House of Horrors (1946)

Director: Jean Yarbrough
Stars: Robert Lowery, Virginia Grey, Bill Goodwin and Rondo Hatton

Last night, I reviewed The Brute Man to remember Jan Wiley on what would have been her one hundredth birthday. Given that it was also Rondo Hatton’s third film as the Creeper, I watched the other two first and felt that I should follow up with the one I haven’t already reviewed. This is House of Horrors, the first in a projected series of films clearly inspired by Hatton’s character in the Sherlock Holmes movie, The Pearl of Death. While The Brute Man is a highly interesting picture for a lot of reasons, I’d still argue that House of Horrors is just a little bit better. It’s still a flawed film in a number of ways, but it tries a bit harder than its prequel. The cops in this film actually attempt to catch the mass murderer terrorising the streets of New York rather than trying to ignore it’s even happening and pass the buck as far and as quickly as possible. Hatton gets lots of screen time and there are also a couple of very interesting performances from Martin Kosleck and Virginia Grey, even if they feel like they shouldn’t be in this particular picture.

It’s Hatton front and centre from the outset, though. In The Pearl of Death, he was firmly in support, doing what the villainous Giles Conover wanted but mostly in the shadows. He gets a great old school Universal reveal towards the end, when he turns and moves into the light, and another as he stalks towards Holmes with an apparent immunity to bullets. Here, he gets an ‘Introducing Rondo Hatton as the Creeper’ credit and stalks around behind the rest. His first appearance in the film proper is also a good one, as he slowly struggles out of the river that Marcel DeLange is thinking of throwing himself into. It’s odd to see Robert Lowery given top billing, given that the film only exists to showcase Rondo Hatton and Martin Kosleck is really the protagonist of the piece, a sculptor hated by the critics who uses the Creeper to visit revenge on them by snapping their spines. Incidentally, this is how the Hoxton Creeper murdered people in The Pearl of Death, so why we’re supposed to assume he’s a different character here, I have no idea.

These movies weren’t A list stuff, firmly intended to support bigger pictures and, as such, they ran short. House of Horrors runs only 65 minutes and The Brute Man is even shorter still, clocking in at less than an hour. Yet George Bricker, adapting an original story by pulp author, Dwight V Babcock, chose to begin as an old school character piece with a long sob story scene that feels like it should begin a fairy tale rather than a horror thriller. Kosleck, born in a part of Germany that is Poland today, still had a European accent, though he was fluent in English, but he downplays that by being as careful with his diction as possible. It almost feels like he’s attempting to play a simple peasant who can’t understand why life has to have it in for him. Perhaps he was just trying to do something different from all the Nazi roles he had been typecast into during the Second World War. He saw it as his mission to expose the Nazis as evil by playing as many of them as he could and he did, becoming described as ‘the definitive Nazi swine’.

Here, he’s just a struggling artist who cares for his cat, Pietro. And when I say struggling, I mean that he has to sculpt his primitive naked women by candlelight because he can’t pay to keep the power on. He borrowed the bread and cheese he’s eating for dinner and he has no milk for Pietro, but it’s all going to be OK again because Mr Samuels will be paying him $1,000 for a statue tonight. Yeah, right. Not if have an idea of where this story’s going! Sure enough, Samuels arrives with Holmes Harmon, a hatchet-man critic who can’t stand DeLange or his work. After he decries Surcease from Toil as ‘unadulterated tripe’, suddenly Samuels isn’t quite so interested in coughing up that much-needed cash. DeLange chases the pair of them out of his studio with a knife, smashes his creation to pieces with a sculptor’s hammer and wanders off to the river to throw himself in and end it all. Instead, he finds the Creeper. ‘Magnifique!’ he pronounces. ‘The perfect Neanderthal man!’

And so we’re off and running. DeLange has a new lease on life, aching to create ‘a masterpiece that will live forever’ by having the Creeper pose for a statue. And the Creeper gets to live, have a place to do so and with the opportunity to do what he does best: break backs. The first is a streetwalker he spies out of his window, suckering him into an alley. When the headlines of the morning papers hawk the crime and the sculptor asks rhetorically why anyone would snap a woman’s spine, Hatton gives what might be the best line of his entire career. ‘She screamed,’ he responds in that cracked and deadpan voice. And then, because DeLange is no fool, even if he sounds like one, he idly wonders about what he’d do to F Holmes Harmon if he only could. Off wanders the Creeper and the story is well and truly in motion. This is where we start to wonder about Hatton’s character. Sure, the opening credits tell us that he’s the Creeper, while the papers stir up his past murders and wonder if this madman could be alive and killing again.

But we don’t see that. We see a quiet creature who does what he does to help his only friend. He doesn’t seem to be all there, as if he’s suffering not from the acromegaly that afflicted Hatton but a kind of brain retardation that leaves him naive and childlike. He’s a big guy and all the more sinister for how he’s big: he’s a slim man who we might describe as being in great shape, if only the acromegaly hadn’t elongated his face and hulked out his shoulders. It’s easy to see why Universal wanted him because he could have played Frankenstein’s monster without any make-up. Jack Pierce, who sculpted such memorable features onto Boris Karloff back in 1931, did the make-up for this film but had little to do for Hatton, who was just right as he was. So he’s sinister and his shadow would definitely shock, but he doesn’t appear to be mad in the slightest. I had a lot more sympathy for the Creeper in this film than I did in his origin story in The Brute Man. There, he knowingly sought revenge for his disfigurement. Here, he just tries to help a friend.

I’d say that, of course, the cops are all over the new Creeper murders, but then they soon wouldn’t be in the prequel; they are at least on the case here. Bill Goodwin isn’t too bad as Lt Larry Brooks, but he’s so loose that we wonder if he thinks that he’s in a comedy rather than a Universal monster movie. He has a grin on his face throughout the movie, even while discovering corpses, and he’s quick on the pull too. As he interrogates an artist named Steven Morrow, who circumstantial evidence suggests could well be the Creeper, his eyes are diverted to the artist’s model, Stella McNally, and he promptly distracts himself to flirt up a storm with her and set up a date. Inappropriate much? Morrow is played by Robert Lowery, who inexplicably gets top billing in House of Horrors. Why, I have no idea at all, because I recognised most of the rest of the cast but not him and because he doesn’t even attempt to build any character into Morrow, content to float through the film falling into every plot convenience trap he can find.

What Joan Medford, hot shot reporter, sees in him, I have even less idea. Virginia Grey plays her with all the sass and vinegar that Lowery has forgotten even exists. I adored her performance, even if it seemed to exist in the wrong movie too. Just like Martin Kosleck believes that he’s in a fairy tale and Bill Goodwin believes that he’s in a comedy, Grey apparently believes that she’s in the sort of fast talking newspaper drama Warner Brothers churned out in the thirties rather than the sort of creature feature that Universal specialised in during the forties. Jean Yarbrough directed with film noir style but Babcock and Bricker are a handicap to him every way. It’s as if they tried to throw every genre they could into one film. I was half expecting Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers to waltz through a shadowy doorway for a musical number! In her way, though, Grey is the best thing about the picture because she’s thoroughly alive and that’s what we needed in a story about a lot of people getting dead.

So there’s a lot to like in House of Horrors, even if it has a notable identity crisis. It looks wonderful, with shadows everywhere and a camera that knows exactly how to move within them. The cinematographer was Maury Gertsman, who had shot a number of films for Universal, including jungle pictures, Sherlock Holmes yarns and monster movies. Mostly, though, he specialised in westerns. The sets, costumes and score all feel right too, but then this was Universal; they owned this genre! Sadly, they felt that it was a safe bet to just have Rondo Hatton creeping around breaking backs and a solid story wasn’t required. It leads to an unwieldy amount of plot convenience to shuffle the cast members around to be right where they need to be. Everyone knows where everyone else lives in New York! Models fall for cops! Art critics fall for commercial artists! Cops are unceasingly cheerful! The further the film goes, the further off track the film goes and the ending is worst of all. The Creeper was a promising series, but it underdelivered.

The Brute Man (1946)

Director: Jean Yarbrough
Writers: George Bricker and M. Coates Webster, from a story by Dwight V. Babcock
Stars: Tom Neal, Jan Wiley, Jane Adams, Donald MacBride, Peter Whitney, Fred Coby, Janelle Johnson and Rondo Hatton

Index: 2016 Centennials.

