Month: August 2015

The Anatomist (1961)

THE ANATOMIST (1961)
Article #850 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-13-2003
Posting Date: 12-10-2003
Directed by Leonard William
Featuring Alastair Sim, George Cole, Adrienne Corri

A medical student finds his impending marriage to a young woman is threatened by his association with Dr. Knox, who may be using resurrection men to supply his medical school with cadavers.

Title check: Appropriate enough, as Dr. Knox was an anatomist.

This is another of the many movies based on the exploits of Burke and Hare; this one is more focused on Dr. Knox, and plays out more like a historical drama than a horror movie. It’s based on a stage play and was shot for television, which goes a long way towards explaining the style of the movie; most of it takes place on only three sets, and it largely consists of characters talking (and shouting) at each other. It’s well acted, even if it’s played somewhat over the top; there were scenes here where I felt that the actors were competing to see who could best channel the spirit of Tod Slaughter. All the action scenes take place offstage.

Ultimately, this might all work, as the story itself is interesting enough. Unfortunately, I was somewhat disappointed by it. Part of the reason is I’m not quite sure if the movie has any real point of view on the matter. The ending makes me suspect that we’re supposed to feel sympathy for Knox, but outside of a single admission of his that he feels a bit of guilt over the deaths of the victims of the resurrectionists, his arrogance and other unpleasant personality traits leave me feeling very unsympathetic towards the man. Though it’s not without merit, I suspect there are several other movies on the same subject that I would rather watch.

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The Phantom of the Moulin Rouge (1925)

THE PHANTOM OF THE MOULIN ROUGE (1925)
Article #849 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-12-2003
Posting Date: 12-9-2003
Directed by Rene Clair
Featuring George Vaultier, Jose Davert, Albert Prejean

A noted businessman disappears at about the same time that mysterious happenings take place in Paris.

Title check: Though the phantom doesn’t focus on the Moulin Rouge for his doings, it is the site for certain events that culminate in his appearance.

The above plot description does not match the movie for about the first half hour, which unfolds in such a way as to lead you to suspect that you’re watching a fairly conventional melodrama of sorts. However, it’s at about the half hour point that things start to get weird, and it’s also at this point that the more comic aspects of the story manifest themselves. The comedy element was somewhat inevitable, as the movie was directed by Rene Clair, who was an expert at adding a light comedy touch to this sort of story. The plot takes some very interesting and fascinating directions; it’s something of a ghost story, but it depends a little on exactly how you define a ghost. At any rate, this one was a lot of fun, with some particularly fascinating editing during the encounter between the businessman and the psychologist.

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This Island Earth (1955)

THIS ISLAND EARTH (1955)
Article #848 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-11-2003
Posting Date: 12-8-2003
Directed by Joseph Newman
Featuring Rex Reason, Faith Domergue, Jeff Morrow

A scientist is recruited by a strange man to do nuclear research.

Title check: The title makes a certain amount of sense within the bounds of the story; furthermore, it is one of the more poetically evocative titles to be found in fifties science fiction.

The main thing that prevents me from placing this ambitious science fiction epic in the front line of fifties science fiction films is that the pacing feels somewhat awkward in the second half of the movie; certain important plot twists occur too abruptly and unexpectedly, and I really think we don’t see near enough of Metaluna and its culture. Nevertheless, this is one of the most interesting stories from that era, with a plot that has slight similarites to an alien invasion story but really is playing a much more complex game. The most interesting aspect of the story is that our primary alien character (given a strong performance by Jeff Morrow) is someone who is going against the grain of his culture by recognizing that earthlings should be allowed to preserve their sense of free will; many movies with aliens tend to make them less varied than this. The first half of the movie is excellent, and the building of the interociter is one of my very favorite sequences in science fiction movies of the era. And though I love the look of the Metalunan Mutant, it felt like a bit of a cop-out to toss a monster into a story that didn’t need one and could have worked better without one; I actually wish they had made a separate movie altogether using the Mutants.

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Sssssss (1973)

SSSSSSS (1973)
Article #847 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-10-2003
Posting Date: 12-7-2003
Directed by Bernard Kowalski
Featuring Strother Martin, Dirk Benedict, Heather Menzies

A sssssinisssster sssscientissst transssforms hisssss asssssisssstant into a sssssnake.

