Finger the Moon and Quaff Mad Laudanum: GOTHIC (1986)

Readers know I look askance upon adoring fetishistic biopics, the auteur often covertly trying to align their own stars with their heroes whether its conscious or not, and in the process making, as they say, a movie about--to borrow Zen koan-- a pointing finger rather than about the moon. Ignoramuses! What do they know about great art and suffering? They love to make a gorgeous finger and presume the moon will magically appear. Well, for Ken Russell, it may be thrice as true as for others but he at least goes for broke - he's all in. He'll show you the moon, and then stick that finger in its deepest crater. Such a crater is GOTHIC, the 1987 all-out wild night in during a storm with Percy and the future Mary Shelly and her swinging mystical half-sister Claire at Lord Byron's 19th century Swiss chalet while quaffing laudanum, indulging in rock star sensuality and wordplay, conducting a seance, trying to contact Mary's dead baby, etc. and conducting a ghost story writing contest. Mary winning in the long term with Frankenstein (with Percy's help) but Byron's personal physician Dr. Polidori wrote The Vampyre (with Byron's help), creating the first work of vampire fiction. So you could cite this long druggy night as the birth of the gothic style of horror fiction and the first salvo towards the Universal pantheon. BUT here we're a long way from normal narrative, more like a creative lunatic ground zero, reminiscent of what an intimate group sex acid trip might be if held at a swanky mansion done up with creepy haunted house carnival ride tableaux and wild sound effects.

Russell's pre-MTV yen for adding surreal pre-music video imagery to musician, artist and film star biopics suffuses his whole 70s output: Valentino, Lisztomania, The Music Lovers, Savage Messiah, Mahler, and Oscar Wilde attending a performance of his Salome's Last Dance at a high-class brothel. The results err all-too-often on the side of the bawdy and grotesque, often leading to pretentious and unwieldy dialogue, with a louche subject and an authorial taste for bizarre imagery bashing into each other without any real way to make them cohesively match. It's not to say Ken cann't deliver, especially when given an actor able to actually sound natural in his artsy waxing, like William Hurt in Altered States or Oliver Reed in The Devils. Russell needs a handsome, brooding star to keep his orgiastic infernos on some kind of firm axis.

Don't you fuckin' look at me!

For Gothic we almost get that. There's Natasha Richardson as Mary, very good in the tense agonized sweat-sheen fear states, but upstaged in the looney-tunes Anita and Marianne-style cool glimmer twin reflection department by Miriam Cyr as her nympho-mystical half-sister Claire. Shagging Lord Byron (who isn't) and pregnant with his child, she steals all her big scenes; Julian Sands comes off probably the best of them all as strung-out Percy Shelley (Julian Sands), totally haunted by a terror of death coupled to regular bouts of opiate withdrawal (though based on the plentitude of laudanum that would seem unlikely). Gabriel Byrne as Lord Byron comes of just so-so. One expects a little more as far as leaning into the madness rather than seeming like merely a smooth-talking cad using the occult as an excuse for philandering. His demons seem to consist of dimly realizing the damage his bisexual orgiastic take no prisoners approach does to his long-term partners. Lastly, in ever way, there's Timothy Spall, overacting the roof off as Dr. Polidori, gamely keeping everyone high off their asses while eschewing the orgy in favor of banging his hand on the nail that holds the cross over his bed (presumably to keep himself from masturbating -- a mortal sin!)

Since this is a Russell movie, the sex and drugs are all urgently leading to something, that old devil moon again. Here they maybe accidentally summon a vampire spirit into the chalet during a seance (guided by Claire, a medium). It howls from without, laughs from within and mocks them from the next room, whichever room they're in, driving each character deeper into the strange bowels of the villa, and into their own labyrinthine minds.

The main thing is, though, in a house stocked with servants and guests all in different rooms, who would be surprised to see a shadow or hear a voice laughing in another room while they're trying to sleep? These things are where Russell shows a surprisingly tenderfoot lack of awareness (exhibited in his earlier Altered States) of the effects of the drugs he shows being taken. No one really high on laudanum is going to give a shit about someone laughing at them from another room, nor would they get the heebie jeebies about death - that's for the next night, after the laudanum runs out. It's the same sort of confused thinking that leads some writers to confuse the DTs with drinking instead of with not drinking. The DTs being the result of alcohol withdrawal (once you've become hopelessly physically addicted) rather than from overuse.

The wild unhinged supernatural whooping might have been easier borne with a better druggier sound mix (ala recent works like Climax and Spring Breakers), but as is there's the feeling none of these actors might have done drugs except maybe Julian Sands, who has a kind of kinetic sexy madness with his poesy lines. One must never forget how perfect he was in Naked Lunch! This is a guy who knows how to seem like he's being seen through a psychedelic prism. He can be full of creepy come-ons, where you find yourself being led by him into strange alleyways when part of you is screaming to run but another part is enthralled. Here he's an opium addict who needs higher and higher doses to keep the poetic madness and fear of the grave from reducing him to a howling, gibbering (but still shockingly loquacious) thing. Luckily Sands makes it very sexy and has a fine moment standing naked in the storm atop the roof shouting about electricity. Cyr, for her part, a muse not a writer (the Anita Pallenberg of the group), does a bang-up job as the one with a mind more open to the supernatural forces. She ends up the movie on all fours, covered in mud with a dead rat in her jaws. She's the only sane on in the group.

Still. no one in the grips of full bore withdrawal or laudanum intoxication can say complicated mouthfuls like "I was almost conscious when the smell of the damp earth hit me! There was an oppressive weight on my chest!" without slurring or jumbling the words. And if you compare their rantings to other 'all in a night and one house' dialogue-driven movies about a small coterie of intoxicated artists, such as Performance, one comes away with the same impression of Russell one gleans watching Altered States. If he has done psychedelics, he hasn't done enough.

Certainly they all make a good foursome, grinding against each other. But there is also Timothy Spall's sexually frustrated, closeted Dr. Milidori who keeps them all high as a kite with his ministering. Good grief. By the end of the night he's bathed in sweat, head shaved, bloody and babbling -- sigh, anything for attention. I know this type well. The same acid trip that lifts the rest of us up to a higher plane leaves them an insecure wreck, needing everyone to pay attention to their nervous breakdown performance. We can feel the crippling self conscious emanating out of them like an uncouth discharge. It really creates a damper on any 'happening.'

Russell films with a lot of fisheye lenses as character run in and out of mostly empty rooms, the kind with clean wooden floors and maybe one old piece of furniture in a corner covered with white linens, evoking any number of Kate Bush videos. Another issue is that, this being the age before electricity, this huge mansion is way too brightly lit for the circumstances. It's not flat TV lighting per se, but it's a far cry from the gorgeous use of blacks we get in other, similar candle and oil lamp-lit movies. Russell has a gift with setting up good actors in wild sets with florid dialogue, but falls apart in the pacing element. While compulsively watchable, Gothic is wildly disjointed and ridiculous. Horrors merely tumble on upon the other with no rhyme or reason. We never get a sense of where anyone is in relation to anyone else. It all ends with an unborn baby floating beneath the depths, as close in head shape to Karloff in Pearce's makeup as the lawyers will bear.

One interesting note is the way homosexuality is handled. Though there are the two ladies, both available for whatever, the terror of the (female) vampire spirit they conjured steeps the latter half in a kind of unbridled horror of the female body. Byron continually makes his female lovers wear gender neutral masks  (including his housemaid) or cover their faces with sheets (even Mary), and Percy's big fear is a woman's breast with eyes for nipples. Cyr's Claire is regularly deemed a kind of combination coquette and animalistic shaman: "She's locked in sleep! Trapped like a dreaming human form." Meow!

