mark boomer redmond

Deadwood: The Movie (2019)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

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.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

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.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Tomb of Ligeia (1964)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

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. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Tales of Terror (1962)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

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. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

House of Usher (1960)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

In this Edgar Allan Poe adaptation, the first character that we see approaches a decrepit old house across a foggy, desolate moor. Upon arrival, they are greeted by a servant who tells them that, although they have come to see their betrothed, they are forbidden from entering the house based on the orders of said betrothed’s protective sibling. They insist upon being allowed entry and, once inside, they are reunited with their love, in spite of the sibling’s interference. From there, they learn that all members of the family who dwell in the house suffer a particular hereditary malady, which includes a tendency toward catalepsy. Beneath the house lies the family crypt, and the newcomer learns about the family’s sordid history. A character has an oversaturated dream and awakes in a start, and the betrothed is buried alive, before rising from their premature grave to wreak havoc on those who have betrayed them. 

Wait, that’s Premature Burial. Except that it’s also a plot description of House of Usher. The unnamed narrator of the original short story is here deemed Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon), and he crosses a boggy tarn amid machined fog to approach the cobwebbed and dilapidated home of Roderick Usher (Vincent Price), who is the next to last surviving member of the Usher dynasty, alongside his sister, Madeline (Myrna Fahey). He is greeted by the sole remaining servant, Bristol (Harry Ellerbe), who at first attempts to refuse him entrance but who is entreatied enough to allow Winthrop to speak with Roderick. The titular house of Usher is a spooky place, bedecked almost entirely in red furnishings—candles, drapes, upholstery, everything—and Winthrop is asked to remove his boots and wear slippers which are provided for him. As the master of the house explains once Winthrop enters his chambers, he is afflicted with an intense sensitivity to all sensory input, keeping the sun out through heavy curtains and insisting that he can hear rats scraping within the stone walls, and the sound of heavy footfall causes him great pain. Winthrop wishes to take Madeline away from this place and back to Boston with him so that the two can get married; Roderick forbids this, telling Winthrop that Madeline has the same maladies as he and that it is his solemn duty to ensure that the Usher bloodline ends with the two of them. Madeline finds them in the middle of this conversation, and she seems delighted to see Winthrop and willing to elope with him, and Roderick thus begrudgingly allows Winthrop to stay.

Damon makes for a very pretty protagonist here, but he’s sorely lacking in screen presence, especially in comparison to Price, who acts circles around the younger man. Likewise, Madeline herself is virtually a non-entity, with Fahey given little to do other than put on pretty dresses and faint. That lack of character depth is particularly unfortunate in a film with only four characters (other than the spectral Ushers of yore who appear in a nightmare sequence), but I did rather like Ellerbe’s nonplussed resignation to the inevitability of the collapse of both the Usher bloodline and home. When giving an extemporaneous interview in one of the extra features on a different MGM Corman/Poe DVD, the director mentioned that his modus operandi when working on these adaptations was to take the story he was “adapting” and treat it as the final act of a standard three act screenplay, and then fill in the first two acts with whatever his writing team could come up with. In this case, that screenwriter was Richard Matheson, for whom I have a lot of fondness as he wrote several great Twilight Zone episodes, the novel I Am Legend, the short story on which The Box was based, and the script for The Night Stalker. There’s nothing wrong with this script, but it’s very clear that, even at a scant eighty minutes, Corman was working to pad out the run time. Thus long walks through hallways run just a little too long to be atmospheric and instead become dull, and this isn’t helped whenever the demands of the story mean that Winthrop and Madeline have the occasional romantic scene that’s so characterless and devoid of any kind of magnetism that the mind wanders. 

