Ride the Snake: Boris Karloff's HEART OF DARKNESS (1958)

Recently discovered hiding deep in the Amazon Prime--an interior so vast and tangled one never knows what serpent jewel is coiled below the most innocent flower thumbnail cover: a 1958 TV adaptation of Joseph Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS starring Boris Karloff as Kurtz. For a fan of both the actor and the tale, it's quite a find: Archetypal, potent, pungent, primitive in every definition of the word (picture quality as savage as the setting), acted in a kind of beatnik cafe dream poetry shorthand, following streams far indeed from Conrad's estuary, it nonetheless sings the masculine psyche electric, turning the journey of Marlow upriver to Kurtz into a kind gone-rogue Boy's Life anti-colonialist/pro-incest version of Alice in Wonderland as performed by the residents of some remote mental institution. Some might consider it unwatchable due to terrible image quality and stagy overacting, but for those of us "in the know," one look into Boris Karloff's wild eyes as he dances  shirtless in a jungle leaf crown while a circle of cannibals thump on drums, shake skull rattles, stab goats, and wiggle long feather or vine skirts that look up close in the unshaded video quality like fire (or radar-jamming window), and we know we're home. Add a shirtless wild-eyed Roddy McDowell as Marlow, demanding the whip and being branded with a hot "K", feeding off Karloff's crazy energy, matching his performance art hysteria beat-for-beat, like if Page and Plant dueling high notes in "Dazed and Confused" was mixed with a family trying to be heard on the tarmac of a busy airport. "I celebrate my cruelty!," they shout. "I celebrate my hatred!"

Been there, bro. I hereby claim this HEART as wild and true. "I celebrate my lust!"

I celebrate the generosity of Amazon Prime and this great deal they seem to have made with 'Sprockets,' a vast library of long-neglected (unrestored) exploitation movies from the 50s-70s, many of them too damaged to even be on a Something Weird compilation. I celebrate the genius of mixing the potted plant jungle lurid sadism and miscegenation fantasy of Kongo, and White Woman with O'Neill's folk play existentialism (Emperor Jones), undergraduate avant garde theatricality (ala the old Pratt Institutionalized Theater, here) and Greek-myth analyst-couch bird-swarm beach-boy maenad rending ala Tennessee Williams / Hitchcock. I celebrate this Heart's mix of Shavian satire, Kafka-esque double talk, Maugham 'Victorian morality dissolving in the jungle heat'-ism, and expressionist dream poem segues. This isn't the Congo of Conrad, with its firsthand observed landscape and anthropological detail, but an inner Oz/Wonderland for sexually repressed British sailors desperately praying away their incestuous desires. And no matter how intense things get, the magic coins in Marlow's pocket can whisk him home as fast as ruby slipper Thorazine.

I'll confess, growing up watching Shelly Duvall's Fairy Tale Theater with my parents, then studying Jung in college, (and finding my own magic doorways to weird worlds, if you know what I mean), have perhaps left me predisposed to love something as woebegone as this old Heart. It's similar to the way I love The Love Witch or Valerie and her Week of Wonders, or Lemorra: A child's Tale of the Supernatural. as much for the flaws and seams as their sense of wonder and mythic resonance. I love the Disney fairy tales too, but they're so well done we don't get the ceremonial magick element, the Brechtian disconnect that lets you think, hmm next solstice maybe I'll get asked to play the Wicked Son, or white witch, or the God of spring harvest. In these films' crude staginess comes the surreal element of dreams, which often appear slightly 'off' as if your unconscious couldn't afford a real art director.

Unlike those feminine-based myths, reflecting anxiety about marriage and sex, this is the repressed hammy male version, reflecting going off to college and having your first acid trip and orgiastic sex experience in the same night and feeling like you just opened up from a black and white cocoon to a prismatic Technicolor butterfly. That said, this stays black and white, down in the basement mythic landscape of the 1933 Paramount live action Alice (see: Reeling and Writhing) rather than Disney. It's about going off on safari and expecting to find the good father (maybe even dead), and finding instead the primal father, the jungle devolving him along a mythic reverse axis, from Zeus back to Cronus, from color back to black, from HD to fuzzy primordial analog fuzziness, bounced across the arial dupes of time like a leaden skipping stone.

