With all apologies to the more famous, and more infamous, The Manchurian Candidate, John Frankenheimer’s four-years-later film Seconds makes his prior effort look like child’s play. That earlier film’s bleak, merciless paranoia of the John Fuller get-in-and-ravage-’em school of filmmaking is no insignificant feature length anxiety attack, but it has nothing on the prowling paranoia and devilish absurdity of the more playful and significantly more experimental Seconds, a work that takes about as long as its title suggests to eviscerate the memory of its predecessor in a cauterizing shriek of a hall-of-mirrors credits sequence courtesy of Saul Bass and cinematographer James Wong Howe. Continue reading →

Return to Oz

Thirty years on, the misbegotten and wonderfully contorted post-Lynchian, pre-Burtonesque nightmare that is Walter Murch’s Return to Oz is on no surer, or saner footing, and thirty years on, this remains all the more reason to revel in the film’s dastardly, devilishly diabolical rereading of L. Frank Baum’s Oz fiction for its own purposes.

Murch, a sound designer and (crackerjack) editor by trade, never fully transitioned to the directorial realm, and it isn’t difficult to see why; in the abstract, Return to Oz is a nasty-minded anti-Wizard of Oz, a riposte to its progenitor more than a conventional sequel. As such, it couldn’t have but been primed to alienate and disarm the very audience, the one reared on the indomitable The Wizard of Oz, that might otherwise adopt it as their own. Continue reading →

So it was with the raving success (by barely-budgeted, cave-dwelling B-movie standards) of Evil Dead II: Dead By Dawn that Michigan backwoods filmmaker was granted access to the secret gilded chamber of the Hollywood machine. His goal? Not to spit shine the cogs, nor to tear them to shreds, but to rearrange them, to warp them, into a slightly more feral, crazed mad scientist’s contraption. Well, maybe not quite that far, but he was at least about to switch out a few gears and spruce up the place with his own signature cartoon-ghoulish paint brush. Continue reading →

At the center of Eyes of Laura Mars lie a pair of vexing, pallid portals into terror and gender power dynamics. They are two objects staring on at the crossroads after selling their soul to the devil. They are the titular objects of the film – eyes – and they engage in the everyday dialectic of stunted privilege and latent oppression in their daily ritual of photographing women who are as likely to be clad in gilded chic as bloody crimson terror. The eyes adorn the face of Laura Mars (Faye Dunaway, fresh off her Oscar win for Network), a fashion photographer in the glitzy Disco era of the late ’70s, who has taken to coiling together sex and death in garish photographs of women stricken bloodless by murderous killers. Or women otherwise strewn about, dead, on the carpet. The women are not actually dead – they are models in staged photoshoots – but they might soon be. An unseen killer stalks them, and he or she seems to have it ought for the eyes of Laura Mars by transforming her art into reality, torturing her eyes and implicating her in the violence by turning her eyes into inadvertent weapons of sorts. If she continues to shoot, he will kill the object of her lens. Continue reading →

With his monumental silent monstrosities of expressionist-tinged paranoia and fervent chiaroscuro-afflicted studies of monomaniacal madmen driving the modern world insane, Fritz Lang practically invented the film noir. That he was somewhat disavowed by producers and abandoned by film audiences after his escape to America on the eve of the rise of Nazism is a quandary. Fellow expatriate FW Murnau was instantly embraced by Hollywood and could have risen to superstar status had the sinister hand of death – the very subject Murnau tinkered with time and time again behind the camera – not intervened. Ernst Lubitsch at least lasted a decade in the top ranks of Hollywood. Billy Wilder’s star would germinate for decades still. Hollywood was generally kind to German filmmakers prior to WWII, or at least, Hollywood was willing to play ball with the Weimar filmmakers who had soundly trounced Americas best efforts during the silent era. If you couldn’t beat em, buy em, or so the American mantra goes. Continue reading →

