastoral Oregon locations set an illusory bucolic tone in the opening shots of Emperor Of The North Pole as a steam locomotive winds its way through rural woodlands.  This is Union Pacific’s Number 19 freight, and it has a madman on board.

It is 1933, the depths of the Great Depression, and 1/4 of Americans are unemployed.  Many of them are literally starving to death.  A mobile army of homeless men roams the country looking for temporary work, stealing rides on the rails.  They are nomads who live by no law but their own, and the Railroad Man is dedicated to their destruction.  On the Portland route, that man is Shack (Borgnine), a ruthless conductor who enforces the “paying passengers only” rule with deadly reverence.

Railroads don’t like it when you stow away on board or trespass on their tracks.  Today they employ a battalion of federally licensed, armed railroad detectives to catch you, and these men behave like real bastards when they do.  But in 1933 even the railroads were hard up.  His actions condoned by underfunded, undermanned, corrupt law enforcement, Shack takes the job of controller, making sure that no one rides for free.  Drawing from his own sadistic black book of dirty tricks he patrols his train like a monstrous gargoyle, perpetually on the lookout for bums.

Relentless and Argus-eyed, Shack is a real-life Terminator: he can’t be reasoned with, he can’t be bargained with, he has no mercy to appeal to, he is hard to kill, and he will never, ever stop.  Shack has a savage arsenal of bizarre, creepy weapons at his disposal, but his favorite is the engineer’s heavy, double-headed club mallet.

When Shack, creeping along the speeding 19′s boxcar catwalk, finds a tramp riding on the frame of a hopper car, he sneaks up on the hapless man.  The bum, enjoying a sandwich, is blissfully unaware of the danger.  With a fell swoop of the club hammer, Shack smashes the man’s skull.  His head laid open, dangling between cars, the hobo begs for his life before being sucked under.  In a spectacular, graphic sequence the rail cars’ sharp under-hangs ensnare the tramp and violently wad him up before the heavy wheels slice him in half like a biscuit.

For the Railroad Man, his pension and gold watch are at stake.  For the hobo, it is a matter of survival.  But for both, there is also pride.  Shack is determined the hobos not see him as a free ride.  He is humiliated and taunted when the hobo community marginalizes him by defying his rules.

The hobos hate Shack, but they also want to prove themselves to each other.  To be a master hobo, a skilled man of the road who can survive in style and avoid arrest, is to become “Emperor of the North Pole,” king of the tracks.  The term is cynically self-deprecating.  Penniless, desperate, with no past, no future, no clout and nobody to vouch for them, the hobos perceive that they lead a futile, near meaningless, existence.  Anybody presiding over the North Pole would be emperor of a worthless desert.

In this context, the alpha male tramp of the West Coast hobo “jungle” camps is the admired A-Number One (Marvin).  A#1 is determined to prove himself Emperor Of The North Pole by successfully riding notorious Shack’s Number 19 all the way to Portland.  He is dogged by a swaggering, inept, tag-along, upstart named “Cigaret” (Carradine).  Using numerous tactics to sneak aboard and avoid detection on the 19, A#1 is caught between Shack’s criminal tactics and Cigraret’s malicious recklessness. Despite A#1′s paternal attempts to mentor him, Cigaret continuously betrays A#1 out of a sense of misguided competition.

In trying to derail Shack, A#1 and Cigaret nearly derail the entire train.  To distract and misdirect Shack, A#1 and Cigaret do their best to compromise and professionally ruin him with a series of sidetracking stunts.  But the stunts are not mere jokes.  They are heavy, malicious felonies which endanger the hobos, other trains, and entire crews with imminent bloody death.

While the ‘bo’s believe Shack deserves killin’, their actions justify Shack’s murderous rampage as well.  Like a runaway train, the perverse feud escalates beyond the boundaries of any sensible limits.  The locomotive steams and roars.  The whistle shrieks.  The pistons churn.  The black smoke streams into the sky.  The trio of enraged men highball over the steel rails.  Their murderous plots against each other descend into a maelstrom of frothy, blood-soaked madness.  As they barrel along among the swaying cars of the speeding train, the inflamed trio hurtles toward an ultimate gladiatorial showdown to determine who will be Emperor Of The North Pole.

Writer Christopher Knopf’s deceptively minimalist script was tailor made for Robert Aldrich’s now familiar themes: men in their primal state squaring off against each other, the ultimate confrontation, man against environment, life as arena, life as a game, men and machines.  The characters are simplistic and archetypal, and the space they occupy, like a gladiatorial ring, is very small: the area enclosed by two rails.  The universality of these simple building blocks enabled Knopf to forge an engrossing adventure to which audiences can easily relate.

Knopf considered the political tempo of the times, the populist social attitudes of the downtrodden, the quest for survival, the attitudes of the elites; i.e. the fabric of society and its rules.  He rendered these factors down into a raw story about a conductor who won’t have hobos on his train and the two hobos bent on defying him.  The result is powerful and directly accessible without being dumbed down.

Every shot is carefully assembled as if it will be a still photo submitted for exhibit.  Each frame showing a character is an artistic portrait.  The selection of shots and the way they are edited is expressive and precise.  Additionally, Aldrich used a fine grain film stock which reveals very sharp detail.  The resulting visual impact dramatically emphasizes the action.  This gives everything about the film a larger than life feel, and reinforces the conceit of archetypal characters in an archetypal situation.

Emperor Of The North Pole was re-released on DVD in 2006.  The DVD reflects that the original film print was carefully preserved.  The re-release has dazzling sharp picture quality.

