When collecting The Wolf of Snow Hollow at the library recently, I saw Wolfen sitting next to it on the shelf and thought, “Hey, why not?” Wolfen is a not-quite-werewolf movie that has been largely lost to time, as it was released the same year as more notable (and well-remembered) definitely-a-werewolf films An American Werewolf in London and The Howling. Although a bit slow, it is an interesting little oddball, and another contender for one of the better films made by a “one-and-done director.” Of course, that’s only technically true if you exclude his 1970 documentary release, Woodstock, which won Best Doc at the 1971 Oscars while also picking up a nomination for Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing. Still, this is his one and only directorial feature, from a screenplay that he co-wrote with David Eyre, who was fresh off of his work on Cattle Annie and Little Britches, making this his sophomore effort. Stranger still, it was based on a novel by Whitley Strieber, and if that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve seen this book cover before:
And if you haven’t seen that, then you’ve probably at least seen the parody of it on The X-Files:
(This is my favorite episode, by the way.)
Strieber is no stranger to adaptations. Wolfen was his first novel, with his second, The Hunger, becoming the 1983 Tony Scott-helmed David Bowie vehicle of the same name, and his non-fiction book The Coming Global Superstorm is the basis for 2012’s Rolan Emmerich disaster film The Day After Tomorrow. This one seems to deviate pretty far from the source material, at least inasmuch as the titular “Wolfen” are handled, but we’ll get to that.
It’s New York in the early 80s, a place and time where blight and crime were apparent and plentiful. Following a ground-breaking event, an entrepreneur, his wife, and their bodyguard make a stop in Battery Park, where the two were married. Shortly, however, all are slain by an unseen force or being, one that’s animalistic in some ways but also capable of neatly severing the hand of the bodyguard before he can finish drawing his sidearm. The bizarre nature of the crime prompts Captain Warren (Dick O’Neill) to call in Detective Dewey Wilson (Albert Finney), who’s been forced into semi-retirement due to personal issues and alcoholism, from which he seems to have recovered. Wilson ends up working closely with two others: Whittington (Gregory Hines), a coroner in the overworked morgue, and Dr. Rebecca Neff (Diane Venora), a criminal psychologist. At the top of the suspect list is a recently released felon Eddie Holt (Edward James Olmos), a (tribe not specified) Native American who was previously incarcerated based on his supposed involvement with a paramilitary terrorist organization. Of course, all the forensic evidence indicates that no knife or blade was used in the killings, and the only physical traces left behind all point to a wolf as the killer.
In his contemporary review, Roger Ebert was quick to say that Wolfen was not a werewolf movie, which plays out in a scene that bears remarkable similarities to American Werewolf and Howling – until it doesn’t. Olmos (young and shockingly fit)’s Eddie strips down at the beach and begins howling at the moon and making dog-like prints in the sand with his hands, with the audience prepared for him to morph into a wolf of some kind, and then … he doesn’t. Dewey approaches him at the beach, having followed him from a bar, and Olmos stops in the middle of what would be a transformation scene in any other film, to taunt Dewey for his superstitions. Having semi-defined what Wolfen is not, we can say that Wolfen is a lot of things; it may, in fact, be too many things. The deceased billionaire killed in the film’s opening was the owner of a security firm whose budget apparently dwarfs that of the NYPD, complete with a monitoring system that looks like NASA launch command. Their network of surveillance borders on the futuristic, and that sci-fi boundary is crossed when we get to witness several interrogation scenes that feature impossibly advanced lie detection equipment. Wolfen is also a murder mystery that evolves into the pursuit of a serial killer as more bodies (well, more body parts) start popping up all over the Bronx. It’s a parable about ecology and colonialism that draws a comparison between the European slaughter of indigenous animals and humans. And, perhaps the most detrimental blow to the film, it’s a movie that has that New Hollywood zhuzh that makes it more interesting in some places and unfortunately bloated in others.
Visually, this one is a stunner. A few years before it would be put to use in Predator, Wadleigh shoots a lot of footage from the point of view of the Wolfen using a technique that mimics thermographic filming. Many scenes are set in the penthouse of the first victim, which features a panoramic view of the city that can be enclosed by long, slender mirrored blinds which lend themselves to great multi-mirror shots and other less conventional uses. The dilapidated church in which the Wolfen are (probably) hiding stands alone amidst a pile of rubble of the surrounding buildings as starkly as if it were on a flat plain, and its burn-darkened exterior lends it a tremendous sense of ominousness. Large areas of urban terrain are composed of nothing but bricks and detritus that look like something out of The Third Man as Dewey seeks answers amidst the decay. The first scene in which Dewey and Holt meet is set atop Manhattan Bridge in a dizzying sequence that follows Dewey carefully treading along a narrow bit of scaffolding before the two of them face off at one of the bridge’s highest points, and it’s positively vertiginous. It’s cleverly and atmospherically photographed, but I can’t help but take some issue with the many instances in which the film goes on just a minute too long, and these add up to something that’s a little too stilted in places.
Once Dewey can no longer pretend that something clearly supernatural is at work, he confronts Holt at the bar and gets the whole “Wolfen” thing explained to him. I won’t spoil it for you, other than to say that it does apparently differ from the book (in which the Wolfen are a semi-sentient parallel anthropomorphic evolution to humans who descended from a common ancestor with wolves). I’ll also say that it’s a little more heady than one would expect, and one that resonates despite some early invocation of “magical Native American” stereotypes. In that scene, Holt talks about how men may have the technological advantage over the Wolfen, and the film plays with this visually by showing us that the same kind of thermal imaging presented as being from the predator’s point of view is also in use in the lie detection software, showing that science is closing the gap, further enclosing the metaphorical (and perhaps literal) hunting grounds.
Despite the occasional dragging and the very New Hollywood touch of forcing a romance plot between two formerly married people (Dewey and Neff, who have little chemistry), this one is solid, and worth checking out.
Oooh boy, this one is a bit of a clunker. Although The Haunted Palace is considered the sixth of Roger Corman’s adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe’s work, it’s not really; it takes its title from a Poe poem that was later incorporated into “The Fall of the House of Usher” but draws its narrative from an H.P. Lovecraft novella, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. If anything, the misspelling of Poe’s middle name as “Allen” in the credits for this one tells you just how far we’re straying afield for these, and although this was followed in production order by The Masque of the Red Death and The Tomb of Ligeia, if you were to tell me that this was the last of these Poe flicks, I would believe it, because it feels like it’s really running on fumes. As always, when it does manage to tread water, it’s being buoyed aloft by the performance of Vincent Price, and he also has Lon Chaney Jr. on site to help (not that they are able to save it).
In 1760s New England—Arkham, Massachusetts, to be precise—several men in the town notice a young, apparently bewitched woman making her way to a mansion on an elevated cliffside that is known as the home of Joseph Curwen (Price), alleged warlock. Ezra Weeden (Leo Gordon) leads a mob of villagers with pitchforks and torches to Curwen’s palatial home, among them Benjamin West (John Dierkes), Gideon Leach (Guy Wilkerson), and Micah Smith (Elisha Cook, whom you may recall as a sympathetic lowlife in The Big Sleep or one of the creepy neighbors in Rosemary’s Baby). The men force Curwen from his home and burn him alive in front of his mistress Hester (Cathie Merchant), but with his dying breath he curses them and their descendants. Precisely 110 years later, Charles Dexter Ward (Price again) appears in Arkham with his wife, Anne (Debra Paget in her final film role, with her penultimate role having been Mrs. Valdemar in Tales of Terror), having inherited the home of Curwen, who was his ancestor. The people of the town (all of whom are played by the same actors as in the prologue) are unfriendly and refuse to help him find it, other than Dr. Willet (Frank Maxwell), who becomes the only friend that the Wards have in town. Once they let themselves into the mansion, they are greeted by the caretaker, Simon (Chaney), who shows them a portrait of Curwen and notes the resemblance between the two men despite the generations that separate them. Although they are prepared to leave, Simon encourages them to stay; the longer that they remain, the more the spirit of Curwen attempts to possess the body of his distant progeny.
