Night of Terror #24: 'The Cat's-Paw'

A quick confession: It's October 24th (actually early on the 25th, but whatever), and I'm starting to feel a little burned out on horror movies. I've been watching a lot more than I've been writing about, and it's gotten a bit overwhelming. So tonight I decided to look for a movie that wasn't quite horror, but would still be appropriate for the blog. And I landed on one of the all-time great "Gearshift Movies," Harold Lloyd's The Cat's-Paw.

Now, just stay with me on this. Harold Lloyd, of course, is a silent-and-early-talkies era comedian, famous for his wild and often dangerous stunts. This movie, though, is much different from what Harold Lloyd is famous for today. For one, no stunts, save for an early scene involving a traffic jam, and that's pretty pedestrian (pun! pun!) compared to stunts found in other Lloyd films. Two: It's a "talkie." Unlike Chaplin or Keaton, Lloyd took to talkies like a dog to a crotch, and I for one think he's got a great voice. Three: Unlike any other Harold Lloyd movie I've ever seen, The Cat's-Paw goes COMPLETELY FUCKING BONKERS at the end. How bonkers? I'll get to that in a minute. The plot is pure Capra, with a naive young man (played perfectly by Lloyd) who was raised in China coming to America to find a wife only to get embroiled in a sham election, when the town's racketeers and scoundrels put him up as a dummy candidate for mayor of the city of Stockport to keep their man in office.

I don't want to say too much, because I think the best way to see this movie is to have no idea where it's headed. This is a bit of a catch-22, though, because if you think this is the sweet, Capraesque romantic comedy it appears to be, why would you be watching it on Halloween? So I'm going to try and have it both ways. If you're an open-minded and cool individual, the type who likes watching obscure screwball comedies from the 30s, stop reading after this paragraph and come back after you get a hold of The Cat's-Paw. Batshit gear shifts aside, you won't regret it - this is a excellently crafted comedy. It doesn't have that manic quality that more famous screwballs like My Man Godfrey and stuff like that have, instead opting for a gentler, quieter brand of comedy, but it's still a delight. Funny, clever, and unfortunately for us, the political themes of corruption and broken democracy will probably still be resonant to most modern-day viewers. OK, cool kids who haven't seen the movie yet, this is your last warning: SPOILERS TO FOLLOW:

So disappointed if you haven't seen the movie and are still reading, but that's OK. You could show me the most exciting tennis match ever played and I'd probably rather watch Get Smart instead. Anyway, as you might have guessed from the plot synopsis a couple paragraphs above, Lloyd ends up, shucks upon shucks, winning the election. And in an even bigger surprise, he doesn't play by the rules of the game, instead opting to throw the bums out and bring his common sense governance to the office of mayor. The lowlifes of the city aren't happy about this, so they arrange a frame-up to make it look like he's involved in dirty political business as well, and he gets publicly disgraced with only 24 hours to clear his name before the governor replaces him with a new mayor. Got it? So far, the plot is still standard-issue political romantic comedy, albeit having actually come out several years before Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Here's where the movie goes completely off the rails: Instead of clearing his name in a typical and acceptable American fashion, Mayor Lloyd has every gangster, racketeer, and lowlife in the city arrested and brought to an underground dungeon in Chinatown. He's got a bunch of scary-looking shirtless Chinese guys down there helping him keep everybody in line, but most of them aren't scared, they figure he's just trying to frighten them. He offers everybody in the dungeon an ultimatum: Inspired by an ancient Chinese folk story, Lloyd says that the criminals can either sign full confessions and face conviction for their crimes, or be beheaded. By the way, this is all played completely straight in the movie, right up to the point where the unlucky contestant number 1 is dragged into a back room and we hear him get his head CHOPPED THE FUCK OFF. As if that weren't enough, two of Lloyd's stormtroopers cart the guy's body in front of the other thugs with his head resting in a bowl that's sitting on his chest. Let me make something clear: After roughly 80 minutes of good-natured comedy with a traditional dose of pathos, the entire sequence in the dungeon is an exercise in slow, creeping dread, as the audience (and the captive audience in the movie) begins to wonder if maybe this mayor guy is serious, and is actually going to cut off some heads. The scene culminates in the decapitation I just described, and I can't overstate the shock value inherent in seeing a scene like that play out in a movie like this. No matter what mitigating factors happen after this scene, the shock value of the initial events is undiminished. This is crazy stuff, and I've never seen anything else like it.

