All posts by Shane Wilson

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960)

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DIRECTED BY: Wolf Rilla

FEATURING: George Sanders, Barbara Shelley, Michael Gwynn, Martin Stephens

PLOT: All the women of child-bearing age in the Midwich  become pregnant after a mysterious period of unconsciousness; their offspring have a distinctive appearance, mature rapidly, and behave in a manner quite unnatural.

Still from village of the damned (1960)

COMMENTS: For two years running, I have celebrated Halloween here with a classic 1950s goofball–monster showcase. So here we are, on the cusp of the 60s, and lots of things look familiar: we’re back in black-and-white, we’re back in England, and something is once more out to get us. But it’s a little different this time. This time, the beasts aren’t strabismus-afflicted giant birds or giddily bouncing brains. They’re children, notable for their platinum hair, their glowing eyes, and their sociopathic behavior. This time, our monster feels earnestly threatening.

We don’t get to them right away, though. The film cleverly serves up its surprises and horrors at a deliberate pace. We must first work through the mystery of the lengthy period of unconsciousness, which the authorities investigate seriously and thoroughly, diligently working through experiments that culminate in a terrible sacrifice. We never get a full explanation for that occurrence, though, because we’re quickly on to the conundrum of the many immaculate conceptions and the havoc they wreak among the populace. In fact, we’re well into Act 2 before we get our first encounter with the enigma of the curious children themselves, who can solve puzzle boxes as toddlers and who get revenge upon their mothers when the feeding bottle is too hot. (The filmmakers were right to forego the original title of John Wyndham’s book; “The Midwich Cuckoos” would have been too much of a giveaway as to the childrens’ origin.) This sense of compounding catastrophes keeps you off-balance like the residents of Midwich, never able to relax before the next dilemma arrives.

The children are appropriately creepy. Lead child David (Stephens, unconvincingly dubbed) does most of the talking, serving up uncomfortable sociopathy by directly confronting the shopkeepers who think them an abomination, or helpfully suggesting to his father that, “If you didn’t suffer from emotions, from feelings… you could be as powerful as we are.” However, the young terrors do most of their intimidation without words. A walk through the town shows the residents in a mixed state of fear and revulsion, responding to the cliquish collection of quiet children as if they were a rowdy biker gang. Luckily, all they need to do is put on their best wish-you-to-the-cornfield look  and the townspeople’s reactions do the rest. They come by their fears honestly, because we’ve seen that the children’s disapproval carries with it the threat of death. This is most evident in Continue reading IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: VILLAGE OF THE DAMNED (1960) →

It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DEAFULA (1975)

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DIRECTED BY: Peter Wechsberg

FEATURING: Peter Wechsberg (as Peter Wolf), Lee Darel, Dudley Hemstreet, James Randall

PLOT: In a universe where everyone communicates via American Sign Language (ASL), theology student Steve Adams discovers that he is the son of Dracula and has been leading a second life as a blood-thirsty vampire with a trail of bodies in his wake.

Still from deafula (1975)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: Even if it weren’t one of the first (and, to this day, one of the only) films made exclusively in ASL, Deafula’s imaginative presentation of a world where gestural speech is the lingua franca and its singular interpretation of the Dracula legend make it a movie that truly has no comparison.

COMMENTS: Let’s start with the remarkable durability of the Dracula myth. Vampires have lost none of their fascination even in our modern world (I’ve discussed this phenomenon before), and Dracula lords over them all, appearing in some form in more than 200 films. Unlike most of his classic horror brethren (werewolves, mummies, zombies, Frankenstein monsters, creatures from black lagoons and the like), Dracula is verbal, and even handsome, as likely to use seductive words as violent action to achieve his aims. So when an underrepresented community wants to tap into the mainstream, there’s probably no figure more iconic and adaptable and copyright-free than Dracula, standing by and ready to tell his tale once more. Blacula, anyone?