That means that much of what there is to enjoy here depends on Price’s performance, which is fortunately rock solid, and that he comes to occupy more and more of the screen time as the film goes on is to its benefit. For the first half or so of the film, his scenes are split up by the aforementioned interminable scenes in which Winthrop confesses his love and Madeline equivocates about running away with him. The best scene the two share is when she leads her beau down into the crypts beneath the house and shows him the coffins of her ancestors, as well as the one awaiting her and which is already inscribed with her name, and even that one ends with the arrival of Roderick to stir things up. Price, meanwhile, delivers his verbose monologues with his usual languid cadence, and does so while looking as pale as a ghost and slightly off as a result of lacking his normal glorious mustache. I particularly loved his recitation of the sins and crimes of Ushers past as he gives a little tour of his macabre portraits of his predecessors, which are garish and strikingly modern, and his gentle reminiscence of the days before his time when the land around the manor was fertile and verdant rather than desolate and barren. Price is also very funny at multiple points in this, especially in places in which the film deviates from the text. In the story, Roderick is a fairly gifted guitar player and the narrator even records the lyrics of one of his impromptu songs in the text, while Price’s Roderick strums aimlessly and tunelessly at a lute, which always sounds awful. I also laughed pretty hard at the moment in which Roderick sees Madeline’s hand twitching within her coffin and he rushes to close it before Winthrop can catch on that Madeline is not truly dead. This too is a change, as Poe’s Roderick truly believed that his sister had passed and only became aware of his error when his sensitive ear heard her screaming in the crypts below to be let out. 

Overall, after now having watched three of these (including Masque of the Red Death), there’s an emerging, discernable formula in what manages to make it into these adaptations. All three films have opening scenes in which a matte painting of a house (or castle) is approached across an in-studio “outdoors.” The lead character then explains their neuroses (or their anti-faith) to the recently arrived naive character, often in a dungeon or a crypt, a character has a trippy color-saturated nightmare, and then we wrap things up with the arrival of mortal or spiritual vengeance. Usher easily outperforms Premature Burial in every one of these individual areas, but it rarely does anything that Masque later imitates better than its successor does. That is to say, despite both of them coming after Usher, Premature Burial is derivative in a way that is detrimental to it, while Masque improves on the already pretty-good Usher, by most metrics. (One place that this outshines it, however, is in Winthrop’s dream sequence, which effectively manages to be both spooky and creepy, and which also manages to capture that feeling we have in dreams where we feel sluggish and ineffectual.) Roderick and Masque’s Prospero are very different characters, as the former is characterized largely by his neurotic behavior and shrinking, withering body language while the latter is a self-assured and assertive man. Nevertheless, one can’t help but see the trial run for later Corman/Price/Poe adaptations to come here, as Price shows his chops by fully committing to every line, delivering each of Roderick’s hypochondriacal and self-pitying remarks with utter conviction, which elevates the whole piece. 

If you are interested, you can read “The Fall of the House of Usher” in its entirety online here. This is a pretty good place to try it out, as I remember barely understanding this particular story when I was in my eighth grade Poe phase. There’s an entire paragraph about all of the literature, art, and religious writings that the narrator and Roderick pore over as their discussions about Roderick’s terrified belief that the house is alive and malevolent, and without the handy footnotes in the version linked above, it’s all but impenetrable. (That’s not to say that the choices of what vocab words to highlight and define in the rest of the text make a lot of sense, as they felt the need to provide meanings for “trepidation” and “pallid” but not “prolixity.”) I rather like it now, especially in its subtleties. The story, like the film, ends with the literal collapse of the Usher’s estate, but before it gets there it incorporates two texts-within-the-text in the forms of Roderick’s song and the fictional chivalric romance Mad Trist, which the narrator reads aloud to Roderick in an attempt to calm the latter’s nerves. That the sounds of a door being kicked down and a large shield falling to the floor which the narrator recites are accompanied by similar sounds elsewhere in the Usher house as Madeline rises from her premature burial (ahem) is a strikingly modern literary device, and the reader gets a real sense of the “irredeemable gloom [hanging] over and [pervading] all.” All that it’s missing is Vincent Price.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Junk Head (2017)

/ swampflix / 4 Comments

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss Takahide Hori’s stop-motion-animated nightmare comedy Junk Head (2017).

