Three Films Make A Post: Ghoulish Delights

Halloweenville (2011): Gary P. Cohen, of Video Violence fame, and one Paul Kaye, document the intense Halloween shenanigans in Lambertville, New Jersey, which turns into a giant, tacky and lovely piece of Halloween kitsch for a week a year. Embedded in cheesy commentary and the cheapest default editing tricks the directors’ editing suite can provide, are interviews with various local Halloween enthusiasts and many a verité (or awkwardly framed, if you prefer) scene of the place’s insane Halloween festivities. It’s enough to make any ghoul cry tears of joy.

While this is certainly not done artfully, there’s so much genuine enthusiasm here, presented fully in the cheesy version of the spirit of the season, it’s impossible not to love this.

The Raven (1963): This adaptation of Poe’s poem as a comedy has never been a particular favourite of mine among the films of Corman’s Poe cycle. On this recent rewatch, I actually fell in love with the film. Price, Lorre and Karloff mugging it up in this tale of duelling wizards, Hazel Court doing a femme fatale bit, and young Jack Nicholson looking confused in front of Daniel Haller’s gorgeous gothic sets, filmed by Corman with the élan they deserve – what’s not to love?

Particularly when I’ve actually grown old enough to find the general silliness rather diverting, find myself actually laughing at jokes I’ve shrugged at a decade ago, and enjoy how much Corman and company make fun of a style they themselves put a lot of effort into creating.

Plus, the climactic sorcerous duel is one of the prime moments of pure, silly, imagination in cinema.

The House of Usher (1989): Speaking of Poe adaptations that don’t exactly keep to the text, Alan Birkinshaw’s bit of late 80s cheese is pretty fun if you accept it as what it is and what it isn’t – there’s certainly joy to be had in Donald Pleasence running around with a drill hand pretending not to be mad, Oliver Reed being dastardly while chewing scenery, some tasteful mutilation and decapitation, a rat eating a guy’s penis, and come curiously fine set design that goes for some sort of modernist gothic. All of this doesn’t make terribly much sense, but certainly looks pretty great.

Not of This Earth (1957)

A rather peculiar fellow going by the - totally not the pseudonym of an alien invader - name of Paul Johnson (Paul Birch) ambles through Southern California. He has a very particular form of blood disease that calls for rather intense blood transfusions, but also the ability to hypnotically convince his doctor to be rather helpful about his medical troubles and his preferred solution to them.

Mr Johnson moves into a nice suburban house, hires himself a former ne'er-do-well as a caretaker and a private nurse (Beverley Garland). Occasionally, he communicates with his alien superiors about experiments meant to save his radioactively irradiated race, and ambles along to kidnap people for some rather radical experimentation which leaves them rather dead.

As a director, I particularly love Roger Corman for his Poe cycle made some years later, but even when he made short and very cheap variations on alien invasion and monster movie models, his films typically had something to recommend them.

In the case of Not of This Earth that something is the very specific type of contemporary Southern California hipness used to fill in the holes in budget and script, like Dick Miller’s short turn as a salesman taking a bad end not unfitting to his profession, the absurd teen patois used in another scene, the general late 50s grooviness of what’s going on, and the immensely quotable dialogue (“If I do not receive blood within four chronoctons of time, I will have no need of emotion”), that feels like the sort of thing Ed Wood was trying to achieve but lacked the sense of humour to reach.

Because of the general scrappiness of the production, this has an often very improvisational feel through scenes that just seem to have popped into the crew’s mind and then directly to camera. Only a couple of years later, this would culminate in little masterpieces of skewed wit like Bucket Full of Blood and Little Shop of Horrors, but even in its embryonic form, Corman the pseudo-beat is a fine thing to remember the man for, among many other achievements.

The Beast With A Million Eyes (1955)

Allan Kelley (Paul Birch), his wife Carol (Lorna Thayer) and their college-aged-yet-acting-like-twelve-for-most-of-the-time daughter Sandra (Dona Cole) are living in the desert, running a date ranch (interesting question for a non-American: why isn't it a date farm?) without much success. Helping them out is a mute, mentally ill, and more than slightly creepy man the family only calls "Him" (Leonard Tarver), for they can't be bothered to find out his actual name.

The Kelleys are as troubled a family as you'll encounter in 50s SF horror. Allan feels emasculated over the lack of success of his business and tends to put his work before his family, Carol has been turned quite nasty thanks to being confined to the family ranch with no human contact at all (unlike Allan, she doesn't even get to see the neighbours), and Sandy clearly has her reasons to want to leave for College as soon as she can.

Fortunately, the titular creature (spoiler: that thing with the million eyes is a metaphor, as the alien explains before the plot starts) has landed in the desert close to the family's farm, destroying Carol's much-loved glass and porcelain wares in the process via a nasty high-pitched noise, and there's nothing better to get a family back together than an alien invasion.

At first, the alien turns the local wildlife aggressive, leading to an unconvincing bird attack, the most polite attack by family dog ever put to film, and one of the neighbours being nearly killed by his cow (ending his "comical" antics, so well done, cow). Eventually, the alien does turn its mental powers on the "weaker minded" humans around, putting the mind whammy on "Him" and trying its luck with Sandra, but Allan and Carol find a very hippie-esque way to deal with the problem.

