bette davis

The Watcher in the Woods (1980)

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A longtime Swampflix favorite, the 1983 Jack Clayton-directed Ray Bradbury adaptation Something Wicked This Way Comes has been unavailable for home viewing since at least as far back as 2017, when we first covered it for Movie of the Month. Thankfully, that is no longer the case. As of this October, it’s finally been added to Disney+ for anyone interested. Back when we first discussed Something Wicked, Brandon talked about that film in conversation with another Disney-funded Kiddie Horror picture, The Watcher in the Woods, which still remains unavailable online. Since Something Wicked wasn’t available to borrow from my local library or from my local video rental place and could only be found on Disney’s proprietary streaming service, I was curious how hard it would be to find The Watcher in the Woods, and lo and behold, it was easier for me to lay hands on it in the physical world than it was online. Deciding that it would make a good “Bette Davis handles a spooky jewelry box” double feature with Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, it was the perfect time to check it out. 

Teenage Jan (Lynn-Holly Johnson) and elementary-aged Ellie (Kyle Richards) are American sisters whose composer father (David McCallum) has been tasked with putting on an opera in England. This leads to them renting a large, old home from the reclusive Mrs. Aylwood (Davis), whose daughter disappeared roughly three decades before. Mrs. Aylwood rarely rents out the home, but Jan resembles her long-missing daughter Karen, and so she opens the house up to the Curtis family. Even before the ink on the lease is dry, strange things begin to happen; Jan sees images of a blindfolded girl in reflections and Ellie learns things that she shouldn’t know and, when asked where she heard these facts, attributes the knowledge to her new puppy, Nerak (Karen backwards, obviously). Jan strikes up a budding relationship with handsome neighbor Mike Fleming (Benedict Taylor), from whom they get the puppy, and Ellie’s writing of “NERAK” in the dust on a barn window leads Mike’s mother to confess that she was there the night that Karen disappeared, along with two other teens, Tom Colley and John Keller. The three of them were doing some classic “secret society at midnight in the old chapel” shenanigans when lightning struck the building and set it ablaze, causing the great bell to fall where Karen had been standing. Only Tom Colley looked back and saw that she wasn’t there when the bell fell, and no remains for Karen were ever found. Can Jan convince several adults that some entity, the titular unknown watcher in the woods, is trying to help Karen get home? 

This movie scared the shit out of me when I was a kid. Although most old television broadcast schedules are long gone now, this isn’t so for the Disney Channel, which allowed me to pin down the actual date that I saw this film for the first time: October 27, 1995, when I was eight years old. This review may very well go up on the thirtieth anniversary of that date, and in all those decades, I’ve never forgotten it, with some of its images haunting me to this day. I didn’t remember much about the ending, given that it’s a bit overcomplicated (the fact that Disney rushed release to coincide with the 50th anniversary of Bette Davis’s first film role only for the film to be panned, resulting in quickly pulling the film and reshooting the ending, tells you all that you need to know), but I’ve never stopped thinking about poor Karen in that mirror. There’s something truly, deeply haunting about this film, and I’m surprised that its contemporary reception was so poor (and I’m talking about the release of the currently available “complete” version). Maybe it was simply that people really weren’t ready for a family brand like Disney to release a film that was this scary; this was, after all, several years before the creation of the PG-13 rating, and it premiered at the beginning of the decade when it would become more commonplace for children’s media to be intentionally frightening, at least in small amounts. The world that The Watcher in the Woods premiered in was one that was still a few years out from E.T. the Extraterrestrial, The NeverEnding Story, Return to Oz, and even Something Wicked This Way Comes, so maybe it was simply a little too ahead of its time. Hell, it even presages The Evil Dead a little, as this contains what may be the earliest use of the Sam Raimi-style “tracking camera.” Shots from the point of view of the villain (although in this case there’s no real “villain” to speak of and the titular watcher is ultimately a benevolent presence, even if some of its actions create dangerous situations) are nothing new, but the low-to-the-ground “Deadite view” hadn’t really taken off yet, and this film has that several times. 