No, The Cat's-Paw is not a horror movie, but it does have one of the creepiest sequences I've ever seen in a movie, and one thing that makes it so creepy is that it really does come out of nowhere. I highly recommend The Cat's-Paw, both as a traditional bit of old Hollywood entertainment, and an insane display of unexpected terror. If that's not Halloween-appropriate, what is?

Night of Terror #23: 'Night of the Demon'

Whoops, forgot to do a post last night, so I'll have to double up today. Here's another fabulous guest piece, this one from my good friend Patrick Brennan on the movie Night of the Demon. Tonight I'll write about something else, probably A Bucket of Blood. Enjoy:

The 20^th century saw two great storytellers who understood that it's not always what you see, but what you feel, that makes a story truly scary: H.P. Lovecraft and Val Lewton. Lovecraft had the balls to say, in the first line of one of his best stories, “Bear in mind closely that I did not see any actual visual horror at the end.” His stories were full of events that couldn't be explained by any scientific or even traditionally religious means. Lewton's most famous movies were, however, more focused on something obscured. Was it a monster, or merely a madman?

When Jacques Tourneur, who directed Lewton's two best movies, took on Night of the Demon in 1957, he did it the same way he and Lewton would have done it after The Cat People or I Walked with a Zombie. In the movie proper, everything can be explained by either Dana Andrews's realist John Holden or the evil magician, Dr. Karswell. The death of Professor Harrington might have been the result of a drug-induced nightmare. Or it might have been the result of an uncontrollable demon summoned from the depths of Hell. We may never know.

Well, we may never have known if Tourneur had his way. After principle shooting was completed, the studio forced Tourneur to edit in footage of the demon. While the special effects are genuinely well-made for the era, the movie manages to create such an unsettling, bizarre atmosphere without them that it just seems completely unnecessary. Seeing the demon doesn't ruin Night of the Demon, but it makes it takes away a little of its mystery.

What's most striking about Night of the Demon is how far it is from the B-plus feel you'd expect from a movie called Night of the Demon that came out in 1957. The movie is full of scenes where reality seems just a little bit off. When Holden and Karswell first meet in the British Museum, we see Karswell walk away, silhouetted, through Holden's eyes. What was an institution of learning and science now looks like a catacomb. When Holden and Harrington's niece, Joanna, visit Karswell's mansion for the first time, Holden and Karswell have a philosophical conversation about the way the two of them view the world ending in Karswell appearing to summon a thunderstorm from nowhere, all while he wears clown make-up. Moments like these create a mood that's closer to Mr. Arkadin than It Came From Outer Space.

Night of the Demon was Tourneur's last truly great movie, and it may in fact be the last vestige of the kind of filmmaking that he and Lewton innovated in the early 40s. It's the kind of horror that comes from being just as afraid of the kind of people that prey on your weaknesses as you are of the things that go bump in the night. Night of the Demon gives it a fitting send-off, showing how it can be disabled with just a few glimpses of a bat-winged monster emerging from the woods, and getting to the core of the genre with just a few words to close the film: “You were right. Maybe it's better not to know.”

Night of Terror #22: 'Tales of Terror'

I watched another Poe adaptation this weekend, this one containing three Poe tales into one movie. Apparently more than one filmmaker has thought the best way to overcome the "length problem" of doing Poe movies is to cram more than one story into a movie. Pretty clever.

This movie, from the director probably most associated with Poe, is from Roger Corman. He's famous for cranking out ultra low-budget exploitation movies, both as a director and a producer. But his Poe adaptations for American International Pictures are probably his most lavish productions, featuring elaborate costumes, Cinemascope, Technicolor, the whole bit. Tales of Terror is a Corman/Poe movie in that tradition, featuring, (of course), Vincent Price, this time in three different roles.

This first segment, "Morella," is the weakest of the bunch. It features a very straightforward gothic horror tale with Vincent Price as the estranged father of the girl who as a baby he blamed for the death of his wife. It turns out the wife shared this opinion, and might have some supernatural trouble to dish out on the daughter now that she's back in the house. It's short, and a little creepy, but not up to the standard of entertainment value of the other two segments (particularly the second one).

That second one is called "The Black Cat," and it might just be one of the best things Corman ever did. It's a masterpiece of comic horror, with Peter Lorre as a drunken cad who steals money from his wife to buy wine with, and who hates his black cat. Price is, dare I say it, in the role he was born to play: The World's Fanciest and Dandiest Man, a wine taster who eventually steals Lorre's wife. If you've ever read "The Black Cat" or "The Cask of Amontillado" you can guess what happens next, but I won't spoil it. Suffice it to say that there's a striking gearshift between the hilarious hijinks of a drunken Peter Lorre bumming around town and the horrific climax.

