Francis Ford Coppola’s deliriously remarkable Grand Guignol version of Dracula, released in 1992, reminds me of Alice in Chains’s seminal muck-spreader of an album Dirt from the same year. In both cases, my love for the object doesn’t always defray the disquiet I feel about the damage it wrecked on its medium. Fortunately, while Dirt and its ilk turned rock music into a no man’s land of post-grunge for nearly a decade, Dracula merely took a genre that was already in the grave and dressed its corpse in Victorian duds. The success of Coppola’s film clearly gave Hollywood a reason to “class up” the old-school Universal Horror monsters as an Oscar-approved variant of the genre. Buttressed by the simultaneous success of Merchant Ivory British period epics like Howards End, the resulting monster movies ultimately traded in indulgences of the demonic for pretensions of the divine.

Divine, of course, means respectable, which, for a horror film, means death. While Coppola’s Dracula is a truly unhinged, discombobulated work, and Mike Nichols’s Wolf, while less than fully compelling, nonetheless attempts its own spin on the wolfman archetype, Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein benefits and suffers alike from its obvious zeal for the material. While it has the eager-to-please smile of an ‘80s horror film, it also has the buttoned-up, primed-and-polished straightness of a prestige period piece. It treats the material worshipfully, as holy writ to study or a monument to bow down before, and in doing so it ironically exsanguinates its devilish spirit. This is a distressingly, unimaginatively literal work, yet it absolutely lacks the texture of the original work itself. In following the letter, it kills the spirit.

The grunge comparison I opened with isn’t just incidental either. Branagh clearly adores himself as always, and that shows both in front of and behind the camera. Running around as the protagonist, he saunters and flagellates like a rock star lost in 18^th century England. His direction is consummate, but, as per usual, his visual and actorly showboating extend beyond loving into the somewhat grotesquely self-aggrandizing. As he would do decades later with Hercule Poirot, another cherished literary character, he accents the soulful and compassionate tendencies of the figure at the expense of their angular and distorted features or their capacity to reveal wider social tensions. Rather than being pock-marked and then riven by societal tensions they can’t help but embody, they beautifully – banally – peer into them from a moral high ground. Branagh himself stares longingly and broodingly before the camera, but this particular film lacks enough familiarity with death to truly bring itself to life. When Branagh first announces himself, the film pauses for several seconds after “Victor,”  as though the camera has been waiting with one hand in its pants for the title to drop.

Branagh is, as he always is, trying exceptionally hard to convince us that he is an honest to God film director – at one point, we even get a half-rate imitation of the famous Lawrence of Arabia graphic match  – but the effects are more deadening than electrifying. The camera pirouettes and cavorts in semi-comic circles to evoke the giddy high of scientific exploration but has little visual sense for the character’s manic derangement or the lingering tensions of Frankenstein’s ego. Branagh reduces a torrent of societal anxieties and energies to an essentially personal conundrum and an individualized tragedy, producing a dangerously myopic adaptation that fetishizes the hero’s body without much to say about his mind. Themes are there, lingering in the shadows. Even the concept suggests a connection between maestro and scientist and film director that travels all the way back to the roots of cinema itself, often described as a “Frankensteinian” technology with aspirations to assemble shots of dead history into renewed collective life. But Branagh establishes these connections passively, not as a matter of intent but a simple fact of cinematic existence. He simply can’t but indulge himself, and it feels like he’s showing off rather than honing in or letting loose. This marks him as a genuine auteur of a kind. It also reminds us that being an auteur is in no way a marker of being an artist.  

Score: 5/10

Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II is a thoroughly slantwise sequel. Rather than honoring its predecessor, it merrily runs amok with it. Insofar, that is, as it is interested in the first Prom Night at all. That 1980 film was a first-generation slasher film, released when the genre was not so much figuring itself out as already dying a premature death in the womb. Creatively speaking, at least. Slasher films would continue to thrive in the box office for several years, but the genre was commercially on the way out by 1987, when this sequel was released. While many slasher films were still being released every year, horror cinema was on its way to the grave for the first half of the 1990s, before a revival closer to the turn of the century. Prom Night II treats the slasher era’s wilderness years as a real wilderness, living out a creative hunger to survive just by attempting anything at all. It is liberated, after a fashion, by the genre’s  own demise, as though the relief of recognizing its own poor box office prospects allowed it to explore its own inner urges without apprehension.

