The Fall of the House of Usher (1979)

Architect Jonathan (Robert Hays), is asked by his old school friend Roderick Usher (Martin Landau) to visit the Usher family mansion, situated in a dismal swamp, as quickly as he can possibly make it. Jonathan’s a pretty obliging character, so she packs in his new wife Jennifer (Charlene Tilton) and goes on a very peculiar version of a honeymoon with her.

As you can probably guess, Roderick and his sister Madeline (Dimitra Arliss) are the last of their line, and both are suffering from a curious hereditary illness that increases their senses so much, they will eventually lose their minds from exposure of the outside world and even die from it.

Roderick, the saner of the two siblings, has developed a curious idea. He believes that the decaying state of the Usher family is intimately connected to that of the family mansion, a place so dilapidated, it’s a wonder it is still standing. But, thinks Roderick, if Jonathan were to find a way to save and strengthen the house, this would in turn save and strengthen the Usher family, saving himself and Madeline.

Strangely enough, Jonathan’s early attempts at humouring is friend and strengthening the foundations of the building do indeed appear to begin to influence Roderick’s health for the better. However, Madeline seems to be beyond the point of anything but an increasingly murderous madness, and she has taken a bit of a dislike to Jennifer. There is also more to the connection between the Ushers and their house than Roderick lets on.

Though I wouldn’t exactly call James L. Conway’s TV version of Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” a completely successful movie, it does go in interesting directions to turn the very short story into a feature length film. Stephen Lord’s idea of turning the connection between the Ushers and the House that is mostly metaphorical in Poe into more of a concrete element of the plot is rather wonderful, and enables the kind of actual Gothic horror plot Poe had no need for, while also giving proceedings, at least to my tastes and eyes, the kind of weird turn you could imagine Poe using if he’d been a 1930s or 40s pulp writer. It’s a clever and effective turn that at once makes some of the metaphorical construction of the film more obvious to the slower members of the audience, and enables the rest of the film to not just be a worse looking retelling of the Corman version.

Visually, the film isn’t great shakes – there are a couple of effective enough looking sets, and Conway is nothing if not professional, but only a very few scenes tell us much through forms, colours and movement instead of dialogue and performances. Fortunately, the performances are generally pretty strong. Sure, Jonathan isn’t terribly interesting a character, and Hays performance is on the bland side, but when has it ever been any other way with the romantic male lead in a gothic horror movie? Tilton, whom I mostly know from her Dallas days, on the other hand, is rather effective at looking increasingly frightened and freaked out by her surroundings and her rather threatening encounters with Madeline; Arliss is pretty great at making mad eyes, which really is all she needs to do here. And Landau, probably not the obvious choice for Roderick, is actually rather fantastic. He makes much out of the strangeness of his character’s regaining of vitality and mental fortitude later on in the movie, but his time as dramatically nervous wreck with age make-up is just as convincing.

All of which turns this into a rather more interesting movie than I expected going in. I still think more visual flair would have done it a world of good (a world of sickliness?), but I do appreciate it for having some actual ideas about what it is adapting, and having a good crack at doing something with these ideas on a TV movie budget.

In short: 12:01 (1993)

Supposedly loveable office worker and semi-professional loser Barry (Jonathan Silverman) stumbles into one of those time loop situations somehow connected to a particle accelerator the company he’s working at develops. Since apparently a part of resolving it will consist of him saving the scientist (Helen Slater) he has had a silent crush on for ages from being gunned down in the street, he’s certainly motivated to get time back to turning again. There’s just a bit of a conspiracy to clear up to put things right again.

Based on a short by Richard Lupoff, this time loop movie is a TV production that mixes romantic comedy, a bit of science fiction and thriller elements to generally entertaining effect.
The direction by veteran journeyman Jack Sholder certainly keeps the film’s timing and pace rolling along very effectively, getting it over a few bumpy moments in the script through the pull of a well-told tale.

Slater and the supporting cast are charming, effective, funny and/or Martin Landau. Early on, Silverman comes over as a bit of a layabout and a mild creep instead of the likeable dude with a boring job the film pretends he is, but once the plot gets going and he starts doing things beyond whining and pining for Slater’s character, I found myself rooting for him – even for the romantic fulfilment part.

