Gently Johnny: A Picture Book Story

"A picture of me arresting somebody would look soooo cool right here."
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The bacon trees are in bloom!
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and the manager gives me a smile;
'cause he knows that it's me;
they've been coming to see;
to forget about life for a while.
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"Excuse us please. Is this the Overlook?"
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Here comes the king, here comes the king, here comes the big number one.
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You're stupid!
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No you're stupid!
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Touchdown!!!
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Best tailgate party. Ever.
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For the real deal, go here. Best review of this film you'll read.

It was always Peter

I recently watched The Curse of Frankenstein again and was once again impressed with how boldly Hammer Film Productions, director Terence Fisher and write Jimmy Sangster all worked together to produce such a splendid reboot of a story (before they were called reboots and one year before their Dracula reboot) so familiar to so many fans. How they took the basic framework of the story and twisted it around just enough to make a story they could call their own while still enjoying the benefits that come from attaching the name "Frankenstein" to the end product. I was again impressed with how well Christopher Lee does in evoking sympathy for the pathetic creature he must play, much more pathetic than his original literary counterpart or the 1931 Universal creation. But more than anything I think I realized, or perhaps better put, finally let myself accept, that without Peter Cushing Hammer films would have never succeeded. That is high praise indeed and I intend it to be the highest praise I can give to an actor underrated by legions of non-horror fans and deified by those in the fold.

Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee are associated with Hammer more than any other two names but the two films that put Hammer on the horror map were this one and the previously discussed Horror of Dracula and in both, even Dracula, Lee is but a supporting player. It is Cushing that carries both films. It is Cushing that makes both films. Without Cushing neither film would have been the success it was and Hammer, perhaps, would have moved on to other things. Goddamit, it was Peter. It was always Peter.

And it's not just that this film, this Frankenstein, wouldn't have worked without Cushing. The 1931 Universal Frankenstein wouldn't have worked with Cushing in the role of the doctor. That role needed an actor who could exhort wildly that his creation had life and then recede into the framework while we follow the monster and his doings. Colin Clive played that role and did it well. But this Frankenstein is Cushing and nothing else. The creature is damn near an afterthought. In fact, he could have never succeeded in bringing the creature to life and it wouldn't have hurt the movie. He could have just kept on killing people and kept on trying and that would have been enough. With another actor it wouldn't have been but with Cushing? Yes, easily.

Peter Cushing had an intensity as an actor that few like him have possessed. Critics and actors like to use the word "intensity" to describe the Marlon Brandos or the John Garfields of the acting world (or any actor associated with Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler or Sanford Meisner), actors playing a brutal or brutalized working class American raised on the streets of Brooklyn. But Peter Cushing had an intensity that put all of them to shame - And NO, I am not just saying that for the sake of hyperbole, October celebrations or to give respect to a disrespected genre. I am saying it because it is true. How many people remember Peter Cushing in Star Wars? Everyone! He has but a few lines and yes, I know it's among the most popular films ever made so even minor characters are known, but still, with all the action and starfights and light sabers and Darth Vader roaming around all moody-like there's Grand Moff Tarkin, and he stands out. Now, think back to the movie, the whole saga in fact. There is no character working for the Empire, save the Emperor himself of course, who does not tremble in Vader's presence, except Tarkin. Cushing's intensity was such that he simply wouldn't have been believable fearing anyone.

It is that intensity that makes his Dr. Frankenstein such an astonishing creation. His face, his eyes, his build, his manner of speaking all signal to the audience far beyond the machinations of the script that this Doctor is mad. Homicidally mad. And that becomes our story, and would further become the story of more Hammer Films Frankensteins because fans couldn't get enough of this great yet sadly unheralded actor playing crazy. Peter Cushing changed the way horror fans thought of Doctor Frankenstein. There was the Doctor from the Universal films, the Doctor from the television productions that followed the novel more closely or even the Doctor from Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein. They all had a madness to them, an obsession that drove their desire to create life from dead tissue. But they were all also, at their core, decent human beings who loved and felt guilt and revulsion at what they had wrought upon the world. And then there's Cushing's Frankenstein. No guilt, no revulsion. This Doctor is a bastard.

