Liminal Notes

What with bad knees and a weed allergy, for me every garden is a torture garden. Maybe that’s why it took knitting to get me through Freddie Francis’ TORTURE GARDEN (1967, YouTube but with commercials, so you might want to wait for it turn up on TCM). The film has some nice touches and is visually impressive, but it tends to drag, and there are logical lapses you may find distracting.

The titles play over some of the picture’s best shots, a carnival as twilight turns into evening. It then moves into the sideshow’s chamber of horrors, where guide Dr. Diabolo (Burgess Meredith) invites those with a truly macabre bent to visit his secret collection. The main attraction there is a statue of Atropos, the ancient Greek Fate who snipped the thread of life. As each stares at the statue, they see an image of a possible future based on their inner failings. A wastrel (Michael Bryant) goes all Regina Giddens on his wealthy uncle (Maurice Denham) only to discover the man’s fortune comes with a feline curse. Aspiring actress Beverly Adams (later Beverly Sassoon) learns the price of career longevity. Music journalist Barbara Ewing fights to get concert pianist John Standing away from his possessive piano. And effete Poe enthusiast Jack Palance (yes, you read all of that right) tries to find the secret of Poe collector Peter Cushing. It’s hardly a spoiler to say that none of this ends well for anyone.

Freddie Francis considered this the best of his omnibus films (I prefer 1964’s DR. TERROR’S HOUSE OF HORRORS) and claims Martin Scorsese as a fan. I think the picture had the potential to be a camp masterpiece if it all just moved faster. There are great absurd elements here: Bryant tormented by a telepathic cat, Adams’ stealing her friend’s date so she can make connections in a posh club and Ewing’s being chased by a killer piano bathed in colored lights. But there’s so much time spent on the set-up for each story they never get up enough speed to go over the top. The only one that succeeds is the finale, with Palance and Cushing competing to see which can out-quirk whom. Palance clearly wins, mainly because he’s cast so much against type and seems to be relishing the chance to purse his lips and coo his lines. Meredith is also delightful as the sideshow huckster…or is he?

In the long stretches, you can easily start questioning the plot. Denham is confined to a wheelchair but lives in a house without a single accommodation. Even allowing that these are different times, how does he wheel down the two steps from his parlor to the front door or get himself in and out of bed with nothing to grab hold of? Adams wonders how her leading man has stayed young and vital for decades, but the studio cast Robert Hutton, no doubt hiding out in England to escape reprisals for having directed THE SLIME PEOPLE (1963). Maybe he could have played the part 15 or 20 years earlier, but who the hell goes through hell to look like a poorly preserved man pushing 60. Standing’s piano can play for him, but he blames himself for hitting wrong notes when he’s been up late courting Ewing. Maybe you should just turn down the sound until Palance’s episode and put on a favorite album.

So, some far from brilliant producer thought without much thought, “Hey, that HALLOWEEN reboot that ignores all the sequels did great by pitting Michael Myers against the first film’s sole survivor. What franchise can we do that with now? Bring back Heather Langenkamp to take on Freddy Kruger? Been done. Bring back Adrienne King to take on Jason Voohees? Oops! He’s already killed her, and she never fought him anyway. Bring back Marilyn Burns to fight Leatherface? Damn! She the actress is dead. Bring back…Wait a minute. Who needs her? Let’s just recast the role. We don’t even have to get someone who looks like her 50 years on? Yeah, that’s the ticket.” And thus was born David Blue Garcia’s TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (2022, Netflix).

A pair of entrepreneurs (Sarah Yarkin and Jacob Lattimore) have bought Harlow, TX, now a ghost town because of the notoriety surrounding Leatherface’s nearby farm. They’re going to auction it off to influencers to create a tourist destination 90 miles or so from the nearest city. But they forgot to buy the orphanage. Unfortunately, they think they own it, leading to a confrontation with its elderly keeper (Alice Krige) that puts her into cardiac arrest. And who’s the last remaining orphan? Why, it’s a maskless Leatherface, who doesn’t look or move like someone in his late 60s or early 70s. When she dies, he puts on a happy face (hers, in fact) and sets out to kill all involved, which is basically anybody within tossing range of his trusty chainsaw. This alerts Sally (Olwen Fouere), the sole survivor of the original film, who’s still out hunting for him.

