Repulsion (1965)

1965
Directed by Roman Polanski
Starring Catherine Deneuve, Yvonne Furneaux, Ian Hendry and John Fraser

This is it.  The final and slightly late-ish film in the 2017 Black (and White) Christmas Spectacular.  Released in 1965 well after color feature films had already become the norm, Repulsion is another one of those rarities that no doubt disqualifies me from writing for anything other than my own blog, because I wasn't into this one at all.  That 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes can suck eggs.

Well, alright, I didn't think this flick was THAT bad.  It's definitely a Roman Polanski film, that's for sure.  I have now seen all three movies in his "Apartment Trilogy," a non-connected series of horror flicks based around an apartment complex as its main setting comprising this, Rosemary's Baby and The Tenant.  All of them are slow burns, and that might be the understatement of the century.  For those not in the know, Polanski is a pretty legendary director noted in film circles for his ability to create paranoia on celluloid.  However, you don't come to the Lick Ness Monster blog for details like that.  He's also a pretty legendary perv.  Now that's the kind of detail you come here for!  But if you want some analysis, paranoia as a theme often leads to lots and lots and lots of padding.  While all of that padding eventually does lead up to some kickass stuff, I can't say that it was an enjoyable experience.  Then again, it might just be that pesky glandular condition rearing its ugly head once more.  Introductory paragraphs completed.  Commence plot description.

Waxing about plots in a movie like this is a very challenging experience.  Advance warning - prepare for lots of padding in this review, just like there is lots of padding in this film's 105-minute running time.  I can't help but notice that my enjoyment of a lot of these older horror films has dipped as time has passed and directors have felt the need to expand the movies past the 75-minute mark.  To this day, I believe that horror is a genre best-suited to being right around 90 minutes, and this outlook will never change.  See the above rant?  That's one paragraph of my four-paragraph "plot" section of this review already killed, baby!

Your star character is Carol Ledoux, played by the impossibly hot Catherine Deneuve in a performance that deserves most of the praise it gets.  I say most because she definitely has a very thick French accent and it's a bit hard to make out what she's saying through some of the dialogue scenes.  But this is a fairly long film, and almost every shot focuses on her in some capacity, so it was no small feat that this character comes off as fairly three-dimensional.  She works as a manicurist, listening to the rantings of this one really bitchy customer in repeated scenes that has a pretty grisly payoff (and I'm not going to spoil that one).  If memory serves correct, the character doesn't have a WHOLE lot of dialogue, so it's more of a minor annoyance than anything.  Presence-wise, Deneuve has this nailed.

A good portion of the movie is spent simply living with the daily grind of Carol's life.  She lives with her older sister Helen (Yvonne Furneaux), but the real story here is watching her awkward interactions with men.  In particular, one man, Colin (John Fraser), who she has dinner with early in the film and promtply rebukes for the next five minutes.  And let me tell you something (brother), watching this guy try to beta-male his way into a second date during all of that time is one of the most pathetic things you've ever seen in your life, prompting an honest-to-goodness "oh, come on, give up, bro."  Knowing what is to come for Colin, my advice was rock solid.  Spoiler alert.

See, Carol has a real aversion to relationships and sexuality.  We watch her lie in bed listening to Helen and her boyfriend mackin' it in the adjacent room in addition to all of the ducking she does from creepy Colin.  Eventually, Helen and boyfriend guy head out of town on holiday, leaving Carol all by her lonesome in the apartment.  And then a whole bunch of stuff starts happening something like an hour into the movie, including one genuinely unexpected murder scene and this one really effective nightmare shot involving Carol walking down a hallway with hands stretching out trying to touch her.  The theme of this movie isn't hard to discern.

There are definitely movies of this type that I enjoy.  One of my favorite horror films of all time is Ringu, and that flick is the very definition of the slow burn and a big payoff.  That film had the benefit of a pair of truly awesome characters to ride along with, though, and this one doesn't.  Deneuve is definitely worth watching, both for her acting ability and ridiculous attractiveness.  Unfortunately, we also have to suffer through some bits of Colin whining to one of his friends about his inability to score with her, and those scenes...I'm not gonna lie, they almost made me bail on this movie.  But I don't dive into a movie these days without the intention of reviewing for this here blog, so I soldiered on like the pro I am.  Yeah.  A pro.  Some people might see details like this as enriching to the experience and falling into the mood of paranoia that Polanski was trying to replicate here, but I mostly just found it dull.