Since I've had wild night like this, and indeed first saw this film via a rental watched around 3 AM during an acid trip with my bandmates and girlfriends, I have a kind of proximal responsibility towards Gothic, as if it's a page in my late 80s memory scrapbook. It's so almost great. I wonder what wildness might have resulted in its stead if, before setting down to write the script, Russell could have taken a bunch of shrooms with some cool artsy college kids and then taken them to a double feature of Suspiria and Performance. Dude, it might have changed his whole perspective. But instead, with Gothic, it seems he's taking the long way around. Instead there's exchanges like this:

"But God is dead!" - Percy
"But haven't we raised the dead?" - Mary

It's nice that these decadents do gaily grind to each other but the problem is that these relationships never develop nor give us much of an arc: they start at a 9 and go up to 10 and stay there for the bulk of the film. Mary isn't a fan of Byron's strange hold over Percy and her sister Claire. She tells him Claire is pregnant (in real life she'd have his child) and Byron's response is a flippant "I'm sure even Polidori can perform a simple abortion" which seems so needlessly cruel and anachronistic it takes us out of the vibe. Mary grieves for her own dead child (thus the submerged baby brought back by electricity that will be you-know-who). We learn she's the least into the ghost story challenge, and, in a sly, backhanded way, the film almost robs her of sole authorship of Frankenstein, implying it is just as much the product of her lovers' frustrated homosexual drives, the repressions of the time giving birth to monsters as gay artistes force themselves into heterosexual pair bonding and bring the wife to a lot of weekends with other brooding "Byronic" artistes like themselves (and what goes on in the Alps stays in the Alps).

The good part is the intended similarity between this magic night and the correct way to take LSD, i.e. in the right set and setting, in a big safe space full of cool rooms to run through, with a bunch of cool artists who aren't going to take advantage of your dislocated mind, at least not anymore than they have already. To do it right you need plenty of space to run around facing your own demons, having wild sex with phantoms, and/or taking a shower with your clothes on. To that end, there's plenty of well staged weird little scenes, not unlike as if God or the chalet's decorator had arranged it all to evoke a haunted attraction, where each room has some bizarre sculpture that moves (there's someone inside it!) or has a boa constrictor coiling around its neck, or whatever.  

As for Halloween it's the perfect party movie, as I remember from seeing it really drunk with a bunch of people, all of whom were cool and high and able to spout poetry without it sounding much too measured, scripted and aware of its immortal importance. Yet here we are.  The moon is just as far away as ever. Maybe the gift of memory is that one is free not see how it all may have looked from the outside, from the aghast dorm room neighbor trying to study while you run shrieking down the hall raving about eternal life, dripping beer and rain water, e feeling yourself as a blessed holy madman, dripping sunshine and brilliant wordplay down upon a grateful continent. 

---SPECIAL NOTE:
-- Sorry if this is rambling - my cat Olive died in the middle of the night last night. I'm still in shock. There's a huge Prime list of films for Halloween coming my next post, but I had to give you a taste. If you're still there. The stream of consciousness writing eases my tortured brain. She was the best cat in the world, and watching her die in my girlfriend's arms after her death moans woke us at 3 AM will haunt me the rest of my days, so much like nightmares and dreaded thoughts I'd had lying there with her between us, basking in her magic unifying love. But I think of her goodness. The good times. And let her spirit depart for whatever cool cushion may wait for her in the next realm. Death is a fuckin' nightmare to watch happen. I'd never seen a being I dearly love gasping in a seizure of fear and pain then going totally dead before you even fully wake up, panicked but irrational, unable to even read the phone in a frantic scroll for help, glasses off, seeing double on the screen and then --a living cat changes to dead tissue with a silent gasp, before we could even... 

Powerless, dreaming of a way to just shock her back to life via the thunderbolt of a compassionate Zeus or Franklin, like Shelley with her dead child in the sea. Remember the good times. That dewey look she gave. We love you Olive. xoxoxo Thank you so much for being with us.

Crazy, Cool Sue Cabot: SORORITY GIRL (1957), MACHINE-GUN KELLY (1958)

Raise the roof! Because under it Shout Factory TV via Prime have dislodged some of the long buried Corman gems from the late-50s beatnik Corman AIP days, including three of his very best: THE UNDEAD (1957), SORORITY GIRL (1957) and MACHINE GUN KELLY (1958). Long unseen by anyone not expressly looking for them (they've never been on DVD) the sudden availability of these three gems, ready to stream and looking great, should be great news to weird movie fans like myself. The dialogue and plots are go-for-broke inspired (Undead being a crazy riff on Bergman's Seventh Seal crossed with a Bridey Murphy hypnotist angle that prefigures The Terminator) and Corman's cadre of genius hipster actors are all here: Barboura Morris, Dick Miller, Richard Devon, and --of course--the divine Susan Cabot. She's not in The Undead but she leads the pack in Girl and Gun, wherein though she's the bad guy in both we root for her straight down the line. Cabot plays Corman's characters with such modulated catlike finesse, we don't blame him for letting her take oer the picture, even if it means stealing the show from Charles Bronson. 

I kept trying to get really good screenshots for this post but it's hard to nail down Cabot's expressive features in a single shot, as she has a way of running through an array of moods and sly glances while doing a kind of restless movement thing with her head bending low and snaking sidewise towards her prey. Both playful and a little macabre, consider, for example, when someone threatens to rat her out to the dean in Sorority Girl: Cabot's face first displays a brief animal rage as she knocks the rat out, to determination while rummaging through the rat's things while she's unconscious, to triumph when she finds some incriminating evidence that will hold the rat's tongue in a blackmail quid pro quo, to playful cool once she has the rat under her control. What matters isn't the evidence she finds, or the absurd idea someone could get kicked out of school for spanking a pledge--it's the irresistible way Cabot has with controlling a scene, with goading the other characters into pushing back, then taking their slaps or incriminations with a cat who swallowed the canary smile. It's theatrical, but it's a special kind of movie-style theatricality that scriptwriters and directors and actors can't often predict, but love when it happens as suddenly their lines take wing. Sue Cabot soars with Corman's dialogue; she susses out all the fissures and peaks and moments the writer maybe didn't even know were there because they couldn't get high enough. 

She got a contract with Universal earlier in the decade but they didn't know what they had, so they loaded her into the background of a bunch of forgettable westerns. She went back to NYC to act on the stage and then Corman came. He recognized a tough confidence in her, she was tough enough to be sensitive and open, that kind of courageous raw nerve that lets her saunter up to a cop and make small talk while her man's robbing the bank next door, if you know what I mean. He put her in the lead, Sorority Girl, then she stayed with him to make six films within a three year period of 1957-59: Sorority Girl, Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, Carnival Rock, War of the Satellites, Machine Gun Kelly and The Wasp Woman.  She could be the girlfriend of a tough guy like Charles Bronson and not even gripe or sob if he socked her for taunting him and teasing him in front of the other guys, and she could be manipulative sadistic sorority girl determined to abuse her hazing privileges. And she could win our admiration almost in spite of ourselves, every time.

SORORITY GIRL

(1957) Dr. Roger Corman

***/  Amazon/Shout Image - A

From the title, we kind of expect a bunch of malt hops and mixers, with Tab Hunter giving our heroine a pledge pin and maybe getting her pregnant the night Chubby Checker or Bill Haley come to town to play at the big beachside fraternity party. Thankfully, it's not that. And we can tell just from the mysterious animated collage credits: a surrealist figure stands, alienated from the bunch, reacting with a cat o'nine tails to those who'd ignore her, becoming a kind of surrogate harpy. It's haunting and totally unique, seriously, there is no comparison to other films. No Tab Hunter tonight. What Freud fan Corman is bringing us under that innocuous title is a strangely sexy psychodrama about a disturbed young woman named Sabra (Cabot), from an affluent but loveless home, who struggles against a deep Sadean impulse to hurt and destroy. Clearly she should see a shrink, but we must remember that back then shrinks were considered a shameful secret. If it got out you'd been to one it could ruin your reputation (a stigma that persisted through into the 70s), and chances are the analyst would be some smug male who'd decree you had 'lady part issues' and needed to get married or, on the other side, have electroshock treatment and be committed. I mention this to temper the scenes of her begging for help from her distant loveless mom, to the point we shout at the screen: see a shrink and get some anti-depressants! But antidepressants are still decades away.