Emperor Of The North Pole was inspired by Jack London’s On The Road and From Coast To Coast. It was shot along the Oregon Pacific and Eastern short line railroad near Cottage Grove, where Stand By Me (1986) was filmed in 1985.  Viewers who see both will recognize the distinctive countryside.  Stand By Me was the last of several motion pictures to be filmed on these tracks.  The first, in 1926, the was The General, Buster Keaton’s famous period piece about a Civil War locomotive chase.

Surviving for over 90 years, the Oregon Pacific and Eastern was constructed in 1901 to bridge Cottage Grove southeast to the Bohemia mining district.  The last train ran the line in the mid 1990s.

The steam locomotive and trains used in the filming of Emperor Of The North Pole were part of the actual working stock of the railroad, still in use in the the 1970′s.  Shack’s Number 19 locomotive featured in the movie is a 1915 Baldwin 2-8-2.  It pulled excursion trains well into the ’70′s along the Oregon Pacific and Eastern (pictured below).

Old #19, Oregon Pacific and Eastern – photograph by John Goldie

Number 19 still runs today, pulling the “Blue Goose” excursion train on the Yreka Western Railroad between Yreka and Montague, California.

The terms “hobos,” “tramps,” and “bums” have been used interchangeably in this recommendation for purposes of convenience.  This is actually not correct usage, as the names have distinctly different meanings.  Here is the rule for remembering them: a bum sits and loafs, a tramp loafs and keeps moving, but a hobo works and moves, and he is clean.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…an unusual, uncompromising and much underrated film.”–Film 4

DIRECTED BY:  Corrado Farina

FEATURING: Carroll Baker, George Eastman, Isabelle De Funès, Ely Galleani

PLOT: A fashion photographer is beguiled by a lesbian witch who seeks to dominate,

seduce and consume her.

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST:  Bab Yaga is straight Euro-thriller.  While such films have an unconventional feel by US standards, the style is characteristic of this distinctive 1960′s-’70′s genre, and therefore very conventional on its own terms.

COMMENTS:  Baba Yaga is a very stylish Italian occult film in the Euro horror tradition of Suspiria.  It is based on artist Guido Crepax’s highly stylized graphic novel about a sorceress who tries to bewitch a fashion photographer.  Crepax adapted the novel from his risqué S&M comic .

Valentina (De Funès) is an up and coming fashion photographer with a knack for controversial shoots.  After she has a chance encounter with the fashionable and alluring society matron Baba Yaga, her life takes strange and eerie turns.  Yaga discovers Valentina on a darkened street, becomes attracted to her and begins to inject herself into the young shutterbug’s life in odd ways.  Yaga develops a strange fixation on Valentina, one that is more than platonic.

Yaga lives in a striking Gothic Revival mansion, it’s interiors bedecked with layers of satin, red velvet –and heavy leather in the boudoir.  While the house is very luxurious, it is in need of a few repairs.  There is a nasty hole under the oriental rug in the drawing room—the opening of a bottomless pit to Hell.  It is only fitting to have an eccentric home, because the owner isn’t exactly mainstream.  Babs is taken with keeping vipers and Australian fruit bats for pets, has some creepy taxidermy a la Norman Bates, and owns a collection of cursed curios.

In a gesture of benevolence, Baba Yaga gives Valentina a large Victorian doll “to protect” her.  Valentina counters that she doesn’t need any protection.  Well, she does now!  The doll, named Annette, sportingly attired in a skimpy leather bondage and discipline suit has a mind of her own.  When Annette isn’t coming to life and parading her bare-breasted charms, she is busy stabbing Valentina’s models with a sharp, poisoned hat pin.

In the meantime, Valentina has been having sexually twisted hallucinations involving Nazis, cruelty, bottomless pits, and Baba Yaga.  It seems that Signora Yaga has plans for Valentina that are a tad unconventional.  She wants to bestow upon her wealth, success, beauty and cosmic secrets.  In return all Yaga expects is total psychic and sexual subordination.  This includes submission to a little S &M, such as a good periodic whipping, and complete domination over Valentina’s sex life.  And Signora Yaga would also like a an occasional kiss and a feel here and there, maybe more as the mood strikes her.

Crepax’s comics were better known in the 1960′s-70′s.  His style has been compared to Frank Miller’s Sin City books.  Adapting Crepax’s otherworldly, abstract visual storytelling produces a dreamlike, stylized, and optically imaginative film.  The set decoration and art direction are explicit if not extravagant, similar to the production quality of Suspiria.  The backdrop of 1970′s fashion and Italian pop culture adds a swank, bold, but not over-the-top cinematic quality that is a treat for the eyes.  The focus of Baba Yaga is on striking images and concepts more than it is on sheer horror.  The film is more stylish than bloody, and more pensive than suspenseful.  In other words, it is slow; however, the lack of spatter is counterbalanced by a generous infusion of chic, arty nudity.  Baba Yaga will appeal to fans of Roger Vadim and Dario Argento.

