The Black Cat (1966)

A Cat Above
The Rest

The Black Cat
USA 1966 Directed by Harold Hoffman
Hemisphere/Severin Blu Ray Zone A

Warning: Poe faced spoilers.

So the fourth film in Severin’s Blu Ray boxed edition of Hemisphere Horrors is somewhat unusual in that it’s not shot in the Philippines at all. It’s an American movie made by a director who only directed one other feature (under a pseudonym) and that’s a shame because, judging from this thing, he had a lot of potential. It’s yet another film called The Black Cat and also takes its inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe’s story of the same name. However, it’s a cat above the rest, if you will, in that it’s actually, apart from the period (it’s been transplanted to contemporary America), a very straight adaptation of the original tale with almost no trimmings or additions to the ideas in Poe’s text.

Which is a really hard thing to do, actually. There have been many adapations of many of Poe’s tales over the years... heck, I even read an entire book published in the early noughties that was devoted to the tidal wave of cinematic Poe adaptations called The Poe Cinema. But even the most famous ones, which I guess would be the ones that Roger Corman directed for AIP in the 1960s, have added maybe 95% of their own ‘padding’ to these, more than twice told tales. And there’s a very good reason for this... Poe’s short stories are usually very short and don’t have time to tell more than a fleeting impression of a tale or, in some cases, an abstract emotional state brought upon by an internal or external influence. If you’re trying to base a movie on one then you almost can’t help but add to it or you are going to end up with a five minute short instead of a main feature.

This film is different. It’s got an admittedly short runtime at 73 minutes but it’s really done the original story ‘straight’ and, managed to take the main germ of an idea and not really stray too much, other than in terms of slightly more visual ways of getting these same ideas across. And that’s no mean feat to actually do this and still, as in this case, make it fairly watchable and interesting.

The film starts with an opening sequence which is in terrible shape, something which Severin warn you about before the film  starts... that just a few of the shots had to be taken from inferior sources or be lost forever. It’s a silhouette of the main protagonist Lou, played by a guy called Robert Frost (no, not that one) in his only film, as he walks by a lake and his voice reads a poem. I’m assuming the poem he reads is one of Poe’s own poems but I couldn’t figure out which one it was (sorry). This, like the rest of the film, is shot in a really stark, contrasty black and white that I associate with that kind of era of American monochromatic cinema. For me, this film has the kind of feel, due to the stock and the kind of atmosphere it has, of films like Herk Hervey’s original Carnival Of Souls or Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers. The feel of something a young Scorcese or even Cassavetes might make.

We then get a credit sequence that absolutely rocks with white type cards with images of a black cat interspersed and splitting the cards with maybe just a half a second of exposure before the next card... so the image of the cat almost goes into the retina at a subliminal level. This is accompanied by some really cool music which, alas, I’ve got no idea how to find. The film has no composer credit on it apart from a rock group performing some songs at a nightclub (technically not in Poe’s original for sure but, used as a stand in for the visual representation of abstract emotions within the text) and the disharmony between various musical choices throughout the film leads me to believe that this must have been a needle drop score culled from a music library. Scores bought by the yard, so to speak. Never mind the quality, hear the width.

These credits also tell us that The Black Cat in the film is played by Pluto. Pluto is, of course, also the name of the cat in both this film and in Poe’s rendition of the tale although, I have to say, the second cat used after Pluto’s death seems to be a totally different feline actor to me.

And the story follows the idea of a rich, playboy type who has a lot of pets and a wife who he ignores. He is presented here as unhinged and Frost does a good job of being obnoxious and also mentally unbalanced, a state of mind which kind of stands in for the peculiar mental state known by Poe and put down in his tale The Imp Of The Perverse. It certainly permeates his original The Black Cat and, frankly, a subtle concept like the mind’s own whim to follow a path of commitment it doesn’t necessarily want to undertake is probably best substituted with an unsound mental grip on reality as it is here.

As in the original story, Lou cuts out the cat’s right eye after it scratches him and begins to obsess about it (a slight inflection added by the writer/director in this version brings in the idea of a cat being a witches’ familiar as a thematic embodiment of his madness). A second scene in a night club, an establishment used earlier to highlight Lou’s frequent neglect of his wife Diana (payed by Robyn Baker in the first of only two films she made... is this movie cursed or what?), shows the live band are all now wearing eye patches on their right eyes and it’s a nice idea for a visual surrogate of the initial guilt Lou feels at his actions.

And, like the short story, Lou ends up hanging Pluto. However, unlike the random fire that follows the next day and leaves the character bankrupt and bereft and acknowledging unnatural forces at work, bringing a kind of karma to the situation... the fire is actually inadvertently caused by Lou’s act of the killing of the cat. In this version, he hangs the cat from a tree with an electrical power cord and, when the cat is hanging, plugs it into a conveniently situated socket, electrocuting the hanged feline. When he’s in bed with his wife a little later, the electricity from the murder of his pet gets out of hand and starts the fire which leads to his financial ruin.

Before he finds another cat as a replacement for Pluto, there is a sequence where Lou is hospitalised for his increasingly aggressive mental condition and it’s revealed he is having shock treatment and insulin injections. There is a scene where Lou is injected with an obviously painful chemical as he writhes and thrashes on the bed and I can only assume that this is a zealous writer/director using this as another, stronger visual metaphor for the guilt that Lou is suffering from his own, nasty actions. It’s a tough call because, in Poe’s tale it’s written in the first person so the audience is not at a distance from the character and can, therefore, feel a little sympathy from the writer in the situation. In this cinematic version, however, it’s hard to call upon any sympathy for the male lead (who nevertheless does a terrific job and, again, I’m surprised this guy never worked again in the business... at least not under the name Robert Frost).