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way first. Fouere and Krige are formidable actresses. Their screen time is limited, probably because the producers didn’t think horror fans wanted to see older women. But what you get of them is precious. There’s one decent kill, seen through a swinging kitchen door. There are also attempts to deal with social issues: gentrification, social media, big city liberals vs. downhome types and gun violence (Yarkin’s sister, played very well by Elsie Fisher, is a survivor of a school shooting). All this is brought up, but the script doesn’t do much with it. Gentrification is an excuse for getting the characters there, and that’s it. There’s one social media joke, in which a victim thinks it’s all a prank and livestreams Leatherface’s attack, even as he’s getting chainsawed. The city/country divide is just there for a few jokes at the start. And Fisher starts out traumatized and then gets it all together when the plot demands it. Her hero’s journey is like a walk to the corner grocery and back.

When accused of cribbing ideas from such films as PLANET OF THE VAMPIRES (1965) and IT! THE TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE (1958), scripter Dan O’Bannon quipped, I didn’t steal from anybody. I stole from everybody.” For film buffs, Ridley Scott’s ALIEN (1979, On Demand) is the rare film during which you can identify numerous inspirations without wishing you were watching them instead. The ideas from other films are transformed — by an intelligent script, astute filmmaking and a dynamite cast — into something better. Perhaps it’s an example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts. What’s also surprising to me is the fact that although I had not seen it in its entirety since its first theatrical run, the film’s plot is so well known I always knew what was coming. Yet I still jumped at all the same places. It’s more restrained than a lot of later horror films. Some may even feel it’s rather slow. But that’s because the film takes its time creating an atmosphere and planting clues for later plot turns and revelations.

O’Bannon has done a bang-up job of world-building, something also reflected in the design and direction. This Nostromo doesn’t look like it was just assembled from a model kit, and the crew isn’t a group of dedicated space jockeys. They’re working stiffs who complain about unfair payment plans while getting on each other’s nerves on a shipt that seems to be falling apart around them. And those dangling chains and exposed pipes provide perfect hiding places for the mechanistic xenomorph designed by H.R. Giger. With its dominant corporation and disgruntled workers, it feels like the world we’re living in now, only with interstellar travel and monsters from other planets rather than board rooms.

O’Bannon also creates clearly defined character with which the strong cast can run. When the crew goes to investigate a signal from a crashed alien spacecraft, ell the three members trekking to it in regulation space suits are hard to tell apart visually. But their voices are clear — the duty-bound captain (Tom Skerritt), reckless, adventurous Kane (John Hurt) and the more skittish Lambert (Veronica Cartwright), who keeps suggesting they just get out of there. Smart woman, and not the only one.

Of the four films in the original ALIENS franchise, the two prequels starting with PROMETHEUS (2012), the two Aliens vs. Predators flicks, ALIEN: ROMULUS (2024) and the very good series ALIEN: EARTH, the original is the most traditional horror film. It’s all about the horror, both the dread of what the xenomorph is going to do to the characters and some well-timed jump scares. It’s also got a clear, subversive point of view. The source of horror here is sexual violence, and a lot of the scares are aimed at white males. The face-hugger is what Barbara Creed calls the “monstrous-feminine.” It penetrates Kane to lay its eggs: a female role performed with masculine aggression. This forces the male to give birth, fatally, and produce a monster with a deadly second set of jaws shooting out like a nightmare penis. And the only characters with a clear sense of how to deal with it are a woman (Sigoruney Weaveer’s Ripley consistently has the right ideas, but nobody will admit it) and a black man. Parker (Yaphet Kotto) is the only one who suggests putting the infected Kane into cryostasis. If they’d listened to the woman, they might all be alive. If they’d listed to the black man, they not only would have survived, but they would have met the corporation’s need for an alien organism to study. Misogyny and racism are the primrose path of not just of dalliance but also self-destruction.

Four obnoxious teens, only one of whom was actually a teen during filming, sit around telling CAMPFIRE TALES (1997, not to be confused with the 1991 film of the same name, Prime, Tubi, Plex) inspired by urban legends (but not URBAN LEGENDS). They’ve just been in a car wreck and are waiting for help or maybe a better script. It took three directors — Martin Kunert, who also co-wrote, David Semel and Matt Cooper — to generate this much boredom.