Which isn’t to say that the film doesn’t have its finger on the pulse. Hello Mary Lou joins John Carpenter’s 1983 killer car picture Christine in excoriating its decade’s obsession with the 1950s, manifesting the Reagan era’s fetishistic fixation on its forebears as a literal possession by a dormant specter. That said, the film’s visual and sonic cues are hardly limited to, or even primarily defined by, ‘50s cues. If this film has a closer aesthetic analogue, it’s Kenneth Anger’s gleefully perverse explosions of mid-century teenage iconography. Although shorn of Anger’s wry recognition of mid-century American fascism, Hello Mary Lou similarly recognizes the paradox of turning to one’s ancestors for a portrait of youth and rebellion. And it similarly plays critique with a frisky grin rather than a moral scold.

Historian W. Scott Poole makes a potent case for the 1924 film The Hands of Orlac as an aftershock of World War I. Reflecting the psychic tremors of a battle where bodies and minds were warped and destroyed, humans reduced to automatons and warped into psychological and physical pieces, the 1924 film severed a pianist’s hands and depicted the terror of the body seemingly working at odds from the mind that was supposed to control them. The 1924 film was directed by Robert Wiene and starred Conrad Veidt (both of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari a few years beforehand), perhaps the first burst of Hollywood engagement with German Expressionist shadowplay, the surest throughline between Weimar horrors and the rise of the Universal Horror Monsters that would cast a long pall on horror cinema. Perhaps aware that it could all-too easily be seen as an also-ran, 1935’s Mad Love is a nominal remake thatreframes the story entirely. If The Hands of Orlac laments the violence of returning soldiers, Mad Love is very much about those who never went to war, for whom the war was a theater to watch and, perhaps, violently obsess over.

While the original story focuses on the plight of talented pianist Stephen Orlac (played, in this 1935 version, by Colin Clive), who loses his hands in a train accident and has them replaced with a murderer’s (Rollo, here played by Edward Brophy), this version shifts to Peter Lorre’s Dr. Gogol (Peter Lorre), the doctor who performs the operation and is infatuated with the pianist’s wife Yvonne Orlac (Frances Drake). Gogol, who houses a mannequin of Yvonne, fancies her Galatea to his Pygmalion, borrowing from the Greek play about an artist that conjures their sculpture to life via sheer artistic ability infused with the incantatory potency of desire. This last dynamic marks Mad Love as a deeply tormented meditation on the relation between creation and control. Rather than a performer-soldier, Gogol is a tragic mastermind-director, longing for something he can only domineer from behind the scenes.

In Larry Cohen’s Q: The Winged Serpent, Midtown Manhattan is being menaced by a giant bird-like dinosaur creature. That, incidentally, is not a good description of it, but it’s better than the verbal description given by the characters in the film. It also has something to do with a string of cult-like murders being investigated by Detective Shepard (David Carradine) and Sgt Powell (Richard Roundtree). It also crosses paths with Jimmy Quinn (Michael Moriarty), a failed pianist turned small time crook (now there’s a career path for you) who also seems to double as a bundle of raw nerves. None of these various menacings really cohere into anything actually menacing as a horror film, but Q’s strangenessmakes it exceedingly difficult to care about superficial things like a film’s genre or the temper it is supposed to have.

Much of that strangeness comes courtesy of the thing really menacing Midtown Manhattan in Q: Michael Moriarty, who seems to unravel the film as he passes through it. A walking psychic tremor of a man, Moriarty’s Jimmy is a human paradox who seems both deeply self-congratulatory and egotistical and essentially lost. He feels like a walking open wound of Method tics, a man feeling out his way through the world. The narrative itself – about a man who feels he has had no shot in the world and needs to command the momentary opportunity he has stumbled into, but doesn’t really know how to – reflects the performative style, which seems obsessed with controlling the space and the audience even as it is barely registering any effort. It’s a truly unmanicured performance, blistering with raw nervous energy and chaotic inner expressiveness. The most unsettling scene has nothing to do with the titular serpent but, rather, the camera’s own serpentine moves around Moriarty as he sidles up sinisterly to a piano less to tickle than prick the ivories on a frankly demented little ditty. It’s a remarkable scene, one in which the narrative content is essentially trivial but the form of the scene and its placement in the film evoke a much darker story.

