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 presented with only the
most basic re-writes and 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.
Professor Jim Tanner (George Hamilton) is the scientist in charge of a
project researching pain to make NASA's astronauts more durable. During a
meeting that is supposed to introduce their new government contact, Arthur
Nordlund (Michael Rennie), to the team, notorious crackpot Professor Hallson
(Arthur O'Connell) gets a wee bit hysterical about the results of some
intelligence tests he made with the members of the group. It looks like one of
the scientists has climbed some additional steps on the evolutionary letter, and
has an improbable IQ as well as the obvious perks that go with something like
that, like mind control and telekinetic powers (of course). The other
scientists, including Tanner and his girlfriend Professor Lansing (Suzanne
Pleshette), are more than just a little sceptical concerning their colleague's
ideas, but when Hallson convinces everyone to concentrate on rotating a piece of
paper with the power of their minds, and the thing actually begins to rotate,
they are proven wrong. Looks like one of them really must be the homo
superior.
That very same night, the mysterious mutant kills Hallson with his or her
mental powers. The scientist only leaves behind a note with the name "Adam Hart"
on it, a name his wife (Yvonne De Carlo) will later remember to have something
to do with her husband's childhood. While he's at it, the guy who definitely
isn't Professor X casts enough doubt on Tanner for the police to see the
scientist as the main suspect for the Hallson's murder. Hart (to go with that
name for him), seemingly having a rather unhealthy sense of humour, then
proceeds to turn Tanner's very real academic credentials into fakes, which costs
the Professor his job pretty quickly. Not satisfied with that, Hart then tries
to kill Tanner (in what may very well be the film's weirdest scene) with the
help of a carousel.
Somehow, Tanner manages to survive the mutant's attack. The events have made
it quite clear to him that he can't expect help from anyone, and that he
certainly can't trust his colleagues anymore, for one of them must be his hidden
enemy. So the scientist sets upon the only course still open to him: trying to
find Hart's trace in Hallson's hometown. Obviously, dangers to life and sanity,
and Aldo Ray await him.
Byron Haskin's George Pal-produced The Power is a surprisingly
peculiar tale that uses its SF thriller plot to create a film that unites
elements of the pre-70s conspiracy thriller with scenes of a gleefully bizarre
nature, and a generally pessimistic view of human nature, resulting in something
halfway between Alfred Hitchcock and an acid trip.
Casting George Hamilton of all people as a scientist of some renown may sound
more bizarre than clever, but his special brand of absent-minded vacuity works
here as well as it would later do in Curtis Harrington's The Dead Don't Die, presenting the character
as someone in whose shoes most every viewer would be able to feel comfortable,
even if said viewer is less pretty and well-groomed. As we all know, this sort
of thriller works well with an everyman character for audience identification in
the lead role, and if Hitchcock could cast Cary Grant accordingly, Haskins could
do the same with George Hamilton.
Haskin's direction is interesting, but also a bit all over the place. The
Power's main draft is the Hitchcockian thriller - some scenes seem to
directly and deliberately echo The Man Who Knew Too Much and North
by Northwest, especially, and a many of the film's techniques for creating
suspense are taken directly from Hitchcock's playbook - yet Haskin also
has a tendency to include moments of broadest-stroke satire that always threaten
to turn into melodramatic horror, and scenes that are mock-surrealist enough to
belong into an Italian film from the 70s (see especially Hart's fun fair attempt
at killing our hero or the very strange final confrontation between hero and
villain). However, there are also moments of truly disquieting nuance to be
found here, like the moment when Yvonne De Carlo's "funny"-drunk and oversexed
middle-aged woman begins to show the cracks that Hart's powers have left in her
mind, or the emotionless, matter-of-fact way Aldo Ray's character discusses that
he's been on the lookout for people asking for Hart so that he can kill them for
these last ten years. These moments also go a long way to demonstrate how
important a good supporting cast is to a) make a film better and b) help someone
with a limited acting range like Hamilton look good. These performances and what
they stand for are also where the film's rather pessimistic and paranoid stance
regarding human nature can be seen most clearly. In The Power's world,
every character has mental breaking points and cracks that make it easy for them
to be dominated by someone like Hart; everyone is corruptible and nobody is save
from harm from the people surrounding him. This is not a position the film ever
states outright, yet it is hidden in plain sight in every scene right until the
end when a big question mark half-heartedly pretends to be a happy ending.
