Quaff this kind Nepenthe: THE RAVEN, WEREWOLF OF LONDON

top: Jean Poe-teases Vollin - The Raven; below: milking the mugwump, so to speak. in 
Werewolf of London

October is here so I may as well confess that even though I have them all on DVD in one form or another (and on VHS from the 80s), I recently got the Universal Horror Classics Blu-ray box anyway: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy, Bride of Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, The Wolf Man, Creature from the Black Lagoon, Phantom of the Opera, they're all there, again. Well, I'm glad I did. They're lovely - like totally different movies. It's like seeing them all over again for the first time, as if I've quaffed the kind nepenthe Poe craves in his poem "The Raven," so that he might forget his lost Lenore. If you've seen most of these over and over to the point of memorization as an alienated child-to-teenager monster enthusiast, this nepenthian memory wipe of uber-HD Blu-ray--cleaned and enhanced to the point of 3D clarity and a luminous silver nitrate glisten--is a welcome plunge once more into the narcotic abyss of ecstasy that only comes with a really good black and white Universal monster movie.

One thing the clean-up HD illuminates, that we were no doubt never meant to see, in the silvery celluloid are the brush strokes of the set painting and make-up. They're visible there in the painted rocks of Henry Frankenstein's crumbling phallic tower interior, Jack Pierce's painterly brush strokes on the faces of Hull and Karloff. We see now too the reflection of black greasepaint under the eyes of Dwight Frye and the spidery shimmer on Mae Clarke's wedding dress. We feel like we're right there in that phallic dream tower, safe inside the welcome invisibility of the camera eye as it slithers up and down the winding staircase, a 3-D expressionistic vertical maze of black and white rocks. 

Not every filmic aspect perhaps benefits from this sharpening. In Dracula, the clarity of HD makes Bela Lugosi seem shorter, his hair oilier, his complexion steamed from the klieg lights as if he needed the mirakle of celluloid grain to hide his base humanity. The film needs the limits of its era, the way the crudeness of early recording technology for movies in the 1929-31 era resulted in a lot of... measured... talking... for clarity, giving the sense of everyone swimming in ether that some of us find intoxicating in a kind of dreamy ethereal surrealist way. Now, for the first time, questions arise: would Lugosi speak the same... slow... halting way if the film was made even a year later, when sound recording--and Lugosi's familiarity with English--had improved by leaps and bounds? Magic sometimes results from hiding weakness. For me, who fell in love with the character and actor catching him on old phantom UHF TV broadcasts as a child in the early-70s, analog ghosting and static crackle help materialize his full unearthly measure of malevolence (and obscure his fragile human physicality). 

Yet on the good side, so much more eerie stillness is now present in Browning's mise en scene, revealing a whole new intoxicating artificiality aligned with the 2-D nature of dreams. The first scenes in the coach and outside the inn at the foot of the Carpathian mountain leading to Borgo Pass now has strange sense of interiority, as if the village where Renfield is told not to venture out after dark has no more depth than the carriage; the black and white of Freund's camera is like an alien technology window into some human third eye fever dimension, The Transylvanian village, the last stop of normality, has no more depth than a Natural History diorama or an animatronic Disney ride tableaux. 

"whom d'angels name Lanorre

Not all of the eight films belong in the set: Phantom of the Opera is just a lavish, well-made 40s musical-romance with lovely Technicolor finally restored, but with the most disappointing unmasking in all the film's many versions (more like a localized skin rash than a hideous countenance to glut one's senses upon). As with Creature from the Black Lagoon (great, but belonging to a whole different period/genre than the others --it would go well with It Came From Outer Space, Tarantula, Incredible Shrinking Man... etc.) seem included purely for their name recognition. 

But the rest of the films hum with expressionistic atmosphere and delirious alchemy of light and shadow, making me, for one, wish they chose the films by date and mood rather than fame. Instead of Creature and Phantom, the special magical alchemy of the restored HD image on these gems should rightfully go to the lesser-known but essential alchemical black-and-white 30s Universal gems, The Raven, The Black Cat, (screened and broadcast so often together they're like one long two-part movie) Murders in the Rue Morgue, Werewolf of London and The Old Dark House. So consider this humble post my arc of triumphant piss against the wind of Universal big wig "it didn't get on a postage stamp, it don't get a Blu-ray" indifference to style over brand recognition. 

For the purposes of this post, though, I'll focus on two films from the Universal pantheon that remain much less examined, from 1935, The Raven and Werewolf of London (which I prefer... heresy I know... to the Wolf Man).

In THE RAVEN (1935), we start with a meta slap in the face: though Lugosi's really the whole show, 'Karloff' gets top billing. An outrage! 

Lugosi plays Dr. Vollin, a totally insane Poe devotee who's "actually built, you know, some of the torture devices described in Poe's stories" and is patiently waiting for just the right snooty family to use them on. Afforded a rare chance to run amok in a big studio project, all the brakes removed, pointed downhill and given a whack on the back and sent freewheeling into gravity's loving arms, Bela does not waste a single syllable of this grand opportunity. Starting the film as a retired brain surgeon and contented genius, obsessed with "the divine Edgar," indifferent to matters of saving lives, once Dr. Vollin is coerced into saving the life of modern dance artist and bourgeois heiress Jean Thatcher (Irene Ware), the ideal torture choice has been made. To show her gratitude, the recovered Jean cockteases our Vollin mercilessly. She lounges and luxuriates by the roaring fire in his 'chambers' while he serenades her with big ominous chords on his organ, from, what else, JS Bach's eerie 'Toccata' fugue (Karloff played the same tune in The Raven's dark twin, the previous year's The Black Cat). 

She leads him on, flirting and flirting, gazing into the fire and talking about how he's like "a god", but when the vibe gets too heavy she mentions Jerry, her fiancee, and eases up off the couch.  Why, didn't Vollin know she's engaged to young Jerry (Lester Matthews)? But now Vollin's blood is up. She leaves, as these types of girls do, and he's left high and dry, too proud, perhaps, to ease his... passion.... the usual way. 

His brain must be clear and Jean torments him! He has every right to think she's coming onto him by the way she gazes enraptured into his fire while he thrusts his fingers down on the organ. She seems mere inches away from becoming the Morticia to his lonesome Gomez.  I sympathize. I, too, know the weird obsessive shame and confusion when a girl pulls that kind of nonsense, treating you like an exotic antique, attractive but ultimately too outside her comfort zone; acting like she's going to buy you, then leaving you on the shelf at the last minute and exiting with a quick "I'll have to think about it," to the sales clerk. She chooses instead the bland safety of her bland social coterie. It's like if Morticia blew off Gomez to marry Dick York in Bewitched. 

