Memorial Valley Massacre

Memorial Valley Massacre (1989) aka Valley of Death aka Son of Sleepaway Camp

Dir. Robert C. Hughes

Written by Robert C. Hughes, George Frances Skrow

Starring John Kerry (!), Mark Mears, John Caso, Lisa Lee

            MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE is pretty much the best you could possibly hope for from a super-obscure, no-budget, 1989 slasher with the word MASSACRE in the title. Which is not to say it is in any way good. That would be much, much better than you could possibly hope for from a super-obscure, no-budget, 1989 slasher with the word MASSACRE in the title. The “best you could hope for” would be that it is incompetent and weird enough to be funny and eventful, which I’m happy to report MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE handily manages. It’s full of enthusiastically terrible actors playing broad, silly characters, features a solid and off-beat slasher hook, and seems generally committed to using all of its non-existent resources to be as frequently entertaining as possible. Absolutely none of that was guaranteed, or even particularly likely (see: SATAN’S BLADE, BRAIN TWISTERS).

            Your first big clue that you can relax and that everything will be OK is that the title, MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE, scrolls onto the screen from the right like a powerpoint slide. Just appearing on-screen isn’t good enough for the title of MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE, it has a deep-seated desire to add zazzle that cannot be contained. It’s a restless, rambling title, it lives somewhere off-screen, ambles in to brighten your day, tips its hat, and then fades away, rides off into the sunset. This is approximately 20 seconds in, so you don’t have to spend a lot of time anxiously wondering it this is gonna be a good movie or not. It is.

            The next big clue that MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE has your best interests at heart comes immediately after that, when a caravan of campers arrive at “Memorial Valley Campground,” only to find that their facilities are not quite ready for opening day. It seems that heartless 1980s Gordon-Gecko-style titan of campground construction Mr. Sangster (hey, is he named after beloved Hammer scribe Jimmy Sangster?) cut some corners on this project, and now his crew, headed by testy foreman George Webster (John Kerry [no, not that one, the one with 71 film and TV roles in everything from DOLEMITE to BLACK DYNAMITE to FROST/NIXON (as “man in disco”)]) wants to delay the big opening while they put the finishing touches on a few minor points, such as functioning toilets. Sangster is having none of it, even after most of the crew quits over all the mysterious incidents which have plagued the construction project, gives the standard “We’re not closing the beach from JAWS” speech, and storms off, leaving any problems to be solved by the surly Webster and Sangster’s fresh-faced, college-boy son David (Mark Mears, no other credits), who has volunteered to help. Problem number one would be, there’s a dead dog contaminating the water supply. Which in itself is not great (why this would make the toilet facilities unusable, I cannot fathom, but go with it), but it’s especially concerning because to get the dog in there, someone had to lift a fifty-pound concrete cover. And we already have a pretty good idea who this was, because we’ve seen that a prehistoric caveman dressed in animal furs has been squatting in the construction shed, and has been driven to violent madness by the barking of the dog.

            So right away you can see two reasons why this is gonna be awesome: first, they got Cameron Mitchell in there for two minutes at the beginning! Don’t worry, I had no idea who that was either until I looked him up a second ago, and discovered he has over 240 acting credits on IMDB (dating back to 1945!) of which I’ve seen at least a dozen, including THEY WERE EXPENDABLE, HELL AND HIGH WATER, Jim Brown’s SLAUGHTER, BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, THE SILENT SCREAM, WITHOUT WARNING, THE SWARM, FROM A WHISPER TO A SCREAM, and BLOOD LINK. He has two movies in his filmography with “MASSACRE” in the title, three with “SCREAM,” and seven with “KILL”. He did DESIREE with Marlon Brando and a movie called GORILLA AT LARGE in the same year (1954). He also played Jesus Christ (voice, uncredited) in THE ROBE (1953). That is some motherfucking range.

