Horror Film Review: The Tomb of Ligeia (dir by Roger Corman)

Posted on October 29, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Did Roger Corman have an issue with cats?

That’s the question I asked myself as I watched 1964’s The Tomb of Ligeia. Loosely based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, The Tomb of Ligeia tells the story of Verden Fell (Vincent Price). Fell’s wife, Ligeia, has recently died but Fell worries that her spirit is still haunting and watching him. One gets the feeling that Fell hated his late wife but, at the same time, was obsessed with her. Fell has an eye condition which causes him to wear dark glasses on the rare occassions that he leaves his manor. He’s definitely a creepy guy but that doesn’t stop Rowena (Elizabeth Shepherd) from falling in love with him and leaving her fiancé, Christopher Gough (John Westbrook), to marry him. Unfortunately, Rowena is soon feeling the spirt of Ligeia as well, in the form of a black cat who keeps attacking Rowena.

Now, in all honesty, I doubt that Roger Corman specifically had an issue with cats. It’s possible the Edgar Allan Poe had an issue with cats, as he lived at a time when cats were rarely kept as pets and were instead just used to catch and kill mice and rats. (And, in fairness to the 19th century, that was a very important job in those days of bad hygiene and outhouses.) There’s no cats to be found in Poe’s short story about Ligeia but there was one very prominently featured in The Black Cat. As Ligeia was not exactly one of Poe’s most detailed stories, it’s probable that Corman and screenwriter Robert Towne just included the evil black cat because that story was one of Poe’s best-known.

That said, for me, it was difficult to watch an entire movie about people hating and attempting to destroy a cat. It’s certainly not the cat’s fault that it’s been possessed by the spirit of Ligeia. As I watched the film, it occurred to me that cats may not have been as popular in the 1960s as they are today. I mean, there was no internet when this film was made and, as a result, people weren’t constantly being bombarded by cute cat pictures. Instead, people probably just knew cats for their habit of hissing at people and scratching their owners. Today, we find that behavior to be cute. Perhaps back in 1964, people felt differently.

If I seem to be rambling on about the cat, that’s because there’s not really a lot to be said about The Tomb of Ligeia. It was the last of Corman’s Poe films and neither Corman nor Price seem to be particularly invested in the material. Price is actually rather miscast as Verden Fell. Fell is meant to be a mysterious aristocrat, in the spirit of Maxim de Winter from Rebecca. But Vincent Price is …. well, he’s Vincent Price. Vincent Price was a wonderful actor and personality but he wasn’t particularly enigmatic. From the first minute we see Price, we know that he’s being haunted by his dead wife because he’s Vincent Price and the same thing happened to him in several other films.

The Tomb of Ligeia is full of the ornate sets and beautiful costumes that were featured in all of Corman’s Poe films. And even a miscast Vincent Price is still fun to watch. But, when compared to the other films in the Poe Cycle, this one falls flat.

Scenes That I Love: Vito and Michael In The Godfather With Dialogue By Robert Towne

Posted on July 3, 2024 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Yesterday, it was announced that the legendary screenwriter Robert Towne had passed away. One of the premier talents of Hollywood’s second Golden Age, Towne was rightly remembered as the man who wrote the intelligent and challenging scripts for films like Chinatown, The Last Detail, and Shampoo.

Towne was also a well-known script doctor, one whose work was not always credited but which always contributed to the overall quality of the films to which he contributed. In 1971, when Francis Ford Coppola realized that he needed a scene for The Godfather that would allow Vito to open up to his son and successor, Michael, Robert Towne was the man who wrote the scene. The result was one of the best moments in a film that is full of great dialogue.

Film Review: Drive, He Said (dir by Jack Nicholson)

Posted on March 13, 2023 by Lisa Marie Bowman

First released in 1971, Drive, He Said tells the story of two college roommates.

Hector (William Tepper) is a star basketball player who everyone expects to turn pro. His intense coach (Bruce Dern) is always yelling at him to stop fooling around on the court but Hector is more interested in fooling around elsewhere as he’s having an affair with Olive (Karen Black), the wife of a self-styled “hip” philosophy professor named Richard (Robert Towne).

