The Long Arm of Coincidence: SCARED TO DEATH (1947)

Bela Lugosi's only color film, and maybe the only horror film period from 1947, surreal poverty row quickie SCARED TO DEATH makes no concessions to atmosphere or tone. Why should it? It has no competition. Instead, along its zippy charge to the finish line, this unique poverty row original rounds an array of weird bases all its own, making it at true deadpan termite wonder, one that doesn't deign to even tag the usual bases as it rounds the diamond lest it lose the go-for-broke fuck-it momentum of someone stealing home on a loping base hit, then running off the field and into the parking lot after a referee in a green mask announces you've been "out" since second.

Director Christy (don't get excited - it's a guy) Cabanne's 162nd feature (it's also writer Walter Abbott's first, and Golden Gate Picture's last), Scared to Death doesn't really give a shit if it makes any sense but we in the Lugosi chat rooms don't care. Plenty of his poverty row films don't make any sense, but more than in some others we forgive the incoherence as it's never dull and--more importantly--it's surreal in that half-intentional (but which half?) zone where Bunuel meets Beaudine. It has the sort of deadpan irreverence we usually see only in international new wave breakthroughs that, if done independently, ala Godard's Alphaville, earn auteur acclaim, and if done for a major studio, like Suzuki's Branded to Kill, get their auteur fired. 

Watched in this light, Scared to Death alchemically transcends its lowly state as a B-mystery Lugosi vehicle, and that's important because, on that level, it fails miserable. Seen the other way though, as a nonsensical exercise in Marx Bros/Beckett noir post-structuralism, it begins to loom wobbly and large 

Set all in and around a single house, one that doubles as a clinic (though there's only one patient), ever-stumbling briskly through an ornate distinctly post-war plot full of gaslighting, shady pasts (what went on in Europe doesn't stay in Europe, even though you thought you left it to die in a concentration camp), lame comedy, exits and entrances, and signification-free fury, Scared to Death might seem incomprehensible the first dozen times you doze through it, but--and this is how you know it's a masterpiece-- the more times you see it, the weirder and more incomprehensible it gets, and the more you start to love it for resisting all analysis so vigorously. As Michael Weldon lovingly wondered in his Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film: "Were the people who made this on some strange, mind-bending drug?" [1] 

Maybe we'll never know, but one thing we do, and that's that you should be on some strange, mind-bending drug when watching. It won't help, but then again, it can't hurt. Then again, the film itself might be enough. Maybe it's already bent your mind, made you strange. Maybe it made you afraid so your mind started to crack.

Set in a former (that was 'before the war') mental institution, now the office and home, of Dr. Van Ee (George Zucco), the film seems haunted by the WW2 in much the same way The Black Cat (1934) was haunted by WWI. Van Ee harbors strange secrets about his past, i.e. during or before the war, secrets the film never does deign delve into. We never learn why, for example, he needs a private duty policeman around (Nat Pendleton). As with the hiring of the Ritz Brothers in The Gorilla (1939), the answer may lie not in that Van Ee hired a private detective but whom he chose. Someone is going to murdered? But whom? Surely not the wife of Van Ee's son Ward (Roland Varno), the paranoid Laura (Molly Lamont), who claims she's being kept a virtual prisoner in her room, though Dr. van Ee and Ward both wish she'd leave (or so they see). Why, is she so anxious to stay in this gloom-less house if she knows whomever is after her has arrived and is somewhere in its walls right now? The  suspicious way Van Ee acts, the weird double meanings and cryptic assurances in the initial scene where he's examining Laura (why would her fear of blindfolds even come up during a routine examination) do nothing to clarify anything. One could almost think one was in that post-structuralist Blow-Up blast radius, next to Elio Petri's A Quiet Day in the Country. 

Though Zucco probably gets more screen time, Lugosi gets top-billing as 'wanted' magician-hypnotist Professor Leonide (Bela Lugosi) who shows up at the door with his mute assistant Ingo (Angelo Rossitto), "one of the little men." They invite themselves to stay a few days (Van Ee says "I can't very well refuse." "How true, cousin Joseph. How... true"). Leonide and Ingo spend most of the film creeping in and out of secret panels in search of some other unseen person or gesticulating at the moon. At one point Leonide watches Laura depart his presence, snarling a weird poetry chant: "Laurette... Laurette, I'll make a bet, the green masked man will get you yet."  

Meanwhile, a scowling green mask regularly looks in from outside the window, but no one sees it. (Though Laura, from beyond the grave, somehow knows it was there in her narration). Bodies appear in one room and wind up downstairs, covered in a sheet on the doctor's examination table, as if by magic. Heads--delivered in boxes left at the door--doth literally roll. 

Its blithe inconsistency of tone might all be a passive-aggressive attempt by Cabanne and Abbott to do as bad a job as possible to get out of a contract with Golden Gate, but I like to think they knew they had to get it done quick and cheap, and so just 'went for it,' throwing continuity to the wind and writing the whole script over one long whiskey and benzadrine bender. Sometimes a kind of loose deadpan Mad magazine irreverence takes over when freedom and speed make 'art' almost by the not wanting of it.  This is why Plan Nine from Outer Space is endlessly rewatchable, while 'better' films appall with their mediocre consistency. This being decades before Antonioni let us see through the cracks of cinema's symbolic code, we have to find these Brechtian post-modern 'see around the sets'-y kernels where we may, and--all through the 40s--poverty row Lugosi films were giving us instances thereto. One could view them as an expression of the producer's contempt for the subject matter, or as harbingers for the post-structuralist landscape to come:

 From top: The Voodoo Man's script is written after the 'real' events happen, the writer/hero even
suggests Bela Lugosi to star; The Ape Man's author peers through windows all through the film,
a kind of 'WTF' through-thread. As a kid, seeing these films on afternoonTV a lot, these kinds of moments
were like insider winks. We didn't understand 90% of the dialogue, but these moments let us know we really
weren't naive. We got post-modernism (We read Mad). That same kind of enshrined ambiguity of inference
would become key European art cinema language, but until we learned it, only children and audiences
seeing movies in languages they don't understand, in un-subtitled prints, could share our sweet mise-en-scene
theory forming aesthetic arrest.  

And I make an Ed Wood association not lightly, and not just because there's a cross dressing surprise (SPOILER!) at the end. Lugosi's long downward slide really begins here, his leanest year. All he'd done in the last three years before Scared were some small roles in RKO B-movies, and one lead villain role, in the Val Lewton spoof-- Zombies on Broadway (1945). [2] Aside from Abbot and Costello Meets Frankenstein the year after Scared, times were only going to get leaner until Ed Wood came calling, like Bela's personal morphine-hallucinated cross-dressing angel of death. And though this isn't really a Lugosi showcase he does get star billing and it holds up today as a great example of how one might handle being handed a question mark of a role, with murky ambiguous motivations not even known to the writer, and turn it into a plum.

The unique things about Scared would go on to pepper later films, like Billy Wilder's 1950 show biz horror-drama, Sunset Boulevard -right), which is narrated, not from a face-up lady in the morgue but a face-down a man in a pool. Other than that, the same, though if you had to guess which film was set in an old dark house holding an ape funeral, how could you ever guess it wouldn't be the poverty row 40s Lugosi chiller, but an A-list Billy Wilder classic? This Lugosi chiller doesn't even have a single dark corner, or ominous statue: it's all light and normal decor, peppered with some heads and masks. But it doesn't matter. Sunset is brilliant even as it veers ever towards a kind of razzing ageist misogyny, while Scared to Death is brilliant because doesn't have enough of anything to be anti-something else. It stays constantly fluid, as if Holden, Von Stroheim, and Swanson, and Wilder couldn't decide if they were making Salome, a making-of documentary playing themselves playing roles, or the roles of Norma, Max and Joe amidst the haunted waxworks and--being clever--decided to keep events, dialogue and performance cryptic enough each line could serve all three or four different readings.

The dialing back and forth to Laurette on the slab, for example, becomes almost comically nonsensical and redundant, as if the editor is venting some irritation with having to spread the length to over an hour. Even with the all-knowing perspective of the unmoored soul, she couldn't possibly know a lot of the details she shows us. Not only that, her comments are often unrelated to the scenes we see. "I became afraid and my mind started to crack" for example, dials back out to Bill the cop (Pendleton) hang-doggedly hitting on the brassy maid Lilybeth (Gladys Blake), calling her his "melancholy baby," his "wild Irish rose." Then we dial back to Laurette on the slab: "Then came a sinister pair!" We see Indigo and Leonide enter through the front door, like a pair of trick-or-treating funeral attendants. 

"then came a sinister pair' (centered)

The paradoxical conundrums and obvious discrepancies continue to accrue. Regularly using big words and then wondering what they mean, Pendleton starts hamming it up to an WB cartoon-level height, even to the extent of saying "which way did they go? Which way did they go?" while waving his fists around. Dr. Van Ee calls the operator and asks for  police but then is conked on the head before he can talk to them; the cops don't come but but reporter Terry Lee (Douglas Fowley - the guy who "likes 'em stupid" in Cat Women of the Moon) shows up anyway, and brings his fiancee, the operator who clued him in on the phone call, Jane Cornell (Joyce Compton). What clue he has that something newsworthy is going on seems vague, but he remembers all the headlines about the weird marriage between Laura and Van Ee's son (she got him drunk and married him on dare) and maybe more besides. Meanwhile a green death mask keeps 'looking' through the window (it has no eye holes), causing girls who see it to faint. And yet - if no one sees it but us, and it cannot see--for it has no eyeholes--how can a dead woman know it was there? Is this mask the embodiment of Laura's post-death all-seeing eye that allows her to comment on action she was upstairs for?  