In reading about the film and older reviews of it, I was struck by the many mentions of the unimaginative shooting, and I find that surprising. The film effectively captures a melancholy mood through many images of the woods surrounding the Curtises’ temporary home, and even when the kids are excited to discover a pond, it’s not exactly a cheerful sight, all fog and murky water. The house is effectively spooky, and the other environs that we see, like the ruins of the chapel and the inside of Tom Colley’s shack, are also rendered very effectively on screen. It may simply be that in an era where most media is shot so flatly and with so little attention to cinematic craftsmanship that I’ve become accustomed to gobbling up slop, so that when something that would have been considered the basic minimum needed to create atmosphere seems revelatory to me. Regardless, this is a nice little intro-to-horror for any kid who might be interested, even if the wrap-up and conclusion won’t stick in their minds. If you’re looking for something in the same vein that’s a little more adult, try satiating your Bette Davis sweet tooth with Burnt Offerings.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964)

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It’s no secret that, when it comes to director Robert Aldrich’s collaborations with Bette Davis, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is the film that everyone remembers and talks about, while Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte is normally regarded as a bit of an afterthought. After all, the former has Davis up against Joan Crawford, an onscreen tour de force that captures the energy of their offscreen antipathy, a rivalry with such a legacy that it’s been turned into entertainment several times itself. It’s a well-known piece of trivia that the role of cousin Miriam in Charlotte, which was ultimately played by Olivia de Havilland as a favor to Davis, was to have been Crawford’s. Although I love de Havilland in this role, I can’t help but think that the Davis/Crawford second feature would have reversed this, with Charlotte as the preeminent psychobiddy picture and Baby Jane as the footnote. 

At a roaring party at Big Sam Hollis (Victor Buono, who had also appeared in Baby Jane)’s plantation home in the 1920s, the man himself warns John Mayhew (Bruce Dern) that he is aware that John has been carrying on an affair with Sam’s daughter Charlotte (Davis) and intends to run off with her and abandon his wife Jewel (Mary Astor), and that he will not allow this to happen. John goes to the grounds’ gazebo to break things off, only to be murdered, with his head decapitated and one of his hands lopped off. We then cut to the present of 1964, which finds Charlotte now a shut-in living in a dilapidated mansion with only the company of sourpuss maid Velma Cruther (Agnes Moorhead) and the occasional visits from childhood friend Drew Bayliss (Joseph Cotten), a doctor. Charlotte’s house is set to be torn down by the highway commission, but her repeated deferral of the impending date comes to a head when she hot-temperedly pushes a large stone planter off of her balcony, coming close to killing the demolition foreman, and she’s been given ten days to vacate. Charlotte’s recluse status is reiterated by the fact that there’s a persistent urban legend that Charlotte killed John Mayhew and got away with it because she was rich, with children daring each other to go up to the nearly abandoned house as if an old witch lived there. For her part, Charlotte believes that her father killed John, but in spite of this she blames Jewel Mayhew for exposing the affair and causing everything to fall apart, and part of her stated aversion to moving away is because she doesn’t want Jewel Mayhew to “win,” since her house isn’t in the way of the highway. Despite Velma’s doubts, Charlotte’s attempts to get her businesswoman cousin Miriam (de Havilland) to come to the old house are successful, although Miriam knows that she’s there to get Charlotte out, not stop the bulldozers. Her arrival in town comes at the same time as a British insurance agent’s, who has a special interest in the Mayhew case. 