Which brings me to this movie's saving grace.  Namely, the third act.  Once everything becomes clear about the hallucinations that Carol dreams up throughout the humdrum existence of her weekend without her sister in the house, we actually get to see some pretty scary stuff.  The score by Chico Hamilton does a fantastic job adding to that mood in addition to the cinematography by Gilbert Taylor.  Everything builds up not to a murder scene or the police capturing Carol, but a reveal shown in a photograph that was no doubt a major inspiration on Stanley Kubrick in the finale of The Shining.  This whole thing was indeed chilling and left me a little disturbed walking away from the television.  Not quite enough to recommend this one, however, because there are just too many slow burn films that I deem as more worthy of your time.

Thus, I award this movie that currently ranks at #14 on Rotten Tomatoes' G.O.A.T. list ** out of ****.  Unless you're REALLY into movies that are big on theming and atmosphere over a satisfying story, I don't know if you'll want to watch this one a bunch.  And with that, I will be back next year with a series of exceedingly negative reviews.  Get ready.

Night of the Demon (1957)

1957
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
Starring Dana Andrews, Peggy Cummins and Niall MacGinnis

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later, a movie in the 2017 Black (and White) Christmas Spectacular that I can't quite recommend.  Night of the Demon isn't a bad flick by any stretch of the imagination, but I did find it to be a pretty damn tepid one.  A lot of the movies that I've watched this silly season have been great because they're all forward momentum with absolutely no time for bullshit.  The running time on this one pushes past 90 minutes, and it shows big time with how much shots there are of dudes sitting around in libraries talking about stuff.  Not terribly exciting.  Pretty much every critic alive disagrees with me.  I just thought I would throw that little factoid out there.

Without a doubt, director Jacques Tourneur had some grand plans for this movie.  It's shot with the kind of care and attention to detail that only directors pre-CGI could have.  There are also exactly three - count 'em, three - scenes that I absolutely LOVED, which we'll be getting to in due time.  So Tourneur knew what the hell he was doing; in my mind, it was just that the story wasn't big enough.  The plot comes from a 1911 M.R. James short story called "Casting the Runes," and with this, I now get another of the references in the "Science Fiction, Double Feature" Rocky Horror song.  With absolutely no knowledge of how long that story is, I can only surmise that the effort to stretch it to feature length was the undoing here.  With all of that said, let's go about unpacking said small plot in a big movie.

Within five minutes of the movie starting we get one of those aforementioned scenes that I loved.  Welcome to the house of Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis), a man suspected of dabbling in Satanism.  Although, is Satanism really something that can be dabbled in?  It kind of seems like an all-or-nothing proposition.  That theory gets tested when rival Professor Harrington (Maurice Denham) threatens to expose him and getes reminded of the threat that hangs over his head.  Upon driving home, a bunch of creepy sound effects start playing on the soundtrack...and then a freakin' animated demon emerges from the forest and kills the ever-loving f**k out of him.  This whole bit is really chilling and effective, and I'll admit to being amped for everything to come.  But then we meet Dr. Holden.

Yes, folks, Dr. Holden.  John Holden, to be precise, played by Dana Andrews and unfortunately a very mopey, somewhat dislikable character who dominates the plot from here on out.  Weirdly enough, I don't even think it's the way that the character was constructed - Holden is there to be the skeptic of the movie, the guy who believes that nothing that happened or is happening is because of any kind of supernatural slant.  But...I don't know.  A lot of the other reviews I've read of this movie just heap praise on Andrews in this role, and I'm sure he was a fine actor in his time, but here he just kind of comes off as a sanctimonious prick.  Is this truth, or is this just another instance of that incredibly rare (to the point of affecting one person on Earth) glandular condition?  Only time will tell.

The plot device is this: Holden is an American professor who is now in England to attend the conference where Harrington intended on exposing Karswell's Satanic cult.  There's also a quasi-love interest in the form of Harrington's niece Joanna (Peggy Cummins) who promptly contributes nothing else to the movie other than some red-hot black-and-white sexual tension.  We get some delightful bickering as Holden and Karswell mock each other's beliefs (or lack thereof) before we get the real crux of the story: Karswell casually informing Holden that he has three days left to live.  Gulp.