While the movie contains many scenes that make this clear, including a scene early on where the good doctor kindly ushers a brilliant scientist guest to his death over the second floor railings just so he can use his brain for his reanimated creature, the scene that projects it best and brilliantly is one of true horror and perversion. Frankenstein has dug up his first failed creature and brought him back to the lab where he has chained him to the wall and brought his former tutor and mentor to the lab to show him off. He orders him thuggishly to "Stand up!" "Sit down!" and so forth while the creature performs these rudimentary actions with oafish inexactitude. His mentor, and the audience, see a pathetic and horrifying display. A mentally disabled man, chained to a wall, clearly afraid, being yelled at to perform like an organ grinder's monkey. But one look at Frankenstein and the audience knows he's thinking, "Isn't this great?! Look at this! That son of a bitch does whatever I tell him - And he was DEAD before! Goddamn I'm good! Aren't you stunningly impressed?" Peter Cushing's Frankenstein cannot, will not, see that he has done something morally repugnant. He can only see personal glory no matter what the cost has been to others (Cushing would have been superb as Colonel Nicholson in Bridge on the River Kwai - not that Alec Guiness wasn't mind you).

The Curse of Frankenstein put Peter Cushing in the public eye but he never achieved the peer recognition that an actor of his immense talents should have. The Curse of Frankenstein is a fantastic reboot of the Frankenstein story but without Cushing it would have been so much less. The Curse of Frankenstein and The Horror of Dracula that followed set Hammer up for life but none of it would have happened like it did without Cushing. It was Peter. It was always Peter.

Burn Witch Burn!

City of the Dead was released in September of 1960 in England and several months later in the United States, along with an unfortunate re-title Horror Hotel. The change in name didn't help its fortunes in the states and the movie quickly fell off the radar of horror fans the world over. It didn't help that it was released just months after Psycho (but began filming a full month before Psycho) which grabbed all the business and all the headlines with its shocker story and twist ending. Another strange turn of fate was that both films used a similar structure in setting up their respective stories. In both films the heroine goes off on her own to an isolated hotel/motel and around the halfway point of the movie is quickly and unexpectedly killed, both times by stabbing. But that's where the similarities end and one wishes the film had been given a better release because City of the Dead is an excellent tale of witchcraft, sorcery and sacrifice.

Tony Award winning actress Patricia Jessel plays Elizabeth Selwyn, a witch burned at the stake in 1692 but living on in the ghost town of Whitewood, Massachusetts, just the place our heroine, Nan Barlow (Vanetia Stevenson), decides to go to research a paper on the occult. She finds the town by way of her professor, played by Christopher Lee. He recommends it to her having grown up there and we soon suspect the Professor may in fact be a member of a coven intent on sacrificing two women every year, one on Candelmas Eve, and one on the Witches' Sabbath.

John Moxey, the film's director, displays a real gift for mood and atmosphere but don't look for any great list of cinematic achievements from him. Except for this feature film and two others he spent his entire career directing nothing but shows and movies made for television, including the original Night Stalker pilot. But here we can see his visual gifts were strong and he takes the rather drab set of the small town with its storefronts and sidewalks straight from the backlot and infuses it with a real sense of claustrophobia, isolation and creeping menace. And he does an admirable job of creating tension and suspense as our two heroes, Richard Barlow (Dennis Lotis) and the dim Bill Maitland (Tom Naylor), race in the end to rescue the second sacrifice before time runs out, in a climax a bit on the ridiculous side (the way the coven is disposed of is questionable for even the most forgiving viewer). Nonetheless, Moxey does a great job with it and it's a shame he didn't have a more successful career with theatrically released movies.

