Liminal Notes

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.

Joshua John Miller’s THE EXORCISM (2024, Netflix, Shudder, AMC+) doesn’t need to be a horror film. Although it’s understandable the director would want to do a spin on his father’s most famous film, the psychological elements of his second directorial effort, co-written with life partner M.A. Fortin, are so strong there’s a whole movie there without introducing demonic possession. And the issues run so deep, the possession blunts the film’s dramatic force. Instead of closure, we get a bunch of horror effects we’ve seen before that push the plot up against the bounds of credulity.

When the star (Adrian Pasdar) of “The Georgetown Project,” an unofficial remake of THE EXORCIST (1973), dies under mysterious circumstances, recovering addict Anthony Miller (Russell Crowe) wins the role of the guilt-ridden priest. But digging into the character brings up his own guilt about sinking into alcoholism and drug abuse while his wife was dying of cancer and his daughter (Ryan Simpkins) needed a father.  It also brings up past traumas from his sexual abuse when he was an altar boy. And dealing with his personal demons leaves him open to possession by the demon depicted in the film. Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

Crowe is quite good as the tortured actor. In the early scenes, he has moments of warmth and humor trying to connect with a rebellious 16-year-old who rightly blames him for past behavior. His agonizing over the role is also quite convincing. Even at what was then his peak weight (277 lbs.), he projects star quality. He wears his weight rather than being worn by it. Simpkins also scores as the daughter. Even when the character is closed off to her father, she’s open to the camera. And the relationship has a strong arc as she becomes involved in her father’s comeback and even consoles him when the tyrannical director (Adam Goldberg) tries to use Crowe’s traumas to get the performance he wants. There’s also a terrific performance from David Hyde Pierce as the unconventional priest/psychiatrist, the film’s “spiritual” advisor. who tries to help Simpkins deal with her father.

Miller and Fortin establish the horror with Pasdar’s death in the first scene. But that sets up the problems with the film. The actor is rehearsing one of his scenes on the set, an impressive three-story house with a missing wall. It’s comic as he goes through the motions while narrating the action and delivering his lines flatly, a comment on the disconnect between filmmaking and reality. But the humor is forgotten once he starts hearing demonic voices and something chokes him to death. There’s a similar lightness in the opening scenes with Crowe. Miller sets up a film that will be poking fun at the whole process of making movies and the people involved. But that and the psychological issues take a back seat once the horror starts. Pierce tries to counsel Simpkins and even agrees to talk to her father about his issues, but then he never does. Instead, we get the usual tricks from THE EXORCIST — fright makeup, bodily contortions, talking with a different voice and even public urination — which by now have become cliches.

Take my advice. If you watch Robert Siodmak’s THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF UNCLE HARRY (1945, YouTube, TCM) turn it off after Geraldine Fitzgerald’s final exit. I don’t need to spoil anything to say what that is. You’ll know. It will spare you one of the most asinine endings every imposed on a mostly effective film. There are problems with the screenplay before that, but nothing as egregious as what the studio decided would play better to young audiences, who we can only assume they considered terminally stupid. It was also wasted effort. The film flopped, though it’s gone on to attract a lot of admirers.

This adaptation of Thomas Job’s London and Broadway hit, “Uncle Harry,” stars George Sanders as the last surviving male in a prominent small-town family that lost its money in the Depression. To support widowed older sister Moyna MacGill and invalid sister Geraldine Fitzgerald, he designs patterns at the local textile mill. There he meets and falls in love with fashion consultant Ella Raines, a New York transplant who finds small-town life and Sanders’ shyness and simplicity refreshing. The only thing keeping them from marrying is Fitzgerald, who delays finding a suitable home to move to so Sanders can stay in the family manse. When she fakes an illness to keep her brother from eloping and moving to New York, Sanders begins looking for a way to get rid of her.

The film is a triumph of casting. Harrison and Siodmak had worked with Raines very successfully on PHANTOM LADY (1944), and her mix of intelligence and sophistication work perfectly here. Travis Banton dresses her like Harrison, with sleek suits and even a feminized necktie that capture her status as career woman. And her two scenes with Fitzgerald, one in which they subtly jockey for position at their first meeting and a later confrontation, are perfectly played, with Fitzgerald’s more frilly outfits clashing with Raines’ sleekness. Also effective are MacGill (Was she the model for daughter Angela Lansbury’s performance as Jessica Fletcher?), Sara Albright as the family’s outspoken cook and Ethel Griffies as the town gossip who at one point hilariously inhales an ice cream cone. Sanders would seem miscast as the shy older man even the young adults call “Uncle Harry,” but he pulls off the role surprisingly well. From his first shot, he’s changed his body language. There’s a slump about the neck and shoulders that captures the sense of a man beaten down by circumstances. In places, he also uses a slight hesitancy in speech. The only times he comes close to playing a more typical George Sanders role are when he’s exasperated with his sister or afraid of losing Raines to his boss and, regrettably, in that stupid final scene (Harrison and Siodmak refused to have anything to do with it).

