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Horror, Movies, Science Fiction/Fantasy

[January 28, 1970] Cinemascope: Just a Poe Boy (An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe, The Moebius Flip, Sole Survivor, and The Dunwich Horror)

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An author's headshot of a white woman with blonde pigtails.  She is wearing black glasses, a pale blue button-down shirt, a dark green vest, and a pendant on a chain necklace.
by Fiona Moore

An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe

An evening of Edgar Allan Poe is written across the top of the poster in yellow capitals on a black background.  The initial A and the word 'Poe' are written in a fancier, medieval-looking font.  The A and the P are superimposed over red squares.  The O in Poe has a drawing of a skull in it. Beneath the title, a color photograph of Vincent Price looking at the camera, cut off at the forehead where it intersects the title . A clock's hands are floating in front of his face.  The Roman numeral XII is projected across his forehead.  In the background there is the ghostly silhouette of what might either be a castle or some pine trees.Theatrical poster for An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe

An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe is an hour-long film in which four Edgar Allan Poe stories are recited by Vincent Price. Originally made as a television play (and in a way which suggests it was based on a theatrical production, albeit with the addition of some new visual effects), it’s reminiscent of the BBC’s A Ghost Story For Christmas segment, and I was recently asked to view it as a possible acquisition as a teaching tool by my university’s English Literature department.

A color film still of Vincent Price, wearing a white bow tie and black tails,and made up to look older with white hair and beard.  He is seated at a high-class dining table with a white tablecloth.  The room is dim and only the table and Price are clearly visible.  In front of Price there are a variety of bowls and dishes stacked up, and past them at the front of the frame is a fruit basket with grapes and bananas visible.  Two candelabra with three candles each sit one on either side of the fruit basket. Price appears to be gesticulating while speaking.
The Cask of Amontillado

The programme is split into four segments, in each of which Price recites a different Poe short story. Fairly predictably, these are “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Sphinx”, “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Each segment is performed with Price in character as the narrator of each story, with appropriate costuming and sets. Although Price does show a decent range in playing different characters, they’re all very much within Price’s repertoire as an actor, so, although none of the performances are bad, there are no real surprises to be had here.

A film still of Vincent Price, this time with dark fluffy hair and a van dyke beard. He is wearing a brown sport jacket over a brown plaid waistcoat with matching brown plaid trousers and necktie. He is sitting in a brown leather wingback armchair with his hands gripping the ends of the chair arms, looking at the viewer.  The chair sits in front of a round side table with glassware on it.  In the background is a pair of diamond lattice windows, of which three diamonds have colored glass instead of clear.The Sphinx

I felt the best segment was “The Cask of Amontillado”. Price really seems to relish the role of Montressor and plays him with a wicked twinkle in his eye, surrounded by luxurious draperies and furniture and a banquet-table of food. The weakest for me was “The Sphinx,” which struggled to hold my attention, though it did have an effective use of special effects when we briefly see a skull overlaid over Price’s face at a crucial moment.

A blurry film still of Vincent Price sitting on a bench at the bottom of the pit, looking up at the viewer.  There is a large support column behind him and straw covering the floor. A blurry line that may be the pendulum is to the right of the frame, as though it had just swung past Price's face.The Pit and the Pendulum

By contrast, “The Pit and the Pendulum” was a good enough dramatization of an exciting story, but the problem was that the producer seemed to feel it needed jazzing up with effects shots of Price falling into the pit, Price helpless before the pendulum, Price faced with colour separation overlay ("chroma-key" to yanks) flames, and so forth. The rats were far too cute, with inquisitive little faces and glossy fur, for me to find them horrific.

Finally, “The Tell-Tale Heart” was a good choice as the opening story, told simply with the set a bare garret, with Price steadily ramping up the hysteria as the narrator follows his path into murder and madness.

