Mirror Mirror 2: Raven Dance (1994)

After a prologue in which a Catholic nun, Sister Aja (Veronica Cartwright), is blinded by the demonic mirror from part one and a crazy lady is eaten by it (or something), we find ourselves an undisclosed number of years later in the same nunnery.

Actually, it’s not a simple nunnery anymore, but an orphanage. An orphanage of a kind, at least, for this is one of those peculiar movie orphanages lacking orphans. Well, apart from dancing-mad Marlee (Tracy Wells) and her (probably) autistic brother (name of the actor withheld to protect bad child actors). For, ahem, reasons, an industrial punk group rehearses a jaunty little number in front of the mirror. In the nunnery/orphanage, while Marlee and brother are watching, oh, yes. The impatient music critic mirror zaps the band to ashes and does something (?) that connects it to Marlee and sibling and leaves Marlee either blind, practically blind, or with reduced vision, depending on the needs of any given scene.

From here on out, things become less strange, though not more comprehensible: Marlee is apparently heiress to a fortune, but her evil step sister Roslyn (Sally Kellerman) teams up with one Dr. Lasky (Roddy McDowell) to drug her insane, the local handyman (William Sanderson) providing practical help to provide her with more effective “hallucinations”. At the same time, Marlee and the mirror fall in love. Our heroine dances a lot, excitedly, terribly. A young Mark Ruffalo appears to earn his “I was in horror movies at the beginning of my career” boy scout badge by getting into a love triangle with the mirror and Marlee. He may be a ghost, or the grown-up child of Nikki from the first movie, or both, or something. He’s doing the rebellious lover thing, badly, and ends up wrestling the mirror demon (I assume) for five second in the incomprehensible climax.

Reading my attempt at a plot synopsis, you’ll probably think “what the hell is going on?”. Watching Jimmy Lifton’s (also composer of the synth noodling score and “writer”) Mirror Mirror 2, the same question came up repeatedly in my head, as well. The only part of the script that makes any narrative sense is the whole, not terribly interesting, “drive the relation” insane business. It doesn’t make much logical sense, of course, but then, the basic situation Marlee is in with the orphan-less orphanage (because that’s where rich heiresses end up, right?) makes little sense either. The supernatural elements are even more incomprehensible. In general, motivations and emotions seem to shift from minute to minute, whereas plans are too stupid to comprehend.

Which really sounds like rather good fun if you are like me: usually of the persuasion that mood, worldbuilding and an air of strangeness are the most important thing about many a movie. Alas, large parts of Mirror Mirror 2 are no fun at all, but feel like an endless slog through badly copied Hitchcock, unconnected supernatural shenanigans and terrible dance routines. The beginning is fun enough, and the climax, while still making not a lick of sense, at least has the good sense to be bizarre and goofy enough to distract one from the pains of existence. The in-between - what the layman might turn “most of the film” – however, is excruciatingly dull nonsense, as if our writer/director had confused some doodles he made on a napkin with the finished script and just shot the napkin. It’s so bad, even the on paper very fun cast can’t turn it entertaining; let’s not even dream of “coherent”.

Dead of Winter (1987)

The luck of struggling actress/waitress Julie Rose (Mary Steenburgen) finally seem to turn. Her newest audition with the friendly Mr Murray (Roddy McDowell) goes swimmingly. Apparently, the lead actress of the project Mr Murray’s clients are shooting has very suddenly left the film, and they are basically searching for a lookalike who can take on the job as quickly as possible. Julie very much does look alike, apparently.

There’s only a screentest with the director somewhere in a mansion in the cold middle of nowhere in Canada to go through before fame and fortune come around. Once our heroine has arrived at said mansion, things with the director, one Joseph Lewis (Jan Rubes) go rather well too. That is, until Julie finds herself drugged and minus one finger. It’s not in the service of extreme method acting either, but part of an overcomplicated blackmail plot in which Murray and Lewis want to use Julie as a pawn, with rather dubious chances of survival for her afterwards.