The name Baba Yaga comes from a particularly colorful occult story in Russian folklore.  Baba Yaga is played by actress/sex symbol Carroll Baker (Baby Doll).  Baker is still active in film and television.  Actress/fashion model Isabelle De Funès is well cast as Valentina.  George Eastman can be seen as The Grim Reaper in 2008′s Grindhouse Universe.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“‘Weird’ [is] the operative word here.  Though framed by a simple story, director Corrado Farina’s approach to the film is every bit as avant garde and surrealist as its source material… the plot had me scratching my head in bewilderment, compelling visuals kept me watching.”–Brain Lindsey, Eccentric Cinema (DVD)

“O Lucky Man! is a film about the real world.  I think that everything in it is recognizable to people who look around with open eyes and can see the kind of world we’re living in.  But of course it makes it’s comment through comedy and through satire, because I think the world today is too complex and too mad and too bad for one to be able to make a straight, serious comment.”–Lindsay Anderson

DIRECTED BY: Lindsay Anderson

FEATURING: Malcolm McDowell, Ralph Richardson, Helen Mirren, Arthur Lowe, Alan Price, Lindsay Anderson

PLOT: Mick Travis is an eager, ambitious trainee at a coffee company who gets a big break when the firm’s top salesman in the Northeast territory goes missing under mysterious circumstances and he’s picked to replace him.   With his engaging smile and can-do attitude, his career begins promisingly, but soon a sting of unfortunate coincidences befall him.  A plague of strange events drive him across the 1970s English landscape, as he is mistaken for a spy, volunteers for medical experiments, falls in with a touring rock band, becomes the personal assistant of a ruthless capitalist, goes to prison, and works at a soup kitchen.

BACKGROUND:

• McDowell is Mick Travis in this film.  He played a character of the same name in three of director Lindsay Anderson’s films, each completed in a different decade: If… (1968), O Lucky Man! (1973), and Britannia Hospital (1982).  Other than sharing the same name, there is no evidence that Mick Travis is intended to be the same character at different stages of life.
• McDowell came up with the core idea for the script, drawing on his own pre-fame experiences as a coffee salesman.  McDowell worked on the script with screenwriter David Sherwin (If…).  In an interview, McDowell recalls that he was having trouble thinking of an ending and Anderson asked him how his real life adventures as a coffee salesman ended.  “That’s your ending,” Anderson told him.
• This was McDowell’s next project after completing A Clockwork Orange in 1971, cementing his position as the most important weird actor of the early 1970s.
• Director Anderson had tried to make documentary about singer-songwriter Alan Price before he began O Lucky Man!, but could not obtain funding to license the songs.  Anderson instead invited Price to write the songs for this movie and to appear as the leader of the touring band in the film.
• Almost all of the actors in the film play multiple parts.  Arthur Lowe won a BAFTA Best Supporting Actor Award for his triple-role as Mr. Duff, Charlie Johnson and Dr. Munda (in blackface).

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The final party scene, with the entire cast dancing to the theme song while balloons drop from the ceiling, although the shot of Dr. Millar’s medical experiments is unforgettable as well.

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: As if Mick Travis’ improbable class-trotting adventures across

Short clip from O Lucky Man!

1970s Britain weren’t strange enough, Lindsay Anderson sprinkles weirdness and non sequiturs throughout, including Kafkaesque interrogations, a half-man half-hog, and an unexpected breastfeeding scene. Any film in which a boarding-room neighbor inexplicably gives a young man a “golden” suit and sends him out into the world with the sage advice “try not to die like a dog,” is tipping to the weird end of the scale.

COMMENTS: The standard line on O Lucky Man! is that it is a satire on the capitalist system.  (No lesser authorities than the Netflix DVD sleeve and the IMDB plot summary proclaim it so).  The first Mick Travis film, If… (1968), with its uncritical (but possibly ironic) praise of revolution for revolution’s sake, was championed by the counterculture, and certainly suggested Anderson was coming from the far left.  The opening prelude to O Lucky Man!, a silent film parody which features McDowell as a third world peasant who gets his hands chopped off for stealing a coffee bean, reinforces the “attack on capitalism” interpretation. Mick begins as a salesman, obsessed with how much he can make in commissions, and continues, through a roundabout journey, to strive for success within the system, even bargaining for a higher price to sell his body for medical experimentation. Eventually his ambition allows him to work his way into the inner chambers of a ruthless industrialist and his corrupt political pals to witness firsthand their plot to crush an insurgency in an African country using chemical weapons so they can build a 500 room hotel resort.  A corrupt judicial system, in cahoots with the moneyed interests, sends him to jail.

So far, so ideological.  But then, a funny thing happens.  Mick reforms in jail; he reads the works of Bertrand Russel and other philosophers, and puts greed behind him to become an altruist and a humanist.  Released from prison, he ventures into the East End of London with pure intentions, bent on helping the less frotunate and what happens?  While he preaches about the inherent goodness of man, pickpockets steal the little bit of money has had left.  Graffiti in the ghetto proclaims that “Revolution is the opium of the intellectuals.”  He joins a soup kitchen, but a gang of ungrateful bums assault him for sport and knock him unconscious with a garbage can.

Truth be told, O Lucky Man! wasn’t popular with the left when it was first released.  The poor were depicted as nothing more noble than rich people without money; just as eager to rob, manipulate and abuse those even worse off than themselves.  And this debauchery is depicted not as a feature of a corrupt political system, but as a key feature of human nature.  Reflecting on O Lucky Man! in 1994 Anderson said, “I’ve never been a socialist.  I’ve never understood how people think that socialism could work because I have always believed in original sin.” (Note that his boss insists Mick eat an apple before setting off on his journeys as a salesman). On the commentary track, scriptwriter David Sherwin reminds us that Britain was heavily socialist, and fairly authoritarian, when O Lucky Man! was written, and that the political order being satirized is actually the socialist order. The corporate, capitalist powers may be ruthless, but the policemen who steal cheese from a car accident victim, the doctor who vivisects his patients in the name of scientific progress, and the military men who kidnap and torture accidental trespassers (asking them such bizarre questions as “Do you believe in the fellowship of man? Think carefully…” during interrogations) were all representatives of the established, supposedly enlightened order.  Mick is an aspiring capitalist because he was born in a society where money is considered the only measure of success. He unthinkingly adopted the dreams that were spoonfed to him from the cradle.  Had he been born in a Communist country, it’s easy to imagine him turning his ambition towards rising in the party ranks, with just as much luck and satisfaction as he has in succeeding at business.