But soon we know she made the right choice. His idea is that (I think decoding the probably many times changed to pass the censor dialogue) her father should send her to him for sexual copulation to ease his torture. For, if he can't relieve his torture, he must torture her, and her father, and her fiancee--that no other option exists (I'm sure the censor has nixed the options and consolations most of us take in these circumstances). It's the height of madness. And Bela does it so so sooo well.

But unlike the bulk of Bela's 'normal' rivals in Universal horrors, played by David Manners or John Boles, Jean's fiancee Jerry's a bit of all right, a regular chap, a newly-minted doctor rocking a drowsy endearing upper crust Brit accent. His response when learning Vollin is a little sweet on Jean, "Well, what of it?" Unlike fey David Manners of Dracula and The Mummy, we like him and his lack of patronizing bossiness. 

On the other hand, Jean's father comes to him noting Jean is sweet on him and he shouldn't lead her on as she's engaged. Rich and cultured, Lugosi's Dr. Vollin saved her life, who cares if he's a few years older? He's a catch, especially if you're into the macabre and want to dance for a 'living.' The father acts like Bela is, you know, precluded from ordinary love affairs due to his.... otherness. That Vollin should understand that. We do, but only because of Bela's body of work and status as a horror star. It's like his meta credentials keep his character automatically off the desirability market

Damn it! Bela never gets the girl, except in Return of Chandu and Black Dragons... but those don't even count, hardly. In one he just shrugs her off, in the other, she's always too endangered, he has to renounce her love to save her life, so he does. 

Maybe he deserves it. In Dracula he leaves his three brides back in Transylvania--never to be seen again (I dream one day a 1932 Brides of Dracula will resurface, a long-buried by the censors pre-code Universal horror laying forgotten in the vaults all these years).  Dracula never quite gets a love scene with anyone conscious. In those Monogram horrors his wife is either sulky and disfigured, dead and re-animated only when he de-animates an unlucky bride, or apparently dead but lurking outside his window, inciting him wordlessly to murder. 

Maybe it's because Lugosi doesn't know how to be romantic in a real-life one-on-one clinch, only tortured for the equivalent of the lost Lenore. Once Jean is dead, he can mope out the window and ponder, weak and weary over his forgotten lore. So if he can't have her live, let him her have her dead - there's nothing anyone can do to stop him pining for a ghost. OOps - I'm way off topic!

The previous year's big Karloff-Lugosi-Poe duel The Black Cat is more widely hailed by fans and critics due to the poetic hand of that other divine Edgar, G. Ulmer, but the two films are like mirrored bookends. Of the two, Raven sends me into movie heaven while Black Cat is more hilarious and artsy but too strange to get me up and cheering, the "phone is dead" comment aside. Either way, they are both very short and benefit from each other's distorted reflections, and are often shown as a double feature, the same way Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein often are.

Consider the similarities: in Raven, Karloff plays a prison escapee who redeems himself by killing evil Lugosi, who is trying to make him complicit in the murder of a young bride-to-be who is spending the night at his spooky mansion during a storm; in Cat, Lugosi is a former POW who gets revenge by killing evil Karloff as he tries to make him complicit in the sacrifice a young newlywed spending the night at his spooky mansion during a storm. In each film, the more evil of the pair is subjected to a bizarre torture by the other after he makes his coded move against the girl; in each the 'normie' husband is way-too over-civilized, young, and ineffectual to not seem merely a useless pawn, buffeted by the wind of Karloff and Lugosi's combined malevolence. In each, the woman they covet is endangered mainly by the era's strict moral codes: if the endangered girl and her chosen young man were allowed to sleep in the same room when staying over at the strange mansions of these two devilish titans, said titans wouldn't be able to take such a free hand. 

Lastly, both Karloff and Lugosi die at the end of each, of course - and we conclude with the couple in transit, back in the consensual reality of the humdrum 1930s world, unscarred by their diverting detour into the lurid and macabre.

But, with its weird policeman on bicycle next morning comedy, a weird deathly Sunday afternoon-style hungover ennui settles over the middle section of Black Cat that The Raven (which never really reaches the next day) never sits still long enough to get stuck in The sweeping romantic motifs in the Cat score--playing seemingly at random throughout the next morning--provide more proof horror never works well in the AM. Further, there's a grim kind of art deco claustrophobia in Karloff's keeping his young wife in bed all day long, unable to leave their room, then killing for no real reason, that leaves me feeling slightly suffocated by the mid-section The Black Cat. Part of my preference for The Raven lies in the well-ventilated sense of the coming (dark and stormy) night, the sort of giddy rapture I've always equated with very cool slumber parties as a kid, watching late night UHF horror movies while playing Ouija and 'stiff as a board' and trying to move a piece of paper with our combined ESP, while parents played bridge and drunkenly wife-swapped below, and then we all watched the sun come up together with a dozen Dunkin Donuts and coffee. Vollin's sleepover in The Raven--with Dr. Thatcher as the sensible adult, trying to warn Jerry and Jean to go home--is very like those giddy parties. There's even an electric pony race track, mirroring those old 'Electric Football' games we used to try and play in the era before the electronic handheld version swept the schoolyard. And there's the ridiculous early bedtime (it's a party and they're all in bed by 10:30) more suitable to children than adults. Dr. Thatcher is 'the one adult' present and Vollin waits until he's asleep to begin the real party, the sneaking downstairs to explore forbidden basements, as we used to do when the adults were all snoring away. 

In Cat on the other hand, only Peter Allison becomes the de facto adult--Boris and Bela wait until he's asleep to resume their struggles, a struggle neither one of them is in a hurry to accelerate, having no real plan beyond killing their enemy before that enemy can kill them, so wanting to stretch it out and, as it were, party, knowing there's no one else who understands their ancient European post-war pain, but each other.

Lastly, what makes The Raven so much more enjoyable in a totally new and unusual way (especially for 1935 when the code was in effect) is that it isn't mired by any extraneous comic relief. There's no bumbling cops like the two bicycle riding locals (Italian-esque for some reason) competing over praise for their seperate hometowns ("Gaiety if you want a-gaiety! Sport if you want a-sport!)" In The Raven, there's no cops, and no afternoon, only stormy nights. The comedy comes from the relish with which Lugosi lets loose, dropping every sandbag over the side and smashing through the roof of the sky, intoxicated by the oversize scenery chewing grandeur of his crazy Poe sadism. It's my favorite Lugosi performance ever, this oversize Poe-loving maniac is Lugosi's Oscar Jaffe in Twentieth Century. Which in case you don't know it is the highest compliment this blog can give.

