Movie Monday: The Bat

This week's movie is the mystery/horror The Bat!

Being a fan of Vincent Price, I assumed I was acquainted with all of the man's films--I haven't seen them all, but I thought I had at least heard of any I hadn't. That is, until I saw The Bat listed on Netflix WI--what the heck is The Bat?

Well, The Bat is mystery/horror film that, this time, was on its third pass through the Hollywood meat grinder. It was originally a play, then turned into a silent film in 1926, only to be remade as a talkie called The Bat Whispers, which (rumor has it) was an inspiration to Bob Kane when he (co-)created Batman. For some reason, this third version is generally less well known; let's see if we can figure out why...

The film is almost entirely set in one location (it was a play, remember), a country mansion called The Oaks. Its being rented by mystery author Cornelia Van Gorder (Agnes Moorehead, awesome) and was the location of several grisly murders a little while ago. Did she not read the brochure?

(I'm pretty sure I had this playset for my Batman and Robin dolls in the 70s)

The murders were committed by a sort of monster/serial killer named The Bat, who rips out women's throats with steel claws(!). The Bat also lets a bat loose, which attacks people, like Van Gorder's maid. When its thought the maid has contracted rabies, they call their doctor, Dr. Malcolm Wells (Vincent Price), who is a bit of an expert on bats.

While all that is happening, its revealed a thief has stolen a million bucks worth of bank securities ans hidden them in The Oaks. In a great, tense scene, the thief confides in Dr. Wells, who turns on a dime and murders the thief in cold blood!

The Bat returns and commits a couple of murders, including a young woman named Judy (played by former Little Rascal Darla Hood, in her last film appearance). A police chief investigates, and he suspects Wells (since that's Vincent Price, that's only logical). But later on, Wells is killed by The Bat, so I guess that rules him out!

Visually, The Bat is no great shakes: this film was obviously designed as the back-half of a double bill (it runs just barely 80 minutes), so they didn't have a lot of money to spend on make-up. Still, with his dark suit and feature-less face, The Bat has a simplicity I like; he reminds of a Dick Tracy or Batman villain from the 1940s (indeed, his "razor-sharp claws" look like they were re-used for Catwoman on the Batman TV show).

Police Chief Anderson (Gavin Gordon) also suspects Van Gorden's new butler Warner. When Van Gorden manages to trap The Bat in a room in her house, The Bat is killed by Warner, and revealed to be...Police Chief Anderson!

The film ends with Moorehead talking directly to the camera (as she dictates her newest book to her secretary), none the worse for wear. She then declares, "Well, that's the end!"...and so it is!


The Bat is a humble little effort, but its always fun to watch Vincent Price, and Agnes Moorehead chews the scenery with aplomb. Maybe had it been directed with a little more flair, The Bat could have really been a minor classic, or at the very least a visual treat. Who knows, maybe The Bat could have come back! The Bat Returns? Bat Forever? The Bat Begins?

Movie Monday: Black Swan

This week's movie is the horror/drama Black Swan!

I generally stay away from reviewing newer films for Movie Monday, because I figure there are so many great/weird/interestingly bad older films that deserve a spotlight.

But the film I had planned on talking about for this week (an Italian horror/thriller) turned out to be so boring that right after watching it, I could barely recall anything that happened. I happened to have received Black Swan via Netflix the next day, so I figured why not?

Just FYI, I won't be revealing any crucial plot details or the ending, in case anyone out there still wants to see it:

Black Swan opens with a beautiful, wordess sequence of ballerina Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) dancing with her partner:

It's a gorgeous way to open the film, but it also hints at what's to come: via camera movements, we feel a slight sense of disorientation, like something's not quite right.

And of course, something isn't quite right: while Nina is a young, beautiful woman, director Darren Aronofsky shoots Portman in unflattering light, and she looks tired and gaunt. She looks stricken when she sees another young woman on the subway who looks a lot like her, but we can't quite tell. Its one of many indications that Nina is not well.

Nina is currently in the running for the lead in Swan Lake, directed by the slimy, arrogant director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel). She seems mousy, almost broken; and that is not helped when another dancer, Lily (Mila Kunis) arrives and joins the company, who always seems to be around every corner:

Nina's home life is no bed of roses, either: her mother (Barbara Hershey) is passive-aggressive in her tight-fisted control of her daughter, treating this young woman like she's a tiny child.