Title check: Aha, one of the few movie titles to conssssissst of one letter (okay, I’ll ssssstop), though just calling it ‘S’ wouldn’t have been safisfiying. Now let’s apply the same technique to several other one letter titles. M would have become MMMMMMMM, which sounds quity yummy, but would not have given a good sense of the movie, and Z would have become Zzzzzzz, which quite frankly sounds boring (I haven’t seen that one, so I can’t say one way or the other). At any rate, I never encourage a movie to title itself in such a way that it invites people to hiss at it.

The basic idea is good old-fashioned mad scientist fodder, and the make up is quite good. The movie is like a cross between STANLEY, THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE, PSYCHO (the shower scene, anyway) and a teen sex comedy. It’s the script that really is the downfall here; the dialogue is very bad throughout, there are way too many characters with tiny brain capacity (a stupid college professor, a stupid jock, his bimbo girlfriend, and two stupid cops are way too many for a movie that isn’t supposed to be a comedy). Some of the scenes are incredibly clumsy; a skinny-dipping sequence has the worst use ever of masking-the-naughty-bit foliage; I guess they just didn’t want to lose that PG rating, which might also account for the fact that the hallucination sequence looks more like an easy-listening music video. The ending relies on the most incredible conjunction of coincidences I’ve encountered in a movie in some time. You might want to save this one for when you’re really in the right mood for it.

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Amphitryon (1935)

AMPHITRYON (1935)
Article #846 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-9-2003
Posting Date: 12-6-2003
Directed by Reinhold Schunzel
Featuring Willy Fritsch, Kathe Gold, Paul Kemp

Jupiter comes down from Mount Olympus and disguises himself as a mortal to romance a woman.

Title check: Amphitryon is the name of the mortal whom Jupiter imitates. No problem.

If I were asked to say what I thought about German musical comedies, I would have precious little to say, since I didn’t even know they made any. Well, here’s one, and I still have little to say because it’s all in German without subtitles. It seems well-acted enough, but the music is not particularly memorable, and it’s not possible to say if the jokes are funny when you can’t understand the language, though some of the visual moments are quite striking. There is also a French version of the movie made at the same time called LES DIEUX S’AMUSENT, which I haven’t seen. Some of the special effects are also quite nice. I’ll leave further commentary for those who can understand the language.

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The Search for Bridey Murphy (1956)

THE SEARCH FOR BRIDEY MURPHY (1956)
Article #845 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-8-2003
Posting Date: 12-5-2003
Directed by Noel Langley
Featuring Louis Hayward, Teresa Wright, Nancy Gates

A hypnotist discovers that his best subject is capable of dredging up memories of a woman who lived before she was born.

Title check: It’s pretty much a basic title for the story.

This movie is based on a (supposedly) true story that was a sensation in the fifties, and though the movie never claims anything more on a factual level than that hypnotism is a fairly powerful tool, it uses several techniques to try to give the viewer the sense of watching reenactments of real events. The end result is odd; it uses a great deal of narration (especially in the opening scenes), and the action is staged in a bare-bones fashion; the overall experience feels something like a cross between that of a radio play and a stage presentation. It’s not even afraid to be dull (some of the hypnotism sessions dwell on the mundane details of life in Ireland during the early nineteenth century), but that has the effect of making it seem a little more real; it’s a nice way to offset the fact that most of the acting and the dialogue is rather wooden. Whether it’s true or not, it did remind me of how I felt when I first watched THE LEGEND OF BOGGY CREEK, in that it tapped into that part of me that would really like to believe these things. There is something rather haunting in the concept that some veils might have been pierced here, particularly when we discover that the woman not only remembers Bridey Murphy’s life, but also her death and afterlife. Whatever its flaws, I have to admit I found this one a lot more interesting than many of the other movies of the time that were inspired by this story.

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The Pyx (1973)

THE PYX (1973)
Article #844 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-7-2003
Posting Date: 12-4-2003
Directed by Harvey Hart
Featuring Karen Black, Christopher Plummer, Donald Pilon

A policeman investigates the mysterious death of a hooker/drug addict who either jumped or was pushed off the balcony of a penthouse apartment.

Title check: A pyx is a container used by Catholic priests to hold communion wafers. As a title, it’s obscure, but appropriate to a movie with a Catholic backdrop such as this, especially as it is one of the items discovered on the body of the hooker.