WEREWOLF OF LONDON (1935) follows the Frankenstein via Whale template--oodles of cozy Victorian atmosphere; metaphoric subtext exploring the ostracized pain of closeted homosexuality-- but with an added layer of drug addiction: The only cure for botanist Henry Hull's lycanthropy is to stick the stem of this special eastern "orchid" into his vein! Too bad for him, and all like him, the flower blooms only under a full moon and there's only one other guy in London with his special "problem," the guy who gave the disease to him in the first place, like Hep C or AIDS from an infected 'stem.'  When Hull's wife gives a tea party in his greenhouse, Hull, and the other werewolf (who gave him the disease) Warner Oland, share some conspiratorial alienation that, in our more enlightened age. is clearly a coded reference to what the gay subculture must have been like in those dim times when homosexuality had to deep, deep underground, visions of the imprisoned Wilde dancing in their heads, a hole array of secret meetings and codes ensuring newcomers had a rough time finding out where to go And the heroin addiction analogy works just as well: with a whole flower needed per wolf per night of the full moon, there's just not enough to go around, so the two men shake and sweat and howl while drooling and fighting over each tasty bud like fiends in the grip of a very hairy opiate withdrawal.

As Hull's wife, Valerie Hobson (Henry's wife in Bride of Frankenstein the same year) sports blonde hair and bewildered concern. She never sees her husband, except to hear his excuses and promises! He's too busy tinkering with his pansies and bestiality to dote on her and pretend to be interested in anything so banal as an upper crust heterosexual pair-bond. Lester Matthews plays Paul (he has the same name and basic role as in The Raven), an 'old friend' of Valerie's, filling in for the ever-absent Hull, as sad-eyed dudes will when a hottie doesn't get her gay or drug addicted husband to tote her around to enough parties. As with his role in Raven, Matthews rocks a genial mix of jolly old England esprit de corp and tall person clumsiness, a stout front struggling under his own inertia and heavy British fog. And then there's Oland, touching Henry on the arm where he bit him while they were both in Tibet, exuding a very gay junkie vibe, begging for a hit from the precious white flower before he goes into convulsions, and/or letting Hull know there's another guy with his 'problem' in London --who maybe knows where the special bars or dens are hidden catering to these illegal lifestyles, and maybe where to score more buds on the DL. 

But the real reason it all works so well is Henry Hull. The most believable of all the Universal scientists, Hull's buttoned-up angular Britishness --his clothes are too small; visibly uncomfortable in his gawky body--makes for a very believable obsessive scientist. You can easily imagine him as your botany class professor, nervously wasting time thumbing through his texts for theorems; his worn sleeves ink-and-pollen stained; his eyes darting and beady. His slavish devotion to science makes his social obligations, to conform to British upper class decorum, a challenge he is just not up to. His face, all angles and eyebrows, looks half-wolf to begin with, and that's the genius of this particular wolf make-up as opposed to the much more highly praised 1941 Wolf Man, which I've never really liked (that pouffy hairdo, like he just visited an Italian barber; hat poodle nose; the way he walks on his tippy-toes). The script for Wolf Man is all about whether Lon's imagining his affliction or not, if his unconscious has got the better of him, reflecting no doubt writer (and German émigré) Siodmak's conception of young America's anxiety about getting sucked back into another ancient European conflict it doesn't quite understand, but being unable to stop itself. 

Werewolf of London, on the other hand, is about science and drug addiction, the pain (I can vouch for the latter) of watching powerlessly, from deep within the prison of your addiction, as your beautiful, warm sweet wife settles for her consolation prize of a doting ever-present, ever-consoling, very sober 'family friend.' I've been through that particular triangle three times and can vouch that it's seldom been captured so well on film, except maybe in Corman's The Trip or Mike Nichols' Closer. The pain it causes you when you notice the first person she hooks up with after you're gone is invariably everything you're not, his strengths illuminating your tragic flaws in ways you resent being made to see; or the horrifying realization that the drug's not a cure for your pain but only a temporary relief from the ever deepening and intensifying withdrawal now intrinsically woven into the fabric of your soul. Every bottle, bag, or shot good only for a single night, with the double the dose needed tomorrow. Oh yeah, I know how that feels. Between the pills and powders, booze and spliffs, a single night's surcease of sorrow can crest the triple digits. You need more and more nepenthe to forget how much nepenthe you need. And as you chase your pain's surceasing, your Lenore, your Jean, your Paula, fades from view... until she's just a gray splotch, with some dude on her arm who's afraid to look you in the eye as he slinks by you in the street, his eyes already wide with the constant jealous worry that comes part and parcel with dating a hottie. 

In case we need more clues: Hull gets quite irate when his wife shines a light in his eyes (another junkie thing as their pupils often pinpoint tellingly); he hangs out in his robe all day puttering around his collections and experiments (the way I would my classic horror video tapes and poetry notebooks during my own 'adventures' and still do even sober); sleeping with (or in this case murdering) girls in a vain attempt to hide the one-two punch of addiction and homosexuality; trying to keep his beard/wife around even while having only the foggiest notion how to fulfill her needs (quitting is not an option); his obsession with his ailment taking precedence, as addiction always does. He doesn't want to lose her but is powerless to change, unable to ease his heart except to kill her, if not by fangs and claws then via the slow soul death that is being married to an addict. What can you do when the drug you need to not go rabid with withdrawal foam at the fang madness just disappears from the market, when another mule is kicking in your stall, another scientist plucking your rare flower? You can only have a tantrum and claw the turf as withdrawal and heartbreak turns you into a howling fiend, every nerve dilated and on fire. 

Chaney's later, more-famous wolf man is who everyone thinks of when they think of Universal's werewolf, but he doesn't have much of a personality beyond unconscious random malice, a big hairy pouffy fro, animal cunning and aggression, wantonly killing anything in his path, mainly gravediggers burying the previous night's victims; and then trying to die the rest of the time, never bothering to actually cut his head off, burn himself alive, or any of the other countless ways (he's one of those people always talking about it but never doing it). Hull's werewolf isn't as random or as hairy and is twice as scary for seeming so human at the same time, Hull's angular features enhanced to make him seem closer to Mr. Hyde vis-a-vis Frederic March, zoning in after specific targets rather than random post-code (i.e. sexual connotation-free) murderingg.

Adding to the Whale effect: some great comic relief with Hull's tipsy dowager aunt Ettie (Spring Byington), who valiantly tries to hit on Oland at her tea party.  Wafting around the gathered chatterers, Wildean pronouncements flowing out of her in an airy train-of-thought monologue you need a full lifetime of repeat viewing to appreciate, one wants to just hang out with her and maybe turn her onto some laudanum (you know she'd be game) rather than mope over lotus blooms with the dour Hull. There's also a great bumbling Brit cop lamenting his fallen arches; an imitation Una O'Connor delivering a great single breath monologue as a low rent landlady leading Hull upstairs to a rented room. She cold-cocks another old bat to get the business and the watching these two continually hide gin bottles from each other while partying on the steps is termite gold. John Colton, one of the screenwriters, wrote Shanghai Gesture! Maybe that explains the strong older female characterization going on, the sort of thing just usually just tossed away as filler between murders by lazier writers. 