And while I was learning this, I noticed that he hadn’t appeared on-screen since 1995, but despite the handicap of having died in 1994, he has a new movie coming out this year of our Lord 2018. Now, there would have been a time in my life when I found this surprising; you see, kids --you may want to sit down, while ol’ grandpappy Mr. Subtlety tells you about the olden days-- there was a time when death would more or less definitively prevent you from appearing in more movies. We called this ‘The Cushing Rule’ I believe. Nowadays, of course, we all accept that you can just use computers running on money to resurrect the dead in defiance of the will of God, so I assumed that was what happened. But then I checked his new movie out, and -- great Scott!-- it’s Orson Welles’s THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND! Tis a rare thespian indeed who can boast to having worked with both Fred Olen Ray (on 1986’s THE TOMB*) and Orson Welles. What I think I’m saying here is this guy is god damned American hero, and there is almost certainly an alternate timeline where he became president instead of Ronald Reagan in 1980, and led mankind into a new utopian age. But then I guess we wouldn’t have gotten MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE, so, you know, bullet dodged there.

            Anyway, Mr. Mitchell, clearly drawing on the accumulated wisdom and craft he acquired during his work with Mr. Welles, acts up a storm in the two minutes or so he appears, and then departs the movie forever. He will be missed, but lest you worry that a movie wherein Cameron Mitchell doesn’t appear in the final 87 minutes will be unwatchable, I direct you to one other promising factor: the movie is called MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE, but they make sure to mention specifically that it’s taking place over Memorial Day weekend.

Wait, is this actually supposed to be called MEMORIAL DAY MASSACRE? That would sure make a lot more sense, especially from a marketing perspective -- hey, now you’ve got a holiday tradition on your hands, that the family has to haul out their worn and well-loved copy of the MEMORIAL DAY MASSACRE VHS every year, or it just wouldn’t be Memorial Day, dammit.** So at first it seems like some kind of wacky mix-up, like maybe the guy who did the titles was so overwhelmed with excitement by his bold side-scrolling title technique that he forgot to go back and proofread what he actually wrote. But then we see the sign for the camp, and sure enough, it’s “Memorial Valley!” So I guess they’re staying in “Memorial Valley” on Memorial Day? That seems like a weird coincidence, but no one in the movie comments on it. Nor does anyone ever seem to wonder what “Memorial Valley” even means. What is this valley memorializing, exactly? Except maybe the passing of the noble caveman?

            Oh right, yeah, the caveman. Yeah, I kinda glossed over that little detail in my haste to impart upon you the greatness of Cameron Mitchell. Yeah, so this is a slasher film where the gimmick is that the slasher is some kind of feral caveman wearing fright teeth and tattered animal skins and killing the interlopers to his territory using primitive spears, clubs, etc. Unfortunately it does not turn out he was unfrozen from a glacier or is the last survivor of a tribe of Bigfoots or something, and if you want to get unpleasantly technical I suppose he is actually not a caveman and instead is revealed to be (spoiler) an abandoned child who has gone feral after his mother’s death. But come on, look at this motherfucker:

Look, he looks like a caveman, acts like a caveman, has fright teeth and primitive weapons like a caveman, and you know what, we don’t have that many slashers about murderous cavemen, and we’re not gonna let a lot of technical bureaucratic bullshit get in the way of our good time. So yes, this is caveman slasher movie, possibly the Caveman Slasher Movie. Roll with it.

            Anyway, our ostensible hero here is David, the boss’s son, fulfilling the essential role of clean-cut 80’s white boy that was legally mandated for a movie like this back in 1989. Surprisingly, actor Mark Mears (a bit of a mystery man with no other roles listed on IMDB) is not the insufferable smarmy pipsqueak you would assume, but actually a rather likable, amiable hero with a good natured, low-key David Naughton-esque charm.*** It’s honestly one of the least intolerable performances I’ve ever seen for this particular trope, and he’s complemented nicely by Lesa Lee (“Girlfriend” in THE BOYS NEXT DOOR**** in her second-to-last role) who also comes across as almost miraculously canny and likable. Not that it matters in the slightest, of course; the important characters in an 80’s slasher are not the heroes, but the body count.

Also, I feel I should mention that several sites suggest this movie was also re-titled as a SLEEPAWAY CAMP sequel!