Remembering noted filmmakers on what would be their 100th birthdays by reviewing one title from their respective careers gives me a great opportunity to select interesting movies. This one, to remember a B-movie actress named Jan Wiley, is about as interesting as they come for a whole slew of reasons. For a start, it’s a Universal horror movie that they never released. They shot it in November 1945, taking under two weeks to do so, but its lead actor, Rondo Hatton, died only two months later before the finish of post-production. Given that Universal were exploiting rather brutally the unique looks of Hatton, who suffered from the disease of acromegaly, it’s very possible that they chose to sell the movie to PRC, a poverty row distributor, rather than just chalk it up as a loss. PRC distributed it in 1946, but it then seemed to become lost, only being rediscovered in 1982, when it was shown on TV and released to home video. Officially, it was just poor timing, as Universal backed out of B movies after their merger with International in 1945.

Hatton plays the Creeper, a character with an interesting history, for the third time. His first appearance was in a Sherlock Holmes movie, The Pearl of Death, in 1944, the ninth in the series with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. There, he’s the Hoxton Creeper, a dangerous tool used by the villain of the piece, Giles Conover, to destroy his enemies, always by breaking the third lumbar vertebra of their spines. Hatton is hardly in the film but he’s memorable whenever he is, shot in looming shadows and only being revealed at the very end of the film, when Holmes cleverly turns him on his master. Two years later, Hatton made what was intended to be the first in a series of movies featuring the Creeper. This was House of Horrors where the character stalks behind the opening credits. He’s rescued from a river by a sculptor about to commit suicide, who then uses his new friend to murder art critics who have savaged his work, all while sculpting a bust of the killer, which he believes will become his masterpiece.

Altered States (1980)

Director: Ken Russell
Stars: William Hurt, Blair Brown, Bob Balaban and Charles Haid

And Death continues to swing his scythe at the film industry. I’ve just read about Andrzej Żuławski, who left us two days after George Gaynes, who I’m remembering here. Gaynes will be best known to most as Commandant Eric Lassard of the Police Academy films and he channelled a similar ineptness as the soap opera star who tried to woo Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie. In real life, he wasn’t inept, being fluent in no less than seven languages, perhaps partly due to being born in Helsinki, back when it was part of the Russian Empire. He and his wife founded the State Street Ballet Company in Santa Barbara, reflecting higher art than Police Academy. He was a prolific TV actor and his films are surprisingly varied, including Marooned, Slaughter’s Big Rip-Off, Nickelodeon, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, To Be or Not to Be, The Fantastic Four and Vanya on 42nd Street, along with this underrated gem from novelist Paddy Chayefsky and director Ken Russell. Hey, I reviewed the first couple of Police Academy movies recently; let’s go more obscure.

To be honest, it’s been so long since I last saw Altered States that I’d forgotten that George Gaynes was in it and, as it turned out, he’s only just in it, with one scene late in the film with a few memorable lines. The same scenario applies to some of the other famous names that I’d forgotten about, like John Larroquette and Drew Barrymore, who debuted here at the age of five as the daughter of the leads, a couple of years before ET: The Extra-Terrestrial. She steals at least one scene here, simply by opening her mouth, unless that’s her screen sister, Megan Jeffers. Larroquette portrays an unnamed X-ray technician, who ironically enough, literally leads us to George Gaynes, playing the awkwardly named Dr Wissenschaft. Oddly, as a number of the future names, like Larroquette and Barrymore, have small roles, the other debuting actor isn’t so hamstrung. He’s William Hurt, who would win an Oscar on his first of four nominations, for Kiss of the Spider Woman, but here was just a brand new actor playing a peach of a leading role.

We begin in April 1967, with Dr Eddie Jessup inside an odd flotation tank that rather looks like a boiler for steampunks. He’s a university professor, working as part of a team to investigate schizophrenia, which he isn’t even sure is a disease; perhaps it’s just a different state of consciousness. He’s interested in it from the perspective of religious experiences, as he saw visions of the saints as a child, visions which stopped after his father’s death at sixteen. He’s so drawn to the concept that he doesn’t want to restrict himself to examining the EEGs of student volunteers, he wants to try it out for himself. He sees the isolation tank as a good means to induce a trancelike state, though at this point he doesn’t want his serious science to be tainted by the psychedelic drug culture that was creeping into the field at the time. It certainly seems to have an impressive effect from this initial scene, or at least his control, Arthur Rosenberg, seems to think so. That’s Bob Balaban from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

It’s at one of Arthur’s parties that Jessup meets Emily, another prodigy of a young scientist, but a physical anthropologist about to start teaching at Harvard. Before that happens, she becomes his wife. Suddenly, we’ve lost two months, as if we’ve been stretching out in Eddie’s flotation tank too and time has ceased to have quite the same meaning. If he had notable experiences in the tank, he continues to have them in the sack with Emily. ‘What are you thinking about?’ she asks him during sex. ‘God,’ is his thoughtful reply. ‘Jesus. Crucifixions.’ This eventually leads to one of the most memorable lines in the film, which bizarrely comes as part of her proposal of marriage, which is as unromantic as they come, given that she tells him that, ‘I feel like I’m being harpooned by some raging monk in the act of receiving God.’ We start to share some of this during his second session: blasphemous mixtures of sex, death and the Christ, which would be utterly amazing in anyone’s work but Ken Russell’s, in which they’re entirely expected.

And so we move on. Quickly. Next thing we know, years have passed and they have kids but they are to divorce, even though she doesn’t want to. He’s just ridding himself of ‘clatter and clutter and ridiculous ritual.’ I told you about the romance, right? And finally, here we start to get to the point of the picture. It revolves around race memory, which Jessup is convinced can be tapped into. He believes that we have six million years of memories stuck in our limbic systems and he wants to experience them. Gone is his reluctance to use pharmaceutical assistance, because he promptly finds his way to Mexico to be part of what must be very similar to an ayahuasca ceremony. ‘Your soul will return to the first soul,’ explains the brujo who leads the way and, to highlight that this is a particularly important journey, their entrance into a cave is reminiscent of science fiction, as if they’re all astronauts discovering a lost civilisation on Mars. The trip is wild, of course, mixing the primal with the civilised. Next up is the hellish vista of a Bosch.

Part of the reason that this film works is the introduction of Charles Haid as Mason Parrish, who works at the same university as Eddie and Arthur. He thinks that the other two are being utterly irresponsible, but he ends up involved anyway, mostly because the three work very well together from our perspective. If Hurt, as Eddie Jessup, is the visionary, the mad scientist, the focal point of everything we experience, the others are the response to what he does. Balaban as Arthur is the calm, studious believer, ready to allow Jessup’s next officially unsanctioned experiment to see where it goes and to monitor it to see what might happen. Haid as Mason is the far from calm disbeliever and his actions are almost violent to pretty much anything that happens, down to simple questions. ‘Do you believe in supernatural phenomena, Mason?’ he’s asked and his reply is a defiant, ‘No, sir, I do not!’ It’s a classic approach to something controversial: throw in someone who believes in it and someone who doesn’t and let battle commence.

I appreciated how Ken Russell focuses on the emotion here. There’s science all over the script, most of it adapted by Paddy Chayefsky from his own source novel, but most of it is buried in frantic dialogue as the passion is more important than the detail. A good part of it is hurled with vitriol during arguments, which means that we can’t really understand half of it but we don’t care. It’s not important to us, even if it is to the characters who are speaking. What matters to us is the passion that they’re resonating because they care. Oddly, Chayefsky had a lot of concerns with Russell’s approach and so had his credit as scriptwriter changed to Sidney Aaron, his real first two names, even though he’d earned a cool million for his efforts. Critic Richard Corliss suggested that his problems with what we see on screen are what I liked the most: ‘the intensity of the performances and the headlong pace at which the actors read his dialogue.’ I have read the book and enjoyed the science there, but on screen I enjoyed the passion.

To be fair, this is only half a science fiction movie anyway. The other half is firmly horror and it moves at steady pace from one to the other as Dr Jessup starts not only to experience primitive states but actually starts to regress physically to them. One of the longest sequences in the movie is the one where Jessup isn’t actually played by William Hurt but by Miguel Godreau, the former lead dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. In some ways it’s rather bizarre to see a primitive apelike creature played by a classically trained ballet dancer, but the approach works really well. He lopes and leaps and climbs, all in the very hairy nude. This sequence is almost entirely devoid of dialogue, just grunting as this regressed Jessup does what primitive apelike creatures would probably do if suddenly confronted with a landscape as alien to them as the America of the 1970s. Godreau does wonderful work, but the piece de resistance comes from Hurt, who smiles knowingly when released from jail. It’s a smile of vindication.