Pity them, the fucked-up children in a time before Prozac.

She tries, in all the wrong ways to connect. I can certainly relate, and maybe you can to, to not realizing that your mistreatment of the one person who does want to hang out with you, just because they're a stupid loser, is the reason you are shunned by everyone else. With her schemes and bizarre psychosexual sadism Sabra prefigures Tippi Hedren in Marnie and Sara Michelle Gellar in Cruel Intentions. And during a surprise visit home to beg for help and/or affection from mom, we don't need our Penguin Freud to see where Sabra gets her inability to tolerate or express affection. It might be obvious, but it's still relentless and true, to the bone.

Thanks to the insights of her voiceover and that heartbreaking visit home, we have endless sympathy for Sabra, which makes her odious behavior all the harder to accept or understand. What sets all this above the average 'co-ed' movie (even above Corman's later nurse pics for New World) is the sober intellect and overall supportiveness of the student body amongst each other. The fear of public gossip---this being the age of strict codes of conduct, where getting pregnant can mean disgrace, when abortions are illegal-- is just a few rings more moderate than Peyton Place, making blackmail and other nefarious evils all too easy.

One of Corman's ingenious tricks is to plant his films with a very strong and entertaining centerpiece scene (i.e. the fight over the fur in St. Valentine's Day Massacre). Usually this scene has only has a moderate amount to do with the rest of the film but it packs in sex and tough, awesome talk, as if Russ Meyer took over for a middle reel. Here, it's an extended scene that goes from Sabra trying to steal her roommate Rita's (Barboura Morris') man (Dick Miller, modulating his /beat swagger to seem like a gadfly about town) downstairs in the drawing room of the sorority house while the other sisters are at a pledge party, to trying to help dowdy pledge Tina (Barbara Cowan) lose a few pounds by forcing her to do some crunches / sit-ups, to eventually becoming so incensed by Tina's defeatist childish attitude, Sabra reaches for the sorority pledge paddle. Suddenly the flow stops cold. You can almost hear the blood rushing in their ears.

 What follows is a very erotically charged sorority paddling, ingeniously edited to focus on Cabot's face, lost in a haze of suppressed lesbian (?) and Sadean desire, worthy of Petra von Kant, especially considering Tina's complicity. She meekly submits, lying face down on the ottoman as if enraptured and trying not to blow the mood. There's clearly some darkly erotic Freudian/repressed sapphic undertones as she submits. A kind of sub/dom unspoken sublimated lesbian moment that, again, is unique to the drive-in, but after all, why we're here.

Corman films this paddling from two angles-- behind Cabot and looking down to the side at the submissive pledge and then an reverse, looking up at Cabot's face, which seems to be hiding an unholy mix of sadistic lesbian relish, all done very subtly (there's no moaning or screaming in pleasure or pain). The quiet sobbing of the pledge afterwards sounds more ashamed of some secret masochistic enjoyment than of trauma. In this repressed world, paddling is about the only means of sexual contact these two maybe gay women are allowed, and even then, it's warped by social repression (cruelty is less abject that lesbianism); neither one has a boyfriend or seems interested in such things (unless, for Sabra, any man is only valuable as a tool of power over other girls). They are their only human companions, two outsiders bound in a coded sapphic master-slave relationship neither one quite understands (this being America and not Germany).

Later, on the beach, they are still sitting together. Tina is doing sit-ups and even dryly noting she's gotten tougher. She's used the incident in a productive manner. It's toughened her up.

Perhaps Cabot drew from experience, having grown up in a series of 13 foster homes in Boston before getting married at 17 in order to escape the havoc. We can feel in her eyes: the round-and-round mix of need/desire for acceptance and companionship ever at odds with a total contempt for weakness and loathing for any kind of physical affection.  When Sabra goes home, hoping in vain to get some sympathy from her socialite mother (Fay Baker), only to find mom would never let her daughter's nervous breakdown and craving for love and connection interfere with her plans for cocktails with the neighbors. It's a devastating, stand-alone scene that tells us everything we need to know and instills the utmost sympathy for this "evil" sorority sister. Cabot brings such raw hurt and psychological complexity to the scene it's simply astonishing for a 1957 drive-in picture. 

In addition to Barbara Mouris, we get Dick Miller as a bar-owning man about campus who rejects Sabra's advances so she blackmails a pregnant waitress (June Kenney) into blackmailing him, even though they both know he's not the one who got her pregnant. The music is by Ronald Stein; Monroe Askins' photography brings an airy depth to the sorority house's close quarters, and a misty mountain marvelousness to the climactic beach scene. The print on Shout TV/via Prime, is ungodly great. And so welcome. Barely clocking in at over an hour, there's not an ounce of fat on this strange cinematic event, which had a male military school version with even more kinky sadism and blackmail, the same year, The Strange One, starring the comparable Ben Gazzara. If you saw them both as a double feature you'd never send your child to school again! 

 MACHINE-GUN KELLY

(1958) Dir. Roger Corman

*** 1/2 / Amazon Stream image - A

Though Charles Bronson gets the title billing, Corman lets Susan Cabot be the real show, the real leader of Kelly's gang, and Cabot has a field day! Her character, Florence "Flo" Becker, is based loosely (one presumes) on the real-life Kelly's wife Kathryn: the brains of the organization and apparently the one who styled her husband's public image, even convincing him to adopt a machine gun as a talisman. Why isn't she the title character? Because she was too smart even for that. Instead, well, Cabot's Flo gets as many--if not more lines--as Bronson's Kelly, who suffers from a major yellow streak. She's way more courageous, witty, and pro-active than everyone else in the film. She keeps reminding Bronson he's her "little baby," and her "gun arm," and she chose him because he was so weak and pliable! She tells him that in front of the other members of the gang, including the Morey Amsterdam as a dime-dropping fink mad at Kelly for ripping his arm off via cougar!

Bronson plays Kelly with a kind of functional sadism atop the fear and, surprise, and a streak of niceness as well as cowardice. It's a full 3D performance with Bronson even playing paddy cake with their kidnap victim and thrashing Richard Devon when tries to rape the kid's nanny (Barbara Mouris).

Some elements of the true story have been shifted around (here Kelly and co. kidnap a rich guy's child -- in real life they kidnapped the rich guy himself) and it's a bit rough on our modern sensibility to see cougars and other beasts in tiny cages but Corman films it all with a punchy urgency so there's no time for feeling glum. This is no plodding origin story. This is just a few crazy heists, and then the cops get 'em, the end. Bang! Credits! Corman has no time for tedious art or Big Statements, and in the process of stripping things down he's way more insightful and illuminating than most of the overblown prestige gangster pics.

To get back to Cabot's Flo, what lets the audience know she's the real leader of the gang is the way only she seems totally at ease with danger. And she's always dressed to the nines, sauntering in and out of the hideout, trailing her fur stoles, while the men all have to lay super low, bickering and playing cards behind closed curtains. As luxuriant and catlike as one could ask for in a super moll, she's the one casing out banks, drawing out maps, and flirting with the guards. Kelly is prone to freezing and running away when confronted with any memento mori (a coffin, skull paperweight, or obituary column), so he needs constant propping up his ego, flirting with his outlaw cronies (none of them have molls) to make him jealous. After he blows a big heist (a coffin passes by in front of him on the way to the bank) the couple hide out at a small brotherl run by her Mom (Connie Gilchrist), almost as cool as Flo herself. Unfazed by Kelly's tough guy veneer, realizing he's no good and telling him so. We see where Flo gets her her scathing wit and her lack of fear when it comes to antagonizing tough-talking, hard-hitting men.

