ESSAY: Who's S-S-Scared?: The Scooby Doo Gialli

The second issue of the Fang of Joy fanzine is hot of the presses (indeed, actual presses [of a sort] were involved this time!). Included within it, among fine pieces from Jose Cruz, Simon Wright, Brad Hogue, one Richard Glenn Schmidt, and many others, is a zine-exclusive essay by yours truly on a particular sub-subgenre of Italian horror-thrillers that I've christened The Scooby-Doo Gialli. Check out the first few paragraphs below and then watch a trailer I've prepared in order to get your further pumped up for your forthcoming purchase. (Is this the first time anyone has bothered to make a trailer for an essay? Is my pat on the back traveling through the post to me as we speak?):

"On Saturday morning, September 13th, 1969, American CBS stations aired “What a Night for a Knight,” the first episode of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! The series would run for 25 episodes, concluding on Halloween of 1970. Each adventure more or less invariably found the meddling teens and gluttonous Great Dane of Mystery Incorporated breaking down in some remote American township and catching wind of a supernatural baddie haunting the area. After much spooking, munching, chasing, and sleuthing, the gang would discover that the supernatural villain of the week was no such thing: it was, instead, always a human in an elaborate costume, scheming towards some money-making human end.

Then, in the early-to-mid-1970s, several Italian and Spanish giallo horror-thrillers—with titles like The Red Queen Kills 7 Times, The Etruscan Kills Again, and Murder Mansion—employed a similar structure on the silver screen, incorporating faux-supernatural menaces into their convoluted plots as cover for nefarious inheritance schemes and psychosexual serial murder. Sure, you’d be hard pressed to spot a van full of adolescent gumshoes anywhere in these films, but the preponderance of red-haired leading ladies and sandy-maned, ascot-wearing pretty boys is certainly suspicious.

Was it merely a coincidence that these faux-supernatural gialli began cropping up immediately after Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! concluded its run on television?

Well, probably..."

Read more by purchasing Fang of Joy Issue #2 for a low, one-time payment of $6.

Shepperton Screams (Part XIII): And Now the Screaming Starts (1973) dir. Roy Ward Baker

For sixteen weeks, Jose Cruz of The Grim Reader and I will be delving into the complete horror filmography of Amicus Productions and regaling you with our spirited discussions. Below is our mutual consideration of Amicus's AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS (1973). Check back every week for more dialogues and (naturally) more nightmares.

NT: Oh, how I pined for the hoodwinking this premise appeared to promise: In 1795, a newlywed couple takes inheritance of the groom's family estate in the English countryside. Before they have the chance to unpack, the bride is catching fleeting glimpses of a whole assortment of creaky Gothic horrors: a bloody hand bursting out of a painting, an eyeless specter leering through windows, and a decapitated limb wriggling around the floorboards. It's all a little too much too soon, isn't it? This new bride attempts to explain these stupefying sights to her husband and the household help, who fail to take her breathless horror with anything but salt and (worse yet!) seem to be conspiring to keep certain information away from her delicate ears. This bride soon begins to go a little nuts, and can be found wide-eyed and bewildered most waking hours. What are the odds that the bride's new husband has cooked up these assorted scares in order to terrify his wife out of her wits and equally out of some vast bank account or bequest? Pretty good odds, really, if we're at all familiar with similarly spun webs of cinematic intrigue from the past several decades of thrillers. If AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS (1973) were a film that you could step inside, you wouldn't be able to help but notice the aroma of softly burning gaslights infecting the air.

Alas, this is no gaslight thriller. No one is trying to drive Mrs. Catherine Fengriffen (Pete Walker regular Stephanie Beacham) to the madhouse. At least no one corporeal. Her loving husband (Ian Ogilvy) is exactly that, and the aforementioned household help (Rosalie Crutchley) soon enough finds herself victim to the same ghostly presence haunting the lady of the manor. Yes, despite my every wish to the contrary, this is a genuine supernatural thriller. Adapted from David Case's short novel FENGRIFFEN: A CHILLING TALE (1970), AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS concerns itself with a strange curse carried out by cackling phantasms, spreading torment across generations while righting a wrong wrought by antiquated class divisions.

Beyond the slightest intimation that the barbaric behavior of the ruling classes deserves to be countered by the equally ancient customs of the pagan peasantry, we're never informed by what strange magic this curse comes to fruition through. In the Amicus Cemetery of Reanimated Horrors, you might return from the dead through specific occult leanings (voodoo, witchcraft, demonic mirror possession) or you might start sucking air as a vengeful fiend simply because the plot demands it. And the plot of AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS demands a lot. But perhaps this vagueness of supernatural origins is as it should be: this film isn't one overly concerned with narrative coherence. This is a big, explosive Gothic horrorshow (our second true Amicus period piece, though its isolated castle setting means the budget doesn't have to stretch far beyond appropriate costumes and interior furnishings). The frights contained within this cinematic castle of blood are hysterically-pitched, full of melodramatic emotion and overblown action. When, at the film's climax, Ian Ogilvy's Charles Fengriffen fervently yanks his ancestor's skeletal corpse out of a coffin and then swings it repeatedly—grasped at the ankles—against the stone of his own final resting place, we know for certain (as if we didn't already) precisely what sort of frenzied film we're dealing with. I mean, AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS is even the earliest film I can think of containing what we'd call modern-style jump scares. Its setting might hark back to the dusty prestige of 1960s English horror, but in every way that matters AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS is a product of the bolder, more frantic, and slightly sillier early '70s.

Whether or not I fully enjoy the final results of all that I've mentioned above is a whole other tomb full of worms. I'll ponder that query as I bounce the skeleton over into your court.

GR: Once again, you’ve perfectly and succinctly captured my own impressions of our topic as you did with I, MONSTER (1970). The first thing that occurred to me when that great, gory appendage popped out from the regal portrait Stephanie Beacham was observing was “Wow, that was quick.” “Too much too soon” is certainly the case here, especially as the opening credits of AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS (1973), despite that grindhouse-ready title, put you in mind of DARK SHADOWS or any number of the paperback Gothic romances that haunted the shelves of grocery stores and pharmacies of the day with their visions of beautiful ladies trying to elude the shadows of menacing manors. The idyllic shots of the stately grounds, the stirring strings composed by Amicus favorite Douglas Gamley, and Beacham’s soft narration (“…my days filled with fear, my nights filled with horror…”) makes one think that we’re going to be presented with a respectable period piece, one that settles for an aura of barely-repressed sexuality and gloomy expressions of the soul in favor of spookhouse shocks. But the minute the wriggling fingers of the Fengriffen curse make their dynamic entrance, we know exactly what kind of movie this is going to be.