Less good than the supporting cast are the film's special effects, or rather,
their execution is more ropey than you'd expect from a film made in 1968.
Unfortunately, the effects in the film's grand finale are its weakest, with some
very cartoony animation, a rotating skeleton and George Hamilton's floating head
standing in for a mental duel that would have worked better if the actors had
just stared at each other while Miklós Rózsa's dramatic music played. In The
Power's case, we call them "special" effects for a reason.
Fortunately, a handful of badly executed special effects in conceptually
interesting scenes is not enough to drag down a film as interesting and peculiar
as The Power is. As a matter of fact, this is exactly the sort of
imperfection that makes a film even more itself by revealing a humanity you
don't usually encounter in things that are perfect.
Showing posts with label george hamilton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label george hamilton. Show all posts
Friday, January 26, 2018
Saturday, October 14, 2017
Past Misdeeds: The Dead Don't Die (1975)
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.
1934. On the night of Ralph Drake's (Jerry Douglas) execution on the electric chair for the murder of his wife during a break in a dance marathon, the supposed killer, who has no memory of what took place between him and his wife but is sure he would never have laid a hand on her, makes his brother Don (George Hamilton) promise to find out who is the true killer.
Initially, Don - who is in the Navy and not a detective anyhow - has nothing to go on in his investigation. A visit with Moss (Ray Milland), the dancehall promoter responsible for the dance marathon Ralph and his wife took part in, does not bring to light anything the sailor doesn't already know.
And that could be that already, making for a very short film, but strange things begin to happen all around Don. It starts when a mysterious woman (Linda Cristal) - later to be named Vera LaValle - tries to warn Don off the case completely, for a certain "he" knows what the sailor's up to and will do something terrible to him if he persists. Before he can question Vera further, Don sees his dead brother walking around outside the restaurant the scene's taking place in, and follows the dead man into a shop whose owner Perdido (Reggie Nalder) is not a fan of people just barging in on him. In the following scuffle, Don accidentally kills Perdido, or at least thinks he does, before the shop owner's assistant (Yvette Vickers) does her best to bash his head in.
When Don awakes, he finds himself in the tender care of Vera. The woman spouts more cryptic warnings, but at least she now gives the mysterious "him" a proper name - Varrick - and very reluctantly puts Don on his trail. That trail, not completely to the audience’s surprise, leads directly into a funeral parlour. Alas, there seems to be no Varrick at hand there. However, there's the body of a certain Mister Perdido laid out. Our hero is confused enough by everything that has happened to him to feel the need to take a good look at the dead man. Little does Don expect the corpse to speak to him with someone else's voice and try to strangle him.
After escaping the zombie, Don decides to go to the police with his rather wild story, because that's what you do when people you killed attack you. The patient cop on duty even agrees to accompany Don to Perdido's shop to clear things up. It's just that Perdido seems to be pretty much alive, and makes Don's story out to be an alcohol fuelled fantasy.
Obviously, Don can't count on the help of the police anymore, yet he can't bring himself to give up and ship out until he has discovered an explanation for what the hell is going on around him.
The excellently titled The Dead Don't Die belongs to the last interesting phase of director Curtis Harrington's career, before he became just another guy churning out episodes for any old TV show people paid him for, and that (very funny) film about the possessed dog.
The Dead is a TV production too, it can, however, count itself among the small yet potent group of US TV horror movies from the 70s that are just as individual and peculiar as anything made for the big screen. Unexpectedly for a TV movie in general, yet not all that surprising if you've seen some of the other TV movies directed by Harrington, the film has the feel of something more personal and individual than what you'll usually see produced for the small screen, and fits nicely into the cinematic body of work of its director.
As is typical of his films, Harrington fuses diametrically opposite elements into a whole that's dream-like and artificial. On one hand, the The Dead Don't Die is pervaded by a sense for and an interest in period detail that just screams - at least as much as the film's budget and short production time allow - "realism". Its visual style, on the other hand, is clearly influenced by the conscious artificiality of the film noir (and what, after all, is more noir than a story about a guy looking for the man who framed his brother for murder, a mysterious woman with a heavy accent, and a series of strange encounters?), the lush melodrama of Douglas Sirk (though with other social interests than Sirk had), and the hidden complexity of Val Lewton's RKO productions. In a sense, Harrington is about as retro a director as I could imagine (see also the near obsessive casting of old guard Hollywood actors in minor roles here and everywhere else in his career), but he's not interested in merely reproducing the past. Rather, Harrington is taking (his favourite) elements of the past to shape something new and very much his own. Which, again, isn't something you'd expect to find in a TV movie, where routine usually comes – has to come - before individual artistic expression.