A color film still of a sparsely furnished 19th century room.  A chair and threadbare carpet are in the foreground, a basin and towel on a stand in front of a window to the left, and a bed or table with rumpled white fabric on it to the right. Vincent Price stands facing the carpet, looking down at it.  He is wearing a white shirt with black waistcoat and black trousers.  His hands are stretched out toward the carpet as if spasming or gesticulating.The Tell-Tale Heart

One great benefit I can see from this production is a chance to show audiences who may just know Poe from the cinematic productions loosely based on his work, just how skilled a horror writer Poe was in real life. The issue with something like “The Pit and the Pendulum” is that one can’t really get an entire 90-minute film out of it without adding a lot of material, which, while it can work as a movie, means you lose the terrifying economy of the original story (although if anyone wants to adapt “The Cask of Amontillado”, I think one could spend at least 90 minutes exploring the buildup of resentment in the two characters’ relationships that led up to the final murder). For this reason, I’m recommending that the English Literature department acquires a copy, and would also say that, if it turns up on TV in your region, it’s worth a watch.

3 out of 5 stars.

A black-and-white headshot of a white woman with dark hair, dramatically arched eyebrows, and dark lipstick. She is looking at the camera with an unreadable expression.
by Victoria Silverwolf

There's A Signpost Up Ahead . . .

Two films I caught recently reminded me of Rod Serling's late, lamented television series Twilight Zone.  Let's take a look.

The Moebius Flip

The title card from the film

Less than half an hour long, this skiing film is the sort of thing that might be shown at a college campus, before the main feature in a movie theater, or to fill up time on television in the wee hours of the morning.  The brief running time isn't the only thing that reminds me of Serling's creation.

We begin with scenes of people skiing, edited in a jumpy way.  Jazz, rock, and folk music fill up the soundtrack.  The skiers also fool around in the snow, eat some fruit, and so forth.

Suddenly, we see a news announcer.  He tells us that scientists have determined that every subatomic particle in the universe has reversed polarity.  I'm not sure what that means, but let's see what happens.

A color film still of a white man with brown hair wearing a plaid suit and red tie sitting in front of a red background with brown acoustic tile on the right side.  He is holding a stack of papers from which he is reading into a black microphone.

Somehow, this is supposed to change the way people perceive things.  That means the film turns into a negative of itself.

A negative image of a color still.  A man in a top hat wearing a cardigan is standing in front of an orange background gesticulating at the screen.  The hat is white instead of black, the man's face green, and the cardigan a bright teal with black +s.

This goes on for a while, then the movie goes back to normal.  Once in a while, it turns back into a negative.  I guess that's a Moebius Flip.  Along with more skiing, we get folks at an amusement park and eating in a restaurant.  This part of the film features some pretty impressive and scary scenes of dangerous winter sports.  People ski over huge crevasses, wind up on top of a tower of snow, and hang from cliffs.

A color still of a person hanging from the underside of a cliff overhang. The person is supported by several ropes and a rope ladder.

Is it worth twenty-odd minutes of your time?  Well, if you like psychedelic images or are a big fan of skiing, it could be.  The science fiction premise is just an excuse to reverse the colors of the film, and there's no real plot at all.  I've never been on a pair of skis, so I can only appreciate the athleticism on display here as an outsider.

Two stars.

Sole Survivor

The title card of the movie SOLE SURVIVOR, written in black capitals with white shadows in a stencil font.  The title is superimposed over a photograph of the silhouette of a wrecked airplane against an orange sky, with the low sun just touching the top of the plane.

This is a made-for-TV movie that aired on CBS stations in the USA earlier this month.  It begins with five men in World War Two uniforms standing around a wrecked American bomber of the time.  They seem to be in pretty good shape, given that they're in a desert wasteland.  Things get weird when we find out they've been waiting to be rescued for seventeen years.

A color film still of five white men in World War II era military bomber jackets. They are standing in front of pieces of wrecked airplane.  The man on the left wears a flight helmet. The man next to him wears a baseball cap.  The third and fourth men are wearing officers' caps. All four look at the fifth man on the far right of the frame, who is facing them and appears to be speaking.
The crew of the Home Run.