Which is not to say that AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS is a bad picture, but it’s certainly not on the same level of prestige as entertainments such as Bronte’s WUTHERING HEIGHTS (1847) or even, to go back to your point of reference, Patrick Hamilton’s GAS LIGHT (1938). This is a rough’n’tumble supernatural shocker in period clothing, no more sophisticated than any of the similar fare that Amicus has offered thus far. Which, again, is not my way of being a priss about the whole thing, but the bloody hand seems like such an incredibly early introduction of the creepy goings-on in the story that it implies some sense of uncertainty on the part of the filmmakers. They don’t think that the audience could possibly retain interest in a story about a newlywed couple in all their lace and frills, so they throw us a bone with that five-fingered beast in the hopes that we’ll sit up in our seats and say “Gee, now this is a good movie!” In this sense AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS begins very much to resemble a more modern horror film in its almost desperate attempt to capture our attention lest we drift off.

Roy Ward Baker seems a little more comfortable in these antiquated surroundings, his directorship solid throughout in his first standalone horror effort after having turned out ASYLUM (1972) and THE VAULT OF HORROR (1973) for Shepperton Studios. He shows an affinity for both the quieter moments of the piece as well as the more operatic business involving mutilation and rape. It’s those grandstanding moments though that this particular house is built on, but this being a British horror film made by old veterans of the industry it shows us very little skin and a relatively small amount of blood, minus the occasional eyeless, handless specter making its requisite appearance. When one thinks how sleazy AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS could have really been (say, in the hands of Al Adamson or Andy Milligan), what we see on screen seems fairly tame. So, when the filmmakers have no flesh or plasma to titillate our senses with, they attempt to drum up the cinematic vibrato in the scenes of murder and mental anguish which, to say the least, has a tendency to play more goofy than shocking. As a matter of fact, I’ll see your skeleton-thrashing and raise you one old biddy strangled by ghost hands tossed down a staircase… in slow motion. AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS may be game, but as you have observed in the past, that earnestness leads the film to occasionally slip on a putrefied limb and go ass over breeches in its attempt to be taken as serious horror-drama. Still, it’s not without its charms.

Now before I pass out all cross-eyed like Mrs. Beacham, I’ll turn the conversation back to you lest you curse the first virgin bride of my home. 

NT: In an earlier discussion of ours (the one concerning TORTURE GARDEN [1967], to be precise), I made a comment about how Amicus was ushering itself into the era of blood and guts, and that their films were beginning to embrace explicit themes and images about half a decade before their prim and proper contemporaries at Hammer Film Productions would. Having since revisited most of the Amicus films through this collaborative series of ours, I've come to realize I was off the mark. Well, to an extent. The Amicus films we've been discussing so far certainly imply a level of explicitness foreign to the majority of popular British horror at the time, but the on-screen depictions and elaborations of this risqué subject matter have more often been suggestive than visceral. 

By the time we reach 1973 with Amicus, we realize they've fallen behind the times in this regard. Hammer had already made their mammary-laden Karnstein trilogy, and the blood was flowing freely in films of theirs like SCARS OF DRACULA (1970). In contrast, AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS presents to us two off-screen scenes of sexual violence (one perpetrated by a ghost!), some light bloodletting, and a brief shot of a lady's bare back. "Fairly tame" is one way of putting it. You're right: I would much rather see this reconfigured as a decade-appropriate sleazefest. Imagine: Andy Milligan's THE RATS ARE COMING! THE SCREAMING STARTS HERE!

Alas, I've decided that I enjoy whatever small charms AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS bashes against the crypt. Yes, it's essentially applying hoary, William Castlesque spook tactics (minus the gimmicks) in a period package, but that's enough to elicit a guffaw of appreciation from me. It's been surprising to observe how flawed Roy Ward Baker's directorial contributions to the Amicus oeuvre have been (much more so than those of the more-or-less consistent Freddie Francis). As you've written, the film seems torn between its earnest ambitions for producing serious period horror and the presumed pressure to provide its audience with over-the-top frights. As a result, the film manages neither, resulting in it feeling like a bizarre, tonally challenged hybrid of intentions. 

I think the film just barely escapes becoming like the over-serious, ludicrous disaster I saw in ASYLUM (1972) through sheer luck: that film's mini Herbert Lom mannikins were on holiday, so the filmmakers had to settle for the normal-sized Lom causing havoc instead. But, in earnest, I think I'm able to stomach the goofy horrors on display in this picture because Baker and his crew seem to have gained an ever-so-slight sense of self awareness about the zaniness they're putting on screen. An example (and my favorite moment in the film): When the tormented Catherine Fengriffen decides to end it all by committing seppuku (!) or perhaps a home abortion (!!), her stab towards her own pregnant belly is foiled (as a slow pan down reveals to us) by the now-skewered disembodied hand we've seen crawling around the estate since the first reel. As a filmmaker, you don't toss in the antics of Thing T. Thing (of THE ADDAMS FAMILY) without the basic cognizance that you're doing something silly. At least I hope so.

Embarking on a deeper reading of the film's themes seems to me a blind, limbless fool's errand, so I will refrain. But that’s not me condemning it. AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS might be as insubstantial as a pair of wriggling, transparent ghost hands, but those spectral mitts can still play my tune.

GR: Wait. You’re saying there is a deeper reading of the film’s themes? There are themes? 

I jest, of course. There probably is at least a small cauldron full of subtext bubbling under the images of AND NOW THE SCREAMING STARTS, and while just about any film is worthy and prime for analytical study if you really wanted to make a go of it, as you say it seems a silly task to try and build an academic mountain out of Roy Ward Baker’s mole-hill of horrors. And for the record, I’m copyrighting the title MOLE-HILL OF HORRORS for my next screenplay.

Instead, I shall take the lead that you’ve so efficiently used in the past and simply jot down a few of the fleeting and not-so-fleeting impressions that the film made upon my mind. And since it’s Friday, I’m going to be taking this to a whole new level of laziness by writing these impressions in bullet-format. Can your heaving bosom handle the shocks that I’m sending your way right now? 

• Catherine’s visions of the gory phantom are certainly evocative enough, but they appear to evoke a different mood when, in the midst of making-out, Mrs. Beacham goes all wide-eyed while Ogilvy attempts to calm her down. Snapping out of her stupor, Catherine pulls her husband forward with renewed vigor, hoping that the demons of the past will be repelled by the scent of passion.

• Though she is frightened by a great many beast, including one of the family Rottweilers, at no point in time is Catherine spooked by a dangling spider, as the Miss Muffet headpiece she occasionally wears might lead you to believe.

• The Fengriffen cemetery is charming in its crowded, insular qualities, all crooked graves and creeping vines, but it must be the first that I’ve seen that seems to generate its own strategically-placed clouds of mist.