And so we come to Deafula, in which writer/director/star  Wechsberg endeavored to give the deaf community something they had never had: a popular entertainment of their very own. He conjured up a messily layered version of the story, with the fundamental vampire-kills-people plotline frequently taking a back seat to the hero’s fraught relationship with his father, a police procedural featuring a Van Helsing substitute whom everybody hates, and a substantial commitment to themes of religious devotion and divine punishment. We do get Dracula in this movie (as an appropriately imperious and condescending figure), but he’s not our star. Instead, our hero is a pretty average, milquetoast kind of guy who, when he transforms into a villain, looks less like a demonic force and more like a low-rent Svengoolie with a ridiculous fake nose.

It is impossible to divorce Deafula from the circumstances of its creation. A drama student at Gallaudet University, Wechsberg was drawn to the power of film, and after getting into some production work, he scraped enough money to make a movie his way, with the deaf audience in mind. (He also aspired to give deaf creators their due; the closing credits specifically distinguish the hearing-impaired performers from their hearing colleagues.) His inexperience shows, especially when it comes to action. He crafts a clever introduction to reveal his hero emerging from the vampire state, but afterward gets caught up in disjointed edits and inconsistent pacing. Deafula’s savage mind-control of a would-be robber should be evidence of his Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: DEAFULA (1975) →

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: HOUSE (1985)

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DIRECTED BY: Steve Miner

FEATURING: William Katt, George Wendt, , Kay Lenz, Mary Stavin

PLOT: Horror writer Roger Cobb moves into the house left to him by his aunt following her apparent suicide, only to find it infested by malevolent forces that challenge his biggest fears and anxieties.

Still from house (1985)

COMMENTS: Poor Roger is having a pretty rough go of it. His agent is eager for him to churn out the next big hit in his Stephen King-like career, but he’s got an awful case of writer’s block. Whyfor? Well, it might be the collapse of his marriage to a successful TV star, which itself is probably due to the mysterious disappearance of their son. (Roger’s repeated calls to the FBI and the CIA get no results.) And it could be the haunting memories of that time in Vietnam when the muscleman of the platoon saved Roger’s life and lost his own to some extras from a community theater production of Miss Saigon. Plus, his beloved aunt did just hang herself in the upstairs of her beautiful Victorian mansion, the very same place where his son went missing, and her ghost has turned up to say that it’s all the house’s fault. So naturally, Roger decides that very house is the perfect place to get out of his head and finally finish that wartime memoir (which he has titled, with all due vagueness, One Man’s Story). It quickly becomes obvious that this was not the best place for a distraction-free retreat: intrusive neighbors lurk outside , including the guy next door who ignores boundaries and the Scandinavian sexpot down the street who stops by to use the swimming pool unannounced. Meanwhile, the TV always seems to be airing his ex-wife’s show, and the walls are covered with his uncle’s hunting and fishing trophies and his aunt’s disturbing paintings. Honestly, it’s probably a relief when the monsters in the closet and the flying knives show up; at last, the man can focus.

As the description above should indicate, House has more plot than it knows what to do with, and that’s a shame, because when it settles down and focuses on one or two things, the film hits its stride. For example, after confronting a monster performing a grotesque parody of his ex-wife (one of the film’s excellently cartoony creature effects), Roger slips into a slapstick routine as he attempts to hide the beast’s body (and later, various pieces of said body) from the police. A perfectly serviceable piece of dark comedy. But a return trip to that well, in which Roger attempts to pry the monster’s disembodied hand off a toddler’s neck while simultaneously peacocking for the boy’s hot mom, falls terribly, as the wacky loose-hand hijinks don’t mesh with the child’s wretched crying. House is unable to pick a lane, and this is a recurring problem. Should we see Roger as the one sane man in a world gone mad, or as a troubled individual very steadily beginning to crack under the pressure? Are George Wendt and Richard Moll here to show off their sitcom-honed comedic chops, or to play against type? The movie can’t figure out how to walk and chew gum at the same time, which means we have a comedy and a horror film trying to occupy the same space, and the emotional wires get seriously crossed. An inherently ludicrous scene, such as a mounted swordfish coming to life like an enormous Big Mouth Billy Bass, is treated as an intense moment of fear and conflict (despite the fact that the thing is, you know, stuck to the wall). Meanwhile, Roger’s PTSD-laden Vietnam flashbacks look like someone saw Sands of Iwo Jima once. (House’s version of ‘Nam isn’t so much shot on the backlot as it is in someone’s backyard.) We never get a true sense of this experience as a lifelong trauma, let alone the source of the film’s Big Bad.