I should also point out that there is this whole side plot involving a character named Rand Hobart (Brian Wilde), another link between cult activity and Karswell.  Hobart has been cataonic since the death of his brother, and figuring out why takes up the bulk of the running time.  See, Karswell is able to cause anyone to be cursed by passing an unholy parchment onto their person - something that he did with both Hobart (who in turn passed the document back to his own brother) and now with Holden.  From here, the movie takes on the "race against time" format as Hobart figures out the mystery, eventually leading us to a final ten minutes that actually manages to redeem the movie somewhat in my own mind.  At least as much as a fantastic game of "pass the parchment" can be.  You'd be surprised how covert you have to be to get somebody to carry a paper around if they know it's coming back.

First, some good stuff.  The atmosphere of the film is fantastic, especially some of the stuff at Karswell's mansion.  In particular, there is one shot of Holden looing down what appears to be an endless hallway that glued me to the television screen.  On the acting end, MacGinnis turns in the best performance of the movie by far.  The character of Karswell really isn't some vile, nasty cult leader - at least in my own mind.  He's a guy trying to save his own skin, and the way that he does this is no doubt immoral, but weirdly enough the dude actually comes across as somewhat likable.  The music is also extremely well-done, granting all the shots of the English countryside and the jagged edges of the Karswell home its appropriate dreariness.

The problem that I had with Night of the Demon is that it's just a really boring film with a lot of padding.  How much padding?  There is a seance scene where various characters talk to Harrington, complete with a comedic gold traditional British song being sung beforehand.  It might not sound funny, but trust me...it is.  There's also a scene where Hobart is hypnotized into telling the audience the key piece of information about sacred parchments being responsible for all of the death.  Both of these take up something like five minutes of running time, and...slog.  For American release, it was trimmed down by roughly 13 minutes and re-titled as Curse of the Demon, and I can see why the change was made.  But I wanted to be legit - I watched this movie in its full, intended form, so that's what I'm reviewing.  Thus, the giant demon attack at the end of the movie can't quite pull it up to positive territory.  Oh yeah, spoiler alert.

The time for judgment is upon us.  ** out of ****.  The flick is definitely worth checking out for historical purposes, but it's not one that you'll ever want to revisit.  At least I won't.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956)

1956

Directed by Don Siegel
Starring Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates, King Donovan and Carolyn Jones

We've got another first here on the ol' blog, ladies and gentlemen.  This is the first version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers  I've ever seen, and that is some accomplishment considering just how many times this flick has been remade/readapted.  There's the late '70s version with Donald Sutherland's fantastic curly hair, there's the 1994 one with Meg Tilly and her retained ridiculous level of hotness after her even more ridiculous '80s prime, and then there's the Nicole Kidman version.  The less said about that one the better, because it looked boring as all get out.  They also seemed to take some words away from the title with each successive reboot.  George Orwell was right about language.  Now I've seen the O.G. version and have nothing else to compare it to, and I can report that this story is definitely worth the hype and the spot that it has in the NATIONAL FILM REGISTRY.  Suck it, anti-horror snobs.

Much like last week's film, Them!, this one was granted a big budget, a respected director and an accomplished cast by its studio and expected to be a big deal.  While a lot of people point to this period of history as a time when the studios relegated horror and thriller films to the summer teenage dead-time, I think they actually gave these flicks MORE respect then.  Universal had a whole wing of its library dedicated to heavily made-up monsters, after all.  Much like all of those Universal monsters, Warner Bros. had themselves a really strong piece of source material in the 1954 Jack Finney novel Body Snatchers, and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring snatched (/tomatoes) every last bit of tension that he could get from Finney's no-doubt tobacco-stained fingers.  How so?  Well, read up and find out.

The movie opens with Dr. Miles Bennell (Kevin McCarthy) screaming his ears out at a team of psychologists demanding to know why he is acting like an insane person.  We flash from here to the fictional town of Santa Mira, California.  More specifically, Santa Mira, California, a scant few days earlier, as Miles is called back to town due to a rash of people reporting mysterious ailments that seem to clear up as quick as they arrive.  McCarthy quietly turns in a performance for the ages, doing the Jimmy Stewart "everyman against impossible odds" role to perfection.  He's got a love interest in the form of ex-girlfriend Becky Driscoll (the lovely Dana Wynter - so lovely that her arrival in the movie is accompanied by tender, tinkly music) back in town after going through a divorce, and this plot manages to hold your attention without once getting annoying.  So then...the matter of those patients?

It starts off innocently enough, with Becky's cousin believing that her uncle isn't quite who he seems to be.  He looks the same, but something is off.  The glassy state and complete emotionlessness should be enough of a giveaway, but we have another hour left to kill.  The plot then moves to the strange case of Bennell's friend Jack Belicec (King Donovan) who has found a near carbon copy of himself in the closet.  Not soon thereafter, Bennell finds a similar copy of Becky in her father's basement.  Then, we get the dinner party, the trip to the greenhouse, and the discovery of the pods.