The film continues to follow Poe’s short description of the character’s downfall when, after going after the second cat in the basement, he (not accidentally in this version) splits his wife’s head open with an axe and then walls her up in the basement. Now, this is impressively done here and the stark black and white photography really helps with the impact of the blood as, in a quick cut from motion to aftermath, we see the axe head buried in Robyn Baker’s skull and blood spurting from the wound to splash the wall and, in another aftermath shot with less motion, its path down her face and clothes. It’s a skillfully timed and edited series of shots and I imagine it must have been quite strong stuff for its day. A similarly strong aftermath shot comes earlier in the film, where we see Lou’s blood coated hand with the cats eye sitting in the centre of his palm.

When the FBI come knocking at his door, the story plays out the same as the source and, when he bangs on his new wall to proudly demonstrate to the inspectors how solid his house is, we hear the sound of the wailing cat which he has accidentally walled in with the corpse of his wife and the two FBI men tear down he wall so we are treated to a shot of the cat jumping out to freedom from the top of the wife’s bloody head. One of the few additions to the original tale, which is now over and which, in a way contradicts the existence of the opening poetry shot, is where Lou tries to escape in his car and the two officers give chase. However, at the last minute (as you kind of know is going to happen), Lou swerves when he sees the black cat in the road and crashes his car in a quite violent piece of editing which really makes the crash feel more than it is (I think a toy car was probably used for one of the rapidly edited together shots). Our last shot of Lou is of his mangled and dead body where, we see, his right eye has also been knocked out from the crash.

The Black Cat is low budget and feels like one of those movies where the director was struggling against finances at every turn but still gave it his all and managed to make, well... a really interesting film for sure, if nothing else. If you are a fan of Poe’s tale then this rendition of it is definitely worth checking out because I’m convinced it’s one of the straightest adaptations of a Poe work in existence. I’m really grateful to Severin for putting this one out there as part of their Hemisphere Horrors box because there’s probably no way I would have bothered to pick this one up as a single edition and I would have missed out. Highly recommended for a certain kind of low key horror aficionado, I think.

Murders In The Rue Morgue

Morgue One

Murders In The Rue Morgue
USA 1932 Directed by Robert Florey
Universal Blu Ray Zone B
As part of the Eureka Masters Of Cinema
three film Lugosi/Poe slipcase edition.

Murders In The Rue Morgue was one of Edgar Allan Poe’s great and much loved tales... and a fairly important one at that. A classic (indeed, the classic) locked room mystery tale, it is considered to be the first ever detective story. Indeed, I seem to remember that it’s quite overtly referenced in the first of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. The central character, one C. Auguste Dupin, an amateur detective, appeared first in this short story and then in two further Poe stories... The Mystery of Marie Rogêt and The Purloined Letter... making him, I think, Poe’s only ever recurring character (if I’m wrong on that, please let me know in the comments section below but I don’t remember him having had any other recurring characters... although it’s been a long time since I revisited his works).

The 1932 ‘adaptation’ of the story, and I use that in its loosest term, was almost a consolation prize of sorts. Florey and the central star Bela Lugosi (who was fresh off his iconic role as Dracula, a part he’d played numerous times on stage and finally on screen, reviewed here), were supposed to be making Frankenstein next but, they were removed from the picture when James Whale wanted to make it and so they were assigned this movie instead. It was heavily cut down to 61 minutes after some reshoots and, I assume, the original (and I suspect far stronger) version of the story, is lost to either time, wilful destruction or vinegar syndrome.

This version of the tale really isn’t a version of the tale at all, although it kind of keeps the murder scene of the story but reveals ‘how it was done’ at the same time... with the ‘trained ape’ culprit being seen right from the start here when the hero of the piece, the bizarrely renamed Pierre Dupin (and remade as a medical student to keep him on the trail of the film’s main antagonist), takes his girlfriend to a street carnival and they see the ape man and his master, Dr. Mirakle, played by Bela Lugosi. Mirakle enthusiastically believes in Darwinism and is up to mad experiments which have him killing various ‘ladies who won’t be missed’ in an effort to somehow fuse his pet chimp with human DNA. It’s a far cry from the Poe short and when the chimpanzee/orangutan (depending on if you are close up or long shot... when close ups of a real chimpanzee are cut against long shots of a man dressed in an ape costume) grabs the leading lady (played by Sidney Fox) and makes off with her after a ‘version’ of the original crime scene from the story, quite near the end of the picture... it would probably re-enforce a feeling you might already have. That being that, it's for sure Florey’s version of Murders In The Rue Morgue is more or less a remake of the hugely influential The Cabinet Of Doctor Caligari, with Lugosi’s sinisterly single eyebrowed Mirakle standing in for Caligari and the ape standing in for Cesare The Somnambulist.