Maybe not, but this sort of thing, and fine paradoxical examples of Ed Woodian ouroboros dialogue, go looping around in lopsided orbit: Van Ee assures a mysterious lady in green that there are no abnormal things going on in his house, "nor will there ever be." She replies "Nevertheless, the way you were described to me, and the way your place was described to me, I am certain that I am in the right place!" Bull says to Laura he was hoping she'd get murdered so he could solve it and redeem himself with the homicide bureau ("who paid you to say these things to me?" she asks). He vows to cook and slave and buy Lilybeth furs and jewels, which leaves her cold ("I'd hate to hang by my neck until you got me those things...") Professor Leonide refuses to announce himself before coming in since "if I allowed myself to be announced I doubt I would be received anywhere" Van Ee lets us know Leonide (his cousin) helped pepper the house with secret panels when he was a "patient" there before the war. It was ostensibly so the guards could spy on the inmates, yet Leonide used one of the panels to escape! Who'd have thought!? Lilybeth drops dead after trying to blindfold Laura (her big phobia!) while in a hypnotic trance. She is then is revived by Leonide only because he can see that Bull "truly loves... this girl." Which is itself hilarious, and Lugosi knows it. Throughout his observations re: the women in the scene are bronzed in iron: he wryly calls Jane "delightful" and advises Lee "take good care... of her" and when Van Ee tells him Leonide he'll be staying in the room right next to Laura's, Van Ee adds, "I know you'll like that." Why or how is never elaborated. Alas!

And what does Lilybeth know, that she taunts Laura about the man in the green mask ("I let him in! Maybe he's here right now, Miss Lavalle!")

These crazy quotes are just off the top of my head, but I could write you out the whole script and get the same surreal buzz transcribing Joyce, Beckett, or Nat Perrin. That's why my heart always sinks when I hear strange canned/echo-drenched French accented voice for the first time that announces Renee is ready to perform the magic act that acts as the film's climax. Hidden in some secret passage while speaking to the gathered players, he sounds not unlike Mel Welles' crab consciousness in Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957). There's no real build-up for this 'climax' and Laurette's past betrayal, odious thought it may be. In that weird sense, it's hard to find something genuinely scary or punishable. Past crimes don't resonate as well as seeing her kill someone new. Had post-war audiences seen enough murder?

No. Film noir was fading out, 50s drive in sci-fi was about to fade in. In between there was only Scared to Death, the missing link in a chain that connects Arsenic and Old Lace-inspired wartime 'horror-comedy' (ala the underrated Boogeyman will Get You) with the psychosexual Freud/Kinsey flood of the late 50s-60s ala Suddenly Last Summer, Lilith, Three Faces of Eve, Psycho, Repulsion and Robert Bloch's semi-remake of Cabinet of Caligari (1962) starring Glynnis Johns (below).

Actually Scared and the 1962 Caligari would make a fine double bill, allowing us to consider the 15 year gap between them just how readily the population flux in the wake of the Second World War led to the frustrations of the 50s housewife, forced to give up her riveting job and stay home with the kids. If unable to find recourse in satisfying sex lives or a posse of hyper-active children, she turned to murder and madness. Electro-shock and lobotomies, hysterectomies and, if all else failed, they may well escape, to a place where birth control and liberation from the confines of male 'protection' might be feasible, i.e. Maine.

This is all just beginning to happen in 1947, where we find Laura in Scared to Death. Her Paris-under-occupation hypnotist act is in the past and now she has no role other than scheming bitch wife. So she hides in hr room, freaks out over branches at the window, stands up to cryptic threats from her father-in-law, and harasses the household staff. AND YET! Laurette/Laura is, a trailblazer -- her paranoia and madness, like a slowly gathering storm, will move across the warm ocean to the Freudian 50s, the bra-burning 60s, and finally blossom into a full on 70s women's lib typhoon!

++

HOLD ONTO THE PAST BEFORE THE PRESENT BECOMES IT.

What makes Scared resonate as indoor-child beloved art is its ability to be seen again and again, each new viewing doing little to shed light on the cryptic allusions to war crimes never fully elaborated on. I recently saw Dinner at Eight (1933) for the zillionth time and this time what I noticed was how the good old days before the Crash are recalled so glowingly it illuminates the desperate straits of the present, of aging and death in general --as if remembering bright lights helping ease the descent into darkness. Scared to Death could almost be Dinner's deadpan satirical inverse. For Scared to Death  it's the reverse, focusing on the bright present to avoid the murky past, trying not to look back to the darkness of the Second World War, to--at least between Leonide and cousin Joseph--let bygones be bygones, and trade the self-destructive intellectual gamesmanship of old Europe for the mire of grinning middle class American New World idiocy. But, they spend their time itching for something to happen, trying to generate tension with screams and faints, almost grateful that Rene with his green mask and back from Europe for revenge motif has come to leaven the small town sameness. Instead of Dinner at Eight-style monologues about the good old days, everyone plays their pasts as cards close to the vest and then, the big reveal as collaborators are ferreted out by presumed-dead concentration camp escapees, i.e. dinner is cancelled. But Desert is served.

RECOMMENDATIONS: 

If yer scared of a little Caligari semi-remake, you should also see on a double bill with The Awful Truth (with which it shares two actresses- above - each playing a Cary Grant rebound (hint: Joyce Compton sings "Gone with the Wind"). Like Scared to Death, Awful Truth gets better and better as the layers of cool little termite moments are shuckered loose from their deceptively shallow shells. As I point in my award-skipping 2003 film The Lacan Hour there are so many "Momento Mori" skulls, masks, and head effigies in Scared one can't help but read the obvious meaning behind them, and the meaning is that obvious meaning itself has no meaning. The quick dick pic sketched and pocketed by Jackie Treehorn in The Big Lebowski is the ultimate in phallic signifiers when using this yardstick to measure. 

Of course in order to 'get' this truth, you need to have seen Scared to Death so many times it ceases to make sense at all. Is staying indoors, strung out on allergy medicine, watching this film obsessively, over and over, a kind of secret pathway to post-structuralist enlightenment? Or is it  a living death which, nonetheless, like the lowering of the shroud, may bring air conditioned peace? (3) See it on a triple bill with the 1962 Caligari and Antonioi's Red Desert  -in that order, while comfortable and, ideally, alone and strung out... See if I'm wrong! 

I know I'm not alone in loving this cockeyed caravan of a film: shout outs to renowned raconteur d'horreur classique David Del Valle (though even he admits it's "not Voodo Man") and a thanks and RIP to my old Scarlet Street mentor, Ken Hanke, who steered me to the best available transfer of this often-crappy PD title back in 2000 (PS, it's the 1999 Sling Shot DVD w/ Devil Bat "The Bela Lugosi Collection - Vol. 1" - worth getting, as the colors are upgraded and the detail is sharp. I think you can get it for $8 on Amazon -- yer welcome. )

SEE ALSO: 

VOODOO MAN: Patron Saint of Megalomaniacal Children and Torpor!  

RETURN OF THE APE MAN: Revisiting the Savage, from a Wartime Perspective 

and many the Woodisan gems from:

Acidemic Journal of Film and Media #8: 

The BRECHT, GODARD WOOD Issue

NOTES:
1. Weldon, Michael Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (1983)
2. See: At Long Last Lost Lewtons
3. Allergy sufferers know that 'air conditioning season' usually signals the end of allergy trouble. What pollen remains is filtered out of the air during the AC process and for those of us with Nordic blood and allergies who hate humidity and heat, air conditioning + Bela Lugosi = nirvana.  

Old Dark Capsules IV: NIGHT OF TERROR, THE CROOKED CIRCLE, THE UNHOLY NIGHT, THE 13TH CHAIR, A STUDY IN SCARLET

Black and white old dark house films are the perfect balm for miserable rainy days like this, or the advent of spring (pollen/allergies) contesting grey winter's turgid encore as the sky clears. Cobwebs, shadows, candelabras, sudden black-outs, howling winds, shifty-eyed conspirators, pouring rain, sheet metal thunder, suits of armor that fall at odd times, cats, clocks striking midnight, readings of the will punctuated by lightning strikes, daggers in backs, spooky seances, fog-enshrouded stalking, spying through keyholes, secret passages, hidden laboratories, gorilla suits, disembodied death masks floating in the darkness - it's all manna. If you grew up at all in the 60s-70s then you remember too the ghosting of the UHF antenna signal (highly susceptible to cloud cover) when these movies showed on local TV Saturday afternoons; how a spooky old film was almost always, somewhere to be found out in the white noise wilderness, deep in those films that were deep in the white noise wilderness, Bela Lugosi waited like a UHF Kurtz, hamming it up in whatever role he got, be it a brooding vampire or just another enigmatic butler.

Back in the 70s, before the advent of VCR, one's ability to see old movies was tied to the whims of TV programmers and the the cloud systems of a fickle God. With only a circular antennae and rabbit ears to move around in vain, atop the set, every second of one of these films that was visible became a sacred text written on the snapchat wind. At any moment a cloud might pass and wipe out the signal, which had bounced in off a storm cloud from Wilmington Philadelphia, and leave you stranded, never knowing what it was called, or how it ended. Thus you basked in the hoary atmosphere while you could, read your Famous Monsters of Filmland like a holy writ, imagining that, one day, you'd be able to watch the movies those photos were from right there on the page of the magazine, as if a screen could one day be as flat and light and book-sized.

You know the rest --that dark birthday wish come true ( I spent a recent jury duty in the waiting room watching Invisible Ghost, The Ghoul and The Black Raven on my Kindle thinking damn, my wish came true, then again, they all have, eventually) and when it's too pollen-saturated or soaking wet and freezing to go outside without sneezing like a machine gun, what can you do now but watch thy old dark house collection from the sanctity of your germ-free bubble, and remember how precious every signal-reception moment used to feel when it was all so ephemeral. The narcotizing effect of these old gems transcends mere pre-sci-fi nostalgia. If you've ever stayed over in a huge dark mansion and tried to find the bathroom in the dead of night, no sound but the rats in the walls and the tick of the grandfather clock and.... what's that creaking?... then you know how great it is to live in a small NYC apartment on a high floor with three padlocks on the one door. Nothing makes you feel dryer than a raging storm onscreen. And if you're a Lugosi fan, then you know.