Christopher Lee, affecting an American accent satisfactorily, does well with a small role as does Valentine Dyall in the role of Jethro, Elizabeth's former lover. But the movie is dragged down in the first half by the lifeless Vanetia Stevenson as Nan Barlow, an actress simply lacking all charisma. It's not that she's bad with her delivery, it's that she's blank in her delivery and had the movie focused on her entirely it would have been a lost cause. Fortunately, many of her scenes are played with Patricia Jessel, an actress of commanding strength who rightly grabs our attention every moment she is on the screen.

City of the Dead isn't as famous as a movie with its sense of atmosphere and mood should be but perhaps that will change. It's in the public domain and has been released on a twofer DVD with William Castle's House on Haunted Hill for a dollar. Yes, a dollar for two movies and yes, believe it or not, it's a pretty good transfer. If you can find a copy of it somewhere for sale I recommend giving it a look.

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Here is the opening sequence to City of the Dead, an opening sequence I absolutely love. You might recognize the shadowy figures at the beginning as being the stars of my first "They're Coming" trailer for October. The last notes of an 'Ave Satani' type chant (16 years before The Omen) can be heard from the credit sequence as we go to 1692 Massachusetts and the burning of Elizabeth Selwyn. The scene ends by abruptly cutting us to the present as Christopher Lee lectures to his students. Enjoy.

One extra clip. This clip was a "WTF" moment for me when I first saw City of the Dead. Nan Barlow (Venetia Stevenson) has been relaxing in her bathrobe and decides to join the guests in the lobby dancing to jazz. In a completely gratuitous moment of "let's show off the blonde" she removes her bathrobe to reveal she is a... French whore! Enjoy.

This. Is. Horror.

Dracula is horror. He's not the first horror figure by a long shot, that role belonging to some long-forgotten figure spoken of in the caves and drawn on the walls, probably some part mammoth, some part monster. And he's also not the oldest passed down in writing either, with such figures as the golem far surpassing his longevity. But Dracula is horror. He is monster, myth and menace, sexual menace, rolled into one.

Dracula is dread. He's the guy who comes into your home, into your bedroom, and takes care of your wife or fiance while you're away, or just in another room. When he leaves she has a disease, one that you can't cure unless you kill him before she dies and if she dies first there's nothing to do but drive a stake through her heart and cut off her head. But the part that really stings is... she can't wait for him to come back. And it's not like you can compete with him because you can't. See, it's not about looks because he doesn't have any. He's dirty, has a foul odor, sleeps in a coffin and has hairy palms... and she can't wait for him to come back. But it gets worse: He is most decidedly not a subject of the British Empire. Oh no, he's one of those swarthy types, an Eastern European lacking the refinement of a well-bred, well-educated Anglo-Saxon man. That's right, your girl has the hots for a foreigner. A foreigner who spreads disease and can disarm you physically in seconds, throwing you to the ground or out the window while your best girl pants in expectation and pulls back the sheets. You. Are. Impotent.

Dracula is the Victorian man's worst nightmare. And Dracula can be or mean almost anything. He can be the sexual predator, he can be the untrustworthy foreigner or he can simply be the monster hiding under the bed. The fact that Dracula can stand in for so many ills and dreads of our society as the perfect scapegoat is a testament to how well drawn he is in the epistolary novel written by Bram Stoker and first published in 1897. But I'm not here to talk about his multiple meanings or vampire symbology or why people are so afraid of the whole sense of "other." Rather I am here to state boldly and without reservation that the movie that best understands everything stated in the first two paragraphs is 1958's The Horror of Dracula (Dracula in Britain), directed by Terence Fisher and starring Christopher Lee as Count Dracula and Peter Cushing as Doctor Van Helsing.