• Winner of Most Fabulously Dressed: Catherine in her handsome strolling attire, complete with dark skirt, overcoat, and hat, greatly aided by the presence of a riding crop she swings at the wind-whipped grass. It makes me feel naughty. 

• Baker shows he can have a good eye for visuals in those beautiful angled shots of the angry blue sky outlining the dark façade of Fengriffen Manor.

• Upon seeing a woodcut-style illustration of a bare-chested woman lying in bed as a horned fiend lurks before her, Peter Cushing’s Dr. Poe feels the need to clearly define what we are seeing with a grim whisper: “Sexual relations with demons.” Yeah, thanks for that.

• Winner of Most Fabulous Line of Dialogue: “I live in horror that this is the child of a ghost.”

• What’s the deal with that ghost anyway? His handlessness seems to indicate that he is the avenging woodsman, but his eyelessness implies that he is that spirit’s descendant Silas (also Whitehead), who has his peepers shot through the back of his skull when the frenzied Ogilvy brings an end to his smirking ways with twin pistols. In a film wrought with conflicting ideas, they can’t even settle on whose ghost is haunting the house!

• For all of its appealing missteps, the film actually generates potent tension and uneasiness during the scene where Herbert Lom’s wicked Henry defiles the bride of his groundskeeper (Geoffrey Whitehead) as the helpless groom is forced to watch. The latter’s behanding by axe is equally chilling as Whitehead doesn’t emit a gasp or a choke as his limb is lopped off, his hatred for his master more intense than any physical trauma he could possibly suffer. The whole scenario is slightly reminiscent of the family backstory from Arthur Conan Doyle’s THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES. And if you expect me to make a terrible HAND OF THE BASKERVILLES joke, you can forget about it. Wait.

• …but as effective as the inciting event of the curse is, the bedevilment itself is somewhat perplexing, as the groundskeeper’s curse attacks not the direct perpetrator of the crime but some random and for-all-he-knows completely innocent woman in the future who has nothing to do with the heinous act itself. I understand that this may be the “point,” as the woodsman’s wife was herself an innocent unwillingly drawn into the madness of the Fengriffen family, but as a means of payback against the man who raped his wife it’s pretty shitty. 

• …however, it does make for a fittingly bleak climax that has the ever-stunned Catherine behold her newly-born babe to see that it bears the same red birthmark on its face as the one that Silas’ family line possessed, in addition to a missing hand. It’s interesting to note the differences one sees in Catherine’s and Rosemary Woodhouse’s reactions to their progeny. For a woman who literally bore the son of Satan, Rosemary takes on the prospect of motherhood in stride when compared to the catatonic Catherine. Maybe it’s just the changing of the times. Maybe it’s because not everyone’s fit to be a parent.

• And for all of those trials and tribulations, the sacrifice and the terror that she went through during the film’s ninety minutes, Stephanie Beacham is awarded in the final credits with the prestigious place of fourth-billing.

Fin.

Next week: Madhouse (1974)

Shepperton Screams (Part I): Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1964) dir. Freddie Francis

For the next sixteen weeks, Jose Cruz of The Grim Reader and I will be delving into the complete horror filmography of Amicus Productions and regaling you with our spirited discussions. Below is our mutual consideration of Amicus's first horror anthology, DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORROR'S (1965). Check back every week for more dialogues and (naturally) more nightmares.

NT: I think Amicus Productions has long been saddled with the reputation of being the lesser Hammer, but that feels like a poor assessment of the company's unique charm. While Amicus probably owes much of its existence to the success of Hammer's films in the early 1960s, it's insufficient to call the Amicus horror films nothing more complex than cheap imitations of Hammer's patented English Gothics. The rampant cross-pollination of acting and directing talent between the two production companies during their peak periods hints to me that there was no great animosity between them; rather, it seems to reveal that all involved felt that the two companies were producing distinct product that was less in competition with than developing alongside one another. With that in mind-- and I'm not sure if you'll agree with this-- I'd feel better calling Amicus the American Hammer. Yes, I'd like to call this English production company American because, well, they were making decidedly American films. Cheaper, faster, and looser, with more raunch, blood, jokes, and moralistic twists: how could a set of films possibly be more American? The majority of them are even sliced down into collections of bite-sized pieces, all the better for American drive-in attention spans. (Not to mention that a good number of those are composed of direct adaptations of EC Horror Comics, those staples of any contemporaneous American boy's reading diet.) In comparison, the Hammer films (at least those up until the early '70s) feel as prim and literate as a Jane Austen adaptation. Color me not one bit surprised to discover that Amicus's founders, Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg, were two New York City gents who relocated to England to set up their company. Their homegrown sensibilities followed them across the Atlantic and merged with the English, Hammer-influenced horror aesthetic they were striving to emulate, producing a body of hybrid cinematic beasts that (at least I feel) is totally distinct from that of the more well-known English fright factory.

I think you can spot this very American quality of Amicus's films from the start. "The Start" in this case meaning their first DEAD OF NIGHT-inspired horror anthology, DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS (1965), written by Subotsky himself and directed by Hammer regular Freddie Francis (credited on my copy as "Freddy," of course, because that's the American way). As made clear by the shockingly creative story titles in this volume ("Vampire," "Werewolf," "Disembodied Hand," etc.), it seems likely that old Subotsky simply plucked a handful of stock horror tropes from the air and started writin' himself a movie. That feels like a pretty American sensibility to me: give 'em everything they want, don't bother to make it too "arty," and screw whether or not it makes sense in context. Consequently, the film has a certain disjointed "we'll try anything once" attitude that's hard not to admire, even if it doesn't do much for the film's cohesiveness. There are some things to like here (most of them beginning with the words "Peter Cushing"), but DR. TERROR is a rather inauspicious beginning to the best run of anthology films in the genre. To me, it feels a bit like what Subotsky's script does to English horror cinema inadvertently mirrors the situation presented in the "Voodoo" segment at the film's center: an outsider invades a foreign land, flees with its cultural production, and then tricks it out for display in his homeland to an audience desiring an "exotic flavor." The rearranged composition, while loose and jazzy and not without its entertaining qualities, nonetheless lacks the original's (voodoo) spirit. What say you?

