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It Came from the Reader-Suggested Queue

IT CAME FROM THE READER-SUGGESTED QUEUE: THE DEVIL’S CHAIR (2007)

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DIRECTED BY: Adam Mason

FEATURING: Andrew Howard, , Louise Griffiths, Elize du Toit,

PLOT: Having witnessed his girlfriend’s brutalization and disappearance by an evil chair, Nick returns four years later with a group of psychology students to recreate the experience.

COMMENTS: The Devil’s Chair could have been a pretty neat movie: a ’70s / ’80s throwback, telling a tale about evil science intersecting with dark occultism: about a sinister device crafted by a mad psychologist to separate the body from the soul in a manner most horrible. Alternatively, it could have been a decent exploration of criminal insanity, from a skewed perspective maintained up through until the very end, leaving us uncertain about the grisly narrative we’ve endured. Instead, it was a third thing, facetiously tossing aside and spitting on the better possibilities.

Despite this decision, The Devil’s Chair has glimmers of promise and possibility. Nick is hitting well out of his league with Sammy, a gorgeous young woman whom he takes on a date to an abandoned mental institution; the pair drops acid and things go pear-shaped. He convinces himself (and us) that the sinister device bloodily violates her before poofing her out of existence. The psychology department at Cambridge is intrigued both by his condition (it must have been a psychotic vision) and the occult possibilities (Dr. Willard knows more than he initially lets on). They take Nick to the scene of the awful for psycho-supernatural tests and observations.

What the movie does right is mostly in the title. The furniture piece in question is one prop I’d be happy to own. A combination of electric chair and sacrificial restraining device, it springs into action when a hidden needle pierces the skin of any finger foolish enough to rest within a cunningly-placed aperture. The doctor behind this machine is one of those classic “brilliant scientists gone wacky,” and the parallel world (with its requisite flickering lights, endless corridors, and gooey-boney demon thing) is derivative, but delightfully imagined. Matt Berry’s presence as an academic toff—at one point clad in a radiogram-skeleton shirt, long underwear, and cowboy boots—adds a chuckle.

But alas, the whole thing feels as if director Adam Mason watched too many movies. He constantly sabotages the experience through snarky asides and observations, rendering his protagonist not only unsympathetic, but also irritating. (This is only worsened by a tendency to freeze the frame as Nick spits out his dumb little witticisms.) There’s also an odd little tirade arriving at what should have been a stirring demonic climax, admonishing the viewer for watching this kind of thing in the first place. Still, The Devil’s Chair had enough momentum to carry me through the “Ahahah, gotcha!” bloody finale, and makes me hopeful that another filmmaker out there might swipe some of its better elements. Bring unto me the horror throwback about an evil chair and the dark arts behind its manifestations.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…The Devil’s Chair, alas, is dumb sensationalism that trusts blood-buckets dumped on thesps are enough to raise a fright, then undercuts even that via laddish, winking audience asides… The eventual twist only makes the scenario seem more crassly lacking in motivational logic.” — Dennis Harvey, Variety (contemporaneous)

The Devil's Chair (Unrated) [DVD]

The Devil's Chair (Unrated) [DVD]
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Capsules

CAPSULE: AN EVENING WITH BEVERLY LUFF LINN (2018)

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DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , , Craig Robinson, ,

PLOT: Lulu is unhappy with her cappuccino-store managing husband, so she runs off with a man who stole money from him to go see an old flame’s “one night only” performance at a nearby hotel.

Still from An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn (2018)
WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: Though advertised in-film as a “magical” evening with Beverly Luff Linn, the onscreen evening is not so much “magical” as “eccentric.” Luff Linn is a hulking teddy bear, leaking stuffing, and with one eye holding on by a thread. It stays surprisingly true to romantic comedy conventions while employing light, sub-Brechtian alienation techniques.

COMMENTS: For a few viewers, An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn will be their first exposure to the weird world of Jim Hosking. Most, especially readers of this site, will be drawn to it to see what the director of 2016’s transgressive The Greasy Strangler would come up with given a bigger budget and professional actors. The answer is that he compromised by scaling back the most aggressively bizarre elements of his shock debut, while still indulging in enough skewed reality to keep the comedy firmly on the surreal side of the ledger. So, for example, in Luff Linn you will see cigarette snuffed out in an absurdly oversized meatball, but no baths in vats of half-congealed grease; a couple of characters repeating the word “immediately” across scenes, but no painfully extended “bullshit artist” segments; Craig Robinson in a 40s-style one-piece bathing suit, but no full-frontal prosthetic nudity. Whereas Strangler felt a little dangerous, like  meets , Beverly is more like a  awkward/quirky concoction, slightly out of step with reality, but without the offal and outrageousness. The results are not entirely satisfactory, but they are also not nearly as much of a sell-out as they might have been.

The plot, although a bit shaggy, is not so bad, with Lulu’s urge to reconnect with a younger and more vital romance bumping up against a couple of subplots in her husband’s suburban gangsta theft of a cashbox and Luff Lin’s mysterious melancholy (which results in his only being able to communicate in Frankenstein grunts for the much of the movie). Aubrey Plaza’s sarcastic resentment, Jermaine Clement’s clueless earnestness, and Emile Hirsch’s petty criminality are perfect matches to the material, but Craig Robinson doesn’t come over as the kind of charismatic mentor Lulu would fall for (which is perhaps part of the joke), and Matt Berry makes little impression as Luff Lin’s platonic partner/manager. Hoskins sprinkles in supporting performances from a couple of his regular stock company: Sky Elobar as a cappuccino-store henchman and Sam “potato” Dissanayake as an angry yet polite convenience store owner. He also finds a few more odd-faced weirdos to add freaky texture in a moon-faced toady and a hulking, pasty hotel clerk with a Ren-faire hairstyle. Though set in the present day, the anachronistic circa 1970s wardrobe choices—Colin’s turtleneck sweater and amber-tinted tinted eyeglasses—garb a world out of whack. It’s the kind of movie where three amateur robbers go on a robbery wearing women’s wigs as disguises, but never bother to cover their familiar faces. Low synths lay a doomy horror movie soundtrack over what is basically a light comedy, adding yet another level of alienation.

And yet, for all its absurdist insouciance, Luff Linn surprisingly has heart—something conspicuously lacking in Greasy Strangler. The boy gets the girl—the right boy gets the girl. The sentimentality may be a put-on, or it may be a concession, but it feels like an honest choice.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s not perfect, and it certainly isn’t for everyone, but oddballs who love weirdo cinema will probably get a kick out of An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn.”–Diedre Crimmins, High-Def Digest (festival screening)

An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn [Blu-ray]

An Evening with Beverly Luff Linn [Blu-ray]
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