Three Films Make A Post: Evil has a new vessel…

Haunting of the Queen Mary (2023): From time to time, Gary Shore’s and Rebecca Harris’s tourist attraction based horror film gets up to a scene or two of effective, surrealist horror. More often then not, alas, this is one of those movies that confuses “surrealist” with “random”, so there are interminable scenes of the filmmakers just throwing random stuff at characters and audience.

Little of that stuff sticks or lands anywhere interesting, while the film drags through an interminable two hours of non-plot. Good actors like Alice Eve and Joel Fry stand around, do things with little relevance or connection, some dude who doesn’t look like him and isn’t too great of a dancer plays Fred Astaire (did I mention this thing is random?), and little of any actual consequence, impact or meaning happens.

The Red Monks aka I frati rossi (1988): Not really less confused but decidedly more concise is this Italian TV movie (“Presented by Lucio Fulci”) directed by Gianni Martucci. Its tale of sordidness and a bit of murder plays out before an early 40s background it can’t afford to actually portray (again comparable to Queen Mary) but really doesn’t seem to care about anyway. What the film does care about is to put a kind of cheapskate greatest hits of Italian Gothic horror and giallo tropes on screen, mix them up with the help of a surprisingly clever protagonist shift in the final act, and let its audience wallow nostalgically in the TV sleaze.

This will only work for viewers who are really into the beautiful ages of Italian genre cinema and its byways, but for those like us, it is a surprisingly fun little movie.

The Spiral Staircase (1975): This version of the Ethel Lina White thriller drags the somewhat venerable book into the age of the 70s British potboiler thriller. It isn’t exactly art, but Peter Collinson was pretty great at this sort of thing, rushing its protagonist (Jacqueline Bisset) through her private gauntlet of betrayal and mad men with verve and the joyful nastiness of the British thriller of that era.

From time to time, the film teeters on the brink of actual feminism, but whenever it does, Collinson appears to get distracted by needing to do something cheap and schlocky instead. I’m neither damning nor complaining here, for as much as I would have liked the whole affair to just be a little bit more clever than it ends up being, I never could – and certainly still won’t – resist a bit of good schlock. Plus, say what you will about the director, Collinson was pretty great at improbably, schlocky suspense sequences.

In short: The Sell Out (1976)

Former US intelligence operative Sam Lucas (Richard Widmark) has retired to Jerusalem where he lives with another former spy, Deborah (Gayle Hunnicutt). Alas Sam’s peaceful life is going to end soon, for he’ll have to cope with the results of a rather peculiar partnership. Apparently, high level US spy Harry Sickles (Sam Wanamaker) and high level KGB boss General Kasyan (Peter Frye) have made a pact to get rid of troublesome and unloved members of their respective agencies by teaming up for absurdly public assassinations. And if that means blowing up Israeli children in a botched attempt to kill US traitor Gabriel Lee (Oliver Reed), so be it.

However, before he changed sides, Gabriel was Sam’s favourite spy pupil. Or even a bit more – Gabriel likes to call the older man “Papa”, so when he comes to Sam for help, the surprisingly honourable (for a spy) man has a hard time not trying to help, even knowing that it will probably cost him everything. Complicating things is the fact that Deborah was Gabriel’s girlfriend before he defected, and Sickles is clearly an old enemy. Add to this the Israeli security Major Benjamin (Ori Levy), who is really unhappy about the whole dead kid business, and you have quite the clusterfuck.

Which is also the proper word to describe the script (by Murray Smith and Jud Kinberg) of Peter Collinson’s spy action drama The Sell Out. When the basic set-up to your spy movie is less plausible than Blofeld’s latest attempt to shoot 007 into space, but you still seem to want to make a gritty, semi-realistic spy movie with actual human psychology in your characters, you are in trouble. The whole basic plan in which Sickles and Kasyan conspire to murder some of their own agents very loudly and in public makes little sense. Since when have spy agencies have had trouble to get rid of their own people quietly, and with less opportunity to create a major international incident or three? Why assassinate people in the least effective manner possible? Why push dangerous people into a position where they are bound to lash out at you just for basic self defence?