The term "Pod People" is definitely one that is familiar to horror fans.  Even I was more than aware of what they were many years ago, mainly due to the awesome level in the SNES masterpiece "Zombies Ate My Neighbors" and the host segments from the MST3K episode Giant Spider Invasion that pay homage to this film.  To a lot of people, Invasion of the Body Snatchers is the "Pod People" movie, and that's where the plot leads us from this point on.  The exposition is spelled out to us in the form of a couple of helpful pod people, and it goes as follows: these alien seeds have been travelling through space for eons, finally finding Earth in the farmlands of Santa Mira.  They hatch, take on the form of a host, and fully inhabit said host's mind and memories when the host falls asleep.  And now that Bennell and Becky know about the plan, they're target #1 for assimilation.

In the final trimester, almost the entire town has been copied and taken over by the pods.  There are some admittedly tense sequences as the hero and the heroine try to escape the town with the denizens after them, trying to also run away from sleep all the while.  I know it might not sound like much, but it is.  The finale, with Bennell and Becky hiding away in an abandoned mine and spotting that gigantic farm full of farmers ready to deliver the pods all over the country is actually pretty dreadful.  And I mean that in the best way.

Throughout my Magellan-like travels watching a lot of these older horror films, I've noticed a recurring trend that the material is taken deadly serious.  There was no 1980s nostalgia to pull from in the 1950s, so that self-referential tone just isn't there, and thank the lord for the nighttime on that one.  More than anything else, though, this movie is carried by Kevin McCarthy.  While there's a large group of characters that we actually get to care about in this flick, this is his movie all the way and he delivers big time.  But it's not just him.  Wynter is also compelling in her own way, as is King Donovan as Jack and Carolyn Jones as his wife Teddy.  I recognized Jones right away, as she was Elvis Presley's costar in King Creole, easily the best movie that the King ever did throughout his long and nonillustrious film career.  But I digress.

I'm wracking my brain trying to think of a weakness this movie has, and the only area that I can think of where Invasion of the Body Snatchers even comes close to being weak is that some of the middle section drags.  The stretch that lasts from Jack finding his body double leading up to the big reveal of the discovery of the first pod doesn't move along quite as brisk as the rest of the film, but it seems like I say this sort of thing every week.  Everything else fires on all cylinders, from the music to the camera work to the script to the performances.  It even has an ending that wraps up nice and neatly in about 30 seconds flat, and I cannot tell you how grateful I was that this movie was made in 1956, because I was immediately struck by that sinking feeling that a modern movie would probably carry on for another 40 minutes of terminal boredom involving the military going back to Santa Mira to fight off the Podded-up locals.  Three cheers for simplicity and 80-minute running times!

*** 1/2 out of ****.  It's definitely worth a buy and a watch for all horror fans, whether or not you're all about the history of the genre or not.

Them! (1954)

1954

Directed by Gordon Douglas
Starring James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan Weldon and James Arness

Longtime readers of the blog know one unequivocal fact: I am f**king terrified of insects.  Seriously, the damn things are the stuff of nightmares for me.  I've had some incidents with them over the years going all the way back to my childhood fear of grasshoppers (yes, seriously), including being frozen in fear for something like five minutes one time when a winged grasshopper flew into my car.  I'm well aware of the irony.  Nerdy blog horror guy can watch people get sliced up and go right to sleep immediately afterward, but bugs?  Yeah, keep them away.

As such, I knew that Them! was going to be a damn scary movie for yours truly before I even hit the "play" button.  I heard of this flick many years ago, back when I used to read every book about classic horror that my middle school library had.  The page-long spread in one of them about...um...Them! stood out immediately.  Out of all insects, ants are truly some of the most amazing, aren't they?  They can lift 20 times their body weight, they have a complex social structure, and they just seem to possess this weird intelligence that makes them slightly unnerving.  Throw these critters into an O.G. 1950s-style creature feature complete with the always great "nuclear testing makes something grow to Brobdingnagian proportions" plot, and you've got a winner.  Watching the story unfold, I also noticed several things that were later ripped off in James Cameron's Aliens, which we'll get to...RIGHT NOW!