This was meant as a calling card for the three beginning directors. That worked rather well for one of them (Semel, who’s done a lot of TV work since then) but not so well for the audience tuning in. The film can’t even keep its basic premise straight. It opens with a re-telling of “The Hook,” (Kunert) with a very young James Marsden and Amy Smart, that isn’t told by anybody. It’s shot in black and white but doesn’t even attempt to use that to up the horror level. After that the pseudo-teens start telling their stories: “The Honeymoon” (Cooper) with a young Ron Livingstone, “People Can Lick Too” (Kunert) and “The Locket” (Semel) with a young Glenn Quinn. There’s also a twist ending that shouldn’t surprise anybody with half a brain, though my decision to watch this makes me wonder if I have even that much.

To be nice: “The Honeymoon” and “People Can Lick Too” have some creepy bits, and Livingston is fun as a horny honeymooner, but it takes forever to figure out which urban legend it is. Damn, I was trying to be nice. I’m also not sure what urban legend inspired “The Locket,” but that could be me. There are also a few moments of nicely washed-out color at the start of “People Can Lick Too.” And that’s it, kids. Be glad I took the bullet for you on this one.

Cinematographer Gordon Willis probably benefitted the most when Francis Ford Coppola recut and restored THE GODFATHER PART III (1990) as THE GODFATHER CODA: THE DEATH OF MICHAEL CORLEONE (2020, Paramount+). The new version gave audiences 30 years later a chance to appreciate anewthe beautiful color palette he created for the film (not to mention the rest of the trilogy). For the rest, the good performance stayed good, and the really bad one (you know who I’m talking about, and if not just read on), don’t change that much. It is ironic, though, that the subtitle Coppola and Mario Puzo had tried to give the film in 1990 is finally on it even though the re-cutting eliminates that particular plot turn.

This version opens with Michael Coreleone (Pacino) agreeing to help Archbishop Gilday (Donal Donnelly) salvage the Vatican Bank in return for the Church’s help in gaining control of an international conglomerate that will finally get his family out of crime. That does not, however, sit well with New York’s other crime families or the European oligarchs controlling the conglomerate. On the home front, his son, Anthony (Franc D’Ambrosio, whose opera scenes are impressive) wants to leave law school to pursue a career in opera, and his daughter, Mary (Sofia Coppola), is falling for late brother Sonny’s hotheaded illegitimate son, Vincent (Andy Garcia).  And somehow it all comes together at Anthony’s operatic debut in Sicily.

I had mostly enjoyed the film when I saw in 1990, but I had only seen THE GODFATHER once years earlier and had yet to see THE GODFATHER PART II. Having viewed both fairly recently, I found the third part, even recut, rather tedious. There’s a lot of good stuff in it — the implication that the Catholic Church, legitimate business and politics are no cleaner than the Corleone’s former businesses, a lot of the performances (particularly Talia Shire, whose Connie is turned into a Lucretia Borgia figure), the delicately played one-on-one scenes between Pacino and Diane Keaton and some of the action. But Coppola and co-writer Puzo keep calling up tropes from the first two films, and the third suffers by comparison. Opening with the Archbishop’s scene sets up the plot more clearly, but it’s a reminder of how good the original’s opening with Marlon Brando and Salvatore Corsitta was. It’s followed by a party that’s not as resonant as the wedding in Part I and the communion party in Part II. And the same holds for the Little Italy street festival and the final montage of murders, which is a lot draggier than in earlier iterations.

Stylistically, Peter Jackson’s THE FRIGHTENERS (1996, Shudder, AMC+) is a kinder, gentler version of his early films like BAD TASTE (1987) and BRAINDEAD (1992). I’m not sure the world really needs a kinder, gentler version of those films, particularly the delightfully offensive and destructive BRAINDEAD. In place of gross-out effects, the picture substitutes a few too many plot twists, making it feel overlong. But it has its charms. As a frenetic comedy it benefits from good special effects, a strong leading performance by Michael J. Fox and an intriguing premise.

Fox is a semi-bogus psychic detective. He has the ability to interact with ghosts and has convinced three who aren’t ready to pass over to help him by staging hauntings he can then dispel for a high fee. That in itself is a solid premise for a film, and the three ghosts (Chi McBride, Jim Fyfe and especially John Astin) have distinctive characters and good comic chops. But his small town is also inflicted with a series of killings by a spirit looking like the grim reaper. With his gifts, Fox can see a number on the forehead of each impending victim. That’s upsetting enough, but it gets worse when he sees the next number on the widowed doctor (Trini Alvarado) he’s fallen for.