While the story is Chayefsky’s, adapted by him from his novel, that novel was based on real research into sensory deprivation done by neuroscientist and psychonaut, John C Lilly, well known for experimenting on his own body and so endangering his health and his life. His research in the early 1960s involved the consumption of psychedelic drugs like LSD before entering an isolation tank or attempting to commune with dolphins. The film, however, belongs to Ken Russell, because it’s a product of wild science, classical music and psychedelic and often blasphemous visuals. Lilly liked it, even if Chayefsky didn’t, particularly appreciating some scenes that resonated from his experiences. The ending is a real trip, reminding once again of 2001: A Space Odyssey, as some of the scenes with Godreau did. Magnificent editing from Eric Jenkins makes these scenes burst; sometimes it’s rapid fire, pulsing, staccato stuff, while other times it’s slow, letting scenes unfold to tell their own story.

Today, it fits well with Russell’s other work, which always stands out even if it’s flawed. It sounds an odd and redundant thing to say but he was a very cinematic filmmaker, using visuals to tell stories as well as add to the ones already being told. He inherited the cast when he took over from Arthur Penn, but could have done a lot worse. William Hurt shows the promise that he soon lived up to, playing his challenging part with aplomb. Blair Brown is firmly in support as Emily, but she manages to steal some scenes from him. Bob Balaban and Charles Haid are exactly what they need to be to support the scientific side of the script, just as Charles White-Eagle carries the philosophical ones as the Mexican brujo. Down the credits, behind Barrymore and Larroquette and others is George Gaynes, who gets little to do with his one scene, but has a memorable line to deliver which he does with style. Parrish suggests that Jessup’s X-rays are ‘slightly abnormal,’ Gaynes looks at him askance and says, ‘Somewhat? The guy’s a fucking gorilla!’

RIP George Gaynes.

The Inheritance (1962)

Director: Masaki Kobayashi
Stars: Keiko Kishi, Tatsuya Nakadai, So Yamamura, Seiji Miyaguchi, Yusuke Kawazu, Mari Yoshimura, Minoru Chiaki, Misako Watanabe and Osamu Takizawa

The great Japanese director, Masaki Kobayashi, who would have been a hundred years old today, directed 22 films, from 1952’s My Son’s Youth to The Empty Table in 1985. The latter starred Tatsuya Nakadai, who appeared or starred in fully half of Kobayashi’s output. Their working relationship began in 1956 with The Thick-Walled Room, one of the first Japanese films to look at what the country had done in World War II, a drama adapted from the diaries of real Japanese soldiers jailed for crimes against humanity. It proceeded through all of Kobayashi’s most famous films, including the ten hour trilogy of The Human Condition; the samurai drama, Seppuku; and Kwaidan, his collection of four ghost stories that is one of the two staples of classic Japanese horror. The latter pair won jury prizes at Cannes and Kwaidan was also nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film. Nakadai also appeared in 1967’s magnificent Samurai Rebellion, duelling Toshiro Mifune. The Inheritance comes in between these, emphasising a superb decade for Kobayashi.

It’s neither a war film nor a samurai flick, but it takes a similarly dark look at humanity, an approach for which Kobayashi is justifiably known. Senzo Kawahara is a rich businessman who lives only for his work, running a company called Toto Precise Tech. Soon into the picture, he discovers that he’s dying of cancer and has perhaps six months to live. He has a trophy wife, Satoe, his former secretary who’s two decades younger than him, but no heirs. Well, not legal ones, anyway. He tells some of his closest associates that he has three illegitimate children, with whom he’s had no contact since conception, and tasks them with finding these kids, so that he can judge whether they’re worthy of receiving a share of his three hundred million yen fortune. His wife will receive the ‘legal guaranteed portion’ of a third of it, but the rest, which is a considerable sum even in yen, is up for grabs. And that’s how these associates take it, immediately scheming as to how they can screw each other over and land the money for themselves.

If it sounds like there are no sympathetic characters to be found in this film, you’d be close to the truth. I usually have trouble with such movies, Gone with the Wind being the obvious example, because there’s nobody for me to root for. Yet here, we’re drawn in through Kawahara’s secretary, the first person we see on screen, and she’s sympathetic for a quite a while before being corrupted by the environment she’s in. She’s Yasuko Miyagawa and she’s a vision from the get go. The film begins like it’s French new wave, the camera a loose companion, floating alongside this stylish young lady in a black and white street. A jazz score kicks in and she glances through her cool sunglasses at shoes and jewellery and coats in storefront windows. This could be a Godard or Truffaut movie, or even a Eurospy flick, if the girl and everyone else around her wasn’t Japanese. It’s a light and fluffy way to begin something that’s not light or fluffy in the slightest, soon becoming dark and traditional, but it’s appropriate as it’s the only light scene.

The camera stops moving, for a start, at least for the most part. Most of the film is shot with the camera static, movement happening within the frame. Occasionally it deigns to aid the actors as they move, but rarely, concentrating instead on imparting something through composition of frame and choice of angle. This quintessentially Japanese approach isn’t surprising, as the cinematographer was Takashi Kawamata, who had shot many films for Yasujiro Ozu, often regarded as the most Japanese of the Japanese directors. It’s hard to imagine anything more Japanese than Tokyo Story, for instance, an appropriately archetypal title for such an archetypal picture, directed by Ozu and shot by Yuharu Atsuta, with Kawamata assisting. Even though the camera doesn’t move much, the effect is still highly cinematic because the motion is in the frame so that, even when characters are talking, they’re cleverly choreographed to ensure that the shot is one painting to begin with and a different one when it ends.

The visuals never stop impressing, some shots leaping out for attention, but it’s a character-driven piece. The script, by Koichi Inagaki from a novel by Norio Nanjo, explores a tangled web of machinations, as the various people who Kawahara trusts are about the last people he should ever have trusted, playing each and every one of each other to get ahead. I wonder how Toto Precise Tech did any business! Then again, maybe they were each biding their time all these years, waiting for this moment to pounce. Miyagawa is the only one of them who seems to care about anyone but herself. She’s his current secretary, who cares for her boss and even admits to have had a little crush on him in the past. The others are careful to bow the requisite number of degrees but we’re not convinced by any of them, not before Kawahara’s disease is announced and certainly not afterwards, when his fortune is dangled in front of their greedy little eyes and they all start to manoeuvre into the best positions to take it.

His wife, Satoe, has the best position throughout, as the law guarantees her a third of it anyway, but she wants it all and plays everyone against each other to get it. Misako Watanabe plays her as an ice queen, cold and heartless and someone not to underestimate. It’s hardly surprising that Kawahara married her for her body and wants little to do with her otherwise. Of course, that says as much about him as it does about her: the man is dying of cancer, an inherent sympathy point, but we never feel sympathy for him; in fact, we get less sympathetic for him as the movie runs on, because the situation he finds himself in is arguably a much deserved one. Minoru Chiaki takes the opposite approach to Junichi Fujii, the secretarial chief. He’s friendly and engaging, with a mild air of ineptitude that’s calculated. He and Satoe are tasked with finding a seven year old girl, Kawahara’s daughter by a maid. Fujii’s thought is to not find her, but Satoe talks him into it as she would become the girl’s guardian and so gain control of her portion too.

The second group is comprised of Kawahara’s legal team. His lawyer, Naruto Yoshida, in the experienced form of Seiji Miyaguchi, the most serious of the Seven Samurai, is a patient and confident man who feels content nudging others into the directions he wants them to take. One such person is his assistant, Kikuo Furukawa, played by a calm but scheming Tatsuya Nakadai, so insincere that we don’t believe any of his promises to begin with, but fully expect him to use them over and over again on a succession of women. Yoshida remains behind in his sanctum of an office while Furukawa goes out and about to achieve their goals. They’re tasked with finding Miyumi Kamio, who would be a young woman now, but Yoshida wants Furukawa to search and not find, because his real goal is to set up a Kawahara Foundation. He would sit on the board and direct affairs, while his assistant could manage the day to day operations. However, it doesn’t turn out to be remotely as simple as that, because Furukawa’s search triggers plenty.

Finally, there’s a boy Kawahara fathered in Manchuria twenty years earlier, perhaps an easier person to find as he doesn’t just have a name, he also knows who adopted him. He has Miyagawa go to fetch this young man, Sadao Narimune, which gives Keiko Kishi even more opportunity to steal the film. She’s the first and last person we see and, if the story is built on So Yamamura’s strong performance as the dying man, it unfolds primarily through Kishi’s as Yasuko Miyagawa, especially as the bulk of the picture takes place through a visualisation of her recollections of a tough time in her life, a time that she describes as ‘the wound I’m so proud of’. She’s given plenty of opportunity to shine, with that initial glamorous scene in the street being contrasted so strongly with the beginning of her recollections that I didn’t even catch that it was the same girl at first. She’s a traditionally submissive but capable secretary and she grows as the film runs on, being moved to Kawahara’s house and becoming closer to him than she expects.