I programmed this movie for the third of five “spooky season” Friday screenings for Austin’s Double Trouble, a North Loop spot that I frequent and adore (the first two were Rosemary’s Baby and Ginger Snaps, with Paprika coming up on the 24th and Cherry Falls on Halloween night, both at 8 PM). In my ad copy for Charlotte, I described it as “Grey Gardens meets Gaslight,” and given that it had been a little while since I last saw it, I forgot just how much that latter film this one liberally cribs from. I’d go so far as to argue that, if the play and film Gaslight had never been produced, the psychological term that we take from it would instead be called “Sweet Charlotting” or “Hush Hushing.” Poor Charlotte Hollis really gets put through the wringer in this one, blaming her father for John Mayhew’s death for decades and hating Jewel Mayhew for exposing the affair, when neither of those things are really true, and that’s before she finds herself psychologically terrorized by phantoms of John and discovering evidence of a potential haunting. Davis is doing some of the most truly compelling work of her career here, and I’ve been haunted by this performance ever since my first viewing of this movie when I was a teenager. Maybe I’m biased and the Louisiana setting and the frequent mentions of Baton Rouge endear this one to me more than Baby Jane, but I really do find the Southern Gothic feel of this one makes it more special (even if the script occasionally flubs and mentions a “county commissioner,” as counties are something that Louisiana does not have). That having been said, I can’t pretend that Baby Jane isn’t a tighter film; although their individual runtimes are within minutes of one another (133 minutes for Charlotte and 134 for Baby Jane), Charlotte feels longer, as there’s a little too much denouement going on after the film’s villains are revealed. This allows for Davis to continue to act her ass off, but it’s not terribly exciting, even if it also gives some time for one or two more twists. 

Although the film is decades old, I’ll give the standard warning here that I’ve got to delve into spoilers to discuss it further. This gets a big enough recommendation from me that I used a platform I was given to show movies to the public to make this one more visible, so that’s all you really need at this juncture if you want to go in unspoiled. Ok? Ok. I love seeing Joseph Cotten and Olivia de Havilland really play against type in this one. I think I remember reading somewhere once that it was only in this film and Dark Mirror in which she portrayed a villain, and in that earlier role she was playing a set of good and evil twins, so that’s a net zero, really. She’s fantastic here, and even though some audience members may find themselves fatigued by the film’s long ending, I wouldn’t trade the opportunity to see de Havilland relish delivering Miriam’s backstory for a shorter run time (even if I would trade it to see Crawford tear into this monologue). Miriam reveals that her resentment toward Charlotte was born the day that she was first brought to the Hollis House to be raised by her uncle following her father’s death, and that old Sam Hollis’s perfunctory hospitality to his niece while he doted on his daughter drove her into a jealous rage. It was Miriam who exposed Charlotte and John Mayhew’s affair, and when Jewel Mayhew killed her husband in a jealous rage, it was Miriam who blackmailed Jewel about it for decades while allowing Charlotte to blame her father, destroying their once close relationship. Miriam’s envy took everything from Charlotte except her house, and now Miriam has come back for that, too (or at least whatever money Charlotte’s entitled to via eminent domain reimbursement), with Dr. Drew as her confidante. His motivation is merely money, which is less interesting, but it’s still nice to see the hero of Gaslight take on the role of accessory gaslighter in this film. 

I’ve barely mentioned her, but I also want to draw attention to the fantastic performance of Agnes Moorhead as Velma. The moment that something spooky seems to be happening, the audience’s initial suspicion must fall on Velma, as the person with the most access to the house and the one who seems most antagonistic toward Miriam, who has yet to be revealed as the villain and seems to truly desire to help. Velma is irascible and her ability to maintain the great old house alone is minimal at best, but she’s also a true and faithful companion for Charlotte despite the fact that she seems to be going feral (when her murdered body is left in her backyard, the authorities say of her place that “I’d hardly call it a home,” which makes it sound like she’s living in a shack). Moorhead really was one of the greats, and she’s just as fantastic here as Davis is. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Death on the Nile (1978)

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I really, really wanted to love Death on the Nile. I first acquired a copy of it shortly after the death of the late Angela Lansbury, my love for whom is widely advertised all over this site. Unfortunately, her role in this is one of the smaller ones from among the ensemble, and the overall tone and extended length of this one was a bit of a letdown. It’s not bad; I quite enjoyed it, but I didn’t love it. 

