The American Scream: A Prelude to Chainsawnukah

The American Scream (2012)

Dir. Michael Stephenson

Or, “How Samuel Jackson’s Arm Made Me a Better Person”

This is a movie about what a few families in Fairhaven, MA do to decorate their yard for Halloween. But in a larger sense, it’s about obsession, creativity, community, loss, fear, and the American Dream. Which is good, because Halloween is a pretty big deal to me, too, and this is an interesting start to a discussion of why that is, and what it means.

First, though, the players. We meet Victor Barbiteau, in danger of losing his IT job by day, obsessive, visionary creator of the phantasmagoric by night, along with his amazingly accepting wife and somewhat more enthusiastic children. We meet Manny Souza, construction worker, family man, whose over-the-top Halloween show seems to grow more elaborate every year. And we meet Matthew and Richard Brodeur, an unemployed father/son duo who create their own ramshackled Halloween wonderland and are decidedly… odd. All three are “home haunters,” which as we learn is a small but fierce community of obsessive Halloween decorators around which there has sprung up a small cottage industry (which I myself have probably done more than my share to prop up). At first glance, the three protagonists --who all know each other-- seem to be on the same page. After all, they all share the same unusual fixation, they collaborate with each other and other “haunters,” they experience the same frustrations and lack of understanding from non-haunters who can’t figure out what’s motivating these nutballs to go to all this trouble.

But the more we get to know them, the more it becomes clear that although the symptoms are the same, the disease is different and distinct in each man. Barbiteau is motivated by his desire to recapture the youth he lost with the Branch Davidian cult (not his fault, his mom was a member). Souza is motivated by his desire to share a memorable project with his family. And the Brodeurs… uh, who knows what they’re thinking. If there’s a reason behind their efforts, they never mention it. They haunt because they must.

The Barbiteua clan. Who paints a coffin Lake Placid Blue? That truly is horrifying.

The movie tries to give us revealing suggestions from each man about why they’re compelled to build life-sized Egyptian statuary and buy discount (used?) coffins off craigslist and so forth. But really, I’m not 100% buying. Barbiteau, probably the most fanatical --he ends up directing a crew of volunteers and spending most of his disposable income in the quest for what admittedly ends up being an absolutely jaw-dropping creation-- offers a variety of explanations, from the lost Halloweens of his childhood, to the need to share a Holiday with the community (Thanksgiving and Christmas are for family, he says, but Halloween is for the whole world) to the power of fear in our psyche. All are probably part of it, as they probably are on some level for all the families we see. Really, though, I think these guys do it because they’re simply creative people. The have to build, they have to create, and this is simply the outlet that they’ve found. The specific motivations are probably complex and obscure, by the desire to do something is overwhelming. The proof is that they simply started one year by taking a shot a building something themselves, more or less on a whim, and that it’s spiraled out of control ever since. The creative impulse is powerful, and it will find a way. Whatever you tell yourself and whatever you can articulate about your motivation, the drive to make something bigger, better, crazier, and more elaborate will win the day.

Since we are entering the Chainsawnukah season, though, I think the most interesting aspect of the film is the one least explored. The question is not necessarily why do these guys build this stuff, but who are these complete strangers who come from far away to be scared by them, and also why do I want to do it so badly, too? Barbiteau offers a tantalizing explanation (and also sounds like he and the good Dr. Jonathan Crane would have a lot to talk about): “When you’re scared, you’re most alive.” There may be some truth to that. Fear is invigorating, fear has the capacity to remind you of the scarcity and fragility of life, reminding us to never take life for granted. And fear does it without the depressingness of having to watch Susan Sarandon die of cancer or something. Fear activates your brain in a way which makes it hyper-alert, releasing adrenaline, focusing your attention, forcing you to actively and intensely engage with the world. Treating ourselves to known artificial fears activates a very primal part of our brain and causes us to undergo a great intensity of experience without actually putting ourselves and loved ones at risk. So he may have a point, there’s definitely something there.

The Sauza clan.