NIGHT OF TERROR 

(1933)

*** / Amaon Prime Image - B-

A long-unavailable old dark house swirl of a thriller melding in some pre-slasher movie signatures, the Bela Lugosi-starring NIGHT OF TERROR is violent pre-code melodrama that more than lives up to its lively reputation. Highlighted by an unusually lurid string of murders by a knife-wielding madman, who grins impishly from the bushes in and around a rolling, fog-enshrouded estate, then creeps in on his unsuspecting victims, stabbing them, then leaving his calling card - a headline of one of his killings - pinned to the back of each new body. From the opening scene of him crawling into a lover's lane convertible to stab a pair of necking lovers (top) it's clear this ain't your average 30s old dark house film, more like a 70s-80s slasher movie. Inside, a dotty scientist (George Meeker) plans to test his new 'suspended animation' death-duplicating drug by burying himself alive for two days--mixing Houdini and medical science together under the watchful eye of an eminently murderable board of directors. His fiancee (Sally Blaine) is too 'animus-dominated' to argue with her gullible dad (Tully Marshall) who encourages the marriage and bankrolls the experiments. She's so passive about it, she even tolerates social climbing reporter Wallace Ford's pushy come-ons. She'd probably get into a car with the killer too, if he had a bag of candy. She might even vote Republican.

The dad is, thankfully, murdered. Heirs gather for the reading of the will; the killer offs them by the dozen; Ford and the cops need to figure out if he's working for one of them (the will's split between heirs, so the fewer the inheritors the more $$) or if it's just a mad killer 'coincidence.' A no-good brother and his cash-hungry wife arrive out of nowhere and try to push everyone else out. The mysterious Hindu servant Degar (Lugosi) and his spirit medium-housekeeper wife (Mary Frey) are also in for a share, though the scheming brother and wife don't think belong in the will and plan to contest it - better hurry up, schemers!

Playing the very first of his long line of red herring butlers, Lugosi's role is pretty central to the action (he's more than just a comic relief macabre sidebar) and--considering what a lean year 1933 was for him (in the doghouse at Universal for refusing to do Frankenstein)--he seems glad to be working and manages some real malevolent around-the-corner stares through doorway cracks. Meanwhile the mad killer's body count rises and the black chauffeur (Oscar Smith) alone is smart enough to want to skedaddle. Naturally there's a mysterious climactic seance (always turn out all the lights in a big first floor open window and ajar door-filled room when a maniac who's already killed four people that night is still at large in the house) and a final act escape down a secret panel to a scary basement.

This rare Columbia B-movie gem was one I'd been looking for since forever - so when it recently surfaced online (I think it's on youtube) and on Prime after never being on VHS, DVD or shown on TV. That I'm actually not disappointed after all that expectation (35+ years of waiting) says a lot. What sets this apart from so many other old dark houses is the wild pace and the abundance of little macabre touches. Man, that lunatic really racks 'em up. I think he even makes it to double digits. I love the blackly comic way no one seems able to alter their schedules, beef up security, turn on some lights, or lock their doors even knowing the killer is right in the same block radius - it's the sort of suicidal eloi passivity--that immunity bubble--that causes so many car fatalities due to people's inability to stop texting.

In a very strange cool ending the killer threatens the audience with death upon divulging the trick ending. It's weird how often that must have happened at the time - because we see that same thing at the end of The Bat Whispers, and so many others. SPOILERS - believe it or not, underneath that weird make-up, the killer is gravel-voiced Edwin Maxwell (Dr. Emile Egelhoffer in His Girl Friday). 

--

20. A STUDY IN SCARLET

(1933) Dir. Edward Marin

*** / Amazon Image: D

My favorite early 30s Sherlock Holmes (pre-Rathbone) film, this has Anna May Wong and plenty of Limehouse fog and that's all I need. Some purists decry Reginald Owen's Holmes as too bulky and slow (he played Watson opposite Collin Clive the year before) but--though he's probably my least favorite Scrooge (in the 1938 version)--I like him. More forceful and less dotty than, say, Arthur Wotner, he's also less keyed-up and fey than Rathbone. The Watson dynamic is inversed too: Nigel Bruce's Watson tended to lag along behind Rathbone's gamboling Holmes like a shopping bag-encumbered mom after her sugar-addled five year-old, is replaced by Warburton Gamble, bouncing off the terrarium walls while Holmes sits motionless like a gecko perched above a watchful cricket, and then--- zap! the cricket has disappeared in a slight blur of pink tongue. Cool rather than fey, assertive rather than snide, Owen's Holmes has more than just a keen mind, he has gravitas. And Watson has more than just bumbling devotion, he has our respect.

When, for example, his close study of a crime scene leads him from the murdered man's desk out to the front yard, we see Watson and Lestrade (Alan Mowbray) just standing off to the side, resignedly watching him nose around the desk's minutiae. Neither is doing the usual dimwitted jumping to conclusions Bruce and Hohl do in the Universal films, as if feeling the need to spell out every misconception for the slow-witted audience members. Owen's Holmes doesn't spell out all his 'elementary' observations either. When Watson points out the resemblance of Thaddeus Merrydew's shoe size and cigar brand to those of the murderer they're hunting, Holmes just looks at him like a patient teacher guiding a student towards an already established insight: "Is that all you observed?" Holmes points out there were a hundred more details Watson missed, but then he doesn't go into them! Still waters run deep with this Holmes and we come to appreciate the carefulness with which Owen keeps the water clear enough to see all the way into his character's purple depths. These long pauses give those sudden whiplash gecko tongue movements extra snap, like when he counters Merrydew's feigning of ignorance over a widow's trust with a simple "it won't do" that chills the blood.

Another highlight is a local tavern out in the country wherein a nice old Col. Blimp-style officer strolls in, buys a bottle, and beguiles the local carriage driver with tons of whiskey before hiring him for a trip out to a for-sale mansion. Owen is so thoroughly buried in his role that we're not quite sure which of the two men is Holmes, if any; we just enjoy the idea of being kind of hard up for another drink, being low on funds, and having a friendly stranger come into the pub and bring over a whole bottle on a foggy moorish morning. We watch in awe as Holmes deftly avoids drinking his share while plying the driver, and how expertly he soon starts searching all over the mansion, locating secret panels, and sending the maid out of the room after feigning a heart attack. 

As in all the best Rathbone Holmes' (The Scarlet Claw in particular) it's the rich foggy night atmosphere that sells the mystery, especially in and outside the gang's Limehouse hideout, where many a chase, sudden shot and skulking suspicious walk occurs. Wong plays one of the inheritors of the bloody tontine (based on some sequestered jointly stolen jewels), alongside the innocent June Clyde and saucy scoundrel J.M. Kerrigan (the guy toasting "King Jippo" in The Informant). She doesn't have much to do but she still generates plenty of intrigue and suspicion with some hooded glances. An invigorating climax finds Holmes, Lestrade and a gang of detectives show up at the county pub for a quick one to bolster the blood before trundling off through the moors for the big climax. Hail Britannia! We wouldn't see a 'quick stop at the local before the showdown' scene again until Straw Dogs! 

 Clearly a labor of love for Owen (he produced and co-wrote the script with Robert Florey), it doesn't have anything to do with original Conan Doyle novel of the same name (Owen had optioned the title only, not the actual story) but they did a bang-up job whipping something together that feels proper and correct, with British atmosphere is so thick you may be forgiven for presuming it came from Gaumont rather than long-lost LA poverty row outfit Tiffany.

THE CROOKED CIRCLE

(1932) Dir. H. Bruce Humberstone 

*** / Alpha Image - **

This 'campy mystery' was the first film ever broadcast over TV airwaves, back in 1933! - and what better choice? Old dark house films thrive with a fuzzy picture. Combined with the inherent staginess and strange rhythm you may get the delicious impression you're somehow not meant to see it, that you're stumbling onto a secret broadcast meant for other eyes. We open on a circle consisting of several men and one woman in black hoods, sitting a skull on round table deep in some basement. They close their clandestine meeting with the chant: "the fight to the knife and the knife to the hilt!"  The way the circle draws cards to see who does each murder "in a manner already prescribed" evokes Robert Louis Stevenson's "Suicide Club." H. Bruce Humberstone, the man behind most of the Fox Charlie Chan movies, directed it, which may explain why it hums and pops.

The suspects all gather around 'Melody Manner', an abandoned, creepy split-level haunted-ish mansion that's just been rented out by the leader of the Sphinx Club, a group of amateur sleuths. Soon the one long night is populated with a rogues gallery of kooks ("before you got here, a queer-acting hunchback brought over a basket of tomatoes"), mysterious violin sounds ("didn't I say death would come with a string?"); killers pop in and out of attics, grandfather clocksl; backyard graveyards have tomb-top chutes down to basement trap doors. There are some genius touches of the sort I haven't seen until the more recent Good Time (like a burglar (Robert Frazer) forcing the homeowner he's holding at gunpoint to change clothes with him, before the cops arrive) and never a dull moment cross-cutting in an all-in-a-single-night small time frame (the mark of a good old dark house movie; daytime shots are a bore).

Irene Purcell--her alabaster Norma Shearer-esque arms as lovely as ever--is the heroine. The eminently forgettable Ben Lyon is her nominal fiancee. Stealing the movie with some elegant 'against-type' aplomb is C. Henry Gordon in a rare good guy turn, sporting a turban as the enigmatic foreign detective Yoganda; fellow Sphynx Clubber Roscoe Karns nibbles on whatever comedy relief isn't chewed down to the nub by mugging Zasu Pitts' terrified housekeeper and James Gleeson's rattled traffic cop ("oh, a wise guy, eh?"); Robert Frazer, Christian Rub, and Spencer Charters are various spooky eccentrics flittering in and out out frame. Before you know it, the Crooked Circle are being unmasked and it all ends too soon but do what I do and just press 'play from beginning' at the first sign of credits, because I guarantee you won't remember a goddamned wonderful word of it even if you watch it twice, back-to-back, in the same evening. It's just that good because--in the words of Zasu Pitts, repeating the warning given her by the toothless violinist early on-- "something always happens to somebody." She ain't kiddin'.