Subtle, pretty color shit wouldn't work in this jungle --dreams are often in black and white anyway, and of poor quality image-wise, as your third eye antenna can't always get a good picture. I can handle poor quality black and white much better than poor quality color, which tends to be washed out and depressing. In this case the rough signal works: there's an Everclear-smudge stained charcoal sketch madness at play, brought out by the ancient tape artifacts (the grayscale has become... unsound). The weird distortions and deep black outlining give it all a ghostly inked-in appearance as if from some spy camera left in a cavern on the moon crossed with a smudgy courtroom sketch witnessed by a drunk in the throes of DTs. The result: neither 50s TV playhouse drama nor beatnik theater improv, but a mix of both, as if witnessed by another planet who don't quite get that we're only 'pretending' and really aren't this savage. Maybe far-away aliens are viewing this from sixty odd light years away (it was broadcast in 1958 as part of Playhouse 90). Their enthralled anthropologists will wonder whether this is some ritualistic indigenous ceremony, a filmed inauguration, live, like an Olympics ceremony re-enacting of ancient rites, on ancient video equipment, as valuable a relic as a cave drawing or Sumerian tablet. 

The late-80s men's movement, ala Iron John, pointed out that initiation rites, from boy to man, such a key part of all indigenous tribe mythologies, being so absent from our own (outside of the military and frat hazing) has contributed greatly to our national crisis of arrested male development. We don't televise wild initiations into the terrors of the unconscious self, but Heart of Darkness suggests maybe we should. After all, like any other televised event, the trials of the masculine initiation rite are mostly all show. We only get to find that out, if we put on the masks and do the dance, and face the idea that immanent torture via antler piercing, beer chugging, paddling, or soap-pillow case midnight beating, might soon be upon us.

As in the Off-Off Broadway dream poetry tradition, scenes in this Heart of Darkness are connected by childhood nursery rhymes ("Bobby Shafto's / gone to sea"), further making this all seem like a long LSD trip back in the day when it was legal and done on a psychiatrist's couch surrounded by giant potted African fronds. Maybe the sound of children playing outside the shrink's window became like tribal chanting reflecting the ebb and flow of inner psychosis, the old neuroses dissolving off the patient's soul like a serpent's old skin. It that skin isn't shed, a very bad trip can result, as it does for Marlow, for quite a spell. McDowell's repressed and unhinged character, in refusing to open himself to his (adopted!) sister's carnal desire, becomes a hurricane eye around which scenes revolve in ever tighter loops of madness. Each new encounter is with a stranger than the last, until Marlow slowly peels his 'false Buddhist' monk robe skin off until all that's left is a wild overacting, shirtless, bug-eyed loon, cracking a whip to keep time.

Starting with a ship's hold wherein he's forced to crush a rat in his bare hands (like salty shipmates always be making faux-Buddhists do), through to his returning home alive and reborn to his lady love/sister Maria (Inga Swenson), McDowell's acting is either terrible or brilliant or both, holding the whole thing together with a kind of magical foot-to-the-gas madness, reminding me how deft, charismatic and hilarious he was as Tuesday Weld's manager in Lord Love a Duck (there, as here, never stealing a scene but rather using and reflecting the energy of the actors around him, then mirroring it back and raising it again, forming a slow burn duel of ham mania).

Inga Swenson's Nordic alien DNA captured via early TV signal
being non-receptive to the alien cover signal (as seen in THEY LIVE)

Indeed in addition to the Conrad text (we do get some of the original dialogue, including "the horror, the horror") there's almost a greatest hits of dissolving theatrical sanity going on. For example, when we first meet Maria, she's running drunk and barefoot through the snow trying to join a throng of passing holiday carolers, conjuring an array of booze and/or loneliness-wracked Tennessee Williams heroines ranging from those of the Glass Menagerie all the way up to The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone ("I have to keep reminding myself you're my brother," she purrs after a long welcome home kiss on Marlow's neck). Though he's clearly into it, Marlow feels compelled to run off and find Kurtz (her dad / his guardian) before he winds up in bed with his own adopted sister. She gives him some coins for the bus home, and they become his magical talisman, the breadcrumb trail ruby slipper. It seems rather forced but it does reflect the realization pulsing through the production that this is mythic freestyle, not a faithful adaptation of the text. There's a parallel in the coins too with the 'parachute' of the psychedelic trip, i.e. a handy Thorazine or--failing that--a Xanax, or--failing that--lots of alcohol or Nyquil. "Pull the string!" The rip cord, the umbilical deep sea diver oxygen line.