But there must be a second part, too, that doesn’t have to do with fear. Or at least not the same kind of startled, heart-pumping fear that a guy in in a monster mask jumping out at you will produce. I mean, plenty of things trigger the fight-or-flight response in our brain; a loud air horn will do the job nicely, and you don’t see people lining up for that. So I maintain that there’s something about the macabre that may be related to fear, but isn’t at all the same thing Barbiteau is talking about. There’s something deeply, perversely appealing about the grotesque, the disgusting, the disquieting, which has nothing to with anything as superficial as a scare. In fact, Barbiteau eventually even acknowledges that “I don’t understand my reasons,” perhaps genuinely flummoxed at having to explain his objectively strange fixation, or perhaps a little afraid to probe much deeper. I mean, if you’re a guy with two adorable kids and a very understanding wife who is willing to tolerate this sort of shenanigan, maybe you’re not too keen to really dig deep into the motivation for your fixation on the icons of death.

Fortunately for me, I have no dependents who might get creeped out by psychoanalyzing the darker aspects of my soul, so I have the luxury of wondering what it is about horror that brings me back to it with such passion every year around this time. Why is it that every year, I seek out a universe of fucked up shit that so many people spend their lives actively avoiding? Why does THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE make me giggle like a schoolgirl, when to most people the very concept results in an immediate gag reflex? I mean, I’m a nice guy. In real life, I loathe violence and suffering and depravity, and to the best of my limited ability I try to work against it. So why do I love it when it shows up in my movies?

I’ve been asked that question a lot, for most of my life. And the best answer that I’ve ever come up with is that I can be a nice guy because I love this stuff. I think every human has the capacity to enact things which are unimaginably horrible. As this year’s most painfully horrifying film, THE ACT OF KILLING, makes clear, it’s a complete self-serving illusion to believe that there is some kind of clear dividing line between the good guys and the bad guys. We’re all people, we all live, we all love, laugh, cry, scream, eat, watch a movie every now and then. Sometimes we do wonderful things, sometimes we do terrible things. Most of us in our lives will do some mixture of both, though perhaps it’s easier to swing towards the positive in the relatively peaceful, resource-abundant modern Western world. I have one major advantage in this: most of my life, my destructive impulses have focused inward rather than outward. I am very seldom tempted to hurt other people, but with myself and my own life, it can be very difficult not to give in to negative impulses. If you’re in introverted person, it’s likely a fight that you’ll have to wage your whole life, and it’s also one that only rarely makes it to the surface long enough to involve anyone else. So you spend a lot of your time living down in the black pit, with all the nameless, formless vague thoughts that weigh down on you like the water at the bottom of a dark ocean. You either learn how to live with, and co-exist with these dark sirens of the subconscious, or, well, you don’t.

And that’s where the horror fan comes in. I was a sensitive child. I remember vividly the day of my youth that I first really listened to the lyrics to Warren Zevon’s immortal nightmare boogie “Excitable Boy” and it reduced me to tears. I used to feel the pain and horror of the world so, so vividly that some days it was paralyzing. Some days it felt like the world itself was screaming in horror, like the primal figure in Munch’s famous painting. I would shut my eyes tight and run out of the room at a death on TV, even a fictional one, because otherwise it would haunt me for days. I guess I was trying to deal with the awful permanence of mortality, with the abominable injustice of loss, and trying to reconcile the horror of the universe which would allow such cruelty with the sublime and awe-inspiring universe I already knew to exist. My response was to shut it out. Most children have adults to shield them from life’s uglier side; I suppose I did too, but like most kids it didn’t take long for me to put the pieces together and uncover the darker strands of the world at the edges of our perception. And once I’d seen them, I wanted to part of them. I didn’t need adults to try to censor the world for me; I took to that task myself, and with the dogmatic intensity only fear can really produce.

And then JURASSIC PARK happened. The moment with Samuel Jackson’s arm --which today plays as almost a parody of ridiculous unearned movie scares-- was at the time the single most horrifiying thing I had ever seen in my life. It happened too suddenly to look away, and once it had made it through my eyes, it took up residence in my mind. I had nightmares about it, that image burning itself into my brain to spring forward when I least expected it.