It’s an entertaining, well-made and likeable little TV movie, and while its treatment of the time loop (or as it calls it, “time bump”) concept isn’t terribly original, it is always a fun set-up for all kinds of plot shenanigans. Here, the concept is used well on a comparatively small scale, certainly making 12:01 a nice way to while away a few hours-

Without Warning (1980)

aka It Came Without Warning

There's trouble afoot in the rural area surrounding a lake somewhere in the USA. An alien (Kevin Peter Hall) uses the place as its hunting ground, killing people by throwing little living discs with the cutest teeth at them, and storing the corpses in a practical little shack. The fiend even gets Cameron Mitchell before the plot is getting going!

The situation escalates when a quartet of four teenagers arrives (oh look, it's a pre-sunglasses David Caruso in one of the meat roles, and he's wearing shorts in a most disturbing manner), and two of them manage to escape the alien into the loving arms of the local bar population. Because it's that sort of film, the closest the kids get to any actual help are great white hunter Joe Taylor (Jack Palance) and Vietnam vet and conspiracy theorist Fred "Sarge" Dobbs (Martin Landau). It's just too bad that Taylor is a bit too much into going mano-a-mano with his hunting brother from outer space and Sarge is so crazy he becomes convinced everyone around him - including the kids - is an alien invader in disguise.

Without Warning is a typical film by minor yet always interesting cult movie auteur Greydon Clark. I always have the impression Clark was at his best when he had the opportunity to direct comedies. At the very least, he seldom seemed very interested in the more straightforward elements of his films in other genres, and preferred to turn up the off-beat humour and the sideways weirdness in those of his movies that weren't actually supposed to be comedies.

The film at hand is no exception there, what with its numerous strange comical bits and detours into strange characters like Cameron Mitchell and his son who just can't seem to get onto the same page; I side with the son's scepticism towards using the phrase "hubba hubba" unironically - or at all - and hating books, I gotta say. That sort of thing distracts from what is supposedly the film's main thrust - you know, that thing about the alien hunter predating Predator? And yes, imaginary reader, I agree, there should be no copyright on ideas, and it's neither of the two movies who had the alien hunter idea initially anyhow.

However, most of the film's detours are so entertaining - or just plain befuddling enough - that I think it's quite impossible not to be entertained by Without Warning. After all, there are not only the strange characters (except for the teens, which are as lacking in character traits as the genre mandates, though I did like Tarah Nutter's somewhat awkward performance enough to root for her over the guy in the big headed alien suit, which surely counts for something) to fall in love with, there's also a scenery chewing competition between Jack Palance and Martin Landau. I think Landau wins that competition easily, but then a crazy Vietnam veteran conspiracy theorist is a more fruitful base for thespian overindulgence than an Ahab without a whale.

Despite Clark trying his best to distract the audience from the very basic man in a monster suit tale he and his four writers are telling, I even discovered some worthwhile moments in the more horror movie-like parts of Without Warning. Some of the sequences of the alien stalking its prey and of said prey running around in fear of it work quite well, mostly thanks to Dean Cundey's typically great photography that turns what could be rote and uninterested moody and tense.

The script also has its moments. A lot of it is just horribly silly stuff to give people a reason to run through the woods, but from time to time, like with the death of the next to last teenager, or the scene when Nutter's character suddenly comes down from an adrenaline high and remembers her dead best friend, there's a streak of self-assured grimness and a willingness to give non-characters moments of humanity on display that stands in hard contrast to the adorable mugging of Landau and Palance, and the off-beat humour.

While the alien suit is somewhat bland - and of course very unconvincing - the design and execution of the gooey little disc things we see much more often is quite great, clearly keeping with the tradition of all those lovely latex things out to suck your blood with tiny tentacle thingies and really dig in(to your heart) with the cutest little teeth. In other words, they're just as adorable as they are creepy.

It's … than one would expect might be Without Warning's catchphrase too, for it is also funnier, sillier, and grimmer than one would expect. Now, I'm not arguing this is one of the great ignored films of the cult cinema canon (a thing I'm not sure I even believe in, nor would want to exist), I'm just saying it's much more ambitious and interesting than it needed to be as a film about a guy in a monster suit chasing people through the woods.

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