Cabot relishes her character, investing so much playful nuance and force it's amazing. Part of it, I imagine, is her theatrical background: the ability to play extended single takes covering a lot of different emotional moments, and she does it daringly well. Unlike most 'moll' characters in crime movies, her Flo enjoys the life of crime. She's a long way from being just Warner Bros-style trophy wife, sulking around on the couch, eating bon-bons, whining about how much she misses nightclubs, irritating a pacing James Cagney .Corman and Cabot's Flo is the one going out and doing all the work. And when push come to shove she's the one ready to go down swinging.

Gerald Fried whips up some really peppy rich jazz for the score, a million miles from the phoned in Dixieland ragtime generic nonsense usually played in the 70s during their 20s-30s nostalgia kick. I mean, man, this stuff rips, I found myself unable to stop snapping my fingers and at one point was lifted out of my recliner as if on the wings of Gene Krupa. And Corman makes sure it's all edited tight as bank heists and the elaborate getaways come off like clockwork tied to the precision jump-back crackerjack flap the pack rack rhythm of the band. Fried had just done the score for Kubrick's The Killing a couple years earlier and the buzz was still generating. It's 61 years later and he's still working! Every day is Fried day!

Alas, aside from this small period of working with Corman (six films in three years: 1957-59), Cabot never really made the lasting mark she should and could have. She went back to NYC and Boston after The Wasp Woman to do mostly theater, and then there's her tragic death at the hands of her deranged son (1).

As for that, well, I don't like to dwell in my favorite stars' murky home lives, lest some detail or other ruin their viability as a screen for some archetypal projection of my own. Cabot is just such a screen, that mix of anima, trickster, cougar and devouring mom I have deep in the collective cinema unconscious. She could embody all these archetypes and more, in a single scene, perfectly modulated, all with a catty class and oomph that reminds us strong cool women come in all decades, shapes, and sizes. That a short brunette with shark eyes, clunky shoes, and a weird smile can wow us to core--even in a B-list gangster movie, or a sorority sister psychodrama meant to fill in a B-slot at a drive-in--proves greatness always eventually finds its way to the light... no matter what happens offscreen. Thanks Shout Factory! We got our Cabot back.

NOTES:
1. See Tom Weaver's piece "The Life and Tragic Death of Susan Cabot" for the full sad tale
2. And to prove the powerful effect of this kind of strange, deeply Freudian scene, Corman recreated it 13 years later in Bloody Mama this time in a holding cell between Bruce Dern and Robert Walden with a wet towel instead of a paddle, and the desire/fear-paralyzed Walden gently singing a religious spiritual as the 'whacks' come down.  In getting at the deep Freudian root, in these two scenes Corman creates moments we find confusing in their eroticism. We're hypnotized and dimly--on a subconscious, precambrian level--even turned on, albeit in the way we may have been as a child imagining such punishments inflicted on others. So often in film these kinds of incidents are filmed all wrong. An auteur like Bunuel or Von Sternberg focuses more on the psychological sort of masochism, and some, like Alain Robbe-Grillet, get too hung up on the bondage gear and class. In these two examples, Corman somehow manages to stage the abuse in a way that captures all the Freudian intensity without ever tumbling into the void of either Shades of Grey softcore tackiness or Girl with a Dragon Tattoo misogynistic trauma. See: Taming the Tittering Tourists: 50 Shades of Grey for the one type (tacky), Butterfly Moanin' - Duke of Burgundy and Fairie Bower Cinema (inert) for the other.

Til Human Voices Wake Us: THE BERMUDA DEPTHS (1978)

Hurricane Dorian spiraled over the Bahamas over this past Labor Day as I watched the ABC Friday Night Movie THE BERMUDA DEPTHS (from 1978) via Warner Archive DVD-R. Crystal blue skies, clear crystal white beaches, clear turquoise water, coral reef footage humming with moody folk love song theme, beautiful young lovers dripping with salt water, mostly tranquilized sea levels and oceanic temperatures, and giant (and I mean giant) turtle occasionally rising like Moby Dick x Gamera to bump his head on an unconvincing helicopter in the name of Triangle-style Satanic vengeance. After it, before it, during it, I was regularly checking in with the wide-eyed barometrically-hip denizens of 'Weather Underground' on The Weather Channel, to see where Dorian was projected to go next, and gawking at the crazy footage of in-progress devastation. Bahamas in tatters! Will... Bermuda be next?

Here's what you got to know about the Depths... once upon a time, circa 1977-79, the whole nation was "that way" about the Bermuda Triangle. From children upwards, all of America and maybe the world were thinking about that triangle and what might strange star portal, gate or devil might be hoovering up half the ships and planes that dared traverse it. The popular Leonard Nimoy-narrated docu-series In Search of....kicked off the craze with a triangle episode in 1977, Suddenly the book rack at the grocery store was flooded with books about it--including pictures!--the movie marquees flowed with documentaries and fictionalizations. "The Bermuda Triangle"... even today the name carries a sexy sea spray currency, like some cult around a strange expensive boutique water that promotes male potency. But all through those last years of the 70s, it was inescapable. 

Flick the channel ahead now to 2019: meteorologists stand before giant maps, caressing the predicted motion lines of swirling energy, pressure, precipitation like zephyrs in the sparkler air. Electric with apocalyptic anticipation, repeating themselves and their predictions, chanting national scientific barometric readings like druidic incantations and the unholy name -- Dorian... Dorian... Dorian, we worship thee. A thousand Moby Dicks worth of water and air swirl towards the TWC Atlanta headquarters, all so they might stand out in the wind and rain and be lashed while trying to talk to the camera. And all so we--at home--might feel extra dry and cozy. 

When I saw The Bermuda Depths over Labor Day, Dorian was circling around the Bahamas, twirling and whirling as if to bring the island chain to some monstrous extinction level vaginal vortex orgasm, a Cenobite maenad rending. The linked necklace of basic comforts that chokes us in the trap of civilized leisure snaps under Dorian's fury. Dorian leaves drowning souls clamoring at the ark's moss-slick sides. Those who drown don't die for long --but grow Satanic tails and squiggle towards a giant moon/egg/eye in the center of the center of the rift. 

The weather people scuttle over to B-roll of Floridians buying bottled water by the Price Club forklift. 

I hit play on the DVD player at the commercial, back ... to The Bermuda Depths and to.... her. 

Note similarity in outline of the rock to his hatted head as he sleeps,

Jenny emerging from his pineal gland, or where land meets ocean;

maybe the most beautiful photographic image in the history of Jungian archetypal symbolism?

(female/dream/ocean vs. conscious/man/sky.

Jennie Haniver (Connie Sellecca) appears at first like a distant black flame, framed in the picture window of a rocky outcrop (above): walking closer through the eye of the island where Michael Pitt-lipped wanderer Magnus (Leigh McCloskey) naps. She brings her own theme song--the indelible guitar of Vivaldi's "Concerto in D major for Lute and Strings RV:93 Largo"--and gazes down at him with loving eyes. A stirring flashback of their time as children on that same beach, raising a giant sea turtle together, even carving a heart with their initials on its shell, comes hazily out before us. She eventually left, without a word, swimming off on the turtle's back as Magnus slept upon the shore. He almost drowned trying to swim after her. And then, the night, after Magnus is in bed, his marine biologist dad decided to conduct some ominous experiment in a grotto under their beach cliffside house. Something to do with a giant unseen monster! It knocks half the house's foundations on on top of him while Magnus frets upstairs in his childhood bed. So many questions, but save them. It's all in the past, and that's why we're here, and maybe there is a connection and maybe there isn't. First, we got commercials coming.