Leroy tells Nina she's technically good enough for the lead, but lacks the confidence to "let herself go" the way the part demands. When Nina forces herself to loosen up, she gets the part (taking over from the company's aging and bitter star, played by Winona Ryder). But the good news doesn't last long: someone seems to be chasing after Nina, trying to drive her insane, like when she emerges from a bathroom stall in an empty ladies room to see this:

Aranofsky spends a lot of time dealing with the physical abuse the body takes: the extreme diet, compulsive washing of hands, a rash that never seems to go away. During one sequence when Nina puts on her shoes, her feet have turned into something straight out of a David Cronenberg movie:

Nina and Lily become unlikely friends, but Nina's unbalanced nature turns the friendship into something more (a lot more; there's a fairly explicit lesbian scene between the two that felt more than a little gratuitous).

She fights with her mother, and it gets so bad it turns physical. The mother seems to want to arrest Nina's sexual development, and there's a disturbing scene where Nina is in bed and her mother asks from outside her bedroom door: "Are you ready for me?" before entering. The scene ends, and you never get to see what the point of the sequence is. I've read theories that suggest the mother is sexually abusing her daughter, and its become such a part of their dynamic that its simply routine.

Nina prepares for opening night, and her confidence is undermined further when she learns Lily has been named Nina's understudy. This leads to a scene in Nina's dressing room that goes so far in the direction of horror that, via the use of some silly-looking CGI, it pops the bubble the film was sitting on for the previous 100 or so minutes.

Nina goes on, and delivers a powerhouse performance as the Black Swan:

...at this point, I will say no more about the film's plot. Not that the ending is some huge twist, but it is worth watching fresh if you're planning on seeing the film.


Overall, I liked Black Swan; the performances are compelling and you get wrapped up in the story, thanks to Aranofsky's skill as a filmmaker. Unfortunately, the film establishes Nina's mental health (or lack thereof) fairly early on, and once you realize that she's coo-coo for cocoa-puffs, the film is another ninety minutes of piling on, showing us example after example of Nina's loose grip on reality. To that end, there isn't much of an arc for Portman; and while I think she's a fine actress I'm not really sure she deserved the Oscar for this performance: she basically goes from twitchy and crazy to more twitchy and really crazy.

Mila Kunis is great in the movie; her matter-of-fact, sorta-Bad Girl character cuts through a lot of the melodrama and self-seriousness of the rest of the movie, and I enjoyed every scene she was in.

Having finally seen Black Swan, I have to admit I'm a little shocked at how many critical raves it racked up; basically this movie could have been something Hammer put out in the 1970s, just with a lower budget and less of a high-falutin' air. Anyone who thinks this is some "amazing original vision" is someone who probably considers B-horror movies beneath them; so when an A-list director and star borrows those elements, it seems so daring!

Movie Monday: Shout At The Devil

This week's movie is the action/adventure drama/comedy Shout At The Devil!

I had barely heard of this movie until it was recommended to me, so when I looked it up I was pleasantly surprised: Lee Marvin and Roger Moore ("my" James Bond) in one movie together? Netflix WI don't fail me now!

Truth be told: I had originally planned to talk about Dario Agento's Inferno, a film I had never seen before, for this week's Movie Monday post. I tried getting through it, but I was a little bored and wondering whether I should keep going. Then I got to a sequence involving some nutjob and a bag of cats, and even though some of it was clearly faked, there was enough real footage of cats not being treated very kindly that I got disgusted and turned it off.

That left me a new movie to find, so I jumped at Shout at the Devil when it was suggested. So what's the first thing they show you in the movie? This title card:

...man, what is it with movies and animals this week?!? Let's just hope this title card is telling the truth.

Shout at the Devil opens in Zanzibar, with American expatriate Flynn O'Flynn (Lee Marvin) trying to make a deal with a local bigwig El Kelb (played by George Coulouris, who played Walter Thatcher in Citizen Kane!). Flynn is desperate and sweaty, and when its suggested he needs some sort of patsy to bring off his plan to smuggle ivory, he spots a suitable rube getting right off the boat: an English gentleman named Sebastian Oldsmith, played by Roger Moore:

Sebastian's money and passport are stolen from his hotel room, which ruins his planned trip to Australia. "Luckily" for him, Flynn is there to overhear Sebastian's distress, and offers to help him out:

Sebastian goes on the ivory-poaching trip with Flynn, which partly takes place on German-occupied land, which gets them in dutch with a German military commander named Fleisher. These initial action scenes are well-staged and full of old time movie brio, with the tone swinging between broad comedy and tense action, like when Flynn ends up in a river and is chased by an alligator:

They get into several more scrapes, with Marvin and Moore making a good pair: two movie stars evenly matched. Marvin in particular is swinging for the fences, with a broad comedic performance, while Moore is his typical British stiff-upper-lip guy, polite and debonair even while shooting and killing animals and people.