Indeed, shots of the town in which it is set, seen through windows earlier in the picture, are slightly twisted, very artificial looking sets and painted backdrops very closely aligned to the German Expressionist movement as depicted by The Cabinet Of Doctor Caligari and, there’s almost an attempt to make things look even weirder, by having a passer-by casually riding a big penny farthing cycle across the set in one shot (although, to be fair, the period is right for this). Also, some of the way the shots are fragmented by verticals and horizontals to section and highlight characters is very interesting. The staginess of one of the sets, where Lugosi’s bound victim is disposed of by a trap door, makes me think of this little sequence as being inspired also, perhaps, from the Grand Guignol theatre performances in France (the film is set, we are told, in Paris of 1845, before those shows were performed but... I definitely see the influence of these here in 1932).

The film has a lot to offer in terms of creativity away from the sets too... although the props do let themselves down a bit when Dupin’s illustrated medical notes are bolstered by facsimiles of exactly the same sheet of paper duplicated to make it look like there are more of them. The camerawork is magnificent including a truly gobsmacking (for 1932) extended sequence where the leading lady is swinging back and forth on a big swing with the camera somehow rigged to the swing and looking slightly down at her, as she stays central in the shot and we perceive the landscape around her (and us) moving around violently. Another great moment is when the fourth murder is being committed. From the outside of the locked door, as the screams are loud and fierce, we see a bunch of people gathered on the stairwell of the apartment building and the camera cuts to very rapid close up reaction shots of various figures in a quite extraordinary moment of what is almost Eisensteinien ‘typage’.... but sped up to almost overload the perceptions and create a very sinister feeling. It’s an amazing couple of seconds.

I last saw this movie as part of a US DVD boxed edition decades ago but, I have to say, the Blu Ray restoration of it here by Eureka Masters Of Cinema is truly stunning. It looks like the thing was shot last week. Such a crisp and blemish free experience... this is absolutely the best way to see this film (and I suspect their accompanying treatments of The Black Cat and The Raven will be similar revelations). The film is presented both in it’s original version, with pretty much no background music (as was in keeping with this period... this lack of an underscore being thrown out as an idea just a year later when King Kong proved that you could successfully still heighten drama through music in a talking picture) and also with a version where Universal has added some more underscore (which I eschewed watching in favour of looking at it properly). There are, however, two very interesting uses of music on the opening and closing titles. The film opens with exactly the same musical opening as The Mummy from the same year, similarly falling back after the opening bars on the Swan Lake music which marked similar Universal Horror branded pictures of the times. The end title music will be especially familiar to people who remember the third episode of Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe (reviewed here), when Dr. Zarkov leads a rescue party for Flash and his colleagues, who have been buried under an avalanche... this is the same piece of scoring used here, although what it’s originally from I have no idea, although I always loved this music as a kid (it’s not from Les Preludes, as was a lot of the music from certain sections of that serial).

And that’s me done on this one. Murders In The Rue Morgue is a film which, like the other two films in this set, owe very little and bear not much relation to the Edgar Allan Poe tales that they purport to be adaptations of, quite prominently, in their marketing. It certainly owes much more to The Cabinet Of Doctor Caligari and it’s great if you love watching movies of Bela Lugosi playing mad scientists (of which he did a fair few, from what I can remember seeing over the years). If you like these films, this new Blu Ray transfer is absolutely amazing and definitely worth the price of admission, to be sure.

Tales Of The Shadowmen 15 - Trompe l'Oeil

League Of Mental Men

Tales Of The Shadowmen 15
Trompe l'Oeil
Edited by Jean-Marc Lofficier and Randy Lofficier
Black Coat Press ISBN: 978-1612278131

I previously reviewed the first 14 collections in the Tales Of The Shadowmen series here and explained about my annual ritual of receiving the next volume in the series either at Christmas or for my birthday a couple of weeks later. And, as I said before, since these things aren’t published until December each year I’m usually one year behind when I get to finally read these things. It’s a cycle I keep meaning to break (if I ever get time around all the other things I’ve got to read) but for now I will quickly... very quickly in this case... cover the December 2019 release which I read a little while ago, Tales Of The Shadowmen 15 - Trompe l'Oeil.

As usual, the gallery of stories by different authors on offer, all utilising two or more heroes, villains or supporting characters from known literary (and other) works and then mixing them together in the same stories, is a bit of a hit and miss affair. As is sometimes the case, actually knowing the characters that are being continually referenced in these stories is part of the fun. This is not to deny that, when a really good writer gives these tales a go, even if you are not acquainted with the character of choice, they will be gripping reads. Usually these books are, once you get the first few volumes out of the way, more hit than miss but occasionally you get a volume where it’s maybe not quite as engaging as previous volumes and, I think that’s definitely the case here.

The book starts off fairly strongly following a short, dimension hopping tale called The Vertigo by Daniel Alhadeff. Like many of the characters in this particular volume, I hadn’t heard of the central protagonist and the brief intro to this tale gave him the hint of an atmosphere which didn’t seem to tally up with what I was actually reading. Frankly, the style it had been written in reminded me of an entirely different flavour, that of the Jerry Cornelius books by Michael Moorcock (I reviewed the movie version of one of them, The Final Programme, right here). So I was pleasantly surprised when a character from that series, Miss Brunner, turned up as one of the main characters a little later on... now it made sense as to why the writer was delving into this style.

Another stand out would be when the human-sized spider detective character, Spiridon, goes on a mission where the villain turns out to be another in a long line of Dr. Moreaus, who is also in this tale, responsible for the creation of the giant ants seen in the film THEM!

In other stories you will find the usual mash up of characters and ideas and, if you want to see what happens when Professor Challenger invents time travel, or when a very young Alfred Hitchcock gets involved in a plot involving Rouletabille and Harry Dickson, then this is a tome for you.