THE THIRTEENTH CHAIR

(1929) Dir. Todd Browning

**1/2/ (TCM image - ***)

Often remade (to no real effect) this is one of those 'have your cake and denounce it too' seance exposé old house hybrids so popular in the days before DRACULA made the legit supernatural cool. Initially a barnstorming stage melodrama, no one has been able to make a good movie out of what is essentially a single room-set play. Margaret Wycherly stars as Madame LaGrange, a soft-spoken medium hired for a party of British diplomats and swanky ex-pats in India. Demonstrating the mechanisms behind spirit raps and table raising, LaGrange seems intent on demystifying mysticism and bumming everyone out, all in the service of finding out who killed a friend at a party the previous year. Summoned to perform on the anniversary of their collective friend's death, Wycherly makes a half-hearted attempt to access real magic for the climax (her familiar is "Laughing Eyes" an old Native American shaman) and in the process shames hardened carnies like director Todd Browning, whose eagerness to expose the seamy underbelly of the seance racket seems mean-spirited (maybe he did it to impress Houdini -dead only three years at the time - or was he?).

Until Dracula two years later proved the public was ready for fantasy, Browning shied away from the straight-up supernatural, thinking the public preferred Chaney's endless stream of 'deformed sideshow contortionist loves circus waif' masochism vehicles. So in this case, the old dark moody billing is a cheat as the medium's calling on her fake familiar for real help seems quite absurd and eventually her dated sentimental schtick plus the elaborate disclaimers combine to kind of swamp the picture.

Ah well, you can always fall in love with Leila Hyams in her seductively diaphanous art nouveau Adrian gown, as I did. The jagged ruffles of her flapper-y skirt alone are as unforgettable as the window treatments in Deep Red. You don't blame mopey Conrad Nagel for mooning over her (though eventually you will want to slap him, too). The Calcutta setting lets art director Cedric Gibbons indulge in the most luxuriant exotica, and Bela Lugosi is great as the local Indian police inspector, masterfully using his aristocratic bearing to boss around the snotty British and the big surprise climax is not without its spooky charm.

Nonetheless... as with other mysteries from the period (like Secret of the Blue Room) it gets too hung up on its final act twist, becoming almost too contrived to be believed. And oh man does Wycherly's schtick stick in the craw. It's clear Browning is as taken with her as Hitchcock was with Lila Kedrove in Torn Curtain, or Anderson with Peter Ustinov in Logan's Run. Browning should have known by then that you can't let elderly characters actors run away with a scene, because they will take twice as long to walk half as far. And then they will be all we remember, and we'll never want see it again, anymore than we want to go to the old lady's home and visit granny. She's a swell old girl, but... just the thought of that place kind of gives us a claustrophobic, buried-alive feeling. Hyam's diaphanous art nouveau gown and Lugosi's imperiousness can compensate for only so much.

On the other hand, twenty years later Wycherly would turn her saintly homespun mom schtick on its head as Cagney's terrifying mother in White Heat, and don't say 1929 mysteries don't age well, because there's one old dark house movie from 1929 with the same basic seance murder mystery structure, and it rocks, and it's up next on the hit parade:

THE UNHOLY NIGHT 

(1929) Dir. Lionel Barrymore

**** / unavailable 

This MGM old dark house thriller gets a bad rap for being--like most early sound films--awash in crackles, hisses, stiff acting, and literal and figurative static. That's all actually plusses for an old dark house fan, for it gives the impression the air of the early sound era was something we could hear and see, like a special alternate form of liquid perfect for late night/early morning dipping. And The Unholy Night may offer the coziest example: everything seems to be taking place underwater seen through some magical submarine window as, under the protective anonymity of London fog, a killer is strangling unwary ex-British military officers. They're dropping like flies in a wild opening montage. Lord Montague (Roland Young) is nearly strangled too, but he manages to get rescued and at Scotland Yard proceeds to start pouring the brandy and sodas to steady his nerves, and he doesn't stop 'til the whole mystery's wrapped up (announcing each new glass is "my first, today"). Turns out he and the dead men all served together at Gallipoli in the Great War in the same regiment so Scotland Yard suggests they round them up at Montague's mansion for a an impromptu reunion and their own safety and thus protect them with some plain clothes guards and get to the bottom of things. What with all the drinking and WWI existentialist undercurrents you can bet it was written by Ben Hecht, and there are so many creepy seances, ghosts, mass murder tableaux, walking corpses, and British army buddies singing drinking songs that it becomes the perfect film to watch as the sun comes up after a wild night of revels.

The cast is rich with strange faces: Montague's sister (Natalie Moorhead) goes in for seances in a big way, and seems a harmless enough pastime to her doctor fiancee (Ernest Torrance) but is it? Hardworking character actor George Cooper is Montague's loyal servant from the war - he's sure happy to see the regiment back together for a weekend, happier than he can say, and knows just what kind of drinks to serve and when to bring another round (which is immediately); Boris Karloff is a foreign lawyer with shady motives and a strange will; Polly Moran is kept on a short leash as the maid (she can really ham it up... if... if encouraged); the disfigured Major Mallory from their old regiment dies in the other room while the gang are mixing up "a bowl of wine" - a concoction of everything but wine, let aflame and carried around while singing "drink it down / drink it down."

Things really shift into high gear with the dramatic arrival of the Turkish-British Lady Efra (Dorothy Sebastian -above, center), the daughter of an officer who was drummed out of the regiment for cheating at chards and who vowed revenge and is now dead.... maybe. She might be in town because she knows about father's will, a tontine, i.e. where the fortune is divided up equally amongst "surviving" members of the regiment, set up as some vengeance-minded rich folks as part of a byzantine revenge plot (i.e. encouraging so-called loyal friends to kill each other). Lady Efra has her own plot in mind probably via 'tricks of the ancient orient' - like hypnosis, sex and suggestion (ala Thirteen Women, another Erich favorite). Naturally the news of the tontine leads to some hammy moments of alibi-challenging, confessions of being broke or in debt, and going "crazy" from the strain (it sure doesn't take long!). Naturally though, this being England rather than some godforsaken corner of the heathen orient, brotherhood prevails and some pretty rounds of "Auld Lange Syne" put it al perspective, eventually. That night the doctor boyfriend slips the nervous Efra some tranquilizers upstairs and asks if she can identify the voice she heard conspiring with Karloff the night before, and the brother officers all mill around outside her door cockblocking one another and thinking of lame excuses to knock.

Yeah, I love this movie to death. I've only seen it a few dozen times, usually late at night, drunk, or sick, all the better to not remember it for the next time. (It is key, really, to enjoying these old murder mysteries over and over again- make sure your short term memory is off, so you forget who the killer is as soon as it's over). I do recall that, considering her possible yen for killing them, the men milling around her boudoir don't seem at all wise. And I remember  Karloff's weird mix of abashed lovelorn discomfort and silken sinister motives during his scenes, but not exactly where he fits in to anything (he's not even in the credits). I remember a great grisly morning tracking shot past numerous strangled victims, lots of hamming. My favorite moments--the one I remember most--occur earlier, a rattled Lord Montague in Scotland Yard after almost being strangled in the London fog, shrugging off his fear with a succession of brandy and soda (his first today!), and when Lord Montague, leading Scotland Yard into his mansion, opens the parlor door to investigate a scream, and finds the lights out and his sister and a gang of folks mid-seance, spooking maid Moran. It's total darkness while the disembodied head of Sôjin Kamiyama whirls around the room, chanting in a hideous deep voice! Oops! Oh well, nothing to worry about. As a viewer it's such a great WTF moment it stays in the unconscious like an eclipse stays on the retina. Well, gentlemen, let's to the study and have another round. Another regimental drinking song if you please and another brace of brandy and sodas. Our first today! Well, you know what I mean. When it comes to how drinking is done by gentlemen, Ben Hecht never forgets!

PS - Good luck finding it - it's not on any DVD or VHS.  TCM occasionally shows it - usually very late at night. Could you please demand they make a DVD, maybe part of a pre-code old dark house five movie DVR set? Suggest they add Murder by the Clock, Night of Terror, Supernatural, and a decent print of Crooked Circle! I'd appreciate it.

See also:
Old Dark Capsules: THE GHOUL, CAT AND THE CANARY, THE MONSTER WALKS, THE OLD DARK HOUSE, THE BLACK RAVEN

Old Dark Capsules II: PHANTOM OF CRESTWOOD, THE BLACK CAT (1941), HORROR ISLAND, ROGUE'S TAVERN, ONE FRIGHTENED NIGHT

Old Dark Capsules III: THE GORILLA, WHITE COCKATOO, WHILE THE PATIENT SLEPT, BULLDOG JACK, SHADOW OF DOUBT

Grave Diggers of 1933: THE INTRUDER, SECRET OF THE BLUE ROOM, BEFORE DAWN, TOMORROW AT SEVEN, SUPERNATURAL

NOTES:
1. Adapted in 1936 (see: Russian Orthodox Roulette: Lindsay Lohan, THE DEER HUNTER, TROUBLE FOR TWO)

Occult Streams of the Amazon (Prime): 13 Witching Hour Picks

The welcome and most unholy arrival of this year's big new horror classic, THE WITCH, onto Amazon Prime last week signaled the month (my favorite) of all unholy magic has arrived. Time for great hauntings and macabre classics to come streaming like a running flow of witches o'er town and dale.  Lucky then that--as I wrote re: their Vampiredeliction last week--though Netflix has shied away from the ratty old rarities and sideshow bargain basement found objects, Amazon Prime has more than picked up the slack. Every micro-genre category of October horror now can now hold its own special list, were a man mad enough to make it. This here one, the Occult-themed film list, stretches from silent films from 1922 up until present day, linking Middle Ages gynocide to 70s ouija boards and forward to modern direct-to-DVD scrappy indie gems with surfeit of imagination and paucity of purse. So let the fall foliage crumble in lovely dark red and purples in the crispness of your knobby knuckle caress! We shall collect them for a recliner to plant before our tombstone screens. Wake thy imps from their velvet cloth slumber --the tape's unwound! So to speak.