But a funny thing happened, too. The more it stuck with me, the more fascinated I became with it. JURASSIC PARK is a pretty scary movie for a fourth-grader, but it also has Spielberg’s unmistakable sense of rollicking fun, and that energy has at least as much power as the horror. And they were intertwined, somehow; as repulsed as I was by the image of death and terror, it was so closely interwoven with the power of the tale being told that it became impossible to entirely disentangle them. And my horror became entangled with excitement, and even a cautious, quietly urgent curiosity. The horror wasn’t going to leave my head, and so I simply had to get used to this new, frightening but subversively compelling permanent occupant. The horror wouldn’t leave leave the world I inhabited any more than it would leave my head, and increasingly, being paralyzed by the pain was turning me inward, planting seeds of despair and isolation that took root early and grew live creeping kudzu into other parts of my psyche. So the only option left became to give in to the pull of the dark. To live with it, I had to know it, and to know it I had to explore it. And so I started on my adventures in horror cinema, into House Haunting, into the music of Nick Cave and Warren Zevon and Metal and punk and horrorcore and, eventually, my personal heaven, the Theatre Bizarre.

The greatest haunt of all

Seeking out darkness in art did not desensitize me to horror, as you might first suspect and as censorship advocates might be quick to suggest. I still ache at the pain and cruelty in the world, and rage at the universe’s monstrous indifference to suffering. And there are still some things which go too far for even for me, mostly articles of simple puerile sadism, which I dearly hope I will always find repugnant, unpleasant, and --perhaps most damningly-- juvenile and unimaginative. But mostly, the dark arts have helped me become paradoxically more sensitive. Not only to the suffering of the world, but crucially to my own life, helped me actually face the darkness inside and discover it’s unique and ultimately ridiculous character. Ironically, our worst impulses are often the most blatantly absurd, and the easiest to tame and direct once we’ve managed to face them, to force them into the light where we can put a shape and a name to them and thus deny them the power of their more nebulous kin. Horror cinema and the whole Halloween season give us the gift of allowing us to, for a short while, bring the whole ridiculous circus of anger and fear and perversity and self-destruction and superstition and vulnerability out into the limelight, parade it about your our amusement, celebrate it as part of ourselves, and let it retire back to the twilight of applause and merriment. It’s part of us, it’s part of the human experience, and as such it has only the power over our lives that we give to it. It is, I think, the ultimate explanation behind the home haunters in AMERICAN SCREAM, and the reason why their fixation represents a triumph over fear as much as a celebration of it. And for me, personally? If I have to watch THE HUMAN CENTIPEDE PART III to find its face and make sure it stays where it belongs, well, it’s something I’ll do with a huge smile on my face, and hopefully with some good friends too. And some whisky.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, let the horror festival begin. Last year I watched in excess of 40 movies, and if October 1 was any indication, there’s plenty more out there for me to find this year. Join me, as we celebrate the grotesque, the depraved, the horrific, the macabre, the just plain bizarre, and of course the grindingly incompetent world of…

CHAINSAWNUKAH: 

FESTIVAL OF FRIGHTS 2013: 

THE SEARCH FOR SCHLOCK  

Chasing Sleep

Chasing Sleep (2001)
Dir. Michael Walker
Written: Michael Walker
Starring Jeff Bridges Daniels, Gil Bellows, Zach Grenier

Heeeeeereeeee's Jeffy!

     Recently I discovered a cache of old screeners back from my glory days as an indie video store employee. I’d forgotten all about them, but apparently when I left the job I took with me a stack of DTV screeners that I’d meant to watch but never got around to. Like most of the DTV indie screeners that were circulating in the late 90’s and early 2000s, I was pretty sure that most of them would be complete trash, but a few looked tempting enough to take a quick look. What the hell, I put it off for an entire decade, might as well follow through on my 17-year-old self’s intention of sifting through hours of drivel in search of hidden gold (remember how much fun we had watching THE ETERNAL KISS OF THE MUMMY?). I grabbed the first one in the pile, depicting a crazy looking Jeff Daniels peeking around the corner at a bathtub with a bloody handprint over it*. What compelled me to pick this up sometime in late 2001, I don’t know, but it looked like it had some vague potential to be some kind of arty crime thriller, maybe one of those tiresome Tarantino knock-offs everyone seemed to be churning out back then. Turns out, it’s a bit more interesting than that.