The music is gorgeous; there are no clumsy voiceovers; no words spoken--nor read at all--anywhere in the first 12 minutes of the film. There is only Vivaldi, and that achingly lyrical folksy theme song (a signature of production team Rankin/Bass)... already burrowing into our souls and leaving us with a plaintive spiritual ache for our own lost ocean animas.. Jenny....

. 

Have I only imagined her?

I still the feel the warmth from kissing her

I'll spend my whole life missing her 
Jenny....
Jenny...

Magnus, now grown, is back in Bermuda. He and Jenny meet again, along the day-for-night shores. We're as obsessed with her flawless raven-haired beauty as he is. She's so ethereal, desirable, anima-like, it's hard not to swoon. But he's only back in Bermuda to do a stint on a marine research vessel helmed by Burl Ives, with Carl Weathers, whose beautiful black muscles glisten in the blazing blue sun as he shirtlessly pilots their vessel out to sea. A marine biologist collaborator with his Magnus' late father's, Ives is researching gigantism in ancient triangle species, i.e. a turtle the size of a football field! But, is this the animal familiar of Jenny, the turtle they raised as children, or is it maybe a guise of the devil, her master, dictating her relentless lure of smitten sailors to the briny depths... of the Bermuda Triangle. Watch out, Magnus! She's a siren. Luckily you have Weathers to cockblock you at every turn.

Ives' wide-eyed black housekeeper (Ruth Attaway) tells Magnus that when Jennie Haniver was alive-- a century ago--she was so vain and beautiful that all the men on the island were in love with her. When her ship was caught in a storm and about to go down in the middle of you know where, she made a deal with "the other god, the one who swims below" to stay beautiful and young forever in exchange for an eternity of 'service' to the leviathan. She lives, notes the housekeeper, "out there" in "what you folks call... the Triangle."  Magnus refuses to believe his Jennie could be a ghost until she reminisces about when her father used to host 'quadrilles.' She invites him to dance to her ever-present Vivaldi soundtrack.... but is it the same giant turtle she swam away on that crushed his dad and house? Let it go, Magnus! And hold on tight!

ABC Friday Night TV movies like Depths made deep and lasting impressions on children like myself (I was 12), who had no voice in the prime time choices. Lucky for me my dad loved this kind of shit (unless football was on). We all loved In Search Of..., so a movie this weird and wondrous couldn't be missed. Somehow, though, it was. I have no memory of it. What else would we have been watching?

After its initial premiere, this weird intensely haunting film lay dormant for decades, gradually considered to be a folk myth told of in reverent hushed tones by the few kids who saw it. But decades later, through the giant claw machine of the Warner Archive, it is dredged from the depths, and it is a treasure. Though it's is a TV movie, its filmed on location and Bermuda has never seemed so beautiful. Jerry Sopanen's brilliant cinematography plus a perfect color restoration results in a blue sky, clear water, white sand, tanned limb clarity that leaves a hole in the heart, evoking among other things, Dali's magical paintings of Costa Brava. 

A kind of oceanic ghost story, Bermuda Depths sails the same currents as Night Tide and even the doomed romance between Bonehead and Lorelei in Beach Blanket Bingo. Maybe it's because I'm a Pisces, but I'm even haunted by Rankin's theme song. I was dissatisfied with the end but, after I switched back to the Weather Channel watched the twirling storm still just hovering over the Bahamas, I couldn't stop thinking about it, and her--Jennie-- with her raven hair, perfect olive tan, waterproof no-smudge eyeliner and the ability to reflect light from her eyes so they glow like a a pair of lighthouses beckoning before an otherwise jet black curtain

ARGH - SPOILERS BELOW! 

It's not an easy role to pull off well, as one needs to be--in a sense--a blank screen, to nudge the viewer's anima into using the coiled energy of the far-off hurricane to fire up its projector and feel once more that sense of hopeless longing that comes from one of Ego and Psyche's all-too-rare reunion. How could I blame the film for being true to the anima's nature, i.e., for all too quickly shutting the projector off again, before we can ever get quite enough? Carl Weathers busting in on us like a big black alarm clock like some resistant superego, we can only pine for her to come again the next time we dream.

And this is--alas--the anima relationship at its purest. The anima appears to us only that her absence may be all the more keenly felt. She does read our letters but doesn't answer. In a way, she even helps us write them - for our (male) ego is a projection of her unconscious as well.

It doesn't matter anymore. I am glad I bought this on DVD, and that the image is so gorgeously clear I can count the ocean's beaded rivulets down Connie Sellecca's luxuriant gamin limbs. I applaud the way the giant turtle is used so sparingly - appearing mainly at the climax, and fading away with an unforgettable dive into the depths and all the ensuing tarot-card ready references that connect The Bermuda Depths with the arcane language of the collective unconscious.

My early childhood anima - the mermaid girl from the old Marine Boy 
anime, from I was around 3-4. I was so
enthralled I think I cried when the show stopped airing. I still
remember her vividly, though not her name.

Though this dream girl aspect ("have I only imagined her?") often irritates me in other films, it works here as there's plenty of evidence she's more than just a male fantasy or a psychotic hallucination. The men who don't believe she's real are--after all--a pair of normal guys on a tiny dinghy who actually believe they'll be able to catch and reel in a turtle the size of a Victorian mansion all by themselves, in a tiny little research vessel not even half its size --and that's way weirder. And besides, Jennie is real to Magnus, and to us, watching. We never see him talking to the air, for example. Though she's never seen by anyone else (except Weathers--at the very end--and then we don't see the version of Jennie he sees, the image that causes him to buckle over in horror, but it's clearly not Connie Sellecca). 

Besides, if the Jennie the Mermaid element of the film was all done as some kind of Harvey-Walter Mitty style fantasy, we wouldn't even be having this conversation. Instead, by reveling nothing whatsoever the Depths delivers the full mythic power of an actual dream, the kind spend the rest of our lives trying to get back to... or forget about. The Bermuda Depths is one of the few films to ever tap fully into the true power of anima projection. The filmmakers know that if there was some big twist at the end, i.e. a mad scientist is behind it all and/or it's a scam and the scammer would have got away with it if not for those rascally kids, or if the film relied on any rational or even metaphysical 'explanation' for the mysteries, it would undo the spell. But the way it's all filmed, the way the story goes down, it never loses its Jungian "on-the-one" beat, where the film itself is a dream from which there is no waking, only a renouncement of one layer of the dream, which may or may not be a transition to adulthood, for another.

The problem is--as besets all young boys once they reach the end of elementary school--Magnus can't get a moment to woo his lady love because of his girlfriend-less rowdy buddies, his shipmates, ie. the Apollonian 'group' of men that lie in dialectic opposition to the male conscious/female unconscious Dionysian pair-bond. Even to a secret, gorgeous grotto Eric (Weathers) knows where to find him. Luckily, in all that time he's been away, no one has touched the wreckage of his family home, nor found the hidden grotto--but again, this all fits the Jungian model.

Why did he not hide from Carl? We did he heed that manly call, that friendly but nonetheless cockblocking Captain Bligh all-hands? He's Fletcher Christian pulled from his languid island hammock with comely Mauatua for another endless slog across the seas. Without a second thought, presuming she'll be waiting when and where he deigns to look for her, Magnus leaves his ghostly love to go fishing with Eric and Dr. Poulis (Ives), as they set about trying to catch a creature so massive that there is no boat big enough to do anything on but drown should they be unlucky enough to hook into it.