Gabriel (Michael Margotta) is Hector’s best friend. They live together, even though Hector’s coach thinks that Gabriel is a bad influence. Gabriel is a self-styled campus radical. He has a devoted group of followers who will do just about anything that he tells them to do. Gabriel is big into guerilla theater and symbolic protests. Nothing he does seems to add up too much but, unlike Hector, he’s good at giving speeches.

Together, they worry about the draft!

Of course, they’re both worrying about two different types of drafts. Hector is worried about the NBA draft and whether he should enter it. He’s been playing basketball for as long as he can remember. The only thing that he’s really good at is playing basketball. And yet, Hector isn’t sure if he wants to spend the rest of his life taking orders from his coaches and devoting every minute to playing the game. However, Hector’s worked himself into a corner. When one NBA official asks him what he’s going to do if he’s not drafted, Hector admits that he doesn’t know. When asked what his major is, Hector replies, “Greek.”

Gabriel, on the other hand, is worried about being drafted into the military and being sent to Vietnam. Gabriel considers himself to be a revolutionary but it soon becomes clear that he really doesn’t have much of a plan for how to start his revolution. Indeed, the film suggests that his activism is more about his own insecurity over his own sexuality than anything else. Gabriel particularly seems to be obsessed with Hector’s affair with Olive. While Hector reaches new highs on the court, Gabriel comes closer and closer to having a psychotic break.

Director Jack Nicholson found a way to work in shout out to his friend, Harry Dean Stanton

Drive, He Said was one of the many “campus rebellion” films that were released in the early 70s and, much like Getting Straight, it’s definitely a product of its time. Today, it it’s known for anything, it’s for being the directorial debut of actor Jack Nicholson. (Nicholson has said that, before he was cast in Easy Rider, he was actually planning on abandoning acting and pursuing a career as a director.) The film features many of the flaws the are typically present in directorial debuts. The pacing is terrible, with some scenes ending too quickly while others seem to go on forever. At times, the film feels a bit overstylized as Nicholson mixes jump cuts, odd camera angles, and slow motion to little effect. It’s very much a film about men, so much so that the film’s ultra-masculinity almost verges on self-parody.

And yet, there are moments of isolated brilliance to be found in Drive, He Said. Some of the shots are genuinely impressive and the army induction scene shows that Nicholson could direct comedy, even if he does let the scene drag on for a bit too long. Though Nicholson doesn’t appear in the film, his approach to the story features his trademark cynicism and sense of fatalism. Though he was often associated with the counterculture, Nicholson was more a member of the Beat generation than of the hippies. As such, Drive, He Said has more in common with Jack Kerouac than Abbie Hoffman. Drive, He Said is definitely an anti-establishment film but, at the same time, it doesn’t make the mistake of glorifying Gabriel or his followers. Gabriel, with his constant demand that everyone join him in his ill-defined revolution, is almost as overbearing as basketball coach and, towards the end of the film, he commits an act of violence that leaves no doubt that his “revolution” is all about his own self-gratification. The film is less a polemic and more a portrait of people trying to find their identity during a time of political and cultural upheaval.

The film’s biggest flaw is that neither William Tepper or Michael Margotta really have the charisma necessary to carry a movie, especially one in which even the main characters often do unlikable things. Tepper is dull while Margotta overacts and, at times, comes across as if he’s trying too hard to imitate his director. It falls to the film’s supporting cast to provide the energy that Tepper and Margotta lack. Fortunately, Bruce Dern and Karen Black are both perfectly cast. Bruce Dern seems to be having a blast as the fanatical basketball coach while Karen Black brings a fierce intelligence to the role of Oliva, an intelligence that one gets the feeling wasn’t really in the original script. Considering how misogynistic every other character in the film is, it’s impossible not to cheer when Olive announces, “I’m not going with anybody, anywhere.”

(For whatever reason, there was a definite strain of misogyny that seemed to run through the majority of the late 60s and early 70s counterculture films. Just consider the amount of time Getting Straight devoted to Elliott Gould shouting at Candice Bergen.)