PS  - as before, each film is rated both for film quality (factoring personal preferences) and image quality (as in the HD clarity, restored crispness/color, etc of Prime's streaming print --which is subject to change)

1. THE CHURCH

(1989) Dir. Michele Soavi

**1/2 (Image- B)

It's long (feels longer than it is), convoluted, and it tries to keep too many balls in the air, but this DEMONS variation makes great use of a vast ancient church set, and involves a treasure map mystery, Templar massacre, and Rube Goldberg-esque Freemason contraptions stirring to dusty life after half a millennia, opening the pit and releasing a horde of long-buried evil spirits and then springing ancient magical masonry traps that close every exit so no evil can escape --but neither can the assortment of tourists, archivists, restoration curators, priests and--as luck would have it--a school field trip and a fashion shoot--that all happened to be in the church at the time the gates and locks swung shut. Like so many horror films dealing with witchcraft, this has its cake (those Templar murderers were wrong to slaughter cute hippie chicks), eats it too (but they were/are real, and evil), and then brings it right back to the store complaining its stale and demanding a refund (so we have to kill them again). As with Soavi's other masterpieces, Stagefright: Aquarius and The Sect, there's a gorgeous olive green tinge to the darkness and a weird playful sense of metatextual humor if you know where to dig for it, as all sorts of little side plots set themselves up and then resolve themselves differently at the last minute from how your sixth horror film sense tells you it will. The model from the shoot (Antonella Vitale) is nearly suffocated in an expensive, beautiful white wedding dress after it's caught up in the gears locking the front gate (with the wardrobe mistress cutting each stitch with tiny scissors while Vitale complains and slowly strangles). There's a Rosemary-style devil copulation (a running theme in Soavi's late 80s-early 90s work), unsettling near-incest with Asia (as her character's working slob father is possessed), hallucinations, gory murders, and a relatively keen sense of who is where in the cavernous space at any given time, which is no easy feat of continuity in an Italian film with so many little bits of business.

Co-written with Lamberto Bava and Dario Argento, this stars Argento company regulars Barbara Cupisti, Asia Argento (when she was still a kid), and Thomas Arana. The music is credited to Phillip Glass and "The Goblins." There's occasionally some annoying prog courtesy Keith Emerson, but most of the time it's quiet enough you can pray to the blessed virgin sans distraction (yet still in vain). The image is a little fuzzy but I think it's always looked like that - on par with Soavi's other films - lots of gray and dust filtering the light. If the CHURCH isn't very good when held up against Soavi's STAGEFRIGHT, THE SECT, or CEMETERY MAN, it still holds up better than most everything else in its league, genre, and field.

2. BURN WITCH BURN

(1962) Directed by Sidney Hayers 

***1/2 / Image - A

What makes this film work is its moody black and white photography and AIP talent roster, including Corman Poe screenwriters Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, who always instill 'classic' material with an edge of modern wit that does nothing to dispel the unease and terror. It's directed by Sidney Hayers, a TV director who's worked on The Avengers, and Baywatch, among others, but hey - it's all about the script and the actors, and these are top flight, even if there's nary a familiar face in the bunch: Janet Blair is the wife, Peter Wyngarde the brooding Rod Taylor-ish lead, Margeret Johnson the limping rival; Judith Stott an amazing and odd face as the charmed co-ed.

I've been shy about this film since I was afraid half of the running time would be spent with the husband condescendingly lecturing and belittling his wife about her black magic habits. He does, but she fights back with scathing wit and makes her conversion to logic something that's a result of her own self-doubt, rather than his stern paternal berating. Part and parcel to this left brain belittling the right thing is the whole code-enforced demoting of women from sexy independent thinkers to smiling slave drone Stepford wives. I love women! I think they're great / they're a solace to a world in a terrible state. What a nightmare to have no women in the world (Lou Reed). Or as BWB shows, it's a nightmare either way, but beautiful (Bing Crosby). Filmed in black and white, BURN has the arty photography of the British countryside, rocky beaches, and cloudy English skies of the British new wave, and stands up against the cream of Hollywood's post-Lewton / Tourneur ambiguous shadowy whispering.

3. BLOOD ORGY OF THE SHE-DEVILS

(1973) Dir. Ted V. Mikels

 ** (Stream quality - B+)

For this alcoholic, a great simple throbbing synthesizer score goes a long long way towards paving over rough spots (what Carpenter called a 'carpet score' - i.e. it avoids micromanaging). Good old De Palma's preference for high-falutin' longhairs like Hermann and Rota can get a little overwrought, like one long music video for the orchestra, but here in Mikels country a nutcase named Carl Zittrer plays 'special electronic music' that's just one crude sustained repetitive drone that's occasionally broken in on by organ and drums. It works with the crude imagery, like some magic enchantment. Mikels directs the whole thing like he's ingested too much mandrake root and didn't pay his light bill. Lucky for us, this Amazon print/image has blacks so dark and deep they seem to creep down some dreamy dangerous and dusty cinematic alleyway between Kenneth Anger's ceremonial magick outsider art and a Sam Fuller primitivist pulp nightmare. You start to get that Temple Drake-style 'being really wasted at a party and suddenly you look around and everyone you know has left and the room is now filled with sketchy strangers giving you weird looks-style feeling. It's a feeling embodied the high strangeness of the lead witch Mara (Lila Zaborin), who stresses every word of her weird rhyming spells as if channeling Mickey Rooney's Puck in the 1935 Rienhardt film version of Midsummer Night's Dream.  Together with that Zittrer drone, Zaborin's intense, drawn-out, vaguely amphetamine-tinged hypnotic trance chanting can make even you--at home and half-asleep--a believer.

The scenes of her group of sexy acolytes dancing around prone male victims with spears, their hot midriffs and long legs driving innocent Christian viewers into the embraceable flames, connects it all in some vague way to Hammer's Prehistoric Women (1967), in a good way. What I mean is, I could have used more of these dancers, less of the weird bouncer guy with the fur hat (he looks like he could be Tom Savini's dad screen-testing for The Hills have Eyes) who just stands around looking inscrutable. Before and after these dances, various coven members stare into mirrors and hallucinate their past lives as witches being persecuted by intolerant sadistic townsfolk, priests, or knights. A scene of a girl forced to watch her child mercilessly flogged while she's burned alive is pretty vividly etched and quite painful to endure. There's also Native American dances, and a pope trying to exorcise a woman and then having her stoned to death by the locals when he fails. It's all very appalling and surprisingly well done, with decent crowd scenes. Since the bulk of the film looks all super cheap in dark and dingy rooms in Mara's mansion, these strong scenes offer a curious juxtaposition.

One tangent has Mara accepting a contract to rub out a crusading politician at a cocktail party via totem telepathy. It works, but the client tries to kill her rather than pay up! What kind of idiot doesn't honor a contract with a woman who can kill through telepathy and voodoo doll torture? A dead idiot, that's what kind. There's also a pretty weird seance, maybe the most amateur-creepy since Ed Wood's Night of the Ghouls. In other words, this is clearly a 'can't-miss' Halloween option, perfect for that coveted 4 AM slot. Interesting too that the film so covertly judges the 'good' guys: a normal hetero couple visit Mara's house for some cheap thrills, but then run for their lives when they realize it's legit. They tell a 'good; doctor, known for his ability to "psychometrize" objects ("Some people devote their entire lifetime to study of the mind!") Though we're never sure why this 'average' couple deem her such threat, the Christian doctor is determined to bring Mara down. "There's a sabbath going on in this house at this time" he notes from down on the street as her cool LA pad glows in the dark. Surrounding the house on all four sides with powerful 'good guy' warlocks, he shoots some painted-on lightning and kills everyone inside. After all, he had a right to! Their politics disagreed with his! Christendom is 'saved.' Not even a rubber bat shall be suffered to live.  

4. THE WITCH 

(2016) Dir. Robert Eggers

***1/2 / Amazon Image - A

Shrouded in portentous gloom and ominous droning electric cello, THE WITCH (2015) is the first great woodsy pre-Salem devil film in 300 years, a SHINING for the ANTICHRIST x BLOOD ON SATAN'S CLAW subdivision of the HAXAN community (with a dash of the recent HONEYMOON if you're keeping track). Set in 1630s New England on a small patch of farm and field, surrounded by deep (if leafless) woods, it's a character piece that delves into the same dark patch of the soul that many witch and devil movies make feints at but then run away from, i.e. the actual dark superstitions and folk tales, court records, and the twisted folk horror stories of zonked-out American mystics like Hawthorne, Poe and Ambrose Bierce. First time-writer/director Robert Eggers shows flair for the milieu and the genre both, making the narrative work by being straightforward with the paranoia and the reality. Not unlike ROSEMARY'S BABY it functions on both conscious and unconscious levels. It's an historical look at repressed female psychic energy in a patriarchy and the validation of that patriarchy's fear of the dark.

Anya Taylor-Joy stars as Thomasin (above, amidst deepdreamgenerator pareidolia), a naif to the menstrual age, who prays valiantly for deliverance from sinful thoughts but nonetheless falls prey to shady woodsy pagan strangeness, especially once the baby disappears on her watch. Kate Dickie, brilliantly unhinged, is the salt of the earth mom slowly dissolving into the dirt from the loss. The loving yet ineffectual dad (the nicely deep-voiced Ralph Ineson) can do nothing but try, fail, and then shy away from all blame. The son, Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw), is the sacrificial Barleycorn offering of a young lad starting--since there are no other options--to lust for his developing sister. Running rings around them all are moppet evil twins and a strapping horned goat named Black Phillip who is possibly the embodiment of Goat of Mendes i.e. Baphomet, or maybe just a buck in heat or in the early stages of rabies. Somehow, that goat steals the show and miraculously never seems CGI fake or badly cut-in to appear to not be doing naturally the eerie stuff he's up to. There's also a rabbit and a raven, filmed in such a thin grey light we feel the ominous ambivalence in their empty eyes. They might remind you, as the did me, of being a small child terrified by some strange small (but big to you) animal. That THE WITCH conjures such tremulous memories via just showing a frickin' hare just sittin' there in the deep dusky woods speaks to the film's unholy power. (more)

5. SATAN'S SCHOOL FOR GIRLS

(1973) TVM (prod.by Aaron Spelling & Leonard Goldberg)