There’s a lot going on in this film — the local newspaper editor out to sell papers by exposing Fox as a fake, an elderly woman (Julianna McCarthy) whose daughter (Dee Wallace Stone) was involved with a serial killer (Jake Busey), an FBI agent (Jeffrey Combs) out to get Fox for his own twisted reasons. You almost need a scorecard to keep up with the action. And like so many films dealing with the supernatural, THE FRIGHTENERS tends to write its rules as it goes along. Things happen not out of any clearly established logic, but simply to move the plot in Jackson and co-writer Fran Walsh’s desired direction. There are also places Jackson lets things get a little too cute. Fox’s broken-down Volvo gets involved in too many comic car chases.  They start feeling like a substitute for creativity. And Danny Elfman’s score contains some cues that are a little too bouncy. They keep yelling, “Isn’t this fun,” when we should be able to figure that out for ourselves. Jackson and Walsh also err in stating that the grim reaper can eat souls. When it starts taking out ghosts we’ve come to care about, it tends to kill the comedy.

But a lot of the picture works. The young Fox was a whiz at physical comedy. He may not be at the level of a Buster Keaton or a Harold Lloyd, but he can generate laughs just navigating the uneven grounds at the local cemetery or taking pratfalls while coping with recalcitrant ghosts. And he connects well with other people. It’s easy to root for him and Alvarado, a gifted actor in her own right. The standout supporting performances come from Combs and Stone, cast against type. His manic craziness at times feels inspired, and she manages to pivot from repressed, sheltered girl to conniving killer in a heartbeat.

I first saw Brian De Palma’s BLOW OUT (1981, TCM, YouTube) during my summer at ACT in San Franciso with a friend from my rooming house there. We both hated it. I’d like to blame Pauline Kael, who oversold the film, hailing it as De Palma’s masterpiece (she would turn on him, an inevitability for Kael, with his next film, 1983’s SCARFACE). Watching again 45 years later I found more to like, though the two sequences I had the most issues with still bother me.

The plot is a mash-up of Michaelangelo Antonioni’s BLOW UP (1966) and Francis Ford Coppola’s THE CONVERSATION (1974) floundering off the shores of Chappaquiddick. While recording wind sounds for a cheap slasher film, sound engineer John Travolta witnesses a car skidding into a river and saves the female occupant (Karen Allen). On reviewing his recording, he realizes that it wasn’t just an accident. He can hear a gunshot before the tire blows out. And the passenger he couldn’t save is a governor who’s been leading the polls against the incumbent in an upcoming presidential election. The cover-up starts immediately. First the governor’s chief aide (John McMartin) convinces Travolta and Allen to keep quiet about her presence in the car. Then a mystery man (John Lithgow) murders a stranger who resembles Allen to create a serial killer scare and cover his planned murder of the woman involved in the assassination.

The film is awash in paranoia and political corruption. Before getting into filmmaking, Travolta had worked on a squad investigating police payoffs. Allen works with a lowlife (Dennis Franz, at his most impressively scuzzy) in a blackmail racket. The governor was hiding extramarital affairs, and it’s hinted the current president’s handlers arranged for him to be caught with her. A lot of this is filmed very well. Vilmos Zsigmond shot most of the scenes at night, and though the sound-recording scene is almost idyllic at first, he captures a lot of the city’s seamy underbelly of faded downtown shops and porn theaters. For the most part, De Palma’s directing tricks are under control. A lot of the scenes get to build with a natural rhythm without a lot of his often-distracting camera trickery.

But then there’s the scene in which Travolta discovers his recordings have been erased. The camera pans around the room three times, as if De Palma finally had to make sure we knew he was directing. It’s a big showy scene, but it robs us of the chance to see Travolta’s growing anxiety as he tests tape after tape only to find nothing on them. The exaggerated showmanship pulls you out of the film. I have the same problem with the ending, which feels self-consciously downbeat (and requires some plot lapses). It’s what Kael would/should have called a “terrible smile.” Yes, De Palma has made filmmaking and its concomitant visual and aural voyeurism a major theme of the movie. It opens with a clip from Travolta’s slasher film in which a campus guard is murdered while spying on female students cavorting in little or no clothing. The picture is all about the queasy thrill of watching and listening to what shouldn’t be seen or heard. But with the ending it turns into such a condemnation of the process one wonders why De Palma even feels the need to make movies. You may feel judged just for watching the film. Does De Palma want to kill his audience (in a sense he did; the film flopped)?