Can an opening quote be considered an unreliable narrator? Jacques Tourneur’s (or should that be Val Lewton’s) CAT PEOPLE (1942, Criterion Channel, TCM) opens with a quote from a book that doesn’t exist, “The Anatomy of Atavism” by Dr. Louis Judd (Tom Conway), warning that “sin cling[s] to the low places, the depressions in the world consciousness.” I suggest it’s unreliable because a) it labels the main character’s turning into a large cat when emotionally aroused a sin when the movie that follows makes it something more sympathetic, a curse inflicted upon the innocent as an accident of birth, and 1) Judd is presented as a condescending twit and, by the end, a sexual predator out to take advantage of what he sees as a traumatized patient. Who’s the sinner here? That ultimately destabilizing moment is the start of what can be seen as a queer odyssey, a product of gay screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen and the European sensibilities of producer Lewton, director Tourneur and cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca.

Ship’s architect Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) and commercial artist Irena Dubrovna (Simone Simon) meet cute at the Central Park Zoo. Her delicate aloofness fascinates the all-American boy, and before long they’re married, even though Simon believes she’s the descendant of Serbian cat people and will kill Smith if he tries to make love to her. Smith sends her to Dr. Judd to see if he can cure what he considers a delusion but in frustration starts falling for co-worker Alice (Jane Randolph), leading Irena to stalk her in a trio of beautifully constructed suspense scenes.

This was the first of nine low-budget horror films Lewton produced at RKO Studios, which — after hefty losses on Orson Welles’ two films — was trying to cash in on the Universal Pictures horror franchise. The studio dictated the titles; Lewton then had a free hand (though they imposed a few shots of slinking panther in one scene that aren’t as intrusive as some make them out to be). His interest in psychology, folklore and stoicism helped create a series of films whose horror lay not in gore or violence but rather in a creeping sense of dread, the fear the universe is just waiting for the chance to get us. There’s also a sense in many of a growing queerness that’s necessary to shake up our staid existence. It’s not just that Lewon snuck gay characters into many of his films, but rather that they destabilize our expectations.

In CAT PEOPLE, the destabilizing factor is Irena. Her kittenish beauty and exotic accent could be the dream of any young man, particularly relevant in 1942, when America’s youth were going off to war in foreign lands. But the dream has a harsher side. She’s a potentially destructive force, first in her inability to bow to the rules of a conventional marriage and then in her possessiveness when she thinks she’s losing Oliver to Alice. It’s fascinating that her curse has resonated not just as a horror trope but also as a representation of both lesbian and trans audiences. Lesbians seize on the moment during her wedding dinner when a glamorous, mysterious woman (Lewton regular Elizabeth Russell) addresses her in Serbian as “My sister.” For them, the threat of violence should Oliver make love to Irena reflects revulsion at the thought of heterosexual intercourse. Trans audiences have seen themselves in Irena’s body language, the way she physically withdraws during tense moments, as well as the physical transformation when she turns into a panther. She’s a woman whose transformation leads society to label has as other, as less than.

Bodeen has also written a poignant reflection of LGBTQ lives in a repressive society, at least as subtext. When Alice admits her love to Oliver, she says, “I know what love is. It's understanding. It's you and me and let the rest of the world go by. It's just the two of us living our lives together, happily and proudly. No self-torture and no doubt.” This is the kind of love denied to people like Bodeen. But when Oliver describes his love for Irena — “It’s a different feeling. I’m drawn to her. There’s a warmth from her that…pulls at me. I have to watch her when she’s in the room. I have to touch her when she’s near. But I don’t really know her. In many ways, we’re strangers” — it’s something darker and more secluded. It’s love for a stranger with whom you’re obsessed for reasons you can’t explain. It’s like the hidden love of gay men and lesbians in more repressive times.

One of the revolutionary things about CAT PEOPLE in 1942 was that it’s set not just in the present, but in familiar spaces. Musuraca’s shadow-drenched cinematography turns New York City into a mystical place. He creates a night world where Irena can shift from human to cat at will, and mundane locations — a walkway through the park, an indoor swimming pool, Oliver and Jane’s architectural office — become sites of horror. Until Irena attempts to attack them there, the latter has been shot rather flatly. But when she calls to see if Oliver’s there and later slinks around among the drafting tables, it’s suddenly a nightmare landscape, lit only by the illuminated drafting tables. In the world of Val Lewton, horror destabilizes what we view as normal. It’s in the places we move through every day without thinking. Or maybe it’s the attractive woman you see at the zoo or at the next restaurant table.