00:00 Welcome

03:55 Vampire Hunter D (1985)
07:07 Casino (1995)
15:31 Deadwood – The Movie (2019)
22:30 The Fall of the House of Usher (1960)
38:17 The Conformist (1970)
42:32 Times Square (1980)
48:56 Devil Fetus (1982)
55:38 Grave of the Fireflies (1988)

1:01:21 Junk Head (2017)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew

Dark Intruder (1964)

/ swampflix / Leave a comment

Recently, Brandon texted me to let me know that Puzzle of a Downfall Child—one of my favorite films that I have ever seen and which, when we covered it for Movie of the Month in June of 2019, was almost impossible to find save for a (now deleted) YouTube upload—was on sale from Koni Lorber on Blu-ray for only $10. (We are not sponsored, but I would gratefully accept a free copy if the traffic on the above link is in any way influential.) Brandon mentioned that he thought Dark Intruder would be up my alley, and I realized that I had already acquired a copy of this in a lot of Alfred Hitchcock items some years ago. Dark Intruder is not actually a Hitchcock affiliated project, as it was shot as the pilot for a proposed series to be called Black Cloak, but the crew of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series did shoot it, so it makes sense that the aficionado whose estate sale I attended would have lumped it in there. 

Clocking in at a hair shy of a full hour, Dark Intruder has several points in its favor. Leslie Nielsen plays the lead: a socialite playboy named Brett Kingsford, whose persona belies a fascination with (and some talent for handling) the occult. He has a little person manservant/butler named Nikola (Charles Bolender) who assists him, and he’s friends with Police Commissioner Harvey Misbach (Gilbert Green). If you’re someone like me whose brain has been completely rotted by too many comic book movies, then you probably recognize a very Batman-like pattern in there, simply replacing the “cowardly and superstitious lot” that our apparent layabout aristocrat faces with investigations into the arcane and the mystical. It’s also a period piece, being set in late 19th Century San Francisco, so there’s plenty of handsom cabs, gaslights, and fog to establish the mood. The plot kicks off when Kingsford is visited by his friend Evelyn (Judi Meredith), who asks him to check in on her fiance Robert (Mark Richman), as he has started to become sullen and withdrawn. Kingsford is also summoned by Commissioner Gordon, um, I mean Misbach, to consult on a series of murders. There’s no apparent connection between the victims, but it is clearly the work of a serial killer based on both the modus operandi and that there is a ceramic statuette left behind; the sculptures depict a man with a gargoyle on the back of his head, with each successive totem showing the gargoyle emerging further and further. 

There’s some investigative rigamarole, and it’s moderately engaging. Kingsford goes to consult an Asian mystic (if the film was more specific, I could be too) who burns some incense with him and reveals, in a roundabout way, that there will be seven murders and then the creature will fully emerge. If you’re interested in this, it’s a fairly short time commitment (even if it’s one that I wouldn’t say is particularly worth the effort), so be forewarned that I’m about to spoil the reveal of this sixty-year-old failed TV pilot, if that’s something you can bring yourself to care about. Everybody still reading fine with the reveal? Ok. See, Dark Intruder throws out a lot of ideas, including talking about Lovecraftian concepts and name-dropping Dagon, but what this ultimately boils down to is a bit of a Basket Case situation. Evelyn’s fiance Robert was born with a malformed twin that all believed had died save for the family nurse who kept and raised him, and the murdered people were all party to this in some way or another. If the creature can kill all seven intended victims by a certain night (which also happens to be the night of Eliza and Robert’s wedding rehearsal … or something — this was very difficult to pay attention to) then he and Robert will swap bodies, and he will no longer be a monster. 