The other, and more accurate, standard line on O Lucky Man! is that it’s a modern version of Voltaire’s “Candide.”  O Lucky Man! fits loosely into the literary genre of the picaresque, tales of the misadventures of an often naive or deluded protagonist as he journeys across a landscape that provides plenty of opportunity for the author to satirize a wide variety of targets.  The model for this type of narrative is “Don Quixote,” but “Candide” is probably the most often imitated.  In Voltaire’s book, Candide naively believes the theory fed to him by Professor Pangloss that humans live in “the best of all possible worlds” and continues to profess this counterintuitive optimism almost up until the very end: despite his continual counterexperiences of being conscripted, shipwrecked, and caught in earthquakes as he travels the world witnessing its misery.  Similarly, Mick Travis’ upbeat optimism and can-do attitude convince him that success is always around the next corner, despite being tortured, experimented on, and wrongfully imprisoned.  Mick continues to indulge in the same madness over and over, following the dream he’s been conditioned to dream and never learning his lesson, until finally he is beaten down so far that his innocent smile is stripped away from him.  (Perhaps this cycle of cluelessness explains why Mick encounters the same cast members palying different roles wherever he goes, but never notices).  It’s only through these hard adventures that he loses his innocence and finds his individuality.  Candide eventually learned to withdraw from the corrupt world and to “cultivate his garden.”  The similar lesson that Mick learns about what truly constitutes a “lucky man”  is encapsulated in Alan Price’s lyrics to the theme song:

If you have a friend on whom you think you can rely
You are a lucky man.
If you’ve found a reason to live on and not to die
You are a lucky man.
Preachers and poets and scholars don’t know it,
Temples and statues and steeples won’t show it,
If you’ve got the secret just try not to blow it -
Stay a lucky man.

The satirical, picaresque structure invites comic exaggeration, and Anderson pushes his critique of modern life to the outer limits.  Everyone, and every institution, is corrupt and venal.  There are secret army experiments, mad scientists, and people plunging out of buildings to their death who are replaced and forgotten moments after they hit the ground.  There are sex parties for the small-town elite and vicar’s wives who give of themselves beyond the call of duty.  There’s the huge cast playing recurring roles. There’s Alan Price’s band, who appear as a Greek chorus whose new album is coincidentally composed of songs that directly comment on Mick’s experiences.  There’s absurd non-sequitur dialogue and non-sequitur coincidences.  There’s unhelpful intertitles, and a couple of times when the movie turns into a silent film.  There’s the fact that the film takes a metamovie turn for the finale.  It’s all very artificial and even grotesque, and yet, as a commentary on the madness of then (and still) modern life, it feels real on a deeper level.  Unreal details aside, this is what life is like, this is how people are, this is how it feels to live in a society which (as Sherwin says in the film commentary) is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

O Lucky Man! is a flawed film, but its flaws are forgivable because they come from having too many good ideas rather than too few.  At three hours, the film is just too damn long, and it’s not always filled with fascinating incidents.  The beginning drags on too long with too little of interest—despite the wonderful coffee kissing scene—before things start to rev up when Mick gets his golden suit and his second assignment from corporate headquarters, which sends him on his first real adventure.  As movies based on wanderings from set-piece to set-piece tend to go, not all of the adventures are equally entertaining or successful, and sometimes Anderson’s experiments in form seem pointless.  But when Anderson’s on—as in the scene where the rich and the powerful drink champagne look on approvingly as a series of stills depict the victim’s of military “honey”—he’s can be as powerfully dark and moral as anyone.

Even when the film lags, McDowell’s performance is still endearing.  His Mick is naive but infectious, and even a bit rakish; the audience pulls for him, although we know he’s about to make another disastrous decision.  He’s the kind of guy who has a beautiful woman in his arms but is distracted by admiring the skyscraper in the distance instead, wondering how much it cost to build and how he can raise the money to afford to do the same. He never stops to think that the reason men raise the money to build massive skyscrapers is so that they can coax beautiful women to fall into their arms.  We desperately want this guy to come to his senses.  We watch to see if, and how, he ever will.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Sometimes comic, sometimes grotesque but consistently intriguing, this is a spectacular, sprawling satire built around its surreal set-pieces and driven by a charismatic performance by McDowell.”–Film 4

“…the coffee-salesman idea is really just a starting-point for a wild, ramshackle series of picaresque episodes, through which we (and he) move with the kind of sinister illogic more usually to be found in particularly vivid nightmares.”–Neil Young, Neil Young’s Film Lounge (festival screening)

“…a film that approaches its material not in the manner of a Swift or an Orwell, but as the Carry On team might under the temporary influence of surrealism.”–Time Out Film Guide

IMDB LINK: O Lucky Man! (1973)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

An Extended Review of O Lucky Man! - Well-researched analysis of O Lucky Man by DVD Beaver’s Peter Hoskins includes quotes from Anderson’s out-of-print newspaper article about the film, “Stripping the Veils Away ”

Trailers from Hell: Allan Arkush on ‘O Lucky Man’ – Director Arkush comments on the film’s trailer

DVD INFO: The Warner Home Video release (buy) spreads the three-hour feature film over two discs (perhaps unnecessarily).  Bonuses include commentary from star McDowell, scripter David Sherwin, and songwriter Alan Price (speaking separately), the original trailer, and a contemporaneous 5 minute segment of “Innovations in Entertainment” covering the film for British television.  The second disc contains the 90 minute documentary O Lucky Malcolm!, a career retrospective of Malcolm McDowell’s work, which is a must for the actor’s fans.