And so it was that, upon absolving the world of its sins with his debut feature film Citizen Kane and then tempting the world again with sin for his second feature, The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles decided to sin a little himself for his third and fourth feature films, The Stranger and The Lady from Shanghai. Admittedly, “decided” is not the whole story; Welles, if left to his own devices, likely would have continued evaporating cinema into its intangible elements and reconfiguring it as he saw fit, but the world had other plans. Hollywood had not taken to his second feature, and they were not about to let Welles go off the deep end of his own Frankensteinian ambition for a third time. He was, for the first time in his life, going to know the iron cage of restraint. He was going to play ball with the studios. To commit the sin of cinematic hackwork. Continue reading →

Catching up on some of the famous Universal Horror films I have missed a chance to review until now. Just in time for Halloween too! ‘Tis the season…

The Wolf Man

After a trio of terrific Frankenstein features, a pair of other memorable monster pictures, and a cabinet of curiosity’s worth of assorted slippery cinematic tricks and treats, Universal finished off the 1930s in fine style. Having almost single-handedly ushered the silent cinematic stylings of playful expressionism and fantastique into the sound era, the company was apparently tired. Very tired, and withering away, but not before one final ride into the sunset before the dark days of WWII made fantastical cinematic horror largely irrelevant and quaint compared to the sandblasted nihilism of the curdled noir genre. Continue reading →

Catching up on some of the famous Universal Horror films I have missed a chance to review until now. Just in time for Halloween too! ‘Tis the season…

The Mummy

With Dracula and Frankenstein enshrining Universal Pictures as the new patron saint of genre cinema, the prospect of renewed wealth stoked a fire in the loins of the company. Projects were suddenly being green-lit left and right. Expediency was the name of the game, but the pedal-to-the-medal production and narrative qualities of Universal Horror never diminished the prowling crawl of the individual frights within their films, works which, in the early days, were not only commercial ventures but artistic expeditions into the unknown as well.

Still, there was no time for ego or excess in the early days of Universal, and productions were humble and forthright. This was never more-so true than with The Mummy, a reminder that, if Universal wasn’t always the most experimental or transgressive production company circa 1932, they were a well-oiled cinematic machine all the same. Continue reading →

As with his prior film Knife in the Water, which was fittingly set at sea and stitched together by jagged, knife-like, tetanus-inducing cuts, Roman Polanski’s Cul-de-sac is filmed like a pirate on a bad day. It’s as though the camera is a sword constantly teetering between literate, venomous pen and protruding phallus, both of which seek to do bodily harm to the characters in the film in their own respective ways. The film, like all of Polanski’s best cinematic scalpels, feels dangerous down to its very artistic construction – the way shots are not so much sewn together as they are stabbed into one another – rather than simply dangerous in its subject matter. That distinction between cinema with dangerous subject matter and cinema with dangerous form to test that subject matter is what separates a film with something to say and a film with a means to say it. It is what separates a mere provocateur from a truly demented, haphazard genius of the form. Roman Polanski laughs at us because he is proud to be both. Continue reading →

Angel Heart begins as many film noirs do, with the grim patron of New York City – nominally in the 1950s but very much marinated in the nightmarish mental collapse style of noir so popular in comic books around the late 1980s. It’s a city with a death wish, but Angel Heart moves beyond the urban decay that so christened 1980s cinema and into the soaking wet juices and oils of sewage-filled Southern decay and centuries of forlorn backwater communities. For a decade of cinema so replete with misbegotten depictions of city life, Angel Heart is not only a lurid noir genre piece, but a trenchant reminder of the areas left unspoken and unanswered in industrial-focused American cinema. It quickly transplants its hero from the deathless New York to the backwoods of Louisiana, and the film follows him. It becomes a tale of Southern conjuration, a capsule of thought that reconnects the mystique of the urban nightmare with the cruelty and majesty of the rural areas of American imagination from whence those cities grew out of the earth. Continue reading →