            Fortunately, MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE is absolutely swimming in goofy, cartoonish body count characters, and clearly understands only too well the lightning it’s caught in a bottle, because the movie is about 80% composed of little comedy vignettes with these goofballs, with the slashing really only appearing as a kind of palate cleanser between the wacky hijinks. First and most promising, you’ve got Walter (David S. Perry, nothing) a whining, bloated manchild who runs back to his parents (Michael Spenard and B.B. Selco, also nothing) at the first sign that he won’t get his way, and is frankly just such a spectacularly unappealing character in every imaginable way that he belongs in the annals of slasher history right up there with Shelly from FRIDAY THE 13th PART III, Gordy from THE WILLIES, or, of course, their king, Allen from RETURN TO SLEEPAWAY CAMP. Unfortunately he bites it with undue haste, but never fear, because we’re still left with a trio of adult biker couples,***** a tough guy general (William Smith, RED DAWN, ANY WHICH WAY YOU CAN) named “General Mintz” and his wife “Pepper Mintz” (Linda Honeyman, good God, her one other movie is THE AMERICAN SCREAM! What a career!), a ménage a trois of horny adolescent kids (Zig Roberts [only one other movie, 16 years later], Michael Inglese [nothing] and Erin O’Leary [assistant grip on THE PIANO?!]), who are trying to work out what combination of them is going to end up fucking, and a kindly exposition-prone fellow named Deke who seems to be an employee but whose exact job is unclear (Jimmy Justice, unfortunately as far as I can tell not the same James Justice who may or may not have written and/or directed WELCOME TO SPRING BREAK).

Between them all, they weave a rich, ridiculous tapestry of enthusiastic, colorful performances, none of them even remotely approaching “acting” in the traditional sense, but all pretty delightful and eager to entertain, if you’re in the mood for that special kind of bad acting which makes 80’s slashers so special. And lest you think this is just another lazy, low-effort slog through mumbled scenes of poorly mic’d dialogue, never fear, there’s some actual production value here too. There’s a real bear, a guy lit on fire, a huge fiery explosion, a couple low key dirtbike stunts, and other signs of general hustle, like some long tracking shots through the woods, which couldn’t have been easy to pull off. So we’ve got a bit of whammy in addition to the comfortable surfeit of wacky characters.

I mean, just look at this dipshit.

What MEMORIAL DAY MASSACRE does not have a surfeit of, unfortunately, is awesome kill scenes. It goes without saying that that a movie like this is not going to inspire white-knuckled edge-of-your-seat suspense, but even so, it’s a bit of a letdown that most of the kills take place during the day in the sun-dappled woods, and mostly (though not entirely) without much notable gimmickry. The body count is actually pretty high, but the caveman seems to be a disappointingly pragmatic serial killer, mostly sticking to efficient but not-very-colorful staples like stabbings and spearings. He does stay pretty faithfully to his theme of being a caveman, though, leading to a battle between the primitive and the modern which is half John Rambo, half Ewoks vs Stormtroopers. Highlights include a sequence in which, after dispatching a pesky dirtbike ride a la PUMPKINHEAD, he unsuccessfully attempts to bludgeon the bike to death, a brutal tiger pit sequence which offers us the movie’s best gore twice, and a final kill which is (spoiler for two movies) a dead ringer, both practically and narratively, for THE FINAL TERROR.

            Director Robert C. Hughes does not have a very extensive filmography,****** but he did another lost-in-the-woods slasher called HUNTER’S BLOOD a few years before this, and, more intriguingly, a feature from the same year called ZADAR! COW FROM HELL (not related to ZEDER, or Robert Z'Dar, as far as I can tell) which is a comedy about a crew trying to make a low-budget horror movie in their hometown, using the locals as extras. That one doesn’t exactly scream “great cinema” either, but it cements my impression of Hughes as a guy who gets it. A hustler, to be sure --you don’t make a movie with the word “Massacre” in the title without being a hustler -- but a hustler with some real affection for the hustle. The kind of guy who would end his killer caveman slasher with a completely unsupportable, but also completely earnest, moment of bittersweet reflection contrasting the savagery of nature with its rugged beauty. It’s dumb as rocks, of course, but that’s OK. I appreciate the effort. MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE is a big dumb golden retriever of a movie, not very useful or even trained properly, but pretty difficult not to love.