Earning his masters in marine biology while spending the summer with Poulis, Weathers' Eric mispronounces "coelacanth" but is otherwise letter perfect as the kind of guy whose energy is like a magnet for lost boys. After pointing out he and his father used to laugh when Magnus as a boy playing on the beach with his "imaginary" girlfriend, he then shrugs it off with a swig of beer, telling his young charge "you're all right, you're home." This brusque fraternal protectiveness is something Magnus is clearly drawn to (or he wouldn't be on the boat at all) and needs on some basic level. And we need it too! So does Weathers! He's clearly having a great time in Bermuda; he improvs freely, cracks open beers that you know are real beers, and struts around loving the sun just as the sun loves illuminating every striation of his rippling shoulder muscles. If Jennie is the anima, then Weathers is the Wild Man, as Ives is the sage. All three offer elements Magnus needs to incorporate in his psyche, but they are not necessarily in harmony. The Wild Man archetype and the Anima, especially, seldom even acknowledge each other, trying to dissuade the hero from hanging out with his other "imaginary" friend.

It doesn't make any sense--that Poulis and Eric would dismiss Jennie but think they can catch a deep sea leviathan with a tug boat and a little net--but that's part of the film's dreamy unease. Even in the safe normal reality championed by Eric and Poulis, things don't add up. Their quest exists as a kind of perennial cockblock. Any young man in the throes of a sexual (but ultimately "dry") dream knows that torturous frustration. Our anima will always be ours, only ours, forever.... but first --before she surrenders herself -- you have to just go do one little thing. The boys are calling you back from the siren's rocky ledge, just as she called you away from their slippery gangplank. Their calling back and forth ensures you are never really with either. "Wait here and I'll be back," you tell her. But of course she's never there if you do return. Either that or you never make it back. Not for years. 

But what does time matter for the unconscious? Time and space are illusions. In reality, there is only waves.

 Magnus, though, too, is an archetype. He's not just some dweeb as so many lesser movies of this sort are saddled with (the sort played by Matthew Broderick or Tom Hanks). He is the Parsifal (and McCloskey does a great job with this vague role); Burl Ives is once again the Fisher King (see #12 of CinemArchetype 24) and there's also Weather moving from Wild Man to the hanged man (literally, in a tarot sense, as man is dragged to the depths by his foot - those are pearls that were his eyes, etc.) - all on the one side; and the alluring anima, her monstrous familiar (in a Gamera-logical sense) and even a wild/wise woman (Attaway's amazing one scene as the black housekeeper / conjure woman / folksy exposition provider) on the other.

It breaks my heart but is because Magnus does leave Bermuda that this becomes myth. If he didn't, he'd be snared in the faerie bower of Eros (1). Aphrodite's scallop shell would close down on the he and Jennie like a submersible honeymoon coffin.  The dreaming ego always goes off with the guys when he can, otherwise there is no myth, only an enchanted knight slowly dying of hunger under the poppy trees, ministered to by a dozen doting fairies til he withers down to a junky skeleton. ++

Some call him Kurma

----

BACK, STORY!

The production team behind the Depths are Rankin-Bass, names familiar to kids all over the 70s for the puppet-animated catchy tune-spattered Xmas specials we all saw every December, and still do, like Rudolph and The Year without a Santa Claus; and the first two animated catchy tune-spattered Tolkien specials - The Hobbit and Return of the King. They clearly knew a few things about how to tap into the deep strain of Jungian archetypal myth that can structure kids' psyches as they merge into the adult lane. Here they're working with same Japanese crew and director: Tsugunobo Kotani, with whom they'd teamed up with for the more-conventional The Last Dinosaur from the year before. But while that movie stayed a 'boy's life' Hemingway meets Edgar Rice Burroughs dissertation on machismo, The Bermuda Depths is infinitely more even-handed and light in its touch. Trying to talk about its brilliance is, as Tyrone Power says in Nightmare Alley, "like trying to put the ocean into bottles."  Like the waves going in and out on those beautiful white sand Bermuda beaches -- it captures that all things are fleeting.  At best, consciousness is just a skittish series of opportunities to practice the fine art of letting go, for one must let go, of everything, in the end - and the end is soon. It's been real, but now the sea nymph must return to the depths, lest she melt into a skull ala Sandra Knight in THE TERROR (1963) and the Vivaldi concerto end, replaced by... Diamanda Galas...

BACK TO THE STORM

Enter 3 meteorologists, tracing their batons back and forth around the barometric reading map like junkies combing the carpet after the last grain is licked off the table, or conjure wives summoning demons from the depths of their cooking pots, roiling like coiling clouds over the Bahamas. Gesturing at the mimetic map as if to move the vortex through their swirling mimetic hand magic.

So as the swirling moves across time, space, and the spinning planet surface, is Bermuda's cosmic bill paid or will the hammer come down? No amount of blowing or fanning will change that spiral's mind. 

Up at Niagara, the Native American art museum is shaped like a turtle... It's been vacant for 22 years. I was there in 1989 with my girlfriend when it was open and full of Iroquois turtle imagery. The turtle carrying the world on its back, the incessant Falls, the force from which it gains its mighty roar...... my girl, her raven hair and crystal blue eyes... the turtle with the world on its... 

Am I still there? Am I ghost wandering that stricken empty shell? My ex had crystal Bermuda water blue eyes and raven black hair, pale skin and a lovely lips. But though she was everything I dreamt of, the roar of my band, of whiskey, and of inertia, all came first- no amount of hating myself could prevent it. 

Wait right here, I'd say....  I have a turtle to catch. It took me 20 years to get over her loss, yet I was so glad to be free of her (more of that in My Long Day's Journey into NIGHT OF THE IGUANA) 

Life was always going to be fleeting. We signed the waiver before we sailed. We're bound to remember we are all just waves that crash on the shore and leave only children, maybe, and photos of ourselves,  and mentions on the web that are only really 'there' if someone reads them. 

see: Godasiyo, the Woman Chief

The Bermuda Depths' theme song knows that horror, yet is sweet as any Rankin/Bass folksy theme. It might be friendly but it knows the power music had in the age of holding tape recorders up to TV speakers. It knows how we were once so anxious to capture any fleeting images of our beloved we would take photos of the TV, to somehow 'own' a reflection, knowing how futile that is. The sadness in the song "only imagined her" knows the almost religious importance we placed on things like 8x10 glossies, trading cards of our favorite movies, bands, and shows, of decals and buttons, of pictures cut out of magazines, traded like furs and guns. 

Now, in this internet age, the anima is harder to find for being so available. We are flooded with potential anima screens now, like the parade of hurricanes rolling out from Africa and around the and up the Florida coast before peeling out east  towards Bermuda or Nova Scotia. The Weather Channel crew traces their path on the empty blue  screen, commenting and gesturing, but there is no making the 'sea wife' come, only letting her go... when she's ready... Until then, she just sits there off the coast, in the deep, twirling in place, grinding the Bahamas down to a treelss, roofless nub. 

 It's only in her absence that she stays forever. That's the anima. 22 years later and the Niagara Great Turtle museum still stands, empty in shell but present in corner real estate. If you see her, say hello, but do not linger, lest your consciousness dissolve in the brine, its husk bobbing up and down in the waves, as she makes way for the next drowning man. 

But isn't that you, too? 

I still the feel the warmth from kissing her

I'll spend my whole life missing her 

Jennie...

NOTES:

1. See Butterfly Moanin: Duke of Burgundy and Fairie Bower Cinema

Relevant Archetypes:

2. The Anima

4. The Hanged Man

5. The Human Sacrifice

6. The Intimidating Nymph

10. The Wild Man

11. The Wild-Wise Woman

15. The Animal Familiar

25. The Fisher King

(Note: the key to this power is the image - Keep the old tactile 'real' photos of her on the beach or in front of the Falls from when you were young. Never look up her virtual pixel image on Facebook decades later, she will not look the same. No empty turtle shell still immortal just absent this time -your anima will shriek as if you caught it in the morning bathroom before it put its 'face' on. The true Jennie Hanniver at last.. Now your old photos just seem 'dead' - the anima has gone from this screen forever. That's Hollywood, and it's your problem. You looked back. And now your gaze itself is salt. 