One has to acknowledge that film’s most obvious forebear: House feels like a cheap knockoff of ’s Evil Dead (the irony being that Evil Dead probably cost the same as this film’s catering budget). The truth is that if Miner and Cunningham ever watched Evil Dead, they couldn’t figure out how to replicate the formula. You can feel them getting awfully close to their goal. Director Miner, a veteran of the second and third entries in the Friday the 13th series (producer Sean Cunningham directed the first), wants to tap into the fun of watching people running from their fears, only you’re expected to care about these characters far more than any of the denizens of Camp Crystal Lake. And those monsters are disgusting, but gleefully so. The hideous beast lurking in the bedroom closet, that Lady Gremlin-esque deceiver, even Moll’s hellish soldier back from the dead to avenge his betrayal all go for gross in the most fun way possible. It’s not scary, exactly, but it’s funhouse scary. (Quite frankly, there’s nothing in this film nearly as unsettling as the movie’s own poster.) Plus, casting Wiliam Katt proves a savvy choice; he’s not exactly dripping with personality, but he’s game and never sells out the absurdities with a wink or a shrug, which means scenes like his journey into the dark void that lies just the other side of his bathroom medicine cabinet are surprisingly strong.

To damn it with faint praise, House is… fine. It’s not especially scary, but it does have moments of surprise or amusing disgust. It’s not particularly funny, although there are chuckles here and there. It doesn’t make all that much sense, yet I can see how remaking it as a six-part Netflix series could give the story’s many ideas the space to take shape and resolve. As it stands, House is a pleasant diversion. But that’s one man’s story.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“The film may in fact offer at least a few more laughs than actual scares, but it is certainly one of the weirder examples of a horror comedy hybrid simply by dint of the fact that it utilizes PTSD (whether caused by war experiences or the disappearance of a child) for some of its humor.” – Jeffrey Kauffman, Blu-ray.com (Blu-ray)

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

House (Special Edition) [Blu-ray]

House (Special Edition) [Blu-ray]
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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue, List Candidates

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: FROM MORN TO MIDNIGHT (1920)

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Von morgens bis mitternachts

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DIRECTED BY: Karlheinz Martin

FEATURING: Ernst Deutsch, Roma Bahn, Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, Lotte Stein, Frida Richard

PLOT: A bank cashier is so enchanted by a customer that he steals an enormous amount of money in hopes of persuading her to run away with him, but when he rejects him, he abandons his family, skips town, and reinvents himself, using the money in pursuit of earthly pleasures to diminishing returns.

Still from From Morn to Midnight (1920)

WHY IT MIGHT JOIN THE APOCRYPHA: One of the pre-eminent early examples of German expressionist filmmaking (no discussion of it is complete without mentioning its fellow 1920 release The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari), From Morn to Midnight delivers a healthy dose of abstract imagery and proto-surrealism, taking advantage of both the newness of the medium and its silence to tell its cautionary tale.

COMMENTS: The Cashier, the protagonist of From Morn to Midnight, doesn’t walk on to the screen, nor do we cut to him. No, director Karlheinz Martin dissolves in on our central character, summoning him to life in the middle of a bank vault as though he were being added to a holodeck program. We will later learn that this wretched figure has a home and an adoring family waiting for him there, but this first scene provides us with the real scoop: The Cashier exists purely for the purposes of this allegorical tale, and no pesky background or deeper characterization will be needed.