* IMDB Plot keywords: “murder of a nude woman.” You may remember this title because we discussed it as one of the many horrible adaptations of Bram Stoker’s Jewel of the Seven Stars back during our lengthy investigation of Hammer’s BLOOD FROM THE MUMMY’S TOMB.

** Actually I looked it up and there was a real-life "Memorial Day Massacre" when Chicago cops opened fire on striking Steel workers in 1937. So my guess is that the makers of this film, like me, did not realize that was already a real thing and had to pivot on the title late in production when someone pointed it out. In fact, there's even a poster with the title "Memorial Day" that you can still find online.

*** If you don’t know who David Naughton is, you’re also probably not the sort of person who would read a review of a movie called MEMORIAL VALLEY MASSACRE, so we’re just going to assume we’re on the same page about that.

*** THE BOYS NEXT DOOR, incidentally, was directed by Penelope Spheeris and written by Glen Morgan and James Wong! And it features Blackie Dammett, Moon Unit Zappa, and apparently an actor named “Don Draper.”

***** Eddie D (whose IMDB filmography is pretty sparse, but whose IMDB biography page is pretty interesting) Charles Douglass (SHORT EYES, episodes of Star Trek:The Next Generation and TV’s Falcoln Crest) Dan S. Famou (nothing) Lyvingston Holmes (“black woman” in PROPHECY) Karen Russell (“topless woman” in HELLBENT) and Christina Sullivan (one other movie from 1997 that has no reviews and no images of any kind on IMBD)

****** Co-writer George Francis Skrow has even less credits, but his other movie is called BACK TO BACK and stars Bill Paxton and Apollonia, so that’s a pretty good career, right there.

I think you should personally buy this special edition of Memorial Day Massacre from this random website that totally, for sure has the rights, and produced this awesome box art.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back To The Tent
TITLE ACCURACY	I mean, technically correct in that there is a “Memorial Valley” in the movie, and a small massacre takes place there. But it seems like the most uncommunicative title possible for a movie about a killer caveman who appears on Memorial Day.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	No
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher, Survival Thriller
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Beloved star of stage and screen Cameron Mitchell!
NUDITY?	There’s a sex scene where a shirt comes off, but it’s pretty tame and I don’t think you really see anything. The wet-T-shirt dance scene is somewhat more revealing, though not technically nudity
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yeah the caveman gets a little rapey with one victim; fortunately in his enthusiasm he breaks her spine before things get too serious
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	A bear terrifies some campers by sticking its head in their tent, but he seems pretty harmless. I guess a dog attacks the caveman and gets what’s coming to it.
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	None
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	No
MADNESS?	Feral child?
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None
VOYEURISM?	Nah
MORAL OF THE STORY	That movie THE CAVEMAN’S VALENTINE should have totally been a sequel set over Valentine’s Day Weekend.

I can't in good conscience go above 3 thumbs for something this crappy, but consider it a strong C+

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

Dir. Roger Corman

Written by Charles Beaumont, R. Wright Campbell, based on the short story by Edgar Allan Poe

Starring Vincent Price, Hazel Court, Jane Asher

            I’ve heard enough “based on” claims in my day to develop a healthy skepticism about the ability of any given medium to fill out a feature-length film. You’ve got your “based on a true story” of course, with the usual free-associative definition of the “based” and “true story” parts. You’ve got “inspired by true events,” which at least has the benefit of more ambiguous language to hide behind. You’ve got “based on a novel,” which usually equates to “inelegantly  summarized from a novel,” and then --only then-- we reach the rogues gallery of even more dubious origin stories: “based on the video game created by Capcom,” “based on characters created by Dinesh D’Souza*,” “based on the theme park ride” “based on the board game created by Parker Brothers,” “based on He-Man and the Masters of The Universe by Mattel.”