This one clocks in at only 87 minutes, but it feels a lot longer than the others. Part of that is that this one has a repetition problem; in order to demonstrate that they house has a hold over Ward, he has to try and leave several times before, at the last moment, being unable to force himself to go, or delayed by Simon juuuust long enough for Curwen to regain control. The film treads water here, and too much of the film passes without much happening. Although I’ve joked about it in every one of these reviews so far, I found myself missing the mid-film nightmare sequence that every other one of these that I’ve seen has, because that would have broken things up a bit in the middle. For most of the second act, the only scene with any life in it is one in which Ward and Anne go into town and find themselves surrounded by several of Arkham’s mutant residents, stated to be the result of Curwen’s “collaborations” between something housed in the catacombs beneath the house and the poor women of Arkham.
We do get to see this Cthulhu monster, represented by a not-quite-humanoid green dummy with four arms. I assume it’s a dummy, anyway, since we never see it move. Instead, it’s given the appearance of motion by passing warped glass over the lens. It’s not the worst idea of how to represent the madness of seeing but not comprehending, and it almost works. The make-up effects to represent the maladies of the mutant descendants, which Curwen was breeding in an attempt to allow the Elder Gods entry back into our world, ranges from passable to comical, and one gets the impression that Corman simply got a really good deal on some almost-expired foam latex and wanted to use it quickly. There’s no one to root for, as the descendants of the eighteenth century mob are all mean drunks, and although they have good reason to fear Curwen’s potential rebirth, when we find one of them has his mutated son locked in the attic like Rochester’s first wife in Jane Eyre, our sympathies lie with the prisoner, not his warden/father. Debra Paget is another in a long line of Corman/Poe ladies who’s just kind of there, serving as witness to the proceedings just like Madeline in Usher, Kate in Premature Burial, Francesca in Masque, and Rowena (although she’s a more active participant) in Tomb of Ligeia. There are make-up effects in use on Chaney from the start and intermittently with Price that indicate Simon has long since been completely subsumed by his Curwen-accomplice ancestor and that show when Ward is being possessed by Curwen. The performances between the two are notably distinct, so that this is a necessity to show when Curwen is “active” but pretending to be Ward, and it’s fine enough.
There’s simply nothing to get too excited about here, and it feels like a half-hearted effort. The deaths of the mob’s descendants in the 19th Century “present” are fine enough as horror moments—Weeden is killed when his monster son is released from the attic and seeks vengeance, Smith is burned alive just as Curwen was—but this one lacks the things from some of the others that make them transcend their American International Pictures roots. The palace is, of course, burned down at the end, and we don’t even get a shot of the fire from the matte painting town like we have in others. Notably, this one also ends on an almost identical surprise ending freeze frame as X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, which premiered only three weeks later, so it might be that Corman was spreading himself a bit thin in the summer of 1963. Since it isn’t even a Poe movie, even the completists amongst the readership can be assured that they can skip over this one without missing anything of note.
There are certain TV series that are hailed as extremely prestigious or otherwise laudable in their time, and which ultimately fade from public consciousness. For most of my life, I often read about how Moonlighting was one of the most unconventional TV series ever made and was extremely ahead of its time, only for the show to be all but inaccessible due to music licensing issues until very recently, when it came to Tubi, the people’s streaming service. Around Y2K, thinkpieces popped up all over talking about the three contemporary television shows that were ushering in a new era of respectability for TV as a medium: The Sopranos (which remains in the public consciousness), The X-Files (which remains a strong brand in some ways but which was unable to maintain excitement enough to support a reboot/sequel series for very long), and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (which was so powerful that it created TV Tropes but which went largely underdiscussed in wider culture until recent news of a potential reboot). HBO was the primary place where you could find ongoing series which were stylistic, cinematic, and profound, as made clear in their slogan “It’s not TV; it’s HBO,” and that remained the case for a long time. In addition to The Sopranos, other series like Six Feet Under and The Wire are also strong contenders for the “greatest TV series ever made” epithet. I also remember a strong contingent of people, mostly on the Television Without Pity (R.I.P.)’s message boards, arguing that Deadwood, which ran for three seasons between 2004 and 2006, was the heir apparent to this designation. After finally watching The Sopranos for the first time last year, I’ve spent a few months of this one finally watching Deadwood, and I have to say that those folks have a pretty decent case.
As a series, Deadwood revolves mostly around Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), who runs a saloon and brothel known as The Gem, in the mining encampment of Deadwood, a settlement in the then-unincorporated Dakota Territory. Nominally, the lead was Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), a former lawman who came to Deadwood seeking a new start co-running a hardware store with his friend Sol Star (John Hawkes). As a series that would play with the tropes and conventions of the western genre, it makes sense that the just Bullock and the conniving, clever Swearengen would have an antagonistic relationship with Bullock as the main character (just as lawmen usually were in these pieces; Gunsmoke is about Matt Dillon, Gunslinger is about secret agent Cord, and Bat Masterson is about, well, Bat Masterson) and Swearengen as the thorn in his side. The show quickly realized that examining the complex compartmentalization of Swearengen’s morality was a much more dramatically rich vein to mine, with Swearengen becoming the most dynamic character while Bullock remains the more static one. Bullock’s first season arc largely deals with his slow realization that Deadwood’s lawlessness demands that he take on the role of sheriff despite his reluctance, as well as his burgeoning romance with wealthy widow Alma Garret (Molly Parker). Bullock has a wife back in Montana, but it’s not a marriage of love but of responsibility, as he married his brother’s widow after the elder Bullock was killed as a member of the Union Army. He is torn between his and Alma’s love and the knowledge that his wife will have to join him eventually (which she does, along with Bullock’s nephew/adopted son at the beginning of the second season, played by Anna Gunn).
Bullock’s partner Sol never gets as much character exploration, but he serves as the motivator for a wonderful character arc for prostitute Trixie (Paula Malcomson), who starts out as the de facto captain of the leg spreading team at The Gem. She’s initially suicidal but comes to recognize her importance to the community with fits and starts, first by defying Swearengen’s orders to help kill a child who is the lone survivor of an attack by highwaymen who are in his employ, and then later by helping Alma through withdrawals from laudanum (Al had ordered her to supply Alma with the stuff to ensure her compliance when he low-balled her on an offer for her land). She finds herself drawn to the awkward Sol and the two slowly fall for one another, although her loyalty remains split between Sol and Swearengen. There’s also “Calamity” Jane Canary (Robin Weigert), who is frequently the best part of the show, as she pontificates in a state of extreme inebriation about how lost she is in life without the direction that she got from her loose partnership with “Wild Bill” Hickok. (Keith Carradine played Wild Bill during the series, but if you’ve ever heard the name “Deadwood” outside of the context of this series, it’s probably because it’s known as the place where Wild Bill was murdered, so no surprises that he’s not back for the reunion film.) The only person from whom Weigert can’t steal the scene is America’s darling Brad Dourif, whose Doc Cochran finds himself on the frontier on the run from warrants for grave robbing while also being haunted by the sheer amount of death that he witnessed and was powerless to stop during the Civil War. There are dozens of other characters, but you’d be much better served by watching the show (it’s less than 40 episodes) than by my recital of their names and attributes, but these are the ones to know for the purposes of the movie.