So begins a surprisingly didactic and moralistic story. Once the Cashier decides to break bad, he goes whole hog: ditching his family as callously as he can; making himself over from a bent and wrinkled old man into a spry, slick dandy; and spending all his ill-gotten gains on wine, women, and song. At every turn, he meets with disappointment. The money doesn’t bring him respect or pleasure. Intriguingly, his road-to-Damascus moment doesn’t work out, either; having forsaken his past sins, he is sold out by a gentle Salvation Army worker who turns him in the moment he mentions the reward for his capture. The final image—the Cashier dying in a crucifixion pose with the words “ECCE HOMO” flickering above him like a neon bar sign—is not exactly subtle.

Then again, absolutely nothing in From Morn to Midnight is subtle, because director Martin is  here to sell an art form more than a story. He piles on all the Expressionist touches in his arsenal. He places every scene in a black void, with only the most abstract simplistic props and scenic elements providing hints of location. What little set decoration there is takes the form of mismatched flats lined in hastily applied white paint, turning every setting into a chalk drawing. Even The Cashier’s trudge through a blizzard is charmingly minimalist, as he walks down a tightly curved pathway while confetti is thrown at him. The actors themselves become two-dimensional elements through heavy makeup and wildly outsized emotional displays. Dogville almost a century before Lars von Trier could get around to making it, From Morn to Midnight is fiercely presentational, and makes sure you know it.

Like any self-respecting morality play, The Cashier’s sad fate can be predicted from the outset. For one thing, throughout the course of the film, on-set clocks are counting down the inevitable march to midnight (a touch that might have inspired Peter Greenaway). Even more telling is an image so indelible that it not only repeats, but the same actress is called upon to fill multiple roles just so it can be summoned anew. For each character Roma Bahn portrays, whether it be a homeless waif on the steps of the bank, a floozy in a hotel bar, or that young Salvation Army officer, there comes a moment when her pretty face is transformed into a death skull. Her every appearance is a red flag that The Cashier fails to heed.

The story behind the film is refreshingly optimistic by comparison. Many of the cast, including lead actor Deutsch, were Jews who later escaped Germany to live and work in the United States. Meanwhile, the movie itself had a limited release in Germany and was thought lost for decades until copies were unearthed in Japan, where Expressionism’s similarities to Noh theater made From Morn to Midnight relatable. And today, through the wonders of public domain and the internet, it’s available for all to enjoy, in the original German or translated into English. In this morality play, at least, the love of film is a virtue.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Not a frame of From Morn to Midnight is wasted in creating a surreal atmosphere…  Its sets are so bizarre, so deliberately over the top that it overwhelms its own message. The audience can only take so much. No wonder theater owners balked at it.” – Lea Stans, Silent-ology

ADDITIONAL LINK OF INTEREST: A Cinema History provides a comprehensive review of the film, with extensive visuals and thoughtful analysis.

(This movie was nominated for review by Shane. [But not, you know, this Shane. Some other Shane.] Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)  

Capsules, It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: SHINBONE ALLEY (1970)

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DIRECTED BY: John David Wilson

FEATURING THE VOICES OF: , Eddie Bracken, Alan Reed, John Carradine

PLOT: A poet/newspaper man resurrected as a cockroach tells a  number of stories about his friend, a cat with loose morals and a knack for picking the wrong mates, and the many times he tries to pull her out of trouble.

Still from shinbone Alley (1970)

COMMENTS: Animation, frustrated aficionados will tell you, is not a genre, it’s a medium. Just because the twin monoliths of Walt Disney and Saturday morning television built their empire on a commitment to entertaining grade schoolers with moving drawings, we should not assume that cartoons are only for kids. But parents and studio executives never seem to get the message. There’s plenty of of evidence of this blindness — just count up the number of traumatized children who were exposed to the original Watership Down — and a leading piece of evidence should be the tagline that marketing wizards devised for Shinbone Alley: “It’s sophisticated enough for kids, simple enough for adults!” Because if anything cries out to be seen by all audiences, it’s the story of a sexually promiscuous cat who takes up with a series of abusive partners, as told by the suicidal cockroach who loves her.