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “N. Vo.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY: Robin Hardy

FEATURING:  Edward Woodward, Christopher Lee, Diane Cilento, Britt Ekland, Ingrid Pitt

PLOT:  A devout Christian policeman flies to the isolated island of Summerisle off the coast of Scotland to investigate a report of a missing girl.  When he gets there, everyone denies knowledge of the girl, but he notices with increasing disgust that the entire island is practicing old pagan rituals and licentious sex.  As his investigation continues, he uncovers evidence suggesting that the missing girl was a resident of the island, and may have met a horrible fate.

BACKGROUND:

• Screenwriter Anthony Shaffer was a hot property in 1973 after adapting his own successful mystery play Sleuth into a 1972 hit movie with Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, and penning the screenplay for Frenzy (1972) for Alfred Hitchcock.  His clout was so great that this film was released under the official title Anthony Shaffer’s The Wicker Man.  He later adapted Agatha Christie novels such as Murder on the Orient Express (1974) for the big screen.
• Director Robin Hardy, despite doing an excellent job on this film, did not direct a feature film again until 1986′s Wicker Man variation, The Fantasist.
• Christopher Lee, who had just come to the end of his run as Hammer’s Dracula, donated his acting services to the production.  He was quoted in 1977 as saying, “It’s the best part I’ve ever had.  Unquestionably.”
• The “wicker man” was a historically accurate feature of Druidic religions that was first described to the world by Julius Caesar in his “Commentary on the Gallic Wars.”
• In Britain the film was released on the bottom half of a double bill with Don’t Look Now, perhaps the most impressive psychological horror double feature in history.
• Shaffer and Hardy published a novelization of the film in 1976.
• “Cinefastique” devoted an entire 1977 issue to the film, calling it “the Citizen Kane of horror movies.”
• In 2001, an additional 12 minutes of deleted scenes were added to create a “Director’s Cut” version.
• Some of the original footage is believed to be lost forever, including part of the scene where Sgt. Howie first meets Lord Summerisle.  The original negative was accidentally thrown away when original producer British Lion Films went under and cleaned out its vaults.
• The climax was voted #45 in Bravo’s list of the “100 Scariest Movie Moments.”
• The 2006 Neil LaBute remake starring Nicolas Cage had as little as possible to do with the original story, was universally reviled, and was even accused of being misogynistic.  Some argue that it is so poorly conceived and made that it has significant camp value.
• Hardy released a “spiritual sequel,” The Wicker Tree, in 2011.

INDELIBLE IMAGE:  The wicker man itself (although, for those of a certain gender, Britt Ekland’s nude dance may be even harder to forget).

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Hardy and Shaffer create an atmosphere like no other; it’s an

Original trailer for The Wicker Man

encounter of civilized man with strange, primeval beliefs.  Select scenes are subtly surreal—observe how the villagers break into an impossibly well-choreographed bawdy song about the innkeeper’s daughter preternaturally designed to discomfit their sexually repressed guest.  Other weird incidents are more outrageously in the viewer’s face: the vision of a woman breastfeeding a child in a graveyard while delicately holding an egg in her outstretched hand.  Almost invisible details such as the children’s lessons scribbled on the classroom blackboard (“the toadstone protects the newly born from the weird woman”) saturate the film and reveal how painstakingly its makers constructed a haunting alternate world of simultaneously fascinating and repulsive pagan beliefs.  The rituals Sergeant Howie witnesses don’t always make sense (and when they do, their significance is repulsive to him), but they tap into a deep, buried vein of myth.  The viewer himself undergoes a dread confrontation with Old Gods who are at the same time familiar and terrifyingly strange.

COMMENTS: CONFESSION: The version reviewed here–horrors!–is the 88 minute theatrical release that initially won most fans hearts, not the 2001 restored Director’s Cut version, which I have not seen.  Since I give this version of The Wicker Man the highest possible rating, the additional footage could only detract from the viewing experience, although I have every confidence it does not.  It’s still preferable for a first time viewer to see the cut that better captures the maker’s intent.

As Sergeant Howie flies his hydroplane across the coast of Scotland on his way to the island of Summerisle to investigate a report of a missing child, he passes over a weird landscape of of buckled hills with jutting phallic rock outcrops, but nothing he sees on his flight is as bewildering and exotic as what he encounters when he lands.  The Wicker Man is a thriller that sets up a sense of strangeness and mounting unease that builds to a devastating climax.  The movie conceives a twist ending of the best kind; even if you guess the “trick” before it happens, it’s power is not diminished, both because it is so brilliantly and unexpectedly executed and acted, and because it so perfectly yet ambiguously caps off the movie’s deeper themes.  At its heart, The Wicker Man is story of the clash of two dogmatically opposed cultures, as represented by Edward Woodward’s stern and judgmental Christian officer and Christopher Lee’s suave and manipulative Lord Summerisle, the puppet master behind the new, sexually free pagan society of the island.

Because The Wicker Man is formally a mystery story about a missing girl, the plot can’t be discussed in detail without the risk of spoiling the film for new viewers.  Besides the triumphant script, however, there are many praiseworthy elements that must be cited.   The performances of the two leads, who spar and play off each other with a hostility barely hidden under a thin coat of gentility, are superlative and drive the second half of the film.  (Note the final jab that Woodward’s Howie gets in on Lee’s Summerisle–a wound that may linger past the conclusion of the movie, and indeed could eventually prove fatal).  The original compositions by Paul Giovanni are fascinating and perform the amazing trick of transforming Celtic folk music into something terrifying.  Britt Ekland’s seductive nude dance, even though accomplished with the help of a body double, is a minor masterpiece of eroticism.  The details of pre-Christian Druidic rituals are impeccably researched, and, like a comparative religion textbook brought to chilling life, the script dramatizes the contrast of the Old Religion’s literal conception of sacrifice with Christianity’s civilized transubstantiation of the same idea into Christ’s symbolic sacrifice.

Ultimately, however, what’s intoxicating about The Wicker Man is that while it can be enjoyed for the simple and honest thrills and chills supplied by the detective story, Anthony Shaffer’s superlative script also offers plenty of intellectual meat to chew on, and alternate ways of interpreting the film.  Many view it as an attack on religious dogmatism and fanaticism of all stripes, and argue that Woodward and Lee battle to a draw for our sympathies.  I think that, especially viewed in the context of the zeitgeist of its 1973 release, the film clearly sides with Woodward’s Sgt. Howie, although it does so with the utmost reluctance.  In the end, The Wicker Man is a politically conservative film, although only in the most cynical sense.

Sergeant Howie is a marvelous character perfectly enacted by Woodward, and a brilliant choice to be the stand in for the viewer.  Howie represents God, the king, and Christianity: he is the symbol of authority and the established order.  But we do not like him, at least not initially, because he is humorless and judgmental. He makes a point of intolerance, at times taking more offense at the islanders’ abandonment of Jesus Christ than at the possible murder of Rowan Morrison.  Few viewers share his simple, old-fashioned, dogmatic faith.  Yet, there is something irresistibly admirable in his solidity, his dependability and his persistence to solve the island’s mystery; we feel we can trust him, even if we don’t like him.  We also must admire the fact that his faith is unshakable in the face of temptation and travails (in this respect, he appears far stronger than the islanders, whose faith comes easily because it’s never put to a serious test).  And, even if we are ambivalent about Howie’s character and wouldn’t choose to share a pint with him back on the mainland, on Summerisle we are forced into identifying with him, for we recognize his world and like him we are strangers to this Brave Old World.  We see the pagan isle through his eyes, and in the end we share his fate.

If we dislike Howie in the beginning but grow to identify with him, the opposite happens with the villagers.  Part of what makes The Wicker Man fascinating is the way it shuttles our sympathy between diametrically opposed characters as seamlessly as it reverses our plot expectations.  In the beginning, the islanders’ religious practices seem only mildly peculiar and harmless. Perhaps they prefer having midnight orgies in the graveyard and worshiping the phallic Maypole to listening to lectures in a stuffy cathedral, but in a society built on freedom of conscience, thought and religion, who is Howie to condemn them?  When the Sergeant presses them about their beliefs, their answers are reasonable and make him seem foolish, narrow-minded, and incapable of appreciating others’ perspectives.  Their independence from convention–which overwhelmingly manifests itself as sexual freedom—is alluring.  They appear joyful where Howie is dour.  No matter how appealing the island’s liberties may appear to us, however, that shadow that crosses the townspeople’s sunny faces when the subject of the missing girl comes up gives us pause.

It seems almost impossible not to recognize the pagan islanders–in their rejection of status quo norms, their embrace of sexual freedom, and their search for more ancient and mystical alternatives to the moralistic religion of their fathers—as stand-ins for the 1960s hippie counterculture, the “flower children” (indeed, all the female characters even have floral names like Willow, Rose and Myrtle). Although the hippies’ peace and love ideology seemed harmless at first, by 1973 the Manson family, the Altamont tragedy, rampant drug addiction, and unprecedented rates of unwanted pregnancies had graphically and demonstrated the tragic downside of the “if it feels good, do it” dogma.

Even if some of the hippies’ causes, like the endorsement of exotic alternative Eastern religions, were already losing steam by 1973, one counter-cultural rallying cry—sexual freedom—had clearly been heeded and absorbed into society at large.  The pagan religion of Summerisle, at bottom, is all about sex.  On the one hand, it’s about the sexual habits of vegetables, the fruiting of the crops (which are, notably, experimental strains that are “unnatural” to these Scottish islands).  On the other hand, the townspeople’s daily worship and activity seems to resolve almost entirely around sex, whether it’s Britt Ekland’s divine whore who initiates virgin boys into manhood, women who jump over bonfires naked hoping to become pregnant by parthenogenesis, or a cross-dressing Christopher Lee.  And, lest you think I am imagining that a concern about the dark side of the sexual revolution was on screenwriter Shaffer’s mind, listen to how he reacts in the 1977 Cinefantastique article when he’s asked if Sgt. Howie’s dedication to remaining a virgin until marriage would appear unbelievable at his age in this day and age:

…if you get some titters in the audience about that, maybe if you don’t imagine the world is in a very bad state, then I do.  The people who moan about the quality of life now compared to the way it used to be have only themselves to blame.  If you tear down a nice old building and put up some shitty supermarket, you cannot then complain that shopping is no longer any fun and your town now looks worse than it did.  It’s the same with sex… there is too much sex about… once it had it’s own mystery, but now it’s opened up, like a barnyard, so that within a generation or so, the act has become meaningless.