A melodramatic and rather dark and intense thriller like Dead of Winter isn’t exactly the first thing that comes to mind when I think about director Arthur Penn. However, the man clearly knew his way around this genre as well as most others he was working in, so this turns out to be a rather great time.

Despite what many a filmmaker working this particular mine seems to believe, this style of very constructed, twisty and implausible thriller is not terribly easy to make. It’s not enough to simply throw plot twists at your audience while the music gets very loud and to quote Hitchcock, badly. For this subtype of the thriller – which often at least borders on horror – to grab a viewer, a director really needs to pull out all the stops and create as intense and emotional a mood as possible, undermining the sceptical viewer’s ability to and interest in thinking the plot through as much as possible, instead manipulating us into buying into a heightened intensity of feelings and excitement; it’s very much the same approach you’d take in an action movie, a romantic comedy or a horror film, for the most part.

Penn does so wonderfully, pulling Julie into a series of paranoid set pieces that sometimes become pleasantly surreal at the edges, never really giving her – or the audience – the time or space to breathe and think things through. This way, implausible twists seem to fit perfectly into the film’s very own reality, the film’s moments of ruthless brutality feel absolutely logical, and the viewer is as much pulled into the narrative’s flow as are its characters.

There’s quite a bit of actual mood building as well as thematic work via gothic and domestic suspense tropes here too. So Julie does not just have to fight two pretty crazy men, but also the willingness of authority figures to buy into “hysterical woman” clichés (as real world authority figures, alas, love to do as well), while moving through the spaces of a very traditional (and very effectively filmed) old dark house in the middle of snowy nowhere. Interestingly enough, it’s not cool calculation as much as Julie’s ability to act just as crazy and brutal as her captors that saves her day here, the film perhaps ever so slightly suggesting that a woman losing her shit under the circumstances at hand and using just as bizarre ploys as her enemies may be just the most natural reaction and healthiest reaction to the proceedings, rather than “hysteria”.

Steenburgen sells all of this wonderfully, working with a fine understanding of how and when she needs to escalate to more extreme emotions, but never letting us forget the very basic human core of Julie. Whereas McDowall and Rubes really dive into moments of wonderful scenery chewing, both actors finding the point where this makes them creepy instead of ridiculous, which isn’t always – well, practically never - a given with McDowall in my experience.

So Dead of Winter turns out to be a particularly fine example of its style, barely stepping a foot wrong.

In short: Mean Johnny Barrows (1975)

Dishonourably discharged from the army after he punched out a white guy who tried to murder him with a landmine (seriously), Vietnam war hero (and former nearly football star) Johnny Barrows (Fred Williams), soon finds himself homeless on the streets of his old home town. Early on, Johnny meets Mario Racconi (Stuart Whitman), a football acquaintance who offers him a job. But it’s clearly doing dirty work for the mafia, and Johnny has his principles. But as it goes, principles can be washed away by poverty and the general shittiness of one’s surroundings, so after further travails, Johnny will eventually take on the role of a hit man for Mario’s clan during an attempt of the aggressive Da Vinces (with Roddy McDowall of all people playing the youngest son) to muscle in on their territory. Don’t worry, the Racconis are the good Mafiosi, though, who only ever made money with numbers games and fought against drugs. Insert humungous eyeroll here.

This is the first of Fred Williamson’s twenty or so direction credits, and for its first twenty minutes or so, it actually feels like a minor highpoint of blaxploitation filmmaking. Williamson shoots as well as plays Johnny’s downward movement in the first act with great strength and conviction, bringing the shittiness of the black experience to life through fine direction and a performance that expresses much of the unfairness of the character’s life without any need for speechifying. It’s still not subtle, mind you, but it’s not about subtle things. As a bonus, there’s also a short cameo by Elliott Gould in which he dresses like a lost version of The Doctor – and calls himself the Professor to boot – teaching Williamson the ins and outs of being homeless by acting really, really weird.