As a whole, The Dead feels like a film noir's themes had stumbled into an RKO horror movie that for its part has found itself inexplicably entwined with the visual and emotional world of the melodrama.
Robert Bloch's (who you might know as the author of the novel Hitchcock's Psycho is based on, but who began his career as a pulp writer in the Lovecraft circle, wrote large amounts of SF, horror and mystery, and also worked quite a bit for TV too) script is an appropriately strange one, too, full of small but interesting diversions and peculiar little flourishes that just might let the members of The Dead Don't Die's audience put on the same utterly confused facial expression George Hamilton wears for much of the film's running time.
I'm not a great admirer of Hamilton, but his sleepwalker-ish body language here and his eternal wide-eyed look of surprise are just what the film and his role need of him. His character is, after all, walking through scenes and encounters as unreal and surreal as anything a man might dream up, never sure what's real and what's not, finding himself completely out of his depth.
Which all adds up to one of the best voodoo zombie movies of the 70s.
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.
1934. On the night of Ralph Drake's (Jerry Douglas) execution on the electric chair for the murder of his wife during a break in a dance marathon, the supposed killer, who has no memory of what took place between him and his wife but is sure he would never have laid a hand on her, makes his brother Don (George Hamilton) promise to find out who is the true killer.
Initially, Don - who is in the Navy and not a detective anyhow - has nothing to go on in his investigation. A visit with Moss (Ray Milland), the dancehall promoter responsible for the dance marathon Ralph and his wife took part in, does not bring to light anything the sailor doesn't already know.
And that could be that already, making for a very short film, but strange things begin to happen all around Don. It starts when a mysterious woman (Linda Cristal) - later to be named Vera LaValle - tries to warn Don off the case completely, for a certain "he" knows what the sailor's up to and will do something terrible to him if he persists. Before he can question Vera further, Don sees his dead brother walking around outside the restaurant the scene's taking place in, and follows the dead man into a shop whose owner Perdido (Reggie Nalder) is not a fan of people just barging in on him. In the following scuffle, Don accidentally kills Perdido, or at least thinks he does, before the shop owner's assistant (Yvette Vickers) does her best to bash his head in.
When Don awakes, he finds himself in the tender care of Vera. The woman spouts more cryptic warnings, but at least she now gives the mysterious "him" a proper name - Varrick - and very reluctantly puts Don on his trail. That trail, not completely to the audience’s surprise, leads directly into a funeral parlour. Alas, there seems to be no Varrick at hand there. However, there's the body of a certain Mister Perdido laid out. Our hero is confused enough by everything that has happened to him to feel the need to take a good look at the dead man. Little does Don expect the corpse to speak to him with someone else's voice and try to strangle him.
After escaping the zombie, Don decides to go to the police with his rather wild story, because that's what you do when people you killed attack you. The patient cop on duty even agrees to accompany Don to Perdido's shop to clear things up. It's just that Perdido seems to be pretty much alive, and makes Don's story out to be an alcohol fuelled fantasy.
Obviously, Don can't count on the help of the police anymore, yet he can't bring himself to give up and ship out until he has discovered an explanation for what the hell is going on around him.
The excellently titled The Dead Don't Die belongs to the last interesting phase of director Curtis Harrington's career, before he became just another guy churning out episodes for any old TV show people paid him for, and that (very funny) film about the possessed dog.
The Dead is a TV production too, it can, however, count itself among the small yet potent group of US TV horror movies from the 70s that are just as individual and peculiar as anything made for the big screen. Unexpectedly for a TV movie in general, yet not all that surprising if you've seen some of the other TV movies directed by Harrington, the film has the feel of something more personal and individual than what you'll usually see produced for the small screen, and fits nicely into the cinematic body of work of its director.
