A Howling in the Woods (1971)

Having had enough of what must have been the endless bullshit of her fashion photographer husband Eddie (Larry Hagman), young and beautiful (as the film will never stop saying, so I’ll just do as I’m told here) Liza Crocker (Barbara Eden) returns to the home of her father in the very rural small town she hasn’t visited for half a decade, to lick her wounds, planning to stay there long enough to establish residence and be able to put in for a divorce.

But Liza’s father isn’t there at all. Apparently, he has already embarked on his yearly archaeological – or is is anthropological - expedition into parts remote where no telephone can reach. At least her stepmother Rose (Vera Miles) provides our heroine a warm welcome, as does the Rose’s son Justin (John Rubinstein) whom Liza meets for the first time. One might even suggest that Justin’s a little too warm, though Liza seems charmed.

These two are pretty much the only ones greeting out heroine with open arms, however. The rest of the town’s population treats her with disregard to outright rudeness Liza can’t explain to herself, as if she were some kind of pariah everyone she once knew was just all too happy to see go. Or is it jealousy for her big city success?

There is, indeed the kind of dark secret hanging over the town you’d expect to encounter in a modern Nordic noir rather than an innocent little NBC TV movie like this. It all has to do with the drowning murder of a little girl some months ago, and with what the town’s people, once properly riled, proceeded to do afterwards.

I know very little about the career of A Howling in the Woods’ director Daniel Petrie beyond his humungous filmography (much of it in TV and family movies), but this thriller is certainly not an achievement to sneeze at, whatever I think about the rest of the guy’s work whenever I may encounter it. Petrie has a firm grip on his film’s not uncomplicated plot, timing his reveals well and turning the town this takes place in into the sort of community that’d only need one good werewolf or vampire to turn into a complete American rural gothic nightmarescape. Though, as it turns out, humans do pretty well in the monster business too.

The film creates an effective sense of Liza’s increasing paranoia, very efficiently suggesting how much her new experience in her old home diverges from what she remembers, using the inexplicability of this change to ratchet up the tension. If you’re not Liza, the film is also suggesting that there always has been something darker under the surfaces she knew, the kind of violence and darkness that needs another act of violence as a catalyst to come to the surface, but which only ever seems to be just waiting for that kind of excuse.

There’s some great acting on display, too, Eden (while about ten years older than her character is probably meant to be) making a likeable and often rather tough heroine, Hagman – who of course pops in during the course of the movie to convince his wife of taking him back via the power of being obnoxious - making pretty clear the difference between meaning well and knowing how to express it, and Rubinstein showing himself as really rather good at being a creep.

It’s a satisfying little movie that uses a complicated and not completely probable plot as an excellent excuse for a thriller that’s also interested in the dark heart of communal life.

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23 Paces to Baker Street (1956): This is a rather heavily Hitchock-indebted thriller by – sometimes brilliant – journeyman director Henry Hathaway, taking place in a London that is traditionally dark, foggy and rainy. Blind playwright and champion in self-pity Phillip Hannon (Van Johnson) overhears a curious, potentially sinister, conversation in a pub and becomes rather obsessed with solving what increasingly looks like a case (though not to the police). The film doesn’t quite have the psychological resonance of the best films of its sub-genre, and Johnson tends to overplay his character so desperately I wanted to punch the guy to shut up the melodramatic outbreaks more often than I found myself rooting for him. However, Hathaway knows how to stage a suspense scene as well as any director of his generation, the script – based on a novel by Philip MacDonald - is clever and twisty in the best way, and Milton Krasner’s photography is as pretty to look at as it is atmospheric, the film making excellent use of a London (even when parts of it are actually the Fox studios) that is still marked by World War II.

Hunt for the Wilderpeople (2016): Taika Waititi’s wonderful New Zealand movie is about a kid (Julian Dennison in a drily witty performance that never becomes precocious or annoying) kinda-sorta absconding into the bush with his decidedly grumpy foster father (Sam Neill, decidedly grumpy and wonderful) after the death of the foster mother, the ensuing manhunt and the pair’s sometimes funny sometimes sad adventures. It’s a film that comes by the description of being “heart-warming” as fairly as the director’s What We Do in the Shadows, creating a slightly off-kilter world but putting characters into it one can’t help but care about. There’s an astonishing amount of whit, wisdom and imagination in the film, often wickedly funny humour, and New Zealand looks rather spiffy too.


Nightwing (1979): I don’t know why you’d want to hire Arthur Hiller, never a man known for his grip on action, of all possible candidates to direct your nature strikes back project based on a Martin Cruz Smith novel I suspect to be rather more tightly plotted than the film at hand, but the ways of Hollywood are wild and mysterious. One wouldn’t usually cast Nick Mancuso as a native American sheriff either. Not surprising anyone, the film is a bit of a mess, with generally competent bat attack scenes followed by brain dead 70s paranoia bits, and some mock-native American mythology stuff ripped right out of a 30s pulp tale, and therefore rather cringeworthy, though at least not meant in bad faith. David Warner takes on Robert Shaw’s mantel from Jaws to take a big bite out of a lot of scenery, Kathryn Harold is attractively frightened, and Stephen Macht is an evil rich guy, so while nobody would confuse Nightwing with a good movie, it most certainly is never a boring one.

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The Strange And Deadly Occurrence (1974): Totally solid mid-70s TV thriller by totally solid TV (and otherwise) director John Llewellyn Moxey. Lawyer Robert Stack (still using his Eliot Ness voice like in the old days), Vera Miles and her teenage daughter move into their dream home in the country. Strange (and later deadly) things occur that suggest the family's house may be haunted. Or is human interference behind everything?

Despite using one of my least favourite tropes in all of cinema as if it were an Old Dark House movie made in the late 30s, Moxey's film is still pretty entertaining, if not particularly exciting. You can see how it could have been much more effective if it hadn't gone all Scooby Doo on its audience, for the seemingly supernatural moments are clearly playing to Moxey's strength the most, but it's a nice enough way to waste 70 minutes of one's life.

I, Desire aka Desire, the Vampire (1982): Ironically, this later attempt at being all-out supernatural by Moxey is less successful than the older movie. A female vampire working as a hooker and as a nurse (and how's that for mixed signals and/or fetishism?) collides with overly nosy law student and morgue attendant David Naughton. It might be the fact that the script is often rather clumsy and obvious where it seems to think that it's clever and subtle, or that Moxey makes more than one directorial decision that hints at self sabotage (wildcat noises for the vampire? Really?), or that the whole affair just drags a bit too much; in any case, while it's certainly not a horrible effort, the film is nothing to write home about in its inoffensive TV movie way.

The film does, however, contain a bit of choice scenery chewing by good old Brad Dourif, so Dourif completists (I know you're out there) will need to have a look anyhow.

The Attic Expeditions (2001): I can see why and how this film has gained a certain amount of cult traction over the years, what with it playing like a homemade horror film version of David Lynch adapting Philip K. Dick with eternal fan favourites like Jeffrey Combs, Ted Raimi and Wendy Robie in the cast. Unfortunately, the whole affair never really gels for me and seems to assume that being weird for weirdness' sake while pretending to be clever and profound is enough to make me overlook less than elegant direction, an atrocious lead performance by Andras Jones, and the fact that the film really isn't as clever and profound as it would like to be. Of course, even in its state of not being very good at all, The Attic Expeditions is at least trying to be different and clever instead of - say - going the ultra-generic gore route, which makes it difficult to be all that annoyed about it.

 

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