I particularly liked a tale by Travis Hiltz set around a time traveller marooned in Medieval France being assisted by the Wandering Jew to help rid the locals of Rotwang, from Metropolis, who was controlling not just Maria but the Volkites from the old Republic serial Undersea Kingdom. Another story has the Nyctalope and others trying to round up Edgar Allan Poe from 1940s America after he has been displaced by 'The Philadelphia Experiment'... a story in which a certain Ian Fleming spots James Bond’s name on a copy of the Field Guide To Birds Of The West Indies and notes how bland a sounding moniker it is (which parallels the real life creation of his famous character of course). They also refer to Edith Keeler in this story and how two other time travellers (which would be Kirk and Spock) allow her to die at her alloted time. You may remember this character played by Joan Collins in the Star Trek episode City On The Edge Of Forever, of course.

Other appearances of note might be the son of Bernard Quatermass, Indiana Jones, Doctor Omega, Liz Shaw, The Master and an interesting Carnacki tale where the Bachus is responsible, in a roundabout way, for the Whitechapel murders believed to have been committed by Jack The Ripper. Not to mention more than a few appearances in various stories for Les Vampires’ number one figurehead, Irma Vep. Another interesting story by Nigel Malcolm called Enemies Of The People is set in Paris in a future that is obviously an homage to the world created by Ridley Scott in Blade Runner. In this, after a near fateful encounter with the being that may or may not be the original Fantomas, Judex joins forces with Michael Moorcock’s character Una Persson and the Nyctalope to try and survive the corrupt government that wants the ‘terrorist’ Judex dead.

Out of many of the Shadowmen collections, I wouldn’t say this particular one is a good jumping on point. Asides from taking on some tales originally written for an unpublished volume collecting stories about characters from the Hexagon Comics range (an imprint I’m not familiar with myself), there are also a lot of tales which are follow ups from various yarns told in other volumes... such as Brian Gallagher’s latest chapter in the ongoing history of Captain Vampire or the latest yarn in the continuing exploits of Felifax.

All in all, it’s not the best in the series but, honestly, some of these collections are so entertaining that they can afford to have a few misses every now and again. I’m not a hundred percent sure I was fully on board with the Madam Atomos, tale where it turns out she was responsible for the death of John Lennon... I dunno, it just felt a little in bad taste to me but that’s no excuse not to let any writer or artist do what they want so, yeah, no real complaints from me there.

Tales Of The Shadowmen 15 - Trompe l'Oeil is not one of the best entries in the series but regular readers should get something out of this, I think... especially if they are enjoying the specific tales which, in some ways, could be seen as multi-parters. As I said, though, I wouldn’t jump into this one if you’re new to the series. Best to start off with one of the earlier collections if this is the case. Check out the full range of these and many other interesting curios at https://www.blackcoatpress.com if you want to peruse a publisher who has some very interesting volumes on the market.

Wordsworth Classics Guest Blog

Will The Real Protagonist Please Stand Up?

My look at the two main archetypes of heroes in literature and film can be found here as a guest blog at Wordsworth Editions.

War Gods Of The Deep

Reservoir Gods

War Gods Of The Deep 
aka The City Under The Sea
aka City In The Sea
1965 UK
Directed by Jacques Tourneur
DVD Region 1

I was looking forward to this movie after just having listened to the score a few times and wanting to know how the music “fit the picture”, so to speak. Well... I think to best summarise my experience would be to say that War Gods Of The Deep is a very... um... interesting movie.

That is to say...it’s quite a bad movie on many levels and, unfortunately, it doesn’t quite (for me at least) fit into the “so bad it’s brilliant” category of cheesy B-movie that I’d kinda been hoping for, although there are many bad judgement calls made along the way. However, where it fails in certain areas, it does make up for with other factors so... wait, I’m getting ahead of myself here.

Let me put a few facts before you first.

The director of this mini adventure is none other than the famed genre director Jacques Tourneur who made such classics as the original Val Lewton produced movies Cat People (a brief review of which is included here), The Leopard Man and I Walked With A Zombie (the latter of which is famously, of course, a zombie remake of Jane Eyre). He also directed the brilliant “adaptation” of M.R. James Casting The Runes as the film Night of The Demon/Curse Of The Demon (reviewed here), which is another piece of cinematic horror movie brilliance. I was, therefore, rather surprised when I saw he’d directed this piece of tosh, to be honest.

The film is distributed by AIP who was in the middle of a string of hits with films that were adaptations (aka inspired loosely by a scene or two) of the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe and so they’d kinda started really cheating on the extent they could get away with tagging up movies with the legendary author’s name. The movie known as “Egdar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace”, for example, is not actually based on Poe’s poem of the same name at all. It is, instead, an adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s brilliant tale The Case Of Charles Dexter Ward and the “Poe” designation is, barely,  justified by including a few lines from Poe’s verse at the end of the movie. My understanding is that, at this time, Lovecraft was a bit less known and not the legend he is today.

War Gods Of The Deep suffers a similar fate in countries where it was marketed as either The City Under The Sea or City In The Sea, because it was pretending to be based on Edgar Allan Poe’s poem City In The Sea (see the link below this review for a reading of this poem by Hypnogoria) but all it has in common with that piece is some lines of the poem recited by Vincent Price, who was at that time (and possibly still is to some extent) the figurehead for all things Edgar Allan and I suspect even he knew that for a lot of people he was “Poe made flesh” in celluloid. The “E. A. Poe-To-Go” guy, so to speak. Oh well, alright then, it does technically have a city in the sea in it too... but you don’t really get to see much of it, to be honest.