Drive, He Said is flawed but interesting. As a director, Nicholson understood how to frame a shot but he wasn’t quite sure how to tell a cohesive story. That said, the film itself is a definite time capsule of a very specific cultural moment.

Tequila Sunrise (1988, directed by Robert Towne)

Posted on April 6, 2020 by Jedadiah Leland

Mac (Mel Gibson) and Nick (Kurt Russell) are old friends who are on opposite sides of the law. Mac was once a legendary drug dealer though he says that he’s now retired. Nick is a narcotics detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Early on, Nick warns Mac that, if he is dealing again, he’s going to have to arrest him. Mac says that he has no interest in getting back into the business but no one believes him.

Mac is actually more interested in Jo Ann Valleneri, who owns his favorite restaurant. Since Jo Ann is played by Michelle Pfeiffer, who can blame him?. After tracks Mac to the restaurant, he becomes attracted to Jo Ann too and again, it’s impossible to blame him. Soon, Jo Ann and Nick are a couple but is Nick just using her to find out about Mac’s relationship with a mysterious drug lord named Carlos? And when Mac moves in and starts his own relationship with Jo Ann, does he really love her or is he using her to throw Nick off of his trail?

Tequila Sunrise should be a great film but instead, it’s only a good one. It has all the elements of greatness — Michelle Pfeiffer at her sultriest, Kurt Russell at his coolest, and Mel Gibson before he lost his mind. It also has a good supporting cast, including Raul Julia, J.T. Walsh, and Arliss Howard. Ultimately, it doesn’t really come together because the film’s director and screenwriter, Robert Towne, doesn’t seem to be sure what type of story he wants to tell. Tequila Sunrise could have either been a great crime thriller or a steamy love story but, by trying to be both, it gets bogged down in its own convoluted plot. That probably won’t matter to most viewers, though. Not when Russell, Gibson, and Pfeiffer are all on screen together at the same time. Tequila Sunrise tries to be many things but it works best as a celebration of movie star charisma.

One final note: The film looks great. Visually, this is one of the ultimate California films. Cinematographer Conrad Hall received an Oscar nomination for his work on this film and it was more than deserved.

Film Review: Last Woman On Earth (dir by Roger Corman)

Posted on August 10, 2019 by Lisa Marie Bowman

The title character of the 1960 Roger Corman film, Last Woman On Earth, is Evelyn Gern (Besty Jones-Moreland). When a vaguely defined apocalypse occurred and apparently wiped out almost every living person on the planet, Evelyn was on vacation in Puerto Rico and scuba diving. Because she had her own oxygen tank, she was able to survive while everyone on the surface was asphyxiated by a sudden change in the atmosphere. (Or something like that. To be honest, I never quite understood what the apocalypse was about or if it had occurred worldwide or just in Puerto Rico.)

Evelyn may potentially be the last woman on Earth but, unfortunately for her, there’s at least two men left. There’s her husband, Harold (Antony Carbone). Harold is a brutish businessman who, before the world ended, was constantly under the threat of indictment. And then there’s Martin (Robert Towne, who also wrote the script), who is Harold’s attorney. With the world apparently ending, Harold decides that he’s in charge while Martin decides that he’s in love with Evelyn. Evelyn, for her part, ends up spending a lot of time praying in the local church. At the end of 71 minutes, someone is dead and the survivors are left to consider an uncertain future. It’s not a particularly happy film, though, at the same time, it’s not really well-made enough to be that depressing.

It’s perhaps not a coincidence that this film opens with everyone watching a cock fight because, despite its title, Last Woman On Earth is all about the extremes to which men will go to assert their authority. There’s absolutely no reason for Harold and Martin to end up trying to kill each other, beyond the fact that they both want to be in charge and they both want the same woman. Honestly, though, if you’re one of the last three people on Earth, I would think that you might be inspired to rethink certain traditional and patriarchal concepts. That, of course, doesn’t happen in Last Woman On Earth. It’s hard not to be disappointed with the fact that, even with society no longer existing, Evelyn’s reaction to most conflict is to retreat to the background and let the man fight it out among themselves. I mean, we expect no better from Harold and Martin but Evelyn’s passivity in the face of everything gets rather frustrating very quickly.