The only remaining character of high plot importance not yet mentioned is George Hearst (played by Mr. Delta Burke, Gerald McRainey). The show slowly builds to his arrival; the first season’s central conflict revolves around Swearengen and Bullock’s rivalry, while in the second season Hearst becomes a spectral figure whose impending arrival is heralded by the appearance of Francis Wolcott (Garret Dillahunt), his “scout” whose sociopathic malevolence overshadows Swearengen’s. The man himself arrives in the flesh in the third season, and he is a figure of such pure, unadulterated evil that his present looms over the encampment. All the while, Deadwood itself becomes less and less of a “frontier” and more connected to the U.S., geographically and legislatively, as the future is always coming. Famously, Deadwood ended without an “ending,” as the series was renewed for two additional seasons after season two, only to have the fourth season pulled from under them. As such, the end of that season deals with Hearst—having already demonstrated how little he values human life by having his army of Pinkertons murder the miners in his employ who talk about collective action and possibly arranging the killing of the beloved only son of his lifetime servant—arranging for the murder of one of the show’s most kind-hearted and beloved characters. This action prompts Trixie to attempt to kill him, which fails, and Swearengen chooses to kill an innocent prostitute in his employ and submit her body to Hearst as that of his attempted assassin in order to prevent retaliatory action and protect Trixie’s life. Then Hearst just rides out of town, hands technically clean, free of consequence. Hearst is such a monstrous character that, with only a few episodes left in the series, I told my friend that I hoped the show would pull a full on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and straight up kill the bastard, historical accuracy be damned. Alas.
But then! In 2019, HBO commissioned a reunion movie to wrap things up. I’m generally wary of these kinds of things. Even when I was a kid I could tell that the Growing Pains reunion movie wasn’t very good, I still remember the gut-punching disappointment of the Arrested Development continuation, and one late night during quarantine I saw Family Ties Vacation and thought I might have already been dead and in hell. Then again, well, you know how much I talk about this. As it turns out, I needn’t have been so concerned, as Deadwood: The Movie is an absolute delight.
As the film opens, Alma Garret arrives in Deadwood, now officially a part of the U.S. (South Dakota specifically) and connected to the wider world not just by the telegraph that was newly installed at the beginning of season three, but also telephone and even railroad. She is accompanied by her ward, the adopted Sophia (the little girl whose family was murdered in the series premiere), and she is reunited first with Charlie Utter (Dayton Callie) and then with Bullock; the former recommends that Alma stay in the latter’s hotel, Bullock and Star having expanded from hardware sales to hoteliers. Trixie is pregnant with Sol’s child, and she insists upon waiting until the child is safely born before she will marry him. Despite the fact that when we last saw him Doc seemed to be in the throes of consumption, he’s still alive and kicking, and he tends to both Trixie and Swearengen, whose lifetime of drinking is threatening to catch up with him, fatally, any day now. As part of the statehood celebrations, Hearst returns to Deadwood to give a speech as a visiting senator from California; he understands that he’s unwelcome when faced with so many people who have not forgotten what he did a decade prior, but he nonetheless has a minor parade through the thoroughfare. Trixie, still furious about the murder of [redacted], refuses to hide as everyone recommends and instead bursts out onto her balcony to call the murderer a coward to his face. Hearst, incensed upon realizing that he was deceived by a decoy corpse before, demands that the nearly infirm Swearengen help him acquire Charlie Utter’s land, as that tract is vital to his plans to expand upon and profit from completing telephone lines. Then, Utter turns up dead.
I am of two minds about the way that flashbacks are used throughout this film to make connections to the narrative that came before. For the most part, they play out in brief flashes of moments, almost like stylized memories interjecting into the present. These feel organic, and they’re so short that they’re almost subliminal. On the other hand, there are several that play out for a little too long, all of them concerning Trixie’s failed killing of Hearst ten years ago and Swearengen’s offering up of a different woman’s body to cover for her. Admittedly, this is a moderately complicated narrative development to have to recap for the audience, and I understand that I don’t need this repeated back to me because I just watched the final few episodes a couple of weeks ago, rather than the thirteen years that had passed for those who had watched the series in its original run and were now back just for this movie. Sometimes, the little snatches of the past are beautiful; Al lies in bed with one in a long line of women under his employ who have given him comfort over the years, and as she curls her head to his chest, so too does Trixie curl up next to him, all that time ago but also here and now, and the moments like this were the ones where my breath caught in my chest. For all the ways that I had been impressed by Deadwood, I had rarely ever been moved by it. I liked the way that the relationships developed, and I was shocked by the deaths of certain characters, and I may have rooted for Bullock’s wife to be disposed of so that he and Alma could be together. Six Feet Under, The Wire, and—yes—Buffy had moved me in their time, but Deadwood was something that was a technical marvel to me, a masterpiece of dialogue and dovetailing plotting, a solid and remarkable genre deconstruction. And then, in this reunion movie, they managed to make me not just enjoy it, but find some meaning in it.
Of course, some of that can be attributed to the fact that all our friends are here! Why, it’s Tom Nuttall, who runs the No. 10 Saloon, and he’s alive! Swearengen’s minions Dan Dority and Johnny are still standing around at the bar at The Gem, waiting for Al to come down and dish out orders that are an order of magnitude above their own cleverness. Samuel Fields is fishing in the stream at Charlie Utter’s property, and Aunty Lou is there to help Trixie with her difficult childbirth! Con Stapleton’s given up on being a goon (or perhaps merely had to find new work since the death of actor Powers Boothe meant that the character of Cy Tolliver had likewise passed) and become a minister! Joanie’s running the Bella Union now and she and Calamity Jane are shacked up together. Bullock and wife have a family of three kids now, and Harry Manning finally, finally got that fire wagon that he was always droning on about. In fairness, Manning’s frequent raising of the issue in the series seems to have been intended to foreshadow the eventual destruction of the original Deadwood encampment by fire, as it was in real life, and would likely have been the series finale if the show had continued. Ironically, Deadwood actually does pull a OUATIH-style historical revision, as the town is still standing in 1889 in this film despite the fact that historically, Deadwood was destroyed in a blaze in 1879. And! At the end of this film, even though we don’t get to see Hearst get everything that’s coming to him, we do get to bear witness to him being arrested for Utter’s killing, and as Bullock carts him off to a cell the people of Deadwood get to kick him around a little (Bullock even considers letting them finish Hearst off!). It’s a very satisfying ending, especially as we also get to see Trixie and Sol married, with Swearengen walking her down the aisle in his final days. It feels complete. It feels whole.
… Except for one thing. There is simply not enough of E.B. Farnum (William Sanderson) in this movie. That makes some sense, as his role in the show proper had declined quite a bit toward the end. Early on, Farnum’s ownership of the only hotel in town granted him access to characters whose activities he could then report to Swearengen and assist in the barkeeper’s machinations, not to mention that it allowed an endless parade of transient characters to meet and comment upon Farnum and their hilarious disgust for him. Farnum’s weaselly nature, his perpetual dampness of the hand, and his wheedling voice made him the butt of every joke, with his appointment as mayor of the town by a committee allowing him nominal authority and no real power being the ultimate pinnacle of his ridiculousness. As a result of being involved in fewer shenanigans, the show gave Farnum an even more lowly worm for him to belittle and mock, but the audience often found him alone, delivering soliloquies about his social impotence and his anger at his position, and they were always comedic showstoppers. Here, we get to see a little bit of him, as he plays a crucial role in the resolution of Charlie Utter’s murder; he has apparently fashioned a crawlspace in his hotel that allows him to spy on rooms Norman Bates style, and his eavesdropping on Hearst reveals the plan for two of his goons to kill the only witness to Utter’s slaying. Despite the seriousness of the situation, it’s still hysterical to watch Farnum try to get himself out of his latest predicament, and I simply wish there was more of him in this. At least for now we have YouTube compilations.