Perhaps one reason why this bunch of unsympathetic characters remain so watchable is that we know it won’t end well for all of them and we want to see each of them fall. It’s phrased rather like a mystery, in the sense that our varied cast of characters manoeuvre their way through the story to end up gathered together for the final unmasking. In a mystery, one of them is usually the perpetrator of whatever crime has been committed and the others mere red herrings, but in this story, they’re all perpetrators in their own ways and we watch to see which will be unmasked by a brutal sense of karma. Certainly these final scenes are the most powerful in the film, because each successful coup makes us happy and leads on to the next. What we might feel about the eventual outcome may determine what we might feel about the film, because there’s a poetry to it and a sense of justice but nobody leaves the film untarnished by the events we’ve witnessed.

I clearly need to watch more of Masaki Kobayashi’s films. My first was Kwaidan, many years ago, after it cropped up so often in discussions of Japanese horror. Everything didn’t really start with it and Onibaba, but they’re as good a starting place as any to find out what else is out there. I’ve revisited it since and it stands up well. I’ve also seen Samurai Rebellion, one of many pictures about samurai to be overlooked in the west, where ‘samurai film’ is often equated to ‘Akira Kurosawa’. I’m not saying to avoid masterpieces like Seven Samurai, Yojimbo or Ran, but check out Hideo Gosha pictures too, like Sword of the Beast and Three Outlaw Samurai, a half dozen of the best Zatoichi films and others like Kill! and Samurai Rebellion. From what I gather, Kobayashi’s Seppuku, also known as Hari-Kiri, is deserving of that company too so I should seek it out soon, along with some of his other work from the late fifties and early sixties. I have a feeling that The Inheritance, utterly not a samurai movie, will resonate with me like Kurosawa’s films noir.

The Finishing Line (1977)

Director: John Krish
Stars: Juniors and Seniors of Roebuck Junior School, Watton-at-Stone Primary School and the Simon Balle School, Hertfordshire, Peter Hill, David Millett, Jeremy Wilkin, Kevin Flood, Antony Carrick, Yolande Palfrey, David Howe, Don Henderson and members of the St John Ambulance Brigade, Hertfordshire

Index: Weird Wednesdays.

If One Got Fat was traumatising, and I’ve heard that adjective used a number of times, then The Finishing Line is nightmare-inducing. It’s a British short, made by John Krish for British Transport Films, on his return to work for them after a period on the blacklist, following his unauthorised commentary on the closure of London’s trams in 1953’s The Elephant Will Never Forget. He was asked to make a film that might help to stop children playing on railway lines and vandalising them. What he came up with, in collaboration with co-writer Michael Gilmour, was The Finishing Line, which surely features more maimed and dead children than The Hunger Games and Battle Royale combined. It proved immediately controversial (like, duh) and was debated on the TV show Nationwide. Some felt it was a tough film for a tough problem, while others worried about it traumatising their kids or even encouraging the very sort of vandalism that it purported to prevent. It was promptly pulled from circulation, replaced by a safe, inconsequential film called Robbie.

So what did John Krish do that so upset the British public in 1977? Well, contrary to every other example of a public safety film out there, he turned the problem at hand into a game. Well, not really a game. It’s a competition, a prominent school competition spawned from the sonorous words of a headmaster that resonate over the opening shots. ‘The railway is not the game field!’ he pronounces, so the one kid who sits dangerously on the edge of a stone bridge overlooking a railway line, immediately thinks, ‘Yeah, but if it was...’ He’d have lots of trains, a twenty foot scoreboard and even a brass band, which strikes up as we watch his twisted imagination at work. I grew up with British sports days and was six when this was released, so there’s much I remember here, from the bowl haircuts to having to restart the first race after some eager kid jumped the gun. The only bit that doesn’t feel familiar is when the folk from the St John’s Ambulance bring stretchers out of tents in preparation for what’s to come.

And off we go! We get four events, to be competed by four teams of kids. They’re each introduced by an announcer, eagerly explained by the anonymous kid on the bridge through narration and illustrated by a very basic diagram of what’s going to happen. It begins with ‘9 and Under Fence Breaking’, a particularly simple to explain event, in which the kids from each team have to run to the wire fence, break through it, get all their members down the bank, across the rails and up the opposite bank to cross the finishing line. Sounds easy enough, right? Well a train is due to drive through halfway just to spur some extra speed out of these kids, and you just know someone’s going to trip on a rail and lie sprawled on the track. It’s a girl from the blue team and his team-mates have to abandon him when they can’t summon up the strength to carry him away. ‘Blue are disqualified for failing to complete with a full team,’ mentions the announcer as everyone goes silent while the bloody corpse of this pre-teen is lifted onto a stretcher and hauled off.

Now you’re getting the idea? Well you have ‘12 and Under Stone Throwing’ next, then ‘Last Across’, with the ‘Great Tunnel Walk’ to finish things off. Each event wraps up with dead or maimed children and stone throwing adds disfigured adults to the mix. That involves simply throwing bricks, colour coded for teams, at a passing train from ten feet away from the track. There’s two points for each smashed window, we’re told, and four for ‘a direct hit’, which means a passenger. Yellow even score six for hitting the driver, who holds in his eyes while the blood pours out of them. Last Across ups the stakes, with two teams on either side of the tracks, fighting each other to get across before the oncoming train hits them head on. By this point I was counting myself and can swear there are twelve kids sprawled in the train’s wake, even if the announcer only claims five injured and five dead. The Great Tunnel Walk is when it gets really serious; as Krish told Fangoria, he wanted to make it ‘look like the Somme from 1914.’ And yes, it did.

It’s utterly surreal to watch this and realise that it was commissioned by a government department. Krish pitched the concept to British Transport Films, which he had co-founded decades earlier before his stint in the wilderness, and their in house psychiatrist loved it. ‘This is exactly what we need!’ he announced. So Krish made it, with the expected audience to be schools, screening to children between the ages of eight and eleven, as it was felt that older kids might see it a little differently. It played in some schools, always to a ‘very silent’ audience, with a few kids needing to be taken out partway through. Krish describes them as ‘the nosebleeders - the ones who are going to faint at anything’. Then the controversy that built up led to it being screened on TV and, to quote Krish, ‘there was a riot afterward,’ so British Transport withdrew it from circulation and banned it for 21 years. The next time anyone saw it in public was in 2003 as part of the Krish retrospective that was organised by the British Film Institute.

Anyone immediately surprised by the boy sitting on the wall of the bridge at the beginning of the picture, in a long shot that zooms into him and clearly shows that there’s no safety equipment underneath just in case he falls off, won’t be too surprised to hear stories of the shoot. According to Krish, he was given 175 kids for five days in the last week of term before the holidays. Given that the line was active, he couldn’t get onto it until 9.30am and he had to be back off it by 3.30pm. He had to finish by the Friday or all those kids would vanish and some of the extras with them, as none of the parents were there. The final shot of the massed dead had to be shot in only twenty minutes, because the production office had cut costs with the sign for the Great Tunnel Walk. They’d printed ‘Start’ on one side and ‘Finish’ on the other so, running out of time, Krish had to shoot the beginning, pull the sign down, transport it through the three and a half mile tunnel and put it up the other way round so he could shoot the final scenes.

I was six when The Finishing Line was made, so I didn’t see it in school. I vaguely remember seeing a few films but not what any of them were, which is a shame as apparently the seventies were strong for public safety films in Britain. Donald Pleasence voiced Lonely Water as the Grim Reaper, warning kids about the dangers of playing near rivers. Apaches was made in 1977 by John Mackenzie, who would go on to helm The Long Good Friday with Bob Hoskins; it features kids playing Cowboys and Indians in the countryside, only to fall prey to a host of hidden dangers, like suffocating in grain pits or burning alive in hayrick fires. Perhaps part of this came from the techniques being borrowed from the horror and exploitation films that dominated the late sixties and early seventies, as Katy McGahan, a BFI curator, suggests. This is helped by the BBFC, the censors whose scissors got busy in the video nasty era, as they left public safety shorts alone. They didn’t even ban this which, like A Clockwork Orange, was voluntarily withdrawn.

The Finishing Line can be watched for free on YouTube.