            What we have here is a “based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe,” which should, in theory, be a less suspect pedigree than films based on toys or board games. Not only do we at least have an assurance that this is based on a story (rather than, say, a piece of plastic), but it’s a story by one of the all-time great masters of genre writing. But Poe stories do not, candidly speaking, have a track record of producing cinema which faithfully reflects the masterful craft of their source material. They are, in fact, almost uniformly garbage, perhaps rivaled in their wholesale worthlessness and ubiquity only by Lovecraft adaptations. Part of that is probably that while short stories are a tremendous medium for incisive, imaginative fiction, they are also, by definition… short. The Masque of the Red Death, first published in 1842, is just a hair under 2400 words. For comparison, my review of LEATHERFACE: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACREIII is over 2600. The Wikipedia page for the He-Man and The Masters of the Universe toy series by Mattel (which also got its own movie, in 1986) is significantly in excess of 26,000 (including tables, it would be over 100 printed pages).

            Short stories stretched into 90 minutes movies are going to necessitate a lot of filler, which is a serious problem, because come on, if you liked the short story enough to feel it was worth turning into a movie, you probably didn’t finish it and say, “hey, that was great, I just wish there had been a bunch more characters and subplots and general narrative detritus to pad it out into a fatty 300 pages.” But that’s exactly what a screenplay is going to need, because in addition to being short, these stories are also seldom structurally narrative. They’re not, generally speaking, about a character who encounters conflict and changes as a result; they’re mostly accounts of incidents. Such an incident often has more structural similarity to a specific scene or sequence than to a full movie, and expanding it into a more traditional story structure consequently entails stitching that incident to other incidents which may not, in themselves, be especially worthwhile. The end result is that your film, made to showcase a short story, instead spends most of its runtime constructing an inelegant kludge of backwards-engineered backstory, wasting time and ironically diminishing through dilution the actual impact of the original inspiration.

Point being, in most cases, a direct, unvarnished adaptation of a short story is off the table. Poe adaptations tackle this problem in a variety of ways; the twisty Italian YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY, billed as an adaptation of Poe’s The Black Cat, spends most of its runtime as a softcore noir before finally becoming an adaptation of the story only in the last few minutes. Corman’s 1963 THE RAVEN compensates by cultivating only the scantest fleeting references to the titular poem and mostly being totally unrelated. 1963’s THE HAUNTED PALACE is actually more closely based on a Lovecraft story (?!). TALES OF TERROR (1962), SPIRITS OF THE DEAD (1968), and TWO EVIL EYES (1990) are all anthology collections.

MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH cleverly pads a little of its time by stealth adapting a second Poe story, 1845’s Hop-Frog, but mostly makes do with maintaining the essential elements of Poe’s original story, and then weaving a broad tale around them of wholly new cloth. Which is not, it turns out, an especially tall order; there are really only four concrete elements of Poe’s original story: the “red death,” a virulent plague spreading through the land; a “Prince Prospero,” holding a masked ball in his quarantined abbey with a misplaced sense of invulnerability; the curious description of Prospero’s castle as divided into six rooms, each of a different color; and finally, the appearance of the “Red Death” personified as a masked reveler who commits the ultimate party foul. That’s it. That’s not just an annotated version, that’s the entire story; everything else is just Poe’s sublimely disquieting lyricism.

A very long time ago indeed, when I reviewed 1971’s exceedingly loose adaptation of Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue, I pointed out that while Poe undoubtedly had a knack for crafting clever, devious scenarios, his real talent was a literary one; it was his uniquely masterful grasp of language and his ability to use it to obliquely evoke --rather than literally depict-- the uncanny and the disturbing, that makes his work so powerful. But that gift is one stubbornly rooted in its native medium. There’s only one spoken line in the entirety of the Poe story (which, incidentally, does not appear in the movie anyway), leaving almost nothing left of the original art in its transition to its new format. Cinema, of course, has its own native art in its visuals, but it would take a rare talent indeed to craft a visual style as artful and potent as Poe’s words. Someday, I hope, it will happen. But the wise would not look for it in a Roger Corman movie.