Welcome to Episode #237 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Brandon, James, Britnee, and Hanna discuss a grab bag of vintage genre films about Vietnam War vets suffering from PTSD, starting with the violent exploitation thriller Combat Shock (1986).
00:00 The Pope of Trash 08:50 Bastard Out of Carolina (1996) 13:00 Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) 17:12 Under the Sand (2000) 24:15 Warfare (2025)
33:00 Combat Shock (1986) 52:15 Dead of Night (1974) 1:03:42 Backfire (1988) 1:17:10 Savage Dawn (1985)
When watching Last Stop in Yuma County last year, my viewing companion mentioned that he had quite enjoyed The Wolf of Snow Hollow, another vehicle for Yuma lead Jim Cummings. Cummings first gained recognition for his feature film Thunder Road, which was an extension of his earlier short film of the same name. I remember seeing the trailers for Thunder Road at the Alamo Drafthouse during that summer that MoviePass was acting as a real-life free movie hack, but its time in theaters was relatively brief and I still have not managed to check it out. Per some contemporary reviews citing Cummings’ character in Snow Hollow as merely a variation on the one that he portrayed in Thunder Road (negatively), that may be for the best, as I came into Snow Hollow with no expectations.
The film opens on the arrival of a young couple to a short-term rental in Snow Hollow, Utah. After the two relax for a bit in the hot tub, PJ (Jimmy Tatro) goes into the house to shower (and grab the engagement ring with which he is about to propose) while his girlfriend turns off the hot tub, but she’s attacked by someone or something that tears her to pieces. The local police arrive, and it becomes clear that deputy John Marshall (Cummings) is covering for the failing health of Sheriff Hadley (Robert Forster in his final film role), who also happens to be his father. John’s dealing with other issues in his family life as well, as his ex-wife serves as a thorn in his side in his relationship with his teenage daughter Jenna (Chloe East), who is set to start college early that January on a gymnastics scholarship. Further, he’s an alcoholic in recovery, having been in AA for six years and sober for three. His fellow law enforcement officers are largely inept and lazy, pleading to let state or federal officials take on the investigation, and the only other person on the team with any real interest in stopping the killer is Officer Julia Robson (Riki Lindhome). Matters only get worse when another body pops up, this time with evidence that the victim was killed by “a wolf the size of a Kodiak bear,” and the local citizens start to wonder if there’s a werewolf in their midst.
This is a neatly constructed little mystery, although I would have preferred if some elements of the mystery were played a little closer to the vest, or for longer. Early on, there are a lot of potential suspects for who might be the werewolf (or the serial killer, as John forcefully reiterates time and again). There’s a local dudebro (Marshall Allman) with whom PJ got into an altercation at a local watering hole over the former’s use of the f-slur; Sheriff Hadley’s medical complications may bely that his body is undergoing changes, as poor health can often be an indicator of lycanthropy in horror; the owner of the short term rental (Will Madden) is suspicious since we saw that the AirBnB had all of its knives removed at the start of the film, as if setting up a victim to have no way of defending themself; even John himself could be the “wolf,” since we see that he’s short-tempered, and lycanthropy could be used as an effective shorthand for the complete personality change that alcohol abuse brings on. Subversively, the film shows us a potential suspect whose name we never learn and only ever see from a rear or ¼ rear profile, and who mostly resembles PJ, whom we know can’t be the killer since we saw him in the shower while the first murder is committed. Later, this character dies of an overdose and, because of feasible but circumstantial evidence, the werewolf’s killings are pinned on him, but by this time we’ve seen enough of the actual killer to know that he’s still out there, even if we have yet to identify him. I was expecting the film to get a little more mileage out of the “Which characters have we met could the killer be?” a little longer, but this is still a mostly elegantly constructed mystery regardless.
What doesn’t quite work is the way that John’s alcoholism is portrayed. After his AA self-intro that functions as his character exposition scene/thesis statement, every time that we see him afterward, he’s clearly a hothead. He pops off at the first crime scene, berates his subordinates (who, since they’re all deputies, are really his peers) at a diner, and screams at Deputy Chavez (Demetrius Daniels) at the second site where a body is discovered. We understand why he’s so stressed, but he’s not a man that’s barely holding it together in the face of tending to his ailing father while facing pressure to find a killer, and is a man who’s already experiencing outbursts of anger long before he falls off the wagon. In the midst of these pre-relapse tantrums is a sequence that actually works, when John meets his ex-wife and Jenna at a diner and the former works to elicit a promise that John will be able to be present at their daughter’s college orientation, and he remains calm and speaks directly to Jenna while clearly struggling not to lose his temper at his ex at the same time. After a second body is found, John finally digs out the beers he has stashed away in the top kitchen cupboard, but there’s very little change in the way John treats the people around him.
Cummings has the face of a movie star from a different era; when you look like he does, you don’t have much choice but to put it up on a screen somewhere. When it comes to this particular performance, however, it remains pretty flat from start to finish, which makes it seem like he only has one setting, and that static nature of this character takes a little shine out of the movie’s luster. Where we do see some escalation from his drinking comes as he falls completely off the wagon. After collapsing on his oven door and shattering it before passing out in the detritus, there’s a scene in which Jenna comes home to find John passed out on the living room floor, and after some struggle she manages to get him upstairs and into his bed. John, completely inebriated, breaks down into barely coherent sobs about his failures while Jenna stands in the hallway begging and pleading through her own tears for her father to just go to bed, screaming that he’s scaring her. It’s harrowing, even more so than any of the murders or crime scenes we’ve witnessed. More than that, it proves that Cummings does have more than one performance style in him, and it just makes me wish that I had seen a greater degree of difference between John before and after his demons got the better of him.
This is a fun little horror comedy (with occasional heaving helpings of drama) with a talented cast and good inspiration. There are elements of Jaws at play here as the police force finds itself under intense scrutiny and pressure in order to make sure that the town doesn’t miss out on its annual cash injection from ski tourism. There’s great ambiguity throughout about whether there really is a werewolf in Snow Hollow or if there’s a seven-foot serial killer using folklore and superstition to cover for their compulsions. There’s some fun misdirection throughout, as it at first seems that the connection between the victims has something to do with the elementary school that they attended, but this is either a subplot that was dropped or it’s an intentional red herring, and I’d say that the scaffolding of the story is otherwise solid enough that I’d vote it’s the latter.
One of the more uninspired trends in recent mainstream filmmaking has been the villain origin story, wherein cinema’s greatest monsters get the chance for the world to see their personal plights from the most empathetic angle possible. Maleficent, Cruella de Vil, Willie Wonka, The Wicked Witch, and the Wizard of Oz have all had their early-years sob stories told over the past decade or so, and now it’s Cinderella’s ugliest, meanest stepsister’s turn. The Ugly Stepsister retells the Cinderella story from the vantage point of the heiress-turned-servant’s cruelest sibling-by-marriage, under the wicked guidance of her stepmother (and the more general wickedness of European beauty standards). First-time director Emile Blichfeldt finds genuine thematic & visual inspiration in the exercise where its far more expensive Hollywood studio equivalents have failed, revising Cinderella to be a woman-on-the-verge story about a teenager driven mad by the never-ending scam of self-improvement through cosmetics. While Cinderella’s homeliest stepsister, Elvira, strives to replicate the beauty of her more famous & desired sibling, her own empathetic origin story quickly devolves into feminist body horror of the Substance, Raw, and Teeth variety, delivering something much more visceral & politically impactful than the empty CG spectacle of films like Wicked or Oz, The Great and Powerful.