As the film opens, we meet Jackie de Bellefort (Mia Farrow), who practically begs her heiress friend Linnet Ridgeway (Lois Chiles) to hire Jackie’s fiance Simon (Simon MacCorkindale) for a position at Ridgeway’s estate. She relents, and then we jump forward a year to find Simon on a honeymoon with his wife, except he hasn’t married Jackie, and is instead now wedded to Linnet. That doesn’t stop Jackie from being a thorn in their side, however, as she shows up at their most recent romantic rendezvous atop a Giza pyramid to recite facts about its dimensions, with Linnet and Simon both expressing frustration that she has appeared at every destination on their post-wedding trip. (As a side note, I loved this; if my best friend stole my betrothed, I would also be so petty that neither of them would know a moment’s peace for the rest of their lives, and there would be no corner of the earth in which I could not find a way to be a nuisance.) They attempt to give her the slip before the next leg of their trip, and appear to have been successful, as they board a steamboat travelling down, as the title would suggest, the Nile River. 

As it turns out, not only are they not alone on this journey, but many of the passengers, like Jackie, are in the vicinity because of their desire to cause trouble for the newlyweds. There’s Linnet’s maidservant, Louise (Jane Birkin), who was promised a dowry for her service to Linnet so that she could marry a man she loves, but which Linnet continues to delay paying, possibly with the intention of completely reneging on their deal. Miss Bowers (Maggie Smith)’s formerly noble family lost their fortune at the machinations of Linnet’s father, forcing her into taking a thankless job as the companion of Marie Van Schuyler (Bette Davis), whose own aristocratic status does not stop her from having kleptomaniacal inclinations, especially with regards to Linnet’s pearls. Linnet has also publicly denounced the practices of Dr. Bessner (Jack Warden), as her friend died under his “care,” which includes treating patients with intravenous armadillo urine, and his career is in the balance. Then there’s Andrew Pennington (George Kennedy), who manages Linnet’s stateside business and who is set on preventing her from finding out that he’s been skimming, while Colonel Race (David Niven) is there surreptitiously acting on behalf of her English lawyers, who want to bring this to her attention. Nebulously, there is a young communist aboard named James (Jon Finch), who bears hatred for Linnet as a representative of class striation, and, last but not least, the ship is also carrying Salome Otterbourne (Lansbury) and her daughter Rosalie (Olivia Hussey); Salome is a romance novelist currently embroiled in a libel lawsuit over one of her recent books, which was partially based on Linnet’s real life and may have insufficiently differentiated the main character from the inspiration. And, of course, Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov) is there, because someone has to use their little grey cells to figure out who did it when Linnet turns up dead, and the only ironclad alibi is Jackie’s. 

The oddest thing about this adaptation is that it decides to play the story for light comedy; that’s not that strange in and of itself (yours truly was in a Christie parody entitled And Then There Was One in high school—it’s a common way to present her work), but it’s curious how intermittently the comedy works. Where this least was least successful was when the humor went very broad, most notably in regards to Lansbury’s perpetually intoxicated (and horned up) Salome, who is possibly the most obnoxious character in the whole thing. You know that if I’m looking at Lady Angela and having a bad time, then we’re really in trouble. Shortly before a failed attempt on Linnet’s life at the Temple of Karnak, we’re treated to a scene of all of the passengers disembarking the ship and setting out to ride up to the site; I suppose we’re supposed to laugh at the sight gag of George Kennedy struggling to mount a donkey while the others get on camels, but it certainly failed to get a mirthless smile out of me, let alone a chuckle. There’s also an overlong gag when the group first boards the ship and I. S. Johar’s captain character does an extended bit about trying to guess which guest is which, and I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s possibly racist and at the very least undignified. On the other hand, the biggest laugh I did get was from one of Lansbury’s scenes, in which Salome is recounting how she managed to witness the killer flee from the stateroom, her voiceover explaining that a deckhand was showing her something on the shore, while the flashback itself reveals her buying several large liquor bottles from the man instead. At least I can say that the film got funnier for me as it went along, with more of the jokes landing in the back half than in the front. 