Criticizing the ending is not, however, to slight Travolta’s performance in it. This is the young Travolta who moves with grace and intention and slips effortlessly into his characters, almost erasing the line between acting and being. Even at the end, he’s totally committed to the character and gives us a powerful sense of how the film’s action has affected him. There’s also good work from Lithgow, who creates a creepy psychopath with very little screen time, and Franz. The one failed performance is Allen’s. She never seems to be completely there and doesn’t go far enough in creating a character voice. She sounds like an actress who’s been told to do Judy Holliday but isn’t fully committed to it. Or maybe she just doesn’t have the vocal equipment or control to pull it off (her line readings are delicious in other films like CARRIE and DRESSED TO KILL). Melanie Griffith would do a much better job at vocal modulation in De Palma’s later, also flawed BODY DOUBLE (1984), and when you can’t measure up to her, you know you’re in trouble.

Filmed on the eve of the Soviet Union’s dissolution, Vera Chytilova’s WOLF’S HOLE (1986, Criterion Channel, YouTube) seems both a critique of authoritarianism aimed at the country’s Soviet rulers and a comment on the generation of Czech’s born after the freedom of the Prague summer. It’s a collision of apolitical, self-centered teens and hardships they never expected to be facing, a wintry variation on “Lord of the Flies.” Call it “Lord of the Snowfleas.”

A group of teens arrive at the Ponikla railway station for a skiing workshop in the Czech mountains. Things go wrong from the start. The road is blocked, so they have to ride up on a lift intended for cargo and supplies. The workshop is intended for ten, but there’s an eleventh person, suggesting one of the teens is an interloper. Then the lift stops running, leaving them without anything to eat but beans, potatoes and a sausage one of the girls feeds to a dog she’s brought with her. And though the workshop’s leader (Miroslav Machacek) says they only planned for ten, one of the girls finds a list with all 11 names. Clearly there’s some kind of manipulation going on, and soon it seems Machacek is trying to pit the students against each other.  But to what end? And why are his assistants prone to rolling around in the snow naked?

Chytilova planned the picture as her version of a slasher film, only without the slasher. It follows the standard tropes of the genre by placing its youthful cast in an isolated spot from which they can’t easily escape. There’s even a man at the railway station warning them not to go. But she’s not interested in coming up with creative ways to slice and dice her young cast. Instead, the focus is on the unreasonable demands made by Machacek and his assistants and the way the pampered young people start losing any pretense of civilization.

There’s a lot going on with these kids, maybe too much. Honza (Jan Bidas) is caught between warring parents. Until she mentions she’s his mother, the woman driving him to the station, who begs him not to leave her, seems like an older lover about to lose her kept boy. There are twins at war because when they both got sick, one lost her hearing. And Petr (Frantisek Stanik) is trying to keep secret the fact that he just got out of jail because of gang activity that led to a man’s death. Maybe this is Chytilova and co-writer Daniela Fischerova’s way of suggesting that these seemingly privileged young people have their own problems, but most of their issues seem to come up only to be dropped. Bidas steals a vial of pills from his mother’s car and sneaks them during his stay. Yet we never find out what they are. We don’t even get a sense of their effect on him. It’s like introducing a gun in Act I and never having it go off.

There are certain things for which I’m a sucker:

True crime, particularly serial killer stories

Low-budget exploitation films

Mahler

Tony Lo Bianco dancing a rhumba in tight, light-colored pants

So is it any surprise I’m a big fan of Leonard Kastle’s THE HONEYMOON KILLERS (1970, HBOMax, YouTube). I even own a copy. It retells, with a few divergences, the case of Raymond Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco) and Martha Beck (Shirley Stoler), the “Lonelyhearts Killers,” who fleeced women he met through a correspondence club and killed between three and twenty of them. On the surface, it seems the pulpiest of all true crime films, yet it also possesses an edgy sense of humor. What else to make of a scene in which a potential mark sings “America the Beautiful” in the bathtub while Lo Bianco and Stoler rifle through her wallet. It’s the American dream gone rancid.

Martha is a lonely nurse whose neighbor (Doris Roberts) convinces her to join a correspondence club in search of a mate. She’s hit on by Ray, who first bilks her for a “loan” but then takes her into his racket. Posing as brother and sister, they set out to court lonely women for their money. When one (Marilyn Chris) comes on to Ray too strongly, Martha overdoses her with sleeping pills. Another (Mary Jane Higby) gets hit over the head with a hammer before Ray and Martha strangle her to death. When Martha discovers Ray has gotten another mark (Kip McArdle) pregnant, however, it triggers a crisis.