Lastly - a great reason all these old gems need Blu-ray upgrades: they're hitherto available only jammed onto other discs and collections in normal--albeit lovely--DVDs. At any rate they deserve love and care, certainly more than old Phantom of the Opera does. Never did like that version of Phantom of the Opera, nor did I ever understand why they pushed it on kids as part of the monster pantheon right down to having an Aurora monster model of it (which I admit I got, mainly for the prisoner down in the sewer). I mean, kids HATE opera.  Whatever. Even my brother loved The Raven and Werewolf of London, back when we'd watch old weird movies, on 6-hour tapes I'd made, after the parents went to sleep in the early-80s. Times never change... for me anyway. Access to these gems leaves me stuck in a blissful October haze. I'm losing track of my point because that haze includes a delirious DXM-addled cold, but... 

Oh yeah, get it together, Universal and give us:

Universal Horror Blu-Ray Collection Vol. II

1. Old Dark House (1932)
2. Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)
3. The Black Cat (1934)
4. The Raven (1935)
5. Werewolf of London (1935)
6. Son of Frankenstein (1936)
7. Dracula's Daughter (1935)
8. The Invisible Ray (1936)

The Mephisto from Missouri: THE RAVEN, COMEDY OF TERRORS, TOMB OF LIGEIA, HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL... etc. (Blu-ray review)

Eyes and voice a purr of delight at his own ghoulishness, Vincent Price made the grim stare into the Poe-Lovecraftian void as cozy as a fireside flanked with sleeping wolfhounds, and last week the Shout Blu-ray set Vincent Price Collection II dropped... like the gallows' floor, like the guillotine blade, like the axe on the neck of the turkey. Hear his legion of eternal fans gobble it up!

Forgive my gauche similes, for part of what makes Price such a treasure is his contagious sense of macabre humor, the obvious fun he has in playing evil rather merely just trying to appall. His luxuriant voice finds worthy dialogue in the classy but sensationalist Poe-Matheson-Towne scripts for Roger Corman, for whom Price would become like what De Niro would become to Scorsese, or Monica Vitti to Antonioni, i.e. the alchemical miracle when an actor and director merge into one mind to form some magic third element, a form of lightning that could zap a film into life around a star like the earth around its molten core, building up a wondrous mood with little but candles, camera, and cobwebs.

This second Shout Factory volume of Price Blu-rays only has two examples of this lightning planet-building: The Raven and Tomb of Ligeia, add in Jacques Tourneur-directed Comedy of Terrors, and William Castle's House on Haunted Hill  and the set is still an instant essential. Extras include Corman commentaries, interviews with screenwriter Richard Matheson, and--as with the first set--those lovely lyrical Price on a staircase introductions made by Iowa Public Television for a series of weekly Gothics from the 70s.

Shout's remastering of the AIP films for Blu-ray lengthens and deepens the image, saturating the palette with deep dark reds and greens, glowing amber and inky opaque blacks; firelight reflections glisten on maroon velvet drapery. Every gossamer strand of the cobwebbed covered gates, every brush stroke of Bud Shonberg's twisted portraits, every shade of the psychedelic paint swirl credits, is now aliight with new fire. Maybe it all adds up to little else but classic horror fan crack, but no matter how threadbare the situation, Price's aesthete air of mephistophelean delight never wavers. Price fans I bid thee: Pounce! Thy prey has alighted. 

THE RAVEN

1963 - dir. Roger Corman
 **** (Transfer: A+)

A personal October perennial, this loose comedic 'adaptation' of Poe's poem has reluctant sorcerer Vincent Price longing for his Lenore on a dark and stormy night, reading forgotten lore until Peter Lorre (bloated but hilarious) as the raven interrupts his moody brooding with a request for aid. A brother sorcerer of lesser skill, Lorre tells Price he was turned into a raven by Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff)--whose castle is right down the coast (Big Sur!). Scarabus killed Price's master sorcerer father in a duel years earlier; what he doesn't know is that the lost Lenore (Hazel Court) is alive and shcaked up with Scarabus as well. Soon Price and Lorre are dressed and headed off to Scarabus in Price's carriage, along with a young Jack Nicholson as Lorre's son Rexford and Olive Sturgess as Price's cute daughter. Hilarity and sorcery ensues!

The Blu-ray remastering is jaw dropping --as different from the old MGM DVD as beautiful soothing night is from shitty gray-ass day. Corman's vast and impressive sets now shine and breath in their vastness (all the castle walls and furnishings from past Poe films are here; Corman just built more as he went, so by the time of The Raven the castle is a vast sprawling Gothic maze). On the old MGM Midnight DVD, the distance between walls made the dark look always looked kind of brownish and washed out, but now every flicker of the big fire pit glows in a new hauntingly lovely greenish gold reflective light and the blacks are oceans deep. The Les Baxter score at times errs on the side of Disney cartoonish (I'd love to be able to re-score these films, the way Baxter re-scored AIPs Bava imports, only taking him out instead of putting him in) but this is still pure uncut Halloween delight, so you might as well bring the kids, by which I mean depressed lovelorn college sophomores reeling from too much bad acid, as I was, catching this at the Student Union while a sophomore, and needing desperately at the time to return to the Gothic chambers and forgotten lore of childhood, wherein every fairy tale was grim but comforting, especially when goosed up by Price's melodious purr.

In the land of the damned Price is as the soothing balm of Ativan.

THE TOMB OF LIGEIA

1964 - Dir Roger Corman

*** 1/2 (Transfer - B)

Definitely one of the better and more unnerving in the cycle, this capstone to the Poe-Price-Corman series, and that's thanks largely to a ripping script by Robert Chinatown Towne, who captures Poe's horrified eloquence via elaborate double-blind metaphors, which Price then rolls through like a velvet serpent, waxing--for example--about how he wishes his rotting mind could be wrest open as easily as the cabbage thrown at Ligeia's trickster spirit animal cat. "What else is madness but belief that inwards does not exist?" Now don't get me wrong, I love Richard Matheson, who wrote many of the earlier Poes for Corman--but over repeat viewings his dialogue tended towards repetitive arguments between a young man refusing to leave the castle until he gets the truth and Price withholding it as long as possible, as if waiting for the censor to go to bed before the torture devices and elaborate Poe musing might be brought forth. Towne, on the other hand lets the rich existential musing flow freely, with lots of off-camera dialogue flowing over dream-like images (Rowena climbing the abbey stairs while Price talks of madness to his barrister; tales of his father told to Rowena over long shots of their honeymoon wanderings), trusting the audience to get the metaphors even as they triple and quadruple back on themselves to obscure their tracks. The result is that Price's natural eloquence is finally unchained, which is good, because he's also sans mustache, as he was in the first in the series (Usher) which I find as unnerving as the dreary English countryside daytime exteriors. I do like his steampunk wraparound shades but Poe should never see natural light--especially not England's wretched gray skies. I prefer Corman's soundstage-bound Poes, which eschew reality in any form. Proving my point, this is one of the worst color-graded HD transfers - with many scenes still uncorrected / bleached out and very light grey blacks, unusual for the deep deep dark the better transfers offer (like the gorgeous liquid blacks of Pit and the Pendulum in the first set). Maybe it's the cinematographer going for a kind of wan, washed look ala Huston's Moby Dick but I think the color restorers on the disc just ran out of energy when they saw those skies. Who wouldn't?