They end up on an island where Flynn has an estate, run by his daughter Rosa (Barbara Perkins). She is none-too-pleased to see the old man:

Rosa and Sebastian fall in love after Rosa helps bring him back to health. At first this is kept from Flynn, and when he discovers it Marvin practically makes the film 3D with an over-the-top angry speech, veins popping and eyes bulging:

Things take a grim turn in the movie when WWI breaks out, and Fleisher sets his sighs on Flynn's estate, burning it to the ground, attacking Rosa, and killing her and Sebastian's infant child. This sequence is quite difficult to watch, and plays with racial stereotypes so loosely that it's more than a little troubling: a bunch of Portuguese soldiers grab Rosa, and there's a series of quick close-ups of their grinning, evil faces shrouded in darkness as Rosa screams for help.

The next day, Flynn, Rosa, and Sebastian set out to get revenge:

Our trio is eventually recruited by the British to sabotage Fleisher's ship, The Blücher, which is undergoing repairs up river. You'd think this would be leading to the film's final sequence, but there's a lot more: a scene with Moore climbing into a plane and getting horribly wounded when it crashes:

...not to mention a long action scene involving some cannons that tear loose from their straps and go barreling down a hill, dragging one German soldier to his death and decapitating some locals when pieces of metal get loose and go flying. Overall, a pretty brutal sequence, even if the gore isn't explicit:

Finally, Flynn and Sebastian sneak aboard The Blücher (with Moore in black face, no less!) and set explosives. In the meantime, Rosa is captured by the Germans and brought on board, which means they have to sneak back on to rescue her! Whew!

I won't get into the details of the final scene; suffice it to say it doesn't disappoint. Moore as Sebastian gets to be more nasty and violent than he was James Bond:

BLAM!


All in all, I enjoyed Shout at the Devil quite a bit. Tonally its all over the place, from Marvin's Groucho Marx-esque name and pop-eyed performance, to the scene with Rosa and Fleisher, which is terrifying. And I didn't even mention Ian Holm is in the movie, playing Flynn's mute manservant Mohammad, who gets all sorts of physical comedy bits to do.

At two and a half hours long, Shout at the Devil is overstuffed with characters, settings, plot turns, and more. At the same time, that's one of the reasons I liked it: its a big, sprawling mess of a movie, with multiple ambitions, the kind Hollywood really doesn't make anymore. It reminded me a lot of John Huston's The Man Who Would Be King, released the previous year. That film is much classier and high-brow than this one, but in some ways that makes Shout at the Devil more fun!


This week's film was suggested by my pal Dan O'Connor. Thanks Dan!

Movie Monday: Union Station

Danger rides along on your way to Union Station!

Union Station is a relatively little-known thriller that came between Born Yesterday and Sunset Boulevard in William Holden's career, released the same year and also starring Nancy Olsen, who also appeared in the latter. But despite its modest reputation and ambitions (it runs barely 80 minutes), Union Station definitely has its charms!

The movie opens aboard a train, where secretary Joyce Willecombe (Olsen) sees something a little unusual: a car racing its way through traffic, speeding alongside the train.

In a neat little scene combining well-timed live and back-projected footage, Joyce sees two men get out of the car at the next station and get aboard the train:

This isn't necessarily all that odd, except when the two men get on, they sit apart and pretend they don't know one another. Also, one of them is carrying a gun!

Joyce tells the conductor of her suspicions, but he ignores her. Finally she badgers him enough to place a call to the cops. The one who gets the call is our hero, William "Tough Willy" Calhoun (great name!), played by the one-and-only William Holden, who gets a great intro shot:

Calhoun, too, thinks Joyce's suspicions are unfounded, but when the train stops at Union Station, she sees one of the men hide a suitcase in a locker, which contains the belongings of Lorna Murchison, the blind daughter of Joyce's businessman boss!