On a purely visual level, the film is much more notable. As a period piece, all of the clothing is gorgeous; the only Academy Award for which it was nominated was Best Costume Design, and it won that Oscar as well as the BAFTA in the same category. Special attention should be drawn to Smith’s outfitting as Miss Bowers. Throughout the film, she’s consistently dressed in tightly tailored men’s tuxedos and other formalwear, and she looks great in every one of them. Her silhouette is stunning, and she works the slightly transgressive look quite well. I was also struck by the various gowns in which Farrow is costumed. When most people think about her, I assume that they all have the same first mental image that I do, which is of her emaciated, shaven-headed prisoner in a nightgown in Rosemary’s Baby. Everything else I’ve ever seen her in was during (or after) her marriage to Woody Allen, during which time she was, to put it lightly, not doing well. I don’t think that I ever realized before that she’s a beautiful woman, and getting to see her slink about in dresses that won costuming awards on both sides of the Atlantic was a thrill. I loved her angry, vengeful energy, and she ended up being one of the movie’s highlights. 

This is somewhat condensed from the 1937 novel on which it was based, as usually must be done when making a Christie adaptation. Characters are removed, motives are swapped around or condensed, and you’re still likely to end up creating something that’s over two hours long, with this particular film clocking in at 134 minutes (Kenneth Branagh’s 2022 version was 127 minutes long, and I can’t imagine how the David Suchet adaptation manages to get the plot resolved in 97 minutes). That’s a decent time for a good mystery, but it errs quite long for a comedy, so it ends up succeeding more as one than the other. It’s not bad, but it almost feels like it would work better broken up into two parts for Masterpiece Theatre. And, frankly, I didn’t enjoy seeing Angela Lansbury take a bullet during these trying times. Embark (or don’t) with that in mind. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Episode #130 of The Swampflix Podcast: Madhouse (1981) & Evil Twins

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Welcome to Episode #130 of The Swampflix Podcast. For this episode, Britnee, James, and Brandon discuss over-the-top exploitation thrillers about Evil Twins, starting with the 1981 Italo whatsit Madhouse.

You can stay up to date with our podcast by subscribing on  SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, or TuneIn.

– The Podcast Crew

Episode #84 of The Swampflix Podcast: Ma (2019) & Classic Psychobiddies

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Welcome to Episode #84 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our eighty-fourth episode, Brandon & Britnee compare the latest entry into the psychobiddy canon, Ma (2019), to a couple towering classics in the genre: Strait-Jacket (1964) & The Nanny (1965). Enjoy!

You can stay up to date with our podcast through SoundCloud, Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, TuneIn, or by following the links on this page.

-Brandon Ledet & Britnee Lombas

The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939)

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I feel like what I’m looking for in any Bette Davis movie is for the actor to let loose & open fire on her costars. I’m not sure if this is retroactively a result of her late career comeback in the famously combative (onscreen & off) What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? or if it’s just a natural extension of a deliberately non-demure persona she carried throughout her career. I didn’t think to expect that loose cannon antagonism in the 1939 Technicolor costume drama The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, but Davis’s lead performance as Queen Elizabeth I delivered it by the truckload. Although it has the pedigree of an expensive Major Studio period piece, the film is essentially just Bette Davis wearing beautiful costumes, gobbling snacks, and hurling vicious insults for two solid hours. In other words, it’s fabulous.

Many actors have interpreted Elizabeth I onscreen over the decades, ranging as wide as Cate Blanchett & Quentin Crisp, but Bette Davis’s depiction feels entirely singular in its vicious, feral energy. Like with many pictures over her career, it’s rumored that she was not at all happy with her coworkers or the demands of the production. She was especially miffed that Elizabeth’s remarkably high hairline required her to shave her head, which put her in a persistently ornery mood. This made the film a chore to shoot, especially since Davis would act out in juvenile ways like slapping the piss out of her romantic co-lead, Errol Flynn, with all of her might instead of just making sure the scripted hit looked good for the camera. That anger translated well to the role, though, making Davis’s Elizabeth come across as a kind of furious demon in beautiful costumes. She’s visibly uncomfortable, constantly reaching for grapes or wine or invisible stress balls to calm her nerves as she inhales between each insult. The effect on the film is glorious, though, transporting Davis’s slack, unceremonious, Baby Jane Hudson-mode energy into a stuffy Studio Era drama where it doesn’t belong.