Meanwhile Price decides to go a different route too, and plays his mournful Heathcliff de Winter-Rochester without any of his usual velvet flourishes. But as a result we can't fathom why the piercingly self-confident English Lady Rowena (Elizabeth Shepherd) would want to marry such a sullen, naked-lipped poseur. Rowena is such an awesome fully-awake British heroine that it's hard not to be mad at Price for treating her so evasively.

All that said, Price still runs the Poe gamut and has a great time despite his possessed air. Dig his excitement during the hypnosis scene, convincing Rowena she almost caught a butterfly! The old Price hamminess really comes through then. Shepherd also does a great audio commentary, though it's with scholar Constantin Nazir, who irks me in daring to suggest Poe wasn't as big an opium addict as legend says. (Nazir, I think, hasn't really either soaked up Poe's druggiest work OR done opiates, let alone read Poe ON opiates, which is to truly understand just how laudanum-soaked all Poe's most memorable work is, and I mean that as the highest of compliments). Meanwhile, Nazir interrupts Shepherd's inimitable on-the-moment observations by lumbering through some Price letter gushing over her. Dude, who cares? We can read it later. Oh if only she was with erudite raconteur David Del Valle instead! Instead the great DDV gets the FLY and LAST MAN ON EARTH films, and folks like Nazir and Stephen Haberman take the Poe films (perhaps to not overlap with the DDV interview with Price?).

Either way, Shepherd knows her shit- able to rattle off a vast list of Corman proteges, and to describe in detail her method, in that great resonant deep purr of lordly confidence only British women seem to have.

The whole film itself, in fact, even more than the story, makes a a grand metaphor for drug addiction and alcoholism. I relate to the whole 'having a will beyond death' with Lady Whiskey as my Ligeia, feeling her call every time I walk past a liquor store window display, or the beer aisle at the grocery store. No mention is made of drugs in Ligeia, but the resemblance to Price's big breakthrough role, as a drug addicted lord in Dragonwyck, is as clear as the story's resemblance to Jane Eyre. The whole last act is like being a wife shut out of her husband's addiction, his weird nocturnal dalliances. When she finally breaks into his secret chamber and learns the vile truth, we see the cool pad we've been missing, and then all that's left is ye olde collection of Corman burning and collapsing wall shots - that old familiar roof caving in and her agog horror.

Meanwhile, Towne and Corman leave it deliberately open-ended as to whether there really is a spirit of a willful real life woman floating around, or if he's just a paranoid necrophiliac trapped in his late wife's post-hypnotic suggestion--and then they take it to the logical conclusion, which so few other writers do--of getting us to the point where we understand finally that there is no difference, that reality is subjective, that Satanic panic, dreams, hypnosis, and reality are all just slight neurochemical adjustments away.

If the tree falls in the woods, but we hear it like a tolling bell, it's probably our alarm clock. A fitting final thought perhaps for this series that plays like one bizarre extended dream.

COMEDY OF TERRORS

1963 - Dir Jacques Tourneur 

*** (Transfer: A)

People aren't dying fast enough for poor Price to pay both his wine bill and keep his Victorian era funeral parlor 'afloat' and he's nothing if not a man of enterprise, i.e. a true American, so he does what needs to be done: thin the herd of rich idiots clogging the streets, boosting his rep for prompt arrival time at their chamber door.

This film used to give me a massive headache with all the nasty bickering between Price and his buxom wife, her off-key caterwauling, assistant Lorre's baggy eyes and bloated body, father-in-law Karloff's funeral-ashen pallor. Here was the the unnerving sight of three of my favorite stars decaying into elderly humans (Karloff unable to even stand up), and Price in his most unlikable role outside of the Witchfinder General (it would have been great if he was nice to at least one person). Luckily Basil Rathbone--baggy-eyed but unbowed, firing on all five of his ancient steam-punk Holmes-y pistons--is so over the top in the crazy semi-dead vengeance climax that even Les Baxter's terminally bouncy score has to catch up, and Price seems at last impressed.

Luckily this new Blu-ray compensates for the shrill farce aspects by making every image gorgeous--the deep maroons throb and the blacks now creep darker than any Stygian shore.  Price's evil funeral director now seems to have more of a right to be luxuriating in his own evil. I've changed too, and now I've been married and divorced and I've had a girlfriend who fancied herself a good light opera singer, and many a pained look did I get from her audiences, as if it was my responsibility to stop her, yet I dared not. When she glanced my way in a loving look I made every effort to smile in support, feeling my ire and shame swell up in a terrible Poe-like maelstrom. So now Price's pained revulsion towards his ever-wailing wife hit deeper than they did. And sure, Lorre's a mess but his drunken leering is just the surface of a real affection for the buxom Jameson. And now I notice that despite his drunken bloat, Lorre is still as nimble as if he was Peter Kurtin-ing around Weimar Berlin. And since Price is killing people to support the lot of them, after all, they could be a little grateful! They do get drunk together, but that only worsens Price's mood. It might have been fun to act but--unless your favorite childhood memories include long nights of parental bickering--isn't that fun to watch.

As they proved in The Raven, Price and Lorre make a great team, somewhere between Burke and Hare and Abbot and Costello and better than both put together. All that stops it from greatness in my regard now that it looks so spiffy is director Tourneur's rigid slapstick regimen (he didn't go in for improvising, which Corman encouraged for The Raven and which led to its light wry air) and Les Baxter's overly jaunty score, which hovers over everything like a helicopter parent at the circus, worried you're laughing enough at the clowns. Look at the clowns, Caitlin! Oooh, that one fell down! Corman's last minute decision not to direct probably cost us a true horror-comedy classic. I'm pretty sure he'd have pinpointed both the bad vibes of the prolonged verbal abuse and the cloyingness of the score, whereas Tourneur was probably more concerned with delivering what was in the script rather than delivering a well-rounded good time at ye olde drive-in.

But hey, it's still cool - with sparkling Matheson dialogue that's a sublime blend of Shakespeare and beat poet, with the undead Rathbone thinking he's Macbeth brought back to life to sleep no more, and all sorts of wry lines from Hamlet and Midsummer Night's Dream deftly shuffling themselves in amidst macabre humor dark enough to get a smile from even the sourest of marital demons.

HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL

1959 - Dir William Castle

***1/2 (Transfer: A)

A perennial public domain Halloween favorite, Shout's HD remastering has infused William Castle's first big ballyhoo masterpiece with a dark rich sense of inner space that alas, don't necessarily do the spare empty sets any favors, but do add an overall feeling of late-50s murk. Deep shadows now go way back into the depths, evoking an eerie sense of cavernous modernism, like a carnival spook show moved into a vast, empty, unlit museum. Instead of looking like heavy oak paneling on the walls, the walls now look like wallpaper painted to look like wood by rushed studio craftsmen. Was this noticeable to audiences back in the day? Does HD show us too much?

We classic horror fans who were too young to have seen it in the theater (with 'Emergo!') first fell in love with Haunted Hill on TV, when it appeared in a haze of local UHF TV antenna static on some lost Saturday afternoon or late night/early morning. It's built for such ghostly arial travel, strong and sparse enough to blast its way through blurry dupes and fuzzy reception like a shot from a cathode ray gun out of a tiny party favor coffin, and to maintain its ghoulish gleeful spookiness even in a theater full of kids throwing popcorn at the screen and the skeleton on the string being squeakily wheeled over their heads. Without such interference, the film can seem cautious and empty, but that passes, it's just too sturdy to let any obstacle get it down. The Robb White script is full of bitchy marital vitriol which of course the kiddies love as much as the heads in the suitcase, and blind caretaker being reeled along like a 'scare' pop-up on a five-cent carnival ride.  Even if Castle's full empty ersatz fly-by-the-seat reckless effrontery is all the more apparent in the merciless clarity of HD, it's still the perfect Halloween party all-ages show, and Price is on full throttle, riffing off a sly Carol Ohmart and a doomsaying Elisha Cook Jr. while rolling his eyes at progressively hysterical Carolyn Craig.

LAST MAN ON EARTH

1963 - Dir Ubaldo B. Ragona

**1/2

Price's neo-realist Italian film, this long-held in public domain adaptation of Matheson's I am Legend now has its creamy/gritty black-and-white widescreen photography restored, and with its post-apocalyptic/futurist Rome mise-en-scene it would make a great double feature with Antonioni's L'Ecilisse which came out the previous year, which uses some of the same juxtaposition of ancient ruins, post-war ruins, modern architecture and post-modern futurism. The script is intelligent and faithful to Richard Matheson's novel, even though it's mostly just read as a voiceover--a trick that gets real old real fast. If the film has any real lasting power it's mainly because the last 3/4 get pretty fun and intense (with finally some dialogue + an almost Wellesian chase through and around a vast apartment complex and ruined church). There's also the (admitted by Romero) clear debt owed this film by the first Night of the Living Dead: masses of pale dead hands come grabbing through the boarded windows; shambling figures are illuminated in the glare of high-contrast headlights; one guy even looks like the mangy Italian cousin of the very first zombie we see in Night--the one who palms Barbara's car. The lead zombie talks, though (in an echo-drenched slur), and is played Italian star Giacomo Rossi Stuart (Kill Baby, Kill!; War Between Planets). 

Alas, even with the spiffy upgrade, I find the bulk of this film dispiriting. Like the next film in the set, it's just isn't the same Price when he's not moving his lips to his own voice. Price seems to feel it, too. The weight of the world seems on not just his character but himself as well. Luckily, the classic horror archivist and raconteur David Del Valle provides a great commentary track.

DR. PHIBES RISES AGAIN

1972 - Dir Robert Quarry

**1/2

One thing I never understood about the Dr. Phibes films is why they waste Price's beautiful voice with pre-recorded poesy-ridden monologues that seem like something Criswell would read for an Ed Wood movie.  For the sequel it's even more pronounced. At first director Fuest's mix of campy TV show style over-the-top poetry, a mix of bible, babble and decadence, is fun in the way where you can imagine Austin Powers watching this and thinking "Groovy, man! Horror is my bag". But after half an hour or so, one longs for structure, some kind of situational cohesion, or--as in the case of the 60s English cult TV show The Avengers--a deadpan center, i.e. the laid back cool of Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee. And since Price has to do most of his acting with his eyes it's lucky they have a great red ring around them that glows in the pink light. It's a nice look, especially in the new Blu-ray upgrade, where the light perfectly accentuates his heavily powdered cheeks. Yet there's just something strange about Price essentially pantomiming a recording of himself reading floridly poetic monologues that makes it all seem almost too ridiculous, too campy even for the late-60s. It's like he's listening to one of his old LPs he made during the classic monster heyday--the ones wherein he reads Poe and spells from Macbeth and Midsummer Night's Dream and old witch yarns--and vamping around to it while he folds laundry. Luckily he has Vali Kemp as the silent but beautiful Vulvania, his deadpan cool sexy automaton assistant. They make a cool pair. And Kemp is perfectly still and on-point. Running through a list fey little props and rituals with nimble grace, Kemp can match his stare with a delicious conspiratorial knowingness. 

Speaking of eyes, what about the bugged-out (like his head's about to explode), intense, round ones of Robert Quarry (i.e. Count Yorga)? He plays the odious and eternally young Darius Beiderbecke (great name). Price's first supernatural opponent Darius needs the same eternal amulet, or whatever, hidden at a lost Egyptian tomb, that Price is trying to find to reanimate his dead wife. Quarry's bug-eyed peepers have a sweaty intensity that cuts through the frivolity and suggest genuine depths and make a fine contrast with Price's wide, sad, Irish wolfhound kind of eyes. They'll stop at nothing to get to the secret tomb first. For Darius that means subjecting his men to verbal lashings and Phibes' to murderous traps (he almost drowns between the paws of the sphinx) For Phibes, it means wafting around with Vulvania in various campu disguises, and murderous trap-setting galore!

Reality and any sense of geographical space are tossed to the side. Phibes and Vulvania can seemingly show up at the ruins of the Egyptian tomb-standing by a giant half-destroyed foot- only to celebrate their arrival by stepping up some marble stairs to his Crowley-meets-music hall art deco organ to play a few tunes. Did he bring his lair with him across the channel? The next scene is some over-the-top comedy at Scotland Yard as they prepare to go to Egypt to track down the killer. And so it goes. Fuest makes sure we come to loathe the oppressive and egotistical Beiderbecke, trying to reign in his rebellious and hip fellow expedition members to his iron will, and that we marvel at Phibes' and Vulvania's ability to somehow set up pointlessly elaborate traps way out in the middle of the desert, all by themselves, unseen, in the dead of night, and then whoosh- celebrate with champagne and music back in the groovy lair. Repeating as needed.