After that, the film unfortunately spirals pretty quickly out of control and turns into a series of, sometimes weird and awkward, sometimes pretty fun, mafia meetings where the actors seems mostly to be farting around, horrible martial arts fights, long and badly written speeches told with soulful facial expressions quite in contrast to their badness by Williamson, a couple of decent action sequences and pointless plot twists, where nothing hangs together thematically or as a narrative anymore, the film losing all momentum as well as showing little of the impressive filmmaking chops of the first act.

In short: The Defector (1966)

Original title: L'espion

A CIA agent (Roddy McDowell) coerces professor of physics James Bower (Montgomery Clift) to do some amateur spying for him while he's visiting Leipzig in Eastern Germany in his capacity as a hobby art expert. A Russian physicist whose books Bower had translated and corrected has some scientific data to sell to the US, but for some reason he'll only give the microfilm containing them to Bower.

Once in Leipzig, things go wrong for our amateur spy quickly. His contact, a local doctor of medicine (Hannes Messemer), is under permanent surveillance by the Stasi and the Russians, and so has to funnel all contacts through one of his assistants, Bower's mandatory love interest played by Macha Méril. Before he has barely even done anything amounting to espionage at all, Bower is greeted by Peter Heinzmann (Hardy Krüger). Heinzmann is a physicist himself but has been recruited to get the microfilm from Bower, if the American ever manages to get his hands on it, that is, but Heinzmann is a man with rather too well developed morals to play spy games. Why, he even disapproves of the awe-inspiring brainwash hotel room his superiors put Bower into, because only evil spies and movie audiences like cheap, surrealist brainwash attempts.

What neither Bower nor Heinzmann know is that the whole thing has been a trap from the start. The Russian scientist has been made for ages, and was only allowed to live long enough to deliver the microfilm to Bower's contact. The microfilm is only McGuffin to get the physicist into compromising situation; once compromised, so the plan goes, Heinzmann's sympathetic manner and similar background will make it easy to convince Bower to defect from the US, making for a wonderful PR coup. Is it any wonder that brilliant plan doesn't work out too well?

Raoul Lévy's The Defector is best known, if it is known at all, for being the last film actor Montgomery Clift made before his death (as well as the last film Lévy made before his death). Not surprisingly, Clift's performance is nervous and slightly off throughout, and it's never quite clear if things like his shaking hands and his at times disoriented gaze are him acting the part of a frightened amateur in a dangerous situation or signs of Clift being at the end of his tether; it's quite disturbing to watch, to be honest, even if it makes the film more convincing.

Apart from this, The Defector is rather too interesting a movie to be only known as the last film made by Clift. It works well as a laconic spy movie that delights in using (West) Germany at its greyest and brownest (with some locations that are situated in my part of the country even), knows about the horrors of DDR wallpaper, does simple and effective psychedelia well in the one scene it opts to use it, and even contains one or two rather tightly realized suspense scenes. It's all pretty grim, with characters trapped in situations they don't fully comprehend, created by powers they can't control in the interest of plans that are absurd at best. In this world, escape is only possible in bitterly ironic ways.

In other words, the film does serious spy movie standards quite well, and is worth watching for that alone.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,german movies,in short,spies,raoul lévy,montgomery clift,hardy krüger,macha méril,roddy mcdowell

The Legend of Hell House (1973)

Millionaire Mr. Deutsch (Roland Culver) hires physicist with interest in paranormal matters Dr. Barrett (Clive Revill) to examine "the Mount Everest of haunted houses", the Belasco house, a former place of controlled debauchery (yay) and murder (boo) that has cost the lives, limbs or sanity of most of its former investigators. Barrett - who smugly does believe in paranormal manifestations yet not in ghosts and is clearly obsessed with his work to the detriment of his marriage - takes his sexually repressed wife Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt) with him. Deutsch has also reserved the help of two mediums - one the painfully optimistic believer in a very Christian interpretation of ghosts - of course also sexually repressed - Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin), the other the only whole survivor of the last Belasco house investigation, Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowall), clearly a believer in repressing everything.