A 16th Century tale of real life war & romance endowed with the same Major Studio bloat of the 1960s Camelot musical, there isn’t much to The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex in a formal sense. As Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, Errol Flynn is propped up as a kind of love/hate romantic sparring partner meant to periodically threaten Davis’s power as the Queen of England. She steamrolls him with ease. Essex & Elizabeth both can’t get enough of each other in their lustful bouts of loneliness and can’t possibly share the same space & time, due to their individual thirsts for power & the throne. This sometimes leads to the Queen sending Essex off to war in the Irish Moors (which look an awful lot like a studio lot) without proper supplies to succeed, just to be temporarily rid of him. It also leads to literal, direct rebellion within the palace where the two square off head to head with their respective guards. Flynn’s Essex is never given a chance to really stand up to the Queen, however. Outside occasionally riding a horse, the athletic leading man isn’t even afforded a chance to do any of his signature swashbuckling. Elizabeth’s other foils, a dangerously horny Olivia de Havilland and a foppish knight played by a baby faced Vincent Price, don’t fare much better. As much as this film’s dialogue frets over Elizabeth’s duties as a Queen being hindered by her desires as a woman, there’s no question who’s in charge and who’s going to make it out on top. I’m not saying that because of the inevitability if its Wikipedia-verifiable history lesson, either. Davis’s fierceness demands her victory, with obligatory demise for each of her opponents, whether or not she wants to fuck them.

I’d be a liar if I said I cared at all about the plot of this film. Formally, The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex is remarkable less for its narrative than it is for its gorgeous production & costume design. One Orry-Kelly-designed dress in particular, with shimmering green mermaid scales, a pale pink Elizabethan collar (naturally), and a neon green feathered hand fan had me gasping for air. Those luxurious design flourishes only serve to contrast Elizabeth’s demonic furor, however, as she complains about her old age, smashes mirrors, claws at a pile of snacks, and fires off long strands of insults: “lying villain,” “wicked devil,” “slimy toad,” “stupid cattle,” “snakes & rats,” etc. If, like me, your favorite Bette Davis performances find the actor in vicious attack mode, the formal mediocrity of this Studio Era period piece won’t matter to you one bit. The film is downright delicious for Davis’s inhuman bursts of Technicolor furor, especially considering the restrained pomp & propriety of the setting that contrasts it.

-Brandon Ledet

When Disney Got Cold Feet Over Getting Spooky: The Watcher in the Woods (1980) & Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)

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July’s Movie of the Month is a jarring entry in the Walt Disney canon, something much spookier, much more adult, and much less financially successful than what the company usually produces. 1983’s Something Wicked This Way Comes is a Ray Bradbury-penned horror film packed with enough ghostly carnival attractions, Pam Grier witchcraft, and children-in-danger stakes to distract you from the fact that it’s a Disney movie to begin with. Still, it’s easy to get the sense while watching Something Wicked that Disney wasn’t fully committed to the adult horror waters it was testing at the time. Casting debates, re-shoots, and studio notes softened director Jack Clayton’s nightmarish vision at every turn. Although the film still stands out from Disney’s usual saccharine tone, it could have gone much, much further. This kind of post-production backpedaling was a constant theme during Disney’s brief adult horror period too. Much like with Something Wicked, the studio’s tinkering revisions softened & distorted the original vision of its first outright horror picture, 1980’s The Watcher in the Woods. Both films survived their troubled production histories as cult classic favorites, not financial successes, but both also could have been much more memorably strange & terrifying than Disney ultimately allowed them to be.