As is typical of his films, Harrington fuses diametrically opposite elements into a whole that's dream-like and artificial. On one hand, the The Dead Don't Die is pervaded by a sense for and an interest in period detail that just screams - at least as much as the film's budget and short production time allow - "realism". Its visual style, on the other hand, is clearly influenced by the conscious artificiality of the film noir (and what, after all, is more noir than a story about a guy looking for the man who framed his brother for murder, a mysterious woman with a heavy accent, and a series of strange encounters?), the lush melodrama of Douglas Sirk (though with other social interests than Sirk had), and the hidden complexity of Val Lewton's RKO productions. In a sense, Harrington is about as retro a director as I could imagine (see also the near obsessive casting of old guard Hollywood actors in minor roles here and everywhere else in his career), but he's not interested in merely reproducing the past. Rather, Harrington is taking (his favourite) elements of the past to shape something new and very much his own. Which, again, isn't something you'd expect to find in a TV movie, where routine usually comes – has to come - before individual artistic expression.
As a whole, The Dead feels like a film noir's themes had stumbled into an RKO horror movie that for its part has found itself inexplicably entwined with the visual and emotional world of the melodrama.
Robert Bloch's (who you might know as the author of the novel Hitchcock's Psycho is based on, but who began his career as a pulp writer in the Lovecraft circle, wrote large amounts of SF, horror and mystery, and also worked quite a bit for TV too) script is an appropriately strange one, too, full of small but interesting diversions and peculiar little flourishes that just might let the members of The Dead Don't Die's audience put on the same utterly confused facial expression George Hamilton wears for much of the film's running time.
I'm not a great admirer of Hamilton, but his sleepwalker-ish body language here and his eternal wide-eyed look of surprise are just what the film and his role need of him. His character is, after all, walking through scenes and encounters as unreal and surreal as anything a man might dream up, never sure what's real and what's not, finding himself completely out of his depth.
Which all adds up to one of the best voodoo zombie movies of the 70s.
Wednesday, January 25, 2017
Death Car on the Freeway (1979)
Los Angeles. A mysterious driver kills young, pretty women by crashing
into their cars with his van while playing some mean fiddle music via outside
speakers. The police, as represented by one Lieutenant Haller (Peter Graves),
has no clue how to stop what’s going on, seeing as they are stumped by
incredibly fiendish tricks from the perp – like the killer repainting
his van and using new licence plates. Victim blaming seems the best solution to
Haller.
Fortunately, up and coming TV reporter – and at this time the “reporter” part of TV reporter was actually still relevant – Jan (Shelley Hack) gets in on the case even before the police does. While she doesn’t have the resources of the authorities, she actually owns a functioning brain. Alas, Jan also has to cope with The Patriarchy as well as The Man. Not only is Haller an idiot, her bosses don’t really appreciate her public criticism of car culture, and last but not least, she herself still has doubts if anything she has achieved until now is only because her separated husband Ray (George Hamilton) once gave her her first break. Then there are Ray’s 70s macho attempts at getting her back…
I came to Death Car on the Freeway for Hal Needham directed death car on the freeway action on a TV movie budget but I stayed for some rather good mainstream late 70s feminism (as written by a guy). Which is to say, if you’re expecting this to be much of an action film, or a thriller, you might end up disappointed, for while the killer’s modus operandi is pleasantly silly, and what there is of the car action and suspense scenes is directed by Needham with the vigour and competence you’d expect of the guy who directed Smokey and the Bandit, about eighty percent of the film really concern Jan’s personal struggles against crusted society structures trying to hold her down.
To my surprise – I’m not much of a guy for films mostly interested in talking through issues even when I agree with their politics - I found myself rather engrossed in the proceedings. It certainly helps that William Wood’s script is as pointed as a US 70s TV movie script needs to be but still presents its case without too much melodrama. It’s not exactly kitchen sink realism (praise be to the Old Gods), but outside its sometime thriller plot, this is not a film of grand melodrama but one sympathetically portraying the sort of crap a young, talented and engaged woman has to fight through for no good reason whatsoever. Obviously, there’s also a rape metaphor sitting practically in the open, which again the film treats with dignity. Needham is a much keener director of this sort of thing than I had him pegged as, too, keeping things moving even when there are no cars on screen and visually centring on Jan in quite a few subtle ways.
All the while the film also provides a very nice feel of its time and place, subtly hinting at the weirdness of living in LA (at least people living in LA tell me it’s weird) and doing one of the things popular culture can do so well: explaining the world or a place at a specific moment in time through slight (or large) exaggeration. There’s a feeling of veracity to much going on in the film that again surprised me.