Despite certain marked horror elements that become more defined as the movie progresses, horror fans may be somewhat disappointed by this one, as it mostly plays its story as a cross between a drama and a crime movie. I found it consistently interesting, if occasionally a bit contrived, and I admire how effectively it pulls off a difficult trick in storytelling; half of the story recounts the investigation of the crime, and the other half tells the story of the hooker in flashback. Though the movie jumps back and forth between the two timestreams without warning, amazingly enough you don’t get lost, because it squarely focuses on the two major characters in each timestream so you always know where you are in the story. It’s definitely a seventies movie, and it doesn’t shy from the sleazy aspects of the story, but it comes off a little better than you might expect.

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Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971)

LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1971)
Article #843 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-6-2003
Posting Date: 12-3-2003
Directed by John Hancock
Featuring Zohra Lampert, Barton Heyman, Kevin O’Connor

A woman newly released from a mental hospital goes with her husband and a friend to a secluded house on an island, where they encounter a strange woman.

Title check: At first, the title makes it sound like a “Cat and the Canary” comedy variant, but a few minutes into the movie you’ll know it’s not a comedy. Then I thought it was going to be a “Gaslight” variant, but it’s not that either. Let’s just say that the title is too flip for the movie.

This movie’s strength is its moody subtlety; it has a genuinely unsettling feel to it, and does a wonderful job of setting you on edge. However, the mysterious subtlety that pervades the movie also leads you to believe that the ensuing events are going to be somewhat more original than what they turn out to be; in fact, for a movie this subtle, its attempts at making the horror more blatant are often ham-fisted and obvious, which undermines the mood that the subtlety has created; specifically, this movie would have been a lot better if the word “vampire” was never used. Furthermore, the subtlety walks hand in hand with a sense of general vagueness and maintains a distance between the action and the viewer. This doesn’t cause a problem in the first half of the movie, but the second half of the movie never takes off as a result of it. All in all, I felt the movie was a failure, though an interesting one; it either needed a more direct, visceral approach to its story, or it needed a better story than the one it has.

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Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1954)

INAUGURATION OF THE PLEASURE DOME (1954)
Article #842 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-5-2003
Posting Date: 12-2-2003
Directed by Kenneth Anger
Featuring Marjorie Cameron, Sampson de Brier, Curtis Harrington

Plot description: Huh?

Title check: Ditto.

Basically, this is film as abstract art. I don’t consider this automatically bad, by any means, as I find that on occasion a movie like this can really fascinate me. However, I’m at a loss usually to explain why I like (or don’t like) movies like this, because I usually just let them wash over me, and they either strike a chord or they don’t. Sadly, this one doesn’t. It apparently has something to do with opera (the background music is definitely operatic), and it involves various people in bizarre costumes and makeup against nondescript backgrounds gesturing and posing. I think there are several scenes where jewelry is eaten, and there’s a lot of drinking of some unknown substance in the second half of this short movie. Much of the imagery is vaguely grotesque, pagan and Satanic, and it all feels like some sort of rather sacriligious ritual. I really don’t know much about Kenneth Anger, but Curtis Harrington would go on to direct several horror and science fiction movies later on in life, and Anais Nin is also in the movie somewhere. It seems foolish to write about something like this when you don’t really know what to make of it, but I have no intention of skipping a movie for this series just because I don’t get it. File this one with the question marks.

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The Blood-Spattered Bride (1972)

THE BLOOD-SPATTERED BRIDE (1972)
Article #841 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing Date: 7-4-2003
Posting Date: 12-1-2003
Directed by Vicente Aranda
Featuring Simon Andreu, Maribel Martin, Alexandra Bastedo

A newly-married woman has encounters with a strange woman who may be a vampiress from the family’s past.

Title check: This movie earns the title at about the halfway point in a fairly bloody dream sequence.

This marks a third attempt at Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” that I’ve seen, and ranks somewhere between the other two; it’s not quite as bizarre or interesting as BLOOD AND ROSES, but is a lot more effective than TERROR IN THE CRYPT. It’s also the most exploitive, with a fairly liberal dosage of sex and gore, and thematically it deals with the bride’s latent disgust and hatred of men. Since her husband ends up being a bit of brute, this is understandable within the context of the movie, but it’s really hard to warm up to anything or anyone in this exercise in mayhem. Unfortunately, the movie takes its time at certain points when it should be moving the plot along, and it saves most of its mayhem for the final ten minutes. The most memorable scene involves a naked woman with a snorkel buried on the beach, a scene so oddly surreal that it feels like it’s in the wrong movie; it comes out of nowhere and nothing before or after really matches it. Definitely a mixed bag, and not for the faint of heart.

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