Stella Stevens was a delicious comedienne and an often quite touching dramatic actress whose career was overshadowed by a sexpot image she always resented and her exploitation by “Playboy” magazine. Her best work often came in films that flopped at the box office or films in which she was overshadowed by the production itself. She deserved better. She also deserves a better documentary than her son Andrew Stevens’ well-intentioned but ultimately unsatisfying STELLA STEVENS: THE LAST STARLET (2025, Prime, Tubi, though I don’t think I could have made it through with commercial breaks).

The film is clearly a low-budget job with original material shot on video. There’s also a paucity of clips from movies they just describe. I’d rather see Stevens’ verbal sparring with Ernest Borgnine in THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972) than just hear someone talk about it. Yet there are surprising television clips, including musical performances from various variety shows (Stevens was part of a vocal group that recorded the themes to THE FLINTSTONES and THE PATTY DUKE SHOW). It’s also refreshing that Andrew Stevens, who’s one of the main interview subjects, doesn’t shy away from his problems with is mother. There are other interviews from friends and colleague BarBara Luna, who’s a lot of fun, shedding light on her life and career, along with experts like Leonard Maltin and Quentin Tarantino, though the latter’s unquestioning love of just about every film she did, no matter how bad, seems a little over the top.

But in trying to cram an 84-year life and 50-year career into a 99-minute movie, the picture keeps bringing up important issues with no follow-through. Stevens and live-in boyfriend Skip Ward were heavily into drugs in the 1960s. And so? Did it affect her career or health? Who knows? She rebelled against sexist typecasting. How? She wanted to direct and produce and finally got her chance with the documentary AMERICAN HEROINE (1979). And so? What happened with it? She championed gay and trans rights? How? Her last partner, Bob Kulick, died suddenly after giving up his role as legal trustee and we all know what happened. And that was?

Renny Harlin directs with all the style and grace of a five-year-old trying to control a submachine gun. He’s too hyper to just let a scene play out in a simple shot countershot sequence. Why use five cuts when you can shove in 25, mostly from different, disorienting angles? The expository scenes in his THE COVENANT (2006, Shudder, AMC+) are so over-directed he has nowhere to go by the climactic battle between good and bad warlocks. You’re so worn out, all you can do is nod and say, “Yep, there sure is a whole lot going on.”

How bad is this film? The title is a mistake. The plot isn’t about some binding agreement or promise. It’s about a group of young men (Steven Strait, Taylor Kitsch, Toby Hemingway and Chace Crawford), the descendants of a New England region’s original colonists, who’ve inherited supernatural powers. In other words, it should be called THE COVEN. Anyway, they’re all rather over-aged prep-school students who discover that an outside magic-wielder is hanging around making trouble for them. Who can it be? Is it the class jerk (Kyle Shmid), the transfer student (Laura Ramsey) Strait is courting (as if this film would acknowledge women with power) or the wealthy transfer (Sebastian Stan) the provost asks Strait to look out for. Check the billing, and you’ll figure it out.

It’s easy to suggest this film is just a male version of THE CRAFT (1996), a cult favorite about high school girls practicing witchcraft. But it’s really more similar to the direct-to-video THE BROTHERHOOD franchise, six films directed by David De Couteau between 2001 and 2009 that combine idiotic dialog, wooden acting, witchcraft and heaping helpings of homoeroticism. Harlin may have better production values, but it’s hard not to laugh when the hunky young warlocks mention that they’re all on the school’s swim team. There are two lengthy scenes of the guys hanging around the pool and locker room, and for butch assurance, you also get a lengthy shower scene involving Ramsey with some strategically placed steam and a well-timed towel (you have to give her points for getting the towel over her bosoms just as she turns to bring them into camera range; or maybe you’ll only want to extend that credit if you’re not drooling in anticipation).

There are some good people stuck in this mess. Strait has to read from the ancient book recounting the coven’s history and actually sounds as if he knows what he’s saying. The villain is quite good at his villainous pronouncements, and when the two warlocks start flying around in their big battle, both actors pull off some neat moves. They’ve clearly boned up on Superhero 101. Wendy Crewson is on hand as Strait’s mother, and though Harlin shoots all around her in her first major scene, she still manages to build a compelling character. Stephen McHattie also turns up but under so much makeup you can’t really tell what he’s doing. At least their presence lets you know the film was shot in Canada, and Quebec does a good job of playing New England. These are the kinds of straws you grasp at with a movie this bad. And, yeah, you get to ogle a bunch of hot young actors, some of them in their prime, but it’s easy to find free porn with even better bodies and often better dialog.