After the baroque excess of Inferno, it is difficult not to figure Dario Argento’s Tenebrae as a retreat of sorts, a re-entrenchment in the (admittedly twisty) narrative form of the giallos that Argento cut his teeth on after the florid excess of Suspiria and the delirious nightmare Inferno  so boldly and provocatively cast themselves in other directions entirely. If Suspiria was narratively curious and Inferno openly narrative hostile, Tenebrae is, comparatively, a relatively straightforward murder mystery rather than a cosmic exploration of worlds beyond our very capacity to perceive them, a curiosity beyond which the word “mystery” is adequate for.

It is, however, Argento, so it’s a sterling murder mystery as far as it goes, one with more than a few tricks up its sleeve. A series of straight razor murders by a prototypically giallo-esque black-gloved killer express familiarity with, even affinity for, the work of mystery author Peter Neal (Anthony Franciosa), visiting Rome with his agent Bullmer (John Saxon) and assistant Anna (Daria Nicolodi). Confronted by the avid fan Detective Germani (Giuliano Gemma), Peter also witnesses brief flickers of his wife Jane McKerrow (Veonica Lario), who has apparently followed him, despite him having little interest in her, nor her in him. This is very much unlike TV interviewer Cristiano Berti (John Steiner), who seems deeply invested in the sexual rage, subliminal neuroticism, and fervent moralism he reads into the Neal’s books.

The latter is the easiest codex for the film’s interests. Tenebrae is a deeply metatextual giallo, the most obviously Hitchcockian of Argento’s films, the most adroitly focused on the dangers and demeanors of filmmaking and filmmakers. Characters repeatedly allude to or outright discuss art and its relation to reality, the murderers are shot with typically fetishistic allure, an interviewer remarks that the novels only treat women as objects. Argento seems to cheerily affirm much of this, although the film quietly complicates and dissents as it coils its way into the back half and exhibits a genuine fright about its own complicity with the killings it depicts. Hardly an unexpected move for a horror film in that era or now, but Tenebrae is slithering and slimy enough to justify the autocritique.

I find myself strangely hesitant with Tenebrae, ultimately, given its relative hesitance with itself. I wish it was more earnestly detestable or more thoroughly improbable, rather than merely reasonably detestable and remotely improbable. But it’s hard to argue with this film’s nastiest cuts. Early on, the film all but announces its murderer, and rather than turning this into a red herring, it seems to have its cake and eat it too, both giving us the obvious murderer and rendering that fact essentially irrelevant, a narrative en route to more interesting terrain rather than the film’s raison d’ etre. Tenebrae, unable to throw itself head-first into the abyss, is always ultimately merely en route to something more interesting, but it’s amusing enough to experience the search.

Score: 7/10

I haven’t fully gotten these horror movies out of my system, so to get me through the frigid month of February, we’ll continue exploring the depths of hell.

Fresh off his monumental, genre-redefining Suspiria, director Dario Argento certainly didn’t take his success as a cause to rest. If the former film was a cosmic tear, Argento creates a pure void with Inferno, which conjures a breathtakingly demonic and disturbed view of a universe governed by clandestine orders and subterranean truths we can only cower before and never really comprehend. If anything, Inferno is even more devious in that it doesn’t even grant us the typical horror film’s descent from the normal to the uncanny. Rather than wayward rationalists suddenly confronted with the limits of their mental frameworks, Inferno’s characterssimply resonate with the film’s delirious rhythms from the start, hardly questioning any of its narrative contrivances. There is no audience surrogate, no questioning soul, in Inferno, unless we’re all as mad as Argento thinks we are.

Even more so than Argento’s earlier films, Inferno is decidedly ambivalent when it comes to its narrative center, and deeply promiscuous as an exercise in narrative flow. Consider the following. Mark Elliot (Leigh McCloskey) receives a letter from his sister Rose Elliot (Irene Miracle) informing him that she has purchased an occult text from an antique book store operated by a Mr. Kanzanian (Sasha Pitoeff). When Mark realizes she may be in danger, he rushes to New York, but not before the film disorientingly spends an entire act with Mark’s student friend Sara (Eleonora Giorgi), who happens to read the letter as well, before the film remembers that Mark exists and that, now, more than half way through the film, he will be our protagonist. The film’s entire first act follows Rose as she delves into the subject matter of the book, or rather, as we assume she is doing this from her actions, which are presented without editorial comment or even supporting dialogue. What, precisely, she is thinking is entirely opaque. Her face is an abyss as unrevealing as the film itself.