What we have here, then, is a completely made up story about stumbling upon a city under the sea off the coast of Cornwall, peopled by immortal smugglers who have been kept alive for hundreds of years due to... um... the properties of the water... and who have captured the leading lady of this movie because she looks like someone Vincent Price’s character used to love, many decades past.

The film starts off quite promisingly, actually, with some locals finding a washed up corpse on the beach and among them is leading hearth-throb Tab Hunter, who is quite convincing as a tough, cynical character... for about 3 minutes, until he goes up to “the house” to see his new lady friend acquaintance to tell her one of her guests is missing. From that point on his “acting switch” just seems to get turned off and he seems to be wooden, contradictory to his character’s initial set up and just generally inappropriate in his acting style for the entire rest of the movie. When his ‘lady friend’ gets kidnapped by a gill-man, he goes off with his other new friend, played as complete comic relief by David Tomlinson... and Tomlinson’s pet chicken.

They find a secret passage through a bookcase in the house which takes them down to a City In The Sea... too complex a labyrinth for them ever to find their way back (or so we’re expected to believe). There they see a young Tony Selby chained up in a water filling cavern and try to rescue him for all of 10 seconds before running off and saving themselves instead, which is not that great behaviour for ‘the good guys’ really but then again, who hasn’t wanted to drown Tony Selby at some point in their lives (no, don’t quote me, I’m kidding). Then they meet Vincent Price, who had apparently only read the script six days before arriving in England for the shoot. He plays the evil leader of the smugglers in his best and most earnest Poe style... which is also completely inappropriate for the style of the picture as it’s been playing so far.

In fact, there is no real chemistry in this movie at all with, it seems to me, any of the actors and actresses involved. They all seem to be very much doing their own thing with no thought about how their acting style fits in with anybody else and how it may help or, in this case, damage the picture... which is a bit of a shame because there’s some nice stuff happening on a technical level with the movie which is really quite brilliant.

Anyway, it turns out the dwellers of the city under the sea are looking for a way to plug up the underwater volcano which has been threatening to erupt and destroy them all for many decades now... so Vincent Price gives his new captives the job of finding out how to nullify the volcano with a deadline of three hours, or they will both be killed. Which is kind of unfair, really, considering he’s been trying to figure out a way of doing it for many years with no result. It turns out, of course, that the smugglers can’t return to dry land by day or the sunlight will rob them of their extra years and they will all die of extreme old age in moments... which is why they use their friends, the gill-men, if they need to “acquire” anything from the land above the sea.

At this point, our heroes meet the only person in the movie who actually seems to be doing a really good acting job and who is trying his best (and mostly succeeding) in fitting in with all the different modes of acting expression going on about him... as a new character helps our heroes escape and shows them a route back to their home which, naturally, involves wading about in diving suits and warding off gill-men and underwater crossbow armed smugglers in a long and quite tedious, extended chase scene. That actor is... John Le Mesurier.

Yes, that’s right. Sergeant Wilson from Dad’s Army acts everyone else off the screen in this film.

And that’s about as much of a simplistic and, frankly, impenetrably contradictory plot you will get out of this film. The volcano happens to go off before even our heroes’ three hours are up and it really does seem to be a bit of a coincidence that, after decades upon decades, the volcano decides it’s going to go off right this minute.

So... acting and script aside, the actual direction and cinematography on show in this one is quite astonishing. It’s always been my long held belief that Corman’s use of extreme colour contrasts in certain scenes in his Poe films for AIP are what contributed to the eventual assimilation of a design style which led to psychedelia within the public consciousness of late 60s pop culture and my personal belief is that this is because he saw a lot of the foreign product put out in a re-edited form by AIP, notably the films of Mario Bava. And this highly saturated method of colour work is something that some of the other AIP films kind of inherited too. Certainly War Gods Of The Deep is no exception. One could be excused for thinking the director is channelling Bava in no uncertain terms as deep reds and lime greens are pitched against other within shot in the least naturalistic and artificial way you could imagine.

And it looks incredible... especially when the design of the shots is so clean.

Tourneur also seems to have inherited Corman’s trick of leaving doors in the background of the sets open so another set shows through from behind, to give the shot a general sense of depth. One can be forgiven for ignoring the obvious mish-mash of different architectural styles and artefacts juxtaposed in the sets, which obviously are mostly borrowed from previous productions (it suddenly all goes a bit Egyptian at one point for a little while, for no apparent reason) because the composition of the shots and the way he directs the actors to move around them, is all very breathtaking.

This makes up for a lot but, it must be said, the gill-men aren’t all that great. They’ve tried, as films which came after this like Island Of The Fish Men and Humanoids From The Deep have also tried, to make the monster costumes be a stylistic flashback to the original Universal Creature From The Black Lagoon films... but, like those other two movies I just mentioned, fail utterly to capture the sheer impact and appealing quality of that first costume from the fifties film series. So that’s a shame... but the first fight in the house between a gill-man and Tab Hunter, where they throw things at each other for a bit, is still pretty good.