And yes, this is a Roger Corman movie, seventh of the eight Poe adaptations he made between 1960’s HOUSE OF USHER and 1965’s TOMB OF LIGEIA, all but one of which starring Vincent Price. That’s hardly a pedigree to be ashamed of, but also not one which exactly strikes one as a likely fount of great art. But Corman brought in two ringers this time around who give the proceedings some unexpected heft: screenwriter Charles Beaumont, and cinematographer (wait for it) Nicolas Roeg!

We’ll get to Roeg in a moment, but it’s actually Beaumont (prolific short story writer and frequent Twilight Zone scribe, whose work here was finished by Corman regular R. Wright Campbell as Beaumont gradually succumbed to the mysterious illness which took his life three years later) who makes the most impression here, doing arguably the hardest job: building a narrative around those four sentences of plot description which stays true to the spirit of Poe’s story while carving out enough of its own identity to work as a full-length film. This he does by using the entire tale as a crucible to examine Prospero, more a plot device than a character in the original story, but here a much more definite figure, more clearly a villain, but an intriguingly philosophical villain not at all shy about evangelizing his philosophy. Which is, ahem, satanism.

            OK OK, I know what you’re thinking, that evil Satanists are the oldest and dullest cliché in the book. That’s true, of course, but Beaumont’s take on Satanism isn’t the usual creaky old chestnut about sacrificing babies and pagan debauchery. It’s actually somewhere closer to the vicinity of actual Satanist philosophy than just about anything I’ve ever seen depicted on film (especially interesting, because Anton LeVey’s establishment of the official Church of Satan was still two years off), basically a kind of carnal rationalism and pragmatic self-interest. It is assuredly, to hear Price tell it, Machiavellian and cruel. But it just might be a completely reasonable reaction to the grim world of dire poverty and random, meaningless horror that Prince Prospero inhabits.

It is, at any rate, a philosophy which prioritizes a sense of control over a world of cacophonous, powerful forces. Asked if Satan is the god of hate, Prospero responds, “Oh, no! Of reality, of truth. The world lives in pain and despair...but is at least kept alive… by a few dedicated men. If we lost our power, chaos would engulf everything.” This is, of course, monstrously self-serving, and Prospero himself openly scoffs at the idea of beneficence. But Price’s delivery is earnest and gentle, with not a hint of smarmy sanctimony; however misplaced his own faith in his ability to exert control may be --for that, of course, is the heart of Poe’s tale-- Prospero has come by his faith honestly, and genuinely believes it to be the only honest and rational response to a world of unremitting horror. You’re either the terrorizer, or you’re the terrorized, and the choice between the two isn’t a hard one. As horrible as serving the Devil may be, Beaumont suggests, at least it’s more comforting than facing the idea that we are helpless victims of a random and dispassionate universe.

            This is reasonably interesting to mull over, and Price uncharacteristically plays the loquacious villain with a restrained, almost sorrowful quality that makes him an interesting and very nearly (though never entirely) sympathetic character. It’s a good role for him, broad enough to make use of his theatrical flair, but complex enough to allow him to do something other than play to the cheap seats. And that’s good, because other than Hazel Court (THE CURSE OFFRANKENSTEIN) as his consort/Satanic sidekick, everyone else in the film is about as bland and dull as it is possible to be and still reflect the visible light spectrum enough to be picked up by a camera. That would include the film’s nominal protagonist, a young village girl snatched by Prospero to administer a lesson in corruption (Jane Asher, ALFIE**), and her fiancé and father (David Weston, BECKET, and Nigel Green, THE SKULL respectively) who have almost nothing whatsoever to do except react with bafflement and shock to Prospero’s philosophizing.