It quickly becomes clear that they are ghosts, waiting for their bodies to be found so they can stop haunting the wreck. 

I should note here that the premise is inspired by the case of the Lady Be Good, a bomber that crashed in the Libyan desert in 1943 and was not discovered until 1958.

A color photograph of the wreck of the bomber 'Lady Be Good' as it lays on the sand in the Libyan desert. The back half of the plane lies at right angles to the front half, and there are several small items scattered around the main wreck.
The real wreck.

Fans of Twilight Zone will remember the episode King Nine Will Not Return, which was also inspired by the fate of the Lady Be Good.  That tale goes in a different direction, however.

Two men in an airplane discover the wreck.  (By the way, the fact that the ghosts have been waiting for seventeen years means that the movie takes place in 1960 or so.  There's no other indication that it's set a decade ago.)

Two white men sitting in the tan interior of a small plane.  The passenger wears a tan hat, a white shirt, and dark jacket, and is adjusting a camera. The driver wears sunglasses, a pink shirt, and a brown jacket.
The discoverers, who look more 1970 to me.

This leads to an official investigation by the United States Army.  (Remember that the Air Force was part of the Army, and not a separate branch of the service, until a few years after World War Two.) Two officers are in charge of the mission.

Two white men in black army dress uniforms and hats sitting in the back of a car and having a conversation. They are looking out the front of the car rather than at each other.
William Shatner, fresh from Star Trek, as Lieutenant Colonel Josef Gronke and Vince Edwards, best known as Ben Casey, as Major Michael Devlin.

They pay a visit to the sole survivor of the Home Run.  This fellow parachuted out of the plane and landed in the Mediterranean Sea, managing to make it out alive to continue his military career.  (More details of what happened later.)

A blonde white man in general's dress uniform stands in front of window with a flower-print curtain.  The man looks pensive.  The view outside the window is dark and rainy.
Brigadier General Russell Hamner, as played by Richard Basehart, recently the star of the TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

Hamner agrees to accompany the two officers to the North African desert.  He claims that all of the crew of the Home Run bailed out into the ocean, so the plane must have continued without them for several hundred miles before it crashed.  Unlikely, but possible.  Flashbacks tell us the real story.

A white man, the top of his face obscured by his hat, sitting scrunched up in the bomber. He is wearing a communication headset and appears to be speaking urgently.
Hamner as the navigator of the Home Run during the war.

The bomber was damaged in an attack by the enemy.  The captain ordered Hamner to plot a course back to base, but he panicked and bailed out against orders.  Without a navigator, the crew went off course and the plane crashed. 

Tension builds as Devlin casts doubt on Hamner's story, and Gronke tells him not to make waves, lest he ruin his career.  Both officers have their own concerns about their pasts, adding depth of character.  Without giving too much away, let's just say that the truth comes out because of a harmonica, a rubber raft, and Hamner's guilty conscience.  There's a powerful and poignant conclusion.

A white man with brown hair and a bomber jacket (the fifth man from the second photo from this segment) holds a baseball in one hand and a baseball glove in the other.  He is standing in front of the airplane.
The last ghost faces an eternity playing baseball alone.

This is quite a good movie, particularly for one made for TV.  I like the fact that the ghosts appear as ordinary men, rather than being transparent or something.  The actors all do a good job.  You'll never hear the song Take Me Out To The Ball Game again without having an eerie feeling.

Four stars.

A white man with dark short hair and a dark van dyke beard sits on a yellow couch reading a fantasy periodical.  A window in the background shows an empty suburban street.
by Brian Collins

Over the past several years, AIP has adapted stories by H. P. Lovecraft for the big screen—or at least the drive-in. The results have been mixed, but they could certainly be much worse. The first and still the best of these was The Haunted Palace (adapted from The Case of Charles Dexter Ward) back in '63, directed by Roger Corman, with a script by the late Charles Beaumont, and starring an especially tormented Vincent Price. It was a very fine picture. Now we have the latest entry in this "series," The Dunwich Horror, taken from the Lovecraft story of the same name, although it's a pretty loose adaptation.