Before The Watcher in the Woods, Disney toyed with an outright horror tone in films like Black Hole or the Witch Mountain series, but it kept those urges confined to the bounds of a science fiction aesthetic, focusing on topics like space travel & telekinesis. The advertising for The Watcher in the Woods promised an entirely new, fully committed shift in trajectory. The trailers boasted, “Walt Disney ushers in a new decade of motion picture entertainment with the following invitation to spend 90min on the edge of your seat.” The problem is that the company wasn’t sure it wanted to accept its own invitation to do so. Director John Hough was hired with the intention of producing Disney’s The Exorcist, but the constant barrage of studio notes that tempered its production consistently diminished the wind in its sails. This behind-the-camera tinkering came to a head when the studio insisted that Hough rush its ending to completion so it could screen coinciding with a commemoration of star Bette Davis’s 50 years in the acting profession. The original ending, which includes a monstrous alien puppet that does not appear in the theatrical cut, was left incomprehensible due to the time constraint. It then had to be re-shot into a much more easily digestible conclusion after hundreds of stop & start rewrites. If pulled off well, it could have been a mind-blowing, impressively dark ending to an otherwise mildly spooky picture. In its compromised form, it’s more of an all-too-easy release of futilely built tension.

As much as you can feel the studio notes shenanigans muddling its ending & ultimate severity, The Watcher in the Woods is still an impressively spooky Disney picture and an important precursor to what the studio would soon accomplish in Something Wicked This Way Comes. Strange lights flashing in the woods, blindfolded ghosts appearing in cracked mirrors, haunted English mansions & carnival attractions: The Watcher establishes early glimpses of the same children vs. immense Evil horror that makes Something Wicked such a classic. Bette Davis appears in the full evil old biddy capacity she was frequently typecast in following the success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, except with a distinctly tragic vulnerability that had been missing since that role reinvigorated her career. Her instantly spooky presence is admittedly sparse, but it suggests much of the film’s horrific tone to come as the mystery of her daughter’s disappearance unfolds. Occultist rituals, alternate dimensions, and, of course, the eeriness of the woods set the stage for a grand supernatural finale that not only was supposed to settle its overarching mystery, but also give physical form to a literal “watcher” in the woods (who appears to be some kind of evil crawfish in the original ending). It’s a shame Disney didn’t afford Hough the patience to see the original conclusion through in all of its spooky glory, but it’s still kind of incredible that they ever toyed with the idea of making a genuine horror film at all, so I guess I should be content with what’s left to be enjoyed onscreen.

Neither The Watcher in the Woods nor Something Wicked This Way Comes are the scariest live-action Disney films of all time. For my money, I’d assume that honor goes to the deeply traumatizing Return to Oz, which was soon to follow. However, as a pair they do make clear that at one point Disney’s plan to revitalize its brand (which was struggling by the 80s, believe it or not) was to experiment with legitimate horror film aesthetics. You can feel that decision lurking in Something Wicked‘s haunted carnival nightmare and, honestly, I do believe it’s the better film of the two. The Watcher in the Woods is a much more naked, deliberate push in the horror direction, though. Besides Bette Davis’s evil old biddy presence, the film echoes plenty of already established horror tropes: The Exorcist’s seances, The Shining‘s backwards mirror writing, the camera’s POV chases through the woods that recall both Jaws & the era’s more typical slashers. It would have been fascinating to see if Disney might have been more committed to this dark path if the success of The Little Mermaid hadn’t ushered in their animated division’s 90s renaissance. Maybe they would have eventually loosened the reins on their hired guns’ dark visions and allowed their live action horrors to run free. It’s literally too good to be true, though, so all we can really do is marvel at the fact that they ever got as close as they did to the horror film deep end before they inevitably got cold feet.

For more on July’s Movie of the Month, the Ray Bradbury-penned Disney horror Something Wicked This Way Comes, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film.

-Brandon Ledet

Episode #28 of The Swampflix Podcast: Ramen Girl (2008) & What Ever Happened to What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?

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Welcome to Episode #28 of The Swampflix Podcast! For our twenty-eighth episode, Brandon makes new co-host Britnee watch the Tampopo-riffing Brittany Murphy romcom Ramen Girl (2008) for the first time. Also, Britnee & Brandon discuss the cult classic What Ever Happened to Baby Jane (1962) and its much less prestigious made-for-TV remake from 1991. Enjoy!

