Something Wicked This Way Comes is one of my favorite films.
The place is Green Town, Illinois. The time is the 1920s. The carnival has come to town but this is no normal carnival. Led by the sinister, Mr. Dark (Jonathan Pryce), this carnival promises to fulfill everyone’s dreams but at what cost? Double amputee Ed (James Stacy) gets his arm and his leg back. The lonely teacher, Miss Foley (Mary Grace Canfield), is young and beautiful once again. Mr. Dark may bring people what they want but he gives nothing away for free. Only two young boys, Will (Vidal Peterson) and Jim (Shawn Carson), realize the truth about the carnival but no one in town will listen to them. Mr. Dark wants Jim to be his successor and Will’s only ally is his elderly father, the town librarian (Jason Robards).
As much a coming of age story as a horror film, Something Wicked This Way Comes takes the time to establish Green Town and to make it feel like a real place and its inhabitants seem like real people. When Mr. Dark shows up, he is not just a supernatural trickster. He is not just stealing the souls of Green Town. He is also destroying the innocence of childhood. Jonathan Pryce is both charismatic and menacing as Mr. Dark while Jason Robards matches him as the infirm librarian who must find the strength to save his son. The confrontation between Pryce and Robards, where Pryce tears flaming pages out of a book, is the best part of the movie. Along with Robards and Pryce, the entire cast is excellent. Be sure to keep an eye out for familiar faces like Royal Dano, Jack Dodson, Angelo Rossitto, and especially Pam Grier, playing the “Dust Witch,” the most beautiful woman in the world.
Based on a classic novel by Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes is one of the only Bradbury adaptations to do justice to its source material.
Well, it turns out that there’s a sequel and it’s on YouTube! Both films were directed by Jim Wynorski and featured pretty much the same cast, despite the fact that a few of them were playing new characters. It was released under several different titles. Hard To Die is the one that I’m going with for this review. However, the film was also known as Tower of Terror, which makes sense when you consider that the majority of the film takes place in a hi-rise office building. It was also apparently released in some places as Sorority House Massacre III, despite the fact that there’s no sorority house in the movie.
Actually, it’s debatable whether or not Hard To Die is actually a sequel. It’s true that Orville Ketchum (Peter Spellos) does make another appearance. In the first movie, Orville was the creepy neighbor. In Hard To Die, he’s the janitor at the office building. Orville tells the exact same story, with the exact same flashbacks, that he told in Sorority House Massacre II. (Those flashbacks, of course, were lifted from a totally unrelated movie called Slumber Party Massacre. There were apparently a lot of massacres in the 80s and 90s.) The evil spirit of Hockstadder returns as well, though this time he comes flying out of a box that was accidentally delivered to the office building as opposed to a Ouija board. And, of course, there’s an abundance of lingerie, awkward dialogue, and cheap gore effects. (At one point, a bucket of fake blood is literally splashed on a wall.) However, Hard To Die also tells almost exactly the same story of Sorority House Massacre II. There are so few differences that I’m actually more tempted to say that Hard To Die is a remake of Sorority House Massacre II than a sequel. The only problem with that theory is whether or not a second movie can be considered remake when the first movie literally came out the exact same year.
(One of the reasons that I love my work here at the TSL is that it allows me to obsess over minutia like this.)
Anyway, the main difference between Hard To Die and Sorority House Massacre III is that there’s no sorority house in Hard To Die. Instead, Hard To Die takes place in a lingerie shop that just happens to be located on the 7th floor of a skyscraper. The hard-working employees are spending the weekend doing inventory but it’s not going to well. For one thing, the sprinklers accidentally go off so everyone decides to take off their wet clothes, put on skimpy lingerie, and order pizza. Personally, I probably would have waited for the pizza to arrive before getting naked but then again, I’ve never worked retail or dated a pizza deliveryman.