The Horror of Dracula is a reboot, only they didn't call such things reboots in those days. It takes the basic, very basic, story of the novel and runs with it. The names are changed, the relationships are changed, the plot points are changed. But what they do is more extraordinary than providing a faithful adaptation (that was done by others later and didn't prove very interesting). What they do is cover the themes and ideas of Dracula and throw everything else away. Look not here for a deep reflection upon Van Helsing or Dracula or any of the characters. Look here for the bewitched damsel getting up to open those windows and unlock those doors because he's coming back tonight. Look here for a vampire woman attacking a good English man only to be thrown to the floor by Dracula and later to be staked, through the heart that is, by that very same good English man, already falling victim to the disease himself. Look for children led astray, burned impressions of crucifixes on foreheads, blood spurting death scenes and sunlight sending the unwanted one, that goddamn dark, stinky, swarthy son of a bitch, to his grave, as it were. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Horror of Dracula is about the idea of Dracula. It couldn't give less of a damn about the story of Dracula and that's why it's my favorite of the vampire genre. Because sometimes the best way to adapt a work of one medium to another is to interpret, not transcribe.

Dracula the vampire, and all of his ilk, will play strongly into the ideas and themes discussed this month here at Cinema Styles and so it seems fitting to introduce the month by introducing the Count but make no mistake: There will also be madmen and monsters, witches and ghosts, corpses and killers. It's October and we here at Cinema Styles welcome you and bid you good morning. Let the horror begin.

To Haunt or Not To Haunt

Horror fans love a good ghost story but the movies don't care for them much at all. Great ghost or haunting movies come out at a far lower rate than slasher, vampire or zombie movies and half the time they're not even real. What do I mean by that? Basically, there are the true haunted movies where the ghosts really exist (The Others, The Uninvited) and what I call the Scooby-Do genre where it's all just a ploy because someone wants someone dead, wants money or wants to scare everyone off their property and would have succeeded if only those meddling kids hadn't gotten involved (The Cat and Canary, The House on Haunted Hill). If the story is well told I can go either way, but in a pinch, I prefer when the ghosts are real.

I do find the Scooby-Do phenomenon odd at times though, I must admit. No other sub-genre of horror fools its audience into believing that Dracula really is a vampire, only to be revealed at the end that he really wasn't a vampire but a land developer trying to finagle a shady deal on Carfax Abbey until that meddling Jonathan Harker got involved. That just doesn't happen. Or a fake werewolf? Or a fake serial killer? Nope. But fake ghosts, yeah, they've got their own sub-genre.

They are also the only characters that truly reach across all literary boundaries. William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens never once wrote a play or story that contained a werewolf or a vampire. And no flying monsters or re-animated corpses. But ghosts? Shakespeare used them more than once and Dickens wrote one of the best ghost stories ever in A Christmas Carol. Ghosts are an accepted part of the culture and unlike horror monsters like vampires, many people really do believe in their existence, which makes a good haunting movie that much more effective, whether real or of the Scooby-Do variety.

The Uninvited is one of the best I have ever seen and I've mentioned it here before. It brilliantly combines humor with suspense and detective story with chilling tale of revenge beyond the grave. It is a favorite of mine and I've probably seen it three times, if memory serves, in the last two years alone. I also like The Changeling and The Others as far as more recent works go (well, if you consider the late seventies to the present to be recent - I do). Works from the sixties such as The Haunting and The Innocents are also favorites. And yes, The Cat and the Canary and The House on Haunted Hill as well. I don't care much for Poltergeist though I know it's a favorite of many. It's ending is too filled with special effects and big loud setpieces to work effectively for me. It feels more like a big-budget summer action movie than a ghost story. And despite today's banner I find The Amityville Horror rather forgettable.

And the reason I'm talking about ghost stories at all is because in the last month I viewed two others that are favorites of mine that I shall review here on Monday. Both hold up extremely well but my reaction to one, a revered classic, quite surprised me. I hadn't seen it in fifteen or twenty years and my reactions to it were completely different then I thought they would be. More on that Sunday and Monday. For now I leave you with the apologetic Christopher Lee and his quest for the truth behind ghosts: Are they real or not? Happy Hauntings.