Perhaps the most stunningly transferred film on this Blu-ray set, with an eerie array of purple and pink hies, all a-glowing in a 3D depth of space. The problem is that this that this lovely clarity reveals clapboard TV-show-style sets that were made with the not-unreasonable assumption most people would be seeing this cropped on TV or at a drive-in through a dense English fog. I'm sure we were never meant to see so so clearly we can almost touch the grains flaking up on Price's whiteface make-up and powdery Beatle wig. Now he seems like some sad gay diva drifting like a Tennessee Williams diva through half-torn down Fellini movie sets in the middle of the night while the crew is home asleep. Don't think I'm quibbling. I don't mind the near total absence of exteriors or connecting or establishing shots. I dislike British exterior shots in general--they're often weighed down by murky grey skies and eerie stillness. But here the lack thereof makes for confusion, to a West Village off-off Broadway pantomime play degree. Even when the whole shebang allegedly moves onto a yacht or then onto the deserts of Egypt, there's never any doubt they're on sets, which I love, usually. I do especially love the giant stone feet entrance to the Tomb (shout out to Ozymandias!), but with the Blu-ray clarity you can practically see the stress creases on the sky backdrop, and the brush strokes on every gold pillar.

That said, composition and blocking are sublime, like Kubrick on poppers at a gay ball. It would be great with the sound off at a party or projected behind my old acid rock band if we played Abba covers and had a bubble machine. As a narrative, though, it's infuriating. Phibes and his Vulnavia's self-congratulatory champagne toasting and dancing seems the height of self-aware camp, which is the only type I dislike. Their relentless perfection and disregard for the laws of reality (i.e. that you can bring your entire secret lair with you while you visit in Egyptian tomb. And shame on the credits for saying it co-stars Peter Cushing as he has but the teensiest cameo. On the other hand, the mechanical jazz band is cool, as is Phibes' Phantom of the Cinecatta disco organ. You can see why Tim Burton and Johnny Depp have their eye on this character for a remake. 

(PS - rewatching this now on Svengoolie, and like it a lot better. The framing seems more cropped, but in a good way so it makes sense, and the relative lack of close detail gives everything an aura of magic. Yeah, baby! I think I was a bit harsh in the above review, but hey, - 5/23/22)

RETURN OF THE FLY

1959 - Dir Edward Bernds 

**2/3

Released in 1959 to capitalizing on its predecessor’s runaway success, this should really be called Son of the Fly. Price reprises his supporting role from the original; he finally gets to help restore a human headed fly back to normal, undoing the damage wrought by the teleportation chamber, rather than just looking askance with blanched horror and then tossing a rock, but otherwise he has little to sink his teeth into and the whole middle stretch--involving grown-up Phillipe (just a boy in the first film) with a giant bulbous fly head, tracking and killing a pair of industrial spies who've made off with his patents--goes on without him. As 'monster on a vengeance-based killing spree' films go, it's okay (his habit of bumping his giant head on chandeliers is a nice touch) but aside from abundant gay subtext and nice lighting, it's pretty familiar stuff. There's the same confluence of attractive and concerned upstairs maid, the same basement whirligigs, the same lofty scientific rationale, the same untrustworthy assistants, that kept Karloff in lab smocks and gangster burial clothes all through the lean 40s. It's all been done better, and worse. 

Not to spoil the end (spoilers!), but when Price restores Phillipe (Brett Halsey) to his former peevish self, we're left with the odd feeling that he's going to get off scott free for his two murders since that was the fly head and not his that orchestrated the deaths (why the fly head didn't spend its time pursuing sugary snacks instead of vengeance makes no sense of course, either - shhhzzzz). And what about the detective left with guinea pig hands? Also, I don't know why you would kill an enemy by teleporting him and then re-teleporting him back to the world. Leave him in the ether - along with that poor cat from the first film! What a way to dispose of bodies! Zzzzitt! No mess. Non habes corpus, non crimen. 

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FINAL (TOTAL) GRADE: A - It would have been nice to see The Tingler and/or Tales of Terror instead of some of these last three lesser works, but it hardly matters when the films look this good and the extras are abundant. (a Del Valle commentary = gold). Even at the set's high cost, it's worth getting just for The Raven!! Sorry to be such a fan! Price rulez!

Into the Velvet Darkness: THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH

When it comes to seasonal horror movies, there are two kinds of creepy - the Jason Voorhees/zombie creepy and the Boris Karloff-Vincent Price creepy. The latter is what I prefer, for it comes with a sly wink that lets you know when the bodies are counted yours won't be one of them. Price and Karloff make the viewer an insider, a friend in the RICHARD III tradition of horror. The horror of Karloff and Price in other words, is inclusive. Part of this comes with possessing the theatrical "voice" of villainy. As I live near the the Lee Strasberg School of Acting (just north of Union Sq.) I'm daily reminded of its slogan: "We entered the theater on the wings of a dream." Price, by contrast, enters our dreams on the wings of the theater. He dispels nightmares by the force of mellifluent theatrical ham diction; an inherent giddiness in his velvet voice makes him seem always as if it's somebody's special birthday and a surprise party is imminent. 

By contrast Jason or Michael would lose a lot of their menace if they spoke. Their silent treatment is scary, but it's a depressing all-too-real kind of scary. With his fiendish laugh Price really just pretends to be scary. He lets you in on the joke and in doing so eliminates the real scariness of the slashers, which is why his films are above all, delightful, not traumatizing (WITCHFINDER GENERAL and a few others being the grim exceptions). The zombies of Romero and his imitators just eat you; unlike le gourmand Price, they don't give a shit how you taste. Nothing slows them down as they stagger and chomp. If you want to get Price off your scent, just toss him a piece of scenery; he'll gladly chew it in your stead.

In MASQUE especially, Price is the picture of perfection as the devil-worshipping Prince Prospero. He's having a ball, albeit one with a guest list of gluttons, slavering toadies and ennui-ridden perverts. Being the only one with anything close to a genuine wit in the whole place (aside from Hop Toad), Prospero relies on his higher purpose--the serving of his dark master Satan--to keep him from getting depressed. Prospero might indulge himself with vice occasionally, but it's always for a point, a spiritual debasing as suits his dark lord's whims; his macabre jests indicate an aesthete beyond petty concerns of greed and lust. Like many a Corman antihero, he's driven to find what lies beyond pain and pleasure, to get to some terrible, usually fatal, level of truth. It's not just lip service. In a way he's like a super-famous rock star, the type for whom all doors are open, all women willing, and everyone catering to his whims, leaving him arrogant but isolated. With all wants catered to the mind is free first to succumb to despair and then to focus in on one's craft, or.... one's god.