On the acting side Hack presents herself as sympathetic, never overplaying or underplaying Jan’s frustrations and keeping us rooting for her in the drama as well as the thriller parts. Hamilton’s performance as that most unmanly kind of guy, a man who can’t cope with his supposedly beloved wife being a muck-raking truth-seeking reporter who cares, is hilariously on point, going from the smug, to the sleazy, though mostly ending up with a facial expression of vacant arrogance whenever Jan tells him what she wants and feels in opposition to what he tells her she should want so perfect it’s as funny as it is infuriating. Whoever cast these two actors is at least half responsible for Death Car’s success as a film.
So Death Car on the Freeway ends up not just being a rather different film from the one I expected but also better in ways I’d never expected of it.
Fortunately, up and coming TV reporter – and at this time the “reporter” part of TV reporter was actually still relevant – Jan (Shelley Hack) gets in on the case even before the police does. While she doesn’t have the resources of the authorities, she actually owns a functioning brain. Alas, Jan also has to cope with The Patriarchy as well as The Man. Not only is Haller an idiot, her bosses don’t really appreciate her public criticism of car culture, and last but not least, she herself still has doubts if anything she has achieved until now is only because her separated husband Ray (George Hamilton) once gave her her first break. Then there are Ray’s 70s macho attempts at getting her back…
I came to Death Car on the Freeway for Hal Needham directed death car on the freeway action on a TV movie budget but I stayed for some rather good mainstream late 70s feminism (as written by a guy). Which is to say, if you’re expecting this to be much of an action film, or a thriller, you might end up disappointed, for while the killer’s modus operandi is pleasantly silly, and what there is of the car action and suspense scenes is directed by Needham with the vigour and competence you’d expect of the guy who directed Smokey and the Bandit, about eighty percent of the film really concern Jan’s personal struggles against crusted society structures trying to hold her down.
To my surprise – I’m not much of a guy for films mostly interested in talking through issues even when I agree with their politics - I found myself rather engrossed in the proceedings. It certainly helps that William Wood’s script is as pointed as a US 70s TV movie script needs to be but still presents its case without too much melodrama. It’s not exactly kitchen sink realism (praise be to the Old Gods), but outside its sometime thriller plot, this is not a film of grand melodrama but one sympathetically portraying the sort of crap a young, talented and engaged woman has to fight through for no good reason whatsoever. Obviously, there’s also a rape metaphor sitting practically in the open, which again the film treats with dignity. Needham is a much keener director of this sort of thing than I had him pegged as, too, keeping things moving even when there are no cars on screen and visually centring on Jan in quite a few subtle ways.
All the while the film also provides a very nice feel of its time and place, subtly hinting at the weirdness of living in LA (at least people living in LA tell me it’s weird) and doing one of the things popular culture can do so well: explaining the world or a place at a specific moment in time through slight (or large) exaggeration. There’s a feeling of veracity to much going on in the film that again surprised me.
On the acting side Hack presents herself as sympathetic, never overplaying or underplaying Jan’s frustrations and keeping us rooting for her in the drama as well as the thriller parts. Hamilton’s performance as that most unmanly kind of guy, a man who can’t cope with his supposedly beloved wife being a muck-raking truth-seeking reporter who cares, is hilariously on point, going from the smug, to the sleazy, though mostly ending up with a facial expression of vacant arrogance whenever Jan tells him what she wants and feels in opposition to what he tells her she should want so perfect it’s as funny as it is infuriating. Whoever cast these two actors is at least half responsible for Death Car’s success as a film.
So Death Car on the Freeway ends up not just being a rather different film from the one I expected but also better in ways I’d never expected of it.
Friday, October 28, 2011
On WTF: The Power (1968)
George Hamilton versus the Übermensch in the excellently paranoid SF thriller The Power by Byron Haskin! Hitchcock, psychedelics and the disquieting collide!
See me stay this excited in my column on WTF-Film!
Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,reviews,sf,thriller,byron haskin,george hamilton,suzanne pleshette,michael rennie,aldo ray,other places
Friday, September 30, 2011
On WTF: The Dead Don't Die (1975) & A Small Announcement
Curtis Harrington had a hell of a strange career. Starting out as a peculiar and artful B-movie auteur, he somehow found his way to the feeding troughs of television where he first made just as peculiar and artful TV movies, and then went to waste directing routine TV shows in a routine fashion.
And because Monday's my birthday, and ancient evils party for strange aeons, this is the last you'll read from me until Wednesday.
Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,american tv,reviews,horror,curtis harrington,george hamilton,linda cristal,ray milland,zombies,other places
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