Of course, the house really is as dangerous as people think, and of course, it's going to play on the single character trait of everyone, so soon enough, Barrett will be even more obsessed with his work, Ann will want to have sex, Florence will try to save the ghost of Belasco's son even if it means implied ghost rape, and Fischer will mug as if he were played by Roddy McDowall.

While mostly ignored in the first decade or so of its existence, confusingly broad-minded director John Hough's The Legend of Hell House is now more often than not described as "highly underrated", " a forgotten masterpiece", or "nearly as good as The Haunting" (and I suspect anonymous internet commenter C doesn't mean the dreadful remake, even though that abomination is actually closer to Hell House in spirit). It's also often described as subtle, a statement that just leaves me puzzled, for subtlety is living in a completely different town than this film.

But before I go into what bothers me about the film, I shall not fail to mention some of its very clear surface charms. While I don't think John Hough's direction actually succeeds in achieving the creepy mood the director clearly sets out to build, I do appreciate how desperately he goes all out in trying to achieve it. There's a whole carnival of fisheye lenses, Dutch angles, uncomfortable close-ups, fog, and deep shadows, all so tirelessly working at playing haunted house they don't have any effect on me at all. The permanent piling on of directorial tics that would be subtle used in a controlled manner, or could create a mood of the weird if used in a more individual one, keeps the film teetering on the edge of the unintentionally funny for most of its running time, and it's only saved from permanently - and not just for half of the time like it does - going over the edge by some very decent performances by Franklin, Revill and Hunnicutt who make the best out of the flat roles they are given, excellent music by Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson of BBC Radiophonic Workshop fame, and fine art direction.

Unfortunately, the fourth of the film's four main actors is Roddy McDowall, whose performance is, as usual when he's not playing a monkey, problematic. He starts out slowly enough with the most showy attempts at "subtle acting" this side of Tom Cruise, but once his character "opens up", he seems to be caught in a scenery chewing contest with himself, which is at times pretty funny to watch but not helpful to keep up the po-faced serious mood of Richard Matheson's script (based on his own novel).

That script features most of the things I loathe about large parts of Matheson's work - the stiff dialogue, the insistence on Freudian bullshit (a problem he shares with Robert Bloch) instead of actual characterisation, all women being hysterics in the Freudian sense at heart - while lacking the things I love about large parts of Matheson's work - the ability to actually do interesting and sometimes even enlightening things with said Freudian bullshit, a deep interest in exploring the darker sides of the human spirit by way of supernatural horror, and a sense for keeping things weird with a capital W. In this version of Hell House, everyone is horribly one-dimensional. Florence is stuck up and trusting, Barrett a smug scientist, Ann sexually frustrated and Fischer played by Roddy McDowall, so the house's attempts at destroying them through their own character flaws are equally flat. If you've seen the character introductions, you know exactly how the place will influence them. It's as if Matheson had written the characters with crayon. Not even Belasco escapes that problem - let's just say that a haunting based on the inferiority complex of a guy who cut off his own legs so he could buy prostheses that make him look taller (that's the degree of "subtlety" you can expect from this movie) is not very frightening, no matter how often the film tells us how frightening it is supposed to be.

This dispiriting lack of nuance runs through the whole film and also infects many of its horror set-pieces: Franklin's ridiculous fight with a cat doll, a finale that consists of McDowall mugging into the wind, and (horror of horrors!) hot and bothered Ann Barrett's attempts at seducing McDowall (whose reaction shots do of course ruin every possibility of the scene working as intended). The list just goes on and on.

It's all so clichéd and cheesy in its attempts to be somewhat daring that my only reaction to The Legend of Hell House is a lot of rather embarrassed laughter, the kind of reaction I usually reserve for larger family meetings.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,reviews,john hough,pamela franklin,roddy mcdowell,clive revill,gayle hunnicutt,horror