Of course, there's a hardened production code burden this Prospero must bear with. For all his freedom, he can't show us any nudity or severed limbs. And all Patrick McGee's evil Alfredo has to do is suggest there's "other things" to be done in the name of evil besides silky talk and he's basically marked for death. Underneath the evil veneer, Prospero is a gentleman; he's genuinely disgusted by the lip-smacking Alfredo's leering. And he likes his little person entertainer, Hop Toad. When Hop Toad dresses Alfredo in an ape suit, ties him to a chandelier and raises it above the laughing throng and then sets him on fire, Prospero is delighted. When you find Hop Toad give him ten gold pieces as reward for his magnificent jest! He gives Alfredo quite a reward just for smacking a tiny dancer, Esmerelda. Not that it's not worth some retribution, but the man in red seems to think he's good enough to survive. All things are relative. 

In short this is the movie that THE PARTY and THE WILD PARTY and THE WILD ANGELS (Corman, 1966) try to be, but don't have enough of the devil on their side to quite fathom. MASQUE's Prospero and ANGEL's Heavenly Blues (Peter Fonda) actually have a lot in common: each is a charismatic natural leader forced to endure the uncouthness of their brutish minions, bound to lead packs of dimwitted trogs who've mistaken unrestrained gluttony and lust for true freedom. Compare the hilariously disturbing scene wherein Prospero orders his guests to roll around on the floor (like the filthy animals they are) to the climax of ANGELS where the gang trashes a church in a drunken orgy of destruction. Heavenly's admonition to the priest, "We wanna be free to ride our machines without being hassled by The Man... and we wanna get loaded... and we wanna have a good time." is not dissimilar to Prospero's decrees, such as: "If a God of love and light ever did exist, He is long since dead. Someone... some...thing rules in his place."

We like Prospero the same way we like Heavenly Blues: we relish their graceful wielding of power and admire their lack of insecurity, their ability to be beyond good and evil, genuinely searching for something rather than just spouting hipster credos, their self honesty and complexity. Caught between the dull conformity of good (Zzzz) and the banal destructiveness of evil (zzzz), they find themselves alone and aching for amusement. Too jaded to be satisfied with the gauche pleasure indulged in by his pack, Prosper's budding relationship with Francesca (Jane Asher) the innocent peasant redhead, prefigures the special bond between Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray in LOST IN TRANSLATION. It's beyond some kind of older man lechery or young woman father complex. It's a connection of mentor and mentee fused to a kind of twin star orbit that illuminates the bond between the two actors as well as their characters.

For me and some of us in the rock group I was in, the lifestyle around sex, drugs and rock and roll were a way to expand the mind and get loaded. For a lot of our hairy fans it was just a chance to get heheheh fucked up! Wooo! Mexican Mud! Yeah! In that sense, Prospero prefigures Timothy Leary, the acid generation, and the later 'e' generation. And thus MASQUE is one of the most legit psychedelic horror movies until Corman's X-THE MAN WITH X-RAY EYES, and THE TRIP! Do you doubt it? Can you look at Corman's MASQUE and not think of some far away rave or acid test of your dreams?

Consider the Satanic initiation of Hazel Court in the film: desperate to regain Prospero's favor after the arrival of lovely Jane Asher, Court undergoes a private ceremony where she is "stabbed" by a series of shamanic figures from throughout the ages: there's an Egyptian, Japanese, African, and Russian shaman/ghost, all waving their scythes and knives over her prostrate immobile heaving buxom figure, distorted through sheet metal reflection and green tinting. With it's thumping Rite of Spring-y David Lee score, this scene should be familiar to anyone whose ever dropped hardcore psychedelics (or had a really bad fever) and had to undergo similar panic-soaked hazing rituals at the hands of mortality's "threshold dwellers" before they could be totally free. "I have survived my own death," she later announces. She has known terror and moved past it. As experienced meditation practitioners and trippers knpw: once you face those grinning demon dervishes and the impure and selfish/fearful parts of you ripped to shreds symbolically, you are free...

Until the hawks of monkey mind ego chatter comes swooping back in.

Similarly, anyone whose ever tried to have a cultivated evening of psychedelically enhanced dancing, talking and group sex only to have the vibe ruined by the late-inning arrival of pinks, townies, burnouts, jonesers and/or wallies will cheer (at first) when Patrick McGee's (left) beady-eyed little ballerina molester receives grisly retribution at the hands of Hop Toad (Skip Martin). And who can fail to notice how Charles Beaumont's clever screenplay casts the humble Christians of the village as dull whiners (and hypocrites) while Prospero remains ever-complex and witty? Like Richard III, Prospero may be "evil" but he's the one taking the trouble to invite you along and to keep the film you're watching full of interesting bits of business. That is, until Death comes for him and he has to face the ultimate threshold dwellers all by himself, all while covered in red paint and forced to participate in modern expressionist dance!

If you still doubt the lysergic glory of this movie, remember five things: 1. It's got one of the best Corman scores ever (Corman had to use a Brit, so Les Baxter was out, though I thought it was Les for years - as a comment below points out, it's David Lee) / 2. It's genuine Poe - which means you can smell the absinthe from across the sea of time / 3) Nicholas Roeg does the cinematography (lots of great camera movement); and 4) Jane Asher was once engaged to Paul McCartney. 5) It ends with a trippy modern dance. The whole rainbow spectrum  of various robed Deaths is a little pretentious but The Seventh Seal had been very influential a few years earlier and this was--after all--happening after death. Tripping, you can always imagine when things get super weird, like everyone turning red and freeze-framing, that you may have died and not known it out there on the dance floor. The part where all the crowd's red hands are reaching out at him as Prospero tries to escape in a kind of Batman villain sideways dance move captures just what it's like when you're trying to get out of a packed Dead Show on too much acid, or Liz Taylor at the beach in SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER.

Asher is pretty good as the girl who feels her morality gradually crumble in the thrall of Prospero's seduction strategies. Though on opposite sides of the divide, the pair share an "only two real people in the room" connection that evokes, in a weird way, that between Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd. The only other person really to stand out as a cool character is Skip Martin, who brings a great deep voice and a crafty blend of manly complexity to Hop Toad. His utterly macabre vengeance, his sly way of admitting to Alfredo that his costume will probably "get a little warm," or the mad grin when he snaps the whip commands "get back!" show why Prospero is so considerate of him (even bowing back when he and Esmerelda--the tiny dancer--are introduced as the evening's first entertainment.

In real life, Asher knew something of this weird relationship. She broke off her engagement with Paul' McCartney when she realized he was way too much of a libertine. She wanted something more old-fashioned and monogamous. Somehow it's very apropos to the film, don't you think? Are the Beatles not in their way as thoroughly famous and kowtowed to as Prospero, and Asher like an innocent inspiration / the one person neither inclined to kowtow nor act the groupie, hence made desirable? As she says early on, "I have no learning!" Here, at least, is a girl who refused to get hitched to the cute millionaire first, then get a juicy alimony arrangement after catching him in the act of libertinism. It's that kind of integrity that Asher radiates. She is innocence at its most seductive to a decadent. What devil could refuse such a challenge, even knowing in advance he was likely to lose? What else are challenges for?