Of course, it could be argued that I may be expecting too much from a film that was shot over a week and only made because Corman happened to be shooting another movie in Puerto Rico at the time. Corman rarely went on location so, when he went down to Puerto Rico to do Creature of the Haunted Sea, he decided to get the most out of the location as he could by shooting a second film. Screenwriter Robert Towne was cast as Martin because he was already getting paid to write the script while the film was being shot. By casting Towne, Corman saved money that would have otherwise been spent on a professional actor. Towne, who is credited as Edward Wain, ends up giving a rather bizarre performance, alternating between stiff underacting and eye-bulging overacting. You kind of find yourself regretting that apparently it was decided that it would have been too expensive to fly Dick Miller or Peter Graves down to Puerto Rico.

The film doesn’t add up too much, beyond serving as a document of an era’s paranoia about the impending end of the world. (Two years after the release of this film, the Cuban Missile Crisis would bring the world to the brink of a real-life apocalypse.) Corman does manage to get a few haunting shots of the deserted streets of San Juan, though one gets the feeling that this would more due to luck than any specific intention on his part. Last Woman On Earth was released on a double bill with Little Shop of Horrors and, when seen today, it really can’t start to compete with Seymour and his talking plant.

Creature Double Feature 5: THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH (AIP 1964) and THE TOMB OF LIGEIA (AIP 1965)

Posted on March 24, 2018 by gary loggins

cracked rear viewer

Boston’s WLVI-TV 56 ran it’s ‘Creature Double Feature’ series from 1972 to 1983. Though fans remember it mostly for those fabulous giant monster movies starring Godzilla and friends, CDF occasionally featured some monsters of a different kind…

Roger Corman and Vincent Price had teamed to make five successful Edgar Allan Poe adaptations for American-International Pictures, beginning with 1960’s HOUSE OF USHER (there was a sixth, THE PREMATURE BURIAL, that starred Ray Milland rather than Price). Studio execs James Nicholson and Sam Arkoff, always on the lookout for ways to cut costs, joined forces with Britain’s Anglo-Amalgamated Productions (makers of the CARRY ON comedies) and shipped Corman and company to jolly ol’ England for the final two, THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH and THE TOMB OF LIGEIA. Both turned out to be high points in the Corman/Price/Poe series.

1964’s MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH is a sadistic, psychedelic nightmare of…

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An Olympic Film Review: Personal Best (dir by Robert Towne)

Posted on February 24, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Like all good people, I am currently obsessed with the Olympics. I was hoping that I would be able to post an Olympic-related film review every day during the games but, unfortunately, regular life got in the way and it didn’t happen. I’ll try to post what I can today and then, for the rest of this upcoming week, I will be concentrating on reviewing films that have been nominated for best picture.

(Interestingly enough, only one Olympic-related film has been nominated for best picture and I reviewed Chariots of Fire years ago.)

The 1982 film Personal Best is a movie that I recorded off of Cinemax last year, specifically so I could review it during the Winter Games. That may have been a mistake on that part because Personal Best doesn’t actually deal with the Winter Games. Though it’s a film about athletes training to compete in the Olympics, they’re all runners, swimmers, and pole vaulters. In short, they’re all hoping to compete at the Summer Games (which, for my money, are nowhere near as much fun as the Winter Games). On top of that, no one in Personal Best actually gets to compete at the Olympics.

Of course, that wasn’t how things were supposed to go originally. While doing research for this review, I discovered that Personal Best had quite a long and somewhat tortured production history. The directorial debut of the famous (and famously slow) screenwriter Robert Towne, Personal Best was originally meant to showcase athletes preparing for the 1980 Summer Olympics. However, shortly after production began in 1980, it was announced that the United States would be boycotting the Olympic Games and the script was hastily changed to reflect that fact. Shortly after the boycott was announced, production was put on hold when the Screen Actors Guild went on strike. In what the New York Times described as being “a ploy to allow the movie to become an independent production and resume shooting during the strike,” Towne filed a lawsuit against Warner Bros. The end result of that lawsuit was that David Geffen stepped in and financed the film.