The rest of the film is a progression of weird archetypal energies: a 'Before the Law'-esque wife of a disappeared trading company envoy; a blind 'crone' (Cathleen Nesbitt - left) in Queen Victoria /Virgin Mary headdress, signs Marlow up while loudly encouraging him to also join "The Society for the Repression of Savage Custom"; the company doctor (Oscar Homolka - below) measures Marlow's skull against those of previous trading company representatives for comparison (he thinks head size changes after "you go out there to that frenzy, that solitude, that swamp of obscene temptation where there's no policeman, where no voice of a kind neighbor can whisper a public opinion, (ala "don't touch the B in room 237").

The transitions are telling in capturing the beatnik theatricality at the heart of darkness and psychedelic transfiguration: the doctor pushes Marlow through a door into what seems like a storage closet but is actually the jungle, so that he and the old woman seem to be looking down at Marlow from the safety of a small window in a tree, like parents dumping their freshman son out of a passing car onto the campus lawn at the start of fall semester, then speeding off.

Now, in the jungle, things devolve quick: cannibals almost eat him alive before he's saved by the estimable Mr. Robertson (Richard Haydn), the Trading Company 'accountant.' The complete opposite of repressed Marlow, and without a shred of the humanity left, Robertson has embraced the moral twilight and encourages Marlow to do the same: "I don't judge anything, so I don't suffer." He offers Marlow a chance to get out his aggression with a proffered whip, and notes that he'll have to whip the native slaves all the way back inland to Kurtz's compound anyway, that he should give into the madness of the place, but Marlow--his resolve ever weakening--cannot, refusing even a Pim's cup with homegrown cucumber. We can feel the ghost of W.S. Burroughs stir sluggishly like an opium ghost in our bloodstream with the appearance of this Benway-esque character: "No drinking, no violence - you're really quite an example of something or other aren't you?" Robertson says. Assuring Marlow he has nothing but admiration for Kurtz's methods in dealing with his cannibal slaves ("he sends them off all fat and saucy with a meal of two-legged pig, which I think is a charming way of describing what they eat. [1]"), Robertson is our first example of a man who's kept his British detachment by surrendering fully to madness. Marlow cannot, he'd rather hang the chain on himself and beg to be whipped like an anguished penitent.  He's combusting from the inside out, being devoured by the Congo, while Robertson isn't even bothered by flies. 

Eartha Kitt (left) shows up as Kurtz's silken feline queen, Maria, as (we learn) all Kurtz's women are named, reflecting his own incestuous obsession, she's ordered to get the coins from him, as if a holy grail relic that might free him from his own trap. Give me those slippers!

Of course in this surrealism-on-the sleeve riffing, it's not necessary to glean whether or not there's actual incest or desire between Kurtz and his daughter --this is pure psychosexual dream theater, laying its surrealistic tells far more bluntly than Conrad (in the jungle there's no time for subtlety). Writer Stewart Stern clearly uses the source text as diving board rather than a podium, he's interested in accessing certain deep Medea / devouring mothers, diving for coins tossed in by long ago Phoenician sailors, swallowed by the depths of the Kali-tentacled maternal behemoth. It's Conrad the way Coltrane's "Favorite Things" is Rogers and Hammerstein.

As we get closer and closer upriver to Kurtz the mythic resonance gets more and more abstract, the acting hammier, the jungle blurred, static-outlined by the primitive video which makes people's eyes and teeth seemed outlined in thick magic marker. When we finally do get to Karloff's Kurtz, his eyes are wild - sticking through the sludge of the image, fitting perfectly the madness of his character, hideously distorted and blurred, like the final freeze frame of James Caan victorious and subhuman in Rollerball, or a Francis Bacon portrait that's been left out in the rain. He looks like he's been brushing with charcoal, eyes bugging on acid, flesh dissolving into the skin-shedding aura only the very high can see. Flanked by leopard skins doubling as shotgun holes through copper plates, he's a scarier children's book monster than Maurice Sendak could e'er imagine. Following him to the sacred circle for a wild man dance seems akin to jumping through a giant thresher machine. 