Like in all variations on the fairy tale, Cinderella and her stepsister are both competing for marriage to the same bachelor prince. However, in this version the prince is a horndog jock who’s only desirable for the wealth that comes with nobility. Naively mistaking his published sex limericks for sincere romantic poetry, Elvira desires the prince’s heart, while the once-pampered, down on her luck Cinderella more shrewdly desires his coin. They start the competition as relative equals, but the matriarch of the household tips the scales in her biological daughter’s favor by banishing Cinderella to a servant’s life while working day & night to pretty up Elvira through cosmetic enhancements. As this is a body horror take on an otherwise familiar story, those cosmetic enhancements manifest as painful methods of torture on the young Elvira: 18th century braces, 18th century nose jobs, 18th century false eyelashes sewn directly to the lid, sans anesthesia. Then, there’s the timeless weight loss tactic of swallowing a Tremors-scale tapeworm to curb her appetite. Each “improvement” makes Elvira more conventionally attractive but also visibly injured & ill. They also make her more conceited & crueller to Cinderella, whom she once looked up to as a role model. It turns out “changing your outside to match your insides” isn’t the best idea, not if you’re willing to allow your insides to become (literally) monstrous in the process.
The question of empathy is slippery in The Ugly Stepsister, as is the definition of the word “ugly.” We obviously pity poor Elvira at the start of her journey as the most awkward girl at her local Finishing School, where her chubby cheeks and steampunk nose guard make her a target for mean-girl whispers & side eye. Despite her dopey face & even dopier babydoll curls, however, (or maybe even because of them) we find her to be cute. Her main fault is that she’s naively obedient to the older women in her life, who are willing to break her in order to reshape the raw materials into something more presentable for the douchebag Prince. Even those women aren’t the villains of the piece, necessarily, nor is the naturally, effortlessly beautiful Cinderella who drives Elvira insane with jealousy. It’s the larger patriarchal courting ritual and the impossible beauty standards that need to be maintained to participate in it that drive most of the film’s cruelty. Where things get slippery is that Elvira is willing to adopt that cruelty once she claws her way to the top of the social hierarchy, when she gets outright ugly to her now-impoverished stepsister in a way that goes above & beyond obeying her mother’s wicked demands. In most iterations of this story, Cinderella has two ugly stepsisters to deal with in this cutthroat competition for the Prince’s heart, but Elvira’s younger sibling seems to opt out of gender completely as a personal safety measure — hiding their menstruation from their mother and hiding their body from everyone else under increasingly baggy clothes. Given what the cosmetic rituals of femininity does to their sister, who could blame them?
It’s likely not fair to compare this film to Disney’s empathetic-villain revisions of its own fairy tale IP. The Ugly Stepsister has a lot less in common with Maleficent & Cruella than it has with other recent low-budget, high-concept horrors of ultra-femininity like Paradise Hills, Lisa Frankenstein, and Hatching. Blichfeldt fights as hard as possible against the camera’s flattened digital textures to find some genuine magic in her grotesque tableaux. She mostly succeeds, leaning into the soft dissolves of Elvira’s romantic daydreams and the oil-painting decay of Cinderella’s visitations with her father’s corpse to reach for an Old World fairy tale feel. Mostly, though, what makes The Ugly Stepsister visually distinct is Blichfeldt’s fearlessness in depicting grotesque bodily detail. The blood, puke, cum, breaks, and bruises of the human body anchor this traditionally magical story to the real world, which helps its political themes of cosmetic self-torture land with forceful, tangible impact. It’s the kind of thoughtful, artful genre film that premieres at prestigious European film festivals (Berlinale in this case) before heading straight to Shudder once it reaches the US, since unsuspecting audiences tend to barf & faint at those fancy premieres. I don’t remember Wonka getting that kind of enthusiastic ovation.
As I noted in my Tales of Terror review, I’ve been skipping around in these Roger Corman/Edgar Allan Poe features based on what I can get my hands on most immediately at any given time. I didn’t have very high hopes for The Tomb of Ligeia, as it’s not a title that I think I’ve ever heard anyone talk about, and its position as the Corman/Poe flick that was the least financially successful (and which thus was the last of these to be made) didn’t bode well. I was pleasantly surprised, however, to see that despite being the last trip to this particular well, the cast and crew clearly still had the juice.
Verden Fell (Vincent Price) lives alone, save for a single servant, in the attached vicarage of a dilapidated and overgrown abbey. Years before, Fell insisted that his late wife Ligeia be laid to rest on the abbey’s grounds, despite the fact that the priest claims that interring Ligeia among the Christian dead is an insult to them and that her very presence beneath the soil will deconsecrate the holy ground. This seems to have been the case, and Fell lives a solitary life alone amidst a be-cobwebbed rectory, surrounded by recreations of Egyptian archaeological finds and tomb sculptures. That is, until the day that his brooding is interrupted by the sudden arrival of the beautiful Rowena (Elizabeth Shepherd), the daughter of a neighboring lord, who became separated from her father’s fox hunt when she was distracted by the abbey. Unfortunately, the sudden appearance of Fell from behind a tree spooks her horse, landing her in a bed of asphodels that grow atop Ligeia’s grave. Despite seemingly being engaged to lifetime friend Christopher Gough (John Westbrook), Rowena is immediately drawn to Fell, and begins seeking him out, slowly drawing him out of his protracted mourning until the two finally wed. When they return from their honeymoon, they find that Fell’s plan to sell the abbey and move on with his life with Rowena has hit a snag; it seems the abbey and the property are both in Ligeia’s name, and because the land straddles two counties, certification of her death fell between the cracks. Legally, Ligeia is still alive and is the owner of the abbey, but Fell is insistent that her body not be disinterred to confirm her death, as he cannot tolerate her tomb being disturbed.
Now that they’re back at the abbey, Fell begins to behave strangely. Multiple nights, Rowena seeks him out (the two appear to be living in separate quarters since the validity of their marriage may also face legal scrutiny, with Ligeia’s lack of a death certificate potentially annulling their union), only to find his bed empty and Fell himself nowhere to be found. Throughout the film, there has been some implication that Ligeia’s spirit may inhabit a black cat that lurks around the property, as it has on separate occasions slashed Rowena’s face when she was flirting with Fell, lured Rowena into the belfry and then attempted to make her fall by ringing the bell, and generally behaved as if acting upon an unknown motive. At one point, Rowena awakens to find a dead fox in her bed, presumably brought there by the cat, as it had previously made off with her father’s slain fox in an earlier scene, and she finds a saucer of milk next to the bed as well. When she seeks Fell, she finds him on his balcony, with no real sense of where he is, seeming to indicate that he has some kind of sleepwalking issue. What’s really happening in that abbey?
I didn’t expect to be expressing this, but Tomb of Ligeia is easily the equal of Masque of the Red Death. Whereas that film drew its production value from its elaborate sets and huge crowds of revellers, Corman knew what he had on his hands when he got the opportunity to film at Castle Acre Priory, some of the best preserved monastic ruins following the dissolution of most monasteries in the 1500s by Henry VIII. As a shooting location, this place lends Tomb of Ligeia an immediate sense of gravitas. There are no in-studio “moors” full of machined fog and spindly little trees here, but a real, tangible sense of something manmade being reclaimed by nature, something historical but decayed. Scenes take place at Ligeia’s graveside, dialogue scenes are shot dynamically as the camera follows participants walking the grounds with columns passing in the foreground, and one particularly lovely shot finds Christopher and Rowena dining outside, framed by one of the priory’s arches. It lends the whole proceeding a real air of class and distinction that is often lacking. The interior scenes are likewise a departure, as the main chamber of the rectory features a large stained glass window at the rear of the stage, which allows for several atmospheric shots that feature Rowena appearing behind a meditative Fell in the middle distance, the light from the window giving her the appearance of an otherworldly beauty. It’s top notch stuff.