There’s nothing wrong with that premise, but I have to admit that as much as I love Nielsen, he does not feel right in this role. He’s playing the character a bit too modernly, with a bit too much of a sneer. This might be a long reach, but the thing it reminded me of the most was the early-aughts Bruce Campbell TV vehicle Jack of all Trades, a campy pleasure of mine in which Campbell plays an American spy named Jack Stiles, stationed on a South Pacific Island in the early 1800s, and doing a bit of a Scarlet Pimpernel thing in his alter ego as the Daring Dragoon. A part of the comedy comes from the fact that Bruce Campbell is playing the Jack no differently than he would play a modern part; the charm comes from how much you enjoy Bruce Campbell saying something pithy and then making a face at the camera, which is not for everyone (more for me!). It feels strange to call Leslie Nielsen’s performance something that feels “too modern” when we’re talking about something that predates the moon landing, but that’s precisely what’s happening. This isn’t the sincere, stoic Nielsen that you get in Forbidden Planet or any number of his appearances across Columbo & Murder She Wrote, nor is it the all-gas no-brakes tomfoolery of his later career. Instead, it’s just a little subtle smugness to him, where he’s a little too above it all and snarky about it, and it’s the same energy that he had in Airplane! It feels wrong, and that permeates the entire piece. 

The design of Robert’s Belial is a mixed bag. The face is appropriately harrowing to look at but is little different from a wolfman design. Dark Intruder is smart to keep this from us for as long as it does, instead showing only the monster’s impressive (and scary) hawklike talons for most of the runtime. Its best sequence involves Kingsford, Robert, and Evelyn having been drawn to meet a reclusive medium, who speaks from beneath a dark cowl with an eerie, distorted voice, and when the protagonistic group leaves, the reveal of those talons from beneath the psychic’s robes is effective. For much of the rest of it, however, wheels are spinning. I was reminded of the last few seasons of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, when the program was retitled as the Alfred Hitchcock Hour and the stories ran for an entire hour block instead of a thirty-minute one. Almost all of those that I have seen suffer a great deal from being expanded to that length, in comparison to the better-paced segments from when the show was half the runtime. Everyone besides Nielsen completists can leave this one off their watchlists, unless you’re merely drawn in by the oddity’s novel mechanical qualities. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

/ swampflix / 6 Comments

The Masque of the Red Death may have already been discussed to death on Swampflix. It was Movie of the Month in February 2015 (so slightly before my time), was reviewed in conversation with its 1989 remake (Adrian Paul?!), and served as inspiration for a Mardi Gras costume as immortalized here. But I just saw it for the first time and was completely blown away by it. It’s the exact flip side of Premature Burial, figuratively, and—since they were released together on a double sided MGM Midnite Movies DVD—literally. I couldn’t believe just how cool it was, especially since Roger Corman, despite how dearly I hold him in my heart, does not have a reputation for being a good filmmaker. The set & costume designs were really terrific, and Vincent Price is an absolute great in this role, treating the whole thing as if he’s doing Shakespeare at The Globe. 

Price plays Prince Prospero, whom I always imagined from the original Edgar Allan Poe short story as being a much younger man, possessed of a kind of haughtiness of youthful royalty. Here, he is instead portrayed by the fifty-three-year-old Price, and his indifference towards the suffering of his subjects is not an aristocratic apathy toward the suffering of the poor as he and his sexy friends (as I always imagined them based on their descriptions as being “hale and light-hearted”) wait out an epidemic. Prospero is instead an out-and-out worshipper of the devil who takes delight in committing acts of evil and depravity and who spends much of the film trying to undermine the faith of a peasant girl named Francesca (Jane Asher). As the film opens, Prospero and his men ride carelessly through a village in his domain, narrowly avoiding trampling a child to death in the thoroughfare through the quick intervention of Gino (David Weston). When the prince stops in the village, he takes umbrage at the underhanded things being said about him, and he plans to kill both Gino and another man named Ludovico (Nigel Green), but Francesca intervenes on their behalf and Prospero humors her; he tells her to choose which one will die, but she cannot choose between her beloved and her father (the former and the latter, respectively). When Prospero learns that there is plague in the village, he cuts his visit short and takes all three back to his castle to deal with them later, and orders the village burnt to the ground. 