An Unlikely Source

I grew up loving the old school horror classics of yesteryear, when make-up was painful to the actor, castles were models and you could see the strings on the bats. Universal, Hammer and Roger Corman were the obvious favorites but I'd watch anything from those periods, no matter who made them. Once my cinephilia took hold in my early teens I temporarily put them aside for the classics of Hollywood and the French New Wave. Italian Neo-Realism and the New German Cinema weren't far behind. As a result, I can say I've seen many of the foreign language pillars of the pantheon but sadly, I honestly can't remember most of them now. I almost hate having to engage in a conversation on Ozu or Fellini or Fassbinder because it's been so damn long since I took them all in I can barely remember basic plot points now. I feel that if someone asks, "Have you seen Ali: Fear Eats the Soul?" I should just say "No" even though I have, but so much has fled the inner recesses of my memory banks that saying "Yes" feels like the real lie. I'm slowly re-acquainting myself with them one DVD or AFI theatre trip at a time. It's a slow process but ultimately rewarding.

But that's neither here nor there, just an example of how one of my favorite genres (the other being Sci-Fi) got pushed aside for a period while I immersed myself in self-education on film history. When I returned to Horror movies, I found I didn't like them anymore. Not the classics I grew up with but the new product. This was at a time when horror meant slasher flicks and nothing else. I had to satisfy myself with meager offerings like The Lady in White or Ghost Story because they were the only movies that even made an attempt to get past the mad killer routine and offer a haunting tale for their viewers to take in. Horror made its way back into my fold once the obsession with psycho-killers died down but what kept me going until then came from a very unlikely source: Computer games.

Now I'm not a PC Game kind of a guy. I've never had any interest in them and the thought of spending hours in front of a pc or television screen shooting things makes me want run screaming for my life. But in the early nineties when CD-Roms were just starting up (before the internet made them virtually obsolete) most of the games released were under the category now described as Adventure Games. If you talk to someone who is into PC games you will find Adventure Games derided in every way possible. Adventure Games take a story and the player, using clues and inventory items (a schemata adopted by most other games now) works his or her way through it. And for whatever reason, in the early to mid-nineties, most of those games were in the Horror genre. And of the kind they just don't make anymore.

Back then, they actually filmed actors in front of a bluescreen performing multiple line-readings and scenes that would then be inserted over a computer generated backdrop for the user to manipulate throughout the game. The games I bought were The Seventh Guest, Phantasmagoria, The Beast Within, Sanitarium and Ghosts.

The acting in these games range from bad to outright atrocious but I lay no blame on the actors. The dialogue they are given is horrendous and I assume the rehearsal times were somewhere in the area of about three minutes prior to filming. Still, I played them. I didn't care about the game part, I just wanted to "watch" the interactive movie, as some of them were called, and see how it played out because all of them took an old-fashioned approach to horror: Haunted houses, possession by evil spirits, and werewolves. Something I wasn't getting from the movies.

Phantasmagoria tells the story of a young couple purchasing an old mansion in New England at the start of their marriage. She writes horror fiction and he's a photographer. She starts exploring the house (which has four stories, multiple hidden passages, a hidden crypt and, from what I could tell, one bathroom), asking townspeople about former residents (one of the townspeople played by Stella Stevens) and learning the history of its murderous first owner, a magician whose five wives all died under mysterious circumstances. She unknowingly releases a demon spirit (I'll spare you the details) that inhabits her husband and soon he begins acting like that crazy magician from days gone by. A not too bad movie could be made from it I'm sure.