Prime's Neo-Jungian Faerie-Wave: NEVERLAKE, THE FORBIDDEN GIRL, THE GATEHOUSE

Leave it to Europe to deliver on the promise of HD cameras and non-union expressionist German handwerkers, taking the time to bring old masters' lighting and composition to even their low budget fantasy. Here are three fairly interesting, more or less family-friendly but dark, fairy tale-style forays into deep Jungian crypto-horror from the Emerald Isle, Germany and Italy. The accents might not always be there (they sometimes seem to be doing 'American') but the lighting runs from good to decent. These aren't your average DIY SOHDV mile-wide misses, they're legit little minor key gems looking for a rocky outcrop in the middle of the YA fantasy fiction and horror waterfall to nestle in, there to patiently wait for the right mopey young person--perhaps the type to read Bronte or Keats while perched on a fractal-patterned tapestry spread over the mossy rocks--to catch the secret glint of in the corner of their glasses.

That they are all findable in the rocky maze of Prime is a blessing. Normally we'd be able to see these only at a 'Fantastic Film'-style festival, where sneaking out after ten minutes would be, well, you'd hate to do it since you know the filmmaker and cast are probably in the row behind you and you're the only non-crew/cast member there, and really, it's not them it's you, etc. One of the reasons I stopped submitting my own work at festivals was to avoid this very thing. Just know this: the genesis of this post began after my surprise at the loveliness of The Forbidden Girl's cinematography. The other two films listed were the only ones I could watch to the end. I've started, stopped and flicked around on, dozens of similar titles on Prime just to get to these three (I was hoping for at least five); so bask in your moment if one of these lost kittens are yours! The rest of you, bring your grains of salt, your huddled sage-and-sandalwood candles yearning to be lit... and press play.

NEVERLAKE 

(2013) Dir. Riccardo Paoletti

**1/2 / Amazon Image - B+

You'd be forgiven thinking this a UK production --the actors are all Brits, Welsh, Irish. But it's an German-Italian joint and--despite the near constant UK-style dinginess of the skies--filmed in Italy! Independent-minded Jenny (Daisy Keeping) is spending a summer with her absentee archaeologist father near an ancient Etruscan lake, from which he's been exhuming ancient fetish totems. In ancient times, these small carved stones used to be tossed into the lake as sacrifices to the spirits. He's been taking them out, but also throwing other stones in, for some reason. Mostly he's gone, researchin' - so she's stuck at home, semi-bullied by a dimly evil au pair named Olga (Joy Tanner) or reading Shelley down by said mysterious lake, a practice that soon draws her an audience of handicapped children with the kind of pale ghostly faces that raise all sorts of red flags for any normal person. But Goth-crazed Jenny gathers them up like a babysitter den mother. Uh oh....

In addition to the whole Etruscan statuary element (shoehorned into the narrative with the finesse of a frostbitten safecracker), there's passages from Shakespeare (guess which play? Hint: one of the pale urchins is a brooding older boy with Edward Cullen facial planes).

Enriched with mythic meaning, often to the point of anything else, writer-director Martin Gooch clearly knows his Maria-Louise von Franz, and ably uncorks the genie of Jungian archetypal psychology which brings glowing Meaning to everything, as Jenny takes on the job of recovering the statues stolen by dad and throwing them back into the lake, and in the process finding a mysterious doorway hidden behind a log pile leading to a secret chamber!

What new mystery lies beyond!?

Fans of 70s-80s Italian horror will be pleasantly surprised to see ember-eyed David Brandon (Scarlet Diva, Stagefright) aging nicely into the sort of enigmatic Irish dad role usually monopolized by Gabriel Byrne; Keeping is a keeper as the can-do 'Nancy Drew on weird drugs' heroine, and--thankfully--there's no romance with the doe-eyed Edward-clone boy beyond some brooding gazes. Instead, we get just the Jungian archetypal challenges, triumphs, and dark father pursuits we find in all the best crypto-Jungian fairy tales with teenage girl protagonists whose moms are either dead or in Florida or both. The underwater photography is crisp and eerie, and for the most part Paoletti wisely keeps the less-successful CGI chimeras at a hazy distance.

Occasional missteps: the Medusa hair effect of one of the water nymphswould have been much more effective if they moved languid like flowing seaweed (as Val Lewton would have done it) and the Etruscan statue tossing thing is kind of bum rushed past us, as if the writers sincerely hope we won't notice the stank of an upcoming social studies quiz creeping in like a dad trying to interest his children in state history during a long car ride.

Either way it's fairly engrossing, makes interesting use of pans and dissolves (as in the above, where a painting of robed figures seems to imprint itself on the twilit lake), and features a pretty riveting climax with lots of drug use (I can't say more). It's great to see movies where the new girl in town isn't saddled with cumbersome school alienation tropes or romantic sogginess and has just the right level of Elektra complex. Jenny might get pissed when dad keeps ignoring her, but she finds things to do other than pine for some dead boy, and if the climax doesn't quite make as much sense as the filmmakers seem to think, at least they have the courage of their convictions, and one ends up feeling compassion for most everyone of the characters, save one....  

 THE GATEHOUSE

(2016) Written and directed by Martin Gooch 

**1/2 / Amazon Image - A-

Though on the surface it's yet another modernized fairy tale where the intrepid young daughter of a slightly-overwhelmed, gruff but lovable widower (Simeon Willis) recovers mysterious stones in order to defeat a horned monster of the ancient woods, there's a lot more going on here than just the usual trite nonsense we'd get in an American movie following the same beats (the dad doesn't mope around watching videos of his dead wife, and when he flashes back, it's of them getting drunk in a canoe together!) Their ghost Mom appears to both father and daughter, warning them of coming danger, so dad can't just blow it all off, like usual. By day, dad occasionally raises his voice and flies into overwhelmed fits while trying to follow the strange clues ghost mom leaves and fix breakfast for his super-inquisitive daughter Eternity (Scarlett Rayner) --- but the pair can also share uniquely nice moments together, like treasure hunts and evenings outside on lawn chairs looking up at the stars ("if I ever get to ill or too old to have a beer under the stars," he tells Eternity, "I want you to put me in a little boat, and set fire to it...") Right on, Willis.

Fans of Irish horror will recognize the oft-used fairie lore moral of 'if you take things from out of the woods you had best return them', which was also underwriting another Irish horror, 2015's The Hallow. Here, Gooch wisely keeps the focus on the brilliantly precocious and alert Eternity as she mucks about digging holes, looking for treasure; she may not be quite aware of the forces she's messing with (as when she hacks into a power cable in the front yard) but she's able to meet the creepy gaze of the enigmatic shotgun-toting neighbor (Linel Aft) without so much as an imperceptible shiver.

But what really sells it is the well-tempered rapport between Eternity--her super long straight hair picking up impressions like a 10 year-old Maria Orsic--and her only-mildly overwhelmed and disheveled, vaguely taller-Ricky-Gervais-ish dad--they seem like both opposites and clearly related--with him gruffly giving her pointers for sticking up for herself against bullies, and gradually realizing he'll be totally overwhelmed on his own search for answers unless he brings her along. Once his investigation into the magic stones leads him to the truth, it's nice that he has no problem totally believing his daughter. How often do we see a dad offering anything but sleepy irritation or pasteurized reassurance when his daughter starts screaming about something being under the bed? Not this dad! He gets down on his knees to look, and he's scared, and so is the musical score! This is a world where bumps in the night aren't just delusions; we've crossed over into fairy tale land but without ever being quite aware there was a door to go through.