"The Facts of the Case of M. Valdemar" goes back to the serious tone of the first segment, but with more entertaining results. The original story is just about a guy who gets mesmerized "at the point of death" and remains suspended in this state for while, only to rot away instantly when he's brought out of hypnosis. The movie adds a bit of business about the one doing the hypnosis (Basil Rathbone) being in it for his own insidious purposes - oh, and Valdemar (played by a nearly comatose Price) turns into a zombie at the end. Good stuff.

All in all, this probably stands as one of the better Corman/Poe pictures, if for no other reason than the better pacing the anthology format provides for. Give it a watch, especially if you're a fan of Vincent Price or Peter Lorre (or if you're interested in becoming one).

Night of Terror #21: 'Two Evil Eyes'

Edgar Allan Poe is kind of a weird figure in horror. He's a huge influence on the genre, writing truly shocking stuff that was generations ahead of its time. He's also really popular as old dead white guys go, which makes him a "draw" as far as Hollywood producers are concerned. And yet, none of his stuff is particularly "cinematic" in the usual sense. Not only was he writing stories and poems hundreds of years before cinema was even invented, but he was also most interested in the thing that movies have always had a hard time conveying: One person's innermost (and deranged) thoughts.

This makes adapting Poe kind of a weird proposition. The filmmaker is pretty much on his or her own in terms of approach, setting, even plot, since most of Poe's most famous works have barely enough plot to fill 22 minutes of TV, if that. The anthology film Two Evil Eyes, a collaboration between Dario Argento and George Romero, opts for a "fast and loose" approach to Poe's work, although compared to other Poe movies it's actually pretty slavish.

The first segment, based on Poe's "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," is directed by George A. Romero. It's restrained compared to his zombie movies and other horror movies, but it's still unmistakably Romero, particularly because of the social commentary present in the movie. The theme can be summed up thusly: The rich are psychopathic monsters, willing to do anything to get richer. The plot is a riff on Poe's idea, featuring a wealthy dying man's wife and her not-so-former boyfriend putting the dying man (Valdemar) under hypnosis in order to rob him of his assets. It's standard Romero - pretty entertaining.

The second segment, by Argento based largely on "The Black Cat" but combining elements of several other Poe stories, is quite interesting. It's not as coherent a piece as Romero's contribution, although why anyone would expect it to be given the director I have no idea. In addition to featuring several classic Argento "tricks," such as several "cat's-eye-view" shots, a "pendulum-eye-view" shot, and Psycho-alum Martin Balsam just beginning to climb up a set of stairs just like in Psycho but turning back at the last second, "The Black Cat" features what I can safely say is the best performance in any Argento film, from Harvey Keitel. I realize that being the "best performance in an Argento movie" is probably the faintest praise an actor can be given, but Keitel puts a lot of relish and verve into his role, giving him an actual character instead of just a human prop to deliver lines and get murdered.

Altogether, Two Evil Eyes is both an underrated horror movie and an interesting example of two horror auteurs at work. Oh, and Harvey Keitel gets impaled through his ass by a wooden stake.

Night of Terror #20: 'Mr. Sardonicus' and 'Van Helsing'

Hello, all. It's me, your horrible host, with another entry in-- sorry, going for a William Castle thing, there, in honor of tonight's entry, Mr. Sardonicus. To write about it, we have the sardonic Phoebe Heyman, and I might chime in in the comments if I feel like it. Let's give her a big "thumb's up," OK?

A few days ago we watched Mr. Sardonicus, a William Castle movie from 1961. The plot: A famous doctor, Sir Robert Cargrave of London, recently knighted for his achievements in the field of curing paralysis, receives a missive from his former fiancee, now married to the mysterious Baron Sardonicus. She beseeches Sir Robert to come for a visit, and when he arrives amidst a flurry of disturbing events, he's eventually pressed into service to protect the innocent, and maybe help the not-so-innocent. While Sir Robert is a bit too unflappable and self-confident to be the best "audience surrogate" for a horror movie, that's the only thing I can really fault about the movie, which is really fun, unexpectedly disturbing, and pretty original despite its tight plotting.