            And they’re not alone, because I gotta be honest with you, there is a lot of philosophizing in here. Some of it is marginally interesting, particularly given the context of the film -- with the rising counterculture, the cold war raging, Vietnam heating up, and Kennedy's assassination a very recent memory, I imagine the contemporary world looked just as random and brutal as the fog-drenched, pestilence-ridden Grimm’s fairytale landscape conjured for the film. Satanism was in the air, with the official founding of the Church of Satan two years off, the Rolling Stones’ endearingly corny Their Satanic Majesties Request and Kenneth Anger’s LUCIFER RISING waiting in the wings a few years down the line from that. Venal nihilism does indeed seem to have been something of a natural outgrowth of so much chaos. But even so, there’s no two ways about it, the movie is stagey and talky, and in 2018, all the prattle about the Prince of Darkness seems more corny than provocative. Price is constitutionally incapable of not being entertaining, but the material, while interesting, certainly isn’t riveting enough to buoy a whole movie.

            Fortunately, right about the time the plot really starts flagging, our old buddy NicolasRoeg (DON’T LOOK NOW, THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, WALKABOUT) begins to assert himself as cinematographer. This was only four years into his career in that capacity (though he’d worked in film, most often as a camera operator, going back to the early 50’s) and, as near as I can tell, either his first or second film in color.*** And for a while, he doesn’t make much of an impression, mostly sticking to unobtrusive, mediums shots with a tendency (shared by many British films of the period) towards overlighting. It’s certainly professional enough, though all the bright lights tend to make the sets (left over from the prestigious BECKET earlier that year, which counted Art Direction among its 12 Academy Award nominations!) look chintzier than they actually are. But he really hits his stride once Prospero begins to venture into Poe’s six colored rooms (only four in this version, but we’ll allow it), where he sets up numerous striking shots both by taking advantage of the borderline-surreal monochromatic setting, and by shattering it with a geometric intrusion of a foreign color.

Observe below: (note, in particular, that they're each wearing colors corresponding to one of the rooms; in the yellow room, they both stand out, contrasting their opposite color schemes. But in the purple room, Price blends in to the point of vanishing, while in the white room, he stands out vividly. In the black room, unsourced red light alters her contrast to the black, representing her inherent corruption by the act of entering. Finally, note the final shot, which changes the angle and gives us a glimpse of a nesting doll of colored rooms stacked on top of each other (black, then purple, then yellow, creating a gradient effect of dark forces closing in on our fleeing figure. It's damned thoughtful stuff.)

He’s also able to indulge his penchant for straight up psychedelia in a hallucinatory sequence where Court is menaced by… well, by a series of unfortunate ethnic stereotypes of primitive shamans, but more importantly the whole thing seems to be taking place in a lava lamp filled with glitter and blue curacao. It’s actually a pretty bold bit of visual stylization, and it probably comes as close as any sequence ever put to celluloid to taking me up on my suggestion of trying to capture the sinister ambiance of Poe’s prose entirely through pure cinema. It’s not quite there (and actually evokes Lovecraft more than Poe in its specifics), but it’s an ambitious effort, and inaugurates the film’s final act with a feverish delirium that never entirely dissipates.

            Pleasingly, the film’s three main strengths -- Price’s hamminess, Beaumont’s intellectualism, and Roeg’s adventurous visuals-- come together strongest in that finale, when the titular masque is interrupted by a solemn gentleman in red. The masque itself is a disappointingly tame affair -- no more than 20 dancers, I should think, garbed colorfully but hardly extravagantly, gliding halfheartedly around a drab-walled tile floor. Corman later recounted that he was himself dissatisfied with the sequence, which he had not had time to shoot properly (when the Red Death appears, Prospero picks him from the crowd and fumes that he had specifically forbade any reveler to wear red, which is an odd claim to make because I count no fewer than five other dancers who are prominently wearing that color, a fact that I take to be representative of the amount of planning time available). And yet, it works, I think;  Price’s butter-smooth transition from triumphant to uneasy to hysterical is a thing of beauty, magnificently showcasing the actor’s range; the conversation between Prospero and the Red-garbed interloper (an inexplicably uncredited John Westbrook, TOMB OF LIGEIA) rather nicely plays off all the intellectual groundwork Beaumont has been setting up during the film, and dovetails rather beautifully into Poe’s original point; and meanwhile, Roeg, (with editor Ann Chegwidden [AND SOON THE DARKNESS]****) works the camera into an impressionistic frenzy of moving bodies and stark colors. The effect is histrionic, to be sure, and more than a little campy (especially with Price in full operatic mode and composer David Lee’s [a noted jazz musician in one of his few films as composer] score churning dramatically) but nonetheless potent.