Kastle’s script makes some interesting changes to the true story. The real Marilyn Beck was a single mother of two who turned her children over to the Salvation Army to be with Ray, but that would seem too monstrous at the start of their affair, so instead she has an aged mother she puts into a nursing home. And it’s likely Ray had already murdered at least one mark before he met Martha. That’s not mentioned so Kastle can focus on the couple’s amour fou. There’s also a change to the ending of their story that’s more questionable. It’s an attempt to move the plot into the realm of the tragic, and I don’t think it works as well as it should. It’s an abrupt shift in tone from what Northrop Frye called the mythos of winter to the mythos of fall without going through spring or summer.

Part of the issue is that up until that moment, the film has been more detached and filled with wicked humor. After Martha blows up at a nurse where she works, Kastle cuts to her walking home and kicking a child’s wagon out of her way. Stoler is the picture of gluttony, gorging on pretzels and chocolates as if they were a substitute for sex, which we all know they are. Lo Bianco makes Ray so obvious when he sets out to seduce his marks, even Martha, that it’s hard to take them seriously. Most of the victims are made to look at least slightly foolish. Higby is hilariously cheap when she takes Ray and Martha out to dinner, and parts of her murder scene are timed with comic precision. Chris, who’s claimed to be off men after one got her pregnant and ran off, keeps coming on to Lo Bianco too blatantly for us to take her seriously. The only mark who maintains any level of dignity is the one that gets away. In the role, Barbara Cason is also the most subtle actor in the film. Her response when she realizes Ray and his “sister” are sexual partners is simply exquisite. This is the one sequence completed by Martin Scorses before he was fired for working too slowly (and maybe too seriously?), and though the tone is different it somehow fits perfectly into the film. It’s the transition into the couple’s growing violence.

A strange substance drips into a college professor’s pipe. When he lights it, he can taste something different and then settles back for a smoke before his vision blurs, brass blares on the soundtrack and he starts to pass out. Is this some vintage anti-drug film? No, it’s Jack Arnold’s Jungian horror film MONSTER ON THE CAMPUS (1958, Tubi), damned by some as a low point in the studio’s 1950’s sci fi/horror cycle and hailed by others as either a comment on racism or a condemnation of conformity, and good for all of them. Though clunky and on occasion inadvertently comical, it moves fast and at least offers a rare leading role to Joanna Moore, an actress Universal could never figure out how to cast properly.

Dr. Donald Blake (Arthur Franz), not the one who turns into Thor, is thrilled to receive a rare coelacanth from Madagascar, which he has to explain is not in Texas. He wants to study it for his work on primitive life, but damned if it wasn’t preserved for transport with gamma rays and not the kind that created The Incredible Hulk. Instead, they make anything ingesting the fish’s blood — a dog, a dragonfly and the good doctor who isn’t Thor, devolve into their species’ primitive form. This would upset his fiancée (Moore), the daughter of the university president, if she weren’t too stupid to figure out that the murderous ape man seen wearing her boyfriend’s clothes is, in fact, her boyfriend. It’s no marvel that the film leaves this helpless little thing behind in her father’s country cabin, while the menfolk go out to deal with Blake’s metamorphosis.

This is a decidedly threadbare production. Aside from a few exteriors shot at Occidental College and Eagle Rock, California, it mostly takes place on underdressed studio sets. Maybe that was a break for cinematographer Russell Metty after capturing the baroque vision of Orson Welles on TOUCH OF EVIL (1958), but it’s no thrill for the rest of us. Franz and Moore make up for this in earnestness, and she has an interesting, throaty voice. But you also get scenes with dating college students Troy Donahue and Nancy Walters, who seem to be competing to see who can deliver the most inexpressive performance. He wins because of the wonderful moment when he’s holding a net to catch the overgrown primitive dragonfly and stands there without a hint of tension or even anticipation.

The film at least has an interesting premise, the idea that every living creature carries within it the species’ past. And that primitive urge is triggered by the great bugaboo of ‘50s horror, science gone mad. That certainly makes for an interesting antithesis between thinking man and brute man. Of course, this is a variation on “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” though without the opportunities for Franz to deliver a bravura performance since his primitive self is replaced by a stunt man in a bad over-the-head mask. The story has lots of cultural implications, hence the academic interpretations, but none of it is reflected in the film’s style. Arnold had created wonderful dreamlike sequences in films like IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE (1953) and CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954), but here the low budget, screaming stock music and 12-day shooting schedule hold him back.  Still, it’s fun seeing coelacanth blood bring out the beast in Franz’s button-down doctor. And there’s always Moore, who seems way too intelligent to be playing a university president’s kid whose life is confined to chaperoning dances, begging her fiancée to spend some time with her and then tattling on him to daddy.

