Director Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton's follow-up to Cat People may be the best zombie movie ever made. Of course, we're talking old school zombies here. The story takes place on a small Caribbean island, where the descendants of African slaves practice voodoo. It is told by Betsy, the nurse who comes to the island to care for plantation-owner Paul Holland's ailing wife, Jessica. Jessica, we discover, lives in a semi-comatose state: though she can walk and follow simple directions, she has no will of her own. The story, written by Curt Siodmak (Donovan's Brain) and Ardel Wray, is one of surprising depth. There's the double-backstory, for instance -- of the island's history and the history of Paul and his family -- the brooding atmosphere, and the realistic detail of the voodoo rituals. Layered one atop the other, what emerges is a portrait of a family torn apart by dark forces and passions. Relatively early in the film, Betsy and Paul's brother sit down for a drink at a local bar. Their conversation is interrupted by a calypso singer (Sir Lancelot), telling the story of the Holland family. The words provide backstory, the style a Caribbean atmosphere, and the title, "Shame and Sorrow," the theme of the entire picture. A short film this may be, but it packs a lot into 69 minutes.
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Director Jacques Tourneur and producer Val Lewton's follow-up to Cat People may be the best zombie movie ever made. Of course, we're talking old school zombies here. The story takes place on a small Caribbean island, where the descendants of African slaves practice voodoo. It is told by Betsy, the nurse who comes to the island to care for plantation-owner Paul Holland's ailing wife, Jessica. Jessica, we discover, lives in a semi-comatose state: though she can walk and follow simple directions, she has no will of her own. The story, written by Curt Siodmak (Donovan's Brain) and Ardel Wray, is one of surprising depth. There's the double-backstory, for instance -- of the island's history and the history of Paul and his family -- the brooding atmosphere, and the realistic detail of the voodoo rituals. Layered one atop the other, what emerges is a portrait of a family torn apart by dark forces and passions. Relatively early in the film, Betsy and Paul's brother sit down for a drink at a local bar. Their conversation is interrupted by a calypso singer (Sir Lancelot), telling the story of the Holland family. The words provide backstory, the style a Caribbean atmosphere, and the title, "Shame and Sorrow," the theme of the entire picture. A short film this may be, but it packs a lot into 69 minutes.
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+++ If this film didn't star Steve McQueen; if it didn't open with a silly -- but catchy -- Burt Bacharach tune (lyrics by Mack David); if it weren't just clever enough to distract us from the monster's Achilles heel by giving us another plausible reason why the Blob doesn't kill McQueen and his girlfriend when it has the chance; if its brand of nostalgia weren't so hard to come by -- you know, the honest if not the trendy kind, where kids rebel but still love their parents and siblings; and if it didn't occasionally succeed in horrifying the more helpfully imaginative members of its audience; if it weren't for these things, this slack and often awkward movie wouldn't be nearly as fun as it is. Old man unwisely pokes a meteorite, the gooey contents of which seize his hand and begin to eat him up. McQueen and his girlfriend (Aneta Corsaut, later to become one of Sheriff Andy Taylor's potential brides in The Andy Griffith Show), haul the geezer to the town doctor, unwittingly feeding it a couple more bodies, whereupon the kids decide they must warn an unbelieving town of the gelatinous monster from space. Followed 14 years later by a sequel, Beware! The Blob, directed by Larry Hagman, and remade in 1988 as a film starring Kevin Dillon and Shawnee Smith. ++++ Physicist Lionel Barrett is the nominal leader of a small group of investigators hired by a dying man to investigate a supposedly haunted house in order to establish conclusively whether or not there is survival after death. Barrett doesn't think so; Florence Tanner, a mental medium, disagrees; and Ben Fisher, a physical medium and the only sane survivor of a previous investigation years before, agrees with Florence -- but he's there less to prove anything to his employer than to avenge his previous failure. Edith, Barrett's seemingly timid wife, is along for the ride. It's a wild ride, to be sure. This is not a book that skimps on its supernatural manifestations. Spirit guides, poltergeist activity, possession, teleplasmic extrusions -- the list goes on and on. You want action? You've found it. To Matheson's credit, it isn't, however, mindless mayhem. He doesn't toss a ghost in the house and figure anything goes. Matheson weaves together the personalities of his investigators with the sordid history of the house to create a believable framework for all the insanity. The final revelation -- a psychologically weak explanation for the house's most evil ghost -- can't spoil an otherwise satisfying resolution. Made into a film, The Legend of Hell House, in 1973. ++ Adaptation of Robert Marasco's horror novel starring Karen Black and Oliver Reed, co-written by director Curtis and the co-creator of Logan's Run (William F. Nolan). Largely dull slow-mover (nobody said it was a bad adaptation) about a small family whose summer home -- a forbidding yet remarkably inexpensive mansion -- has a mind of its own. Marasco did little to illuminate the motivations of his characters (including the house) and this film does even less. With Betty Davis as Reed's elderly aunt and Burgess Meredith in a small role as co-owner of the house. Soporific. +++1/2 One of Hammer's best horror films, starring Peter Cushing and real-life identical twins Mary and Madeleine Collinson. Cushing plays Gustav Weil, a zealous witch-finder seemingly determined to rid Central Europe of pretty young girls by burning them at the stake. Enter his orphaned nieces -- both young, both pretty -- one of whom so resents his authoritarian ways that she seeks out the local degenerate, Count Karnstein, who promptly turns her into a vampire. Based "on characters created by J. Sheridan Le Fanu" -- which means that Le Fanu's Carmilla, her name here scrambled as Mircalla (Katya Wyeth), is briefly but effectively summoned from Hell to turn Karnstein himself into a vampire. Hough and screenwriter Tudor Gates make good use of the twins motif in a story that is actually more complex and satisfying than most horror films of this type, with several genuinely dramatic moments, as well as a healthy