Stanley Black’s score for this movie is also pretty good, I would say, pushing the adventuresome qualities of the movie to their full... probably a lot fuller, actually, than I would have expected but it certainly adds to the fun. It’s just a shame it’s being showcased in a less than perfect movie.

So there we have it. War Gods From The Deep is really not a Poe film and if you go into this thinking it will be then you’ll probably be disappointed. The acting and script are both laughable elements but this is saved by some good shot design and execution. Steer clear if you are not a fan of trashy b-movie AIP films but certainly go and have a look if you are interested in exploring the less successful spin offs from the ‘Poe Fever’ that was on everybody’s mind at the time. For this reviewer, however, one Poe quote certainly springs to mind... “Nevermore.”

To hear a reading by Hypnogoria (aka Jim Moon) of Edgar Allan Poe’s City In The Sea, click here. 

The Raven (2012)

Ravenous

The Raven USA/Hungary/Spain 2012

Directed by James McTeigue

Playing at UK cinemas now

Warning: Beware the spoilers scratching at

the wood and masonry with their fingertips!

The Raven is the latest in a long line of many things...

Firstly, it’s the latest of about a gazillion and one* movies to be called The Raven. Hollywood studios do really seem to believe that people watching these films have blindingly short memories or, I dunno, never pick up a book or turn on the TV. That the audiences are somehow, to quote Woody Allen completely out of context (as is my right as a blogger I reckon)... “unaware of any event pre-Paul McCartney”. Except... maybe insert Lady Gaga or someone in place of McCartney. That’s the kind of people these film studio’s think are watching their movies... and if they’re right then we’re all really in trouble as a worldwide collective audience.

Secondly, this is also the latest in a long line of movies to be, or in some famous cases claiming to be, somehow inspired by the works of that literary genius Edgar Allan Poe** (a quote from the poem from which this very film takes it’s title has always been visible in the right hand column of my blog if you’ve ever scrolled down the sidebar). Edgar Allan Poe movies have been with us since the dawn of cinema but, the trouble is, the majority of his short stories aren’t really stories as such, at least not in the sense of the word as we come to use it today. They are short sketches of incidents really and so, with even the most skillful directors and writers, Poe movies tend to go off and do their own thing and make reference to the source material in a scene or two during the length of a feature... but you can’t really blame the movie makers for that, what else could they do? This one does pretty much what Dario Argento’s adaptation of The Black Cat does in Two Evil Eyes, in that it references a few Poe stories and successfully, at least to a point, manages to get away with it.

Thirdly... this is yet another movie to feature an actor portraying Poe as a main character... this has been done quite a bit more than you might imagine throughout the history of cinema and the last time I remember seeing it done was when Jeffrey Combs played him a few years back in yet another homage to The Black Cat, this time as a TV episode in the Masters Of Horror anthology series.

Okay... so this particular movie starts off in a most off-putting manner, following a brief opening sequence depicting Poe dying, as a police carriage rushes to the scene of a murder. I say it was off putting because I found myself already counting the number of seconds that each shot in this sequence was held... there can’t have been many shots in this opening that went on for more than 3 seconds tops I reckon. Fortunately the pacing settles down a little later but, it has to be said, this opening seemed to me to be very much trying to capture the same “lightning in a bottle” that the opening of Guy Ritchie’s first Sherlock Holmes movie captured.

The police come in to a murder scene which has so obviously been inspired by Poe’s The Murders In The Rue Morgue that it was interminable waiting for the characters on screen to catch up with me. I believe The Murders In The Rue Morgue was the first ever detective story (please correct me if I’m wrong), the main protagonist of which was referenced in Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes story, again if my memory is serving me correctly... it’s been a while since I read it either of them.

Anyway, when a second, gruesomely depicted murder (more so than even Argento’s own homage to this particular story... so can’t think why this one was unleashed on the general public in the UK as a 15 certificate, unless money changed hands), based on the swinging axe of Poe’s The Pit And The Pendulum is discovered, this leads the police into strong-arming Poe into... how does the saying go? Helping the police with their enquiries?

Soon the game is afoot and we are awash with murders, kidnapping and intrigue as Poe must write some last stories for daily publication inspired by each day’s events or lose the life of the woman who he loves, held hostage by the killer. Turns out... threat of death of a loved one can be a good motivator. Out of the bottom of a bottle of alcohol and back into the swing of producing great literature.

That’s as much as I’m saying about the plot. The pacing just about works and the film engages the eye, if not the brain, for most of the time. John Cusack as Poe is absolutely outstanding and his version of the gothic genius is empowered with a sense of energy which lends able support to the frantic journey of what is almost an action movie. However, it has to be said that there are some problems on the way... one of which is the fact that when the killer asks Poe a question near the end of the picture, Poe dismisses the question and just says “Pass”. Now I may be wrong (and again correct me if am please, as I’d like to know), but I don’t think that particular one word phrase, especially in that particular context, was around in Poe’s day now, was it? I understand the need to make it at least in some ways relevant to a young audience (it’s called keeping your eye on the money) but I think injecting a period piece with this kind of controlled (presumably, if the writers caught it) anachronism is not necessarily a good way to do it. In fact, I’m sure it’s not.

Another thing I felt about this movie was that, since it was trying to pitch itself as a kind of serial killer action fest, we could have done with a little less preamble and characterisation than what’s up there on the screen in this one and maybe jumped into the actual pursuit of the killer a little more quickly. Either that or give the movie another half an hour on the run time because, by the time they get up to pursuing the killer, the whole thing felt too short and almost like it was just a frame of a script to hang set pieces on... granted, that’s what most modern US movies are these days but, this doesn’t make this kind of “script construction” any less boring than it actually is... and it really can be boring sometimes.