Growing up on old movies, I knew Edma May Oliver as Shirley Temple’s nemesis in LITTLE MISS BROADWAY (1938, and thank you “Shirley Temple Theater”), the scene-stealing Nurse in ROMEO AND JULIET (1936) and the definitive Red Queen in ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1933), because that’s what was showing on Philadelphia’s network affiliates. It wasn’t until last night and thanks to TCM that I finally caught up with George Archainbaud’s PENGUIN POOL MURDER (1932, TCM), the first of three films in which she played Stuart Palmer’s crime-solving schoolmarm Hildegarde Withers opposite James Gleason’s Inspector Piper. The film is rather broadly acted, though expertly so, and it doesn’t have the tightest mystery plot. But watching Oliver and Gleason work together, with her nasal honk coming up against his guttural growl, is an utter joy.

Somebody has killed crooked stockbroker Gerald Parker in an aquarium conveniently filled with people who had a strong motive. The killer’s biggest mistake is doing it when Oliver is there on a class trip. She not only discovers the body but also effortlessly joins Gleason in the investigation. Is it the man’s unhappy wife (Mae Clarke, who spent half her career being manhandled by her leading men-handlers), the ex- (Donald Cook) who hopes to get her back, the aquarium director (Clarence Wilson) fleeced by the deceased or someone else. Hint: the solution involves information withheld by the writers until the last minute.

That last speaks to the film’s biggest problem. Although I solved the case based on gut instinct before they’d even assembled the evidence (casting will out), you can’t really do so based on the evidence. And though the writers have given Withers keen observational powers, she’s only tangentially instrumental in bringing the killer to justice. Rather, the miscreant makes a heat-of-the-moment mistake (for which Withers and Piper have set them up). But does that really matter when you can spend 66 minutes watching Oliver and Gleason mug their way into your heart. And it’s refreshing that this is the rare detective film where the police inspector welcomes the help of someone outside the force. The two may spar verbally, but they’re basically partners throughout the action. The film even ends with their running off to get married, though that would be forgotten in the sequels, two more with Oliver, one with Helen Broderick and two with ZaSu Pitts.

From the film’s subtext, any marriage between Withers and Pipers would likely have been tinged with lavender. Oliver always read rather butch (years later Marjorie Main would say she preferred the company of women, if you know what she means), and Withers’ tailored wardrobe does little to dispel that impression. And though Gleason doesn’t have a femme bone in his body, he has a line about a lawyer (Robert Armstrong) who collects penguin statuettes — “Well, I wouldn’t want to live with [a penguin fancier] if he kept bringing them home” — that suggests he’s not averse to sharing his life with a member of the same sex. In true pre-Code fashion, things get a little more overt when Withers quizzes the murder victim’s receptionist (Rochelle Hudson, no doubt looking for some imitation of life) about how she knew it was a man who called to tip her boss off that his wife was at the aquarium. “Well, it ain’t likely a woman would be calling me ‘Baby,’ is it?” she asks. And Withers quips, “No, not so far downtown as this.”

I showed this my friend Ben last night, so this is a second review:

In her second feature (after 2021’s SO VAM), Australian Alice Maio Mackay took on the giallo with BAD GIRL BOOGEY (2022, Shudder, AMC+, Tubi) but with her own queer semi-punk twist. It’s like a mash-up of Gregg Araki and Dario Argento. She may not get every element of the form perfectly, but the film has a quirky sensibility rarely found in its Italian inspirations. And it offers the refreshing idea, which she would develop further in her 2023 T BLOCKERS, of having queer kids stand up to a homophobic world.

The film starts with two sequences set in the past during which someone dons a cursed doll mask and starts killing people. We then jump to present-day Adelaide, where teen lesbian Angel (Lisa Fanto) is being raised by her aunt (Kate Bonney) after her mother was murdered in the film’s second prologue and revealed to have been a lesbian. Alice loves hanging out at the local lesbian bar with friends Dario (Iris Mcerlean, sometimes billed as Ethan) and Lila (Prudence Cassar). One night, someone wearing the mask murders Lila just outside the club. As more queer teens are killed, Angel and Dario, convinced the straight adults in their world don’t care, set out to solve the crimes on their own.

