The House on Haunted Hill

Without seeing it. I’d always dismissed 1959’s The House on Haunted Hill as a duller-witted cousin of its relative contemporary, 1963’s The Haunting, directed by Robert Wise and based on Shirley Jackson’s excellent novel The Haunting of Hill House. And while The Haunting is more psychologically rich, and has some moments of terror that Haunted Hill can’t match -- that pounding on the door! -- I finally caught the William Castle-directed movie last weekend for Halloween. I shouldn’t have written it off, because man, it’s a pip.

Vincent Price is Frederick Loren, a millionaire who, along with his wife, played by Carol Ohmart, has invited five strangers to spend the night at a haunted house, with the potential of earning a substantial sum of money. One of the strangers is Elisha Cook’s Pritchard, who has a family history with the house, and walks in terrified. The others -- a secretary at Loren’s company, a pilot, a gossip columnist, a doctor -- all have reasons for needing a lot of money, quickly. And at once point they’re told that there’s a lump sum of money that the survivors of the night will split, giving them a reason to off each other.

And then Vincent Price hands everyone a loaded handgun.

What’s so much fun about The House on Haunted Hill is that there are so many reasons these characters should be fearing for their lives, even without the intervention of the supernatural. The guests have a financial motive for murder. The married hosts, while preparing for the party, have also told each other in no uncertain terms that they’d like to see the other dead. And there’s a vat of deadly acid in the basement! Pritchard (Elisha Cook is so good in this!) tells everyone, almost mesmerized by the morbidity, “It completely dissolves flesh and hair.” A little rat skeleton floats to the bubbling surface.

And then, of course, there are the hauntings themselves. A ceiling drips blood. An old woman appears out of nowhere. A character who has died is later seen floating outside one of the guests’ window. Decapitated heads appear in the darnedest places. Are these plants meant to scare the rubes, or are they genuine supernatural manifestations? Could be column A, could be column B -- the movie plays this close to the vest for the longest time. But with all the backstabbing and suspicion from the living, ghosts are just gilding the funeral lillies.

Rob

Oooh, Witchy Woman

Elvira has an important message for you. Especially if you're a voter in Delaware.



Elvira's Movie Macabre is showing at 2am on Fridays and 1am on Sundays on WPIX in New York and WPHL in Philly... more local listings are here. (Pdf download.)

Rob

2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams

Last night, Kathy & I went to a screening of the east coast premiere of Tim Sullivan's horror-comedy 2001 Maniacs: Field of Screams. Tim's a Metuchen guy, and he came back to him hometown (and the Forum Theatre) to debut his most recent gorefest.

And a festival it is: The town of Pleasant Valley, Georgia, holds an annual "Guts 'n' Glory Jamboree" in which northerners are duped into their little town and are murdered and eaten as payback for the slaughter of 2001 town residents during the Civil War. (Oops, sorry, the War Between the States. Please don't eat me, cannibal Confederates.) But this year, when the sheriff decides not to allow the Jamboree to continue, the band of creepy hicks and inbreds (led by The Devil's Regects' Bill Moseley and Lin Shaye from There's Something About Mary, who plays the deliciously overt-the-top Granny) decides to take its slaughtershow on the road. Which is how they encounter the cast and crew of  Road Rascals, a thinly veiled mockup of Paris Hilton & Nicole Ritchie's The Simple Life, stuck in Iowa with two flat tires.

After circling the crew of Yankees (though as one guy points out, they're really from California) like sharks for a while, the Maniacs start killing them one by one, and then, eventually, in packs. I like a horror movie with a large cast -- there's plenty of people that can die, instead of killing the same poor schlubs over and over.

One thing about this movie: Leave any sense of racial and gender sensitivity at the door. I mean, it's a horror movie, so human dignity really isn't on the agenda. Everyone here, Maniac and Hollywood creep alike, is a stereotype, or is treated as one by the Maniacs. Part of that is just the obviousness of the writing (horror isn't a genre that rewards subtlety), and part is because Sullivan clearly enjoys poking a finger where it hurts. Some of this is eye-rolling; other parts are quite a bit more unsettling. When a black man participates in a carnival-style lynching of a black woman -- not because she's black, but because she's a northerner, though when someone says "northerner," they're cautioned not to use the "N-word" -- you know that Sullivan is deliberately crossing as many lines as he can, just to see what he can get away with. And all the while, you're watching thinking "he's not really going to do this, is he? He can't do that!" And for a moment you think Sullivan has pulled away from it at the last minute, and you realize that the reprieve doesn't make it better. And then...