Screenwriter Robert Towne would go on to quite the career after this, winning an Oscar ten years later for Chinatown, being nominated again for Shampoo (with co-writer Warren Beatty), and co-writing both the John Grisham adaptation The Firm and the script for the first Mission: Impossible film. There’s a great economy of narrative in this one (which clocks in at a scant 81 minutes), and Towne, like other Poe adaptors under Corman’s direction before him, draws in elements from other short stories to give this one a little more punch. In the original story, titled simply “Ligeia,” we find ourselves receiving the story via narration from a typically unlikeable character. The unnamed man upon whom Fell was based was truly and deeply in love with his deceased wife and married his second wife, Rowena, apparently out of social obligation rather than any real interest. Our narrator is a self-confessed opium addict who barely tolerates his second wife, who herself is not terribly fond of him, and thinks her family foolish to have married her off to a kook who lives the way that he does. When she dies of some withering disease or other, he watches as she seems to struggle to revive herself. With each revival, she appears more and more to be Ligeia rather than Rowena, before his first wife appears to overtake his young bride entirely, with the last lines of the story being his horrified revelation of this change. Towne makes Fell much more likeable from the outset; he’s the platonic ideal of a Poe hero, longing for his lost love, but instead of having him resent or dislike Rowena, we get to see him change over time. When the two first meet, he’s cold and indifferent, clearly unpracticed in the maintenance of conversation, but as she refuses to leave him, there’s a kind of Beauty and the Beast story happening here wherein she gains his trust and ultimately wins his heart.
Another major contributor to the success of this change is Shepherd, whose performance as Rowena is very strong. In most of these, the actresses who have appeared as the love interest (or leading lady) in these movies haven’t risen to the occasion. Myrna Fahey’s Madeline Usher in House of Usher had very little to do other than faint and try and act off of Mark Damon’s stiff and lifeless Philip and every single wife featured in Tales of Terror was completely forgettable, with only Hazel Court’s appearances as the treacherous duo of Emily in Premature Burial and Juliana in Masque of the Red Death being the strongest showings. Shepherd really demonstrates a lot of depth and subtlety here, which is not something that can be said about a lot of Corman productions. Notably, she plays Rowena as fully hot and heavy for this weird, gloomy neighbor from the moment that she meets him. It’s worth noting that Price’s Fell appears first in head-to-toe black, including top hat, coattails, and leather gloves, and wearing a pair of sunglasses that he attributes to a particular malady that renders sunlight unbearable; he’s a full on goth lord living in an abandoned church and Rowena is into it. I love that for her, and I appreciate her desire for this handsome, brooding widower as being something that makes him slowly defrost. If it weren’t for the machinations from beyond the grave, the two of them could really be happy together.
That’s another point in Tomb’s favor; a lot of these end in death but don’t have a real sense of tragedy, while Tomb does. Of course, the film ends with the vicarage going down in flames (you didn’t think Corman would miss an opportunity to reuse that same burning house footage from Usher and which reappeared in Tales of Terror one last time, did you?), but it’s different. We’re not sad to see the titular House of Usher crumble to the ground, especially not when the last man standing is the aforementioned wooden Philip, and when Leonora rests at peace in her father’s arms in the “Morella” segment of Tales, we’re more relieved than anything else. In Tomb, Towne makes Fell so much more likeable and more pitiable that we’re actively rooting for him and Rowena to make it work, and that he ultimately dies as his house falls down around him, is a truly downbeat ending. Rowena’s survival is a nice change as well, but the film ends with her having been carried to safety and escaping in the carriage of Christopher, sending her off into a potential happy ending that makes the whole thing feel bleaker.
Another Poe text from which Towne borrows is “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” which was previously adapted in Tales of Terror. Specifically, the dubious science of mesmerism plays a major role here as it did in that original text and its adaptation. In Tomb, we learn that Ligeia was a mesmerist and that, on her deathbed, she bewitched Fell into never having another wife, which has fractured him so completely that he’s essentially two different people depending upon whether it’s day or night. Mesmerism comes into play early on when the film is still playing coy with just how much supernatural business is happening around the place, as the cat is still behaving suspiciously and Rowena, in a hypnotic trance, is able to recall a song that her mother sang to her as a child despite having no distinct memories of the woman. Still entranced, she then begins to recite Ligeia’s dying words, which she has no reason to know. It’s a bit of a cheat to explain Fell’s apparent split mind, but it works well enough as a plot device that I won’t complain. How can I when the text is also giving us other surprisingly subtle little bits? When Rowena and Fell first meet, as mentioned above, he’s clad in all black, while Rowena wears a bright red dress that reflects the color of the fox from the hunt she’s peeled away from. At the end of that scene, the hunted fox is presented and then disappears, with Fell saying that the cat must have made off with it, just as Fell himself has already captured the fox-colored Rowena. It’s not Tolstoy, but you don’t normally get that much to really sink your teeth into in these Corman pictures, and I really appreciated the sweat that went into this one.
As I now find myself approaching the tipping point of having seen more than half of Roger Corman’s adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe, at which point it only makes sense to see them all, right? And since I’m already watching them completely out of order (having watched the third, the seventh, the first, and now the fourth), why not just hack away at them in whatever order I happen to be able to get my hands on them? The next logical step after House of Usher would be to move on to The Pit and the Pendulum, but the video store didn’t have that one in stock when I swung by, so instead I picked up Tales of Terror, which is at some points quite good and at others fairly mediocre, averaging out fairly positively. The film comprises three segments that adapt four Poe short stories, opening with an adaptation of “Morella” and ending with an adaptation of “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” with a mash-up of “The Black Cat” and “The Cask of Amontillado” in the middle.
Tales of Terror opens on a beating heart, the camera’s eye approaching it as Vincent Price intones an introduction. A pastel image of a seaside manse fades into a matte painting of the same, with waves crashing upon the shore. It is to this place that the heroine of the piece arrives. Her name is Leonora (Maggie Field), and she has come to the home of her estranged father (Price) after spending her whole life, virtually since birth, not knowing him. At first her expressed desire to visit him once before she’s “out of [his] life forever” seems to mean that she’s tying up loose ends before marrying, but it eventually comes to light that she’s dying. Her father, who had sent his daughter away because of the dying wish of his wife Morella (Leona Gage), who died in the middle of a party that she attended by her own demand despite being too weak following a difficult childbirth. Leonora and her father bond over the fact that they are both fading away, and when she is murdered by her mother’s spectral spirit, Morella takes over her bodily, while Lenora appears in place of her mother’s corpse. Morella then strangles her terrified husband as the mansion catches fire (reusing footage from the destruction of the house in Usher) and the body swap reverses, with Leonora smiling peacefully in death knowing that her mother has been vanquished.
Skipping ahead to the final segment, the adaptation of “Valdemar,” Price appears as the title character, who has invited family friend Dr. James (David Frankham) to visit the Valdemar home. Valdemar has a strong relationship with his wife Helene (Debra Paget), but his recent interest in the growing “science” of mesmerism has led him to invite a hypnotist named Carmichael (Basil Rathbone) as well. Valdemar expresses his wish to be placed under hypnosis at the moment of his death, so that some manner of “scientific” inquiry can be made about the potential of life within a lifeless man. His wish is fulfilled, and some months later, he’s now begging for Carmichael to release him from his undeath by ending the trance, but Carmichael’s designs on Helene mean that he refuses to do so unless she marries him. Dr. James attempts to force Carmichael to free Valdemar and Helene enters the fracas. When Carmichael attacks her as well, Valdemar’s corpse rises from his deathbed and kills the villain. Upon the moment of doing so, the hypnosis is released, and Valdemar instantly putrefies upon Carmichael’s prone body.