The Dunwich Horror

The title card from 'The Dunwich Horror.' The title is written in white capitals, and includes the quotation marks. behind the title are abstract silhouettes of trees with short, spiky branches stand against a dark blue background.

One warning I want to give about this movie, one which has nothing to do with sex or violence, is that, aside from being generally a pretty strange film, there are several scenes featuring flashing lights, or a color filter changing rapidly to give one the impression of a strobing light. Some people (thankfully not many) are susceptible to epileptic fits if subjected to such stimuli.

Now, as for the film itself, once we get past what I was surprised to find is an animated (as in a cartoon) opening credits sequence, we start with what seems to be a flashback of a woman giving birth, surrounded by two elderly sisters and an old man. We then flash forward to Miskatonic University, that college of the occult and Lovecraft's making, in Arkham. Nancy Wagner (Sandra Dee) is a student who, in the college's library, meets a good-looking but unusual young man named Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell), who is terribly interested in the Necronomicon. I'm sure his interest in the accursed book and his strange deadpan way of talking are perfectly innocuous. A certain professor at Miskatonic, Henry Armitage (Ed Begley), gets a bit of a hunch that Wilbur is up to no good, but for now does nothing about it.

A color film still. A man in a black shirt, his face visible only from the mouth down because of the camera angle.  He reaches into a glass case to gently lift out a large black hardbound book with metal fittings and a lock on the pages. The label at the top of the case reads 'The 'Necronomicon' ' in white capitals. A woman in a white shirt stands behind the man, her hands raised, watching what he is doing.  Her face is visible only from the eyes down.
The Necronomicon, kept in a cozy glass case.

"The Dunwich Horror" is one of Lovecraft's most celebrated stories, but it's also one of his trickiest. As with "the Call of Cthulhu," Lovecraft wrote "The Dunwich Horror" as if it were a report or an essay, a work of journalism or academia, rather than a fiction narrative. There's no protagonist, properly speaking, although Wilbur is certainly the story's nucleus. This remains sort of the case with the film, although Nancy and Armitage now serve as our eyes and ears, or rather as normal people in what becomes an extraordinary situation. However, it's not Sandra Dee or Ed Begley who caught my attention, but Dean Stockwell as Wilbur, who gives almost what could be considered a star-making role (to my knowledge his most high-profile roles up to now were film adaptations of Sons and Lovers and Long Day's Journey into Night), if not for the movie that surrounds him. Unlike his short story counterpart Wilbur here is not physically deformed, but instead talks in a strangely deadened tone, as if human emotions are foreign to him. Stockwell as Wilbur manages to be uncanny simply through how he talks and acts, which is a major point of praise.

A color film still of a young white man with brown curly hair and a mustache and a young white woman with blonde hair.  They are staring to the left of the viewer with apprehensive looks on their faces.  The man wears a blue shirt, dark tie, and brown jacket.  The woman wears a black blouse and tan jacket.  Some dark wooden furniture is behind them, along with teal wallpaper.
Dean Stockwell as Wilbur Whateley and Sandra Dee as Nancy Wagner.

Director Daniel Haller and his team of screenwriters have opted to streamline Lovecraft's story while giving it a sort of romance plot, as well as a dose of sex and violence. Sex and Lovecraft have always been uneasy bedfellows, even in something like "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" which explicitly involves sex in its plot. Wilbur is one of two twins, the other having supposedly died in childbirth, with the father being unknown, and his mother having been kept in an asylum for the past two decades. Wilbur lives with his grandfather, Old Man Whateley (Sam Jaffe, who some may recognize as that one scientist in the now-classic The Day the Earth Stood Still), who seems convinced his grandson is also up to no good, but arbitrarily (the film does nothing to explain this) does nothing about Wilbur being a scoundrel. For his part, Wilbur sees Nancy as a pretty fine girl—for a dark ritual, that is. The idea is that if he can steal the Necronomicon and impregnate Nancy (the implication, via a mind-bending scene, is that he rapes her), he can bring one of "the Old Ones" into the human world.