Putting other Kurtz's to shame (Welles' radio show version included, Brando of course being the worst), Karloff seizes the chance to really ham it to the rafters and thank god he did, for anything less would have been lost in the splotchy Bacon/rain smudginess of the distorted video image. As it is, both his and Roddy's eyes--seemingly outlined in black magic marker--really pop out, like mad scientists in the peak of a DOM trip, that bold 13-hour mouth at the froth from which no traveler returns sanely without a jingling secret pocket coin, Xanax, or a ("welcome to Annexia") silver bullet for the Emperor Jones' William Tell routine.

It's worth comparing this unique Heart alongside two other mythopoetically dense Stern screenplays: Rebel without a Cause (for Nicholas Ray) and The Last Movie (for Ray's friend Dennis Hopper). Each has a special fascination with ancient tribal initiation rites finding root in the modern era. There's the Rebel 'chickee run', or the way the Bolivian natives in Movie actually hurt each other and jump off roofs in literalized imitation of movie stuntmen; and the terror conjured by a sexually voracious female on the male psyche (Natalie Wood's daddy issues; Julia Adams' cougar in Last Movie). 

That last theme is turned into a fairy tale magic talisman for both Kurtz in Marlow, both the impetus for their escape to the Congo and the magic key for their return. The yearning of voracious, unbalanced Maria reaches out to both men at all times, holding them in a loose orbit around her via symbolic totems: her coins for Marlow, her portrait medallion for Kurtz (like a pagan charm -her image becomes the yin in the center of all this frantic performance art yang). Both men are driven to flee home to escape her, only to find representatives with her same name (the queen). Their pronouncement "I celebrate my lust!"-- in conjunction with the talk of 'cutting loose' in a land far from the prying eyes of puritanical neighbors--serves as a reminder that the 'repression of savage instincts abroad' (as in the Puritans, Rev. Davison in Rain) always fail, the heat and lack of options devolve the men into sex tourists: "Behold my surrender! Behold my marriage with abomination!" Marlow snaps the whip;  Kurtz leads the chant; the drums pound; the flames heating the "K" brand and the wiggling feather/taffeta skirts and headdresses all overlap and become one blurry rain of braided energy. The way the natives clatter their homemade percussion instruments and wave their crude knives evokes Suddenly Last Summer (released the same year) and anticipates The Birds,  which attack as per Mrs. Brenner's unconscious bidding, just as Suddenly's beach boys as per Violet Venable's (rather than their sons slip out from under their wings). Kurtz represents the male equivalent of this Madea/ devouring mother, he's the primal father writ large- mirroring our modern cult leaders like David Koresh or Jim Jones, preferring to wipe out his flock rather than be taken back to civilization, ruling with violence and keeping all the women to himself, like a lion.

I should note that, as with the source text, there's a rampant racism at work here: all the African natives--except the queen--are depicted as savage childlike cannibals who respect only brute force (the whip). At the same time, we should always remember that this jungle is in the mind of a repressed virgin white man who's never been, and so projected his id onto its exotic natives. Well, isn't that what racism is, you say? True, I retort, but it's even a theme of this weird adaptation that only by expressing it can we exorcise it. Openly celebrating his racist evil and insane lust frees Marlow from its toxic grip. Once made conscious and expressed--as in art therapy--the repressed desire evaporates, the way lust evaporates in the minutes after orgasm. Finally, he can give himself a hug (above) and look, through his dilated pupils, towards the finally-revealed heaven. The repressive force within him is spent, the vile racist worldview can dissolve with a ruby slipper heel-tap.

At the same time, it wouldn't suit Marlow's character is to get all preachy and self-righteously racial activist now that he's seen some sort of light. What can even the most liberal of white authors know of blackness? To try and Stanley Kramer it up would kill the larger-than-life messiness of myth. Myth needs to be neither believable nor logical, true or safe, (nor -as here - even in focus or frame), PC or un-PC, what it needs to do is resonate below the line of consciousness, go deeper than mere truth can reach, provide a kind of trapdoor access to the basement of the mind, to open up the vents and allow for temperature equilibrium. Just as the African tribesmen surrounding Kurtz use ceremonial masks to express their demons rather than bury them, this primitive TV broadcast of Heart of Darkness spews forth an admission of racist evil and in the process exorcises it, temporarily at least, even though it can't really do anything with its liberated outlook.

That's why it helps in a way too that this production is so poor and overwrought --the totemic demon mask need not seem real, but almost something to laugh at, a cathartic confession rather than denial, the head of Medusa reflected in the Perseus shield of satire. So let us celebrate our evil and above all celebrate the ability to revisit weird-ass shit like Playhouse 60's Heart of Darkness, celebrate a humanity that would allow this dark plumbing of its darkest depths. It exhibits bravery in going--as my friends and I used to say--"for distance" rather than polish, decorum or clarity, for "riding the snake" rather than scorching it in terror, or containing it a terrarium. By contrast to its messy brilliance, our live TV events today are tepid musicals, toothless as a long-caged rheumy lion. We won't see the like of rough unhinged dream theater 'interpretations' like this Heart again, outside perhaps of "Le Bad Theater" on SNL reruns (2) and we will continue to suffer for its absence, just as the lack of male initiation trauma (3) it so resonantly depicts inevitably outs in everything from school shootings to alt-right trolling, and all the other sad last ditch gasps of boys who never found their hideous dark father's compound, and so never saw the sad end game of their own dark hypocrisy, or tasted the ecstasy of feeling their anxious flesh rendered by a thousand little beaks, until all that's left is skybound.

"even the jungle wanted him dead"

It's also on youtube!

NOTES:

1. "two-legged pig" also known as "long pig" =  human flesh. 

2.  though there was a TV movie version in 1993 with John Malkovich and Tim Roth,  it was faithful to the text to the point of sterility.

3. Initiation rites do exist in some modern organizations (frats, etc.) but outside of, say, the Navy Seals, they lack sufficient prolonged traumatic endurance for the facilitation of a true psychic change. The agony of child birth makes a mother of a woman, the agony of the initiation rite 'second' birth makes a boy a man. "No pain, no gain" is no mere gym mantra but a sad underwriter of all human maturity. Would it were otherwise!!

Misterioso Blu Review: PUMPKINHEAD (1988), LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE (1973)

"If you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you."                                                                                    --- Nietzsche

LEGEND OF HELL HOUSE

(1973) Dir. John Hough

 ***

A serious-minded, less campy, grumpier, more sexually experienced ground level update of Bill Castle's House on Haunted Hill, the British horror film Legend of Hell House (based on a Richard Matheson novel) was once seen often on late shows on weekend TV movies by kids like me. I remember seeing it at slumber parties (before VHS existed so it was just 'on'). We seldom made it to the end before falling asleep or losing our UHF reception, but what we saw scared us silly. While the plot seems kid stuff--a disparate group of people paid handsomely to spend awhile in a very haunted house--it's not just for 70s slumber parties or skeletons on strings, not anymore. Now, with Shout's new Blu-ray, Hell has taken over the adult wing and expanded to a big dark, beautiful monster ready for closer inspection - and man is it pretty. Cinematographer Alan Hume delivers near Bava levels of warm, dusky, painterly light, and shows special magic capturing the the translucently pale skin of the two actresses, giving them an 'alive in the firelight reflection of the rose red wallpaper' glow that makes them look sexy as hell yet creepy, untamed, assertive, even dangerous.

Pamela Franklin (upper left) proves herself a master of slow simmer emotional build-up as Florence the psychic (is this a sequel to her role as the child "Flora" in The Innocents (1961). Am I the first to make that connection?); Gale Hunnicutt is Ann, wife-assistant of Dr. Barett (Clive Revill) and quite prim by day, but open to wild sexual possession at night. The men, on the other hand, are buzzkills. Barrett is self-righteous prig who thinks ghosts are just psychic energy without personality or form, easily dispersed by a magnetic pulse generator, which he's bringing over later, so considers Florence's reports of spirits in the house with scathing condescension. Roddy McDowall is in the Elisha Cook Jr. role (i.e. he's the only survivor of the last such sleepover party) so spends most of the film drinking and tossing off cryptic remarks about their inevitable doom, without any of Cook's dreamy hipster disconnect (instead he's just snippy). They've all been hired by a dying millionaire (who's trying to determine "once and for all" if there's life after death) to to spend a week in the "Mount Everest of haunted houses," the Winchester-ish estate of sadistic, decadent (and long-dead) munitions magnate Earnest Belasco. Past investigations have been calamitous, but when has that ever stopped an intrepid ghost hunter earning $100,000. for a week's sitting around?