This is a film that got plenty of critical praise at the time it was released, and it's easy to see why since the script here wastes precious little time building this palpable sense of dread.  A helicopter pilot is out cruising a lonely beat in the Mexico desert when they spot a lone little girl wandering around.  Sergeant Ben Peterson (James Whitmore, who is aces as the "everyman forced to be a hero" character) and his partner Ed Blackburn (Chris Drake) are on the scene to pick her up, and what they find is a child unable to speak, terrified into silence at whatever she has witnessed.  The girl is played by Sandy Descher, and while her role in this movie is brief, she makes an indelible impression - so much that it's easy to see why Cameron chose to ape this plot device with Newt in the aforementioned Aliens.  This sequence eventually leads to the discovery of two busted-up buildings, the latter of the two the site of a shootout between Ed and an unseen assailant that gives us our first offscreen screaming death.

Flash forward right along in our Screenwriting 101 lesson, as the film then introduces us to the rest of our main characters.  There's FBI agent Robert Graham (James Arness of Gunsmoke and my dad's favorite actor of all time fame) who fills in the "somewhat officious nice guy" role.  But then there's the real stars of this shindig, the antologists - Dr. Harold Medford (Edmund Gwenn) and his daughter Pat (Joan Weldon).  They give us some more dread as they share what their specialty is, and they are present when Ben and Robert go scouting the desert for whatever it is that's killing a whole bunch of seemingly random people for no reason.  Yeah, there's hints of romantic tension between Robert and Pat that pretty much goes nowhere, but just ignore that plot thread.  Eventually, Pat walks up that hill as she hears the curious sound that has been playing at various intervals throughout the film thus far and sees...it.  A giant freaking ant.

Amazingly enough, the creature effects still look pretty good more than sixty years later.  I'm a broken record when it comes to this subject, but here we go again: hand-made effects are 17 times as effective as CGI, because when it's done right it looks like it actually MIGHT be real, as compared to Michael Bay's goddamn crayola drawings, which just look like goddamn crayola drawings.  For its time period, Them! had a big budget to work with, and it's a good thing because the ants are onscreen quite a bit from this point in the movie forward.  Medford gives us the requisite science lessons that accompany the events and attack scenes, explaining that this desert was the site of the very first nuclear test a decade earlier.  Yup, we tampered in God's domain, or something.

The pace in this movie is brisk, and all of the big set pieces fire along in a slam-bang way.  We go from the ants' nesting site in the desert (and man, that sequence was nothing short of gut-wrenchingly tense for this guy) to an offshore ocean liner to the canals underneath Los Angeles.  There's a lot of yelling, a lot of politicians wondering how the hell they're going to keep 30-foot ants under wraps, and a lot of machine gun fire.  There's really a lot of that.  The finale takes place with the ants threatening to colonize L.A., and as I type this I'm actually feeling trepidation imagining such a thing happening under my small Minnesota town.  Ick.  And yes, folks, I was into the climactic scenes of this movie.

The writers here did a great job with both main things they set out to do.  First, they wanted to create a likable group of main characters, and this is a really memorable bunch.  Peterson has the emotional stakes of trying to avenge the death of his state trooper understudy, while both Medford and his daughter serve as the representatives of science doing their best to use their intellect to save mankind.  Because if these bugs manage to make a decent amount of colonies, it's the end of civilization.  Yet more nightmare fuel.  These likable characters lead us into goal #2, as we get more than a few truly cringe-worthy moments with these characters in peril.  The first reveal of the scout ant in the desert with Pat coming face-to-face with those mandibles...don't even get me started.  But then again, I don't know many other people besides myself who avoid knocking over anthills at all costs because they're worried that they'll sneak into your bedroom and kill you at night, so your mileage might vary.  And folks, I wish I was making that up.

While I greatly enjoyed pretty much everything this film had to offer, I will admit that it does lose some of its steam in the second half.  I think the movie would have been damn near perfect had they just confined the entire story to the remote New Mexico population and the vast desert, ending with the long, slow descent into the colony and coming face-to-face with the queen (a scene that we do get, and yet another thing that Cameron would later xerox).  Once the bugs start hitting different locations, the tension kind of dissipates, in no small part due to the fact that we are then introduced to a bunch of government officials that I couldn't have possibly cared less about.  I also think they should have kept the terrified mute girl around longer in the story than they did.  Hey, I never said that Cameron didn't do a GOOD job ripping this movie off!

Those flaws, though, are very minor.  If you like good 1950s-era acting and special effects and you're scared of bugs like I am, odds are you'll really enjoy this movie.  *** 1/2 out of ****.  And you can bet your ass I ain't watching this one again.