GR: For starters, your assessment is an astute one. I grew up watching the Amicus pictures and in many ways they shaped the way I processed the horror genre. That "picking of tropes" that you mentioned is how I thought anthologies of this nature were supposed to be made. You gotta have your vampire story, your werewolf story, your... creeping vine story? The Amicus films were one of the first times I was exposed to horror's nearly limitless set pieces. The number of ideas boggled me. It's fair to say too that the company's output had more of an American-ness about it. There's still a tangible British quality to their movies, but it's of a (then) contemporary flavor, a little more with the free love, a little jazzier like you say. Hammer was of the archly Gothic, getting their inspiration from Stoker and Le Fanu; Amicus was definitely the pulpier of the two, their tales culled from the thin, smudged paper that had been the home to Robert Bloch and R. Chetwynd-Hayes as well as those garishly gruesome fables from Entertaining Comics. You would go to the theater to see Hammer. Amicus was definitely for the drive in-crowd. Could one imagine Hammer ever producing a story about a jealous, sentient piano? Hardly. Some might say that this is indicative of Amicus' lower sensibilities. I say that it's proof that they were willing to have some fun, no matter how silly it might have made them look. This might all sound like it's been building up to knock them, but I think there's a good reason why when people think of "horror anthology films" the first ones that come to mind are the ones from the studio that dripped blood.

How appropriate that the first feature I ever recall watching was Amicus's first experiment in terror, DR. TERROR'S HOUSE OF HORRORS (1965). It uses as its template the "teller of fortunes" motif that would crop up again and again in the other portmanteau films (TORTURE GARDEN [1966], TALES FROM THE CRYPT [1972]). Here the purveyor of the grim future is Peter Cushing, looking something like a Nazi war criminal in his pointed beard and dark-brimmed hat. Milton Subotsky surely had an interesting conceit here: five trainbound travelers stuck with a strange little man who claims to know what fate has in store for them (though it's kind of odd that Cushing's Schreck would refer to his own deck of Tarot cards as a "house of horrors"). Speaking of which, I couldn't help but wonder if this movie was floating around in Stephen King's mind while he was writing DANSE MACABRE. Many of the stories themselves seem rather tame in comparison to vignettes from later pictures, but I think there's a charming, cozy quality to some of them (I have a soft spot particularly for "Werewolf" with its creaky mansion setting and entombed lycanthropes); others are just pretty flat but not without their own clever touches. For instance, I was surprised how menacing the vine strangulation was in the second story--the lack of music is key there--and how the voodoo practitioners slowly surround our "hero" in the "Voodoo" tale in between cuts. Also having a lot of fun here is Christopher Lee as the uppity art critic. He made a great priss! And as familiar as the "shock ending" has become within these types of films, seeing that grinning skull as the music crescendos at the end admittedly scared the ever-loving hell out of me when I watched this for the first time in third grade.

NT: Your point about how horror anthologies should be grab-bags of horror tropes is well-taken. The implication inherent in a well-wrought horror anthology film is that the diegetic world on screen is large and complex enough to contain not one but multiple horrific elements and situations (if not all of them), and that's enough to spin one's mind dizzy with all of the monster-mashing possibilities. I think many of Amicus's subsequent anthology films create just such hideously overpopulated worlds. But DR. TERROR's world is a bit less successfully imagined. After all, this is a world that (if Dr. Schreck's tarot cards are to be believed) is about to be plagued by a plant apocalypse. Where's the logical space for the existence of an entombed werewolf ghost in a world like that? As a winking vampire might have addressed the camera if he'd thought of it, "This town ain't big enough for a vampire and a triffid." The real problem might be tonal: as the film travels from a stately Gothic to a cold scientific thriller, from a lighthearted musical interlude to a wryly ironic morality fable, we never understand what's being presented to us as taking place in one recognizable world, but rather many different worlds with their own distinct tenors, aesthetics, and outcomes. Maybe that's the point of Dr. Schreck's house of horrors anyway, as if he desires to tease us and his victims with those wildly divergent tales of stock cinematic terror before loosing the trapdoor beneath us all and sending us spiraling down into a bleaker, unified vision of hell. Now that I've typed it out, that sounds like a pretty great concept. It's a shame it doesn't translate half as well to the screen.

Unsurprisingly, the wraparound is the film's highlight. (The presence of Cushing here certainly doesn't hurt: his reading of the line "Have you not guessed?" before his big reveal is the most chilling the man has ever been.) Yet, some brief comments on the individual segments are in order: 1) I have fond feelings for "Werewolf," too, for both its being the only Scottish Gothic I can immediately call to mind and for featuring a werewolf named Waldemar a few years before Naschy started doing his thing in LA MARCA DEL HOMBRE LOBO (1968). 2) "Creeping Vine" certainly delivers some fine plant strangulations (bye, puppy), but the overall film's unwillingness to stretch well-worn horror concepts beyond the obvious is most apparent here. 3) Though its digs at cultural appropriation are appreciated, "Voodoo" might be a little too blase about its characters' cheerful racial belittling. Quote: Drink rum! Git love in de sun! 4) "Disembodied Hand" is the harbinger of anthologies to come and is certainly the best of the lot. Lee's snooty performance is a fun one, but I prefer how the ever-sly Michael Gough bounces off him with a slithery menace (and he's not even the villain of the piece!) 5) "Vampire" is this anthology's equivalent of a bat on a string.

GR: I hadn't considered the idea that in an anthology film, particularly one wherein the stories are supposed portents of the future, the different threads of reality would have the potential to kind of "run into each other" at one point or another. As you said, does the whole werewolf rising from his grave business occur before, during, or after the human race's enslavement by our new weed overlords? Of course, accepting that these things would take place on the same timeline is perhaps not asking too much more out of us than to believe that these supernatural occurrences would even happen in the first place, so why not go along for the whole, creepy ride?

I've always compared anthologies and collections of terror tales to buffets, and DR. TERROR fits the bill of a true sampler perhaps more than any other from Amicus and from without. There's no real unity at work in these stories as there would be in ASYLUM, for instance; they're just a handful of appetizers grabbed without discretion for the sole purpose of appeasement. Which is funny considering that the very nature of an anthology is to bring us multiple stories concerning almost entirely different subjects, and yet other portmanteau horrors manage to feel of a single piece and overriding mood despite their disparate elements. DR. TERROR, for all its dime-store and spookshouse thrills, doesn't quite have that sense of composure.

Oh, and I love that line by Cushing at the end. Not even because he's playing it sinister--he is just a little--but because he says it with this almost pitying tone, like these poor dumb fools just don't understand what's happening to them and he finds it a little tragic. If you ask me, that makes it all the more horrifying.

I did note the impressive moniker of the ancestral werewolf in the first segment, but I guess I must have misheard it because I thought they said Valdemar, as in a reference to Poe. So, either way, neat right?

I don't know why, but I keep feeling the need to defend "Creeping Vine" although it certainly is the stalest of the lot. Maybe it's because I feel like there's some actual thought that was put into it, be it however slight or half-baked, and a keen eye towards crafting a menacing presence from the most innocuous of subjects. I mean, that slithering weed was easily ten times more impressive than any of the undead hijinks in the "Vampire" yarn. There was not a single fang to be seen in that thing. And it literally does have a rubber bat on a string! Also, just how does our bloodsucking physician manage to ward off Donald Sutherland's wife by inadvertently making the sign of the cross with his arms without, I don't know, bursting into flames himself? Talk about your wasted opportunities, that.