Both of these segments are fine. As noted in past reviews of other Corman/Poe ventures, Corman’s modus operandi was to pick a Poe story and then treat that as the third act of a screenplay, then craft the first two acts to lead into the adaptation of the original text. There’s a lot less room for that when you’re making an anthology of three short films with a total runtime of roughly ninety minutes. As such, there’s much less room for deviation here. Of the shorts, the adaptation of “Morella” strays the furthest from the original text; there, the primary focus of the story is on the unnamed narrator’s relationship with his wife, an infirm woman who teaches her husband all about her study of the philosophy of the mind, and that her hyperfixation on this was unsettling. She dies in childbirth and bears a daughter that the narrator never names, and whom he raises with a loving affection that he never had for his wife. She’s a strange child, however, preternaturally gifted and wise beyond her years in a way that discomfits the narrator. He never gives her a name, but upon the day of her christening, some compulsion drives him to speak the name “Morella” to the priest, causing the daughter to cry out “I am here” and then die in his arms. It’s not a story that readily lends itself to adaptation, and screenwriter Richard Matheson took the bare bones of it—mother died in childbirth, may possess said child in the moment of their death—and make it something that works better on the screen. That Price’s character has kept his dead wife’s corpse in a bedroom in the manor gives it a touch of the macabre, and having Leonora raised away from her father creates an opportunity for some character exploration between the two, and it works, even if it feels so “of a piece” with both Usher and Premature Burial as to feel derivative. It’s also helped by its brevity.
The segment based upon “Valdemar” hews fairly closely to the source material, adding only a couple of characters to give the piece some breathing room. The original short story was narrated in the first person by the mesmerist, who is Valdemar’s friend, rather than the villainous Carmichael. In fact, the very format of the title “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and the way that names are redacted within it have led most critics to believe the piece to be a bit of a hoax on Poe’s part mocking the gullibility of the public. Matheson adds a wife and the family friend who is to be her suitor in her incoming widowhood (at Valdemar’s direction before he dies, mind you) so that there is some manner of conflict that the story’s epistolary “dispatch from the frontiers of science” form lacked. The make-up work done on Price to turn him into a corpse that’s failing to rot properly is very good, and it’s a moment of genuine shock when he rises and attacks the man who is forcing him to remain in an unpleasant state of undeath. The instant deterioration of the corpse as seven months of decomposition catch up to it is also a gruesomely fun image, as it appears that Rathbone has been covered in skeletal bones and peanut butter slime.
Where this one really shines is in its “Black Cat” segment. A drunken character played by Peter Lorre comes home and harasses his wife, Annabel (Joyce Jameson), for some money that he can drink away at the tavern, in between berating her, calling her a liar, and complaining about her beloved cat. She claims there is no more and calls her husband Montresor, which will automatically sound familiar to anyone who has read “The Cask of Amontillado,” but which might be chalked up to being one of those Poe adaptation easter eggs. After all, the narrator of “The Black Cat” and his wife are both unnamed, yet here she is called Annabel, and when Dario Argento had to give the narrator a name in his adaptation, he came up with “Rod Usher.” (Perhaps in reference to Tales of Terror, the wife in Argento’s “Black Cat” adaptation was likewise given the name Annabel.) Unable to come up with a penny to get back to drinking, Montresor takes to the streets and begs for change, until he comes upon a meeting of wine retailers and sneaks in. The guest of honor at the little convention is Fortunato (Price), sealing that this will be a combination of the explicitly named source material and “Amontillado.” Fortunato’s claim to fame is that he is a perfect palate and can name any vintage, which Montresor mocks as he claims to be able to do the same, without any airs. This leads to a drinking contest in which Montresor, surprisingly, is able to go toe to toe with Fortunato when identifying estates, vineyards, and vintages (he can even tell when one bottle came from “the better slope”).
Of course, as his ultimate goal is to get sloshed rather than prove himself, he succeeds, and Fortunato reluctantly escorts/supports him home. Annabel and Fortunato immediately hit it off, and he begins to see her while Montresor is out drinking, with him little realizing that the reason his wife suddenly has money to give him to go out drinking is because Fortunato is paying to get him out of the house. When this is made clear to him, he returns home and sees Fortunato departing, then he enters the house, where he confronts and kills his wife, then chains her body in an alcove in the crypts below the house. Later, he lures Fortunato there and likewise chains him up, then bricks up a wall to conceal their bodies (in “Cat,” the narrator cites as inspiration “the monks of the middle ages [who] are recorded to have walled up their victims,” while the narrator of “Amontillado” just gets to work). From there, the story plays out just as in “The Black Cat,” with Montresor content that no one will ever find his wife or Fortunato, whom he claims ran off together, until, while allowing the police to inspect the place, he arrogantly slaps the wall that he built and is greeted by the growl of the cat he errantly bricked up inside, causing the police to discover the makeshift tomb.
This one is a pure delight from beginning to end. Price is playing stoic men in both of the other segments, but here he gets to fop it up real good, and it’s pure magic. The scene in which he dandily polishes a small silver cup that he wears around a chain on his neck and makes a great show of tasting the wines, complete with swishing and hammy fish faces, is priceless. Lorre is no slouch, either, as he plays Montresor with a hapless impotence that makes him pitiable despite his role as the villain of the piece. The two on screen together make for an immediately comedic pairing, as the short and stout Lorre next to the tall and lean Price (Lorre was 5’3” and Price 6’4”) look like they’re two cartoon characters drawn in distinctively different styles. The film does still manage to include the spooky dream sequence that appears to have been all but contractually obligated to be in these films, and instead of using a distinctive color saturation, the film’s image is just “squashed” from the top and the bottom, such that the already vaguely turtle-walking-upright stature and body language of Montresor becomes even more pronounced and humorous. Although it’s bracketed by two other stories that I would label as decent but forgettable, this one makes the price of the whole worthwhile.
Of course, no Overlook Film Festival experience is complete without stopping by the Vinegar Syndrome table to peruse their annual selection of vintage-genre-cinema Blu-rays. I find the ritual both exhilarating and overwhelming, especially without the guidance of Letterboxd & blog-post reviews that help make sense of the boutique label’s catalog when shopping online. As a result, I usually end up buying the discs that most inspire me to think “What the fuck am I looking at?” when browsing those horizontal stacks — a method that has rewarded me with past genre gems as varied and as extreme as The Suckling, Nightbeast, and Singapore Sling. My blind-buy Vinegar Syndrome purchase at this year’s Overlook was no different: the Category III demonic possession title Devil Fetus, the most “What the fuck am I looking at?”-est title I could find on the table. Having now seen the movie a couple times at home since the festival concluded, I still cannot answer that question with any confidence or clarity, which may be its greatest strength as a vintage genre curio.
The narrative structure of Devil Fetus makes no logical or thematic sense as a work of commercial screenwriting, but it does create plenty of open, ambiguous space to stage a wide range of gore effects & carnival sideshow gross-outs. The story opens with a young woman entertaining herself at a local Hungry Ghost Festival while her husband is out of town on business. Mesmerized by a jade vase that the festival auctioneer promises will see “all her desires fulfilled,” she makes the impulsive purchase and takes the vase home . . . to immediately have sex with it. Disastrously, the absentee husband arrives home to catch his wife and the vase mid-coitus, where he sees the vase personified as a “Tibetan sex demon” and attacks the adulterous couple. The vase is smashed in the struggle, quickly leading to both spouses’ deaths (one by poisonous gas, one by housecat) and the demon is safely imprisoned in a Buddhist temple by a helpful priest. That magic doesn’t hold forever, though, and the woman’s nephew is the next body the demon possesses, much to the sexual peril of everyone around him.