Does this dying bastard really figure setting up some investigators for a week in a haunted house will answer the age-oldiest question once and for all? It would be hilarious if it wasn't played so grouchy-dead straight.

Fans who hate when a ghost movie wastes time with character development and other bits of business will rejoice over Hell House, for--like Castle's Haunted Hill--the credits have barely begun appearing before the chosen four are creaking open the gate and entering the very fog-bound manor, the house looming above them, all ominous. Instantly setting the mood, it never returns to exterior daylight, or any of those piddly-ass subplots or cliche patronizing fake-outs where the monster in your room disappears before the witnesses can answer your screams so they all think you were only dreaming. Or what about those tired scenes of incompetent detectives being called in, or sunny daytime shots trudging out to the local church, to see stodgy vicars? Or Cockney horse trainers skulking tiresomely around the grounds, peering around corners while chopping wood with scary axes? Not this house, sisters. And it's all based on what might, one day, be real life paranormal events! In a forward blurb, Tom Corbett, 'psychic consultant to European royalty' notes that “although the story of this film is fictitious, the events depicted involving psychic phenomena are not only very much within the bounds of possibility, but could well be true.” Or as Criswell says in Plan Nine, "Can you prove it didn't happen!?"

As the allotted week of investigation goes on, the days and times click by on the bottom of the screen in a kind of countdown of dread, approaching and passing Dec. 25th, though no one mentions Xmas. The randomness of the dates and times adds to a feeling of authenticity and also enhances the sense of endless night and gloom; it might only be 4 PM tea time or 9 AM breakfast, but it all feels like one long night in this mostly windowless, dark strange mansion, which they mostly never leave. Kubrick was undoubtedly inspired by this sense of time's mounting irrelevance for his sporadic use of of similar 'time stamps' ("Tuesday"!) in The Shining.  What better endorsement do you need? Another influential aspect is the throbbing echo-drenched diegetic distortion score by Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hogdson of 'Electrophon Ltd.' Pitch-shifted somewhere between Forbidden Planet's 'electronic tonalities' and the avant garde echo-cussions of 70s thriller-period Ennio Morricone, it's so weird it's sublime. It may well have influenced some of the wilder music choices in Shining as well.

Another thing I love in a ghost film is when it totally doesn't waste time debating whether ghosts are real or just figments of a suggestible mind, which is usually a big problem in American and British films. Here the supernatural is a given-- even Dr. Barett believes something's happening-- so the argument can finally move from an 'if' to a question of whether actual personalities survive beyond death or just a form of psychic residue which we instinctually anthropomorphize. Dr. Barett thinks it's all just projected psychic energy, void of personality or soul, and pissily accuses Florence of creating it, unconsciously or not. Florence thinks the activity is being generated by the spirit of the evil Mr. Belasco's walled-up son. In the dead of night, to liven things up, Mrs. Barett sleepwalks, possessed seemingly by the ghost of a major nymphomaniac. When she glides down the stairs or makes sudden appearances in the far corner of the frame, in flowing hair and nightgown she generates an autonomous sultry frisson that's quite unforgettable. Sexually frustrated by her cold fish husband while conscious, asleep she tries to seduce McDowell and get him into an orgiastic menage a trois with Franklin. Modulating a slow burn from smiling self-possessed enigma to furious flesh-rending maenad cannibal, Hunnicutt is simply outstanding here. McDowall, on the other hand, just stands frozen in these scenes like he's not even tempted by this hot babe in her ghost-flowing lingerie. Instead, he just waits patiently until she's at maximum pitched intensity to slap her, as if he has no interest in helping anyone with their big scenes, or trying to do a decent job, or even feigning interest or even homosexual panic. No wonder British women are so sexually assertive, with such men as these for pickings! And why is Roddy even there in the scene? They may as well as put a suit of armor in his place, or a life-size cardboard cutout. Mainly he stands around and waits through almost the entire film until nearly everyone else is dead before he finally steps up to the bat, shouting whole pages of plot point denouement at the ghost of Belasco. Wind howls, doors rattle, and the tenor of McDowell's voice rises and rises to match it. Finally you can sense the phantom residue of Vincent Price rouse from its chewed-scenery nest, proving once and for all, you dying rich sponsor, ghosts is real!