The Beast Within told a tale of lycanthropy in modern day Germany, The Seventh Guest a kind of House on Haunted Hill take-off, and Sanitarium a tale of a scientist nearly killed then locked away in a mental hospital because he discovered that a medicine his company was profiting from was actually killing children. The last one in the collection, Ghosts, isn't a game at all but an informational CD-Rom, hosted by Christopher Lee, and yes, that's where all those ridiculous Christopher Lee video clips are coming from. Lee takes you through an old mansion where you get to click on paintings and cabinets and diaries to hear stories or read haunted tales or see "experts", aka paranormal nutjobs or skeptics like Susan Blackmore who gets about 90 percent less "screen time" than the nutjobs (it's not exactly fair and balanced) , talk about one spooky experience after another. And of course, you get six ghost stories told by Lee, one of which, The Silent Pool, went up here this past Saturday.

All of these hold a special place in my heart because they brought back the old-school horror to me at a time when I desperately needed it. And before the Star Wars prequels and The Lord of the Rings Trilogy came along, they gave actors like Christopher Lee work, and I am thankful to them for that too. And I still have all of them today. Occasionally I pull them out for nostalgia sake just to take a look at some the treats inside or marvel at how bad the acting is. And to be honest, I wouldn't mind seeing more movies made in the same spirit of old time horror that these now antiquated PC games picked up when the Hollywood slash machine dropped the ball.

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And while we're on the subject, let's have Old Chris give us some more fascinating advice, although as far as these things go, this one seems pretty lazy ( a bad omen? That's the best you can give me?):

The Silent Pool, told by Christopher Lee

A story to start the weekend off right. It's a little over eight minutes in length and tells the story of the Silent Pool. What is the silent pool? Well, it's a real place in England and Christopher Lee, our narrator and official Cinema Styles October Kill Fest Month Spokesman, gives vague directions on how to get there. It's done in the old fashioned way, that is, a recounting of horrible events with a coda concerning spirits one might find there today. Here's the story. Enjoy.

Water, Water Everywhere

Keep some towels handy because it's going to get wet around here. For the next three days October Kill Fest celebrates water, water everywhere, as in death by H2O.

Starting things off tomorrow will be a short montage celebrating ... well maybe that's the wrong word. This is Kill Fest month so the montage will be all about death in the water so I'm not sure I'm celebrating that. But I am celebrating movies that portray it. After all, some of them do a great job at it. Anyway, this being a kill fest montage it will obviously contain multiple scenes of death and killing so if you're not into that kind of thing don't watch but if you've seen a movie rated higher than PG at some point in your life then I can't see a problem. And it only uses thirteen movies, same number I chose for my pictures of the stars, because I'm a loser and thought thirteen would be a cool number to go with for October. And as an added bonus, the title could easily double for an underwater porn movie. Sometimes you just get lucky.

On Friday, a couple of waterized pictures of the stars will go up and on Saturday an eight minute film from the same source I've been getting all those ridiculous Christopher Lee clips from. Only this one is Lee telling a chilling tale of death by water. The video and pictures that make up the film come from the same mysterious source but the music was overlayed by me from composer William Stromberg. I hope you enjoy it. It's old fashioned, as in it simply relays a horrible turn of events and then ends by saying, "Even now as you walk by..." and so on. I think Lee does a fine job with it.

And if I think of anything to throw in in between it all, I will. The banners will carry on the water theme as well. So let the Kill Fest celebration of Death by Water begin. And the lifeguard is definitely OFF DUTY.

Christopher Lee Thinks You're a Vampire

Sorry, he's been acting a little weird lately.

Creepy Things to Remember: A Kill Fest Public Service Announcement

Another Public Service Announcement from Christopher Lee. Notice the odd cocking of the head at the end, as if confused by what he just said. Just one more little touch that makes Lee the best PSA announcer EVER!

Creepy Things to Remember - With Christopher Lee

Throughout the Kill Fest this month I'll be running these invaluable Public Service Announcements from Christopher Lee. It's information you need to know! After today, they won't get their own day's post (but hey, the weekends are slow so I'll wait until tomorrow for a written post) but rather will pop up on a random afternoon after that day's post has gone up. Enjoy, and remember this next time you watch some burning embers. The life you save could be yours!