Actually, it’s not entirely clear if the nephew is possessed by the demon or by the aunt’s undead spirit, given that at one point the mud-bodied “Tibetan sex demon” that seduced his aunt bursts out of his skin and, at another, he’s shown primping himself with lipstick & blush in a vanity mirror as he’s possessed directly by her spirit instead. Either way, the sins of the aunt being passed down to her nephew doesn’t make a ton of thematic sense beyond a generalized discomfort with sexual pleasure & aberration. In the aunt’s segment, the vase is presented as a kind of supernatural dildo, one she flips out to discover is being played with by her young nephews who went snooping in her room. In the now-grown-up nephew’s segment, the discomfort lies somewhere in the feminized traits that have been carried over from the demonically-corrupted aunt, which raises a political eyebrow by the time the demonically-possessed teen starts attempting to rape all women in his immediate vicinity. It’s doubtful either of these implications were thoroughly considered in the writing stage, though, rather than bubbling up from the subconscious while quickly hammering away a script at the typewriter to meet a deadline.
Something I’m not writing about much in this recap of Devil Fetus is the titular devil fetus itself, which appears in exactly one shot, emerging from the dead aunt’s pregnant belly like an Alien chestburster. It’s just one of several copyright-testing images that recall famous horrors like The Exorcist & Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video, none with any more thematic or stylistic importance than another. The movie is mostly a collection of gross-out gags involving puked-up birthday cake, worms crawling out of rotted faces, dog-on-human cunnilingus, semi-documentary animal slaughter, and whatever other disgusting image came to the production crew’s mind as they improvised new hellish horrors from day to day. It takes the cowardly Possession over an hour to work up the courage for a monster-fucking scene that this Cat III freak show delivers in the first ten minutes, and it’s followed by a nonstop assault of out-of-nowhere sight gags that had me shouting variations of “Wow!”, “Whoa!”, and “Ewww!” every few minutes while I was trying to make sense of the plot.
Like every Vinegar Syndrome disc I’ve ever purchased, this Blu-ray issue of Devil Fetus is a gorgeous, high-quality scan that adds a new layer of aesthetic beauty to the picture that cannot be discerned from the grainy VHS prints screenshotted elsewhere online. The movie was directed by cinematographer Lau Hung-chuen, whose consistent attention to color-gel lighting and visual illusion affords it a genuinely supernatural feel. Even when the plot spins its wheels during go-nowhere kendo tournaments, dance parties, and swimming pool horseplay, I was never bored thanks to the beauty & unpredictability of Lau Hung-chuen’s imagery, even when it was objectively, abhorrently disgusting. Usually the “What the fuck am I looking at?” question leaves my mind once I leave the Vinegar Syndrome table, but this year it continues to linger.
Self-described as “a summer camp for genre fans,” The Overlook Film Festival has quickly become the best of New Orleans’s local film fests . . . as long as you’re a total sicko. I consistently catch a wide selection of the year’s most stylish, violent, and memorable horror films & thrillers in the festival’s lineup, many of which don’t otherwise reach local big screens before they get siphoned off to the cultural void of streaming platforms. In recent years, all films programmed have been corralled to the two locations of The Prytania Theatres, which allows you to form a weekend-long bond with fellow movie nerds you continually run into while lining up for the next fucked-up delight. Everyone’s watching too much, sleeping too little, and loving every horrific minute. It really does capture the summer camp or sleepover feeling of staying up all night watching scary movies with your friends after the adults fell asleep and can no longer police what’s playing on the living room TV.
This was the first year of the festival where I made some time in my schedule for a couple repertory screenings: the Corman-Poe classic The Fall of the House of Usher (1960) and a block of David Lynch’s early short films (namely “Sick Men Getting Sick,” “The Grandmother, “The Amputee,” and “Premonitions Following an Evil Deed”). The Vincent Price campiness and costume drama fussiness of House of Usher made for a classically wonderful trip to the Prytania’s original location uptown, but the Lynch shorts made a much more significant impression on me. As a collective, they offered a glimpse into an alternate dimension where Lynch might have stuck to a full career as a Don Hertzfeldt-style outsider animator. More importantly, they also projected most of the scariest images I saw at this year’s festival, especially in the domestic blackbox-theatre artificiality of “The Grandmother.” There’s always something novel about watching challenging art films in a downtown shopping mall like Canal Place, and that Lynch block may have been the most abstract & challenging films ever screened there. It says a lot about Overlook’s sharp, thoughtful curation that they made room for films that academically rigorous alongside feature-length sex-and-fart-joke comedies like Grace Glowicki’s Dead Lover (which, I might as well admit, was my favorite of the fest).
I see no point in rating or raking the works of recently fallen legends like Corman & Lynch here, since their contributions to the festival are so deeply engrained in genre cinema history, they’re beyond critique. Instead, I’m listing below the ten new-release feature films I caught at this year’s Overlook Film Festival, ranked in the order that I appreciated them, each with a blurb and a link to a corresponding review. For a more detailed recap of the Swampflix Crew’s festival experience beyond these reviews, check out the most recent episode of The Swampflix Podcast.
Grace Glowicki follows up her freak-show stoner comedy Tito with a flippantly surreal Hammer Horror throwback, filtering the Frankenstein myth through the Tim & Eric meme machine. Some of the most gorgeous, perverted images you’ll see all year paired with the kind of juvenile prankster humor that punctuates its punchlines with ADR’d fart noises. If Glowicki’s filmmaking career doesn’t work out, she can always pivot to becoming the world’s first drag king Crispin Glover impersonator, bless her putrid heart.
Grief has been the major theme in horror for the past decade, while Conspiracy has been the major theme of mainstream political thought. Only Cronenberg could find a way to eroticize both in a single picture. The king of the perverts continues his reign, despite his reluctance to wear the crown.
An all-in-a-car, real-time thriller that reimagines 2013’s Locke as a dark fairy tale about irresponsible parenting. Extremely satisfying for anyone who loves to watch Rosamund Pike act her way through a crisis.
A self-deprecating meta doc about a true crime dramatization that fell apart in pre-production. Reminded me of a couple postmodern television series of my youth: Breaking the Magician’s Code – Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed (for spoiling the magic of how the true-crime genre works) and The Soup (for giving a broad enough overview of the genre that I don’t feel like I have to watch any genuine examples of it to Get It).
The new Kiyoshi Kurosawa (no not that one, the other one) asks a really scary question: What if online flamewars became physical, literal, and consequential? Turns out they’d still be at least a little bit silly and a lotta bit pathetic.
Screenlife cinema that abandons horror in favor of the heist thriller, following the small-scale, laptop-bound schemes of four teens who steal a Bitcoin fortune from an Elon Musk-type dipshit. I personally preferred when this still-burgeoning subgenre was fully supernatural, but it’s nice to see a version of it where teens are actually having fun being online (even when in peril).
A documentary about To Catch a Predator as an aughts-era reality TV phenomenon. Felt like I was going to throw up for the first 40 minutes or so, because I had never seen the show before and wasn’t fully prepared for how deeply evil it is.
You’ve seen a haunted house movie from the POV of a ghost. Now, line up for a haunted house movie kinda-sorta from the POV of a dog! What a time to be alive.
A WWII-set creature feature stranded somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. Continues a long tradition of unspoken homoeroticism in wartime dramas, now with a Roger Corman rubber-suited monster as lagniappe.
A sci-fi revenge thriller about a grieving mother who gets addicted to killing her child’s murderer in multiple alternate dimensions. It brings me no pleasure to act as the logic police, but the temporal shenanigans of this one make no sense. It’s like they wrote it as a time-loop movie and subbed in the word “multi-verse” instead at the last minute without cleaning up the implications of how time passes differently in that genre. The violence is effectively nasty, though, and there are a few tense set-pieces that almost distract from the quibbles.
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