Sources:
Kier-La Janisse - School of Shock: Q+A: John Krish on Railway Scare Film 'The Finishing Line' at Fangoria.
Jude Rogers - Consider Yourselves Warned: Public Information Films at The Guardian

One Got Fat (1963)

Director: Dale Jennings
Stars: Charles Hagens, Dick Hutto, Kevin Lindsay, Janice Powell, Dan Whitehead and Lucie Hagens

Index: Weird Wednesdays.

I got a pleasant surprise when I played this bicycle safety short because it turned out that my better half had seen it. It was screened to her and her class in school, somewhere between kindergarten and second grade, perhaps a decade after its original release. Over four decades later, it had stuck in her mind to the point that she remembered it immediately, just from the opening shot of a odd huddle of kids with rather immobile tails. Yes, that will become clear shortly, I promise. The film didn’t traumatise her, she says, but then she didn’t ride a bike! She remembered the film as merely creepy, but probably funny to her too, at least as a six or seven year old kid. I’d only read about it, so this was a first time experience for me and I have no idea what the filmmakers thought they were doing. Why would they set up something so surreal just to make one meaningless punchline work at the end of fifteen minutes, especially given that it hurts the points of the film, which, the more we think about it, are really horrible life lessons.

The logical explanation for the film is that the folk at Interlude Films wanted to tell kids how dangerous it could be to ride their bikes without following safety precautions. Nobody has a problem with that, right? I fell off my bike as a kid, breaking one bone in my left arm and bending the other, so I know what it’s like to get hurt. Then again, I didn’t break any of the cardinal rules that are outlined in this film; I just fell off and landed on the kerb. Anyway, I’m all for this film in principle. But then I watched it. So now I wonder if anyone actually benefitted from the intended message. Did anyone avoid an accident on their bike after remembering to abide by the rules they learned in One Got Fat? Or did kids get into more accidents after emulating the bad behaviour of the monkeys on bikes. And there, I said it. The ten kids who get together and decide to go have a picnic in the park nine blocks away aren’t really kids. Well, one is. The others are all monkeys, wearing a variety of monkey masks and curiously immobile monkey tails.

Why? Well, I’m going to spoil the joke because it’s an irresponsible joke that gets worse the more we think about it. The title refers to the one real human boy, who makes it to the park safe and sound just because he isn’t, get this, a monkey! So what’s the lesson? Is it that monkeys make terrible cyclists? Is it that kids have no peripheral vision when they ride their bikes while wearing monkey masks? Nah, I’m just kidding. Surely it’s that when all your friends die horrible deaths all around you, you should carry on regardless so you can eat their lunches and get fat. Don’t call 911. Don’t make a responsible adult aware. Don’t stay to comfort your dying buddies in their last moments on earth. Just think about all those packed lunches and the carnage won’t even register. Then again, not acknowledging what’s going on while you’re riding down the road sounds pretty dangerous. And hey, didn’t ‘Slim’ Jim McGuffney’s bike collapse under his weight? Eat up all those lunches, Orville Slump, because you’ll be next, kiddo, you’ll be next!

I was actually as flabbergasted by the narration as the visuals, courtesy of Edward Everett Horton, one of the gems of thirties Hollywood. Each time I tried to figure out why I was watching a bunch of monkeys on bicycles, he’d throw out a new line of inappropriately chipper monologue to grab my attention back. For instance, the reason why Orville has all ten lunches defying the laws of physics on his bike’s back rack is because, ‘Slim thought that his sack would be hard to handle.’ Did Dale Jennings write this deliberately? He certainly aimed to fit as much humour as he could into this morbid monologue of mangled monkeys, so perhaps he did. Just look at the names of the characters! Just watch the cartoon explosions and listen to the squishing sounds! Just think about how cheerful Horton sounds after each accident! His dismissals of each character after their horrible deaths is reminiscent of the dark wit that Vincent Price got to use so frequently when making horror pictures for William Castle. ‘Phillip Floogle is no longer bored.’ Oh yeah.

I won’t run through all the deaths, because you should certainly watch this surreal how-not-to yourself. I’ll just illustrate the comments above with some examples. First up is ‘Rooty Toot’ Jasperson, described as ‘a slam-bang go-getter headed for big things in life.’ Like a car, when he gets fed up of making hand signals when he wants to turn and swerves into traffic. ‘At this point,’ enthuses Horton, ‘Rooty Toot Jasperson left the party.’ We can only assume that he was so far ahead of the pack that the emergency services cleaned up the road before the rest of them caught up. Otherwise, why wouldn’t these monkeys stop and gawk in horror at the bloody remains of their friend? Those damned dirty apes! They just carry on and continue to make mistakes. Tinkerbell McDillinfiddy (seriously, where did these names come from?) is just a forgetful soul and, in this film, that leads to being hit by a big frickin’ truck. Worst is maybe Filbert Bagel, who gets squished by a steamroller because he can’t swerve, I mean doesn’t do maintenance so his brakes fail.

Best of all is Mossby Pomegranate, who doesn’t even have a bike, because he didn’t register it and failed to obtain a license, so the cops couldn’t do anything when it got stolen. He’s the first monkey not to die in a horrible fashion, which perhaps leaves us with the lesson that the safest way to ride a bike is to get the frickin’ thing nicked so you can’t get into an accident on it. All he ends up with is fallen arches because a few blocks of jogging was apparently deeply unhealthy in 1963, albeit not as deeply unhealthy as riding a bike in an ape mask. Of course ‘Slim’ Jim McGuffney gets his, as does Trigby Phipps and Phillip Floogle, Nelbert Zwieback (who’s a girl, by the way) and Stanislaw Hickenbottom, who rides his bike into a tunnel without lights or reflectors and apparently exits into the Twilight Zone. ‘Picture this: a world populated by apes, who ride bikes and drive cars and do all the things that we do, except adhere to the safety rules of cycling in traffic.’ That’s what it felt like. Right? Right!

One Got Fat can be and, frankly, should be watched for free on YouTube.

Heir (2015)

Director: Richard Powell
Stars: Bill Oberst Jr, Robert Nolan and Matteo D’Avino

If anyone foolishly thought that, after Worm and Familiar, a pair of deeply unsettling short films, Richard Powell, their writer and director, would settle down and make something pleasant for the kiddies, they’re in for something of a shock with this one. Sure, its tagline does suggest that, reading simply, ‘A touching tale of father and son’, but it’s playing more literally with those words, even if it obscures everything in a web of deceit and another abstraction into body horror. The film’s credits at IMDb appear in alphabetical order and the very first one is for the dream part of ‘Rotting Pedophile’, so there should be no surprise to discover that this is another deeply unsettling short film, looking at the curse of paedophilia as a disease. Back yet again is Robert Nolan, who shouldn’t be getting better and better with each film I see him in, as he was too damn good to begin with, but he’s accompanied by Bill Oberst Jr, an amazing actor too often wasted in crappy movies. He’s painfully believable here, disquieting and loathsome but utterly real.

Nolan plays Gordon, who is magnificently introduced in the 75 seconds before the title card. We see that he’s a husband and father, but that things are not good in this family. Initially we think divorce, because he takes pictures of his wife and son and crops her out of them. He composes an e-mail entitled ‘My Son’ to ask for a ‘play date’. But then he starts to ask directions and we start to wonder. The ominous, pulsing, score doesn’t say divorce; it says nagging urge. Nolan looks guilty, as if he’s not only fighting something within him but he’s scared of losing that fight. And he has some sort of sore on his hand, an oozing sore full of viscous white liquid that emerges as he fingers it. Clearly this itch that he’s scratching is not just a physical one, it’s a metaphorical one and it doesn’t take much to collate these pieces together to see an awful big picture. Gordon likes little boys and he has one of his own. Perhaps he hasn’t done anything at this point, but he wants to and whatever he’s used to stop himself thus far isn’t working any more.

So off he drives with his son, Paul, who’s probably in his early teens, to meet an old college friend, Denis, at a diner, and, if we hadn’t worked out what was going on already, we can’t fail to figure it out here. The double entendres about food are unyielding and the only way Paul can miss the nauseating eagerness of his dad’s ‘college friend’ is through really not caring in the slightest about any of this and losing himself in his game while the adults chat. ‘You’re not hungry?’ Denis asks Gordon and he’s really not referring to food. ‘Ain’t nothing like the real thing,’ he digs. ‘Ain’t that right, dad?’ In this scene, Nolan, who’s usually the dominant presence, clearly plays second fiddle to Oberst; Denis is so comfortable with who and what he is that he can generate nightmares just by eating a sandwich. Gordon is stuck in the uncertain ground between his companions. Paul is completely innocent, while Denis is that word’s every antonym: not just guilty but corrupt, immoral, experienced, cunning, impure and stained. Gordon isn’t that. Yet.