sense of eroticism, particularly in the early going. Cushing gives a fine performance as the stern but ultimately conscientious Gustav, while the Collinson sisters, perfectly suited for their roles (and only a year removed from being Playboy's Plamates of the Month for October 1970), belie their resume of seemingly minor roles in a string of British sexploitation films. The third entry in Hammer's so-called Karnstein Trilogy, after The Vampire Lovers and Lust for a Vampire. + A 300-page diatribe against Calcutta, which city evidently offended Simmons at some point. The hero, Bobby Luczak, is a coward who behaves stupidly and illogically; he's a literary type who one would think would treat his mathematician wife with some respect, but who repeatedly hides things from her and deserts her without reason. He claims to have a terrible temper, yet he's impotent in a crisis. He has a child, a 7-month-old daughter, whose very existence serves only one unpleasant purpose. His wife's only purpose seems to be to show how stupid Bobby is by contrast. One character, the college kid who gets the plot rolling, tells Bobby a story about the worshippers of the evil goddess Kali. The story starts on Page 62 and ends on Page 111. Bobby doesn't applaud at the end of it, despite the fact that it's a bravura performance, complete with backstory, chapters, and narrative arc. Perhaps he withholds his approbation because he knows the story could have been drastically shortened, and even demonstrates this when he later condenses the boy's 3-hour monologue to 10 minutes in relating it to his wife. Very little actually happens in this story, though it is filled from end to end with repeated descriptions of the rampant squalor of Calcutta. Bobby decides this is because the people are evil. Makes it easier, I suppose, for him to feel nothing for them. He dreams of it disappearing in nuclear fire. For him, it's a pleasant dream. Simmons seems less interested here in plot than Lovecraftian dread. Lovecraft, however, didn't write 300-page novels. There was a reason for that. Embarrassingly, this book won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel of 1986. +1/2 Garbled adaptation and laughable telefilm of James Patterson's Virgin, a poor novel that should not have been difficult to improve. When the Vatican learns the truth of two virgin pregnancies, Father Justin (Tony Denison) and Sister Anne (Sela Ward) are dispatched to figure out which girl carries the new Messiah and which the Antichrist. Brian Taggert's script substitutes a constant stream of meaningless 9-volt shocks for character development and logic (in much the same way Patterson did), and it's a toss up whether the worst example of this is the dumb ending or the moment when Sister Anne crashes a family meal in the nude. A dismal film, in no way saved by its at best nondescript but otherwise wooden performances. ++1/2 Proto-slasher film based on actual events about a mask-wearing psycho who attacks people, killing most of them, in Texarkana in 1946. Written and filmed like a crime doc reenactment, but not quite so accurate as its claim that "only the names have been changed" would have you believe. This is particularly evident in the scene of one of the killings where the filmmakers turn an irrelevant saxophone into a deadly trombone. Plays better than its small budget in the "filler" scenes between the killings -- they aren't nearly as embarrassing as they might have been (see The Zodiac Killer and others) -- and becomes something special during the scenes of the attacks, which are so well done that even that killer trombone comes off as both believable and terrifying. Just as in real life (and countless later slasher films), the killer here is never caught. Dawn Wells, of Gilligan's Island fame, plays one of the victims. Followed in 2014 by a sequel/remake, directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. + Rage is a slimy little book that comes to us from the bottom of some dank pond in fairyland. It's about a maladjusted high school kid who takes his Algebra class hostage in order to give his classmates a crash course in puerile psychology. Written by a future best-selling novelist, the kids all talk not like high school seniors but like future Stephen Kings. If this is an honest book, as King claims, it's a little scary how divorced from reality the man was even before he'd gone whole hog on drugs. Honest or not, the book is so light on truth that it practically floats. It belongs in the sewers with Pennywise. (Which, more or less, is evidently where it is these days. King and his publishers allowed it go out of print after several disturbed kids attempted to recreate the plot in real life.) After Charlie Decker takes over, his classmates become willing participants in his ridiculously unbelievable psychotherapy group, chipping in with their own horror stories. Fat guy with overprotective mom, fat girl who gets no dates, and so on. (There's little danger of the reader imploding under the weight of such psychological depth.) It's all ostensibly leading to one guy, the jock who isn't the All-American he appears to be. But his story is no less superficial than all the others so King goes all Lord of the Flies on him to try to generate some excitement. He fails. A truly miserable book, one that purports to reveal the humanity of its characters, but which instead celebrates only hate and violence. King's first "Richard Bachman" book. +++1/2 Admirable adaptation of W. H. Hudson's novel stars Anthony Perkins as a hate-filled refugee from Caracas, Venezuela, whose search for the gold he needs to bankroll his return and revenge leads him to a forbidden forest where he meets a strange, beautiful woman. Screenwriter Dorothy Kingsley takes a throwaway lie of convenience told by the man in the book (about the gold), makes it true, and then uses it to motivate all his early actions. Did we say this was an "admirable" adaptation? Oh, yes -- inspired, even. It's no longer quite the same story, but it is a more than reasonable version of it, for film. Much of the novel was unfilmable anyway: its long interior monologues, for instance, and not least the ineffable beauty of the woman. Her name is Rima and she is played here by Audrey Hepburn, herself a more than reasonable version of her literary counterpart. What remains -- and quite a bit remains -- captures the essence of the essence of Hudson's story: a tantalizing romance -- not a "romance of the tropical forest," as Hudson wrote, but one yet between harsh reality and unsullied innocence. Several of the best scenes in the book also survive; there is humor, excitement, and some wonderful dialogue. And, finally, a different ending. |
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