The idea of a creating musical based on the “archy and mehitabel” stories of Don Marquis was unusually persistent. The tales were enormously popular in their day (the titular cockroach and cat are among the literary figures immortalized on the bronze screen that fronts the monumental Brooklyn Public Library), but they didn’t get paired up with song-and-dance until a concept album in 1954, penned by Joe Darion (who would gain acclaim as the book writer for Man of La Mancha) and composer George Kleinsinger (whose best known composition is probably Tubby the Tuba) and starring Bracken and Channing in the title roles. The script would get a punch-up from Mel Brooks before making its way to Broadway for a six-week run in 1957, now starring Bracken alongside the dangerously seductive Eartha Kitt as Mehitabel. (So now you know: Andrew Lloyd Webber did not provide the first dancing cats on the Great White Way.) Undaunted by the flop, a shortened version of the show found its way to television in 1960 (featuring Bracken and Tammy Grimes as the titular feline) before arising once more a decade later as an animated feature with the original stars in tow. So with all that effort, there must be something in the adaptation that was demanding to be seen.

I’m still trying to figure out what that is. Shinbone Alley is a collection of scenes in which our heroes go through a sad and troubling cycle: Mehitabel searches for fame, free love, and good times, ignoring Archy’s pleas to clean up her act; her latest beau turns out to be apathetic at best, cruel at worst; Archy has to bail her out of her latest predicament; Mehitabel becomes furious with Archy for trying to kill her buzz; Archy becomes deeply depressed; Mehitabel realizes that Archy is probably the best friend she has; the pair celebrates their friendship, and we go around again. It’s possible that this dysfunction once played for laughs and has just aged poorly, but it’s hard to see who might have enjoyed seeing one of the lead characters getting threatened by a big bully, stolen from by a charlatan actor, and ultimately knocked up by both and then saddled with a litter that she promptly abandons to be nearly drowned in a storm. Is that the part that’s sophisticated enough for kids, or is it the other lead character constantly threatening to kill himself?

Shinbone Alley is actually a well-animated film, and director Wilson has fun shifting from the ugliness of the alley to colorful flights of fancy like pop art representations of Archy’s free-verse musings, or especially the extended scene in which Archy plots revolution in the distinctive style of George Herriman, the “Krazy Kat” creator who illustrated many of Marquis’ stories. But the other elements are a drag. The score is utterly unmemorable; the most notable song is the pals-forever number “Flotsam and Jetsam,” which at least relates to the characters. Other tunes barely connect to anything in the story at all, such as Big Bill’s ode to the alley and his own violent nature (sung by Reed in the same voice he used for Fred Flintstone), or the reminiscence of Tyrone T. Tattersall (“sung” by Carradine) of his early days in the theater. At one point, we even get Shakespeare delivered in the style of beat poetry. It’s as though Darion and Brooks, both of them Tony-winning book writers, can’t think of a single reason for their characters to break into song, so no reason becomes reason enough.

Ultimately, the film seems to take its inspiration from Mehitabel herself. She never seems to learn from her setbacks, bouncing back with the repeated watchcry, “Toujours gai!” So it goes with Shinbone Alley. What worked in Marquis’ newspaper columns never translated to stage or screen, but here we are, giving it another go. The peculiar mix of perky animation and grim subject matter is is certainly weird, but not half as weird as the certainty its creators held that this was a story that must be told.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“Shinbone Alley, you see, is a singular strange animated movie, trapped in the film marketplace of the early 1970s with absolutely nowhere to go, certainly no naturally-occurring audience… Weird stuff for a kids’ movie (I am, if nothing else, 100% confident that this was the first American animated feature in which one of the main characters has sex, gets pregnant, and gives birth, all out of wedlock, during the overall course of the narrative), and there’s something irresistibly jarring in that mismatch between the dopey simplicity of the film’s comedy and the thorny, mean streets filthiness of its plot, not to mention the sullen existentialism of archy’s overall arc, and the generally moody songs…”– Tim Brayton, Alternate Ending

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

Shinbone Alley

Shinbone Alley
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