Past Misdeeds: The Curse of the Living Corpse (1964)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


Rufus, the patriarch of the Sinclair family, is laid to rest in the family mausoleum. Nobody seems all that shaken by the old man's death, in fact, it would be difficult not to diagnose the bereaved with a certain amount of happiness. If we can believe their tales, Rufus must have been something of a sadist and a madman, making the life of his wife Abigail (Helen Warren) and that of their children a living hell. Which is not something I'd recommend to people like Rufus who have an uncommon physical illness that makes them prone to seem quite dead when they are still most definitely not, awaking fears of being buried alive. He might have set down certain security measures against it in his will, but no one is actually willing to take them. As you might have guessed, the Sinclair family is about as pleasant as Rufus himself was, with the exception of cousin Robert (Dino Narizzano), the boyfriend of Benson's daughter Deborah (Carnival of Souls' Candace Hilligoss in her completely forgettable other role). He's the young, bland guy the gothic trappings require to survive everything on account of the power of pure, concentrated boringness.

The opening of the will by family lawyer Benson (Hugh Franklin) doesn't go well, anyway, because the will also keeps the money out of the family's hands for a whole year, to make sure Rufus is truly dead. Oh, and by the way, dear children, if you are not doing what I told you, I'll come back from the dead and kill you all after a fashion based on your worst fears.

Obviously, it comes like it has to come - the old man's coffin is soon empty and a disguised figure is slaughtering the charming family one by one. The family calls the local chapter of the keystone cops, but those aren't of much help to anyone, so it's either up to alcoholic son Philip (a young Roy Scheider) or the bland one to step up to the occasion.

And lo! It happened that AIP made a shedload of money with Roger Corman's Poe adaptations and the early Gothics of Mario Bava. And Del Tenney said "I want some of that money too!", and decided to make his own little Gothic picture on the grounds of his father-in-law's highly photogenic property. But something strange and terrifying happened to Tenney. We are not sure if it was a sudden bout of artistic ambition or just a knock on the head with the rubber suit out of his The Horror of Party Beach, but in any case, Tenney suddenly developed the idea of making a cheap knock-off that was also trying to emulate the visual flair of the films (in a sense cheap knock-offs themselves) it stole its ideas from.

So the courageous viewer of Curse of the Living Corpse is confronted with things he won't usually connect with Tenney's handful of films - carefully constructed shots, rather thoughtful framing and effectively moody outside locations. It is really impressive to look at, and even though the sets used for inside shots are a little drab and perfunctory, Tenney (or is director of photography Richard Hilliard to praise?) for once films in a way developed to cover up these limitations.

Alas, while Tenney the director is showing actual artistic development from his earlier films, Tenney the scriptwriter isn't able to rise to the occasion. The script's weakest point is the terrible dialogue, obviously based on the way people in Corman's Poe adaptations speak, but Tenney is neither Charles Beaumont nor Richard Matheson and decides to turn the dialogue up to a crescendo of unbelievable stiffness that is at times difficult to stomach. It is the way stupid people think cultured people of the 1890s used to sound, I suppose.

The dialogue's weakness is quite a shame, too, because the basic character concepts that are lost among all the monologizing aren't bad at all. As a matter of fact, they remind me of the giallo principle of packing your cast full of the most unpleasant people you could imagine (and aren't all rich people unpleasant and of dubious morals, young grasshopper?), giving them more psycho-sexual hang-ups than necessary or in good taste and then killing them off in even more unpleasant ways. The slightly cruel streak as well as the violent-for-its-time murder scenes also give up a whiff of American proto-giallo (more than of proto-slasher), just less class-conscious and less willing to really go to the unpleasant places.

Pacing is of course also a problem. The film is money-savingly talky, something I am willing to tolerate, but also cursed with a bad sense of timing that usually puts the most annoying comic relief imaginable right after a scene that is atmospheric and immersive, as if something in Tenney just couldn't abide the thought of his audience actually being interested in his film, or even thrilled by it.

Acting wise, Curse of the Living Corpse is better than one would expect of a film that affords its - obviously not costly - cast to speak dialogue this stiff with fake English accents. Sure, the accents are sometimes off, but very tolerable, and most everyone does her or his role with solidity. Scheider and his film wife (and Tenney's real life wife) Margot Hartman are even rather good, obviously having fun with being less than pleasant human beings.

The three (oh yes, the humour is so painful it had to be divided between three people, or someone would have died from it) comic relief actors are of quite a different calibre, of course, even making me think wistfully of people like Johnny Walker (at least not, fortunately, of Jagdeep), but when has the odious comic relief ever been well acted, not to speak of funny?

All of this might make the film sound a lot worse than the experience watching it was for me, but I am a fan of Gothic and mock-Gothic horror and therefore easy to please in this regard. Your personal mileage will certainly depend on your love for Gothic tropes.

Descendant (2003)

Imaginary history lesson: Eddie Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” was based on a real family named Usher and ruined the family name for generations. To reciprocate, one Usher murdered Poe’s Virginia, and cursed Poe (Arie Verveen) and all of his descendants. Seeing as Poe didn’t have any children, I don’t see much of a point in this curse, but hey. The film will of course pretend people descended from the man’s larger family are indeed his descendants, demonstrating early on what kind of a film it’s going to be.

Today (well, in 2002), Poe’s “descendant” Ethan (Jeremy London) has a career as a popular horror author of books which mostly seem to consist of mangled Poe quotes, bad-mouthing old Eddie while coasting on the Poe name. He is also, as we will quickly learn, rather crazy, having shouting matches with a hallucinatory version of Eddie and making all the bug-eyed crazy faces you want. Alas, he’s supposed to be a dark, charming sort of crazy, and so Ann Hedgrow (Katherine Heigl), also a far descendant of a man without any children, falls for her very distant cousin at once, as does he for her, when they meet at a Q&A session. Well, or he might just like the sex and living in the huge house she just inherited from her mother. Not surprisingly, a series of murders starts right about the time Ethan hits the small town Ann lives in. Who, oh who, might the murderer be? The guy who shouts at Poe? Ann’s best friend with an eternal crush on her, Deputy John Burns (Nick Stabile)? Ann’s lunatic brother with incestuous hopes Kiefer (Matt Farnsworth)? It’s not very difficult to guess, as is the rest of the plot.

Descendant is the sad, embarrassing end to Del Tenney’s attempt at a return to films, co-directed with Kermit Christman, and mostly pretty damn bad even if you ignore the whole idiotic set-up with the real-life Ushers or the point nobody involved in the production seems to have had much of a clue about Poe or his work (or if they did, didn’t bother putting that in). That’s bad, of course, but I probably would have gotten over it in a film that started from a bad place and went anywhere interesting or entertaining.

Instead, you get a barely tolerable Gothic Romance movie that plays up the stupidity and uselessness of its heroine whereas it would have been quite a bit more entertaining and interesting if it had gone in the totally opposite direction; of course, then the people involved would have had to come up with reasons for a competent heroine to get into trouble via love. And yes, the script: it’s stupid, it’s obvious, it misses the best set-ups for Poe-nods that would actually work, it shows no imagination for the macabre whatsoever, and does tend to meander, too.

There’s not much on the acting side that could redeem anything here either: Heigl is bland, London chews the scenery in the least charming and most joyless way imaginable, and Stabile is wearing a uniform. Christman’s and Tenney’s direction is mostly as bland as their heroine, though it does reach the heights (depths) of inadvertent hilarity from time to time through the virtues of awkward staging and just plain bad decisions. The grand finale is indeed a bit of a side-splitter, but that’s really the most entertainment I got out of Descendant.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,thriller,del tenney,kermit christman,katherine heigl,jeremy london

December Beach Party: The Horror of Party Beach (1964)

The agents of M.O.S.S. (yes, we still kind of exist in our own, half-assed manner, and will even upgrade to three-quarters-assed soon) are nothing if not timely - or secret sympathizers of the Southern hemisphere - so December seems just like the right time to get down to the beach and find out what we find there.