I particularly enjoyed the movie for its enthusiastic participation in the "Eastern Europe as locus of the frightening and uncivilized" motif, a trope I encountered frequently when I majored in Slavic Languages and Literatures. However, Mr. Sardonicus is notable for its commitment to an authentic setting - it's nominally set in the fictional Central/Eastern European republic of "Gorslava" but all the visible writing, like in the train station and cemetery, is real Czech, and the village scenes are pretty good too.

It was also interesting to contrast the film with Van Helsing, which we watched today: Both films are set in the abstract Mitteleuropa of . . . well, horror films, but despite coming out forty years earlier, Mr. Sardonicus actually gives a much more nuanced depiction of the region. Van Helsing claims at once to be set "in Transylvania," "on the far side of Romania," and, most bizarrely, in Budapest. Both films also draw a sharp juxtaposition between a "civilized" Western city and a heavily fictionalized, indiscriminately Eastern or Balkan rural area: London and "Gorislava," Rome and "Transylvania." Both films also depict the contrast between a large castle or estate - removed from the village milieu and owned by the aristocracy - and the surrounding rural region. In Van Helsing, the heroine Anna and her brother Velkan are the last of the Valerious family, whose huge castle stands adjacent to the "Budapest" village area. From their names, we can assume that their ancestors were not autochthonous to the region. In Mr. Sardonicus, Baron Sardonicus is originally a local, but after buying his expensive estate, he furnishes and staffs it so that it is indistinguishable from any Western counterpart. Both the Valerious and Sardonicus estates become the loci for horrible deeds and disturbing events, as if the uncanny nature of the Eastern setting must always triumph over the trappings of civilization.

The immersive location isn't the only unique quality of Mr. Sardonicus. The plot, which I don't want to reveal too much about, is a great mash-up of multiple influences: Dracula, of course, but also maybe "The Monkey's Paw." More than anything, the flashback that's the film's centerpiece reminded me of an Eastern European folk tale. The film's most unique feature, and probably its most famous, is the "Punishment Poll" that appears before the film's conclusion. The original theater audiences were given a glow-in-the-dark card with a "Thumbs Up" sign that could be turned over for the "thumbs down." William Castle comes on-screen and asks the audience to vote with the thumb, Roman Colosseum-style, on whether the villain has received enough punishment or if he deserves some more. Unfortunately, reports that Castle actually shot an alternative ending to the film proved to be apocryphal. Despite its gimmicky nature, I think the Punishment Poll fits into the plot of the movie surprisingly well - the villain is convincingly sympathetic throughout most of the movie.

Despite its huge budget, expansive CGI, and some unexpected bright spots - Kate Beckinsale does a surprisingly good Eastern European accent - Van Helsing isn't such a great movie. Mr. Sardonicus, on the other hand, is above all else really fun - and has one of the most shocking movie moments of all time. Watch it today!

Night of Terror #19: 'Hellraiser'

Greetings, ghouls! Joe here, with another thrilling guest blog post. You know what that means, it will be a bit longer than mine, and better written, more interesting, etc. This one is from the ingenious Oswald Hobbes of Assault.it. Enjoy:

As a young child, I was fortunate enough to spend a fair amount of time with two middle-aged alcoholics possessed of an extremely liberal outlook on R-rated videotapes. I would spend weekends at their house regularly, and no trip was complete without a trip to the horror section of the local Blockbuster – valuable learning experiences, not because of the movies (most of which I fell asleep halfway through), but because of the many hours spent simply perusing VHS slip covers. It's my theory that horror films are so universally popular with little kids not just because we all, at that age, like to experiment with the scare button in our minds, but also because the illustrations on their packaging are so enticingly weird. Also, the genre's offerings fall into loose, easily identifiable (even for a middle-schooler) groups: slasher flicks, supernatural stories, stuff about space, and movies based on short stories by Stephen King.

Oh, and then there was the really extreme stuff, the stuff that dealt with the most taboo horror of all: sex. Hellraiser, in my young mind, was among the most notorious of these scandalous sagas. The image of Pinhead (played by Doug Bradley, and billed in the first film as “Lead Cenobite”), with his ghostly pale bald head stuffed full of thin metal spikes, was frightening enough. But the mere mention of Clive Barker above the title got my youthful mojo risin': I had read about ten pages of a Clive Barker book when I was ten and the main takeaway involved a character passionately masturbating and spilling “spunk” all over the floor.

Even now, approaching thirty, I'm pretty tantalized by Hellraiser's primary conceit: the existence of a mystical puzzle box that, when patiently coaxed open, releases four gruesome demonoids who extract so much incredible pain from their victims that, finally, it passes into the realm of horrible pleasure. Hellraiser depicts not once but TWICE the final result of one character's experience with Pinhead and his cohorts: his body being ripped apart by chains attached (in a really fake-looking establishing shot, used repeatedly throughout this film and its sequel, Hellbound) to his flesh with hooks.