This led to yet another lawsuit, this one filed by Towne against Geffen. Towne claimed that Geffen forced him to sign a “coerced agreement” that not only lost him the rights to a script he had been working on about Tarzan but also left him dead broke. Geffen, in that same New York Times article, is quoted as saying, “Robert Towne took a picture budgeted at $7 million – ‘Personal Best’ – and made it incompetently for $16 million,” and that he agreed to take over financing because, ‘no other studio would pick the film up because Robert Towne had spent $5 million, and there wasn’t a coherent scene in the entire movie.”

I know what you’re saying. “That’s great, Lisa, but what’s the actual film about?”

Personal Best, for the most part, is about bodies in motion. Oh, don’t get me wrong. There’s a plot. Chris Cahill (Mariel Hemingway) is a young runner who hopes to someday compete in the Olympics. She finds herself torn between following the advice of her lover, Torry (Patrice Donnelly) and the advice of her manipulative coach (Scott Glenn) and things get even more complicated when she enters into a heterosexual romance with a swimmer named Denny (Kenny Moore). Both Towne and the film deserve credit for the forthright way that it portrays Chris and Torry’s relationship and also for its unapologetic portrayal of women who are just as competitive and determined to win as men.

But really, the film doesn’t seem to be that concerned with the story that it’s telling. The film itself is far more interested in the images of professional athletes competing and training. This is one of those films that is full of slow-motion scenes of people running down tracks and attempting to jump over hurdles. Most of the cast was made up of actual athletes and Towne’s camera lovingly captures every single ripple of muscle as they move across the screen. Watching the film, it was hard not to be reminded of the way Leni Reifenstahl fetishized athleticism in Olympia. This is a film that loves, celebrates, and comes close to worshiping athletes. That wouldn’t be a problem, except for the fact that the film lingers for so long on those bodies that it’s hard not to eventually get bored with them. I mean, there’s only so many times you can watch someone jump over a hurdle in slow motion before you don’t care anymore.

And it turns out that, no matter how impressive the athletes may look, you do need to tell a compelling story, especially if, like Personal Best, your film is over two hours long. As written, Chris Cahill is not particularly likable or even that interesting. Her life revolves around competition and she really has no other interests. That may be a realistic portrayal of what it takes to be the best but there’s a reason why most sports biopics are heavily fictionalized. Chris spends a lot of time getting mad and crying and it gets a little bit old after a while. Perhaps it would be different if we believed that Chris actually was one of the best runners in the world but the film never quite convinces us. (It doesn’t help that Mariel Hemingway spends the entire film surrounded by actual track and field athletes. Hemingway does her best with the role but it’s always easy to tell who is actually an athlete and who is just acting.) On the other hand, the coach and Torry are far more interesting characters but both of them keep getting pushed to the side.

Personal Best is a film that will be best appreciated by people who are as obsessed with athletics as the film is.

Halloween Havoc!: CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA (Filmgroup 1961)

Posted on October 4, 2017 by gary loggins

cracked rear viewer

Roger Corman satirizes himself in CREATURE FROM THE HAUNTED SEA, throwing in everything but the kitchen sink to create one of the most wacked-out goofy drive-in flicks ever filmed, that gets even goofier as it goes along. We’ve got goony gangsters, a lovesick spy, beautiful babes, and the silliest looking monster you’ll ever see.

Rapid Roger had just wrapped up shooting THE LAST WOMAN ON EARTH in sunny Puerto Rico, and since the weather was so beautiful, decided to quickly churn out another picture. He got screenwriter Charles B. Griffith to whip up a monster movie spoof (having had success with Griffith’s A BUCKET OF BLOOD and LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS) and retained the previously shot film’s stars. Actor Beach Dickerson designed the sea creature out of a wet suit, with ping-pong ball eyes and covered in an oil cloth to give it that straight from the depths look. Hokey looking…

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44 Days of Paranoia #25: Chinatown (dir by Roman Polanski)

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Our latest entry into the 44 Days of Paranoia is a dark masterpiece. Based on a script by Robert Towne, directed by Roman Polanski, and starring Jack Nicholson, 1974’s Chinatown is one of the greatest films ever made.