And the bit that really enraged me and left me foaming at the mouth is what is literally the last minute of the movie. I don’t want to give the game away here but it felt really tagged on, cowardly in every way and like it was pandering to some stupid preview audience. It seriously made my blood boil and I’d hoped we were above needing such endings these days. Never mind... I guess it could have been worse.

That being said, The Raven is a fun little movie and is a lot better than some of the junk they’ve got playing at your local cinema at the moment. I’d personally rather be watching either of the two Boris Karloff starring movies of The Raven (from both 1935 and 1963) but this doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy this little romp for what it is on its own terms. It’s an enjoyable enough ride if you want a pseudo-gothic night out at the cinema to soak up a movie with, at the very least, a nicely chilling atmosphere to it. It’s no “From Hell” but it’s definitely worth a look if you’ve got nothing else on and I’ll certainly be picking up the DVD for another watch when it hits the shelves.

* approximate number of movies only, not an exact amount but close enough. ;-)

** There’s a pretty cool book which is just about still obtainable called The Poe Cinema: A Critical Filmography of Theatrical Releases Based on the Works of Edgar Allan Poe by Don G. Smith which is worth a read if you are interested in the subject.

Feline Groovy

The Black Cat
1981 Italy

Directed by
Lucio Fulci

Shameless Screen Entertainment

DVD Region 0

I always have mixed feelings about Lucio Fulci. Sure Zombie Flesh Eaters (aka Zombi aka Zombi 2 depending on which country’s print you happen to be viewing at the time) was an okay movie in that some of the shot compositions are nice (visually it’s like the spiritual cousin of Breakfast At Tiffanys) and in that it never really takes you out of your comfort zone so it’s one of those films you can just relax to. But he also did what I consider to be the truly dullest and most unwatchable spaghetti western ever (and I’ve seen a fair few), Four of the Apocalypse.

On the other hand, he also directed Lizard In A Woman’s Skin which is easily one of the finest giallo movies ever committed to the screen.

So I’m never really sure whether a new Fulci movie is going to bring me something really great, something totally dreadful or something in between the two. But I picked up a DVD copy of his Poe “adaptation” The Black Cat and decided to settle down and watch it because I’ve not seen a great deal of his work.

Now Poe is a hard deal when it comes to adaptation because, frankly, he wrote mostly short stories which, if they were done faithfully on screen, would leave you with movies which are only ten minutes long at most... so most movies which “say” they are adapted from his work use that term very loosely. Most of the plot lines to Poe movies are created from air by scriptwriters in an anemic attempt to give a narrative structure to whatever key moments happen in the original short (if you’re lucky and they bother to even read the original Poe before embarking on the script... for example Roger Corman’s movie Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace is actually an uncredited adaptation of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward).

I’ve now seen at least five different adaptations of Poe’s The Black Cat and I have to say that this version is no exception to the above rule. Fulci’s version certainly goes off on it’s own tangents throughout the course of the movie but I also have to say, in all fairness to him, that he manages to hit more of those elements which were part and parcel of the original story than most versions I’ve watched.

This is basically how the Poe version goes...

The story is about a man who hates a cat so much he gouges out its eye. After a while he kills it by hanging it but after a fire in his house the shape of the hanging cat is etched on the wall in the soot. After being haunted by the presence of an identical, one eyed cat which one is to presume is the original cat reincarnated, he goes to kill it with an axe but accidentally kills his wife instead. He walls her body up in the cellar and nearly gets away with his crime when the police investigate but just as they are about to leave a wailing from behind the wall is heard. The police knock down the wall and find the corpse of the wife with the wailing cat on it. To quote Poe, “I had walled the monster up within the tomb!”

Most of these elements from Poe are in place in the Fulci movie (I was impressed by the inclusion of the spectre of the hanged cat on the wall after a fire) although a lot of other stuff is thrown in to the mix to make it a full length feature. Like the fact that the cat in this one seems to be a killer cat of death and is going around causing the murders with it’s slinky feline antics. And the fact that it somehow seems to be able to control the minds of others, including that of a spiritualist who “owns “the cat, played by Patrick Magee (The Final Programme, A Clockwork Orange) a year before his death, in his own unique manner as always.

The cast is rounded out by some familiar names to people who like to watch gialli and horror films. Such luminaries as Mimsy Farmer (Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Autopsy), David Warbeck (Twins of Evil, Razor Blade Smile) and Dagmer Lassander (Femina Ridens, Werewolf Woman, Forbidden Photos of a Woman Above Suspicion) grace the movie with their presence and their collective presence is one of the main factors in helping to lift the movie above the expectations of a jaded audience.

Another factor is the absolutely superb lighting and framing which one would normally expect to find in a giallo more than a horror movie. There’s some really nice things going on here and, from what I’ve seen of the Shameless label so far, they seem to have a bit of a knack when it comes to picking out films which have a very strong and memorable visual flair. People tend not to think of Fulci in this light but in some of his films he certainly does some groovy things with shape and colour and this is one of the better examples.