The Beast With A Million Eyes is a very early Roger Corman production, with a belaboured and painful production history featuring unconvinced ("Where is the monster?" - "Why, it's invisible!" - "No way!" - "Oh, alright, have a hand puppet!") distributors and pissed off unions (turns out unions don't like it when you try to get around paying union rates - who knew!?). It's probable that the film's official director David Kramarsky didn't do any directing at all, and that Corman did the rush-job himself, making this the great man's second stint on the director's chair.

This early in his career, Corman wasn't quite as good at working around the problems of a miniscule budget as he would soon become, and so The Beast is plagued by a number of expected problems, like too many scenes of desperately unexciting filler scenes of people walking through the desert, acting that is all over the place (though sometimes - especially from Thayer and Birch - pretty good for a change), an inappropriate but free soundtrack of classical music, entirely unconvincing to ridiculous (cow attacks are never ever frightening) animal attacks, and a climax that is only exciting if you really like to watch people talk to a kettle-like contraption in the desert. Let's not even talk about the monster, except to mention that this is the first bit of work Paul Blaisdell did for Corman.

On the positive side, the film's script has more than just one good idea. The first twenty minutes, which are predominantly spent on the family's troubles, are excellent, showing a group of people whose love has faded thanks to the horrors of day to day life, and even allowing Thayer's Carol more complexity than just making her a bitch. In this context, I can't even fault the film for the woozy idea of people loving each other again being the solution to their alien problems. It might work out too pat, but putting the emphasis on the love instead of the duty in familial relations seems like a very un-50s and un-conservative thing to do. It's also pretty neat that one of the plot points setting up the film's happy end for the family is that Allan finally bothers to find out "Him"'s real name, giving him back the full humanity the family had denied the man until then (not that it helps the poor guy survive, but it's not as if modern movies would treat the mentally ill much better; after all, there's nobody shouting at producers and writers for the slightest transgression real or imagined or supposed towards them for them).

The film's ropy execution may generally overwhelm the script's intelligence and humanity, however, I do prefer a film that tries something and fails to one that doesn't try anything and still fails, so I can't help but like The Beast With A Million Eyes more than its actual quality deserves.

 

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In short: The Secret Invasion (1964)

1943. The British Major Richard Mace (Stewart Granger) is tasked with freeing the former commander of the Italian troops in the Balkans, General Quadri (Enzo Fiermonte) from German captivity in Dubrovnik, in the hopes that the general will be able to rouse his loyal troops into changing allegiances and fighting the Germans.

To achieve this goal, Mace is provided with various prisoners of dubious talents as a commando troop. They are Roberto Rocca (Raf Vallone), an Italian with excellent talent for operational planning who would in peace times probably be the wise middle-aged boss in a caper movie; Terence Scanlon (Mickey Rooney, as dreadful as is to be expected), an "Irish" terrorist/freedom fighter and demolitions expert; Simon Fell (Edd Byrnes, even more dreadful than Rooney), forger and whiner; John Durrell (Henry Silva), a silent and reserved professional killer; and Jean Saval (William Campbell), the guy they took on because Tony Curtis wasn't available professional thief and man-with-a-thousand-faces-and-badly-plucked-eyebrows.

The group only has to get to Yugoslavia, meet up with the local partisans, and break into the German headquarters in Dubrovnik to get their man. Whatever could go wrong?

The Secret Invasion is one of Roger Corman's higher budgeted (different sources talk about $500,000 to $750,000) efforts, and Corman seems to have made the most out of it by shooting the film in Yugoslavia. For the sort of movie I'm usually talking about here, it's sensational to have a film mostly taking place in Dubrovnik that was actually shot there instead of a random studio backlot. Corman seems to have relished this opportunity. At least, he's using the attractive landscape and the city as much as possible, to quite satisfying effect.

On the negative side, Corman with a high-ish budget isn't Corman at his most daring, and so much of the film plays out exactly as one would expect from a war movie of this type, if a very competently done one featuring equally competent actors (except for Rooney and Byrnes, obviously) - or in the case of Silva and Vallone, competent actors being casually much better than anyone else on screen.

There are, however, two moments in The Secret Invasion that don't fit into the "war as a nice adventure for boys mould" it slavishly follows at all. First, there's the scene in which Silva accidentally smothers a baby to death while hiding out from German soldiers, breaks down into a crying fit and is comforted by the dead child's (partisan) mother. This sort of existential grimness isn't something you can expect to find, well, anywhere apart from 70s horror films, and feels like a secret invasion of actual human pain and suffering of a film that just doesn't deal with that sort of thing.

The other moment of equal import is The Secret Invasion's incredibly cynical ending, in which the good guys win, but achieve their victory in such a way that only the most thoughtless audience member will be able to cheer for it. Like the baby sequence, it doesn't fit the rest of the film's tone too well, but it's these two little shocks of a less easily digestible idea of what a war movie might be that make this movie worth watching, and not the routine and the competence.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,war,roger corman,stewart granger,raf vallone,henry silva,in short