Look, I don't know what to think of this. Sullivan's clearly using racially charged imagery, but I don't think he's trying to do so in a racist manner. He's trying to provoke, though I don't know to what end. There doesn't seem much point to the scene other than one more stomach-churning set piece. I'm not sure what he's trying to say. I didn't enjoy the scene. But at the same time, I can't stop thinking about it. (Out of all the killings, it's also the least bloody; I get the sense that for all the glibness of its setup, Sullivan isn't treating this as a punchline.)

Anyway, enough of that. Suffice it to say that there are plenty of stereotypes on display here, and most of them get slaughtered -- though none in quite so historically ugly a fashion. And in general, if you like horror movies and lots of red squirting everywhere, if you're willing to overlook clumsy (intentionally clumsy, I think) stereotypes, and if you like girls taking their tops off (since that happens a lot, too), you'll possibly like this movie. But I don't think you'll like that scene. I doubt you're intended to.

Rob

Abusement Park

Last weekend, Kathy and I headed south to the Monster-Mania horror convention, hooking up with a friend we hadn't seen in years, and eventually sharing an elevator with Gary & Jake Busey. (I get the feeling that if Gary Busey crosses your path, you're jinxed, but I crossed paths with him a second time, hopefully nixing the jinx.)

While we were there, we went to the premiere screening of an as-yet-unreleased film, Closed for the Season. It wasn't remotely good. Which is fine -- sometimes (especially with horror films) "good" isn't precisely what you're looking for.

But what you're looking for is usually better than this.

It's a haunted amusement park story, with Aimee Brooks as The Girl, Damien Maffei as The Guy, and Joe Unger as The Carny. (The character's names are actually Kristy, James, and...  well, the Carny, but they're hardly names you need to know.) Apparently the amusement park is angry at being abandoned after a kid flew off a roller coaster 20 years ago and impaled himself on a tree and just lay there with a severed spine for hours (days?), and years ago Kristy lost a stuffed teddy bear there, and... hell, there's no way to explain this. The movie tries, every now and then, and when it does, it becomes impossible to focus. If you try too hard, your brain will turn into Mike and Ikes.

What's happening is that the amusement part is making Kristy and James hallucinate horrible things that they were afraid of in the amusement park when they were kids. There's the Lake Monster, the alligator wrestler, the notion that mobsters buried people under the rides. There's the giant Civil War soldier who hung people high up in trees until their flesh was picked clean and they became just bones, bleaching in the sun. And there's the creepy carny, dressed like a (creepy) clown. Sometimes he has a backup band.

All the hallucinations give the filmmaker (writer-directer Jay Woelfel) an opportunity to film all the gore scenes he wants (such as, say, an alligator ripping off someone's leg) without having to deal with any of the consequences. Problem is, when these events have no consequences, they also lose any of their effect on the audience. What's the point of watching, if nothing that happens matters? Furthermore, with all the emphasis on disorientation -- the characters are always trying to escape the park, but it never lets them -- it would be good to have some sort of handle on what the baseline reality is. Without that, the action becomes a confusing, muddled mess.

Complicating matters, at some point the characters split off into their own evil selves (in evil clown makeup, natch). In a completely unnecessary scene , we get to see Good Kristy getting raped by Bad James and the Carny, while Bad Kristy (and later, Good Kristy, because it's a hallucination) look on. (Also, her beloved stuffed bear gets kinda rape-y, as well.) This scene only exists--like most scenes in Closed for the Season, it has no bearing on the plot--because the writer/director thought it would be awesome. It's not. It's simply a gratuitous and ugly scene in what is otherwise a nonsensical, unentertaining trifle.

Plus: It's two hours long. It goes on and on, and every ending is a false one. Just when you think they've ridden all the rides and visited all the attractions, there's one more thing they have to check off their haunted to-do list. Their ride on the Ferris wheel -- earlier described as "the world's fastest" -- had all the excitement of cleaning the gutters, but none of the danger. If I'd had a box of Sno-Caps with me, I would have used the nonpareils to saw away at my own wrists.

Rob

Hey Mister President

Sometime in November, when Barack Obama was elected president, some of my friends and family members asked if I'd be going after Obama when I thought he was wrong, just as I went after Bush. (The fact remains, though, that I'm no bulldog -- the last few years of Bush didn't see as much fire from me as the first years. Ya get worn down, is what I'm saying.)

Well, here's one of those times.

There have been a number of things in recent days that I'm not happy about. I'm not entirely satisfied with Obama's handling of the torture photos, nor the dismissal of the idea of prosecutions for torture. I think our moral standing is the greatest force we have as a nation, and it erodes when we don't police our own. I understand the desire to avoid further inflaming the factions in the Middle East who would point to those photos as evidence of war crimes, rather than pointing to the release of the photos as evidence that the war crimes have ceased. That's a subtle point, and one liable to be lost on a lot of people. I get that, and I'm a lot more inclined to trust Barack Obama's judgement on these matters than Bush and Cheney's. But there's a principle that makes old horror movies come alive in the way that new ones seldom do: The most terrifying thing of all is that which is unseen. By withholding the pictures, anything can be in them. Better, I think, to have concrete photos to look at than to let imaginations run wild.

But that isn't what I'd intended to write about. It's this: The majority of the country believes that gays should be able to serve openly in the military. And by majority, I mean majority. The majority (86%) of liberals (of course). The majority (77%) of moderates. The majority (58%) of conservatives. Practically every subset of American society believes gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly in the millitary. 69 percent of us, overall.

So get on that, willya? The Supreme Court is passing the buck, but honestly, as commander in chief, the ball should be in your court, anyhow. I'm tired of hearing about gay Arabic translators being fired for their orientation. It sucks for the people being discharged, and it makes us less secure as a nation, not more.

But regardless of the polls, equal human rights are not a popularity contest. There are some cases where the right thing to do is as clear as day, and this is one of them. An estimated 65,000 members of the military are gay. It's time they breathed a sigh of relief.

Rob

Laughing at the Pieces Will Never Die!

Lately, I've been feeling that Facebook has been killing my blogging.

Well, that's not entirely true. I've been feeling like Facebook is part of a sinister cabal conspiring to kill my blogging. I do short, quick updates there, and I don't throw things up here. It satisfies some of my need for certain types of communication--the targeted, friends-only kind--a little better than this li'l ol' blog does. And lacking something to take me out of the house every day, it's been something of a blessing. (Not to mention the work it's brought me.)

But that's not all that's making this blog slumber. Here's the rest of the cabal:

Shut-In: If I'm not out having adventures, there's no adventures to write about. Although to be honest, I probably should have written a little bit here about the explosion and kitchen fire.

BusyBusyBusy: There are times when I'm actually busier than I used to be, between looking for a job, looking for freelance work, and -- when I'm lucky enough to get it -- actually doing freelance work.

Scatterbrain: Trying to find work has made my brain something like an octopus -- lots of different tentacles reaching out to lots of different places. And while I still look at the news and comics blogs I used to surf, they're much tinier dots on my horizon.

The Great Comics Gerrymander: Not only am I not buying many new comics, but I also should be feeding Blog@Newsarama every once in a while. (Something will be up there from me again, soon.) So my comics writing here has been limited on two fronts lately.

Political Satisfaction: Jeez, Obama's President, and I'm pretty happy about how he's going about things so far. To save you all from a string of posts that are essentially, "Squee!" I'll probably only be writing about politics when something unusally good happens, or unusually bad, or if something strikes me as funny. (Yesterday, for example: I probably wouldn't have mentioned the second swearing-in if I hadn't thought of the "Oaf of Office" headline.)

Secrecy: Every now and again, I do some work on a writing project that isn't yet ready for me to talk about. So I don't.

Now, I have seen some interesting movies lately: the 1948 Powell/Pressburger ballet film The Red Shoes, and Michael Haneke's home-invasion thriller Funny Games (an American shot-by-shot remake of his decade old German version). I liked both quite a bit, although I couldn't recommend either film to everyone. (In the case of The Red Shoes, old romances don't float everyone's boat; on the other hand, as subversive and clever as it is, Funny Games will repel as many people as it attracts, intentionally so.) In any case, this is undoubtedly the first paragraph ever written that mentioned both films, so I've accomplished that, at least.

Blogging will continue here, of course. There's no doubt about that; I'm hooked. And tomorrow, I'll be going back to my cult, so I'll have a picture of something gargantuan to represent the weight I've gained in these past few months away from it. But I wanted to explain my intermittent absences, and essentially where my head is at in these strange, fallow days.

Rob

McCain Gets Kinky

John McCain has called Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid a "dangerous threesome."

Seriously.

I can think of a much more dangerous threesome.


And now you'll never sleep again.

Rob

If Bad Was a Boot

So, Rob, why did all those children creep you out the other day?

Well, imaginary interviewer, I hadn’t really put it together until now, but I think it might have to do with a little song I'd been listening to by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds called “The Curse of Millhaven,” about a 13-year-old precious little serial killer. I’m not going to reproduce all the lyrics here (you can probably hear the song on Seeqpod), but here’s how she’s introduced:

My name is Loretta, but I prefer Lottie
I’m closing in on my thirteenth year
And if you think you've ever seen a pair of eyes more green
Then you sure didn’t see 'em 'round here
My hair is yellow and I’m always a-combing
La la la la La la la lie
Mama often told me we all got to die

You must have heard about The Curse Of Millhaven
How last Christmas Bill Blakey’s little boy didn’t come home
They found him the next week down in One Mile Creek
With his head bashed in and his pockets full of stones
You can just imagine all the wailing and moaning
La la la la La la la lie
Even little Bill Blakey’s boy, he had to die

And there’s more and more, as a rash of killings shocks the town, until finally:

Then, in a cruel twist of fate, old Mrs Colgate
Was stabbed but the job was not complete
The last thing she said before the cops pronounced her dead
Was, “My killer is Loretta and she lives across the street!”
Twenty cops burst through my door without even phoning
La la la la La la la lie
The young ones, the old ones, they all gotta die

And this may be my favorite verse:

Yes, it is I, Lottie, the Curse Of Millhaven
I’ve struck horror in the heart of this town
Like my eyes ain’t green and my hair ain’t yellow
It’s more like the other way around
I got a pretty little mouth underneath all the foaming
La la la la La la la lie
Sooner or later, we all gotta die

I love Lottie’s depiction of herself as a monster whose true countenance no one can see. She spits “my eyes ain't green, and my hair ain’t yella.” I also like this next bit, where she shows a little false regret before pulling the rug out again:

Since I was no bigger than a weevil they’ve been saying I was evil
That if bad was a boot, then I’d fit it
Oh I’m a wicked young lady, but I’ve been trying hard lately
Oh, fuck it! I’m a monster, I admit it!

Now that’s venom.

So Lottie confesses to the murders that she’s charged with, and many, many (many!) more. It’s a catalog of malice, and she’s eventually committed to an asylum.

Now I got shrinks that will not rest with their endless Rorschach tests
I keep telling them I know they’re out to get me
They ask me if I feel remorse and I answer, “Why of course!
There is so much more I could have done if they’d let me!”

I really love the song–it’s horrible and terrifying on one level, propelling the listener from one horror to the next (and even one crime she didn’t commit, instead perpetrated by “two junior-high-school psychos: Stinky Bohoun and his friend with the pumpkin-sized head”). Yet it has a level of deep-black humor to it as well—both in Lottie’s unrelenting spite, and just the idea of 39-year-old Nick Cave singing for a 12-year old girl. Like he's a viper in her belly, the demon driving her to do these things.

Anyway: Take a few listens to the song, and then suddenly find yourself surrounded by unfamiliar children. Surely, one of them has a knife—but which one?

Rob

Reeling

I saw three very different movies this weekend. First up was A Hard Day’s Night on DVD. I was honestly surprised by how much I enjoyed this. The movie is sheer exuberance and joy. I realize now that I wasted my youth. I should have been the Beatles.

The music, of course, was great. But the the personalities of the Beatles shone through with such clarity and honesty that it completely validates Beatlemania in my mind. How could all those teenagers watch this movie and not fall in love with this band? Forty-odd years later, they're still breaking hearts.

For a completely different take on being young, Kathy & I went to see Juno on Saturday night. It’s a terrific little movie. Ellen Page is wonderful as Juno, of course -- sarcastic, impulsive, vulnerable and creative. You’d want her as a friend. I was also really impressed with her parents (dad and stepmom), played by J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney. Diabolo Cody’s script sets them up to be more than the usual teen-comedy dupes and foils, and Simmons and Janney make the most of the opportunity, playing them with wisdom and bite.