Turns out Joyce's boss knows about kidnapping, but doesn't want to get the cops involved for fear of his daughter's life. Calhoun and another cop, Inspector Donnelly (Barry Fitzgerald) get involved to try and stop the kidnappers.

Most of the movie's scenes take place in or around Union Station, like a good chase scene between Holden and one of the crooks. With his pitch-black coat and hat, Holden cuts a dashing figure against the bright Los Angeles (subbing for Chicago) sky:

There are a lot of characters in Union Station, so many that unless you're really paying attention its easy to get a little confused. There are a couple of good set-pieces; there's one scene where some of the cops and the kidnapped girl's father watch some silent home movies of her; leaving the film completely quiet for a minute or two.

There's another scene that's almost startling in its noir-ish cynicism: Calhoun and some of the other cops, demanding information from a suspect, drag him down to a train platform and threaten to throw him in front of a moving train to get what they want, pulling him back at the last second. This scene also cleverly splices live action and projected footage:

The case is resolved, of course; though I won't say how in case you check out Union Station for yourself. The movie ends on a jaunty note, with Inspector Donnelly nodding in approval of Calhoun and Joyce's realization they kinda like each other--of course they do, this is a Hollywood movie, after all!

Union Station was directed by Rudolph Maté, who also made the classic D.O.A. (released the same year), and the sci-fi extravaganza When Worlds Collide. He keeps the story moving a brisk clip, and while there aren't that many scenes that really stand out, the movie holds up a good little thriller, with some nice performances, a good early star turn by Holden, and some compelling visuals.

Movie Monday: The House on Skull Mountain

Every room is a living tomb in The House on Skull Mountain!

The House on Skull Mountain was one of those movies I remember seeing at the video store I worked at, probably a thousand times as I put boxes back in the horror section. In the days before DVDs, lots of obscure movies got put onto VHS, and The House on Skull Mountain, without any stars to show off on the box, always looked like one those.

I had forgotten all about it until I saw it surface on Netflix WI, so I thought why not give it a spin?

The movie opens promisingly, with this evocative, slightly old-school matte painting of the house in question. Remember: location, location, location!

After some shots of voodoo drums, we find an old woman on her death bed inside the house on...well, you know. The woman hands four letters to a priest, then pulls out a box filled with voodoo dolls. She dies, and we go to the opening credits:

Unfortunately, after this, there's scarcely little horror content to follow---sure, this movie's about voodoo and all that scary-type stuff, but visually it looks like a TV movie. Maybe part of the reason for that is this:

Yep, that's Lionel Jefferson himself, Mike Evans, playing one of the people who receives a letter from old lady Pauline Christophe. Evans plays Phillippe, one of her great-grandchildren, summoned to skull mountain along with another great-grandchild, a cousin, and a doctor, played by another TV stalwart, Victor French.

Another relative, an older woman, boards a plane to come to Skull Mountain. This is the one scene where the relative cheapness of the production pays off: she sees a weird hooded figure sitting a few rows up, and is terrified when it turns around and stares at her:

Utini!!

Now, don't get me wrong: this scene is not all that scary, and anyone who watches this film just for this scene will come away very disappointed. But the complete lack of atmosphere helps give this moment a feeling of weirdness that you hope for in a horror movie. Unfortunately, its still pretty tame, and over way too fast.

The first night, the great-granddaughter, named Lorena, prepares to go to sleep, and director Ron Honthaner drops in a little bit of visual trickery just to help set the mood:

...again, nothing to write home about, but it is a little something. Sadly, the movie put in between these moments is just talk, talk, talk, and more talk. French's character keeps being asked how he's related to the Christophe family when he's white.

French, playing generally against type as a doctor, does reasonably well in the role, but he's not quite the leading man/action hero this movie requires:

One of the Christophe family is practicing voodoo, and uses it to try and control the others. French's Dr. Cunningham steps in, and there's a battle with machetes that looks like it was shot on standing TV sets (I'm pretty sure I've seen a number of bad guys end up on the business end of a Vulcan Nerve Pinch in front of that wall).

There's some spells, some snakes, some undead; typical voodoo stuff--all of it perfectly fine, but its all presented so boringly that it was really hard for me to stay interested. This is one of those instances where the poster promises a lot more than the movie can deliver.


Director Honthaner never directed another film, I guess Return to the House on Skull Mountain never made it past the idea stage...