Michael Gough is rather quietly off in his performance, isn't he? He never swears vengeance on Lee or anything like that, but that doesn't necessarily mean he wouldn't, if you catch my meaning. "Disembodied Hand" probably has the best stinger-ending of the bunch, a single line of dialogue that hits the gut harder than any visions of writhing appendages (as impressive as those admittedly are). It's in little moments like that that Subotsky's writing talents and the inspirations of his writing come to the fore. They may be modest, but they are there, like a skull peering out through the darkness of night.

NT: You know what, you're probably right about the whole Waldemar/Valdemar confusion in "Werewolf." It's not as if we see jolly Count Cosmo's name inscribed on anything, but Valdemar seems the more logical spelling because of both the Poe connection you've pointed out and the fact that the red-headed red herring maid is named Valda. (Alas, I was hoping beyond hope for her to snarl "They call me Valda...MAR!" before turning into a wolf.) I think what I was doing was imagining an alternate dimension wherein Scottish folk vocalize their words with Germanic pronunciation. I hope to visit that dimension one day. At any rate, I'd still reckon that Naschy was aware of if not directly inspired by the Count's perfectly wolfish surname.

I understand where your affection for "Creeping Vine" comes from. The segment does give the material its best, and I find the results to be fitfully effective because of this effort. (I agree with your earlier pronouncement that the absence of an overwrought musical score produces much of its success.) Nevertheless, the sight of what I would assume is a production assistant slowly outstretching a chintzy, roughly vine-shaped pole towards an actor's shoulder across multiple cuts can only inspire a snickering sort of menace in me.

But I suppose that's all part of the fun, eh? DR. TERROR is pure, unfiltered pulp: a chaotic first draft of the Amicus anthology formula that would be perfected soon after by the likes of the more narrative-conscious Robert Bloch and eventually Subotsky himself (once he began to employ helpful blueprints from EC Comics). But blundering rough drafts are the foundations of expert revisions, so the missteps here seem more forgivable while the glimmers of terrors to come leave me appreciating how much they managed to get right at the time of this first hearty howl at the full moon. All Hail Our New Weed Overlords.

Next week: THE SKULL (1965)

Dr. Jekyll & His Women (1982) dir. Walerian Borowczyk

a.k.a. Docteur Jekyll et les femmes; The Bloodbath of Dr. Jekyll

I once promised you that I'd write at greater length about director Walerian Borowczyk's veritable bloodbath of a film, Dr. Jekyll & His Women. Months passed by with nary a peep, and there you were thinking I had forgotten my sacred oath, betrayed you in the worst way. How wrong you were.

Many moons ago, Richard Schmidt of Cinema Somnambulist, Doomed Moviethon, and Hello! This is the Doomed Show contacted me about submitting an original piece to a new venture of his, a Eurohorror and giallo fanzine entitled Fang of Joy (which, if you're wondering, is the curious translation of the title with which Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) was christened for its Japanese release). Such a bold, costly, and reckless experiment in print criticism during the Age of the Tweet appealed to me instantly, and I decided I'd write him a piece on the spot... several months after he originally sent me the messages, when they finally decided to show up in my inbox. So, maybe not on "the spot," but certainly on "a spot." Thankfully, Richard was still at work compiling the first issue, so I spent one frenzied night breathing whiskey and cranking out a very long piece on (what else) Dr. Jekyll & His Women for him to include. This essay is now available to you, my adoring readership, for a nominal fee, alongside many other fine pieces. Because the fanzine is a print exclusive, my essay will remain exclusive to it as well, so you'll have to throw down some bones for a copy if you'd like to read it (as you surely do). To tantalize, I will preview an early paragraph:

"Polish director Walerian Borowczyk’s 1981 French-German co-production Docteur Jekyll et les femmes (a.k.a. Dr. Jekyll & His Women; alternately The Bloodbath of Dr. Jekyll and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Miss Osborne) takes an approach to the Hyde conundrum that’s distinct from that of previous adaptations and in line with that of the source material. In Borowczyk’s film, Jekyll’s mad science is unambiguously presented as no more than a means of obfuscating the truth: Hyde’s crimes are those that Jekyll wishes he could commit, if only he could do so while maintaining his respectable reputation, which — in Victorian society — means everything. To lose one’s good name is to lose power and status, but to maintain one’s good name requires one to abstain from any behavior deemed immoral (reasonably or not) by the society that reaffirms that good name. Jekyll’s solution to this bind, in both novella and film, is to create another name entirely, one that is capable of enacting his forbidden desires and absorbing the scathing criticism that follows. When we first meet the film’s Dr. Henry Jekyll (Udo Kier) he’s dictating a new book on his latest transcendental research. He relates a historical tale he’s heard about men who hire other men to perpetrate crimes for them, all in order to preserve their good names while still indulging (however vicariously) in the societal misdeeds they wish they could partake in. Taking this lesson to heart, Jekyll fashions himself a wicked cipher through his science by rolling around (constantly, as if it were the height of orgasmic ecstasy) in a tub of transformative blood-colored chemicals. For Jekyll, metamorphosing into Hyde is no more than the act of pulling down a mask to conceal his identity or—as Jekyll himself puts it—the ability of the schoolboy to toss of the pretense of his uniform whenever he desires to cause mischief. In one particularly revealing moment near the end of the film, Jekyll attempts to claim that Hyde’s words and deeds are separate from his own before contradicting himself by admitting “both of my faces are me.” "

That's all you get. Now throw them bones.

Meltdown 09: Yellow Days of Summer (Part II)

Body Puzzle 

(Misteria) 

(1992) 