I mentioned before that Corman wasn’t known for being one of the greats, but what he was known for in his time and beyond is that he was a very economical filmmaker. When writing about Targets years ago, I mentioned an anecdote in which Corman said that he had managed to shoot entire movies in two days; the Corman interview that is the only special feature to speak of on this home video release is pretty illuminating about his process. When talking about American International Pictures’ higher-ups, he says that they learned about a special tax credit that the UK was offering for films shot there. Feeling that they were leaving money on the table by not taking advantage of it, AIP relocated Corman from his normal filming environs and sent him to Associated British Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire, England (where Jamaica Inn was filmed!). Corman praises this decision, as it allowed him to hire actor Patrick Magee, whose performance as Prospero’s friend Alfredo conveys both vulnerability and menace in a way that Corman highlighted when meditating on the making of the film. 

Also here in the castle is Julianna (Hazel Court, who was also in Premature Burial), Prospero’s mistress who has heretofore enjoyed the fruits of being Prospero’s concubine without having to commit to marriage. The presence of Francesca (and Julianna’s eviction from her own suite to make way for her) complicates these matters, prompting Julianna to commit to going “all the way” in her dark studies and present herself to the devil as his willing bride. She goes through with the final ceremony and then the film goes into a weird psychedelic dream in which she’s attacked by an entire United Colors of Benetton ad’s worth of international stereotypes before she gets pecked to death by one of Prospero’s birds. This might be part of what makes this one so memorable and novel, as the film has all of the trappings of being a very different, Shakespeare-for-the-BBC, self-serious film, but because Roger’s at the helm, he brings a little bit of that Hollywood flavor to it so we also get to have a series of excitingly violent sequences, including the burning of Francesca’s village, Prospero murdering a guest who arrives late to the party with a crossbow, dungeon-based sword-fighting, a man being burned alive in a gorilla costume, and the aforementioned death-by-bird. What’s also impressive is the scale of this one, as production was completed in a mere four weeks, and yet there are many impressive camera movements around the ballroom where the festivities largely take place while the dancers in the background never lose a single step in their choreography. In fact, Corman said that he considers it to be a 3.5-week picture that just happened to take four weeks to complete because of what he considered to be a slower pace. (James Cameron is still sour about British crew’s slow pace making Aliens, and Stanley Kubrick was likewise vexed by the high number of tea breaks taken during the making of Full Metal Jacket, which is not bad company for Corman to find himself, to be honest.)

I had quite a good time with this one. It’s very well made, has extremely high production values, and is never dull for a single moment. The only really puzzling thing about it is the casting of Esmerelda; without watching the Corman interview that explained it, I would never have known that the child actress was supposed to be portraying an adult little person, especially as they had her in the same scenes with Hop-Toad, who was portrayed by an actual little person (Skip Martin). This confusion works in the context in the first scene in which she appears, as we see that Alfredo talks about her with a kind of lust that helps to illuminate the depths of the depravity that Prosper’s boon companions are filled with. In her only other scene, when Hop-Toad is preparing for his vengeance on Alfredo for striking Esmerelda, he warns her to be ready to flee the castle, and she speaks with an adult voice, which didn’t make sense until Corman admitted in the interview that he couldn’t find a little person actress for the role in England and cast her with eight-year-old Verina Greenlaw instead. Just have that in mind when you check this one out. And you should! 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Secret Mall Apartment (2025)

/ swampflix / 2 Comments

At the turn of the millennium, Michael Townsend spent five years as a drawing instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design, but unbeknownst to his colleagues, during that time, he and seven other artists were working on something unbelievable. Inspired by a 2003 radio advertisement for the then-new Providence Place Mall in which a woman expressed her excitement about the shopping center’s opening and how it would allow her to get everything that she needed for her life in one place and expressing a desire to “live in the mall,” Townsend set about finding out if this would be possible. Over the next few years, he and several others, including fellow Providence-based artists and even a few of his students, managed to locate an unused vacant space within the mall itself and, over time, turned the 750 square foot “void” into a (mostly) habitable space, before being discovered by the mall’s powers that be and being evicted. In the nearly two decades since, the others who assisted in making the mall their home have remained unnamed—Townsend is no narc—but recently participated in the creation of Jeremy Workman’s most recent documentary, Secret Mall Apartment. 