Character psychology doesn’t work much better either. It is clear the film is trying, and it certainly has a fine cast to do it, but no character relation here ever feels plausible or convincing. Everything is either plain stupid, or screeching, overwritten melodrama (particularly Hunnicutt has to go through literal contortions), or just plain pointless. Most acting choices are as inexplicable as the writing, but then what’s an actor to do when given material this incoherent?

Collinson attempts to muddle through whatever it is the script is trying to do, but there’s a lifeless quality to the melodramatic parts of the film, and little flair to the more general spy business. The Sell Out only ever truly comes alive during the action sequences. But a couple of good car chases and shoot-outs can’t save anything here.

In short: Shadowman (1974)

Original title: Nuits rouges

A mysterious criminal mastermind who likes to either wear silly costumes or a red ski mask, and therefore goes by the moniker of Man Without a Face (Jacques Champreux) gets wind of a way to acquire the lost treasure of the Knights Templar. While attempting to find the treasure, he tortures the uncle of sailor and obvious protagonist Paul de Borrego (Ugo Pagliai) to death, making himself an enemy who will team up with a beleaguered cop (Gert Fröbe), a “poet detective” (Séraphin Beauminon) – because this is still a French movie - as well the sailor’s sort of girlfriend (Josephine Chaplin) to get at the villain’s faceless hide.

Also rather cranky about some weirdo and his henchies murdering their members and trying to steal their shit are the Knights Templar themselves, who still exist in secret and are well able to stage a commando raid on a villain’s lair when need be.

Our villain isn’t helpless, though, for apart from his own man of a thousand faces shtick, he also has a huge number of masked henchpeople, the mandatory nameless, pretty, and pretty murderous woman as his number two (Gayle Hunnicutt), and a mad scientist tucked away in a cellar who turns normal people into pretty damn hilarious zombie killers. Among other things.

Despite carrying quite a few of the hallmarks of the genre, one really shouldn’t go into Georges Franju’s Nuits rouges expecting something on the lines of Eurospy or the more comics-styled Eurocrime films. They do share a lineage with one another, obviously, but this, as was Franju’s earlier Judex, is very much an homage to the serials of Louis Feuillade, full of attempts to consciously capture the peculiar surrealism and unexpected sense of off-beat poetry of things like Les Vampires.

Usually, trying to create the air of accidental surrealism or to artificially create the strangeness that just happens to some movies is a terrible idea. But more often than not, Nuits rouges achieves what Franju is aiming for, and has an air of individual peculiarity that’s more interested in inhabiting the strangeness of this sort of high pulp realm than in making it genuinely exciting as pulp. How much any given viewer will like this approach to the material is to a considerable degree a matter of personal taste, but if it doesn’t work, Franju’s the last one to blame, for he puts all of his considerable powers as a filmmaker into his project, caring little if anyone watching it might find it misguided. It’s difficult not to at least respect this. I, of course, found myself so charmed by the whole affair, I’m now trying to find the version of this Franju somehow got onto French TV as an eight part show.

The Legend of Hell House (1973)

Millionaire Mr. Deutsch (Roland Culver) hires physicist with interest in paranormal matters Dr. Barrett (Clive Revill) to examine "the Mount Everest of haunted houses", the Belasco house, a former place of controlled debauchery (yay) and murder (boo) that has cost the lives, limbs or sanity of most of its former investigators. Barrett - who smugly does believe in paranormal manifestations yet not in ghosts and is clearly obsessed with his work to the detriment of his marriage - takes his sexually repressed wife Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt) with him. Deutsch has also reserved the help of two mediums - one the painfully optimistic believer in a very Christian interpretation of ghosts - of course also sexually repressed - Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin), the other the only whole survivor of the last Belasco house investigation, Ben Fischer (Roddy McDowall), clearly a believer in repressing everything.

Of course, the house really is as dangerous as people think, and of course, it's going to play on the single character trait of everyone, so soon enough, Barrett will be even more obsessed with his work, Ann will want to have sex, Florence will try to save the ghost of Belasco's son even if it means implied ghost rape, and Fischer will mug as if he were played by Roddy McDowall.

While mostly ignored in the first decade or so of its existence, confusingly broad-minded director John Hough's The Legend of Hell House is now more often than not described as "highly underrated", " a forgotten masterpiece", or "nearly as good as The Haunting" (and I suspect anonymous internet commenter C doesn't mean the dreadful remake, even though that abomination is actually closer to Hell House in spirit). It's also often described as subtle, a statement that just leaves me puzzled, for subtlety is living in a completely different town than this film.

But before I go into what bothers me about the film, I shall not fail to mention some of its very clear surface charms. While I don't think John Hough's direction actually succeeds in achieving the creepy mood the director clearly sets out to build, I do appreciate how desperately he goes all out in trying to achieve it. There's a whole carnival of fisheye lenses, Dutch angles, uncomfortable close-ups, fog, and deep shadows, all so tirelessly working at playing haunted house they don't have any effect on me at all. The permanent piling on of directorial tics that would be subtle used in a controlled manner, or could create a mood of the weird if used in a more individual one, keeps the film teetering on the edge of the unintentionally funny for most of its running time, and it's only saved from permanently - and not just for half of the time like it does - going over the edge by some very decent performances by Franklin, Revill and Hunnicutt who make the best out of the flat roles they are given, excellent music by Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson of BBC Radiophonic Workshop fame, and fine art direction.

Unfortunately, the fourth of the film's four main actors is Roddy McDowall, whose performance is, as usual when he's not playing a monkey, problematic. He starts out slowly enough with the most showy attempts at "subtle acting" this side of Tom Cruise, but once his character "opens up", he seems to be caught in a scenery chewing contest with himself, which is at times pretty funny to watch but not helpful to keep up the po-faced serious mood of Richard Matheson's script (based on his own novel).

That script features most of the things I loathe about large parts of Matheson's work - the stiff dialogue, the insistence on Freudian bullshit (a problem he shares with Robert Bloch) instead of actual characterisation, all women being hysterics in the Freudian sense at heart - while lacking the things I love about large parts of Matheson's work - the ability to actually do interesting and sometimes even enlightening things with said Freudian bullshit, a deep interest in exploring the darker sides of the human spirit by way of supernatural horror, and a sense for keeping things weird with a capital W. In this version of Hell House, everyone is horribly one-dimensional. Florence is stuck up and trusting, Barrett a smug scientist, Ann sexually frustrated and Fischer played by Roddy McDowall, so the house's attempts at destroying them through their own character flaws are equally flat. If you've seen the character introductions, you know exactly how the place will influence them. It's as if Matheson had written the characters with crayon. Not even Belasco escapes that problem - let's just say that a haunting based on the inferiority complex of a guy who cut off his own legs so he could buy prostheses that make him look taller (that's the degree of "subtlety" you can expect from this movie) is not very frightening, no matter how often the film tells us how frightening it is supposed to be.

This dispiriting lack of nuance runs through the whole film and also infects many of its horror set-pieces: Franklin's ridiculous fight with a cat doll, a finale that consists of McDowall mugging into the wind, and (horror of horrors!) hot and bothered Ann Barrett's attempts at seducing McDowall (whose reaction shots do of course ruin every possibility of the scene working as intended). The list just goes on and on.

It's all so clichéd and cheesy in its attempts to be somewhat daring that my only reaction to The Legend of Hell House is a lot of rather embarrassed laughter, the kind of reaction I usually reserve for larger family meetings.

 

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