Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: HYSTERIA (1997)

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DIRECTED BY: Rene Daalder

FEATURING: Patrick McGoohan, Amanda Plummer, Michael Maloney, Emmanuelle Vaugier

PLOT: Clinical psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Fry delivers an especially troubled patient to the only place he believes can help, the remote Langston Clinic, where he discovers that the cure for mental illness may be worse than the ailment.Still from Hysteria (1997)

COMMENTS: “Welcome to the last good old-fashioned madhouse!” exclaims Dr. Harvey Langston, and he does not deceive. They just don’t make mad scientists like they used to, and Hysteria is a throwback to that wonderful time, both historically and cinematically, when society just threw all its lunatics into one big Gothic mansion and trusted to let God sort it out. The fun is in seeing just how nuts people are going to get, and once you’ve made the decision to cast Patrick McGoohan as your mad scientist and Amanda Plummer as his majordomo, you’re setting the crazy bar pretty high.

A prologue hints at a sinister explanation for what’s going on at the Langston Clinic (and is quickly forgotten), but soon after Fry’s arrival, the real secret is revealed: Dr. Langston has pioneered the use of neurotransmitters to establish a mental link among everyone at the clinic, patients and doctors alike, turning the whole place into a kind of hive mind. The result is that the afflictions of these patients are shared among the group, meaning anyone could suddenly lapse into Tourette’s or begin stuttering or suddenly rip open their blouse. Hysteria‘s great innovation is not that everyone in the asylum is crazy, but that the crazy is collective. This spirit informs the film’s wildest scene, in which a sexual encounter is appreciated far more widely than one might expect.

Despite moments like this, or a surprisingly moving scene in which a victim of paralysis attempts to crowdsource the ability to dance, Hysteria isn’t weird so much as it is ambitious. Presenting itself as a traditional horror flick in which a lone man must do battle with the forces of insanity, it eventually reveals itself to be a lunatic-themed metaphor for “it takes a village.” It’s arguable that everyone we meet is at least a little bit wacko, especially our hero Dr. Fry, esteemed clinical psychiatrist and clear voice of reason in a world gone mad. Of course, the only reason he is driving his troubled patient to a mysterious clinic in the woods is because he’s blown up his spot in the big city, raging out at a policy that favors drugs over hugs and fiercely determined to rescue this woman for whom he secretly harbors a crush. We buy in because of Michael Maloney’s passionate demeanor and plummy English accent, but the movie wants you to know you’re backing the wrong horse.

Hysteria is best enjoyed as a fun bit of misdirection masquerading as a traditional horror. The effort is aided its strong cast, including McGoohan playing both paternal and happily demented, and Plummer as the true mastermind, earning pathos through her full commitment. (Special shout-out to Vaugier, who successfully accomplishes the two tasks set before her: to play convincingly crazy and to look beautiful when called upon to take off all her clothes.) It’s far from groundbreaking, but moves in enough unexpected directions to reward the casual viewer: a good old-fashioned madhouse.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Hysteria is a film that can’t quite find the right balance between the bizarre and the intriguing… it can seem as if Daalder is including weird things for the sake of weirdness, like some kind of David Lynch wannabe... It’s admirably ambitious, but the bulk of the film ignores Daalder’s more intriguing ideas and comes off either too conventional or too aggressively weird.” – Tyler Foster, DVD Talk (Blu-Ray release)

(This movie was nominated for review by jamesoliva76. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

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Hysteria

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    It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

    IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE BUBBLE (1966)

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    AKA Fantastic Invasion of Planet Earth

    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: Michael Cole, Deborah Walley, Johnny Desmond

    PLOT: When a storm, and his passenger’s birth pangs, force a charter pilot flying a pregnant woman and her husband to make a sudden landing during a storm, the travelers find themselves trapped in a strange community.

     

    COMMENTS: Another brainchild of Arch Oboler, The Bubble is an odd little curiosity. Oboler had a surprise hit with the first American 3-D picture, Bwana Devil, in 1952. Fourteen years later, he tried to replicate this success, despite the subsequent boom and bust of the 3-D fad. Not only do The Bubble‘s technical gimmicks hearken back to the 50s, its plot derives heavily from another cheap sci-fi horror flick made ten years previously, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). But while Body Snatchers would earn a place in the American psyche, and become subject to numerous remakes (along with Night of the Living Dead, the zombie film these earlier efforts anticipate), The Bubble never gained quite the same degree of cultural cachet.

    The Bubble begins in the heart of the action. A young married couple, Mark and Cathy, plan a brief stay in a remote mountain cabin before she gives birth to their first child. They hire a charter pilot, Tony Herric, to fly them to their destination but their plans go awry when they encounter unexpected bad weather and Cathy goes into labor. After losing radio contact, Tony makes a sudden descent onto what he thinks is a landing strip, but turns out to be a deserted stretch of road flanked by street lamps. Having no idea where they are, the trio seem to experience amazing luck when a cab pulls up out of nowhere.

    “Cab, mister?” asks the driver.
    Mark and Tony hurriedly explain how they need to get Cathy to a hospital ASAP.
    “Cab, mister?” replies the driver, as though he hasn’t heard a word they’ve just said.

    They manage to make it to the hospital, but since the baby is a month premature, the doctor insists on keeping him in a incubator for at least a week. While Cathy recovers in the hospital, Mark wanders empty streets, trying to find a working telephone. Having no luck, he finally runs into Tony at a bar that looks suspiciously like a saloon from a Western movie set. Here they encounter more odd behavior from the bartender. Like the cab driver, he’s a one trick pony. He polishes glasses and repeats the phrase, “What’ll it be, gents?,” but that’s it.

    The 3-D action heats up a little when a cabaret dancer performs, her fishnet-stockinged legs projecting off the stage into the audience, which includes the very appreciative Tony. He then offers her a drink, and in an otherwise unexplained moment, the tray of beer bottles and glasses floats off the counter and flies across the room—

    Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE BUBBLE (1966) →

    List Candidates

    APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DEMONIA (1990)

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    DIRECTED BY:

    FEATURING: Meg Register, Brett Halsey, Lucio Fulci, Lino Salemme

    PLOT: An archeological dig unleashes vengeful ghosts. Still from Demonia (1990) WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: It’s a matter of balance with Fulci: do the weird parts outweigh the boring parts? Consider Un Chien Andalou. That movie has a razor blade slicing an eyeball. Fulci (famous eye assassin, apparently settling a score from childhood where optometrists beat him and took his lunch money) has a cat jump up onto a woman’s face and chomp her eyeball out and eat it, amid a screaming swarm of clawing kitties. This, in a film that would play well next to a ade, complete with otherworldly dream logic and characters that act like anything but normal human beings with brains. Fulci is oft-capsuled in our pages, but never listed. One Fulci madhouse or another should ultimately claim the throne of weirdest, and we just as well might pick this one, if not The Beyond.

    COMMENTS: Demonia is chock full of images you don’t see everyday. Fulci outdoes himself in his notoriously over-the-top death scenes. One notable flashback has a nun collect a fresh-born baby swaddled in blankets and then unceremoniously toss it into a flaming altar to burn. In a super-imposed effects shot, we see the baby’s arm amid crackling flames sticking out of the blankets as it uncurls its fist into a very distinct middle finger salute. So, there’s no shortage of off-the-wall death scenes. You could also pick the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it scene where a naked cultist nun ghost materializes brandishing a ghost-harpoon-gun, only to fire a very physical harpoon into some guy’s gut and quickly vanish.

    The trouble with this title is the parts between the deaths: talky, boring, slow-paced, sloppily written. Fulci released Cat in the Brain, a parody with the director playing himself as a director who gets Hollywood hallucination fits after his sanity is taxed by directing endless gore scenes (a plot ripped off in Evil Ed) in the same year. Just sayin’. Fulci wasn’t exactly swinging for the pro leagues in 1990. In Demonia, Fulci is so low-effort between gore scenes that he might as well carry around a margarita to sip as he plays a police inspector who fruitlessly tries to solve these ghost murders.

    What holds this movie back and divides Fulci fans? The acting is atrocious all around, the characters make no sense and are all dumb as cheese, the dialog is flat, the plot might as well be steered by dartboard, the low budget production makes everything look cheap and dirty, and Fulci phones in a performance of himself phoning it in. The first half hour’s slow pace almost kills it, but this is largely just set-up for characters that will later die to the ghost-nun rampage like so many roaches writhing in bug spray fumes. The second two-thirds grinds to the film’s advantage as the craziness starts to pile up. How many ways can we kill a person? How about tie this guy’s legs to two different trees so when you trigger the trap, they split him in two? The non-murder parts also have quirky details worth mentioning, Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DEMONIA (1990) →

    It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

    IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: A BOMB WAS STOLEN (1962)

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    AKA They Stole the Bomb

    DIRECTED BY: Ion Popescu-Gopo

    FEATURING: Iurie Darie, Liliana Tomescu, Haralambie Boros

    PLOT: An everyday man finds himself in the midst of conflicts between opposing factions for the possession of a small nuclear bomb.

    Still from A Bomb Was Stolen (1962)

    COMMENTS: The Cold War nuclear annihilation paranoia that raged from the late 1940s to the 1980s left a lasting impact on global cinema. ‘s nihilistic political satire Dr. Strangelove (1964) is perhaps the most iconic work on the subject.  And who can forget the ominous haunting animation When the Wind Blows (1986)?

    The cinema of the former Eastern Bloc followed a slightly different, more didactic approach, however; it tried to offer constructive arguments. Even Krakatit (1948), a Czechoslovakian film following a dreamlike logic, offers a moral lesson towards the end. Romania’s A Bomb Was Stolen, despite stylistic differences, is a product of the same ideological line. The plot follows an everyday man finding himself amidst a chaos of conflicts for the possession of a small stolen nuclear bomb. By pure chance, he comes into possession of a valise containing nuclear explosives, without the slightest idea of its contents. While wandering around town trying to find the bag’s owners, he finds love with a beautiful girl working in the tramways.

    The first few moments of this film establishes long shots of deserted landscapes, showcasing a formalist geometrical austerity in the composition, but this aesthetic won’t be sustained for the film. Instead, variety shows and silent era slapstick cinema are the main influences. Silent cinema in fact dictates the style, since dialogue is completely absent. What we have is exaggerated, hysterical acting and a plethora of visual gags—from typical food fights to the most bizarre (an inventive method of assassination). Add in futuristic imagery from a 1950’s sci-fi B-movie and a few stop-motion animated effects and the result is a playful overall tone.

    Our protagonist remains an everyday man ignorant of the bigger events surrounding him; but not in a Kafkaesque sense. He is never in real danger, always having a sense of control and agency. In the end, along with his newfound girlfriend (an exemplary representative of the working class) he even have constructive propositions to suggest, contributing to positive social change.

    WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

    “…starts and ends with satire and comical surrealism, and presents a fun farce with slapstick in between.”–Zev Toledano, The Worldwide Celluloid Massacre

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