I was intrigued by the premise, but I didn’t expect to be moved by the film. On social media recently, I saw someone calling out the documentary Waiting for Superman as being propaganda for charter schools and denouncing the way that contemporary critics had been too kind to it. This led into a discussion about documentaries that included a quotation about how a documentary that does not improve one’s knowledge about the subject more than reading an article about it is one that should be met with criticism. (With James Gunn’s upcoming Superman film, you can imagine that even with boolean additions, searching for “waiting for superman” was a futile endeavor in trying to find this discussion again.) Secret Mall Apartment is much more than that, weaving together a tale of a group of artists in opposition to gentrification, as well as a more subtle narrative about the ephemeral nature of art, that its beauty (like our lives) are meaningful not because of permanence but because of impermanence. Nowhere is this more clearly made evident than the section of the film which focuses on Townsend (and his students)’s work with in tape art, as instruction (as we see Michael teaching a class of students about using masking tape as a kind of temporary graffiti), as installation (as seen when the camera tours the Hasbro Children’s Hospital and all of the art there that was made by and in collaboration with patients), and as memorial (when Townsend and some of his students spend half a decade creating silhouettes all over Manhattan in the shape of four superimposed hearts). 

It’s the last of these that’s the most transitory, as even the website that was used to document this project is now defunct. (When this was noted during the documentary, I wondered if this was true and if the website was really gone, but even when checking the WayBack Machine’s archive, all of the pages I could find looked like this, so it does appear to be well and truly lost.) That transient nature of art is made manifest early on, when Townsend and others speak about the experience of losing Fort Thunder, an underground art collective in a Providence textile factory that hadn’t been in operation since the 1860s; for five years at the end of the last century, the place was used as a living and working space for artists and musicians. However, while the Providence Place Mall was being built—notably with no entry access on the side that faced the Olneyville district that it butted up against—developers turned their eye to that warehouse district as a place that they could further capitalize upon, and they ultimately did destroy Fort Thunder. It was this parasitic ideology, the desire to completely fill out “unused space” in every way possible, that was part of the inspiration for the Providence Place apartment artists, as they, too, were finding a way to fill an empty part of the mall which had come to dominate the city. We also get to explore an outdoor exhibit that Townsend created even earlier, a hidden public space that was only accessible by slipping through train tracks and entering a sort of covered canal, in which he had placed dozens of human figures. That exhibit, Fort Thunder, tape art, the secret apartment itself — all of these things are fleeting. The secret apartment is recreated as a set for the film, and we get to see it being explored by Townsend, his now ex-wife Adriana Valdez-Young, and others, and it serves as a stage to recreate the day that Townsend was caught and apprehended in the apartment. And then, we see it dismantled. 

And yet, in all of this, there are things that remain eternal, and which we do carry with us. Several of the other members of the secret apartment crew retain, to this day, the keys used for entry into their protest/clubhouse (the building of a cinder block wall and the installation of a door is one of the highlights of their activity). One of them was originally painted with flames, the image of which has long since been worn away on the key’s surface but remains, in some small form, in the grooves. That’s where we carry art with us, and where it stays—in the grooves. It’s a surprisingly moving piece, and I can’t wait for others to see it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond

Lagniappe Podcast: Buddha’s Palm (1982)

/ swampflix / 3 Comments

For this lagniappe episode of The Swampflix Podcast, Boomer & Brandon discuss the Shaw Brothers’ laser-wizards martial arts actioner Buddha’s Palm (1982).

00:00 Welcome

01:37 Eephus (2025)
04:45 Looney Tunes – The Day The Earth Blew Up (2025)
09:03 Black Bag (2025)
15:40 Misericordia (2025)
21:16 The Shrouds (2025)
27:47 Ash (2025)
34:32 The Premature Burial (1962)
39:38 The Masque of the Red Death (1964)
48:20 Dark Intruder (1965)
50:26 Imitation of Life (1959)
57:01 The Unbelievable Truth (1989)
1:00:43 Secret Mall Apartment (2025)
1:05:27 Perfect Blue (1997)
1:12:11 In Fabric (2019)

1:19:00 Buddha’s Palm (1982)

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

– The Lagniappe Podcast Crew