I topped off the weekend with Magic, Tivoed from AMC a few weeks ago. This evil-ventriloquist-dummy movie has a heck of a pedigree: Anthony Hopkins plays Corky, a skilled technical magician with no charisma until he “teams up” with a ventriloquist dummy. Ann-Margaret is Penelope, the now-married high-school sweetheart, and Burgess Meredith pays his agent (who has one of the funniest lines in the movie, as he barks to his secretary, “Sylvia, what’s the first rule of being an agent? Never forget it was an actor killed Lincoln.”). The movie is directed by Richard Attenoborough from a script by William Goldman. They weren’t messing around for this dummy movie.

Naturally, the movie plays Corky (get it?) as an unknowing schizophrenic who uses the puppet (named Fats*) as a release, all the while teasing that the sinister Fats may be more than he seems. That sort of theme was in the air, and even if I never saw the movie, the zeitgest haunting it surely rattled its chains in my direction as well -- I wrote a play in college that trod the same psychological ground.

In hindsight, the movie seems trite and a bit too earnest for its own good, but there are a couple of scenes that are nicely affecting, and another that underplays what is actually pitch-perfect EC-comics style irony. The first of the bunch is an opening scene where Corky’s act bombs in front of a distracted audience. As Corky tries to impress them with card tricks, the camera keeps cutting to a woman’s rich, horsey laugh -- at something her dinner companion said, rather than anything to do with what’s happening on stage. Finally, after lifting an ace from the deck and getting no response, Hopkins spits, “Do you see that? That’s a thousand hours of my life.” I’ve heard Penn Jillette say that the secret to magic is devoting more time to fooling people than they’d consider the trick is worth, and Corky’s frustration magnifies that pain in that statement.

Later, there’s a great moment when, to break the tension between them, Corky brings Fats into a conversation with Penelope. Fats uses the opportunity to tell Penelope about a betrayal. What’s interesting is that he doesn’t tell her that Corky killed her husband that afternoon. Instead, he sabotages their budding relationship by telling her the secret behind a magic trick Corky used earlier to get her into bed. It’s a sharper cut, and a much more interesting swerve.

But the topmost moment in irony comes at a point when Fats is telling Corky how he might just blurt out the details of Corky’s double-murder at an inopportune moment. Fats is pressing him and pressing him until Corky just can’t take it any more, and suddenly Fats slumps down at Corky’s side, motionless. And, as a veteran of hundreds of murder movies, a thought flitted unbidden across my brain: He killed the dummy. Because he was afraid he would talk.

Rob

*While "Corky" is a fairly inelegant reference to a material dummies can be made of, "Fats" strikes me as a more clever nod to one of the components of flesh-and-blood folk. So hats off to "Fats".

Giving the conservatives their props

Okay, while looking for an image of James Carville to show Kathy, I found this HI-larious page from before November's election. Haven't read much of it yet, but the pictures are pure gold.

Hats off to you, conservative blogger Korlapundit. You struck comedy gold.

Rob

If BRAINNZ be the food of love, play on...

Am I ever sorry I’m going to have to miss this. If you're free this weekend, you might not have to.

Rob

1940’s Double Feature!

And believe me, the only thing these two movies have in common is the decade in which they were released.

I was home sick today, under doctor’s orders not to do anything, so I took the opportunity to watch some movies. My first pick was Casablanca. I’d seen it a number of times before, and so have you, so I’m not going to bother to summarize the plot. Besides, if you haven’t seen it, go out, buy it on DVD, and watch it. Don’t bother renting it, it’s too good not to watch more than once.

This time, I watched it with Roger Ebert’s commentary on (rewatching some of my favorite scenes with the movie audio), and I learned a few things. The thing that probably sticks with me most is that very few of the actors were born in America. Most had fled Europe after Hitler came to power. Look at the IMDB bio of S.Z. “Cuddles” Sakall, who played Carl, the Maitre’D at Rick’s. German movies from 1917 to 1937, then a three-year gap, then American movies from 1940 onward. The extensively European cast gives the movie an extra stamp of authenticity.

Another thing I learned (and this wasn’t in the commentary) is that Claude Rains looks a lot like one of our ferrets, The Dude.

Later on, Kathy and I sat down to watch The Devil Bat, a 1941 horror movie in which Bela Lugosi plays a kindly doctor who secretly has been enlarging bats to enormous proportions, and training them to attack whoever wears a special shaving lotion he’s prepared. The great fun of the movie is watching him jump through hoops to get people to splash a bit of it on. Well, that and the giant rubber bat. There are no giant rubber bats in Casablanca. You’re looking for giant rubber bats, only Lugosi’s got you covered.

Everything else, though, I’d go with Bogart.

Rob