There's nothing like a neck injury to help you catch up with a backlog of unseen 1970s horror films... especially if you leave the remote painfully out of reach. Now you are paralyzed anyway so it may as well be with fear... Bring on... THE SENTINEL! I don't know what kept me away so long from this 1977 gem, but I'll never leave again. It's got it all: an overly brassed-out score (by TV composer Gil Melle), super young Christopher Walken; a super young Jeff Goldblum; two PSYCHO co-stars (Martin Balsam and Sylvia Miles); several FREAKS stars sans the compassion of Todd Browning; Burgess 'the Penguin' Meredith as a mincing elderly gay stereotype with a haunted cat; Beverly D'Angelo as a freaky young lesbian stereotype... yeah, you heard me! She and her partner use inappropriate masturbation to creep out our already very creeped-out (straight) suicidal heroine (hot as hell brunette but smize-deprived model Cristina Raines), who's just visiting them like a good neighbor (no NYC-er ever goes to 'visit' neighbors. It's just not done --and we like it that way), a skeevy boyfriend played by Chris Sarandon, with one of those unforgivably waved hair and pencil thin 40s B-player mustache. The score
I can't reveal another detail, the neck pain's just too great, but let me just add some more classic old faces: Ava Gardner, Jose Ferrer, Arthur Kennedy, John Carradine and Eli Wallach, and lastly I must mention scenes in which the lovely Cristina investigates strange noises while wearing a sexy negligee, armed only with flashlight and butcher knife (see bottom last pic) which she holds in the correct manner... but forget it. You don't even need all that, because there are real freaks.
Real freaks. Genius! And quietly appalling in a PC kind of way). When have we seen real freaks outside of 1932's FREAKS (above)? Here in THE SENTINEL, the bizarre parade (gooble-gobble!) of Browning's children comes to its long awaited final stop 45 years later. It's fitting, for THE SENTINEL reflects a time when homosexuality was akin to being a pinhead or a limbless and was all part of the exploitation of deformity and difference on which our circus sideshow culture was and is based. Here this tasteless shockmeistering gets a last, armless bow before the onslaught of liberal PC brainwashing "saves" the freaks by putting them out of work... one more time.
As I recall from my childhood street-corner conversations in those pre-AIDS days, when we figured gay people to be like pods from INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS --the only way to prove you weren't gay was to talk tough and be derogatory towards gayness, to show how manly you were by accusing your weaker clique members of being 'faggots.' So as knee-jerk conservative as it is, THE SENTINEL is of it's time. The pro-gay flak thrown at the lurid depictions of William Friedkin's CRUISING (1980), for example, makes a nice contrast to the 'why in hell would we pay to see that vileness?' attitude of mainstream suburbia. THE SENTINEL just slides homophobic stereotyping in there amidst a cavalcade of gleefully un-PC shocks, so critics didn't even know where to begin when savaging this movie in their weeklies. But whatever -- we don't come to a ROSEMARY'S BABY-EXORCIST era napper (clearly from an imitative novel, in this case by Jeffrey Konvitz), like this for social uplift. So if it's not quite in the same league as its 1970s compatriots, like LET'S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH or BURNT OFFERINGS, well, what is? THE SENTINEL'll do until some other movie with Bevery D'Angelo as a creepy lesbian masturbating in a leotard comes along.And as for the poor freaks, I am sure they appreciated the humanitarian concerns of not being exploited anymore, but they probably missed the money, and isn't it sad this great American institution is gone forever leaving only a bunch of insane but non-deformed humans hammering nails into their noses and swallowing swords down at Coney Island's Sideshow by the Seashore?
THE SENTINEL is one of those great last gasps of 1970s split-level thinking: we're meant to recoil from the lesbians as if Robert Aldrich was directing, and to recoil from the freaks as if they're demons from hell, validating the patron's conservative "wholeness" in contrast to, say, a filmic celebration of the grotesque and abject ala Browning's 1933 film. In 1977, NYC was still where the family went to recoil in horror from X-rated film marquees, wobbly-heeled hookers and urine-stained winos until the theater started seating them for A CHORUS LINE, "I can do that / that I can do!" We wouldn't have dreamed it would all turn into Disney Stores and Nike flagships--and THE SENTINEL's not trying to impress you with its liberal bias, it's trying to scare you and creep you out, like a day trip to what NYC used to be--one giant sideshow up and down Times Square. See Ratzo Rizzo, half rat, half man! See Jackie Superstar! She thought she was James Dean for a day! Step right up! See the colored girls who have considered suicide go doo doo doo do doo.
There is a rationale for re-evaluating films like SENTINEL, for when used as a measuring stick these films reveal our current culture to be more progressive than we sometimes give it credit for. Being publicly skeeved out by the thought of gay sex is on its last gasp now, in most civilized states, but still a permissible reaction in the 1970s, up until movies like CRUISING (w/ Pacino, pictured above) pushed too far and caught gay rights flack. THE SENTINEL played on similar attitudes but it was in service of a hackneyed demonic documentary, but in the process they helped audiences grow acclimated. If familiarity breeds tolerance, it's repetition-compulsion disorder that breeds familiarity, and it's shock and horror that breeds repetition-compulsion disorder, therefore: shock = repulsion = repetition = eventual tolerance = problem solved once some new shock-repulsion comes along.
After all, even more skeevy than deformity and homosexuality back then was the most commonly used "free" horror effect: old age! First introduced in WHATEVER HAPPENED TO BABY JANE? and the 'horror hag' subgenre, then finding a resurgence in ROSEMARY'S BABY, the idea that old age was inherently demonic--as in emaciated corpses with shambling gaits and nightmarish dentures--faded in the all-drenching teenage blood wake of Halloween and Friday the 13th, but man old folks used to scare the shit out of us! We recently saw David Lynch use old people for creepy effect in MULHOLLAND DRIVE, but you have to be a certain age yourself to be afraid of the elderly, and now Lynch is. Just as Niagara Falls is lovely from a window, but terrifying if you're stuck in the current; it's a matter of proximity. So what is left now that old age, homosexuality and deformity are all no longer allowed to be horrific in and of themselves? Instead of "one of us! one of us!" we have ghosts coming through the computer screen and no parties to go to that aren't flooded with blue lights and lamp-trashing tripping douche bags. Instead of horror we have horror signifiers strung together cheerlessly like gold dollar signs in a rap video. Add an an eye through a key-hole, water leaking in the basement, a girl with dark hair drawing, thunder, a chainsaw, a girl in a shower seen from outside the steamy stall door, Satanic graffiti, hands scribbling in a journal while monks run down stone staircases, partial nudity highlighted in thick felt markers, and golden-hued car commercial subtext, and all bathed in a sugar crust of flashy editing and served with nu-metal flatware, and then the credits: please exit quickly the next show's about to start there will be no refunds step right up and God damn the different! (and what else is damnation if not the sincerest form of repetition?)
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Read Tenebrous Kate's valuable take on Cruising here
and the Costuminatrix on The Sentinel here.
