Although Universal was nearly dead in the water by 1946, RKO’s Val Lewton-Jacques Tourneur B-movie cavalcade was just a few years past its prime, and Warner Bros. The Beast With Five Fingers, released in that year, isn’t a patch on the dueling acmes of that cluster: the impossibly well crafted Cat People and the impressionistic, lyrical I Walked with a Zombie. So obviously, and honestly, we’re grading on a curve with The Beast With Five Fingers when we champion it – after all, this was a year in which the near-dead quasi-corpse of the genre was struggling to let its vaguely beating tell-tale heart be heard. But, with Warner Bros. playing Universal Horror for the only time in the whole decade, The Beast With Five Fingers is about as studious and sturdy an update of the even-then hoary Old Dark House format as you might imagine a struggling studio to release when they were stepping their toes in the sand of a genre that wasn’t really their own. Continue reading →

Years of experience with Lucio Fulci and Dario Argento, the reigning post-Bava Italian giallo masters, will give you Stagefright. For Michele Soavi, actor and assistant director to the masters turned first-time director here, this meant conjuring up this 1987 pseudo-slasher as his big come-up. The original title, Deliria, being vastly more apposite, this is less a slasher dressed up in giallo airs than a giallo putting on slasher clothing to sneak into the mainstream so it can uncloak its true self when the moment beckons. Like any good disreputable giallo, Stagefright is a bodacious concoction of performance-art murders choreographed like installation pieces, on one hand, and pure, unbridled instinct and impulse on the other. So while the kills may be judiciously filmed and planned, Soavi never lets anything as trivial as common sense or good taste trounce on his funhouse; his film is orchestrated but never programmatic. Continue reading →

Aesthetically-minded avant-garde director Nicolas Roeg, daringly immature puppetcraft impresario Jim Henson, and nasty-whimsy peace-negotiator Roald Dahl is one of those divine, demonic accidents of circumstance you didn’t really know you needed. Easily Roeg’s most commercial film, but not a cash-grab judging from his delectably devious direction and satisfyingly cryptic editing, The Witches was still a commercial misfire. Which isn’t a surprise; even by the standards of the late-‘80s run of vaguely dark and dreary children’s horror pictures either adapted directly from Dahl or owing kinship to his spirit, The Witches is an insidious little devil of a picture, vastly more warped and spidery than even the Grand Guignol likes of Return to Oz earlier in the decade. It settles more for naughty than nasty, but the effects are heinously satisfying nonetheless. Continue reading →

Having not completed a Midnight Screening in a while, I decided to quadruple up this week with four films from Joe Dante, typically considered a modern master of B-movie gusto. I’ve chosen his less excavated films as a way to stave off the obvious choices. 

The ‘Burbs

After a short sabbatical in the realm of more overtly childlike whimsy with Innerspace, Joe Dante returned to his day job brokering a peace between manic comedy and subfuscous horror with 1989’s The ‘Burbs. Primarily remembered today as an early starring role for Tom Hanks, Dante’s film – his final unqualified success at the box office – is also the final film in his run of relatively straight-faced pop cinema. Come the turn of the ‘90s, Dante would pay more overt homage to the channel-surfing impudence of his youth with post-modern cinematic swindlers that would, artistic bravado aside, often leave audiences bamboozled as to how to approach Dante’s films. While Dante’s later films would dive into the non-narrative, youthful indiscretion clearly closer to his heart, the commercial success of The ‘Burbs was probably a factor of its relative stability and cohesion. Continue reading →

Death Becomes Her

With 1994’s Forrest Gump, Robert Zemeckis finally succumbed to the primary weakness of his Socrates, Steven Spielberg: trying to cleanse himself in the waters of dramatic absolution, falsely presuming that historical allusion and narrative heft side-winds into genuine complexity. A real artist – something Zemeckis had been, however intermittently, for the decade until that point  –  knows that art comes in all forms, nimble and dexterous or heavy and tortured. Craft in any form inspires depth; depth doesn’t have to be appended onto a film like a sledgehammer impacting the piece with the self-serious melodrama of a Schindler’s List or a Forrest Gump. Continue reading →