Chinatown takes place in 1940s Los Angeles. Private Investigator Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is hired by a woman (Diane Ladd) who claims that her name is Evelyn Mulwray. She wants Gittes to follow her husband, Hollis, and discover whether he’s having an affair. Gittes gets some pictures of Hollis with a young woman (Belinda Palmer) and hands them over to Evelyn.

The next day, the pictures are published on the front page of the newspaper and Gittes is confronted by another woman (Faye Dunaway) who explains that she — and not the woman who hired him — is the actual Evelyn Mulwray. Gittes then learns that Hollis has turned up dead, drowned in a reservoir.

Gittes suspects that Hollis was murdered and launches his own investigation. This eventually leads Jake to Hollis’s former business partner, Noah Cross (John Huston). Noah also happens to be the father of Evelyn and he offers double Gittes’s fee if Gittes will track down Hollis’s younger girlfriend.

As his investigation continues, Gittes discovers that Hollis’s murder was connected to both the continued growth of Los Angeles as a city and a truly unspeakable act that occurred several years in the past. Nobody, it turns out, is what he or she originally appears to be. To say anything else about the plot would be unfair to anyone who hasn’t seen Chinatown before.

Since I first started reviewing films for this site, one of the things that I’ve discovered is that it’s actually easier to review a bad film than a good film. It’s easier to be snarky and cynical about the latest film from Michael Bay or Roland Emmerich than it is to explain why a film works. There’s a famous saying about pornography: “I don’t know what it is but I know it when I see it,” and sometimes that’s the way I feel whenever it comes time to try to review a great film.

Consider Chinatown. At its heart, Chinatown is an homage to the old film noirs of the 40s and 50s. Now, I have to admit that I’ve lost track of how many noir homages I’ve seen. It seems like every director has to make at least one hard-boiled, morally ambiguous detective film. Chinatown has all of the familiar elements — the hero is a private investigator, Evelyn Mulwray initially appears to be a classic femme fatale, the dialogue is appropriately cynical, and the plot is full of twist and turns. Even the film’s theme of political conspiracy serves to remind us that most noirs used their detective stories as a way to explore the hidden underbelly of American society.

And yet, with Chinatown, Polanski, Nicholson, Towne, and producer Robert Evans took all of those familiar elements and used them to create one of the greatest films ever made.

Why is Chinatown such a great film?

Some of the credit has to go to Jack Nicholson who, in the role of Jake Gittes, gives perhaps his best performance. As I mentioned above, Gittes is, in many ways, a stock character but Nicholson brings so much nuance and depth to the role that it doesn’t matter. Nicholson’s trademark cynicism and sarcasm are both to be found here but he also brings a cocky recklessness to the role. Gittes is such a charismatic and likable hero and so confident in himself that it makes the film’s ending all the more shocking.

As good as Nicholson is, he’s matched at every turn by John Huston’s Noah Cross. Noah Cross is one of the most vile characters to ever appear on-screen, which is why Huston’s rather courtly performance is all the more disturbing. When Gittes confronts Noah about the worst of his many crimes, Cross simply responds that a man is never sure what he’s capable of until he does it. Huston delivery of the lines leave us with little doubt that Noah believes every word of what he’s just said.

In the end, though, most of the credit has to go to Roman Polanski’s direction and Robert Towne’s script. Towne’s script provides a genuinely challenging and thought-provoking mystery, while Polanski’s stylish direction keeps the view continually off-balance and unsure of who is telling the truth. Reportedly, Polanski and Towne had a contentious relationship, with Polanski changing the ending of Towne’s script to make the film much more downbeat. In the end, Polanski made the right choice. The film ends the only way that it possibly could.

Or, to quote the famous line: “It’s Chinatown.”

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