There's an ecological message underlying things but it never gets heavy-handed. In this case the CGI is better modulated than in most such low budget films: branches reach out and victims of a woodland "Green Man" style horned guardian of the forest captures those traveling through the woods and meshes them into the roots of trees - a pretty scary, well-done effect. There are also some terrifying parental dreams dad has, as when he cuts off his daughter's fingers because she won't put down her iPad! The fairy tale intensity of this all works to keep things uneasy and may scare children into realizing the emotional fragility of adults who become shut out of their kids' lives due to cell phones. People die in this film, in true fairy tale grimness; even an innocent lady cop who spends the day wandering around the woods, evoking a mix of Winona Earp's sister's cop girlfriend Nicole, and Amy Pond in her cop costume in the first Matt Smith episode of Dr. Who. (2)

My favorite bit is the third act, when both mom of the babysitter and dad finally believe the kids and they all go on an armed expedition into the woods to find the horned god, and there's even a Goth psychic (Anda Berzina) friend of the sitter (Zara Tomkinson) who drifts over to read tarot cards. As with Neverlake, strange country houses turn out to have hidden rooms deep within secret chambers accessible only from trap doors hidden in the base of closets or woodpiles.  By the end one has grown quite fond of all the characters (save one) and we wouldn't be averse to a nice sequel. Like Neverlake it has the air of a YA fantasy novel, and there are virtually no boys at all, just a few adult males pointing dad towards the horned truth, and the strange Mr. Sykes for counterpoint.

PS: For a similar film, more adult, check out another big favorite discovery of recent years, Michael Almereyda's The Eternal (1998)

--

THE FORBIDDEN GIRL

(2013) Dir Til Hastreiter

*** / Amazon Image - A+

What a difference a talented ambitious cinematographer makes! Merely OK films become great, or at least worth a glimpse. 99% of the unknown stuff floating on Prime is shot on HD video, in this case it's the staggeringly pretty looking (especially for such a dismal and unfair imdb rating, a staunchly undeserved 3.4) movie that lets you know just how good digital film can look with the right painterly craftspeople at the helm. My observation through relentless slogging is that such brilliance is almost always the result of an Eastern European craftsman, with the artsy eye to deliver beauty that, like in Ivan Brlakov's stunning work The Bride, transcends the film it services. In this case, it's Hungary's Tamás Keményffy, who brings a golden dusk sharpness to German-Dutch production, The Forbidden Girl, a (filmed in English); a tale of Jungian high weirdness I stumbled on via Prime when I was drawn to the cover art.

The result? It might be my favorite random discovery since Bitches' Sabbath (i.e. Witching and Bitching). It's a little rough around the narrative edges, but it's a nicely acted and sometimes well-written tale of the anointed (American) son whose mysterious (German) dream lover may well be either a witch or imprisoned by one. Toby McLift (Peter Gaidot) is sent to a mental hospital after his looney-tunes Baptist preacher dad murders his girlfriend; he's hired as a tutor in residence at an ancient, crumbling mansion that just happens to hold his true love chimera girlfriend. But if he thinks he's going to have an easy time teaching her though or rekindling their passion, he's wrong. For one thing, she doesn't even remember him! For two, her guardian is a towering, supernatural, controlling Germanic watchdog played Klaus Tange (Strange Color of Your Body's Tears), who skulks ever within hearing range.

Hamburg-born, Strassberg-trained actress Jytte-Merle Böhrnsen is alive and wild as this forbidden girl Laura, a classic Jungian anima figure, whose kept in a tower, away from the eyes of strangers, though why her guardians should want a doe-eyed lovestruck mental case like British-born dreamboat Peter Gadiot up there as a tutor is anyone's guess, unless it's because he bears 'the mark' that will open doors to Hell. That's not really a spoiler if you've seen enough of these kinds of films. But what's unusual is the great use of the crumbling mansion as a sprawling set that puts the Overlook and Hill House both to shame. Scenes take place by a leaf-filled crumbling half-full indoor pool, for example, or along dark twisted hallways, and into small ditches around the property. We get a real feel of the architecture through the ever-prowling camera. 

And in bed in a different room, withered and dying though slowly growing mysteriously younger with Gaidot's presence (ala Hasu, or I Vampiri), waits is the enigmatic witch Lady Wallace (Jeanette Hain). You won't need a copy of Campbell's Hero of a Thousand Faces to figure out what's really going on (or why even a tiny amount of sunlight--as when a shade accidentally flips up--can set fire to ancient books and generally wipe these witches out. As the light creates a weird camera obscura image on the side of what looks like a transparency projector, we're forced to admit that, unconvincing as it is, it's all way prettier, better, and more genuinely surreal than Lynch's Twin Peaks: The Return. 

But these kinds of dark fairy tales are never about either story of beauty - they're about the journey, these are the equivalent of the tales children love hearing over and over, because the story rings deep into the fabric of our unconscious tapestry, shaping the way we view the world and giving our dreams the narrative structure our unconscious is often not enough of a dramatist to provide. Here we get the same balmy 'living all ages of life at once' thing we get in Valerie and her Week of Wonders, Lemora, and even Muhlholland Dr. to a weirder degree. It's not 'better' than those films, but it is certainly lovely to look at, with deep blacks and rich moody colors that evoke the saturated interiors of Next of Kin's old folks home, or the autumnal leaf-bedecked scenery of José Ramón Larraz films like Symptoms and Vampyres. The CGI is bad, but you can't have everything!

Performances, too, are all superb in their offness - the 'American' accents give these European actors an uncanny frisson - with special praise to Jytte-Merle Böhrnsen, so alive from one moment to the next that capturing a good screenshot for her was like asking fire to hold its flicker; and Hain, who proves herself a real master at the sort of raspy, old world seduction wherein we believe she could hold both young and older men in her sexy cobra stare on separate floors at the same time. Tange is legitimately frightening yet also romantically tragic and Gaidot shows he's more than just a pretty face through all his can-do gallivanting in the face of insurmountable supernatural cockblocking. Less successful CGI elements depict a kind of shadowy quick-moving ghost creature ever trying to steal back Laura to Hell or wherever, but the CGI black smoke whiffs don't overstay their welcome (except for some tacky fire effects here and there). And the score doesn't become too bogged down in tacky Danny Elfman whimsy cues, though composer Eckes Malz's reliance on familiar orchestral and chorale themes does seem a missed opportunity (oh what a Klaus Schulze could do). But the camerawork overcomes all: it zips and prowls on padded feet so we feel like we're skulking around the mansion's spooky vastness on stocking feet in the dead of night. It's a hard thing to get right, but by the end of the film we feel like we know all the ins and outs of this weird wondrous place, including how to escape it, or die trying, and trying again even after that.

One of the story's many strengths is the total absence of a distinct black/white dichotomy. We empathize with the romantic yearning and sense of irrecoverably lost time in the sad eyes of the older pair of lovers and can't help but wonder whether the real villain is actually Toby in his blind determination to rescue Laura whether she wants to go or not.

Jeanette Hain

All together, taken as a triptych, we get in these three films what can happen when imaginative low budget filmmakers let loose with enough of a European sensibility that their work isn't stepped on by a lot of second-guessing producers. We learn that children in fantasy movies needn't be doe-eyed drips or crass morons, and parents needn't be saints or sex offenders with no room in between. Childhood fairy tale wonderment and adult sexuality (portions of Forbidden Girl get pretty racy) go hand-in-hand. Wether it's delivering stolen ritualistic stones back into the hands of woodland spirits or shagging 300 year-old witches during arcane rituals, these tales take us home, to the real home. When told with the feeling of real danger, alive with real magic, the secret doors hidden in our gatehouses open, and along with the demons comes everything we ever thought was lost, all those traumas too rough to recall in the same decade they happened, all those intense in-love moments that were so great they left you feeling hollow and lost for years after they ended, vainly trying to get back to the garden until, by the time you got there, that garden was a wasteland, plants all dried and dead... You took too long to get there with the watering can and now aren't even the same person that left. But maybe the golden intense love you lost is still waiting, inside the innermost secret chamber of your dream castle. 

Stop looking for the key and there it is.

NOTES:

2. Surprise! If you get those two references, thou art a geek