Everything in the movie looks pretty fake, actually, and now that I'm old enough to watch Hellraiser with more than a few experiences of both the sexual and the painful variety in my rearview, I can see clearly that the effects are the main attraction here – the S&M elements are sprinkled somewhat liberally throughout this entry (and downplayed to a greater extent as the series progressed and the mythology increasingly centered around the Pinhead character) but suggestion is all they are, really.

The story is set in motion by Frank (Sean Chapman) purchasing and then solving the aforementioned puzzle box (to be known as the Lamont Configuration in future films), which leads to his sparsely furnished bedroom morphing into an elaborately appointed torture chamber complete with eerie gray light shining through cracks in the walls. After he becomes just so much rubbery splatter on the walls, the film shifts perspective to his somewhat square brother Larry (played, in a righteously satisfying tour de force of scenery chewing, by Dirty Harry bad guy Andrew Robinson) and his shady British wife Julia (Clare Higgins). After that, without getting too spoilery, things take a decidedly sinister turn, with the introduction of Larry's nubile-but-independent-minded daughter Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) and Frank's resurrection as a revolting, blood-drenched half-man hungry for human flesh.

But, the effects: masterminded by Cliff Wallace (a guy with a resume as illustrious as it is long), they're pain-staking and gross, the kind of disgusting creations so sickening because of their obvious weight and mass – the kind of mind-blowingly awesome stuff that has, in the past decade, been almost completely replaced by cheap, shiny CGI, essentially unbelievable in the same way, but somehow easier to shrug off because no sick bastard actually went to the trouble of actually creating it with real materials. Hellraiser is an artifact of a bygone era when crafty backstage lifers toiling in dark and dingy makeshift laboratories made, in the truest sense of the word, the stuff of nightmares literal.

I miss those days, just like I miss those intoxicating weekends of my childhood lost to the likes of Sleepaway Camp II and endless cans of cold Dr Pepper: there is a sense of wonder to Hellraiser, a fundamental and unshakable awe that a lot of people got together and believed in a third-rate horror writer's kinky idea enough to build it from the ground up. And the end result is still scary shit, my friends – I recently watched it alone, with the lights off, and had to pause it three quarters of the way through to go find my cat and hug him close for comfort. Its theme of pain as the ultimate pathway to true pleasure will always vibrate seductively, a window into the dark part of the human soul that most of us will never be brave enough to inspect in the harsh light of day. For that, I'm willing to overlook some obvious latex errors.

Night of Terror #18: 'The Unknown'

Who's your favorite actor? De Niro? Pacino? Brando, maybe? I like those guys too, but the fact remains that no film actor ever surpassed Lon Chaney in terms of technical ability. Chaney can do more with just his face than literally any other actor can with many more tools at his or her disposal: Dialog being the big one of the bunch.

I definitely do NOT want to spoil the plot of The Unknown, because part of its berserk pleasure is watching its unpredictable plot unfold. But as someone who has seen this movie around half a dozen times, I can vouch for the fact that it holds up even after you know everything that happens in it.

I'll give you the briefest of setups here, just to get you interested: Lon plays an armless circus performer whose specialty is doing stuff with his feet - throwing knives, firing guns, that sort of thing. Joan Crawford plays another member of the circus troupe with a bit of a psychological hang-up: She can't stand being pawed at by men. A match made in heaven? You'll have to watch the movie to find out, but suffice it to say that their would-be romance does not progress smoothly.

In lieu of an in-depth and spoilery discussion of The Unknown's plot, I'll relay an anecdote of my first viewing of it that I think illustrates its power even 80+ years after its release. I was visiting home from college, and put on The Unknown as part of a recently purchased "Lon Chaney Collection" DVD set. My sister, 7 or 8 at the time, happened into the room and started watching it too, her interest becoming stronger as the movie progressed. By the time the final scene arrived, she was in near hysterics over what was going to happen. Never let anybody tell you that silent movies "don't hold up" while movies like The Unknown exist.

Sorry about the vague nature of this post - I'm just really reluctant to spoil this movie for anyone because I recommend it so highly. It's probably my favorite of the movies written up here so far, which, looking back, I guess isn't that impressive. But it's also one of my favorite horror movies ever, and I can't recommend it highly enough.