Mackay’s works seem to be about creating a queer utopia. The LGBTQ teens in her films gravitate toward each other because nobody else seems to understand them. Even Angel’s sympathetic aunt doesn’t always get it. She thinks the only way to protect her is to keep her locked in the house, even though the girl derives her strength from the community she’s built with her friends. The younger characters also are channeling the fury of their generation about inheriting a world that seems hostile, here because of the continued prevalence and even acceptance of bigotry. The school’s bully ends up in their grief therapy group simply because his well-off parents are afraid staying out if it will hurt his college chances. It’s just window dressing, with no pretext of dealing with his prejudices and hateful behavior.

The film captures the super-saturated colors of giallo. It’s set in a neon-lit world dominated by the places the young characters hang out at night. There’s also trauma in the mask’s history, though it’s more social than the personal trauma motivating most killers in giallo. The mask is associated with the Third Reich and, as a sympathetic police detective explains, serves not to make people kill but to let them. It unleashes their inner bigot. Where the film fails to live up to its inspiration is in the finale. Mackay tries to use camera movement and quick cutting to create an operatic feel, but the acting is too close to the vest to carry it further. Grand passion isn’t in these characters’ vocabulary. Irony is their main coping mechanism. They’re upset when their friends are killed, but they also wisecrack that “We’re never going to get out of therapy.”

That’s not really a flaw of course, but the film has some of its own. It sets up psychological issues for the two main characters — April is a cutter, and Dario a recovering drug addict — that neither relate to the plot nor lead to anything. There’s not even much of an explanation of what led to such behavior. It’s just a given. But the sense of a teen world built on alienation and sarcasm is powerful. These are character in development, as evidenced by their music. It’s all pop punk from groups like Alter Boys and Teenage Joans. The characters haven’t made it to full-fledged punk yet. They’re still growing up, if a homophobic society will just let them.

After the success of Willliam A. Wellman’s classic NOTHING SACRED (1937), producer David O. Selznick tried another screwball comedy with Richard Wallace’s THE YOUNG IN HEART (1938, YouTube, Tubi). It doesn’t have the bite of Wellman’s film and gets rather soft and sentimental at the end. Nor was Wallace Hollywood’s most distinctive director. But it has some charming moments from a strong cast headed by Janet Gaynor, in her last film for two decades.

Gaynor is part of a family of con artists — father Roland Young passing himself off as a retired Bengal lancer, mother Billie Burke and brother Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. When they’re tossed out of Monte Carlo mid-scam, they bump into a lonely, wealthy old woman (Minnie Dupree) on a train and move in on her. At first all they want to do is catch a breather living with and off her for a few weeks. Then Gaynor suggests if they stick around long enough, they could end up the beneficiaries in her will. To make her think they’re on the up-and-up, Young and Fairbanks have to get jobs. The surprise is that they like making an honest living, though part of Fairbanks’ pleasure comes from his new boss, Paulette Goddard (her first film after 1936’s MODERN TIMES).

The talent is the real pull here. Fairbanks may come off as a poor man’s Cary Grant, but that’s better than someone who doesn’t even remind you of Grant. Dupree is a delight in a role that could have been non-stop treacle. Young has impeccable timing, and Burke has that addled air that makes it seem she’s just babbling until she nails a punchline: “[My husband] says the only way to do away with unemployment is to do away with employment. If nobody worked, there couldn't be any unemployment, and so the Sahib hasn't done a speck of work for a year. Passive resistance, you know. Ghandi.”  Gaynor is surprisingly effective at playing the steely con artist. It’s only when she starts falling under Dupree’s spell that we get the stock silent film ingenue. You can see the wheel’s clicking then. By contrast, Goddard can play both young romantic and tart career woman equally well. Maybe it would have been better for the film had they switched roles, but Gaynor was the star, while Goddard was just getting started.

The picture tips its hand early on. The train crashes, and the family rescues Dupree from the wreckage. Gaynor braves the cold, using her fur coat to cover the old woman, and you can tell she’s not just protecting her meal ticket. She really cares. But as soft and squishy as the picture gets, it’s almost always expertly played. Adding to the fun are Henry Stephenson as Dupree’s lawyer, Lucille Watson as the wife of their first mark and a wonderful mutt named Jane of Aylsebury. The film also marked the feature debut of Richard Carlson, but that’s rather like applauding a new formula for whipped cream cheese.