So, in part, at least, The Wicker Man is a film that expresses concern that our rejection of old (Christian) sexual mores may lead us to something unexpectedly horrible (unwanted children, disease, the breakdown of the family, all of which have come to pass).  Although Howie seems to be a representative of the ‘normal,’ ’straight’ world in a strange new society based on ancient beliefs, in the sexual sense he doesn’t stand for the current status quo.  Rather, he’s a reactionary, clinging to discarded beliefs about the sacredness of procreation in a licentious world that has already come to pass.

But the script goes even further than merely commenting on changing sexual values and suggests that the wave of cultural change of the late 1960s and early 1970s, rejecting old settled ways and charting new courses based on new (or long discarded) stars, may lead to unintended horrific consequences.  The script makes this wider concern clear when Howie asks Lord Summerisle, “And what of the true God?”, the visionary replies ”He’s dead.  He can’t complain, had his chance and in modern parlance, blew it.”  Summerisle’s observation, of course, is a paraphrase of the famous pronouncement of Nietzsche’s Madman, “God is dead.”  Nietzsche’s point was not to make a gleeful metaphysical statement about the Christian God’s non-existence, but to recognize that, with new competition from science and Enlightenment rationality, Christianity no longer played the central role in Western society that it once had.  Nietzsche prophesied that Christianity’s power would continue to erode in the coming decades and centuries; and with that erosion of religion’s ability to explain our place in the world, Christian morality would necessarily weaken as well.  The Madman’s rant was full of fear of the uncertainty about what might take Christianity’s place as the organizing principle of society: “What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent?”

Festivals and sacred games. Summerisle offers a nightmarish answer to the question of what might replace the Christian order once it has been overthrown: a reversion to a state of anarchy, superstition and barbarism.  However much we may initially dislike the grim, judgmental and seemingly joyless Sgt. Howie, by the end of the movie we come to realize that his solid values of restraint, civilization, and humanity are not traits we should lightly sacrifice in our search for a new world order.  The devil we know is better than the devil we do not.  That this fundamentally conservative theme should be hidden deep inside a movie that has been embraced by the very counterculture it critiques is only appropriate in a movie that constantly deceives us, where nothing is ever exactly as it seems.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…possessed of a weird and paganistic story. Anthony Shaffer penned the screenplay which, for sheer imagination and near-terror, has seldom been equalled.”–Variety (UK) (contemporaneous)

“…as a meditation on the rise of New Age spiritualism, the movie is now, of course, gleefully camp and a tad reactionary.”–Kevin Maher, The Times (UK) (rerelease)

“Robin Hardy’s ultra-strange movie, best described as a ‘psychedelic pagan horror’… is played equally for laughs and whimsy. There’s naked cavortings, frequent detours into song, dance and surrealism: the islanders wear badger and hare masks and peep over walls like Beatrix Potter characters.”–Channel 4 (rerelease)

IMDB LINK: The Wicker Man (1973)

OTHER LINKS OF INTEREST:

The Wicker-man:  As of this writing, this unofficial site for the film is incomplete and has not been updated in over a year, but still contains a remarkable collection of information, interviews and articles on The Wicker Man.

Robin Hardy interview with “The Fortean Times”:  Interview with director Hardy.  WARNING: contains spoilers.

MungBeing Magazine: Ritual and Myth >> Revolting Literature:  Interview with Robin Hardy on The Wicker Man and his long-delayed thematic sequel, Cowboys for Christ

Paul Giovanni’s MySpace page:  Four songs from the remarkable soundtrack–”Corn Riggs,” “Willow’s Song,” “Maypole,” and “Gentle Johnny”–are available on the music director/composer’s page.

Gary Carpenter: The Wicker Man – Settling the Score: Associate music director Gary Carpenter describes his experience working on the soundtrack of the film

DVD INFO: The preferred version is the 2-disc special edition (buy), which contains both the original theatrical version and the director’s cut with 11 minutes of additional footage for comparison.  It features commentary by Robin Hardy, Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward (on the director’s cut), a promotional interview with Lee (an Easter egg uncovered by navigating to the wicker man on the “special features” menu), and two documentaries, the 35 minute The Enigma of the Wicker Man and the 50 minute Burnt Offerings.  Other reviewers indicate that the additional footage used to create the director’s cut has degraded and is not of the same quality as the theatrical footage.

The single-disc Anchor Bay release (buy) is now out of print but still available from many sellers and is the version reviewed here.  It contains the original trailer along with numerous TV and radio spots and The Enigma of the Wicker Man. No commentary is included.

(This movie was nominated for review by reader “Filipe A.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

DIRECTED BY:  Nicolas Roeg

FEATURING:  Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie

PLOT: John and Laura Baxter (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) lose their daughter in a freak drowning accident. Life goes on, however, and they travel to Venice as planned, where John is directing the restoration of a Gothic cathedral. While there, they meet a blind psychic woman who tells them she can see their daughter, and John begins to catch glimpses out of the corner of his eye of a red-hooded figure that looks suspiciously like his drowned daughter.