The pizza does eventually arrive but no one gets to eat it because the deliveryperson gets set on fire and ends up falling several floors to her death. That’s a waste of good pizza, which is kind of depressing. Meanwhile, Orville keeps trying to warn everyone about Hockstadder but, instead, he keeps getting beaten up. The end credits of Hard To Die promised that the next film would be called Orville In Orbit. Apparently, it was never made but I do hope that Orville got a vacation after all of this.
Anyway, Hard To Die is an extremely silly movie but it’s just so sincere in its silliness that it feels somewhat churlish to be too critical of it. If I had to choose whether to be in Sorority House Massacre II or Hard To Die, I would probably pick Hard To Die because, at least in that movie, I’d get to shoot a machine gun. Hard To Die is so blatantly and unapologetically over the top that you can’t help but be amused by it all.
And if you didn’t already know that, you will know it after watching the 1957 film, The Vampire.
Like many films of this kind, The Vampire starts with death.
Actually, I take that back. Technically, it’s true but it’s also little bit too melodramatic. And, to be honest, The Vampire starts with a 14 year-old boy, who is very much alive, riding his bicycle down the street of Anytown USA. He has a box with him, one that has air holes. On the back of his bike, a cardboard sign reads: “Bobs Pet Zoo! If Its Alive We Got It!” Apparently, the kid is smart enough to run his own zoo but not smart enough to know when to use an apostrophe.
Anyway, the kid comes up to a creepy old house, one that looks somewhat out of place in the otherwise pristine suburban neighborhood. Originally, I thought that maybe Pennywise lived in the house but then I reminded myself that The Vampire was made decades before It. Instead, the house belongs to Dr. Campbell, a scientist who is doing experiments with blood and who needs a never-ending supply of animal test subjects. (Boooooo! Animal testing! Hiss!) Apparently, the kid keeps Dr. Campbell supplied with animals. When the kid enters the house, Dr. Campbell is nowhere to be seen. It’s not until the kid enters the laboratory that he discovers Campbell, dead and slumped over his desk.
As news spreads of Campbell’s death, his friend, Dr. Paul Beecher (John Beal), searches through Campbell’s belongings and he comes across a mysterious bottle of pills, which he promptly takes home with him. Dr. Beecher is kindly doctor, the type that we all wish we could deal with whenever we had to go in for a check up. However, he suffers from terrible migraines. That night, when he’s literally blinded with a headache, he asks his daughter to get him his pills. She retrieves a bottle of pills but guess what? They’re the wrong pills! They’re not headache pills! Instead, they’re Dr. Campbell’s vampirism pills!
The pills cause Beecher to blaxk out. Whenever he comes to, he never has any memory of what he may or may not have done while he was out. However, strange things are happening to his friends and his patients. One of his longtime patients dies of fright when he comes by her house. On her neck, he finds two puncture wounds…
So, it’s not a spoiler for me to tell you that Dr. Beecher has been transformed into a vampire. And I know what you’re thinking. Why doesn’t he just stop taking the pills? The simplest answer is that the pills are addictive. The more complex answer is that he doesn’t want to. The pills have brought out his dark side and, now that it’s free, it’s not planning on going anywhere.
In a strange way, The Vampire reminded me of Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life. In Bigger Than Life, James Mason plays a gentle and good-hearted professor who, after taking steroids, turns into a monster who dreams of creating a master race. Bigger Than Life was unsettling for the exact same reason that The Vampire is unsettling. Both suggest that the pills didn’t turn their user into a monster. Instead, the pills just allowed his true self to come out.
The Vampire was a low-budget film, a B-movie as many would probably call it. The musical score is overly melodramatic and so are some of the actors. But I would say that The Vampire is actually a bit of a subversive masterpiece. This 1957 film suggests that behind the pristine facade of suburbia, there lurked monsters. Even an outwardly successful and respected man like Dr. Beecher can turn into something totally different behind closed doors, this film is saying. That’s a message that it as relevant today as it was when this film was first released. In its own way, The Vampire is a brilliant and important movie.