*** (Image - C)

A smooth occult TV movie prelude to both Charlie's Angels (1976) and Suspiria (1977), this Spelling/Goldberg joint stems from the halcyon days of relaxed morality, a time when free love and occult practice alike were mainstream-sanctified and girls' schools were allowed to have their male teachers host wine parties, and tell the students to "condemn nothing.... embrace everything... and hang loose" and it was all alright. Future Angels Cheryl Ladd and Kate Jackson are students at an all-girls college where there seems to be only two teachers: both groovy men--Dr. Delacroix (Lloyd Bochner)--who goes crazy imparting the secrets of mind control via a relentlessly-squeaking rat maze--and Dr. Clampett (Roy Thinnes), who teaches art and encourages the girls to embrace their own hallucinatory perceptions: "What we think we see is as real as what we actually see." Dude, that was like our mantra in my 4th-5th grade combined (artistic-minded) class! And maybe in the 70s in general. The less-cool Delacroix meanwhile talks about how terror makes rats and humans alike irrational and suggestive. Jaime Smith-Jackson (who'd just come off Go Ask Alice!) worries she may be next and drops to the hallway floor shrieking in terror between classes for no conceivable reason. Pamela Franklin (the girl-child in The Innocents who'd just come off shooting Legend of Hell House) is Elizabeth, secretly investigating the supposed suicide of her sister (Terry Lumley) whose ironed dirty blonde hair and red sweater / denim jacket ensemble kick things off perfectly in the paranoid opener. Jackson--wearing devilishly long straight black hair is the smart girl who helps Elizabeth with the mystery while espousing the wondrous powers of professor Clampett ("he can't help you if you fight him" she tells her). The all-of-a-piece low-key acting (only Jo Van Fleet's conflicted headmistress hams it up) and lengthy scenes of crackling thunder and blowing wind, girls walking around in their nightgowns in the dark, with a lantern illuminating their scared but determined young faces, all add up to laid-back 70s TV horror movie heaven, or... the other place... Satan, where do I sign?

The print on Amazon isn't great but it's the best we've got and at least the bulk of the artifacts are actual celluloid damage--green lines, cigarette burns, inconsistent color, blotches etc. with very faded color, but it's not blurry or obviously a VHS tape-transfer like some other TV movies floating around. It's over pretty fast and there's nary an uncool moment, so if I were you I'd join them.

----

6. VOODOO MAN

(1944) Dir. William "One Shot" Beaudine

** / Amazon Image: B

It might be hard to appreciate the beauty of Voodoo Man without the background of having being what Forrest Ackerman called "a monster kid" in 1960s-70s, when it was on local TV in Saturday afternoons a lot, introduced by various horror hosts or just flung onto screens with no warning. If you decided to stay inside and watch it, expecting Lugosi and company to make it worth your while, you'd be forced to admit you made a mistake. But to understand why that mistake was still worth making, and why we look back on this movie now so fondly now, first you must know the combined pain of artsy introversion, blase parents, clingy little brothers, and allergies. OR maybe, if it was in the theater, you needed to understand  the pain of losing sweethearts to Nazi or Japanese gunfire, the pain of soldiers heading overseas to face death at the hand of foreigners and hoping their young brides or sweethearts stay 'on ice' as it were. If you understand either audience, and the way strict censorship tried to wheedle every drop of horror out of horror movies, then maybe you will know the joy we all found in Bela Lugosi's insane megalomania as he broke through all restrictions to do whatever he wanted. Here he hypnotizes, and dresses young women in ceremonial robes and then uses them in weird soul energy transfer voodoo rites to bring his catatonic or dead wife back to life. Sound familiar? He did the same thing in Monogram's Corpse Vanishes a few years earlier, but that time he was truly evil -here he's sympathetic. The film itself isn't very clear about if it's supposed to be the victim's souls going into the wife's body, or vice versa, making it incoherent to a nine year-old Lugosi fan. Where's the monster, we wondered? Why is George Zucco wearing the funny hat with the feathers? Who does voodoo happen in a remote house instead of the jungle? Had the studio no potted fronds?

VOODOO MAN suffers from disrespect and the hostile derision not only of critics but itself (the writer hero disparages even his own past 'voodoo movie' scripts) but we monster kids were used to being told stuff we liked was crap. And we raged against boredom and against every bedtime and in this refusal to kowtow to life's petty rules we really found a kinsman in Lugosi. It didn't matter how bad everyone else was in front of and behind the camera in these dull murky dramas, Bela was the star and he 'got' our pain. He was how we imagined we'd be as adults, for we couldn't imagine life without our world-conquering mania. Bela never phoned it in. His banal surroundings made him glow that much brighter - not unlike ourselves trapped in the tedium of suburbia! 

And this has George Zucco.... in a headdress, acting up a solid 1/2 a shit storm of no tomorrow with mouthfuls of gobble di-gook probably made up on the spot. In these scenes lies the bliss kernel inside the bland screenwriter headed to a wedding shell. Not even John Carradine's painful hamming as an imbecile assistant (which I realize is for the censors--so he scans too childish to molest the zombie brides beyond petting their hair)--or the condescending attitude of the hero-- can dampen the glow, the passion, the moistening in Bela's eyes when he thinks he's finally waking up his sleeping beauty. Life.... to.. death! (more)

7. HAXAN: WITCHCRAFT THROUGH THE AGES

(1922) Dir. Benjamin Christensen

**** / Amazon Image - A

The definitive documentary / dramatization on the 'science' of the Middle Ages, this weird but essential tract on hysteria examines one surefire cure to the problems of overpopulation and unmarried old bitches in the days before women had rights --witchcraft accusations. We follow two different relatively minor incidents which balloon into wholesale slaughter and torture of the innocents. In the first, the father is dying of some unnamed malady; the wife suspects witchcraft; a passing old lady makes the mistake of dropping by to steal bread, and that's all it takes. Event follows event, and soon the entire household is rounded up and burnt at the stake. In the other: a horny young monk can't stop fantasizing about some local girl, so he renounces her as a witch.. Sooner or later all the women confess to lurid fantasias of midnight orgies in the middle of the woods, orgies vividly brought to life as Bosch-style horrors coupled to a Bruegel drunken peasant woodcut facial wrinkles. It might have been made in 1922 but the scenes of the monks laughing and drinking while torturing poor old women to death are pretty Eli Roth-style gut-wrenching. Luckily, there is also a scene of witches kissing the devil's filthy ass like it's a new bride at a wedding reception line; a devil feverishly churning his witch pole and flicking his tongue with enough lascivious obscenity to shame a Pazuzu-possessed Regan McNeil; flying witches on brooms; stop motion imps breaking through doors; flying gold pieces always just out of reach and banquet morsels that turn to squirming toads at first bite --all of it brilliantly-rendered, like some wild datura root nightmare come to life.

On Amazon Prime we have the (to me, superior) 1968 rerelease restored version --the one with a strange and wondrous free-form jazz score (crazy avant garde percussion and the violin of Jean Luc Ponty) with the intertitles replaced by narration from William S. Burroughs! He not only covers both the intolerance, hysteria and the fantasy but begs further thought, especially as regards modern Satanic panic / conspiracy theory / UFO abductions and so forth, as they survive to this day. Did the constant heart-wrenching torture these girls endured unlock past memories through the shattering of the mind and body? Supposedly this how the CIA creates split personalities in its sex slaves and assassins! I muse more on this all over on Divonorum Psychonauticus. 

For those of us familiar with the film through old shitty grey dupes, the Prime transfer is a whole other beast. See it and shudder at the fathomless depths of your own crazy species and all we do not know about where our narrow space-time dependent conception of reality ends and the timeless madness of the collective subconscious begins. 

8. SOUTHBOUND

(2015) Dir. by Roxanne Benjamin, Radio Silence,
David Bruckner, Patrick Horvath

*** (Amazon Print: A)

Immeasurably fueled by the Gifted's wildly retro-analog synth score, this scrappy anthology offers an array of southwestern Satanists, demons, strange voices on radios and cell phones, and world-weary bartenders, all aiding and abetting various characters driving down a stretch of American Southwestern highway someone calls the 'ass end of purgatory.'  Some characters are mere innocents on the wrong turn of their lives, some stuck on endless loops of karma and demonic pursuit, and do they even know which is which? It's as if the idea of watching a film obsessively over and over is more than just the strategy of neurotic film lovers striving to avoid their own existential mortality, it's what lies beyond as well. Some of the vignettes are scarier or funnier than others, but the cumulative effect is one of droll pleasure mixed with that anything-can-happen WTF dread we used to get from Tarantino and his spawn back in the 90s, back when our genre narrative expectations were first used against us with some regularity.

To be honest, those narrative expectations are why I've never been a huge fan of anthology horror films. Too often they rely on lazy scripts full of banal set-up and see-it-coming-a-mile-away twists, by which I mean all the stuff from Britain's Amicus or America's EC comics. Soutbound on the other hand, is more Sin City than either of those, albeit with a quietly remarkable absence of misogyny (there's even a girl director for one segment). Stories range from a Satan-worshipping 'normal' family recruiting most of an all-grrl rock band, to a very chilling and nightmarish trip to a deserted ER, a misguided 'rescue' by some old crazy brother for his long-missing biker tattoo-artist sister, and a murkily-motivated assault on a vacationing family that is almost--but never quite--explained. The patter of the local DJ (rockin' Larry Fessenden) ever-present on all the vehicular radios, unites the tales, not in theme or direction, but in Wolfman Jack-cum-Red Sovine highway philosophizing. But unlike the Crypt Keeper or Alfred Hitchcock, Fessenden's DJ doesn't add bad puns or plothole putty, just keeps the existential road homilies flowin' like a steamy asphalt ribbon down the line. Drive on, good buddy, whether you can't get off the highway and home before dawn, remember one thing: If yer an American, the endless highway already is home. Drive it and never look back, good buddy, because the Bickle freeze-frame rearview glance might be y'alls last, or already was.