And they go back to Denis’s place and I’ll stop right there, after three and a half minutes of the fourteen that Heir runs. Let’s just suggest that what your twisted imagination might have conjured up for the rest is likely to be partly true and partly wide of the mark. I’ll avoid talking about where Gordon’s itch goes in reality and mention that it goes a heck of a long way in metaphor, a bubbling and boiling creature living inside of him, phallic of course and even more reminiscent of Cronenberg body horror than what we saw in Familiar because it’s as much science fiction as it is horror. I’ll also say that while it’s easy to see what this story is about, what’s truly going on in Gordon’s head is a complex tangle indeed. This is far from a black and white reading of an issue that many see in black and white terms and that’s going to generate controversy in itself, but where Gordon goes within this story is worthy of a great deal of discussion too. He’s a villain, make no mistake, but he’s also a hero in his way and that’s an odd thought to ponder.

The title is another conundrum, as it usually is with Powell’s films. Worm was a relatively straightforward title, albeit through metaphor, but Familiar carries a number of meanings and so does Heir. Does it refer primarily to the cycle of child abuse where the abused sadly become the abusers? If so, is the suggestion that Paul will become the heir to Gordon? If so, he becomes a more important character in this film than we might initially assume, given that he’s very much the MacGuffin of the piece. Or is Gordon the heir, a whole other story having unfolded before this one even begins? That idea gives depth to what Nolan has to channel in this role. Certainly mere progression suggests that Gordon might become Denis’s heir, but that’s where this story lies and you’ll need to watch yourself to see how that plays out. I love how Powell can endow so much depth into his short films, especially when they’re edited as tightly as this one. This makes the longer Familiar seem like a sprawling epic.

What’s really different here is that Nolan isn’t the dominant force that he has been previously. It was hard to acknowledge that anyone else existed in Worm and he was all over Familiar like a rash, but here he’s the lead character without being the dominant one. It’s fantastic to see Nolan and Oberst share a screen, especially when both have such gifts of characters to portray. Oberst gets the dominant one and he does it so well that I wanted to wash my hands when the end credits rolled. Nolan gets the one with depth but at the cost of emphasis. He’s tasked with playing a character driven in a number of different directions at once and that’s really difficult to do. I think he nails it at the beginning and at the end, but perhaps allows Oberst too much dominance at points in between. The diner scene is a great example of one that he gifts to his co-star when he could have fought a little harder for it; he had to stay subservient but not quite so far as he does. It’s still another great performance though and I can’t wait for a Powell/Nolan feature.

Jack's Back (1988)

Director: Rowdy Herrington
Stars: James Spader, Cynthia Gibb, Jim Haynie, Robert Picardo, Rod Loomis and Rex Ryon

Never mind the Superbowl, which we celebrated by going to a party and not watching the game, instead sitting outside to chat away the evening in good company over good food and good drinks. 7th February also marks the birthday of James Spader, one of the most consistently interesting actors working today. I felt we should join in that celebration, so we came home to watch Jack’s Back, an underrated thriller from 1988 that marked the debut of Rowdy Herrington as both a writer and director. He’d learned in Hollywood as a gaffer or best boy, working on films as notable as Repo Man and A Nightmare on Elm Street, but got his break here and did well enough to follow up with Road House and Gladiator (no, not that one). A little later came A Murder of Crows, which is also worthy of note. While Spader was turning 56, hardly a round number, the film explored a centennial by having a modern day serial killer recreate the murders of Jack the Ripper in Los Angeles, each a hundred years on to the day.

We enter the film as the LAPD prepare to hopefully avoid the final murder, as the original Jack the Ripper was most likely responsible for the ‘canonical five’ deaths of prostitutes in 1888 around the Whitechapel area of London. Whoever is recreating these crimes in the City of Angels is interesting because he shows restraint in his brutal killings, not only by waiting for each centennial but by cutting up the bodies only to the degree that his mentor did, which means that the third victim wasn’t mutilated at all. ‘Jack’s Back’ is an unsurprising headline reporting on the case and we see a clipping of it pinned onto what is surely the wall of the killer. We don’t see who it is, of course, but there are strong indications given that it’s a young medical student named John Wesford, who works at Dr Sidney Tannerson’s clinic, pisses off his boss with an astounding level of calm and clearly has a strong interest in the pregnant hooker he sees at the clinic. We know from the police briefing that the last victim will be pregnant and murdered at home.

From the hindsight of 26 years, we would be forgiven for adding that Wesford is played by James Spader, because this is precisely the sort of role that he’d be interested in. Back in 1988, he was primarily known for a brace of TV movies and such uncontroversial features as Pretty in Pink, Mannequin and Baby Boom. Perhaps the only edgy film he’d made by then was Less Than Zero, from the novel by Bret Easton Ellis. It wouldn’t take long for him to move towards the less conventional, though; Sex, Lies and Videotape came next, which broke him internationally and won him a Best Actor award at Cannes. This was an interesting role for a few reasons. Not only does he play John Wesford, the cops’ best choice for being their new Jack the Ripper, but he also plays his twin brother, Rick. We don’t meet Rick until the exact moment that John is murdered, having walked in on the last victim and been attacked by the apparent killer. He gets away but not for long. He’s followed, strangled and strung up in a staged suicide.

Only Rick knows better, because he saw it, in a nightmare. The introduction of the twin is done superbly. When he wakes up in bed, we assume that the murder was just a dream, but he looks out of the window to see a growing number of police cars congregating. He walks down to the murder scene, lifts the cover from the corpse and sees... himself. Well, his twin brother, as we now realise. And because we saw what John saw, we’re now set up to think that the new Jack is really a man named Jack, a big bundle of brawn called Jack Pendler who works at the same clinic as John Wesford. Naturally, the cops don’t want to hear Rick, because why would they trust some guy’s nightmare when they have a logical suspect already out for the count. He’s left handed, he’s covered in the last victim’s blood and he worked at the clinic which turns out to link all five victims. They need to shut up the press so they call this case closed, leaving just Rick to follow up on his sure knowledge that his brother wasn’t Jack but was murdered.

I need to quit the synopsis at this point because there’s quite a lot going on in this script, an ambitious one for a first time writer, who would go on to direct more than he would write. On one level, it’s a serial killer story, even if we come in before the fifth of five murders and that one takes place almost exactly a quarter of the way into the picture. On another, it’s a thriller, with a man aiming to catch a murderer the cops don’t believe still lives (or, if he does, it’s actually him). There’s also an intriguing story in the twin angle. John and Rick weren’t close and there was little history of paranormal connections between them but, as Dr Carlos Battera, the consulting psychiatrist working with the LAPD on this case, knows, there’s more than one example of one twin seeing the other’s death at the exact moment that it happens, even from a distance. I also like the social element that creeps in at points, such as how the patrons of a pub look uneasily at Rick, when his identical twin is being reported as Jack the Ripper.

So the script is decent, though there are a number of plot holes that can’t be ignored, especially during a finalé that clearly exists only to wrap up the various personal stories that have been building through the film; apparently we can safely ignore modus operandi at this point. Also, while the cops are treated with some respect, none of them cast in the standard LAPD thug stereotype, they’re also rather inept. With a case as prominent as this, you’d think they’d dot their i’s and cross their t’s before announcing the case is closed to the press and, given that they get it wrong, you’d think that they’d really make sure before they do it again. Rick does have a military background, so perhaps we can cut the cops who lose him so often a little slack, but I don’t see how to do the same with their bosses back at headquarters. After four murders that closely mimic the originals a century earlier, why don’t they have issues when number five doesn’t follow suit, given that she was given an abortion before being murdered?

The actors are decent too. Spader looks young, even though he had nine features, five TV movies and a TV show behind him, but he’s still more than able to flesh out two similar but different characters. Rick is a nice guy with a bad history, while John’s apparently a nice guy but might not be. Spader has no trouble depicting all of that and some of what he does is recognisable in more recent work, such as his ongoing performance as Raymond Reddington on The Blacklist; the early scene between John and Dr Tannerson, in which John is infuriatingly calm as he manipulates his boss into more and more emotional outbursts is textbook Red. Cynthia Gibb is the lady tasked with playing opposite both of Spader’s characters and she took a while to grow on me. She’s very wholesome with her perky nose, big glasses and trusting nature, and she’s easy on the eyes, so I can see why she’s in so many TV movies. I felt that she underplayed her role early on, but she grew on me throughout and had sold me on her performance by the end.

