Entity (2012) is a British supernatural tale written and directed by Steve Stone that mixes found-footage with more traditional, albeit hand-held camera work. Taking place in Siberia (though filmed in Northern England), it tells of a reality television show that investigates a location where authorities had found the bodies of dozens of unidentified people out in the wilderness. Accompanied by a medium, they soon find an abandoned government facility which houses disturbed and bitter spirits.
The film has capable performances and generates an effectively somber, unsettling mood. With a modest budget, the movie makes the most of its location. Nevertheless, it offers nothing new, has a predictable ending, and while I generally enjoy what is often described as “slow burn,” the pacing here is overly slow and we lose the urgency that we should be feeling from the characters. Speaking of these characters, those slow moments could have been filled with a bit more dialogue or something to give greater insight into them, but we really only learn about one of them. We know nothing of the others’ pasts and therefore have little from which to generate sympathy.
Entity has a few choice moments, but they don’t congeal to make a worthwhile viewing experience. It succeeds in creating a creepy atmosphere but does not provide enough story to justify it.
Troma Entertainment was founded by Lloyd Kaufman and Michael Herz in 1974 and has been known henceforth as the foremost purveyor of Z-movies – films of such low budget, standard, and taste that they don’t qualify even as B-films. And millions of horror fans have loved them for it. They have become the category standard by which all intentionally terrible movies are judged, which is a testament to their value as valid entertainment. As an eighties kid Troma movies were a rite of passage. Their overt nudity, violence, and surrealist mania was known among the playgrounds from kids whose older siblings had let them watch a beat up rental cassette. If you hadn’t seen a Troma film, you probably lied and said you had.
No Troma film was more well-known to us elementary schoolers than The Toxic Avenger (1984), an R-rated offering that oddly became even more popular with kids after it was made into an environmentalist children’s cartoon in the early 1990s called Toxic Crusaders. I can even remember the jingle that accompanied the toy line: “Toxic Crusaders – they’re gross, but they still get girls.” I think I still have some action figures somewhere. It’s similar to the unlikelihood of Rambo – a Vietnam vet who experiences violent flashbacks and who burned down a small American town – also becoming a cartoon hero in 1986. The Toxic Avenger represents the surprisingly uncommon coupling of the comic book superhero and horror. With an overflowing abundance of low-brow humor, gore and exploitation to fill it out, Toxie has since become Troma’s flagship icon.
As a kid I loved Troma films. They were beyond anything I had ever seen while still keeping to well-worn 1950s horror tropes; they were a combination of the bizarre and the comfortably familiar. They were intentionally bad movies that tried to cross into the so-bad-it’s-good realm, offering unapologetically crass entertainment. Troma movies are ones to watch when you’re in the right mood, and preferably with the right companions. The Toxic Avenger is certainly one of their films that still manages to hold viewers’ attention and even generates intentional laughs from its endearing, irresistible awfulness.
For those who don’t know, the movie tells of a skinny nerd who works as a janitor at a gym who gets harassed and pranked and ends up falling into a barrel of toxic waste – while wearing a pink tutu, of course. The radioactive chemicals result in deformities, super strength, and an unstoppable impulse to vanquish evil in all its forms. If that sounds like a plot you’d be interested in seeing on screen, even out of purely morbid curiosity, Toxie might be worth checking out for you. However, the movie is filled with cartoonish characters, terrible acting, worse dialogue, blatant stereotypes, gory but unconvincing special effects, and of course boobs. We even get hilarious dubbing. If that generates further interest, then Toxie is definitely worth checking out.
Troma movies aren’t for everyone. Most of the time, they aren’t even for me. But I’ve seen The Toxic Avenger many times over the years and I’m sure one day I’ll share it with my son so he can tell all the kids on the playground about the crazy-ass Troma film he just saw.
Movie Review – Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986)
The horror genre is no stranger to controversy, and one of the most controversial films of the 1980s is 1986’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. The film began when director John McNaughton was hired to helm a horror film for a meager budget. At first unsure of what to make, McNaughton came upon a 20/20 episode about the serial killer Henry Lee Lucas who was convicted of eleven murders and claimed (mostly unsubstantially) to have killed hundreds more. Taking inspiration from Lucas’s life and his outlandish claims, and his friendship with fellow killer Otis Toole, McNaughton crafted a loose adaptation that was disturbing in its realism. It was filmed on 16mm film in less than a month for only $110,000, and yet it shocked audiences upon its general release four years later, with its realistic portrayal of murder, and garnered an “X” from the MPAA, further cementing its base reputation.
Michael Rooker was a janitor when he was cast as Henry in his first film role. His performance sells the apathy and impulse of the killer. Other performances are memorable, if not completely strong, though Tracy Arnold, who plays Becky, Otis’s sister, is quite natural.
Henry’s Chicago seems devoid of law and order. It is a gritty concrete corpse that the characters occupy like insects, feasting on the weak like nature’s cruel creations. Henry kills on a whim but still functions in society, never standing out enough to draw suspicion. In one brilliant but disturbing sequence, the audience sees the murder of a family via a home video made by Henry and Otis like an early but effective found-footage snuff film. The two men sit lazily watching it from the couch. When it’s done, Otis rewinds it. When Henry asks what he’s doing, Otis says he wants to see it again, but this time he uses the slow motion feature.
There’s plenty here to make the audience uncomfortable, but the filmmaking is actually quite good and, in a way, compelling. Unlike most 1980s slashers, there’s no flair to these killings. Murder is quick and cathartic, and the fragility of life is fully displayed. Despite the increase in killings, Henry never seems close to being caught, and one can’t help but wonder how many murders go unsolved each year, and whether or not the stranger one sits beside at the bar has killed innocents without hesitation and is willing to do so again.
In a 2013 study in the Journal of Forensic Sciences two Belgian psychiatrists looked at the depictions of serial killers in film and found that most are entirely unrealistic, with a few notable exceptions. One of those was Henry, which they thought effectively fit the profile of common serial killers. They wrote: “Another realistic interesting example is Henry (inspired from Henry Lee Lucas)… in this film, the main, interesting theme is the chaos and instability in the life of the psychopath, Henry’s lack of insight, a powerful lack of empathy, emotional poverty, and a well-illustrated failure to plan ahead.”
Perhaps Henry disturbs so much because it offers a depraved truth devoid of the Hollywood tropes that so often soften the subject matter. It is visceral in its presentation and is a movie that, despite one’s wishes to the contrary, will stick with the viewer long after seeing it.
This review is part of the Daddy Dreadful review series.
Daddy Dreadful Review – A Halloween Puppy (2012)
The internet, as we all know, is a cesspool of belching, bursting hyperbole. While YouTube comments are a fervent breeding ground for trolls, internet movie reviews fare little better, and it doesn’t take long for any sane person to begin ignoring user reviews with titles like “worst movie ever!” Generally, I try to approach my own reviews as maturely and as fact-based as possible, for I’ve come to realize that even most bad films are made with the best of intentions. So it is with this level of awareness that I proclaim that 2012’s A Halloween Puppy is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. As a dedicated horror fan I am accustomed to sifting through bad films in order to find that diamond in the rough – it’s a process that can be fun when approached with the right attitude. Therefore, I’m no stranger to bad films, but A Halloween Puppy, also known as A Magic Puppy, is perhaps the most transparently lazy movie I’ve had the displeasure to watch, and that’s saying something.
This low-budget feature quickly outlives its welcome in its attempt to tell the tired tale of a spell gone wrong that turns a guy into a (female) dog. If 1959’s The Shaggy Dog took a dump on celluloid, you’d at least understand why it’s shitty. But here we get a litany of reused footage, awkward and static camera angles, blue filters in obvious daylight to stand in for night, atrocious acting, and a script that hardly qualifies to be referred to as such. The advertising stresses the appearance of Susan Olsen from The Brady Bunch, but her dull cameo won’t warm the cockles of nostalgic hearts. More interesting to me was Kristine DeBell as the mother, who I immediately recognized from 1976’s Alice in Wonderland: An X-Rated Musical Fantasy and to a lesser extent, Meatballs (1979). Understandably, the first of those films required some additional explanation for my wife. By far the most sincere performance was from Muffin the dog who at least didn’t need a reason for eating the grass, unlike DeBell.
Directed by Mary Crawford… wait, no, that’s a lie. Crawford is a pseudonym for David DeCoteau who has churned out a seemingly endless stream of schlocky, micro-budget horror flicks over the years, particularly the homoerotic “1313” series which appears to fill a niche exploitation market that craves male models running around in their briefs. Recently, however, DeCoteau has turned to making talking animal holiday films that generally have very misleading covers, featuring pets that never appear in the actual film. Even more so than his campy adult-targeted gay-themed films, these are purely created to suck the money from parents’ wallets, and that they’re marketed to children actually makes them, in my assessment, more distasteful.
Recommended Age: Adults – good humored, under the influence, and ready to collectively laugh at the screen. Final Thoughts: Absolutely terrible. Not at all recommended. However, David DeCoteau knows his schlock, and for adult audiences I do recommend his informative short commentaries on YouTube for the “Trailers From Hell” web series.
Zombeavers (2014) – wait, read that title again. If that word combination does nothing to spark your interest in seeing this film, you are obviously not the target audience. Clearly, the film is a horror-comedy, and it is one which combines The Killer Shrews (1959) with Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Evil Dead II (1987). The first of those films is often a title mentioned when one feels the need to deride the terribly cheap drive-in movies of the 1950s (e.g., dogs dressed up as giant shrews), while the latter two movies are held as a modern classics, and rightly so. But I enjoy them all and love the idea of combining them into a modern, campy B-movie. In this respect, Zombeavers, directed by Jordan Rubin, doesn’t disappoint.
While most of the characters are unlikable and obnoxious, the beaver hand-puppets, ample gore, and practical effects are enough to satisfy any good-humored genre fan, and a few of the many jokes are actually quite funny. Plus, just when the notes begin to grow stale, especially as tired horror tropes are played for comedic effect, the script is smart enough to add some twists to keep things interesting, getting increasingly absurd in a comical, entertaining way.
Zombeavers is not high art and it doesn’t try to be. It’s a B-movie that wears its bloody beaver heart on its sleeve, and I can’t help but find that endearing.
The Fly (1958), starring the legendary Vincent Price in a rather secondary role, is a notable example of the shock cinema of the late 1950s. It tends to cause two different reactions among viewers as it walks a fine line between schlocky fun and unsettling science-fiction horror. Some scenes which could easily be funny, such as the reveal of the fly head, still have the ability to effectively catch viewers off guard. Others, such as the little fly with the human head shrilly screaming “help meee!” on the spider web, can make one chuckle while still getting under one’s skin, mostly because the actors play it completely straight (although Price would later recall trying to film the scene and he and fellow actor Herbert Marshall bursting out laughing at the flailing animatronic figure that they used as a reference point).
Beautifully filmed with vibrant colors, the story of a scientist who accidentally turns himself into a giant fly is a parable about the dangers of interfering with the order of things, and of the unrelenting cruelty of nature. It is a theme that had been widely exploited since both the atomic age and the Holocaust made Americans fear the side-effects of science run amok. While the movie is a little slow and subdued in places, the direction and acting keeps everything grounded, never letting it stray too far into either camp or dullness. It remains determined to present a character-driven story as David Hedison, who plays the scientist both in and out of the fly make-up, gives a sympathetic performance.
Directed by Kurt Neumann, this film would be his biggest box office success. Unfortunately, he would not live to see it. He died of natural causes after the premiere but before the film’s general release. Perhaps more famous than this version, The Fly would be remade and re-imagined in 1986 by David Cronenberg with some of the most memorable scenes of body horror ever committed to film. This original 1958 production is very much a product of its time and is, generally, best enjoyed as such.
You’re Next, directed by Adam Wingard and written by Simon Barrett, quickly made a reputation for itself when it first premiered in 2011. As a home invasion film, the aesthetic owes a lot to 2008’s The Strangers – inspiration can clearly be seen in some superficial ways, such as the shot compositions, the use of music, the lighting, and of course the masked intruders. However, whereas as The Strangers was a straight-forward, self-serious slow-burn, You’re Next is a romp of gore and bloody antics.
The plot involves a family reunion at a house deep in the countryside. Two wealthy parents have invited their adult children and their significant others to gather for a long weekend, but almost immediately find themselves assailed by masked men wielding crossbows, machetes, and axes. However, one of the guests – the girlfriend of one of the son’s – is surprisingly capable and competent in this intense situation and begins to fight back like a blood-bathed Kevin McCallister.
The plot is too predictable to be scary or shocking, but the gore is practical, abundant, and well-utilized. The film gets rolling quickly and invites the audience to come along for the ride, giving us one of the most memorable final girls we’ve had in years. Really, the majority of the film is generally run-of-the-mill, but the final act makes up for much of that.
There are some flaws. The shaky cam is overused and gratuitous and we learn almost nothing about most of the characters. Having the crux of the film involve close family members requires exceptional acting to portray the grief of losing loved ones, and few of the performers, though some may be notable within the genre, are able to accomplishing this. You never really get a sense that this is a family with history. One actor, however, should be mentioned: Ti West, one of horror’s current notable directors whose films include The House of the Devil (2009), The Innkeepers (2011), and The Sacrament (2013), self-referentially plays a pretentious filmmaker.
In terms of a home invasion film, You’re Next is heavy on gore but light on scares. It’s a fantasy fulfillment we all have (at least I hope it’s not just me) of taking out intruders with extreme prejudice. It’s that body-count kind of slasher where you look forward to the next kill to see what practical effects will be employed, but not because you care a thing about the characters.
This review is part of the Daddy Dreadful review series.
Daddy Dreadful Review – The Worst Witch (1986)
I can’t help but to have a bit of anxiety when revisiting the influential films of my childhood even as I am excited to watch them with my son and see them anew through his eyes. Ultimately, it may be disheartening to have my fond memories tainted by the viewing of a film that clearly hasn’t aged well. Of course, nostalgia can carry us a long way, and I have to assume that is largely the case with the enduring popularity of 1986’s The Worst Witch. My wife watched this movie every Halloween season on a well-worn VHS recorded from television throughout her childhood. As we sat down to watch it with my son (age three) – my first viewing and his – she texted her two brothers a screen shot and they too felt compelled to find a copy and watch it that same night.
The Worst Witch is based on the Jill Murphy’s children’s book of the same name. It stars Fairuza Balk in her second of three films involving witches in her career, the first being 1985’s Return to Oz and the next 1996’s The Craft. Also starring are Diana Rigg, Charlotte Rae, and Tim Curry. The film was a collaboration between HBO and UK television, and the production quality is clearly minimal. The editing is shoddy and the story, especially the climax, is weak. There are three songs of varying quality: the first is cute and probably the best, the second catchy for kids but Charlotte Rae certainly wasn’t going to win any vocalist awards for it, and third one, performed by a confused-looking Tim Curry before a green screen, is an acid-trip of 1980’s kitsch. Rock Horror this ain’t. In addition to the worst witch, the film may also showcase the worst lyrics:
Your dentist could turn into a queen, Has anybody seen my tambourine?
Of course, none of this mattered to my son. He loved Aggie’s song and sang it for days. I thought he’d be bored with the fairly slow pace of the movie but he asked to watch it again and again as the month of October went along. It’s a harmless film with nothing objectionable. I have to admit that there is a minor charm to all, and seeing the similarities that J.K Rowling would employ in the Harry Potter series can on its own occupy the focus of one’s viewing. As a bat lover my eyes widened when one girl briefly walked in with a live megabat hanging from her hand, and I wish we could have seen more of that. My wife recognizes the film’s shortcomings but, knowing it word for word, doesn’t adore it any less. Who am I to shit in their punch bowl?
Recommended Age: 3+ Final Thought: Soft recommendation. If you’re nostalgic for it, indulge to your heart’s content. No judgement here. For the kids it’s probably best for the preschool crowd before they graduate to Hogwarts. If you’ve never seen it before and want to, you might want a hard drink handy.
I loved the Curious George books as a young kid, attracted as I was to the illustrations and the bold yellow which swathed the covers. It wasn’t until my son came along that I saw the troublesome monkey in any other media, and thus far the animated features celebrating the seasons are what we’ve watched. Curious George: A Halloween Boo Fest (2013) served as a great introduction to the Halloween season for my son – it’s got pumpkins galore, music, the legend of a hat-kicking scarecrow named No Noggin, and a celebration of “boo” scares.
There was nothing that frightened my son though the movie definitely left an impression. He enjoyed jumping around yelling “boo!” afterward and mentioned “No Noggin” each time we put on our hats. The story is appropriate for preschoolers and, being under an hour, doesn’t outstay its welcome for the adults.
Recommended Age: 3+ Final Thought: Recommended for the preschool crowd.
Mario Bava is a legend of Italian horror. During the 1960s and 1970s he helped to pioneer both giallo and slasher films. Before then, throughout the 1950s, he was an effective cinematographer who did some milestone jobs, often taking over when other directors walked away from projects. Two of these movies are considered the first horror and the first science fiction entries in Italian cinema, respectively.
But it was in 1960 that Bava received his first solo directing project, and he chose to loosely adapt Nikolai Gogol’s horror short story, “Viy”. The result was Black Sunday (1960), today considered a Gothic classic, but at the time was considered extremely graphic, so much so that it was banned in the UK until 1968.
The plot revolves around the resurrection of a vampire-witch who was murdered centuries ago, and who is now seeking revenge on her executioners’ descendants. The plot is admittedly thin and at times muddled, but it’s also not really the point. Filmed purposefully in black and white, much like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) which released the same year, Bava’s skills as a cinematographer are on full display. He creates rich compositions and cleverly employs shadow and light to announce characters and elements. He understands the way the eye moves along the screen and exploits it for surprising reveals. The story serves the visuals, not the other way around.
The film still has the power the shock, especially its opening sequence where a mask of spikes is nailed into the witch’s face. The effects are also still impressive, such as the reanimation of a skeleton as Bava plays with light to make it appear as though eyes are being formed in the hollow sockets. Old school techniques stand beside the new, like using make-up and special lens filters to make it appear that an actor’s skin is changing, used famously with Fredric March in 1932’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
No less importantly, the film marked the debut of Barbara Steele, a British actress who would go on to become a horror icon through the next two decades, and who is still making horror movies to this day. Some of her more notable entries include The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) with Vincent Price and a famous bathtub scene in David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1975).
The pace of the story can be slow moving, which may challenge modern viewers. Also, as was typical with Italian films, the voices are dubbed, sometimes not terribly well. Even Barbara Steele, who is speaking English, is dubbed over with an American accent. But Black Sunday has a tremendous amount to offer for those with the patience to appreciate it. It feels like a Gothic horror from the 1930s infused, or updated, with a taste of the gore and sexuality that would harken the more visceral horror of the coming decades. Any list of great Gothic horror films would be incomplete without this film’s admission.
The Mirror (2014) is a British found footage film that was written and directed by Edward Boase. Boase was inspired by a 2013 news article that told of a mirror being blamed for its owners’ run of bad luck. Made on a micro-budget of only £20,000, the story centers on three flat-mates who buy a purportedly haunted mirror on Ebay and set up cameras in the hopes of winning The James Randi Educational Foundation’s Million Dollar Challenge, which until 2015 was a real challenge that offered one million dollars to whomever could scientifically demonstrate the paranormal. It was tool meant to debunk the validity of such claims and no one was able to successfully claim it.
Hoping to get rich quick, the three friends hang the unassuming mirror in their apartment and it isn’t long before one of them, Matt (Joshua Dickinson), begins sleepwalking and acting stranger and stranger. Essentially, this is the whole movie – we see Matt quietly wander the flat at night, sometimes being menacing, while those around him make profoundly stupid decisions. It becomes tedious and tiresome in equal measure, both from the film’s execution and from the thick-headedness of the characters. For instance, their apartment is broken into and they immediately blame the mirror instead of calling the cops, even though the front door was ajar when they returned and the mirror has thus far done nothing. Did the mirror trash the place and then run to the store for a pack of cigs? When their friend suddenly goes blind do they call an ambulance from the phone that is clearing mounted on the wall in the hallway? Nah, they just put him to bed and tell him to rest so they can fret endlessly about not knowing what to do.
Other questions abound: Do they work? Is Matt the only one who knows how to lock a door? Are they really going to run around the house panicking, searching for their lost and possibly homicidal friend with microphone equipment clipped to their pajamas?
So little happens with the lackluster mirror – I’ve seen creepier mirrors in Home Goods – that it becomes irritating each time they remind us it’s there and is supposedly causing these issues. We know that the mirror is, for the purposes of a horror film, supposed to be haunted, but this conclusion is continually reached through such asinine reasoning by the characters that they come to perfectly represent the very impressionable, superstitious people that The James Randi Educational Foundation seeks to expose and/or educate. I’m confident this was not the film’s intention. They may be right about the mirror because this is a horror film, but their methods in reaching this conclusion are anything but logical or reasonable. Consider their acquisition of the mirror – they purchase it on Ebay taking at face value the seller’s insistence that it’s haunted and then devote their time and resources to prove that unfounded claim. Clearly, they aren’t geniuses and would likely make very poor investment partners. With a little tweak to the script such as making the mirror a family heirloom with a legendary past their focus and dedication might have been a little easier to swallow.
While the actors do a decent job with what little they’re given, there’s nothing to recommend The Mirror. I applaud the filmmaker for making a movie with so few resources, but what is offered will be repetitive and stale to any but the newest of horror watchers. If you’ve seen the movie’s poster, you already know the lone possibly horrific scene in the movie. The same poster warns the potential viewer “Don’t Look…” That’s good advice.
Eerie Tales (1919) is a German film released right on the cusp of the Expressionist movement, predating The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1920) by only a few months, and one can clearly see German cinema moving in that direction through this movie.
This film is one of the earliest examples of the horror anthology, perhaps even the first. The story revolves around a bookshop in which three portraits – the Devil, Death, and a prostitute – come to life and read scary stories from the stacks of books. The three main actors play both the portraits and all of the lead roles in the five stories, and they look like they’re having a blast doing so. The tone of the film is mirthful and a lot of the joy in watching Eerie Tales lies in seeing the actors trying different roles. Most of the stories are the predictable macabre tales of the time, and of course includes one by Edgar Allan Poe. As they nearly all involve a love triangle of sorts, the plots tend to blur together. The movie certainly creaks in places, but overall it’s a nicely paced romp for those acclimated to the filming styles of the time period, particularly the limitations.
Like with The Student of Prague (1913), gaining insight into the people involved makes the work more pleasurable to watch. Their stories tell a great deal about Germany between the wars, and their individual lives are generally fascinating. First is the film’s director, Richard Oswald, who would over the course of his career direct over 100 pictures (he was more prolific than good, unfortunately). Most significantly, in the same year he made Eerie Tales, he also directed the profoundly important Different from the Others, featuring the first gay character written for cinema. What makes this film so amazing is that the portrayal of the homosexual is entirely sympathetic. Not surprisingly, the Nazi censors would end up destroying most copies, but fragments do still exist. When the National Socialists overran Austria, Oswald, being Jewish, fled to America and had a waning career in Hollywood.
And who played the gay character in Different from the Others? None other than Conrad Veidt, who plays Death in Eerie Tales and who is one of my personal film heroes. Truly, Veidt is the only actor that can rival Lon Chaney in his work in silent horror. Fascinated by acting at an early age, he hid his passion from his disapproving father but was quietly encouraged by his supportive mother. In World War I he took part in the Battle of Warsaw but contracted jaundice and pneumonia. After recuperating he was still deemed physically unfit and was discharged from the army, and so he tried his hand at theater, eventually being hired as an extra by the renowned German Theater run by Max Reinhardt. His skills were quickly recognized and his roles increased. He made dozens of films, including of course Eerie Tales, before getting his international breakout role as Cesare in Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920). He would become the second-highest paid actor in Germany (behind Emil Jannings) and star in the horror films Waxworks (1924), which won him the admiration of American actor John Barrymore, The Hands of Orlac (1924), The Student of Prague (1926), and Paul Leni’s American masterpiece The Man Who Laughs (1928), which would inspire Bob Kane to create the Joker.
Committed to tolerance and liberalism, Veidt was a staunch anti-Nazi and outspoken enemy of Hitler. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Propaganda, recognized his value and offered an Aryan certification to his half-Jewish wife if he would sign an oath of loyalty. Veidt refused and tried to leave for England but was placed under house arrest by the Gestapo and even ordered executed, but was eventually allowed to leave in order to avoid an international incident. Though not Jewish, once arriving in Britain he signed his religious affiliation as “Jew” and made a pro-Jewish film, thumbing his nose at his homeland’s anti-Semitism. In the era of talkies Veidt’s accent meant that he would be offered many roles playing Nazis, most notably in Casablanca (1942), and he had no qualms about taking them and revealing the horrific nature of the National Socialists. All the while, nearly all the money he made would go to the British war effort. Tragically, he died suddenly of a heart attack on a Hollywood golf course at the age of 50. In the 1920s he was known in Germany as the “Demon of the Silver Screen,” but in addition to being a brilliant actor Veidt was a true hero at a time when such moral fortitude was most needed yet was in such short supply.
The second male of the film’s acting trio playing the Devil is Reinhold Schunzel, who would go on to direct extremely popular films in Germany, so popular that despite his Jewish background the Nazis would name him an “honorary Aryan,” meaning they wouldn’t kill him if he kept making good films. That wouldn’t stop them from interfering, and in 1937 he went to Hollywood where his directing career sputtered. He eventually went back to acting, but after the war he carried the stigma of having stayed and worked in film with the blessings of the Nazis and found work increasingly hard to come by.
Lastly we have the role of the prostitute, and for Anita Berber the part probably wasn’t a stretch. During the 1910s Berber became a popular exotic nude dancer and quickly made a reputation for herself as a voracious lover of men and women. She became the embodiment of Berlin’s debauchery during the Weimar Republic. Many today would never believe that before the Nazis rose to power Berlin was arguably the most liberal and hedonistic city in Europe, mainly a result of the postwar economic downturn attracting foreigners with money looking for fun. Berber obliged. She was known to perform stark nude, the dances named after amphetamines, and was often seen walking around Berlin with her pet monkey wrapped around her neck. Marlene Dietrich could be counted among her lovers. She continued to dance throughout the 1920s while imbibing in copious amounts of alcohol and cocaine. Those substances would rack her body and, like the original candle in the wind, she would die of consumption by the age of 29 in 1928, but not before she would be captured for posterity in a famous painting by Otto Dix in 1925.
The Dancer Anita Berber by Otto Dix
On its own, Eerie Tales is a middling effort. But knowing the performers elevates the experience, at least for me. It’s great to see these people working together with such clear bacchanal joy, especially knowing that the dark cloud of fascism is moving ever closer and that so much of what they embody would no longer be tolerated, including tolerance itself.
Oswald would flee. Veidt would defy. Schunzel would collaborate. And Berber would burn out as a symbol of a dying age. Eerie tales, indeed.
Any late-comer who watches The Changeling (1980) will have to contend with its considerable reputation, at least in the more discerning circles in which it is praised. Based on supposedly true events that writer Russell Hunter experienced while he was living in the Henry Treat Rogers Mansion in Denver, Colorado, the film won the first ever Genie Award for Best Canadian Film as well as awards in many other categories. Martin Scorsese placed it on his list of scariest movies of all time.
The plot follows a musical composer (George C. Scott) who is torn by grief, having just lost his wife and daughter, as he relocates to Seattle to concentrate on his music and to begin lecturing at a local university. He rents an old mansion owned by the historical society because of its music room and soon starts experiencing loud bangs and doors opening on their own. It isn’t long before he realizes the ghost of a child killed eighty years prior haunts the place, whose murder was covered up, and to further matters there may be a connection to a wealthy old senator.
The Changeling is filmed beautifully and the sets are terrific. The mansion is huge and exquisitely carved, yet manages to still feel claustrophobic and foreboding. The musical score is enchanting, often appropriately reflecting the main character’s piano numbers. The script unravels a very good plot as the secrets regarding the ghost’s origins are revealed, and the history-nerd in me is always a sucker for horror movies in which the characters are seen searching through old documents and libraries in the hopes of finding answers. The cinematography, too, is impressive and the shots well-framed.
There are definitely some scenes that will linger in the mind after viewing, particularly the séance. The most haunting for me is the one where a mother describes her daughter screaming in the night that a boy was trying to crawl out from her bedroom floor. It’s the imagining of the scene that is more effective than if it had been shown. And the wheelchair scene is of course iconic, if admittedly a bit silly.
Is The Changeling deserving of all its praise after thirty-five years? In many respects it is, but it’s certainly not without its flaws. The film takes a little too long getting to the ghost story – the horseback riding scene could easily have been edited out, for instance – and some of the main character’s actions are questionable (such as hiding information and evidence). Keeping in mind the memorable scenes mentioned above, some scares are certainly less effective and clichéd, and the director has a habit of irritatingly cutting to another scene just when a powerful image is beginning to take shape. The music, which I praised earlier, can nevertheless at times be overbearing and a distraction. I sense an influence from Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977), with its constant assault of noise and colors, and it appears here that the director attempts a more subdued form of that approach to varied success. (The director is Peter Medak, a Hungarian who fled his home country in 1956 during the Hungarian Revolution.)
George C. Scott’s performance has often been hailed, and while it didn’t affect me personally I can see why others might be moved by it, and the supporting cast does well enough, including Scott’s wife, Trish Van Devere. It was also nice to see Melvyn Douglas playing the aged senator. He would go on to star in another ghost movie, Ghost Story (1981), the following year just before his passing. At the beginning of his career he had starred in James Whale’s Old Dark House (1932), one of my favorite horror films of the 1930s and an early example of campy humor being infused into the genre. As a genre fan it’s great to see an accomplished actor with such a long résumé bookend his career with notable horror entries. And for those fellow Trekkers out there, the guy who plays De Witt is John Calicos, who played the first Klingon in the original series and who would memorably reprise that role in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
The Changeling is a good ghost yarn with many strong aspects. It attempts to tell a creepy ghost tale with class and relative minimalism. In my opinion, it has been surpassed by subsequent haunting movies, and calling it one of the scariest films of all time is a considerable overstatement. Nevertheless, it’s still a classic worthy of respect and worth seeking out.
Killer Mermaid (2014), also known as Nymph and Mamula, is the first ever Serbian creature feature. The director, Milan Todorovic, also directed the first Serbian zombie film, Zone of the Dead (2009). A horror concept like a killer mermaid was once laughable, until of course we saw something like it in Cabin in the Woods (2012). Nevertheless, when you go into a creature feature like this, you have a pretty good idea of what to expect, and those expectations are never high.
Honestly, that may be to best way to approach this film, as it’s more well-done than one would at first suppose. The film begins like a B-movie exploitation flick, with a naked girl and a typical slasher-style killing, but this appears more like a ploy to get the audience’s attention as it tries to skirt away from a reliance on those tropes for the rest of the film. The first half of the movie is actually devoted to character development and flushing out their connections, which succeeds only partially. The mermaid doesn’t even enter in until the second half of the film, and her scenes are actually very impressive. The cinematography, too, is very appealing. It is shot on location at the island of Mamula, which is uninhabited and houses a nineteenth-century fort which, during WWII, was converted into a concentration camp by Italian fascists and became infamous for the tortures which occurred there.
This is all not to say that this is a great film. The acting is shaky and we spend a lot of time with characters just running around an island trying to hide from a crazed killer, sometimes making stereotypically poor decisions. Also, for some reason the movie focuses on two American girls, though one clearly has an accent (Ukrainian) which is never explained.
But really, the film tries harder than I would have given it credit for, and I was never bored while watching it. Instead, I wanted to see more of the mermaid, which is effectively only teased at for the majority of the film. She is actually creepy, which given the premise one can imagine is no small feat.
Killer Mermaid is an entertaining ride that just might surprise some genre fans in the mood for something light and fun. It’s a B-movie that doesn’t try to be an A-film, but that doesn’t condescend to its audience either.
1918’s Eyes of the Mummy Ma is a German film which, despite its title, features no mummies. Instead we get Emil Jannings in blackface playing the role of an evil Egyptian who hypnotizes a young woman, the Ma of the title, played by Pola Negri. Jannings’ makeup is applied haphazardly, leaving exposed gleaming white hands, arms and shoulders. I don’t expect cultural sensitivity in films of this era, but I expect a little more effort from filmmakers to assist the audience in suspending disbelief. For her part, Ma spends the film fainting and doing awkward “exotic” dance numbers. The story is too weak to warrant its feature length run-time, and pacing is a serious issue (thank the movie devils they resolve that, for most films, in the next decade).
The director, Ernst Lubitsch, would go on to earn great respect with his talky films, including 1940’s The Shop Around the Corner, which my wife and I enjoy watching during the Yuletide season. But this early effort, and one of his only forays into horror, is easily forgettable, and it makes me sad that films like this survive while those like Tod Browning’s London After Midnight (1927) are probably lost forever. This would be the first of many successful collaborations between Lubitsch and Negri, who was the first European film star to be invited to Hollywood where she would have a thriving career for the remainder of the silent era.
Emil Jannings had an enormously successful career both before and during the Third Reich, at one point being Germany’s highest paid actor. He would star in other horror classics, notably in Paul Leni’s Waxworks (1924) and as Mephisto in F.W. Murnau’s Faust (1926). He starred in numerous Nazi propaganda films and was even named by Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels an “Artist of the State” in 1936. After the war, Janning’s was unable to work due to denazification and he retired to Austria where he died of cancer in 1947.
The Revenant Review 