9. LITTLE WITCHES 

(1996) Dir. Jane Simpson

*** (Image - B)

It's in full screen if you can believe that but damn, maybe it was never in anything else. I certainly don't remember it in theaters though I imagine it tried to ride the success of the very similar high school girl clique coven flick, The Craft. Much as I like that film and much as critics disparage this one online, I think Little Witches is better. The only advantage The Craft has over this is that career-defining badass performance by Fairuza Balk. Well, this one has a great evil witch performance too, from the lovely dark-haired Sheeri Rappaport. Rocking an insane midriff and baring her (thankfully un-augmented) breasts with diegetic abandon (but sans ickiness), Rappaport is quite a heart-stealer., and it doesn't have the yucky Skeet Ulrich either, adhering more to a Satan's School for Girls format, set an all-girls boarding school, this time Catholic, but with the same chosen coven of orphans and kids whose parents don't want them home for the Easter holiday, i.e. spring solstice!

Unlike SSFG, there is one boy toy character to deal with: a dumb hunk construction guy whose crew uncovers a walled-off room off the campus rectory, exposing a deep well/pit to caverns leading to the sea, and a gaggle of skeletons of missing girls from decades earlier. The (living) students--bored and under-chaperoned--find themselves returning to the uncovered room in the dead of night, again and again, driven to perform unholy rites for reasons that wouldn't make sense to the sober layman (dormant evil has the ability to make you think summoning it forth is your own idea, that is to say, some evil witch made you notice the Ouija board for sale and think it would be 'a lark' to try it --and that witch is the one who answers your attempt to contact those who've 'gone on').

Horror royalty Jennifer Rubin (Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors, Bad Dreams) is the cool nun in charge of the girls; Jack Nance is the priest; Poltergeists's Zelda ("this house.... is clean") Rubenstein is the requisite blind nun tasked with the holy Sentinel-style duty; one of the assembled girls is a very young Clea Duvall. Allow it.

Anyway, where we we, again? Oh yeah --the unholy powers are summoned. The Good Friday solstice convergence threatens reality as we know it and the Lovecraftian tentacles from beyond the door loom like a checkered flag.  Rather hostilely, Arrow in the Head notes that the film is too on the fence about what it wants to give us: "the sex is too soft (no lesbian scenes or sex scenes) to satisfy the [XXX] hounds and the horror too weak to thrill the genre fiends. I don’t even know if the film is supposed to be a comedy or not." But to some of us, Arrow in the Head, that's the very thing (or lack of) that makes it great! Once it's one or the the other, a comedy, a sex film, or a gore fest, it's boring. What Little Witches has that's unique is the in-between, the fluid genre-traversing. I also appreciate the hard-to-duplicate naturalistic Hawksian overlapping rapport between the girls, and the film's refreshing freedom from all the typical characterization shorthand we associate with the boarding school supernatural misadventure. There are no dumb pranks, gross gags; there's no slut-shaming, doofus boys leering through keyholes and snickering about scoring, or dullard parents loping in at the wrong moment. I like the sense of the supernatural arising slowly and naturally, almost like a joke at first but then, like the frog in the boiling water, too late to escape. I'd say anyone who hates on this film is a misogynist idiot whose fate is decreed by the unholy raiment of the Illuminati Sistren shish boom blah blah blah.

Probably, I'd be wrong.

Dig Rappaport's Linda Fiorentino-ish brunette feline fierceness

10. CHANDU ON THE MAGIC ISLAND

(1935) Starring: Bela Lugosi
**1/2 (Amazon stream Image -D+)

It's sometimes hard to figure why Bela Lugosi got such mean treatment from the studio system, but films like this may offer a clue: the unsteadiness of opiate dependence (so vividly, if compassionately, chronicled in Ed Wood). A lifelong drug addiction can be controlled, even harnessed, with an endless prescription from a connected quack with the ability to prevent the star from taking either too much (which would make him nod off and miss his cue) or too little (which would turn him into a twitching, sweaty, wild-eyed basket case). The 'too-little' part seems to be Bela's lot for Return of Chandu, the serial from which Magic Island was edited. Perhaps a simple "booster" from a studio doctor (if you were at a studio big enough to have one on call) could have knocked Bela into the outfield of calm, centered brilliance (as he demonstrated in The Black Cat the same year at Universal) but there was likely no studio doctor on a B-movie serial set like this one.

I generally warn you away from Amazon streams with the poor image quality--and this is one of the worst in this list-- but I've never seen a good version of  Magic Island's source material (my old two-tape set of the original serial looked just as bad) and, at any rate, the condensing of 12 dull chapters, keeps it lively; and the blurry pixelation gives weird accidental oomph tto all the shimmering spellcasting. Everyone has a glowing aura/halo and the crystal ball, stirred fountain effects, and fire pit all shimmer like some kind of yard sale surplus Max Reinhardt fairy dust.

Adding to the weirdness is that Bela plays Chandu instead of the villain (confusing those of us who loved him as the evil Roxor in Fox's Chandu the Magician from 1932) and even has a girlfriend in Princess Nadi (Maria Alba). Bela, with a girlfriend? He's more the dead wife type. Sweating, overwhelmed, wild-eyed and messy-haired, in ill-fitting white khakis, Bela can be hard to look at unless you do as I do, and pretend Bela's Chandu really is a junkie and that his (good) magic is the power of mightly Narc-Anon and the evil black magic is centered around opiates; the imprisoned white magician Tyba (Jospeh Swickard) is a friend Bela's Chandu makes in rehab; Chandu/s ancient guru is always reachable via crystal ball, i.e. like a sponsor available on speed dial; and scenes like where he's tied up and tortured with the crushing stone almost an exact mirror of the tortures of withdrawal. So even if --at times-- you'll want to bitch slap Lugosi's character for just standing around letting people get hurt rather than speaking up or launching a spell; and you'll wonder why he keeps toting a big ungainly diplomat family all over the Far East and subjecting them to danger nonstop while he just stands around sweaty and horrified and passive. I say, forgive him, as I have via your magical fourth step. Then keep this film on your Prime watchlist for emergencies.

 Sometimes just taking the edge off is paradise.

11. WITCHOUSE

(1999) Dir. David DeCoteau
*** (Amazon Image: B)

A simple story set in a very cool mansion about a solstice celebration, thrown by well-heeled Goth girl Margaret (Ashley McKinney) for a disparate bunch of Dunwich schoolmates, who come heedless of the fact they don't like her. Do they know their Puritan ancestors burnt her ancestor, Lilith (Arian Aulbright), as a witch 300 years earlier, and Lilith's been revived for the party? The pentagram is drawn. The lights are low. The mansion is gorgeous, and yet some don't give this DeCoteau-via-Charles Band joint a chance since it's shot on video and the witch make-up is kind of Sid and Marty Kroft rudimentary. Actually, Witchhouse looks fantastic once you give it a chance, thanks to patient Romanian craftsmen who use a stunning array of candles and oil lamps instead of unnatural electric light (Band had set up shop there, hiring talented local crews for cheap). There's all the requisite types for that film's totemic sacrifice: the stoner comic relief, the sex addict couple, the dumb jock and his hot blonde punk rock girlfriend, the bookworm hero and the hot-but-doesn't-know-it bespectacled girl. It might be the lamest party ever (pot and whiskey are nixed by buzzkill girlfriends) but the basement seance works like a charm and that natural lighting compensates one hell of a lot, as does woozy camera work (when magic is afoot the camera sways drunkenly) and there's a great sense that the whole mansion is lit up for running around in, rather than just in some static scenes - so the camera goes careening after the actors as they tear all over the place in this huge beautiful house and it's all in a very grand. I love that the uptight smug film major is the first to get zapped and he's the loudest at just saying no - preferring to stay all tense and bothersome--and clearly we're meant to cheer his demise --and we do! And I love that the stoner's girlfriend gets to knock out Lilith with one punch ("I coldcocked her," she flatly declares "and locked her in the other room"). Even the magic laser effects are well done.

L-R: ---Brooke Mueller (the rocker type); seance; Monica Serene Garnich (the cute nerdy type)

So, like Little Witches (above), what we have here is a lesser-known, underappreciated spookshow that's neither all the way sexy, funny or scary. That may bother some folks but I appreciate how unburdened by covertly-misogynistic it is. It may not be that great, story-wise, but so what? It's not trying for anything it can't achieve--it knows the spell we want to see it make, and it makes it. I dig the low-key acting of some of the characters, the engaged acting and clever writing--how innocuously yet lovingly the cinematographer keeps the candlelight in proper atmospheric balance (total termite). There's nothing to upset your babysitting charge's Puritan ancestors, with just enough aching "c'mon and kiss her already" tension that one five second kiss is all the affirmation they need to die for each other even though they just met. Ah kids.

Maybe I'm just partial to the ancestor-of-Salem vibe as I myself am the grand child of Dorothy Perkins, therefore a "direct" (?) descendent of several Salem community 'witches', including Mary Easty and Mary Edwards. Seeing films like this I wonder if I should enact some kind of unholy black magic revenge on their behalf? The simple fact is, 320 years is a long time to hold a grudge. Just to be safe, though, I bore witness against the thinness of Sherri Moon Zombie's lips in my review of Lords of Salem.

Lastly, it might help to have grown up reading/watching shit like The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew to really resent (as I do) the way gore and graphic sex and sexual assaults are so regularly rubbed in our faces, sex demeaned through pathetic dog-like rutting smash-cuts employed as a cheap shortcut to amping up the intensity. Then again, I'm very particular - the list of things I dislike in my go-to horror films gets longer every year, especially if there's any depressing imprisonment, puerile douchebag snickering, misogyny, or garlic. Witchhouse may not be as stealth great as The Eternal, but it's similar enough that I forgive it all trespasses. Plus the bond between Lilith and Margaret is cute -it's like she's the cool 320 year-old eccentric aunt who visits on the holidays once a year and the niece falls under her sway and gets into crystals and the tarot or something. You know the type? Neither turns on the other as a final bloody twist and the nerds win in the end, but who gets to rock out? Margaret and Lillith. Witches give snitches stitches and damn right they'll be back in another 320 years, whether anyone shows up to fuckin' ever drink that whiskey or not! Fuckin' lightweights

---

12. THE MARK OF THE WITCH 

(AKA "ANOTHER")
(2014) Dir. Jason Bognacki

**1/2 (IQ -A)

Proof you don't need a huge budget and a ton of scenes or even a sense of linear time in your film, you just need to have done enough drugs, meditation, therapy, or arguing with a manipulative mother to know how slippery identity and self perception really is. This film by newcomer Jason Bognacki shows us he may qualify.  His 2014 debut has q cute young pharmaceutical intern's 18th birthday shift interrupted by the sudden arrival of her absentee body-hopping immortal mother. Guess whose body she wants to inhabit? Lynchian para-sympathetic matriarchal ellipses and horror hallucinations and dreams-within-dreams, make it harder and harder for us to figure out what's real as our plucky intern tries to learns the truth about her coven heritage. For witches, it seems, blood is not only thicker than water, it's the sewer tunnel through which immortal spirits scurry like rats under the river of the centuries. If you have access to a pharmacy, so much the richer.