dir. Lamberto Bava

They're never the best of the lot, but it feels wrong to ignore a giallo from Lamberto Bava whenever one watches a whole pile of them in a row. Although they were all produced a decade or more after the subgenre had peaked, there's still something quintessential about his giallo films, or at least quintessentially '80s European horror about them, meaning they're cheaper, gorier, frillier, and more colorful and garish than their forefathers. From A Blade in the Dark (1983) to Delirium: Photos of Gioia (987), Lamberto's gialli forgo subtlety and style in favor of big blades and bigger hair. As the great Mario Bava's talent-challenged son, Lamberto chooses to overcompensate for his lack of cinematographic grace in all of his directorial efforts by piling on the decade-specific sleaze and cheese. And as in the cases of the two films mentioned above, this overabundance can be a lot of fun, as his gialli often border on a sensibility close to that of the frenetic insanity of his biggest horror hit, Demons (1985). But I have to suppose that by the early '90s, after several years of cranking out mostly Italian TV features, Bava had begun to mellow out. Body Puzzle, his chief giallo of the period, is an almost restrained effort, barring the inclusion of a few pieces of inspired lunacy (like a toilet bowl cam that watches from underwater as a severed hand plops down into the bowl, or when the snarling killer pops out from the interior of an icebox full of cubes and corpses). Through its restraint alone the film winds up tonally and aesthetically closer to the traditional gialli of the '70s than Bava had ever come before, and the result is a curious change of pace. Following the Columbo formula, we're presented early on with a killer (François Montagut) who listens to classical music through earbuds while he harvests donated organs from his assorted victims for conspicuous placement around the house of the recently widowed Tracy (Joanna Pacula), and it's up to the efforts of a dedicated police inspector (Thomas Arana) to unravel why. Many convoluted revelations concerning identity, sexuality, and vital statistics follow, along with some cameos from nearly unrecognizable older versions of Erika Blanc and Gianni Garko. Its constant, running-length-stretching plot twists and contortions keep the proceedings involving, but it's both amusing and beguiling to watch Lamberto play-- even fleetingly-- at building a classy production. I mean, consider who we're talking about here.

In the Eye of the Hurricane 

(El ojo del huracán) 

(1971) 

dir. José María Forqué

In the Eye of the Hurricane is a very Jean Sorel sort of film. It's an erotic thriller in the Diabolique mode concerning a handsome playboy who slyly plots the torment and hopeful death of a wealthy woman that he's romantically involved with in order to gain access to her vast funds. So, it's a lot like some of Sorel's other gialli: Parnoia (1970, written about below) and The Sweet Body of Deborah (1968), in particular. As luck would have it, Sorel happens to star in this enthralling Spanish-Italian co-production too (hooray for type-casting!). I won't deny that I'm a sucker for this type of giallo, as I've found that much joy can be wrung out of the games of domestic treachery and double-crosses even when they're not all that creative in their respective approaches or implementations. But In the Eye of the Hurricane, I'll hazard to argue, holds a dagger of originality up to the sub-subgenre's throat and dares it to make a clever move, resulting in a film that's both more suspenseful and ultimately more satisfying than its formal typicality would initially suggest. 

In this type of giallo, the female protagonist is generally beleaguered and hysterical, driven to madness, beset by paranoia, and left without much hope of saving herself from her own predicament without outside aid. In contrast, In the Eye of the Labyrinth's leading lady, Ruth (Analía Gadé), overhears the unambiguous late-night scheming of her envious ex-husband (Tony Kendall) and her sexy yet duplicitous new boypal (Jean Sorel, naturally) about halfway through, and thus she uses this secret knowledge to shape the events that follow. We spend the rest of the movie observing Ruth's emotional waffling between silent heartbreak over her beloved's betrayal and her cool determination to foil the plans against her before her danged brake fluid is tampered with again. (This waffling isn't always graceful, but it is always enjoyable to watch: in one scene, Ruth pretends to lay asleep and bizarrely resigns herself to death while Sorel's character stands behind her and points a gun at her head, unaware of her cognizance of his presence and intention. The editing in this scene hits a fever pitch as it quickly cuts back and forth between extreme close-ups of their anguished faces waiting far too long for something to happen before it finally does: the bedside phone rings.) Our uncertainty about which perspective Ruth will ultimately align herself with (revenge or resignation) makes the last act (which mirrors Carroll Baker's blackmail home imprisonment at the hands of two nymphomaniacal siblings in Umberto Lenzi's Orgasmo (1969)) a riveting watch as Sorel sneers, a crazed Rosanna Yanni snarls, and the sexual torment commences. Without divulging too many details of the wrap-up, it should be noted that Ruth is a complex and capable female protagonist-- independent, strong-willed, and essentially faultless-- and these qualities alone set the film that rises up around her apart from the pack and their parades of tragic or guilty women. All this, plus a scene in which Sorel and Gadé perform an upside Spider-Man kiss on the beach while rubbing each other's tummies. This corpse is exquisite.

Everybody Deceased... Except the Dead 

(Tutti defunti... tranne i morti) 

(1977) 

dir. Pupi Avati

It's not an arduous task to place myself back into the frame of mind that once thought, "A giallo spoof from the director of one of the subgenre's finest entries (The House with Laughing Windows (1976))? How could this viewing experience possibly go awry?" But, as I was reminded of after watching Everybody Deceased... Except the Dead, one should probably never underestimate the enigma that is 1970s Italian comedy: it will always find new horrendous ways to baffle and repel. We are, after all, speaking of the cinematic output of a country whose horror-thrillers even end, from time to time, on the high note of an anal rape gag (see: Andrea Bianchi's uber-sleazy Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975)). Commercial Italian films of the period were in no way subtle or refined, and the comedies even less so. If you haven't seen any but would like a general idea of how they feel, then imagine the general tasteless tomfoolery of a Screwballs (1983), a Joysticks (1983), or any other lewd and crude American teen sex comedy of the '80s and then skew that exact same content towards a middle-aged audience rather than post-pubescent teens. So, in short: jokes about masturbation, loose women, the mentally-handicapped, little people, homosexuality, cowboys, and... book salesmen. The story concerns just such a bulbous-nosed book salesman (Carlo Delle Piane) who arrives at the Zanotti family mansion on the eve of their patriarch's funeral in order to sell that collected bunch of eccentrics and perverts a reproduction of an old manuscript detailing the finer points of their family curse and a prophecy promising treasure if nine corpses are accumulated over the course of one stormy night. One member of the household, seeing this prophecy, decides to don a fedora and black gloves in the hope of speeding fate along. Hilarity ensues? 

There are certainly some good jokes to be found in-between all the groan-worthy nonsense: I quite liked the exchange between a confused victim and his killer immediately after the latter has stabbed the former in his side: "What's that?" "A nice stab, can't you see?" "(groans, dies.)" The film contains a few of the warm, fuzzy Old Dark House laughs that you'll receive from watching similar yet superior slapstick murder mysteries like Clue (1987) and Murder By Death (1976). For example, when the power is cut by the killer, the perpetually clueless Inspector Martini (Gianni Cavina) shouts at the others assembled, "pay the bills, guys!" (when the lights flicker back on later in the film, he sighs, with relief, "so they paid it!"). The film's most amusing gag occurs when the gathered family members, led by Inspector Martini, attempt to instruct a pair of dogs to follow the killer's scent from one of his victim's severed hands that they've discovered. They toss the bloody hand to the dogs, who then promptly devour it. There's clearly something amusing about the giallo murder mystery ripe for skewering, but  Everybody Deceased... Except the Dead's parody is far from as focused as it ought to be. When's the last time you saw a giallo that featured death-by-electric anti-masturbation machine?