The way the whole film is leisurely shot and paced gives a certain sense of atmosphere which is not always easy to credibly create in these kinds of movies but it’s certainly the case here that you get a definite feeling of unease and foreboding from the way certain scenes are handled. The DVD case itself makes a comparison to Hammer in terms of the mood conveyed in this picture but I think, in this particular case (or even on this particular case ;-) they are doing the Fulci movie a disservice since it gives off way more dread than the average Hammer movie (with one notable fumble which I will highlight in a minute).

Also thrown into this artistic stew of a movie is a vibrant and jaunty score by Pino Donnagio which is at times reminiscent of some of his earlier work, notably the score he provided for Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. I say jaunty because there is, perhaps, a certain sense of some scenes being either notably overscored or, perhaps, inappropriately scored. The point of view shots taken from the cat’s perspective are maybe a little bit “over jolly” and are feintly reminiscent of some of his later works, most notably the theme associated with the little boy in Dario Argento’s Trauma. But mostly it’s pretty good Donnagio and he’s always worth a listen and can always be relied upon to bring a Hermmannesque sensibility to proceedings when it is called for.

The only real major fumble in the whole movie (apart from an unexpected “oh-he-wasn’t-killed-after-all” moment with one of the characters) is when the tension is building as Mimsy Farmer explores Patrick Magee’s house and is transfixed by the gaze of the cat... the cat unexpectedly teleports to another place in the room with a Donnagio musical flourish, reminiscent of the way Mr. Benn used to change clothes in the fancy dress shop on children’s TV. This may well kill the atmosphere for you and leave you to erupt in fits of laughter... you’ve been warned on that one!

The transfer and print quality is everything you’ve come to expect form a Shameless release (with the usual choice of a reversible sleeve). It’s worth checking out this and other releases because there are some real gems in their black cat-alogue (err... sorry, I meant back catalogue... getting carried away again).

This is probably not the most enthralling adaptation of Poe’s work that you’ll see but it is unique in some of the elements of the original story it gets up onto the screen and it’s a more atmospheric side of Fulci that you might not have glimpsed before. Definitely one to add to the pile for late night, alcohol fuelled viewing this Halloween. Give it a shot!

A Wordsworth to the Wise

Thought this might be an opportunity to give my readers a quick pointer to Wordsworth Editions. People may remember this publisher, who introduced us to the idea of the £1 classic back in the early nineties.

Well, they’re still going strong and their editions are still exceptionally "value for money" (ok cheap, then) ranging at prices from £1.99 to £2.99 which, when compared to the cost of many modern paperbacks and given the extraordinary array of books available from Wordsworth Editions, is truly staggering. They’ve recently released my favourite Jules Verne novel, Mysterious Island, as part of their range and I’d urge any interested parties to pick this up as soon as they can - I remember waiting ages for a special order of this novel only a few years ago and when it finally came through it cost about a tenner! Wish I’d waited until now.

Of special interest is their “Tales of Mystery and the Supernatural” series of classic reprints. There are some great “value for money” editions of some absolutely terrific titles lurking beneath the covers of these distinctive black and charcoal grey editions (with their odd embossed and spot varnished blood and skulls), many of which I might never have been aware of if it wasn’t for the existence of this company.

Richard Marsh’s truly amazing tale of The Beetle for instance, which outsold publication of its nearest rival Dracula (also available in an excellent Wordsworth Edition) by a significant margin, is on their listings... and once you’ve read it you’ll see why it outsold the Stoker classic - it’s fantastic. This was apparently the source novel for a silent film of the same title, so if anyone can get ahold of a copy or give me any information as to its status as either a lost film or something from which the footage still survives... please contact me.

If you’re a fan of recurring characters, they have some complete collections of some very interesting ones... for instance, “The Casebook of Carnacki the Ghost Finder” by W.H. Hodgson or “The Right Hand of Doom and other tales of Solomon Kane” by the legendary Robert E. Howard. Plus lots of stalwarts of the genre such as Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft and Arthur Conan Doyle (and not just his Holmes stories, although these are obviously all covered... my first read of the Professor Challenger stories was via a Wordsworth Edition called “The Lost World and other stories”).

Contemporary writers are also on board with this label, such as David Stuart Davies and his remarkable tales of Sherlock Holmes adventures “previously unwritten” (like The Tangled Skein, which pits Holmes and Watson against Dracula).

And for all you people who like to know where your movies and TV shows have grown from, an interesting batch of short stories await you from this sterling publisher... an M.R. James collection, for example, which includes his “Casting The Runes” most famously adapted as Night of the Demon (or Curse of the Demon depending on which version you know)... an Ambrose Bierce collection which features “The Damned Thing” (most recently made into a Master’s Of Horror episode)... Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (which was the basis for many vampire films based on tales of the Karnsteins - including Hammer’s three movies kicking off with The Vampire Lovers)...Lafcadio Hearn’s “Oriental Ghost Stories” (which includes the tales which were the basis of Masaki Kobayashi's masterpiece Kwaidan... or Kaidan, depending again on which edition you have)... the list goes on. Do some research because I think you’ll find it’s worth it.

I should probably stop gushing now... suffice it to say that I owe Wordsworth Editions an enormous debt when it comes to exposure to a lot of great tales which I might not otherwise have read. From D’Artagnan to Dr Nikola and from Robinson Crusoe to Rouletabille, these editions are not to be missed and I personally consider this particular publisher to be providing, frankly, a wonderful and much needed (in these jaded times) public service rather than running a business... although they seem to be managing to do both quite well.

For details of all their editions go here... www.wordsworth-editions.com