The supporting players are very capable and quite a few get the opportunity to get into their characters. Robert Picardo, always an underrated character actor, is excellent as Dr Battera, but Jim Haynie as LAPD Sgt Gabriel and Rod Loomis as Dr Tannerson do exactly what they needed to do and Rex Ryon is decent as the murderer of John Wesford who realises that he has to follow up with his brother Rick or risk being exposed. He’s large of body but small of mind without falling into the stereotypes that description might suggest. I should also call out Danitza Kingsley here, who doesn’t get much of a part as Denise Johnson, victim number five, but makes it her own and sells it absolutely, whether as a loud character raging out of Dr Tannerson’s office or a quiet one who regrets agreeing to an abortion even as she does so. It’s sad to say that her next film about a murder would be a documentary, which investigated the death of her ex-husband, ‘Good Time’ Charlie Minor, who was shot to death by a dumped girlfriend, Suzette McClure.

I really wish the ending hadn’t been such a cop-out because I was thoroughly enjoying Jack’s Back. The script kept me interested, the actors delivered well and the direction was interesting too. Right from the beginning, which unfolds to a third rate eighties rock song, it feels like a Michael Mann picture, just shot with a little less overt style and a little more grit. I felt that throughout, especially through the electronic score by Danny Di Paolo and the blue saturation used by director of photography, Shelly Johnson. It’s all very eighties and gets anchored there by the finalé borrowing far more than it should from Manhunter, another very eighties movie that works well as a reference point for a lot of serial killer movies to follow. The ending doesn’t render the film not worthwhile, it just leaves us wondering why Herrington, who had done such a good job up to that point, couldn’t finish up his debut more effectively. It merely knocks the film down from underrated gem to obscure title that’s worth seeing.

Max Mon Amour (1986)

Director: Nagisa Oshima
Stars: Charlotte Rampling and Anthony Higgins

Happy birthday to Charlotte Rampling, surely one of the most interesting and unpredictable actors in an era where neither adjective is deemed beneficial by most filmgoers. She turned seventy on the 5th and I wanted to celebrate by reviewing one of her films. There are plenty of odd little gems in her filmography to choose from, whether they were made in the ’70s such as ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, Zardoz or The Night Porter, the ’80s like He Died with His Eyes Open, Angel Heart and Mascara, or even later, such as Asphalt Tango, Swimming Pool or Melancholia. I ended up picking Max Mon Amour, a movie which will turn thirty this year. It’s a truly international picture, made in France by a Japanese director with three English leads, who alternate between the English and French languages throughout, and supporting actors from France, Spain and Italy. It’s also a surreal picture which I saw soon after it was released and didn’t understand in the slightest. It’s surely about time to revisit it and see if I’m now able to understand what it aimed to do.

And, long story short, I still don’t have a clue. It’s simple to explain what happens but not so easy to find the meaning behind it all and there are a bunch of alternative solutions to the puzzle. However, I’m now of the opinion that there isn’t an intended solution, as it follows the surrealist approach of Luis Buñuel in not only the wild and confrontational subject matter but also the style in which it was filmed, which is an elegant, simple and straightforward one with no cinematic gimmickry anywhere to be found. The theory is that it isn’t needed, because everything should be utterly routine except for the one wild aspect which leaps out as utterly ridiculous. That’s the one on which we should focus, not merely for its own sake but to see how everyone else interacts with it. Many of Buñuel’s best films, such as The Exterminating Angel, are inexplicable when taken literally but rewarding and insightful when read as social commentary. It’s a safe bet that this works best that way too, if only I could decide what it’s actually commenting on.

We’re here for Peter and Margaret Jones, an English couple living in France where he works as a diplomat and she works as, well, a diplomat’s wife. They live in a gorgeous house, furnished with antiques and old masters, which is kept in pristine condition by Maria, a full time maid. And, as is expected in polite French society, they have lovers on the side. Peter’s clearly having an affair with his secretary, Camille, while his wife has had dalliances with Mr Archibald, who’s been absent for a while, working in the Lebanon. Each is aware of the infidelities of the other and they’re so polite that they can all sit down to dinner together on Margaret’s birthday. However, Peter discovers that his wife is also getting up to something else on the sly, lying about where she’s been and what she’s been doing, and that bugs him. He hires a private detective who is able to track down the shabby place she’s rented in a shabby neighbourhood and Peter goes there to catch them in the act. All straightforward so far, right?

Well, he finds that she’s cheating on him with a chimpanzee named Max and everything gets continually weirder from there. Certainly this is a surreal comedy of manners, because things proceed in a strangely polite fashion. ‘I thought I knew you well,’ comments Peter over dinner, before suggesting that Max move in with them. Maybe it isn’t just satirising French infidelity but the British stiff upper lip, as Rampling and Anthony Higgins are both English. Is this a race metaphor, given how multicultural it was in France in the eighties; is Max the scandalous thought of a black or Algerian lover just taken to extremes, someone who would, through their mere existence, be a step too far for polite society? Could it be more straightforward: just a commentary on the bestiality fad which swept European pornography in the 1970s? I remember stories of Bodil Joensen, who ran an aptly named animal husbandry business and loved her German shepherd, Spot, and all her animals both sexually and emotionally, both in real life and on film.

I have a couple of better ideas. One is that Margaret lied about her sexual relationship with Max, who she loves like a child, suggesting that their relationship is more like an adoption. For all Peter’s inquisitiveness about whether his wife and the chimp do it or not, he’s more jealous of the love that passes between the pair, even during a gloriously uncomfortable scene at her birthday dinner, at which their guests see just how close they are. Peter reacts later, with a telling line: ‘You never loved me like that.’ A pro is that this English couple have themselves been adopted by France, but a con is that they already have a real son, Nathan, who lives with them. However, their bourgeois politeness leads to little emotional exchange with him, or indeed between each other. It’s not that these parents don’t care about their son, but they talk to Nathan roughly like they talk to their maid, Maria. Perhaps Margaret is rebelling against that relationship and Max is her means of exploring her more emotional side.

Or, perhaps, even more likely, everything we see is a red herring and this is all a way for Margaret, who’s not French, to win her husband back from the French social custom of expected infidelity. This theory has merit but I’d have to watch the whole thing again to see if it really holds true. Certainly, Margaret admits to bestiality but it’s never seen, not by us and not by Peter, who constantly pleads to watch, not because he wants to get his rocks off but because he wants to know that it’s really happening, that the act is even possible with a chimp and what Margaret gets out of it, given that chimps are only supposed to last a few seconds. So could this be an elaborate plan to get her husband so focused on her that Camille becomes just an memory? Certainly Higgins initially plays Peter as unemotionally as a robot but he gets more and more emotional as the picture runs on, while Rampling, who can do Machiavellian in her sleep, stays on an even keel throughout, even as the character who’s emotional, being overtly in love with a chimp.

Who knows? Jean-Claude Carrière, who co-wrote with director Nagisa Oshima, was experienced in the art of the surreal, having written seven films with Luis Buñuel, from 1964’s Diary of a Chambermaid through 1972’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie to That Obscure Object of Desire in 1977. This seems very much like another one, though Buñuel had died three years before its release, and I intend that as a firm compliment. I think he just had a lot of fun with extrapolation, ways in which to shake the famous French politeness and the bourgeois acceptance of everything. Can there be a more French moment than when Mr Archibald visits his married former lover with a bouquet of roses and a psychoneurologist because he feels she needs help? Why not introduce a prostitute, who attempts to proposition Peter in the street only to find that he brings her home to strip off to make love to Max just so he can see what it would be like? And, of course, have young Nathan interrupt the half naked young lady leaving. What a childhood!

Like every surrealist film, this is certainly not for everyone. It’s not as slow as you might expect, but it’s a very calm movie and audiences used to rapid fire editing and Jerry Springer Show histrionics aren’t going to get this in the slightest. Indie film fans might get turned away by the ostensible subject matter or that relentless calm, but they might get drawn in by the nature of the piece and the performances. Rampling is a glorious cipher throughout, Higgins finds his moments and the combination of Rick Baker’s creature design and Ailsa Berk’s movements work wonders as Max. This chimp looks pretty much like a chimp, as it should, of course, but it’s impressive to have to look closely to realise that it isn’t one, thirty years on. It’s definitely a step up from the old Planet of the Apes movies, even if it isn’t up to the CGI of the latest one. Berk is a dancer and actress, most famous for playing Aslan in the British TV adaptations of Narnia books but also characters in Return of the Jedi, Greystoke and Return to Oz. She deserves more credit.