Allan Gray (Nicolas de Gunzburg, performing under the name Julian West) might be a student of the occult or he might just be a man having a dream within a dream. He’s handsome with just enough of an aristocratic bearing to be intriguing. His face is strangely blank. Whenever we see him, we wonder if he’s awake or if he’s asleep. We’re reminded of Werner Herzog’s film Heart of Glass, in which the entire cast recited their lines while hypnotized.
Allan’s come to a small village in France. It’s a quaint little place, probably the type that most tourist would consider to be quite beautiful. But from the minute that we see it, the entire landscape seems to be off. The inhabitants of the village seem almost as blank-faced as Allan. When we see the trees sway in the wind, we’re reminded of Victor Sjöström’s The Wind and how the nonstop wind drove Lillian Gish mad.
Allan stays in an inn. He goes to sleep. When he wakes up, an old man stands in his room. The old man gives him a package. The package is not to be opened until the man’s death. Allan goes outside. The village is full of shadows. He watches an old woman and the town’s doctor. Allan meets with one of the old man’s daughters and learns that her sister is deathly ill. She needs a blood transfusion. When Allan reads a book about vampyres, he suspects that both the town and the sisters are being held prisoner. At times, the events feel almost random but the film has such a hypnotic power that we automatically know that nothing happens by mere chance.
Directed by Carl Theodor Dryer, Vampyr was filmed in 1931 and released in 1932. This was Dreyer’s first sound film but Vampyr almost seems like a silent film. It certainly has more in common with Dreyer’s hallucinogenic silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc, than it does with Universal’s version of Dracula. Vampyr feels like a cinematic dream, full of surrealistic images and odd performances. As a collection of images, Vampyr is one of the most intensely atmospheric film that I’ve ever seen. Allan, who may be having a dream within a dream, discovers a coffin and is shocked to discover who is inside. A character is buried alive in flour. Fogs rolls across the river and a figure with a scythe brings to mind Charon, the ferryman who took the dead to the underworld. Shadows dance across the screen. Much like Lucio Fulci’s Beyond trilogy, Vampyr succeeds by creating its own cinematic world, one where reality is solely defined by the images on the screen. The plot of Vampyr might not always make sense in the real world but it’s perfectly logical in the world created by the film.
Vampyr’s a surreal classic, one that reportedly came close to being a lost film. Several of the video releases have been technically inferior, though the flickering picture and inconsistent soundtrack of those releases can actually add to the film’s dreamlike power. It’s been released by the Criterion Collection and that is the ideal version to watch.
Well, as another horrorthon draws to a close, it’s time for another Shattered Lens tradition! Every Halloween, we share one of the greatest and most iconic horror films ever made. For your Halloween enjoyment, here is George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead!
That’s the question that is asked in the hauntingly beautiful film, A Ghost Story.
How to describe the plot of A Ghost Story? It’s not going to be easy because A Ghost Story is a film that defies easy description or categorization. It’s power comes less from the specifics of the story and more from the mood that it creates. A Ghost Story makes you think and it makes you feel and, to a certain extent, you’re just going to have to take my word on that. This is one of those film that, to truly understand, you simply must see.
Casey Affleck plays C and Rooney Mara plays M. They live in a small house, near Dallas. They’re like any couple, really. Sometimes, they appear to be in love. Sometimes, they appear to be on the verge of breaking up and never seeing each other again. Sometimes, they are happy. Sometimes, they are sad. The film starts with an almost random series of scenes, showing their life together.
Suddenly, we see a smashed car sitting in front of the house.
Just as abruptly, we’re in the hallway outside a sterile hospital room. We can see that, inside the room, M is staring down at a body on a slab. The body has been covered with a sheet. M leaves. Slowly, the sheet-covered body sits up. We watch as the sheet-covered ghost walks down the hallways of the hospital. Briefly, it pauses to look at what appears to be a portal to … somewhere else. The ghost does not enter the portal and the portal closes.
We spend the rest of the movie following that sheet-covered ghost as he wanders through our world. No one living sees it and the ghost never says a word. He watches as M mourns over his passing. Time passes. People enter and leave the house. Life goes on but the ghost is stuck forever where he is, powerless to do anything other than occasionally break a dish, play a piano, or open a book. Time passes. The ghost sees the future, the past, and the present. Why is the ghost still there? Does the ghost know? Is the ghost just waiting for someone who it has forgotten?
If I’m making A Ghost Story sound like a sad movie … well, it is. There are moments of humor, largely coming from the fact that the ghost is literally a sheet with some eye holes. For the most part, though, this film is a somber meditation on life, death, and what makes it all worth the trouble. It’s a film that makes you wonder whether you would have entered that portal or if you too would have returned to your old house so that you silently watch the world go on without you.
From the stillness of the morgue to the view of a futuristic cityscape that the ghost can see but probably no longer appreciate, director David Lowery gives some truly beautiful and haunting images while telling this story. (It’s not surprising to learn that the Dallas-based Lowery previously worked on Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color.) A Ghost Story came out earlier this year and really didn’t get the attention that it deserved. It’s a thought-provoking film and definitely one of the best of the year.
Today is the 79th anniversary of Orson Welles’s infamous War of the Worlds broadcast.
In 1938, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater of the Air performed a radio adaptation of H.G. Welles’s War of the World. Presented as a live news program, it was one of the first mockumentaries. It also caused a panic. How big the panic was is open for debate. Some say only a few people took it seriously. Other sources say that it was a nationwide crisis. But, regardless, Welles made history on that night. Not only did he illustrate the power of the media but he also scared the Hell out of a lot of people. All in all, a pretty good night…
Filmed in 1957 for a television program called Westinghouse Studio One, The Night America Trembled is a dramatization of that night. For legal reasons, Orson Welles is not portrayed nor is his name mentioned. Instead, the focus is mostly on the people listening to the broadcast and getting the wrong idea. That may sound like a comedy but The Night America Trembled takes itself fairly seriously. Even pompous old Edward R. Murrow shows up to narrate the film, in between taking drags off a cigarette. (I enjoyed the show but, whenever Murrow showed up, I was reminded of a grumpy old teacher complaining that none of his students cared about the Spanish-American War.)
Clocking in at a brisk 60 minutes, The Night America Trembled is an interesting recreation of that October 30th. Among the people panicking: a group of people in a bar who, before hearing the broadcast, were debating whether or not Hitler was as crazy as people said he was, a babysitter who goes absolutely crazy with fear, and a group of poker-playing college students. If, like me, you’re a frequent viewer of TCM, you may recognize some of the faces in the large cast: Ed Asner, James Coburn, John Astin, Warren Oates, and Warren Beatty all make early appearances.
As I said, it’s an interesting little historical document and you can watch it below!
Zombie Island Massacre has got a massacre but it ain’t got no zombies.
Instead, it has a group of tourists who travel to Zombie Island so they can watch a voodoo ceremony. Afterward, their tour bus breaks down. The driver leaves to get help but never returns. There is a deserted villa nearby so the tourists decide to take shelter there for the night. Whenever anyone stumbles away from the main group, they are killed by someone wearing a costume made of leaves. There ain’t no zombies or surprises in the glacially paced movie. There might not even be an island. It might actually be a peninsula. I’m not sure.
The only reason that Zombie Island Massacre is remembered is because one of the tourists is played by Rita Jenrette. Rita was the wife of John Johnrette, a South Carolina congressman who was taken down as a part of Abscam. Rita got a divorce and wrote a book called My Capital Secrets, where she revealed that she and John had sex on the capital steps while the House was holding an all-night session. Rita was not a bad actress, though the material only required her to scream and take a shower.
The main problem with Zombie Island Massacre is obvious. There ain’t no zombies on that island.
I previously shared Haxan back in October of 2013. A day later, YouTube removed the video and turned my post into a tease.
Well, the video has been uploaded again so I’m sharing Haxan again!
To quote what I wrote the last time that I shared this particular film:
Directed by the Danish director Benjamin Christensen, Haxan is a quasi-documentary that, over the course of four separate sections, documents the history of witchcraft and superstition in Europe. Along with making a potent case that religion and superstition are largely the same thing, Haxan is best known for dramatizing various old folk tales. Though the film was made in 1922, its images of lustful devils and dark magic remain powerful to this day.
Some movies just force the viewer to ask, “What would you do?”
I mean, just consider what it would be like to be in the scenario that’s presented to us in the 1990 film, Sorority House Massacre II. You’re a college student. You’ve got your entire future ahead of you. The president of your sorority has just purchased a new sorority house and she wants you and three others to spend the weekend helping her fix the place up.
You arrive at the house and you discover that it’s literally on the verge of collapsing. There’s no electricity. There’s no telephone. (And remember, this is back when people just used landlines.) There’s no hot water. Soon after arriving, you’re informed that there’s two reasons why the house was being sold at such a cheap price.
First off, there’s the neighbor. He’s a creepy, kinda pervy-looking guy named Orville Ketchum. When Orville comes over to meet his new neighbors, he announces that he has the keys to the basement. He reaches into his pants to retrieve them. Ewwww!
Secondly, it turns out that the house isn’t just any deserted house. It’s the old Hockstadder Place! Years ago, Mr. Hockstadder killed his daughters before dying. Orville witnessed the whole thing. As he tells the story, you might notice that the flashbacks are lifted from a film called Slumber Party Massacre, despite the fact that you’re starring in Sorority House Massacre II.
Despite all of that, you still enter the house. A storm is rolling in and, whenever you look out the window, you see the same lightning stock footage that has appeared in a countless number of cheap horror movies.
When you and your friends decide to explore the basement, you find a Ouija board. You know that Ouija boards can be dangerous but everyone else wants to run upstairs and use it. Someone suggests that maybe the board can be used to contact the spirit of Hockstadder. After all, according to Orville, Hockstadder swore that his murderous spirit would never leave the house and would possess anyone who tried to move in.
At this point, you have two options.
Do you say, “Okay, obviously, it’s not a good idea to contact the spirit of a murderer — especially one that said he would possess anyone who tries to contact him — so I’m going to go ahead and leave now?”
or
Do you light some candles, strip down to your underwear in front of a bunch of open windows (despite the fact that weird old Orville is right across the street), sit on a filthy floor, and try to communicate with the spirit of a homicidal maniac?
The smart option would be the first one so, of course, the characters in Sorority House Massacre II do the exact opposite. Then again, nobody in Sorority House Massacre II appears to be that smart. For one thing, they’re all in their 30s and they have yet to graduate college. Trust me, I wish I could have stayed in college forever but, at some point, you really do have to either graduate or drop out. Tuition’s not cheap.
Anyway, Sorority House Massacre II is one of those movies that just amuses me to death. There’s absolutely nothing subtle about it. It’s such a blatant exploitation film that you can’t help but admire it for not pretending to be something that it isn’t. (At the same time, it’s rather tame when compared to the movies that we’re used to today. Whenever someone is killed, obviously fake blood is squirted on a wall.) This may be a stupid movie but it’s very sincere in its stupidity and there’s something to be said for that.
Add to that, Peter Spellos is memorably weird as Orville. The way he delivers his lines makes Orville into the neighbor that everyone would dread having next door. In the end, though, it’s a good thing that Orville was there.
Finally, there is one surprisingly effective moment. The movie starts with the “final girl” huddled in a dark room, begging the unseen killer to remember who they are. The movie then flashes back to that morning, with the girls standing in front of the house. The abrupt cut from darkness to the bright and sunny morning is surprisingly effective and feels almost dream-like. Though one gets the feeling it was probably unintentional, it’s still works far better than you’d expect.
Something Wicked This Way Comes is one of my favorite films.
Zombie Island Massacre has got a massacre but it ain’t got no zombies.