Too bad Revill's smarmy know-it-all doctor makes sure that no one gets along, bonds, or laughs until then. You could offer him a coffee and he'd snarl at you for your stupidity in believing caffeine is the answer when it's merely a placebo for the feeble minded. He curtails all attempts at camaraderie and as a result the cast all keep to themselves, reacting to each other's presence only with shouts and slaps, demeaning disbelief, and worried condescension. It's enough to make one long for the cozy lesbian flirtations between Lili Taylor, Catherine Zeta Jones and Owen Wilson in The Haunting remake. In fact, I know it's heresy, but I'll see that movie again any time, while this this film for all its thick atmosphere, beautiful photography, superb Brit thesping and spooky effects, makes the criminal mistake of forgetting spookshows are supposed to be 'fun'  -- hungover bitchiness never helps generate repeat business.

The Shout Blu-ray does what it can to allay the damage, bringing out the full gorgeous eerie textures and depths of the film. Extras include a genial 'talking shop'-style interview with John Hough, wherein he notes that Disney hired him to direct Escape to Witch Mountain based on his work in Hell House, and there's a repetitive if interesting commentary track with Franklin. She mainly says that Hunnicutt and McDowall kept to themselves while, surprisingly, she and Revill got on famously and that the cinematographer took forever with his lighting, using every single light he had in every single shot, to the point the crew would start hiding lights from him in the cupboards. Though the time spent was clearly worth it, and thanks to this spiffy Blu-ray upgrade, every shot is suitable for framing.

PUMPKINHEAD

1988 - dir. Stan Winston

***

Lance Henrisken is (unsurprisingly) strange, muted, a tad poetic and A-gaming through this EC comics-esque B-backwoods monster tale. As the woodsy general store/gas station owner and bereaved single parent Ed Harley he's the type of character we usually only see in the beginning of a horror film, cryptically warning the teenage weekend campers not to go too far from the highway, before spitting tobacco at their feet and wiping his hands on a filthy oil rag. This time the equation's reversed: the visiting teens are the bad guys, kind of, killing his son (by accident) and spurring old Ed to backwoods vengeance. Surprisingly complex for a monster film, director Winston lets us see both the rudeness of the snotty suburban teen interlopers through the local's eyes and the sheer grimy otherness of the locals through the suburban teen eyes --in fact there wouldn't be a more even-keeled look at the rural-vs.-suburb/city divide in horror until Tucker and Dale vs. Evil. 

The down-ramp of all that though is the usual 'get to the monster already' agitation, that is, unless we're wise enough to lean back and absorb the incredible lighting and lived-in detail, which we can more easily do with Shout's gorgeous new Blu-ray. Now we can see the full magic hour-heavy breadth of cinematographer Bojan Bazelli's genius, how he makes the outdoors seem like indoors, and vice versa, how he makes the backroad country seem pregnant with menace the way Dean Cundey did to the suburban streets in the original Halloween. The first sight of the old witch's cabin as the sun sets, for example: with its orange light shining through the windows, captures an uncanny stillness in the air, as if the whole natural world is hushed and waiting to see what old Ed Harley's gonna do. Using natural candle light and lanterns in rustic cabins, and eerie crosshatches of moonlight and diegetic headlights, flashlights, and lanterns for the outdoor nighttime shots, Bajelli conjures a very Halloween-ready mood that never really survived the journey to the small screen in previous video editions. Now we can savor how how the poetic-realist folktale touch is gradually applied, luring the story from rural revenge saga afternoon, to dark setting sun fairy tale, to nighttime blue-filter monster movie.  I don't mind that it seems to take forever to get started now that the photography glows so duskily and the details of the vast spooky graveyard pumpkin patch can be pored over like we're right down in the muck with Ed. Now too we can see the details of the old crone in her cabin (where on VHS it was all just an orange darkness): her old age makeup makes her look like Freddy Kruger's blind aunt crossed with Sir Roderick Femm in The Old Dark House (1932)!


The rest of the cast is pretty interesting too, now that some of the actors have become minor stars: Devon Odessa (Sharon in My So-Called Life) and Mayim Bialik are two of the barefoot backwoods children a-teasing their small brother with the Pumpkinhead poem chant (there's always one kid who's afraid to hear it. As Tracy, Cynthia Bain is luminous and resourceful: her youth and beauty in stark contrast to the dirt-stained roughness of the locals and even the lesser mortal sheen of her fellow teen co-stars. The pastel 80s fashions and terrible headbands are guaranteed to provide uncomfortable shivers to anyone who remembers an anguished teenagerhood spent amidst Springsteen bandanas, jean jackets, aerobics wrist bands, and stone-washed seamless jeans. Me, now I rejoice to see them, signifiers as they are of pre-CGI monsters to come (vs. the CGI revolution of the early 90s, with its khakis.