Newcomer Paulie Redding brings a marvelous range of expressions as the possessed intern: we can instantly tell who's possessing her at any given time. The Skelton Knaggs-nosed Maria Olsen--playing either her mother or herself or her ancient ancestor, makes a terrifying shadow/devouring mother archetype. We feel the futility of trying to fight one's genetic matriarchal heritage (even with rebel 'good witch' guardian Nancy Wolfe trying to help), the same way we feel it's futile trying to convince relatives their politics are wrong at Xmas dinner. Bognacki trusts his imagery to structure a story within the viewer's paranois, sparing him the duty of linear explanation (which seems counter to the workings of real druggie magic anyway). 

Clearly this was originally a short, being stretched to feature length by any means necessary (dig the way the director bides for time by slowing the end credit scroll to ten minutes!) but that's not to denigrate a very promising and unusual debut. Even possessed by Lymcjoam tropes, it remains quite itself.

13. THE ETERNAL 

(1998) Dir. Michael Almereyda

**** (IQ - B)

Like a few other films on this list, I'm shocked at the afforded hostility of the average critic over the loose drunkard druid revisionist  meditation on Irish horror novelist Bram Stoker's Jewel of the Seven Stars that is The Eternal. Have they even seen it? Blood from the Mummy's Tohand that winds up possessing a young Victorian daughter of a catatonic Egyptologist. The book is great, like Dracula, Stoker seems obsessed with a kind round the clock vigil over endangered hotties whose past lives either are these ancient demons or were in love with them. Either way, that ridiculous faux K-horror erotic video cover is terrible, the title is meaningless, and even the other title 'TRANCE' is bad. Michael! Call me I can help! You could have called it She-druid Drunks of the Iron Age - that's just off the top of m'head. And whatever you have against this film, film critics at large, admit that Allison Elliott is sublime in an array of roles, and the idea of a devouring matriarchal druid ancestor jibes very well with the other films on this list, so even though I've written about it a dozen times already (see: Inescapably Her Iron Age Druid Bog Mummy Telekinetic Alcoholic Hottie Self) I had to include it, do you understand? I didn't have a choice!! 

And for Almereyda heads out there, Prime has his first feature, favorite of everyone ever in the world who's seen it (all sixteen of us), 1989's TWISTER, (no relation to the 1996 Jan De Bont action movie), a strange family movie with Crispin Glover, Harry Dean Stanton, Dylan McDermott.... hell yeah.

Also: 

SUGAR SKULL GIRLS

(2016) Dir. Christian Grillo

*4/5 (Image - A)

If Phil Tucker (the 'genius' behind Cat Women of the Moon and Robot Monster) took a bet he could film an all-ages girl power spookshow with just his daughter and her slumber party friends, a few very odd guest stars (such as Michael Hills Have Eyes Berryman) over a single weekend, then this is proof he won that bet. For "adults" of all ages, this is perfect for parents who are trying to turn their ten year-old daughters away from the Neon Demon and the hentai watched by their peers and towards their own Labyrinth / Power Rangers past. It's a demonic Power Puff contingent for the freshly pierced, something the less mature children can show their younger siblings after trick-or-treating - to both laugh at and with, and even get the gist of what good Brechtian so-amateur-it's-genius is all about.

As Prospero says in Corman's Masque of the Red Death, the best swordsman in Europe wouldn't fear the second best, he would fear the worst.  SSG is proof that terrible pacing, clunky editing, amateur acting and muddled writing can be overcome through pure muttonheaded moxy.

I also will ascertain at this juncture I know no one in the cast or crew, have not been sent a copy or courted via emails to review this, I just found it floating in the Amazon stream, like all the rest. Let us give thanks this day, for in my childhood this kind of distribution was a foolhardy dream. The label putting this out is 'Potent media' and their symbol is an inverted pentagram. Something is amok, I mean amiss. Yet I found it - floating in the 'similar titles on Prime' and for a hot sec I felt once again like a single digit-aged Ed Wood fan finding a surreal K. Gordon Murray kiddie import on the 5 AM movie as I waited for ISIS... and SHAZAM.

The DEVIL'S HAND

(1962) Dir. William J. Hole

**

I have tried to see this all the way through a few times but it seems like little more than an Alfred Hitchcock Presents or Karloff 'Thriller' episode padded with a lengthy scene of coven members sprawled on divans watching a floor show of devilish beatnik jazz dancing and bongos. That said, mileage may yet vary if one day feathers prove the ploy. Bruno ve Sota lurks amidst the divans, the Satanic honey trap (above) has excellent posture and look fast for...nah I won't spoil it.

BAY COVE 
(AKA [Easy] BAY COVEN)

(1987) TVM - Dir. Carl Schenkel 

** (IQ - C)

The mid-to-late 1980s TV movie was mired in a lot of regretful fashion choices: pastels, shoulder-pads, Ray Bans; perms, sweatbands and spandex bouncing to aerobics videos, and Armani narcissists like Tom Cruise and Richard Gere who honestly thought that by playing narcissists who finally get their heads out of their own asses, they're somehow 'heroes', that any step forward out of their narcissistic materialism should be accompanied by a parade of gorgeous women's admiring tears. That said, by 1987 we were wising up to such tinny bombast, and we had the abortion affidavits to prove it.

What we needed was a fresh start. Really fresh. We needed to get out of the city, with its boardrooms and Venetian blind-and-cigarette diffused lighting, and get back to small upscale communities with sinful secrets, and farther back still, to harvest sacrifices and chanting covens.

So come thee, hetero DINC couples, to Bay Coven, or Cove as they call it (to throw the persecution-crazy Christians off the scent). Here in this isolated island community ("only" 45 minutes away from San Francisco!), an unholy pact has resulted in all the original members being still alive after 300 years. Their secret: sacrificing the descendants of their olde thyme persecutors. You know, business as usual.. in the '90s... the 1690s. But now they need new blood for the circle, so its time to recruit Timothy Hutton and and his sexy wife (Pamela Sue Martin!), and to welcome them to easy Bay Coven!

We're left with many unanswered questions. The main one: who the hell does the script think Woody Harrelson is? Did the citizens use their magic to kill Pamela's brother and why no mention Woody was her brother until after he's dead? Confused? I am.

Well, I know it's a lot to ask, but if you can handle Pamela Sue Martin's post-New Wave shoulder pads and unflattering Cherry Hill perm and don't mind the movie's stubborn refusal to try even one original plot point of its own instead of "borrowing" everything (right down to the dream sequences) from 70s touchstones like: Let's Scare Jessica to Death, Crowhaven Farm, The Stepford Wives and The Dark Secret of Harvest Home, (and of course, the one they all borrow from -- Rosemary's Baby) and if you're not dissuaded by its dated ersatz neo-noir look (the muted blue-and-grey shot-on-video colors) and you're doing something else at the same time, like laundry or homework, to keep yourself distracted, then you may like Bay Coven or Cove.... whichever.

Maybe that's the whole reason the whole family used to love these old TV movies in the 70s: they were never meant to be original or riveting - never meant to absorb our full attention, never meant to disturb us, or bum us out. They were designed solely to keep us watching through the next commercial, to keep us mildly absorbed but never fully enthralled. We'd joke about lame dialogue or inept special effects while sharing popcorn, guzzling Coke (for the kids) and highballs fort the parents and being able to follow the plot while eight other things were going on--Monopoly games, babysitter pony rides, general carrying on (see also: Satan's School for Girls), talking on the phone (and when a bit older, making out on the couch).

Now that we can watch entire seasons of disturbingly violent and vivid TV shows in one sitting--no commercials, no respite, no return from reality--all that social connection is fading.  The sheer number of options leaves our attention span too short to watch anything less than instantaneously riveting.

Maybe what we need is a fresh start. Really fresh. We needed to get off of TIVO with its brutal SVUs and back to the simple joys of 70s TV horror movies. That said, this is from 1980s.... hand me the sacrificial scythe.

SEASON OF THE WITCH
AKA "Hungry Wives"

(1972) Dir. George Romero

 ** / IQ - C

This doesn't get a lot of love due its hopelessly trite surrealism, depressing aesthetic (terrible greasy paleface make-up that everyone seems visibly sweating under, close-ups of middle-aged faces with yellowed long teeth), and dialogue way too close to how annoying friends of your mom actually used to talk. Sure it's directed by George Romero, sure it was made between Living Dead and The Crazies. Nonetheless, it's too dingy and too didactic to work as either horror or 'cracker factory' polemic. It's like hey, we get it: like so many women in the early days of "women's lib," housewife Joan (Jan White) is bored and sexually frustrated. Her bland husband barely seems to notice her (and vice versa) and she's got nothing to do all day--she thinks--but laze around dreaming in surreal shorthand. Even her witchiness is boring. Honey, we all have to suffer against the sucking tide of societal indifference towards our own inertia. Toying around with New Age accoutrements like it's not just another form of isolation consumerism is not 'doing' anything. And no offense to Romero, but do we really need another man telling a story about the troubles faced by women at man's hands? Instead of just laying around in bed all day dreaming of being led around on a leash by an uncaring bored (impotent) husband, why not get a job, or write your own damned movie? Go work as a dominatrix in the afternoons and you can lead the men around on the leash instead like Catherine Deneuve. Or at the very least, maybe volunteer at the animal shelter.

LATE ADDS:
Since this post more cool titles worth seeing have come out on Prime:
THE LOVE WITCH (review/essay here)

THE WITCHING starring Pamela Franklin!