Two older white men stand in front of a house with dark wooden siding and a four-paned window.  The man on the left has curly hair and a beard and wears a white shirt with blue stripes and a bugundy smoking jacket.  The man on the right wears a fedora, a black suit, and a dark gray overcoat.  They both look to the right offscreen with disturbed expressions.
Sam Jaffe as Old Man Whateley and Ed Begley as Professor Henry Armitage.

As this point the plot splits in two, with one half focusing on Wilbur and Nancy's "romance" while the other sees Armitage tracking down the mystery of Wilbur's birth, since it becomes apparent the young man and the Necronomicon are somehow connected. One of the strangest (sorry, "far-out") scenes in the whole movie is when Armitage goes to see Wilbur's mother (Joanne Moore Jordan), who apparently had lost her mind many years ago upon giving birth to Wilbur and his dead twin. When it comes to this movie, there are two types of strange: that of the unnerving sort, and that of the cheesy sort. There are parts (sometimes moments within a single scene) of this movie that do a good job of spooking the audience, and others where it's rather silly. With that said, the nightmarish effect of Jordan's performance combined with the changing color tints in this scene make it one of the most effective. This is a movie that generally shines brightest when it focuses on Stockwell's performance and/or the Gothic cliches (including a creepy old house) that clearly also influenced Lovecraft's writing. Maybe it's because they didn't have the budget for it, but the lack of an on-screen monster for the vast majority of the film's runtime also works in its favor.

An old woman with unkempt white hair and a blue one-piece hospital gown huddles in the corner of a padded cell looking upward with a frightened expression.  The buttons of the padding - like on a mattress - are visible on the walls and floor. The metal frame and springs of a bed are in the foreground.
Joanne Moore Jordan as Wilbur's mother, who's spent the past two decades as a mental patient.

When Old Man Whateley finally decides to take action, Wilbur kills him for his troubles, along with imprisoning one of Nancy's friends and turning her into some kind of abomination. Meanwhile Wilbur gives his grandfather a heathen burial and in so doing provokes the wrath of the Dunwich townspeople, who never liked the Whateleys anyway. It's revealed, or rather speculated, that Wilbur's twin may not have died after all, but instead gone to the realm of the Old Ones while Wilbur got stuck on Earth as a human. Armitage and the townsfolk succeed in stopping Wilbur from completing his ritual with the unconscious Nancy, Armitage being well-versed enough in the Necronomicon to use the book against Wilbur, killing him with a blast of lightning. So the last of the Whateley men is dead. Unfortunately, the final shot, eerily showing a fetus growing inside Nancy (which is odd, because she's probably only been pregnant a day or two), implying an Old One may be born after all.

A white man with brown curly hair - the same one from the earlier photo - stands among trees at night.  He looks off to the left, seemingly in concentration.  He is wearing a black cultist robe and rests his hand on top of a metal wine goblet which is standing on a wooden board.  A hand, presumably attached to a body lying on the board, is visible at the bottom of the screen.
Dean Stockwell at his most devilish.

Lovecraft purists will surely be much disappointed with this movie, and even as someone who is not exactly a Lovecraft fan, I have to admit it's by no means perfect. Even at 90 minutes it feels a bit overlong, and it tries desperately to contort one of Lovecraft's more unconventional stories into having a three-act structure. I also get the impression that the addition of blood and breasts was to appease those (people my age and younger) who are suckers for AIP schlock. Not too long ago we had Roger Corman's so-called Poe cycle, which for the most part did Edgar Allan Poe's (and in one case Lovecraft's) fiction justice on modest budgets. I would say The Dunwich Horror is on par with one of the lesser of Corman's Poe movies.

A high three stars.

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