BACKGROUND:

• This was director Nicolas Roeg’s third film, after Performance (1970) and Walkabout (1971). The movie was adapted from a short story by the British novelist Daphne du Maurier, whose works also inspired Rebecca and The Birds.
• The love scene between Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland was so graphic for the time that (unverified) rumors persisted that they had actually had intercourse on the set.  Roeg has since dismissed the rumors.
• Some of the style of the film may have been influenced by Italian giallos of the period, though this connection has been exaggerated simply because of the Venetian setting.
• Don’t Look Now is #8 on the British Film Institute’s list of the all-time great British films.

INDELIBLE IMAGE : The color red. (More would constitute a spoiler).

WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD:  Don’t Look Now is subtly unnerving—perhaps too

Trailer for Don’t Look Now narrated by John Landis (courtesy of Trailers from Hell)

subtly—throughout. But the last 20 minutes are a truly unsettling, nightmarish experience, capped by a shocking, largely unexplained resolution that leaves it to the viewer to solve the film’s mystery. By the end, the city of Venice has turned into a strangely deserted, Gothic labyrinth that may haunt your nightmares.

COMMENTS: Near the opening of Don’t Look Now is a fast-moving montage in which key images are repeated, echoed, and transformed. Although the significance of all the symbols won’t be clear to the viewer at first, the sequence is a masterpiece of imagery, the effect subliminally hypnotic. Near the end of Don’t Look Now is a hyperkinetic montage of images from the film that come at the eye like shards of shattered glass. It’s as if the movie’s own life is flashing before its eyes.

In between these bravura sequences is a movie that is nearly a masterpiece.  Don’t Look Now is an intricately constructed puzzle that requires thought on the audience’s part to sort out.  The final resolution is nearly perfect for this sort of film: the literal narrative ties up loose ends in a tight, if unexpected, package.  As a symbolic expression of John Baxter’s failure to come to grips with the death of his child, it also satisfyingly closes the door and turns out the light on the main character’s psychological reality.  But the ending is also so—weird—that it suggests further interpretations that lie beneath the surface. Did it really happen that way, just as the narrative says? Or did the story actually end some time before: were the last twenty nightmarish minutes just an expressionist dream?

The reason that Don’t Look Now is nearly a masterpiece is that it has one terrible flaw.  For long stretches between those opening and closing montages, it commits the one sin that no movie should ever commit: it’s boring.  After the couple gets to Venice, Roeg spends a lot of time focusing on the ordinariness of John and Laura’s domestic life.  It’s true that underneath that surface of that ordinariness lurks the couple’s shared grief over the death of their daughter, and the separate ways in which they deal with that sorrow.  But their differences don’t explode into vicious disagreements arguments often enough to keep the viewer’s interest.  In fact, throughout most of the center part of the movie, they seem to be coping with the tragedy unexpectedly well: life goes on, they focus on their work, they have sex, they dress and go to dinner.  Their wounds seem long healed, and Roeg chooses not to pick at their scars.

In a way, the celebrated sex scene between Sutherland and Christie is a microcosm of what’s wrong with Don’t Look Back, rather than what’s right about it.  The coupling is not gratuitous; it serves an obvious plot function, coming as it does so soon after Laura has seemed to come to grips with her daughter’s death.  The viewer supplies the missing detail: the couple hasn’t made love like this since the tragedy.  The scene is intercut with a scene of the couple dressing for dinner, another indication of normality and ordinariness. But the scene, while it temporarily wakes the viewer up from his slumber, goes on far too long after it has served its purpose.  It’s symptomatic of the film’s overall disinterst in moving the plot along quickly.  There are entire scenes and characters in the movie that don’t advance the story at all, scenes of John discussing work with the bishop or eating arrangements with the proprietor of his pensione.  Much of the time, the viewer’s mind is drifting, observing at the Venetian scenery rather than at the subtle cues on the faces of the main characters.  And while this sort of backdrop of banality creates an excellent contrast to the dreamlike world John will soon find himself trapped in, it does not make for a compelling watching experience.

The film runs 110 minutes, which is twenty minutes longer than average.  Had Roeg found twenty minutes of domestic fat to trim, the film may truly have turned out as the masterpiece that many critics claim.  As it is, too many viewers actually give up on the film before they make it to the payoff, which is surely not what the filmmakers had hoped for.  In the end, Don’t Look Now is a film that plays better in the memory than onscreen, and also a film that is much better on a second viewing—with a finger always poised near the fast-forward button.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…a fragile soap bubble of a horror film. It has a shiny surface that reflects all sorts of colors and moods, but after watching it for a while, you realize you’re looking not into it, but through it and out the other side. The bubble doesn’t burst, it slowly collapses, and you may feel, as I did, that you’ve been had.”–Vincent Camby, The New York Times (contemporaneous)

“Roeg’s film is a characteristically elliptical and genuinely unsettling affair, heightened by a palpable sense of atmosphere and ominous portent in which nothing is what it seems… an undeniably key work in British cinema.” –David Wood, BBC (video)

“After 25 years, ‘Don’t Look Now’ still has the power to frighten and disorient — to suggest a world that’s perilous, cruel and out of control.  Roeg… created an atmosphere thick with portents and subliminal clues and edited the film in a fractured manner that distorts time and perception.” –Edward Guthmann, San Francisco Chronicle (re-release)

IMDB ENTRY:  Don’t Look Now (1973)

DVD INFO:  The Paramount DVD release (Buy) contains no extras, except for the original trailer.