Bizarrely, the most successful angle to the film may also be its least successful. Oshima was no stranger to controversy, having helmed the art porn movie, In the Realm of the Senses, a decade earlier, and this bestiality comedy could easily have raised as much concern, but it ends up safe and civilised and oddly inoffensive. I don’t think there’s a single swearword uttered and, beyond never seeing any bestiality, we only see one pair of boobs (courtesy of the delightful Sabine Haudepin as Françoise the prostitute) and a single shot of Rampling’s butt as she walks out of a room. In fact, as the film runs on, we actively wonder why we’re not being offended or outraged but instead finding an odd sense of sympathy for this strange family. What husband would allow his unrepentant wife’s lover to move in with them, especially when it’s a chimpanzee? What wife would allow that to happen, especially when their son lives with them? What viewer would accept a bestiality film so inoffensive? Maybe I’m more bourgeois than I thought.

Death in the Desert (2015)

Director: Josh Evans
Stars: Michael Madsen, Shayla Beesley, Paz de la Huerta, Jon Palladino and Roxy Saint

If this film’s story sounds familiar, it’s because it is. The screenplay was based on the non fiction book of the same name by Cathy Scott, which looks at the life and death of Las Vegas casino heir, Theodore ‘Ted’ Binion, the homicide investigation that followed his drug overdose and the trials (plural) of Sandy Murphy and Rick Tabish, his live-in girlfriend and her lover. Binion died in 1998, so it’s not ancient history, and we have had plenty of opportunities to catch it in books like this one, coverage on TV shows like On the Case and American Justice and in at least one TV movie, 2008’s Sex and Lies in Sin City. It was fictionalised on CSI and even turned into a musical spoof. What’s more, the whole story feels like quintessential Vegas. If we’ve seen one movie about the underbelly of Las Vegas, we’ve seen ’em all, right? This time, the movie merely wasn’t directed by Martin Scorsese and Joe Pesci isn’t anywhere to be found. Well, not quite, as it turns out to be surely the most interesting take on this age old story that I’ve seen yet.

Now, don’t get me wrong, Michael Madsen plays the character we expect, merely renamed here from Ted Binion to Ray Easler, and what he goes through is the story we expect. The difference is that we don’t get to see much of it at all, because it tends to unfold offscreen, out of our sight and, more importantly, out of sight of Kim Davis, the Sandy Murphy equivalent, because, while this is Easler’s story, we’re watching it unfold from Davis’s perspective. Initially this feels a little off and it gets progressively more off until we twig to the approach that John Steppling (writing as John Melmoth) and director John Evans took. We don’t watch Easler grow, because we join his story when Kim does. We don’t meet his estranged wife, because he keeps her away from his girlfriend. We’re never a fly on the wall to his business meetings as she’s not there. We don’t find out just how much danger he’s in until bullets are fired through their house windows. We’re kept out of the loop because Kim is kept out of the loop. Only our experience fills in the gaps.

We’re here to watch Kim, played by Shayla Beesley. She’s a California girl who moves to Vegas and starts that familiar decline: she pawns the diamond that’s the only thing she has of worth and loses the money on the roulette table, she gets a job as a stripper and clearly sells her body on the side because that’s the way she meets Ray, the swaggering big shot in the cowboy outfit who takes a shine to her and waves his money around, starting with some for her services rendered. However, she’s not yet the broken soul that some of her companions are. She lives with Margo, who Paz de la Huerta plays like a woman who’s been chewed up by the lifestyle and spat back out again. Frankly, Margo is a scary lady, like Cory, Kim’s friend at work, who Roxy Saint endows with the impression that she’s only getting through her life with the help of illegal pharmaceuticals. She only comes to life when she sings at the Schizoid Pistol, because it’s what she wants to do and it’s the only time she feels herself.

By comparison to these two, Kim seems to be doing well. Sure, taking off her clothes in front of strangers and giving head to rich guys in broken down buildings is hardly a dream job, but she’s a pretty girl, she’s able to say no to free drugs and she knows not to admit who she is to a stranger who knocks on her door. Well, at least not until he explains that he’s Easler’s chauffeur with $2,500 to pick up Miss Davis for a lap dance. And so the relationship begins. She knows that he’s married. She knows that she’s just the young and pretty girl to hang on his arm in public and service him in private. She knows that it’s not going to be this way forever. But hey, he buys her a car and a horse and takes her to posh dinners. He owns the town. Beesley plays Kim like she’s a fish out of water who’s trying very hard to learn how to swim. She’s also not just Ray’s girl, she’s his mother and his nurse and his conscience, and when she occasionally recites, ‘Yeah, baby, whatever you want,’ sometimes she actually means it.

What I spent a long time trying to figure out is if Beesley was up to the task. Madsen struts his stuff as we might expect, swaggering and swaying through the film like a big shot who knows he can do pretty much anything he likes and often does so just because he can. He’s large and he’s loud and the screen belongs to him just like everything in Vegas. He also provides the narration, so he’s never far away. Kim is quieter, calmer and inherently subservient, so we watch her while we experience Ray. The question is whether the fish out of water is Kim Davis, Shayla Beesley or both. There are moments where Kim stumbles and we’re not sure if it’s really the actress stumbling, because she’s relatively new, only has a few credits so far and just impressed a casting agent enough to get a shot in an indie feature opposite a recognisable lead. Yet there are also points where she nails scenes so perfectly that we wonder why we ever doubted her talent. I found that I bounced back and forth between these two throughout. I need to see her in something else.

I ended up on the side of the actress, because everything we see is centred on her character and I didn’t think that the picture would have progressed without the filmmakers being in tune with her performance. Also, she’s depicted with more sympathy than what little I know of the real events might suggest. Within the film, she’s the most sympathetic of the few main characters, even though she starts out as a stripper, becomes a trophy girlfriend and ends up cheating on her meal ticket with one of his colleagues, publicly too. However, she’s also a voice of reason who constantly works on Ray to quit his burgeoning drug use, a calm presence in his life who only gets into one shouting match in the entire film (truly unprecedented) and someone who apparently comes to actually care for him, even if she never planned it. In real life, the equivalent character was arrested for his murder, along with a batch of other charges such as conspiracy, robbery, grand larceny and burglary, tried, found guilty and locked up, until a second trial freed her.

If Michael Madsen, a frequent recognisable name in indie features, is easily the most obvious thing about the film and Shayla Beesley’s much more subtle performance is its actual focus, the script is the third real thing of note. The film’s plot synopsis might suggest that it’s really a love triangle, but that’s buried deep in the mix and John Palladino isn’t given any real opportunity to steal much attention. He’s decent as Matt Duvall, but the character has no real depth and he can’t compete with Madsen, who effortlessly steals his share of scenes, and Beesley, who looks halfway between Mariah Carey and Debbie Harry with perhaps a little Elisha Cuthbert in there for good measure. The script is what emerges to make itself known and I’m fascinated as to why Steppling and Evans chose to tell their story from such an unusual perspective. It’s an utterly original dynamic, alternately frustrating and invigorating, as we’re left out of the big picture to catch only its periphery when events or conversation bring Kim into those smaller pictures.

Visually it’s capable, with the production given access to a variety of locations and props that help to sell the affluence of Ray Easler without having to resort to cheap tricks. Regular viewers of indie features will see where money isn’t spent where Hollywood would have spent it, but it spends enough to work. Only in the supporting roles does its indie nature really show up, because some of the actors who get a line here and there clearly aren’t up to the standards of the rest of the production. A few are capable, like Charidy Wronski as a policewoman and some polite but knowing ranchhands, whose names I failed to catch, but most are not. Other weaker aspects include some slower scenes in the middle portion of the film and the way that the ending is left open wider that it should have been, given just how much has been published on this case and is readily available for anyone to explore by simply searching in Wikipedia, especially in regards to Easler’s fortune in silver and the favourable treatment given to Kim Davis.

Then again, this is fiction, even if it’s based on a non fiction book. The wise choice to change the names of the lead characters speaks to that. Kim Davis may be a sympathetic character, clearly innocent of any of the charges that were brought against Sandy Murphy in real life, beause they’re not the same; one was merely based on the other. It feels like they didn’t take that decision just to avoid being sued by someone who might get upset with any of the changes, but because they knew they’d changed things just enough to want to ensure that their creation is received as fiction. Braveheart this isn’t, thank goodness, and the film doesn’t begin with a banner that proudly proclaims, ‘Based on a true story!’ It’s a work of fiction and on that front it entertains, led by one strong lead and one subtle one and an odd experiment of a script. I wonder how many viewers will thrill to the different approach and how many will feel cheated because of what they don’t get to see. Maybe it’s down to the budget, maybe imagination, but it’s certainly original.