-Brandon Ledet

Burnt Offerings (1976)

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fourstar

Dan Curtis is most well remembered as the creator of gothic soap opera Dark Shadows (poorly remade as an irreverent fish-out-of-water comedy starring Johnny Depp in 2012), but  remembrance of his legacy should also include his direction of 1976’s horror film Burnt Offerings. A kind of haunted house flick, the story concerns a run-down neoclassical manor home and the spell that it casts over a hapless family in order to rejuvenate itself.

The owners of the mansion are the wheelchair-bound Arnold Allardyce and his sister Roz (Burgess Meredith and Eileen Heckart, prominently featured in the film’s trailer but in what amount to extended cameos). They are delighted when the Rolf family, consisting of father Ben (Oliver Reed), mother Marian (Karen Black, whom Curtis directed the previous year in Trilogy of Terror), and twelve-year-old son Davey (Lee Montgomery, future heartthrob of Girls Just Wanna Have Fun), express interest in renting the house. Of course, for the low rental price of $900 for the whole summer, there is one caveat; the family must care for the ancient Mrs. Allardyce, a recluse who requires only that meals be left outside her door thrice daily. Ben is resistant at first, but Marian, already affected by the house, insists, and the trio, along with Ben’s elderly Aunt Elizabeth (Bette Davis), arrive at the mansion the following week.

Things seem to go well for a while. Davis is a particular treasure as the wisecracking Aunt Liz, and although Marian becomes more withdrawn (becoming obsessed with Mrs. Allardyce’s collection of photographs and listening to a music box for hours on end), the rest of the family bonds on their vacation. Things begin to take a turn for the worse as Ben starts to have nightmares about a creepy, grinning chauffeur (Anthony James) he encountered at his mother’s funeral as a child, and his roughhousing with Davey in the pool takes on a dark turn as he feels compelled to drown the boy. Soon, the lively Aunt Elizabeth grows ill and dies while the house continues to become less decrepit. Ben ultimately tries to flee the grounds with Davey, but forces conspire to block his way, as his hallucinations of the evil chauffeur begin to appear even in his waking states. When the pool once again tries to drown Davey, Marian’s spell is briefly broken and she agrees to flee with the rest of the family, but the house will not let them go so easily.

A forgotten treasure, Burnt Offerings shares more than just its genre with Poltergeist: they also both share a PG rating. Although it’s still a bit of a shock to think about Spielberg’s haunted house movie being given such an age-inappropriate rating, it’s easier to see how the creepiness of Burnt Offerings slipped under the radar. There are no ghosts in the Allardyce house; the house itself seeks to feed upon the life force of its inhabitants, and very little explanation is given as to how or why the house came to be this way. In a more modern movie, the audience would likely be forced to deal with an unsatisfying origin story for the house’s hunger, but the lack of context actually adds to the horror factor; unanswered questions often leave a stronger impact than unfulfilling answers, and Offerings is a movie that understands that. The only thing that could conceivably be called a specter is the grinning chauffeur, who is effectively unsettling despite never performing any malicious actions. Who is he? Nobody, really, just a creepy guy that Ben encountered as a child and who left an impact on him, which is a nice touch. He’s not affiliated with the house except in the way that he relates to Ben’s unspooling sanity, and he actually stands out as one of the creepier boogeymen that have haunted horror films of the past, calling to mind the Thin Man from the Phantasm series.

Further, the way that the house uses its occupants to act out violence against each other is also quite scary. The tension builds slowly in this film, starting first with images of life and renewal (a dead potted plant suddenly has a green leaf, a burned-out light bulb begins to work) before more outrageous elements occur (gas leaks in locked rooms, dilapidated siding and roof tiles flying off of the house and being replaced by fresh fixtures). If the film had spent less time establishing the Rolfs as a happy family before tearing them apart, the escalation of terror wouldn’t work half as well as it does, and I can’t believe such a great film has faded into relative obscurity. It’s definitely worth tracking down and enjoying.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond