Every month Ken Lowery and I look at a selection of trailers for upcoming films to see what looks good and what reinforces the theory that we’re gluttons for punishment.
January means it is time to release the films that wanted to get out of the way of the blockbusters or take advantage of the quiet season to bolster their numbers. It’s…pretty obvious which are which.

January 6th

Roadie

DW: Three actors I really like in a film I have absolutely no desire to see. Which isn’t to say that this looks bad; it looks like an intelligent, emotionally honest, mature drama. But it also looks very much like a Pretty People With Problems (Of Their Own Making) film, and life is too short for me to spend time watching any more of those.

KL: There’s some wit on display here I like a lot, and maybe it goes no further than the trailer; I especially like the abrupt end to the sensitive acoustic song taking us through The Sad Passages of what is no doubt a Behind The Music set on a much smaller scale. Still, I like the color tones here – lost of warmth that expresses a mood without being overbearing. And I liked Twelve and Holding an awful lot, so thumbs up for Michael Cuesta in general.

January 11th

Loosies

KL: Not one of your better movie titles. I guess this is something of a passion project for Peter Facinelli, given that he wrote and stars in this. Um, I guess it looks OK? I suspect all the fun pick-pocketing stuff will give away to all the romance stuff somewhere around the second act, and thus would my curiousity take a serious nose dive. Probably not, barring some unexpectedly good reviews.

DW: I was actually pretty much with this, self-conscious and strained “quirkiness” and all. I mean, look, it’s basically an rom-com for guys, only without the blatant misogyny of, say, a Judd Apatow film.

And then they had to go and toss Vincent Gallo at me and, oh man, I just cannot take that guy or anything he is involved with seriously. Shame.

January 13th

Contraband

DW: There’s really no other way around this; this looks awful. A sad imitation of so many other, more sophisticated crime/action dramas out there.

That being said, I actually do find myself almost interested. Maybe it’s because I know going into it that this is going to be pretty dreadful. With stakes that low, any amount of quality is going to make the film enjoyable. Or maybe it’s just residual fondness for Giovanni Ribisi and amusement at how absolutely ridiculous he comes off here trying to play a heavy. In any case, this is at the very least worth a buck at Redbox.

KL: Well, style points for using The Dead Weather amongst the, I think, six song samples in this trailer?

Objectively, I know the deal. Foreign directors with outstanding names (or just outstandingly ridiculous ones, like “Chaos” – remember that guy?) have to helm some piece of crap (sorry, “pay their dues”) to justify their possible existence in Hollywood. But the whole system still feels like a big old middle finger from studios to uppity foreigners. Oh yeah, Gavin Hood? Gonna roll in here with your Tsotsi and your Oscar win? Fuck you, here’s X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

This plays out yearly.

I like Ribisi in these kinds of roles just like you do, Dorian – thought he was great as an unhinged but generally benign small town boy in The Gift – but this just looks like generic crime garbage. Doubly hilarious, because someone went to the trouble of adapting an Icelandic movie to turn it into… the kind of throwaway mainstream crime thriller that gets released in January. Sad trombone.

Don’t Go In The Woods

DW: A musical slasher film? That looks as if they are deliberately aping the aesthetic of cheap, 80s horror films, only with a cast of decidedly modern emo musicians? And it’s directed by Vincent D’Onofrio?

I’m really not sure what to make of it, if it looks really spectacularly awful or brilliant in a purposefully trashy way. In any case, it looks pretty much tailor made for me and my fondness for horrible, cheap, 80s slasher films. Hell, the D’Onofrio connection alone is enough to get me really interested in it, regardless of look or tone or subject matter.

KL: “Incredible” in every sense of the word, and I hope to God it’s sincerely made. Making a slasher musical with earnest sincerity takes ten times the amount of balls needed to make the same thing for ironic laughs. I have no idea if I’ll see this, but I’m glad it exists.

The Iron Lady

KL: Word of mouth on this one has almost universally been “great performance, not great movie,” and boy, if the subject is Margaret Fucking Thatcher, that is not enough to get my ass in the seat. I will pass on the inspirational story of a woman who broke the glass ceiling of world leadership by being one of the 20th century’s biggest assholes.

DW: Yeah, the trailers seem to do the usual hagiography thing that most biopics do, and in this case they’re selling the “feminism” thing hard. Which is pretty damn unintentionally funny given that this is a film about Margaret Thatcher. Some of the early reviews suggest that this a full-scale whitewashing of her politics as well, glossing over her racism, homophobia, even portraying her war-mongering in the Falklands as some sort of twisted matter of principle.

So yeah, fuck it.

Joyful Noise

KL: Commentary on this sort of movie is superfluous. The story’s beats are so old and creaky I want to give them arthritis medication, but I also know that seeing familiar beats played out one more time carries its own peculiar pleasure. Nonetheless, I will not see Joyful Noise because “the fulfillment of genre ritual” is not enough to get me to choke down the truckloads of sugary sweetness accompanying this thing; other people will see it because that is precisely their cup of horse shit. I mean tea. Que sera, sera.

DW: Some films are made for a very specific audience. In this case, gay male fans of Queen Latifah and/or Dolly Parton and gospel music fans. Since there’s a lot of crossover with the gospel music audience and the black film audience, I’m prepared to let a certain amount of tired, over-used cliches slide while I bear in mind that certain groups of film-goers are underserved, and anything that targets them can be filed under the “not for me” category.

And I say this fully aware that my husband, the gospel music choir director and Dolly/Latifah fan, has been looking forward to this film for months.

January 20th

Red Tails

DW: I’m not generally a fan either of war films or “important historical lesson” films. Primarily films are about entertainment for me, then art, then social commentary. There is absolutely a place for the social commentary and educational film, and the story of the Tuskegee airmen is the sort of story that could benefit from an exciting, mass appealing film. I just don’t think that this is that film. The CGI just in the trailer is so heavy and extensive that the entire thing has an unreal, video-game quality that is just off-putting. A more realistic look would have grounded this so much more.

KL: I do miss the days of seeing actual dogfights in movies about dog fighting; I fear we are forgetting that one of the simple joys of movies is seeing people do cool things, whether or not you’re aware that the person doing those cool things is a stunt person and not, I don’t know, Nicolas Cage. But we lost that fight ten years ago or more, and anyway good uses of CGI argue for that other simple joy of the movies: it’s cool to see things you can’t see anywhere else.

I consider any “epic” released in January to be suspect right out of the gate, but movies aimed primarily at black audiences often get the Black History Month release schedule, so who knows. As above, so below: I’m glad this movie exists, though I suspect I’ll wish it had been better.

January 27th

The Grey

KL: Liam Neeson as a super-badass battling wolves in an arctic wasteland – the jokes just write themselves, as Neeson has become something of a beloved caricature amongst the Gen Y Internet set. The marketing knows this, too; the poster’s nothing but Neeson’s name, face, and blank title.

The third trailer knows it, too, quoting extensively from Ain’t It Cool News (ugh) with lavish praise like “A Man’s Man’s Movie” (double ugh) and fragments of Internet-style discourse like “That, sir, was Dirty Dozen good” (triple ugh).

Leaving aside the troubling question of what a critic for AICN thinks a “Man’s Man” is, we must consider the thing itself, which is Liam Neeson Is Awesome, As Directed By Joe Carnahan. The Neeson lionizing gets old after a few jokes, and Carnahan has repeatedly demonstrated he thinks posturing trumps substance and nonsense action is just as good as velocity.

In other words, no.

DW: I never jumped on the Liam Neeson=badass train, so the very fact that these sorts of films not only exist but are actually turning into a thing sort of fascinates me.

Not enough to waste money seeing this, of course. I didn’t bother with Frozen, I didn’t bother with The Edge and combining the two doesn’t hold any more appeal.

Maybe if they tossed in some Ravenous.

One For The Money

KL: Given the relative slightness of the plot on display and the presence of TV director Julie Anne Robinson at the helm, I’m guessing there’s not a lot going on here that you won’t see in the trailer. And did you know you can watch trailers for free, as often as you want? You won’t get hampered down with nonstarter B-plots or wacky best friends/elderly family members who say outlandish things. Win-win!

OK, I don’t hate the trailer. I think if the stars aligned this could be fun, in a “well, nothing else is on” way. But I do not think the stars aligned here.

DW: I don’t want to jump on the Katerine Heigl hate-train, because it’s not that I dislike her. I just don’t like her as much as film producers and casting directors seem to think I’m supposed to like her. I can think of a half-dozen actresses who could pull off a role like this with more charisma (and a more convincing accent), but they’re not a current “it” girl so we get another film trying to convince us that Heigl is a lead actress. And I just don’t buy that.

Otherwise, this looks pretty bland but safe and inoffensive. There’s no way I’m paying for this, but maybe when it comes to “Watch Instantly” and I’m bored I might give it a shot.

The Wicker Tree

DW: The “not a sequel” sequel to the seminal The Wicker Man (the good version, not the one with Nicolas Cage and the bees). And it’s really not a sequel, it looks damn close to an actual remake, only with earnest young missionaries instead of a sexually repressed policeman.

It doesn’t matter. It’s the creator of one of the best horror films of all time making another “folk horror” film with possible connections to the aforementioned one of the best horror films of all time. It is exactly what I want to see, and I am going to see it.

KL: The IMDB page says this is a “reimagining,” so there you go.

I, uh. I’ve never seen the original Wicker Man. I know, OK? I know. But this looks pretty great, and it’s the same guy, and comparisons to the original will mostly be lost on me, so I get to see this one as a fresh product. You may consider me deprived, but I consider that liberating. I suppose I’ll see the original soon enough, too.

It’s hard to say what exactly the “legacy” of the oughts in terms of horror films is going to finally shake out to be; we’re still all a little too close to the era to make definitive statements. A few trends did emerge; Asia’s horror boom spread to France and Spain and Northern Europe, with interesting and peculiar films being created in those countries. The back-catalog of film studios was thoroughly raided as the great wave of almost universally unimpressive horror remakes began to be made. And the “teen pop superstars in peril” trend was over-corrected by the rise of gore and torture splatter films. While all these trends are worth commenting on, it’s the more conventional, traditional horror films that I tend to prefer, and Neil Marshall’s 2005 creatures-in-a-cave film The Descent offers a number of interesting angles to view it from.

The film opens with a flash-back to a group of three women on a white-water rafting trip. One of the women, Sarah, is being picked up from the end of the trip by her husband and daughter, though neither he nor Sarah seem particularly happy about it, possibly due to the long looks exchanged by Sarah’s husband and her rafting partner Juno. On the way home, Sarah’s husband and daughter are killed in a traffic accident, and Sarah awakes in the hospital to hallucinations of empty corridors and pursuing darkness. A year later, Sarah, Juno and Beth join three other women in the Appalachian mountains for a spelunking expedition to what turns out to be unexplored caverns. Sarah is still hallucinating from the trauma of the accident and is heavily popping pills. In the caves, Sarah begins to see what she thinks are figures watching them from the caves and while crawling through a particularly narrow tunnel, she has an attack of claustrophobia that triggers a rockslide which not only cuts the women off from the only known exit to the caves but loses them half of their gear. After one of the women breaks her legs in a fall, the group is attacked by subterranean albinos, seemingly the descendants of people who had previously become trapped in the caverns, and one by one the women are picked off by the creatures, save Beth, who is killed by Juno accidentally. Sarah continues to hallucinate while she tries to escape, until she and Juno finally find a possible exist. Sarah cripples Juno in retaliation for Beth’s death and leaves her to the creatures, crawling out of a cluster of tree roots and running back to the car and driving as far as she can from the cave. Where she then has a vision of a bloody Juno in the car with her, before hallucinating that she is back in the caves with her daughter.

Horror as a genre is often concerned with feminine themes or motifs, and The Descent takes full advantage of that. Broadly the film falls within the “tourist horror” genre, with the monstrous savage locals in this case being horribly inbred cannibals of indeterminate origin, and the all female cast calls to mind an inversion of a film like Deliverance. That the cast is female and the setting is something as yonic as caves and caverns also suggests an implied message about female strength and solidarity, though one that is undercut somewhat by the deliberate and accidental betrayals the characters subject each other too. These are ultimately more interesting and rewarding themes to bear in mind while watching the film, as most of the other horror standards it attempts to introduce are less satisfying. Sarah’s frequent hallucinations call the entire reality of the film into question on a number of levels, an old horror gimmick, but one that is slightly over-played here, right down to the ambiguous ending which makes it unclear what has actually happened to Sarah and the other women. And while the the cannibal creatures are unsettling, and the confined nature of their hunting grounds is dramatically satisfying, they also feel somewhat generic; there are no shortage of cannibals, devolved humans, inbred monsters or some combination of all three in horror films and stories already. They work in context, but they’re far less interesting than the humans they attack, and there are moments when this feels like an interesting film about women inexpertly patched together with a splattery monster movie.

The 90s were a transitional period for horror again. The endless sequels of the 80s slashers were dying out, major directors were doing “not really horror” films with themes and imagery that seemed awfully close to those of horror films, and the first waves of horror renaissances in Asia and Europe were starting up. But mainstream, mass-market horror film didn’t really have a coherent voice. And then Kevin Williamson and Wes Craven made Scream and, for good or ill, a new mainstream horror cycle began.

The plot for Scream is actually quite unremarkable; it’s a bog-standard slasher film, with stupid teens in an isolated area. The film is at its best during it’s opening act, as a young girl is tormented by mysterious phone calls before she and her boyfriend are brutally butchered by masked assailants. This is the movie’s most effective and chilling scenes, and it’s still a high mark for horror films. But, soon after, we’re introduced to Sydney, our ostensible heroine, and her creepy boyfriend and disagreeable friends. These are typical, ironic, snarky 90s teens (and I say that as someone who was one of them at the time), and they take the brutal murder of two of their classmates in stride, Sydney too busy mourning the year-ago murder of her mother and the repeated suggestion that she fingered an innocent man for the crime and her friends making snide and tasteless jokes, with comic relief provided by a comic sheriff Deputy and a conniving, ambitious tabloid reporter. It soon becomes apparent that Sydney is the real target of the killers, but the police show an odd laxness in allowing Sydney and her friends to attend an unsupervised party at an isolated farmhouse. Guests are picked off one by one, and the killers are eventually revealed to be the, yes, obvious suspects with extremely muddled motives.

Much of what Scream gets praised for is its knowing, post-modern winks at the audience, its self-awareness and willingness to acknowledge the tropes and cliches of the genre. The problem is that all it does is wink at the audience, it still follows slavishly the tropes and confuses making jokes about “final girls” and horror movie rules with actually doing something original and transgressive with the genre. It’s still an effective slasher horror film, but much of this is due to Craven’s effective direction. The script is remarkably trite, overly concerned with referential jokes, and the acting is abysmal. One of the more regrettable aspects of Scream‘s success is that it kicked off the “basic cable stars in peril” school of horror films. These are teeny-bopper television stars through and through, and apart from their characters not being likeable, they simply over-act horribly through the entire thing. The obvious suspects are too obvious, mostly because both Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard over-play the “creepy guy” angle. There is absolutely no ambiguity to their villainy, and even the fake-out “death” of Ulrich is unconvincing. While Scream felt remarkable and special at the time, its flaws have only become more apparent with age, and the shadow it cast over horror, spawning countless gimmicky, ironic imitators providing a secondary income source for unremarkable television actors, has been mostly detrimental.

Last year, around this time, I went through a whole spate of 80s horror films. My thesis then was that, for fans of cheap B horror, the 80s were a boom time thanks largely to the home video market and the demand for material. Outside of the schlock arena, though, some interesting and not so interesting things were happening. A big chunk of 80s horror was dominated by sequels and wannabe franchises for slasher films, usually repetitive formula films in which the main draw was a murderer killing teens in inventive ways that, more often than not, the audience was invited to identify as the “hero.” The auteur directors of the 70s were still around, but most of their efforts were mixed at best, as the age of blockbuster and the hunger for exploitable franchises led to increased attention from studio suits to genre films. The results, across the board, were generally films with interesting ideas and problematic executions.

And thus Robert Harmon’s 1986 “tourist horror” film The Hitcher, starring young and pretty C. Thomas Howell and slightly older and prettier Rutger Haur. The prettiness of the leads is key, as The Hitcher has that odd mix of homoerotic tension and vaguely homophobic tone that several other 80s horror film (A Nightmare on Elm Street 2 and Fright Night come most readily to mind) exploit, mostly unintentionally. But the frustrated homoeroticism of the film is mostly just an interesting minor point with this film; the truly frustrating thing about it is that it occupies a space half-way between a horror film and half-way between a loud, dumb, blustery Reagen-era action movie.

The film opens with Howell as Jim Halsey, driving a sports car through the deserts of Texas at night during a storm. He’s struggling to stay awake, and very nearly misses being killed in a collision with a semi. He then spots Hauer hitch-hiking at the side of the road, and despite the fact that “his mother told (him) never to do this” decides to pick him up. The man introduces himself as Jack Ryder, a man literally walking out of nowhere in a storm, in a Doors reference so shameless that screen-writer Eric Red pretty much had to cop to it. Jim attempts to engage his passenger in conversation, fruitlessly, until Jim sees a car pulled over to the side of the road that had passed him shortly before his near collision. Ryder forces Jim to drive on, before pulling out a knife and telling him how he killed the driver of that car and is going to kill Jim as well unless Jim stops him. Unable to expose Ryder when they are forced to stop at a construction check-point, Jim eventually manages to force Ryder from the car. He is pleased at his escape, only to see a family sedan pull past him with Ryder in the back-seat. And a violent game of cat-and-mouse between Jim and Ryder than plays out across the desert, with Ryder on an inhuman rampage and Jim pursuing him while trying to stay ahead of the police who believe Jim to be guilty of Ryder’s crimes, with aid only coming to Jim from Nash, a waitress who improbably believes his story of a psychopath who comes and goes from the ether.

The first third of the film is unabashedly horror. Hauer plays up the cold menace of Ryder perfectly, while Howell does a convincing job of playing a naive young man horribly out of his depth who is quickly hardened by the events he witnesses. The extent of Ryder’s brutalities is played ambiguously. We never actually see any of his victims on the road, and most of the violence he commits is implied, with only a grisly police station massacre shown in full, and even then only via Jim’s after-the-fact discovery of the bodies. That shying away from violence is a bit curious in the later part of the film, when it morphs into a more conventional action movie, with explosions and car chases and crashes. The ambiguity of the earlier horror portions feel like an important element of deciphering what is going on. Ryder’s ability to come and go without being detected and to perfectly frame Jim for his crimes suggests either a supernatural component to Ryder’s character, or to his being a complete fiction of Jim’s-the theory supported by the police in the film. When the film devolves into action mode it becomes harder to plausibly deny the full reality of Ryder’s existence, though his curious ability to travel and escape from anywhere is still curious.

The film does its best to maintain some of that ambiguity regarding what Ryder is and what he wants. A pivotal scene occurs in yet another diner, where Ryder again comes from nowhere to terrify Jim and escapes unseen by anyone else. Jim asks him, directly, why Ryder is doing this, “this” presumably being toying with Jim and framing him rather than simply kill him. Ryder’s response is to tell Jim to figure it out, while placing coins over his eyes, a distinct classical reference regarding the preparation of the dead. Given Ryder’s seemingly supernatural abilities, what does this mean? Did Jim really survive that near collision, or is he now in some sort of Purgatorial state, with Ryder acting as his personal angel of death? Or, to go back to those oddly homoerotic moments earlier in the film:

Is Ryder simply a lunatic obsessed with Jim for his own reasons? The film never really wants to make it clear. Until, of course, it has to, and Ryder kills Nash in one of the most brutal deaths in horror films; a death that, again, happens off screen-it’s painfully clear to the audience what happens, and it’s horrible, but the restraint that the film displays in not showing it is admirable and more effective than a special effect would have been. Sometimes what isn’t seen is more horrible than what is. Once Nash (tomboyish Nash with her ambiguously gendered name…) is dead, the physical reality of Ryder is obvious and public, which only leaves the inevitable bloody shoot-out between hero and villain to end the film. It’s frustrating to see a film which starts out with a good, strong sense of dread turn into a more cliche film by the end, especially when you continue to see little glimpses of the good film lurking below the surface.

The 1970s were a period of great critical and popular success for horror films, possibly even moreso than the first great flowering in the 1930s. Even a short, cursory glance at the films released during the decade is to see just how tremendous an impact the period had on the genre: Duel, Last House on the Left, The Exorcist, The Wicker Man, Black Christmas, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jaws, Carrie, The Omen, Suspiria, Halloween, Piranha, Alien, The Amityville Horror, Phantasm…and that’s the short list. True, there’s a lot of shlock and exploitation films in that list, and even more produced during the era. But there’s also a number of films that profoundly influenced not only the horror genre but gained widespread, serious critical acclaim and attention, and films that had an impact on film culture as a whole. Not only was horror something that major studios were seriously investing time and money in as well, but horror was bleeding into other genres, such as drama (Straw Dogs), action films (Deliverance), and art films, such as Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now.

The film’s plot is remarkably slight, and it’s been referenced and parodied so often it’s not surprising to discover that many people fail to recognize the parodies as parodies. Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie are a couple, John and Laura Baxter, living in a hotel in Venice while he restores an old church. At some point in the relatively recent past their young daughter drowned in an accident at their home in England, and both are still feeling the trauma of the event. While a subtle background plot of mysterious murders plaguing Venice plays out, Julie befriends a pair of elderly sisters on vacation in the city, one of whom is blind but appears to have psychic abilities and speaks to Julie about her daughter. The repeated message from the afterlife is that Venice is not safe for the Baxter’s, particularly John, and they must leave. John’s skepticism regarding this rises to the point of hostility, but he becomes unnerved when he begins to have flashes of deja-vu, as well as seeing a child in a red raincoat identical to the one his daughter wore when she drowned in the Venetian streets, seemingly following him. Strange events continue to occur, including a near fall from scaffolding, culminating in a sequence where John chases the red-cloaked figure through a deserted church, thinking it to be a child in peril, only to discover the figure behind the killings and the revelation that all of the preceding events were misinterpreted premonitions of his own death.

Don’t Look Now opens itself up to a large number of readings, possibly because it wears its themes rather boldly on its sleeves. Vision, and the interpretation of vision, is central, with Christie declaring in the opening moments that “nothing is as it seems.” Throughout the film we see a number of images in reflections of mirror or water, glass breaks with alarming frequency, and of course certain characters see beyond the physical realms, but importantly almost no one “sees” what is really going on until, of course, it is too late. The subjective nature of visual reality and its constraints keep the characters trapped in realms beyond their understanding. This plays out in other ways, less blatantly symbolic. The red-cloaked figure is always seen either at a difference or out of the center of the shot, and there are numerous compositions in the film in which action is taking place either to the side of the screen’s center or partially obscured. Not only vision, but time is distorted as well. There are frequent flashbacks to prior events, and events now are mirrors of previous events, such as John’s near fall being nearly identical to the death of the bishop’s father. There are also a number of montage shots, breaking up time and space, most notably in the at the time controversial love scene between John and Laura that intercuts their love-making with their post-coital dressing for dinner. And, of course, the various visions and premonitions of the future that various characters have play out as the future bleeding into the present. There’s also, of course, the fairy-tale aspect, with the red cloak evoking the story of Little Red Riding Hood, and the grotesque inversion of that story as it plays out. That the film is still entertaining and sensical, with Roeg packing so much dense symbolism and material into the film, is only one of the reasons why the film works and resonates so well. We can tell it resonates because of the impact it has had on pop culture. This isn’t the first story to make use of a “murderous dwarf” figure, but the specific misdirections and stagings this film brought to the trope have become the stock method, to the point where it has become a very specific part of horror film language, understood even by people unfamiliar with the source.

The 1960s are an interesting time for horror films. It’s primarily a time of transition. You still have Hammer and AIP churning out Gothic melodramas, but you also have a steady rise of more realistic, psychologically orientated horror films, as well as the births of the “slasher” genre of psycho-killer movies. You also have the beginnings of horror’s return to respectability as a genre, notably with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. These various trends combine in interesting ways in Roman Polanski’s 1968 film Rosemary’s Baby, which took the mood of the Gothic thriller and transplanted it to modern times to great success, reviews and awards.

Polanski’s film opens with Rosemary Woodhouse and her husband Guy looking for a new apartment. Rosemary falls in love with an older building, the Bramford, where a previous tenant has just died after a long coma. Her friend, Hutch, tells her over dinner that the building has a long and sordid history, involving accusations of witchcraft and cannibalism by the tenants, but Rosemary and Guy move in anyway. At first the apartment seems perfect, despite the odd noises coming from the next apartment, of which Rosemary and Guy’s home was once the back set of servant’s quarters. After the apparent suicide of the only neighbor Rosemary has met, she comes into contact with the elderly couple next door, the Castavets. Rosemary is eager to meet them, while Guy is stand-offish, though their opinions of the couple quickly reverse after a few meetings. Guy, an actor whose career ambitions have stalled, is suddenly cast in a major role after the actor initially cast goes blind, and insists that now is the time for he and Rosemary to have a baby. Rosemary consents, but on “baby making night” she becomes ill and passes out, having a dream of her neighbors and Guy watching as a demon rapes her. She awakes to find scratches all over her body, which Guy explains away by, well, essentially confessing to spousal rape and comparing the experience to necrophilia. Rosemary’s first few months of pregnancy are marked by severe abdominal pains and weight loss, while her doctor, Guy and the Castavets all work to keep her isolated from her old friends and assure her that her experiences are normal and that she should not, under any circumstances, try to determine if this is the case or not for herself. When Hutch visits her, he is both alarmed by Rosemary’s appearance and the revelation that Minnie Castavet is giving her a daily “vitamin drink” containing tanis root, and calls Rosemary to meet him outside the apartment, only to fall into a sudden coma before he can do so. Shortly before Rosemary is due, Hutch dies, and he awakes just long enough to arrange for Rosemary to be given a book on witchcraft which would seem to suggest that Roman Castavet is the descendant of a Satanic cult leader who lived in the Bramford and that Rosemary’s baby is going to be used as a sacrifice. Rosemary tries to escape from those she believes to be conspiring against her and her baby, only to be captured by Guy and the Castavets and the other neighbors, the stress of which leads her to an early labor. Rosemary is told that her baby died after being born, but after a few days she can hear crying from the Castavet apartment. Locating a secret door linking the apartments, Rosemary is horrified to discover that not only is her baby alive, but the deformed creature is being worshipped as the Antichrist by the cult. The film ends with Rosemary, under pressure from the cult, accepting her role as the child’s mother.

A lot has been written about what is going on in Rosemary’s Baby outside of the Satanic cult plot. It’s been argued that the book and the film are about abortion, Catholicism, feminism, insanity…with various levels of convincing arguments for these and other topics. In my mind, it’s more probable that both Levin and Polanski tapped into a number of themes that were of concern to people in the mid and later 60s. The arguments that women’s rights is a central concern of plot are particularly compelling. Rosemary begins the story as an assertive woman who is happy with her role as supportive wife and home-maker (for all of Guy’s ego, it’s Rosemary who boasts of his acting accomplishments, even though his outstanding roles so far have been an understudy and one word in a commercial), but over the course of the story her husband, her doctor and her neighbors (chiefly male authority figures) slowly take away bits of her identity. She is discouraged from seeing her old friends in favor of the Castavets. Her doctor explicitly instructs her not to read up on pregnancy, insisting that he is the authority over her body. Even her books are taken away from her, lest she exercise her mind and endanger her baby. Finally the only role left for Rosemary is that of mother, and specifically mother to a child that was forced on her. But there is also an interesting discourse on materialism and ambition at play here. Both Rosemary and Guy are materialistic; she dreams of yacht voyages with celebrities, he makes a point of buying shirts advertised in classy magazines. Guy’s ambitions are plain, and it is the bait with which the cult ensnares Rosemary through him. Rosemary’s desires are less clear, but her yacht fantasies and exaggerations of Guy’s acting abilities suggest a desire for fame through Guy. Their quest for a new apartment is an expression of a desire to trade up their living quarters, and even the decision to have a baby is suggested to be something of a status symbol for them; a baby being the one accessory they don’t have yet. That their success is only possible through the misfortune of others is telling, as is the utter banality of the face of evil that the film presents. The evil-doers are not great menaces or cold-blooded killers, just slightly annoying neighbors. The pettiness of their evil leads to great horrors.

In the first half of the fifties horror continued to be sidelined, with audiences showing a marked preference for science-fiction themes in their fantasy films. There were several films occupying a middle-ground between science-fiction and horror, to be sure (it’s hard to argue that The Thing From Another World doesn’t borrow heavily from Frankenstein), and a fair number of noir-ish thrillers were produced, but little in the way of traditional horror films appeared. This trend reversed itself spectacularly in the later half of the decade, with Hammer films in England bringing back a variety of Gothic monster films and AIP in America churning out a long stream of exploitation films with horror plots. Both studios, and their imitators, benefited greatly from relaxed censorship standards, and horror films began to amp up the amount of onscreen blood and gore and, of course, nudity and eroticism. Hammer’s success owes as much to the decolletage of its leading ladies as it does to the magnetism of Cushing and Lee.

One of the more restrained efforts of the era is Jaques Tourneur’s Night of the Demon. Like his earlier film Cat People, Tourneur favors an air of ambiguity for most of the film, and while the reality of the supernatural is always clear to the audience, for the characters there is always a question of whether or not this is all in their minds or not. Loosely based on the M.J. James story “Casting the Runes”, the film opens with Professor Harrington, a psychologist and skeptic, racing to the home of Julian Karswell (aka “Not Aleister Crowley”) begging him to call off an impending threat. Karswell promises to do what he can, but it is clear that Harrington’s fate is already sealed, and shortly after the Professor returns home he is killed by a demon that materializes out of the night. Or he hallucinates a demon and crashes his car into some power lines. It’s clear that the film wants the reality of the demon to be in question, but showing a giant demon crashing his foot down on a person is probably not the best way to go about that. Shortly, American skeptic and psychic Dr. John Holden flies out to take Harrington’s place at a psychological conference focused on debunking the paranormal, with a denunciation of Karswell’s “devil cult” the centerpiece. Holden discovers that the annoying woman who sat behind him on the plane is Harrington’s niece Joanna, who is convinced that her uncle was killed through supernatural means, and she begs him to call off his speech, just as Karswell calls him and implies that the same fate that met Harrington will be his if he doesn’t stop investigating him. Karswell and Holden meet several times, with Karswell demonstrating abilities he claims are supernatural and generally acting the genial sociopath, as well as slipping a paper bearing strange runes into Holden’s papers without Holden noticing, with Holden becoming increasingly unsettled but sticking to his skepticism, despite Karswell’s insistence that Holden will die in three days. Holden and his associates decide the key to exposing Karswell lies with Rand Hobarth, a farmer convicted of murder and confined to an asylum in a catatonic state, and also a member of Karswell’s group. Under hypnosis, Hobarth reveals that the power to kill lies in the runes, and the only way to prevent the death is by returning the cursed parchment bearing the runes to the person who gave it to the intended victim. Holden follows Karswell, who has kidnapped Joanna, to a train, and as the time Karswell has set for Holden to die approaches he becomes increasingly nervous. In the confusion of a police confrontation with Holdren, he manages to slip the parchment back to Karswell, who discovers it just as a wind whips it from his hand and down the train-track. Unable to retrieve it in time, Karswell is killed by the demon. Or, run over by a train, from the perspective of the onlookers. The film ends with Holden and Joanna realizing that, when it comes to the supernatural, it is sometimes best not to know the truth.

Despite the complications of the plot, the film moves along briskly. Tourneur’s direction aids in this, but the script by Charles Bennett and Hal Chester handles issues such as exposition deftly. The performances also are commendable, with Dana Andrews playing the lead as a ruggedly arrogant American, even if his “tough guy” persona does lead to some raised eyebrows at the notion of playing an intellectual. The real stand-out is Niall McGinnis as Karswell. He’s an extremely charismatic and likeable man, even putting on parties for the local children, but he shifts from clown to menace quietly, and his resolve is magnetic. An especially effective and illustrative moment occurs when Karswell and Holden discuss a game of Snakes and Ladders some children are playing. Karswell observes that he always preffered “sliding down snakes” to climbing the ladders. The religious metaphor is obvious, and it’s vital that Holden misses it, joking instead that Karswell “likes to lose.” Karswell’s shift from clown to sorcerer at that moment is eerie as he tersely informs Holden of just how wrong he is.

As with Tourneur’s previous work, the film is filled with shadows, dramatic lighting, and hints of things lurking just outside of vision. The central conflict between Holden and Karswell, rationality vs. superstition, is mirrored in the uncertainty over whether the events of the film have supernatural origins or are, as Holden argues, simply tricks of the mind. The appearance of the demon, both at the beginning and end of the film, would suggest a definite answer that, yes, the supernatural is real, and dangerous. Both Tourneur and Andrews in interviews both claimed to be disappointed by the demon’s appearance, insisting that it was a requirement of the producers, who believed that audiences would want to see the monster. But it’s also worth noting that, when the demon does appear, no one sees it but the victims, and their deaths are explainable as accidents. The final appearance at the trainyards does a particularly good job of undermining the notion that the demon is real, as the clouds of smoke that the demon appears from closely resemble the steam coming from the smokestacks of the engines. It’s a striking visual and ties the physical and the supernatural together at the film’s close in a compelling way.

The forties are an interesting period for horror films. The genre had largely started to die off in the late thirties, and though there was a brief flurry of revivals and sequels at the start of the decade, horror had started to become somewhat “kiddified” as the decade wore on, with novelty pictures such as Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man and the later sequence of Abbot and Costello films were they meet with various horror icons. It seems like audiences were having trouble taking monsters and ghouls seriously (understandably, given the war) and sophisticated audiences were looking increasingly towards crime thrillers and noir films for scares, human monsters feeling much more plausible than magical European beasts. Jacques Tourneur’s 1942 Cat People is perhaps a reflection of those changing tastes. Originally conceived by RKO bosses and producer Val Lewton as a cheap, quick money maker with a catchy title, it surpasses it’s exploitative origin as a means of recovering some of that money that Orson Welles kept costing the studio.

Serbian fashion designer Irena has a romantic comedy “meet cute” with engineer Oliver at the zoo. She’s sketching panthers, he’s creeping on girls. After a brief, sudden courtship that catches Oliver’s friends off guard (notably his gal-pal “office wife” Alice and her lecherous psychologist friend Dr. Judd) Irena and Oliver wed, but some challenges to their relationship arise almost immediately. Irena is haunted by a legend from her homeland about evil women who transform into cats when their passions are inflamed, driven into the mountains by King John (images of whom mid-cat spearing occur throughout the film, notably in Irena’s home decor). A chance meeting with a strange, cat-like woman at her wedding dinner cements the notion in Irena’s mind that she is one of these cursed women as well, and she rejects the physical consummation of her relationship with Oliver, locking herself in her room at night. Oliver enlists Alice in arranging for Dr. Judd to take on Irena as a patient, a marital faux-pas so jaw-dropping it beggars belief and makes Alice’s later play for Oliver come as no surprise. Dr. Judd’s therapy proves ineffective, driving Oliver right into Alice’s arms, and shortly Alice finds herself stalked by a mysterious cat-like creature that seems to follow her in the shadows. Convnced now that Irena really is a cat woman, Alice persuades Oliver and Dr. Judd to have Irena committed to an asylum. Oliver and Alice are menaced by a panther in their office, while Dr. Judd waits for Irena in her apartment. When she finally appears Judd makes his lecherous intentions towards her quite plain. When he forces her to kiss him, Judd is horrified when Irena does transform into a cat and kills him. Seemingly distraught over shedding blood, Irena runs to the zoo and release the panther from its cage, and it kills her in its escape, leaving Alice and Oliver free to live their lives together.

Cat People is pretty firmly in the sympathetic monster camp. It helps that Irena is pretty much the only sympathetic character in the film. Dr. Judd is an aggressive creep, Alice pretty openly steals another woman’s husband and Oliver is so devoid of backbone he pretty much just goes along with adultery because Alice asks him to. Not only is Irena struggling against the darker part of her own nature, but she’s completely surrounded by people either actively hurting her or taking advantage of her. You feel great sorrow at her death, not only for her, but also because she didn’t take more of these horrible people with her. Most of the film plays like a melodrama, with heavy emoting and dramatic reactions, with the reltionships between Irena, Oliver and Alice driving most of the story forward. The horror elements become remarkably subdued, and Tourneur mostly keeps the reality of Irena’s transformations ambiguous. We never see a physical transformation, when we do see a cat it is almost always in shadow, and apart from an ill-considered sequence showing cat prints changing to shoe prints, the monster is mostly off-screen. The horror then comes from Irena’s psychological struggles to contain her animalistic impulses, and so despite the seeming inevitability of her transformation, we still feel for her, that her husband’s adultery basically triggers her transformation and ultimately her death. It’s easy to imagine a happier ending; one in which a less sexually inhibited Irena comes to a happier end, and the “happy ending” coming to a man who essentially cheated on his spouse is odd for the period, but understandable in light of the “the foreign and unnatural must be destroyed” morality of the era.

Every month, Ken Lowery and I look at the trailers for a selection of films being released in that month to see what looks like a must see, what looks like a must miss, and what’s just out because somebody needed a new Mercedes.
It’s October, and the Paranormal Activity franchise has finally unseated the Saw franchise in the “what, another one?” stakes, so let’s see what else is out this month.

October 7th

The Ides of March

KL: Well, I guess we know how this movie’s going to go, don’t we? Clooney’s directed some great stuff and also Leatherheads, and he’s writing this with creative partner Grant Heslov (with whom he co-wrote Good Night, and Good Luck) so in those departments he’s got the goods. He’s also a fine actor, and Gosling can’t seem to make a wrong move. But this whole movie, from the title to the trailer, seems so on-the-nose that I feel like I’ve already seen the damn thing. Perhaps the reviews will turn me around. But without some solid A+’s across the board, pass.

DW: Yeah, this is one that is really going to depend on the tone and quality of the reviews. I like Ryan Gosling a lot, and I think he’s damn compelling as a leading man, but I’ve never been a fan of political dramas. And while I do like George Clooney, I’m not sure I want to see him playing faux Howard Dean/John Edwards in a film about a lot of people doing ethically questionable things in their quest for power. I can see the same thing for free by turning on the news, so “plot” isn’t really a compelling argument to see this, it’s got to be character. And all these people seem pretty disagreeable and unlikable.

Real Steel

DW: Hugh Jackman is determined to test the limits of his charisma as an actor, isn’t he?

The first sign that this probably wasn’t going to be a very good movie was probably when I noticed toys creeping into stores before I’d ever even seen a trailer. And then I finally saw the trailer and it prominently featured a particularly annoying child actor. As for the premise…I mean, honestly, what can be said? It’s a film version of “Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robots” with middle-aged screen-writers adding in a reverse perspective “daddy issues” emotional hook.

I’ve watched a lot of terrible movies just because I like looking at Hugh Jackman, but I’ve hit my limit.

KL: What, and miss out on this generation’s Over The Top?

Like most of the world I didn’t know what the hell to think of Real Steel when I first heard of it, until I saw the trailer – and realized, oh, hey, this is a movie for kids. It’s kind of all right for those to be dumb, because kids like dumb things, I liked dumb things when I was a kid, and I turned out OK.

Or maybe it’s not just a kids’ movie. This article  labels it a satire, and points to Real Steel’s origin – a Richard Matheson short story adapted into a Twilight Zone episode, and apparently Matheson is pleased as punch about the adaptation. Barring some truly fantastic reviews I’m not going to see it anyway, but hey, points for weirdness.

October 14th

The Big Year

KL: “From David Frankel, the director of The Devil Wears Prada and Marley & Me, comes a sophisticated comedy…” Gonna stop you right there.

OK OK. Let’s try again. Ah, it’s a comedy about… men who need direction in their lives. That’s it, I’m out.

Fine, one last shot. So… they’re going to spend a year vacationing together to find themselves? We’re done here.

DW: Wow, that is certainly three actors whose work I used to enjoy and now cringe at the sight of due to years and years of incredibly lousy films.

Three white guys “finding themselves.” Yeah…I just can’t muster myself up to care about that in the slightest. At least it doesn’t look like any of them are stand-ins for the screen-writer working out his daddy issues. Oh, no, forgot about Jack Black’s character. Never mind.

Footloose

KL: I can’t imagine this premise wasn’t already quaint in 1984, but then this is a movie (franchise?) for teenagers, so the broad strokes and ridiculous stakes are par for the course – presumably as training wheels for larger battles later in life.

Uh, that was pretty heavy. This is a movie about dancing, I guess. Craig Brewer should breathe some life into this, and I guess I can’t knock this particular remake about using a bunch of unknowns, because hey, movies like these are meant to be star makers. Carry on, I guess.

Argh I have the song stuck in my head ARGH

DW: I’ve seen at least one interview with Brewer where he tried to suggest that the whole thing was a metaphor for the oppression gay teens face, and, ha, no, that was clearly him pandering to that website’s audience, because it is 2011 and the idea that that is a subject that has to be dealt with metaphorically is just dumb. No this is just Step Up with the promise of more of a plot. It’s perfectly fine for the audience that wants to watch dance movies, but let’s not pretend that this is anything other than an excuse to film some impressive choreography and sell soundtrack albums.

Texas Killing Fields

KL: And now begins the rehabbing of Sam Worthington’s career. Might be an odd thing to say given that he’s starred in some HIGHLY grossing box office movies, but in all of those he’s not done much more than stand there and be generically handsome in an action hero kind of way. Now, we see if the guy can actually act. Jeffrey Dean Morgan I like, and I’ve already accepted that Jessica Chastain and/or Chloe Grace Moretz will star in every third movie made, so they’re sold. I also like that this movie is attempting to capture the Texas aesthetic—or one of the Texas aesthetics, anyway. Seems an ideal setting for a thriller bordering on a horror movie, and what little nuggets I glean from this trailer “feel” right.

I’m sure I’ll be disappointed, but hope springs eternal.

DW: “True Story” in anything even remotely horror-like is usually a sign for me to stay away, but this appears to be going more for the thriller-drama angle and an emphasis on the investigative characters rather than the killer or victims, so chalk me up as “cautiously optimistic” as well. I like Jeffrey Dean Morgan even though nothing I’ve seen him in has been particularly remarkable, and even the stuff I’ve liked, like The Losers, is of debatable quality. And Worthington, well…he’s pretty, I’ll give him that. Still, though they seem like an odd pair to cast in lead roles, what we can see of them here is surprisingly attractive. Like I said, “cautiously optimistic.”

The Thing

DW: I’m not usually a fan of pointless remakes of horror films, but I can’t in good conscience fault the makers of this film. Most of the complaints levied against this are coming from fans of the John Carpenter version. I’d be more inclined to take the fan rage seriously if it was coming from fans of the Nyby/Hawks version.

Which isn’t to say that there isn’t plenty that’s baffling about this film. A prequel to a remake that has virtually the same plot as the remake and the same title as the previous two films in the series? Why not just go ahead and do a full on remake? Why ride the coat-tails of the Carpenter version? It feels like the studio is trying to avoid being dismissed as “just another” remake, but going about it in the most calculatedly cynical way possible.

Apart from all that, though, it looks like another “action movie horror film” and those just really don’t do it for me.

KL: I guess I can see why they’d go the prequel route: perhaps the creatives tasked with making this movie wanted to find some way, ANY way, to make their own mark on the franchise and not just fill in the blanks set in place by the familiarity of the Carpenter version.

The thing that works about the Carpenter version (the thing that works about MOST Carpenter movies) is that it’s grungy and brutal—note that I say brutal, not gory. It’s nearly impossible to elicit the same gut reaction to a movie that’s a well-oiled machine; perversely, the better made a horror movie is on a technical level, the more often you notice the artificiality of it. Maybe that’s just me, but it’s reason enough to stay away from this movie, even if I feel no moral outrage at its existence.

October 21st

The Three Musketeers

DW: By all rights a “steampunk” version of the Dumas novel with slow-motion fight scenes shouldn’t be something I’m looking forward to. But sometimes I don’t feel the need to be picky about my film viewing. This isn’t a “turn your brain off” sort of thing, because I hate that attitude and the laziness it excuses. This is more of a “there’s a difference between good and entertaining” sort of thing. This, by no means, looks to be a good film. But, if it is even remotely aware, in the tiniest bit, of how ridiculous and silly and over the top it is, it could be an entertaining night out or in watching this.

KL: This may be my month for not being as morally outraged at stuff as I should be, because this is another one generating some serious hate. It’s silly and goofy and stupid, but those alone are not mortal sins. It does look uninteresting, which is. The Fifth Element was the first and last place I could take Milla Jovovich; she just does not have any appreciable charisma, and that would be the primary selling point of a silly/goofy/stupid movie. Pass.

October 28th

Anonymous

DW: I’ve seen some early reviews of this that suggests that it’s a good film, but frankly I’m skeptical. It’s not just the premise so risible it would give Dan Brown pause (given how vicious Shakespeare’s contemporary critics were, it’s hard to believe that they wouldn’t have leapt at the chance to expose him as a fraud). It’s more that this is from Roland Emmerich, a man whose entire film career up to this point can be summarized as “big, loud and dumb.”

If I want a silly action movie about people in brocade plotting against each other, I’ll go see The Three Musketeers, which doesn’t look anywhere near as preeningly self-important as this.

KL: I wonder if I am missing the parts that would make this premise provocative. The trailers might as well say “HOLY SHIT WE ARE JUST SO SHOCKING HERE,” and, like, man, I don’t care. To me, Shakespeare’s utility to society has little to nothing to do with who he actually was, and the question marks floating around that topic are like a secular version of the old angels-dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin ruse.

That was a long way to go to say I DON’T CARE.

In Time

KL: Insert quip about how it’s great for this production to have an in-story reason to cast only young, pretty people in all the roles.

OK, I actually like what I see here. I’ve entered the part of my life where I finally accept that maybe Justin Timberlake can be entertaining (thanks a LOT, Saturday Night Live) and I am A-OK with Amanda Seyfried in a sexy dress and red bob. I do not expect a life-changing experience, but perhaps we’ll get some fun class warfare messaging thrown in with the action sci-fi shenanigans.

DW: I’ve got nothing against Justin Timberlake, I just don’t see why I’m expected to see him as an actor worth paying attention to. Yeah, he can be entertaining, and?

Anyway, slick sci-fi movie, high-concept premise, borrows heavily from a bunch of earlier, better sources. Cast of male leads that all look curiously similar. And an absolutely groan-worthy dumb “time” pun in the trailer. I’m just not feeling it.

The Rum Diary

DW: I had to stop for a moment and make sure this wasn’t a Tim Burton film. I’m so used to seeing hammy, over-acting Johnny Depp in Burton films I sometimes forget he does that routine for other directors too.

It makes a certain sort of sense to cast Depp as Hunter S. Thompson’s thinly-veiled fictional alter-ego, and Aaron Eckhart does play a nice, smarmy villain, but much of the trailer does play like a “wacky” version of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and the notion that that was a film that needed to be “wackier” hurts my brain a little. I mostly just feel like I’ve already seen this same movie with the same lead already, and I liked it just fine then and don’t really feel compelled to revisit it.

KL: There’s a fine line a filmmaker has to walk to create the headspace Thompson’s prose can put you in, and even directors tailor made for the job, like Terry Gilliam, can have a rough time of it. Bruce Robinson gave us Withnail & I, but that was a long time ago, and Rum Diary seems to have some of that slickness problem that The Thing has. I like watching pretty people being scoundrels, but… no.

The 1930′s was one of those pivotal times for horror films. Even though many of the tropes and types had appeared in earlier decades, this was the era that horror films hit big as a genre, and many of the iconic figures premiered. It’s also where many, many, many of the cliches are birthed. A brief look at the films of the decade shows just how many of the important films in the genre have their roots here; Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dracula, Frankenstein, Bride of Frankenstein, The Mummy, Island of Lost Souls, White Zombie, The Invisible Man, and the infamous Freaks. There’s a lot to unpack with all of those films, and it’s little surprise that they’ve all been extensively and exhaustively written about. So I’m more interested in the “also ran” films of the period. Which brings us to James Whale’s The Old Dark House, produced after Frankenstein but before Bride. It’s based on a novel by British dramatist and wartime broadcaster J.B. Priestly, and, well, it’s not one of his works that’s kept in print, if that gives you any clues as to what we’re dealing with.

The film opens with a scene that would come to typify many horror films to come, and could almost be counted as an early example of “tourist horror”-those films where urbane travelers must protect themselves from savage locals/natives-as a young couple, Phillip and Margaret Waverton are driving through a storm in the Welsh mountains with their friend Roger Penderel, a cynical World War One vet. The road washes out behind them and they are forced to take shelter for the night at the home of Femms; Horace, a pale effete dandy and his sister Rebecca, a religious fanatic spinster. Also in the house is Morgan, the mute butler played by Boris Karloff, and Sir Roderick Femm, the 102 year old family patriarch, now confined to his bed after a lifetime of decadence. The Femms are reluctant hosts, but well-bred enough not to turn away visitors, even when more travelers arrive, tycoon Sir William Porterhouse and his “companion” Gladys Perkins. Much sitting around and talking ensues until the storm worsens and a drunken Morgan releases Saul Femm from his attic prison, and the madman attacks the guests, dying in a confrontation with Penderel.

The film is oddly static, and has that “filmed play” vibe for long stretches that isn’t uncommon for early films. Very little of Whale’s trademark visual inventiveness is on display, save for several shots of the large, highly shadowed staircase from below and a disconcerting sequence of shots of Rebecca Femm filmed in distorted mirrors, talking about sex and corruption. Most of the film’s strengths are in the blackly comic tone and sense of unreality, though an over long and ridiculous romantic subplot between Gladys and Penderel dominates the middle of the film and completely destroys the pacing. By the time Saul finally does appear, you almost find yourself hoping he’ll remove some of these extraneous characters.

Like many other films of the era, The Old Dark House is an early example of, if not the birth of, many of the cliches that would come to haunt the genre, notably the “madman in the attic” trope (though, to be fair, that is an even hoarier literary device…thanks for nothing, Jane Eyre), notably in Black Christmas, House of Long Shadows, and of course The Simpsons. And as I said earlier, the theme of urbane, sophisticated travelers being menaced by weird locals would become a particularly annoying horror cliche. But what strikes me the most about Whale’s film is it’s very careful use of subtext as a vehicle for horror. There’s a lot of sex in this film, in which there is of course no actual sex. There’s Sir William and his “companion”, of course, despite Gladys’ transparently false insistence that all Sir William does is “sit on my bed.” There’s also the dissolute history of the Femm family itself. There was another Femm sister, long ago, who died, and Rebecca comes just shy of implying that either her father or her brother or both was involved in an incestuous relationship with Rebecca. This is suggested further by the near revelation of what, exactly, Morgan is to the Femm’s, particularly Saul. A mute servant prone to frequent drunken rampages is a bit much to buy, especially when he habitually beats or frees the lunatic upstairs. It’s never going to be explicit, but the suggestion is clear that Morgan is Saul and Rebecca’s son. Horace is awfully effete and shows a more than healthy interest in just how jaded Penderel is, though the true blending of sexuality occurs with the casting of Sir Roderick. The patriarch of the Femm family is actually an old woman, a fact that goes completely unremarked upon by the entire cast. This is probably Whale’s idea of a joke, but it adds a fluid sense of gender and sexuality to a film that’s already heaving with implications and innuendo.