Kill the Fatted Calf and Roast It

(Uccidete il vitello grasso e arrostitelo) 

(1971) 

dir. Salvatore Samperi

Salvatore Samperi's ultra-rare and ever-so-excellent Kill the Fatted Calf and Roast It deserves a wider audience, for its peculiar cinematic tale would satisfy genre junky and art film connoisseur alike. Far from a straight-razor wielding giallo, the film has as much in common with one of Poe's darkly humorous Gothic family tragedies as it does the more eccentric, atypical products of the subgenre it has been lumped in with due to historical proximity. This sad but inevitable tale of the doomed Merlo family, who are plagued by ancestral madness, Oedipal complexes, incestual lust, and sibling backstabbing, holds artistic pretensions that would place it in line with the demented, sexually-malformed social commentaries of Samperi's compatriot Pier Paolo Pasolini. The film not-so-subtly posits that Italy's rich old families, who have built their vast ancient wealth on the destruction and murder of whole villages of those less fortunate than them, are diseased at the root and fated to poison themselves through desire and aggression turned back on itself now that there's no one left to subjugate. After the unexpected death (or murder?) of the family patriarch, youngest son Enrico (Maurizio Degli Esposti) begins an investigation that places his shady older brother Cesare (Jean Sorel, making his second appearance today) and his dryly seductive cousin Verde (Marilù Tolo) as the primary suspects. At the same time, Enrico also busies himself with creating a creepy shrine for his insane dead mother and carrying on an illicit affair of motherly affection with his cousin Verde, who has sex with him but also dresses in his mother's clothes before offering him her breast to suckle. Sublime, surreal Freudian weirdness runs high throughout: it's the sort of film that inspires one to jot down a note reading "boob/pudding jiggle juxtaposition." Eventually, Enrico wades deep enough into his family's deadly business that he begins to drown, forcibly. The film submits through its title and some internal dialogue that in this way Enrico is like an innocent calf among hungry wolves, but it also becomes clear through Enrico's damaged psyche and the story's grim conclusion that a calf too long among wolves grows sharp teeth.

Death on the Fourposter 

(Sexy Party; Delitto allo specchio) 

(1964) 

dir. Jean Josipovici

An Italian-French co-production, Death on the Fourposter (also known by the less striking title Sexy Party) arrived in cinemas the same year as Mario Bava's Blood and Black Lace (1964), a film of no small importance to the foundation of the giallo subgenre. Consequently, director Jean Josopovici's film doesn't have an ingrained giallo tradition to draw upon when concocting its own murder mystery, and so instead draws upon elements of the Gothic. And yet, those elements of the Gothic that Death on the Fourposter employs-- seances and mediums, chilly castles, returns from the dead-- would soon become as much a part of the giallo tradition as Bava's fashion models and gloved killer. This observation is not intended to give Death on the Fourposter (which is, after all, a rather obscure film) equal or even a significant amount of credit in the development of the subgenre, but it does make clear that Bava's film didn't appear out of the ether: it, like Jean Josipovici's film, was the product of an evolution of a long and storied tradition of murder mystery and Gothic horror cinema in Italy and throughout Europe. That these and other Euro mystery films were, by the mid-1960s, simultaneously beginning to include scenes of more blatant sexuality and bloody violence than those films of previous decades is a sign of the fast-changing times post-watershed horrors like Psycho (1960) and Peeping Tom (1960).

Through almost entirely deficient on the bloody violence count, Death on the Fourposter's proto-giallo cred certainly shines through in its sultry sexual content. There's none of the explicit sexuality or nudity of the '70s giallo canon, but the film's alternately titular sexy party certainly earns that designation. A band of irritatingly rich young men and women whose names invariably end in either "y" or "ie" descend upon a castle for a weekend get-together (one of them quips, "this is better than your father's castle") and their evening soon devolves into a string of naughty parlor games in which there is much seducing, teasing, partner-swapping, wagering, sexy dancing (set, off-time, to a special guest's new hit party record, entitled, naturally, "Sexy Party"), and shattering of illusions. This first half of the film is quite a lot of steamy fun, thanks in no small part to the bewitching presence of actress Antonella Lualdi as Serena, a sort of devilish socialite with devious charm and sex appeal to spare. Serena puts her fellow party guests on trial through her only ostensibly playful games, revealing the others' various hypocrisies and petty vices while she smiles all the while. Serena is such a strong and alluring presence in the film that the action takes a nosedive in its interest for the viewer after she's knocked off at the midway point. Who killed her? Why? Who's dead next? Where are the stolen rings? Who's going insane? These are all questions that the film spends the rest of its length answering, but I would have preferred to have seen some more of Serena putting chinks in high society's armor of respectability.

Cross Current 

(Un omicidio perfetto a termine di legge) 

(1971) 

dir. Tonino Ricci

Like In the Eye of the Labyrinth, Tonino Ricci's Cross Current twists and turns endlessly in its trashy attempt to simulate a Diabolique-inspired murder soap opera. (Also like in that film-- released in the same year, by gum-- the lovely Rosanna Yanni pops up here as a scheming sexpot who favors boogieing in miniskirts. No complaints.) Cross Current isn't as clever or as complex as that other film, but it certainly makes up for that lack in plot complexity. Most of the notes I took while watching the film were mostly intended to help me keep the details straight as it barreled along in its tale of boating accidents, gardener blackmail, midnight stranglings and the like. As is usually the case, everyone here has a hidden agenda and more than likely a hidden lover. More than a few of them "die" before popping up very much alive in order to enact some new nefarious plot. The rich plot and scheme, killing each other and themselves, all over measly business interests. This is the standard score, but Ricci and his crew pull an admirable job by maintaining its appeal. It's kind of hard to frown on a film that ends with a character being so scared by some spooky music playing on the record player that she trips, hits her head, and dies after guzzling down some J&B, only to then have it strongly implied that it was all part of the villain's plan. Ludicrously messy murder-plotting all in good fun, with the added benefit of providing our first sighting of the ever-smirking/ever-dashing Ivan Rassimov this month. No complaints at all.