Shadow of a Doubt

It’s no coincidence that Shadow of a Doubt, although several films removed from Alfred Hitchcock’s American debut, was the first masterpiece of his thirty-year sabbatical from British filmmaking. Fine though they were, films like Rebecca – playing around in desecrated aristocratic spaces and cavorting in the hallowed regions of spectral Old Money sticking to you like bones – played to an American producer’s somewhat stilted view of a British director’s propriety. Those not in the know would be excused for assuming they were British productions anyway. But Shadow of a Doubt, the director’s favorite among his own films, is a noir-infested, corrosively polluted work of invasion and sabotage that found the director not only unearthing the world of everyday American suburbia, but taking his newly adopted home to task in the process. Continue reading →

Carnival of Souls should have befallen a watery grave decades ago, and yet, like its inveterate crash zooms, or the nagging figments of a nightmare or a half-imagined shard of memory, it lodges itself somewhere in the dankest, most indecipherable thickets of the mind. Who knows where it is stored precisely. Probably in the muddy, constantly-slipping-away but always-haunting-you halls next to Eraserhead and you parent’s wedding videos, a duality that very much encompasses the film’s bemusing, off-off-Broadway existence. Continue reading →

The historical prestige genre, entombed in its ever-lasting leisure, ain’t got nothing on Ken Russell’s The Devils. A power-mad concoction of scorching lecherousness and sacrilegious, anti-social visual brio, it’s a torrid affair, but love is nonetheless the only applicable word for anyone smitten with Russell’s peculiar brand of rattled-with-fever historical spasms. Few directors have ever barreled so gleefully into the dankest regions of their own inner mental faculties with such a cavorting brand of heretical dissidence, a defiance to not only social propriety but filmmaking rule of thumb. Fitting for a work about witches, Russell’s inimitable work feels like cackling witchcraft conjured out of nowhere but his own devilishness. Continue reading →

Ray lived by night, Godard left us breathless, Penn ignited the New Wave, Altman turned the camera back on thieves like us, and Malick informed us that lands, despite being the crux of majesty in the world, were indeed bad, all prismatically glimpsed from the confines of the same essential story of lovers on the run from the law. Before all of them, though, a German expat, death and national turmoil lingering in his mind and social opprobrium hot on his tongue, took the same story and welcomed it as an opportunity to remind us that innocence, once drained, has no life left to give. A rejoinder to the torrential downpour of Nazism absconding with the ostensible innocence of his old home and a riposte to the dislocation of Depression-era life in his new home (two paths that would cross circa 1939), You Only Live Once sparkles with director Fritz Lang’s inveterate directorial gloaming. It isn’t the destruction-maestro at his most malevolently implacable (M could never be topped). But this mostly unknown film today not only tackled present-day social schism with fractured, sharded filmmaking but also, arguably, served as Lang’s most explicit premonition of the genre he would become most famous for: the noir. Continue reading →

Fritz Lang’s post-Metropolis rejoinder to his own maximalist desecration of modern German society is a fanciful, feisty kaleidoscope of Berlin bedlam and Weimar-era hedonism untethered from the astringent social critique of Lang’s Mabuse pictures. While Rudolf Klein-Rogge plays a monomaniacal mastermind of pandemonium here, as he did in Dr. Mabuse from six years before, this erratic, erotic, orgiastic display of Lang’s bravura skill shoeshines German Expressionism with pumped-up serial and rubs itself down in a torrid love affair with presentation itself. If the Mabuse films secretly smuggled in a critique of German society, Spies is, relatively speaking, more of a love letter to the temporal high of monomania, even if it is a note written with a poisoned pen. Certainly, Lang was well aware of the horrors of unfettered ’20s capitalism in Berlin and the imminent rise of the Nazi party – three years later, he would direct the ultimate cinematic statement on Nazism without even mentioning the word. But, just this once, and until its startling and corrosive finale, Lang let his monocle down in one of the ultimate cinematic odes to filmmaking as toybox more than toolbox. Continue reading →