In fact, it’s good enough to make one seriously consider how necessary the rest of the film is. If the movie started ay 73 minutes in, we would still find every major aspect of Poe’s story (save the colored rooms, unwisely not utilized for the titular masque) handily covered, and with a lot less dilly-dallying around with dull heroes, unrelated subplots, and the finer points of Satanic philosophy. Once again, the case for stretching a finely-tuned and elegantly concise little fable into a 90-minute narrative film is a difficult one to make. Even with the inimitable watchability of Price and the added artistic heft of Beaumont and Roeg, one is never entirely unaware that this concept has been stretched a bit thin.

But fuck, you got something better to do with your time than watch Vincent Price mince around about Satan in front of handsomely framed, vaguely surreal sets? No, you absolutely do not. No less an authority on the subject than Corman himself has numbered it amongst his favorites of his own films, and that’s pretty high praise coming from a guy with a filmography as extensive as his. Characteristically practical producer Samuel Arkoff, grumbling about its lower-than-expected box office, suggested that the film was too “arty-farty” and not scary enough, and that might be a valid criticism. There’s probably no justification for making a film version of Masque of the Red Death in the first place, but since they were going to do it anyway, producing something that could be described with any variety of “arty” is probably something close to a miracle. Very few films with the “based on the story by Edgar Allan Poe” credit justify their existence; this one, at least, does enough to justify having watched it.

* I actually realized in the editing process that I intended to write Steven de Souza, but actually this is much funnier so I’m gonna let it stand.

** But probably still most popularly known --to her obvious irritation-- as the one-time girlfriend and muse of Paul McCartney, whose first gig with the Beatles, attended by Asher, occurred during filming.

*** It’s either this or the same year’s NOTHING BUT THE BEST

**** Chegwidden, by the way, dances so deftly around Roeg’s visuals that this sequence could fit into any of his later films as a director. It’s genuinely amazing that an editor --and especially an editor in 1964!-- seemed to so intuitively grasp what Roeg was going for long before he was a known auteur with a recognizable style. I’ve never seen any of the other films she edited, so I’m not sure if she was an unrecognized visual wunderkind in her own right, or if she collaborated closely with Roeg, or if his cinematography is so distinctive that it naturally bends to this kind of editing, or what.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	We Defy You To Stare Into This Face. Done and Done.
TITLE ACCURACY	Sure, that title happens
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	Yup, both of 1942's Masque of the Red Death and 1945's Hop-Frog.
SEQUEL?	None, although you could probably count is as part of the eight Poe adaptations Corman made between 1960-1965.
REMAKE?	Yes, actually, there is another Corman-produced movie of the same name from 1989, starring Adrian Paul of all people.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	Corman and Price are American, but it was shot in England with an English crew, for tax reasons.
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Satanism, Body horror
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None, although we know for a fact that Paul McCartney visited the set.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Vincent Price, Roger Corman, Edgar Allan Poe
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	I mean, Prospero kindaps the poor girl and keeps her locked up in his castle, and kind of forces her to be his date, although I don't think he does anything physically untowards. But certainly extremely ungentlemanly behavior. Also the dream sequence with Hazel Court seems to have taken on a sexual element to some commentators, but I'm kinda scratching my head on that one. It's maybe some kind of rape metaphor? But if so I don't really get it.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Falcon straight up kills a lady. Tragic, but if a three pound bird can kill you, I dunno lady, how badly did you really want to live?
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No, nothing like that
POSSESSION?	Surprisingly no
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	Actually it just seems like Prospero and his lady, but they got, like, a shrine and everything, I think it counts.
MADNESS?	None
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Nah
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	Don't assume Satanism will save you from bacteria.

B- , anyway