Paranoia 

(A Quiet Place to Kill) 

(1970) 

dir. Umberto Lenzi

Carroll Baker is a race car driver. If you need me to continue, then your eyes must have skimmed past the previous sentence without fully gleaning its import. Paranoia, Umberto Lenzi's third giallo with the inestimable Ms. Baker and the only in which her character stars as a bonafide prizewinning race car driver, has driven a symbolic race car off of a cliff and into my heart. It might not be the best giallo that this power duo concocted together (my vote would still go to Orgasmo), but-- from its solarized, spoiler-filled opening credits to its closing ironic twist that dooms the villainous victors-- it's awfully close. Three years before the action of the film begins, Helen (Carroll Baker) had all of her money spent by her lazy European boyfriend, Maurice (Jean Sorel, again), before he split, forcing her to spend the next few years making drastic career moves (i.e. race car driving) in order to recoup her wealth and get over her heartbreak. When Maurice's new wife, Constance (Anna Proclemer), sends Helen an invitation to stay at their home in Maurice's name, Helen impulsively decides to take up the offer. What she discovers after arriving is that Maurice is still up to old tricks and that Constance wishes to enlist her help to rid him from their lives, preferably by strategically placed harpoon. However, Helen's rekindled passion for all things Maurice makes her decision a difficult one. A murder, a cover-up, and a guilty conscience later, the film reaches an entirely new level of delirious entertainment when Constance's sultry schoolgirl daughter, Susan (Marina Coffa), arrives at the estate and begins to sniff that something foul is afoot. We're then gifted with a parade of wigs, whiskey abuse, and exploding cars to close events out (complimenting the film's earlier parade of a carrier pigeon, bubble disco dancing, and a frumpy green bikini quite nicely).

There are many neat things to be found in Paranoia for the subgenre buff, but the neatest might be the film's pointed inversion of typical gender roles. It is the film's women, rather than its men, who are the providers. Both Helen and Constance are self-made women, using their earned wealth to lead extravagant lifestyles that cater to the whims and tastes of their hunky but penniless arm candy (like the unemployed Maurice). Helen and Constance both make clear that they've cycled through many young live-in playboys due to lust over the years, as if they've been irresistibly tempted by their masculine charms. This sort of domestic and romantic arrangement is totally typical in giallo films if you reverse the sexes, but Paranoia's evacuation of gendered expectations is unique, and, in a way, sort of total: when the car that Helen and Maurice are driving breaks down on the road, it's Helen who takes a peep under the hood and announces the car's failure while Maurice idles by helpless. Carroll Baker is a race car driver.

House of the Long Shadows (1983) dir. Pete Walker

Logline: Kenneth Magee (Desi Arnaz, Jr.), a successful but creatively stagnant writer with a monstrous ego, makes a brash $20,000 bet with his publisher that he can dash off a novel of the same literary significance as Wuthering Heights over the course of only twenty-four hours. Taking up his publisher's offer of an abandoned Welsh manor for an appropriately melodramatic setting in which to write, Kenneth settles into this opulent yet menacing abode and soon finds himself assailed by a parade of uninvited guests, each of whom provides Kenneth with a piece of the estate's lurid, bloody history. And that's when folks start being murdered. 

By re-opening the same vein of metafictionality that was slashed in The Flesh and Blood Show (1972) and then allowing it to bleed out all over the place, The House of the Long Shadows finds Pete Walker splattering the walls with nine pints of meta-fun that soon dries, leaving behind the stain of a meta-headache, a dash of meta-confusion, and eventually a meta-shrug. The screenplay by Michael Armstrong (director of Mark of the Devil (1970) and Screamtime (1986)) is adapted from Earl "Charlie Chan" Derr Biggers' 1913 novel Seven Keys to Baldpate, which was itself adapted into a farcical play by George M. Cohan soon after its release and from there into well above a dozen different film, television, and radio pieces over the ensuing decades. House of the Long Shadows looks to be the latest and possibly last adaptation of the material, and that's not a particular surprise: the basic story has a pulpy, melodramatic, turn-of-the-century levity that must have felt as out of place in '80s genre cinema as it would in today's. Granted, this version of the tale is based more closely on Cohan's play, which-- through a metafictional frame narrative concerning an author's bet with his publisher and certain revelations concerning the play's triple artificiality-- sought to undermine the conventions and stock characters of pulp mystery and crime writing. House of the Long Shadows attempts to do the same, but with Old Dark House murder mysteries and more contemporary horror cinema as the targets of its lighthearted ribbing. 

It's hardly the only film of the '70s/'80s to resurrect the Old Dark House subgenre, but it's telling that the most creatively successful entries were the out-and-out comedies that never really played for gasps (Clue (1985), Murder by Death (1976), Haunted Honeymoon (1986)). Walker's film sort of does attempt to be frightening (by late in the film employing the same sort of gory murder set pieces we could find in any of his more earnest efforts) but this secondary goal is continually undercut by the film's insistence upon being that unfunny-but-pleasant-enough type of comedy that we damn with the label of "amusing." Walker and Armstrong appear confused about what they want their film to be, and this confusion has seeped so deeply into the film's foundations that it comes of not only confused about its tone but also about its intended parody. One might think that the film, with its horror movie updating of Derr Biggers and Cohan's original mystery plot and almost direct references to classic films like, oh, The Old Dark House (1932), is hoping to elicit from the viewer the same wry, knowing response that it does from Arnaz, Jr.'s character when he's introduced to the titular house and its spooky irregularities: "I've seen the movie." Simply placing all of these weathered horror icons on screen together (Vincent Price, Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, John Carradine) clues one into the fact that the film is attempting to say something about the horror films of a bygone era.

And, yet, it's not as clear cut as that: after all, Arnaz Jr.'s character is an author of mystery novels, and the novel he takes the bet to write (which in a meta twist becomes the story of the action of him actually trying to write the novel) is intended to ape the Victorian Gothic melodrama tradition of writers like the Brontë sisters. Placed alongside its movie genre mockery, this deliberate narrative association with classic literature (carried over from the play) results in unclear intertextual references: Christopher Lee's character resembles Heathcliff as much as he does his earlier character Kurt Manliff from The Whip and the Body (1963) and we can read as much Jane Eyre as The Old Dark House in the old "madperson locked up in the attic" trope that the film includes. Is this a film about literature or cinema? Is it just about genre itself, as if genre doesn't become complicated when switching between media? You would think the filmmakers-- who were making a movie ostensibly about movies based on other movies that were adapted from a play which was derived from a novel-- would ponder these questions. You'd think.

House of the Long Shadows was Walker's first major-minor-studio effort (a Cannon film, no less!), his last horror film, and his last film to date. It features a hugely impressive cast (minus the dreadful, black hole of charisma known as Desi Arnaz, Jr.), but this same cast is given little to chew on. They seem tired, and the film does no more than fall back on their previously established celluloid gravitas. This is the last time Cushing and Lee would collaborate before Cushing's death, and the film hardly has the two interact while otherwise requiring Cushing to put on an embarrassing elderly Porky Pig voice for the majority. Walker's signature excessive gore is a lot of fun during the murder scenes, but these scenes feel frightfully out of place in this otherwise bland and stagy film, one content to throw down buckets of exposition in place of meaningful action or story. It's a frightfully low note for Walker to go out on: as if the spirit rattling the chains in the spooky mansion attic tried to keep the guests up for awhile before losing interest, allowing his chains to slacken, and nodding off to sleep.