Unfortunately, what I found for my second and final entry in the theme month is The Horror of Party Beach, a film I'd forgotten about. Or rather I had repressed how much I loathe it. In fact, I hate Party Beach so much, I was badly tempted to let this entry consist exclusively of a few hundred cartoon curses. But that would be tacky, particularly in the year in which the film's director (I use this term in the broadest possible sense) Del Tenney died.

So, I'll try to just keep to the facts here: radioactive goo creates incredibly goofy looking amphibian monsters looking like the Creature from the Black Lagoon as reimagined by a three year old with a thing for golf ball eyes. The creatures attack pillow fights and beach party people. Horrible music plays. The dances of the mad are danced. The sort of romance in which a "hunky" (beach party) scientist gets over the death of his estranged bad girl girlfriend right quick thanks to the efforts of an incredibly sanctimonious thirty year old teenager occurs. Jokes that would make the Riddler ashamed are told by actors who can barely speak. There's a racist caricature of a black maid walking around.

So, all in all, I really should love this thing, particularly since I've enjoyed films that are objectively even worse quite a bit, but I'm just not feeling it in Horror's case. Maybe it's the non-coastal person's distrust of beaches and the people who dwell on them, maybe it's an Innsmouth kind of thing, or maybe my irony glands just don't function as well as they should when confronted with The Horror of Party Beach. All I know is that watching it doesn't result in my giggling companionably to the nonsense happening on screen, or finding myself surprised by hidden depths (fat chance), or even just accepting the film with a feeling of mild tolerance and embarrassment on behalf of the filmmakers, but instead sees me ending up with a feeling of barely contained rage, as if Del Tenney and co.'s attempt at making a quick buck by mixing the outgoing beach party movie craze with the monster movie were are very personal affront. Which it well may be, for all I know.

Anyway, your beach party tolerance may vary.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,in short,horror,del tenney,december beach party

On WTF: The Curse of the Living Corpse (1964)

I've never been much of a fan of Del Tenney's movies (camp will only get me this far), but while watching his brilliantly titled Gothic proto-Giallo The Curse of the Living Corpse I had to revise my opinion of them and him a little - there are ambitions and good ideas in the film, and I'm going to tell you all about them in my write-up on WTF-Film. Expect a young Roy Scheider and Carnival of Soul's Candace Hilligoss and many a monologue.

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,del tenney,gothic,horror,reviews,roy scheider

The Horror!? 91: I Eat Your Skin (1964)

Swinging, womanizing, gun-toting writer of questionable talent Tom Harris (William Joyce) enjoys the pool life in "Monty Carlo", when his agent/publisher/something like that Duncan Fairchild (Dan Stapleton) hedges a great plan to drag the slothful bastard back to work: Take him to the wonderful Voodoo Island for inspiration, a place that promises poisonous snakes and an army of the living dead. Surprisingly, Tom is not that interested in such a place, until Fairchild mentions the existence of a mystical thing called virgin girls on the island.

So off Fairchild, his wife Coral (Betty Hyatt Lynton, whose voice could be the most terrifying thing I'll ever hear) and Harris go, only to soon land in the clutches of an evil voodoo cult, madmen and bug eyed zombies armed with machetes. Well, at least Harris gets to use his gun and other heroic manly charms to a) blast some people and/or undead and b) woo the love of his life Jeannie Biladeaux (Heather Hewitt). As on the Love Boat, so on Voodoo Island.

There are two ways to look at Del Tenney's I Eat Your Skin. You can either see an inept piece of the trashiest filmmaking of the Sixties without any redeeming features or you can look at it as a gloriously wrong, but attractively early example of an American Swingin' Sixties horror/action movie, that may not be any good, but is extremely entertaining.

I of course chose the latter way to interpret reality and so had some great fun while watching William Joyce's idiotically horny "hero" hit some zombies, charm women with the magnetism of his hairy chest and butcher his lines with the routine of a real pro.

Also, the movie's incredible stupidity is mitigated by comic relief so unfunny I couldn't stop laughing about it, a really cool soundtrack and an admirable absence of filler. Like in a good serial, there is seldom anything happening that makes sense, but there is always something happening.

 

 

Technorati-Tags: american movies,horror,reviews,del tenney