But even then, the real reason to see the film is Henriksen, with his ever-strange otherworldly air working in full step with Bazelli's color filters to make the overly familiar backcountry milieu neither hostile nor friendly in conventional ways, but as uncanny as an alien landscape. That his character's southern accent comes out strongest when he's really angry or upset is the mark of a truly subtle actor, as if the rest of the time his Ed Harley is trying to mask his mountain man roots. Only great actors bother to fill their B-roles like this with such layered lived-in termite detail.

That said, if the film adds up to less than the sum of its parts it's because, perhaps, it tries to be too nuanced, it forgets its purpose along with the way. As with Hell House, it's not the kind of 'fun' ride that leads us to demand sequels (though they sure came). If the teens were cooler and the demon was loosed on them for some ridiculously small slight--one of them shoplifted a candy bar or something--it would chill us far more more, which is the point. Also, the idea that any boy wouldn't be keenly aware of the path of those motorbikes, wouldn't be asking to ride one, or at the very least be watching in awe as they jump, is just hard to believe. It would have worked far better if it was a stray bullet from a drunken backyard target practice or somethign. And it never makes sense why Harley wouldn't go to the cops, or his neighborhood drinking (or AA) buddies, especially him being a small business owner where success depends on being sociable and developing repeat customers, or that he wouldn't first try confronting the kids directly, taking revenge himself, or at the very least find some other recourse to be exhausted first. Not to make light of losing your kid, but no matter how aggrieved he got I don't think any man would leap to the demon conjuring option first, without even considering other saner options, especially when he well knows the consequences. Even worse is Harley's second guessing himself, trying to welsh after the first grisly murder, running back to the witch to demand she lift the spell, then to his neighbors to demand they help him kill it when that doesn't work. All this after he demanded they tell him where to find the witch in the first place and they wouldn't. I don't blame them a bit for keeping their doors barred to his pleas. You made your bed now lie in it, Ed Harley!

Such qualms might irk, but they might also melt away once one sees the film a few more times. Its earthy folktale aspect, its devotion to minute atmospheric detail (the lived-in dirt of the rural clothing and faces), its sparingly ominous synth music, the myriad facial expressions and unique movements of the monster, the eerie stillness in the exterior magic hour photography, the way the monster uses the lifeless bodies of its victims to smash in doors and windows, the way it travels with his own whirlwind of leaves, fog, and crackling lightning, it all adds up big time now that it can all be appreciated in its ultimate HD expression. 

Extras include a lively fun commentary track with the special effects guys, and you can tell they had a blast making the film and love pointing out all the strangely-placed puppeteer eye holes, and the cuts that alternate the monster between live-action puppet, stop motion miniature, mechanical head or arm, guy in a suit, and animatronic dummy, sometimes all in a single action. My favorite detail was hearing them point out that the guy wearing the monster suit in some of the walking scenes was deliberately trying to move in the style of Harryhausen's Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth (i.e. a human in a suit aping stop motion animation!) and that in certain spots his sneakers were visible and had to be masked out. There's also a dozen or so talking head interviews, including one with a moist-eyed, breathless, possibly insane Richard Weinman, some great VHS tape monster suit test runs, and a tribute to the late, great Winston.
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All in all, Shout's loving care (via their Scream Factory offshoot) and Blu-ray remastering help make these two minor horror films into 1080 HD works of art. Maybe in the end all the needless killing has been worth it, for we are living the dream of every movie lover who died before the advent of this format. I know I dreamt of such things as a monster lover kid. I even wrote a paper in junior high school advocating the importance of creating a widescreen TV, dreaming of perfect vivid picture and giant screens while reading Famous Monsters of Filmland instead of playing kickball --they always picked me last, so why wouldn't I spurn them?. I wonder if I'll have to pay some hellish price for my anamorphic HD Blu-ray wildest dream wishes coming true... Whatever it is, I'll pay it, Ed Harley!