    CHASING SLEEP has many of the hallmarks of this period in independent film, after the floodgates had opened to passionate indie filmmakers using private funding to put together their dream project, but before most of them really figured out how to make films good. It has one recognizable star surrounded by mostly obscure (local?) actors who are noticeably not as good. It has some needless showy stylistic flourishes which now look pretty trite and embarrassing. It has some pretty iffy lighting and only one major location, which I would guess is probably the director’s house. But it also has one thing going for it that most of the films in this pile probably do not: it’s actually pretty good.

"A taught, tense action thriller! -- FOX TV"

    Hey, sometimes the Republicans are right, sometimes Bigfoot posts nude pictures of himself on the internet, and sometimes the system works the way it’s supposed to. Director Michael Walker (nothing) really put together a movie here which he could never have made through the studio, but manages to use the limited resources of an indie film production to really create something distinctive and affecting. I’m as surprised as you are, but there it is.

    There’s not a lot of plot to CHASING SLEEP. Jeff “Not Bridges” Daniels plays a college professor who can’t seem to sleep, no matter what he does. He’s lying in bed one night, staring at the hole in his bedroom ceiling caused by his leaking pipes, when he suddenly realizes his wife hasn’t come home yet. He calls her friends to see if he can find her, calls the cops, talks to a couple people about the situation. But mostly he just putters around the house, trying to keep it together.

    Bridges Daniels is fantastic in the role, perfectly exuding that state of utter mental and physical exhaustion and creeping unreality which comes from worry, depression, and lack of sleep. He can keep a conversation up, but everything seems very slightly distorted, as if he’s responding from a very long way away. Time seems to have no meaning. Sometimes a simple trip across a room seems to take unbearably long, other times he’ll have a late-night dinner and suddenly discover that it’s the following morning. Things seem weird and off, even before he finds a severed human finger under the bathtub and then it crawls away. And of course, there’s the constantly leaking pipes everywhere, crumbling and decaying the walls and spilling into almost every corner of his life.

I bet that symbolizes something.

    What does it all mean? Walker’s not telling. There are enough details for you to draw some informed suspicions, but to his credit Walker never really answers the questions definitively, nor does he ever entirely reveal how much of this is literally happening. It could all be real, or it could all be a dream, or anywhere on the spectrum in-between. The literal meaning of it isn’t so important as the creepy, melancholy, dreamlike vibe of the thing. And it really nails that. I saw a few reviews which seemed frustrated at the film’s stubborn refusal to give you an objective truth, but jesus guys, that’s the whole point. It perfectly captures that early David Lynch pulse of suburban normalcy suddenly pierced by the macabre and bizarre. Call it Twin Peaks in a house. It starts innocently enough, but slowly --almost imperceptibly-- a gnawing darkness eats away at it until it’s completely consumed, and the viewer along with it.

There are some admittedly amateurish qualities to it, but in a film like this the only thing that really matters is that its current is strong enough to sweep you up into it. Daniels’ work here has to be some of the best of his career, and Walker (aside from a few gimmicky missteps) shows the maturity to slowly and steadily build complexity into his film, so that it’s constantly developing but never resorts to cheap twists or shocks. It’s a gripping, unsettling nightmare that also contains a grain of genuine human truth -- perhaps more than any other film I’ve seen, it manifests that corrosive simmering panic of waiting through the lonely night for someone to return. For a DTV film from that era, a very rare thing indeed.

*Needless to say, nothing like this happens in the movie.

Sound of My Voice

Sound of My Voice (2012)
Dir. Zal Batmanglij
Starring Brit Marling, Christopher Denham, Nicole Vicius

SOUND OF MY VOICE is an interesting little exercise in a film which is narratively complete, straightforward, and yet still offers only questions with no answers. Whether or not you enjoy it probably comes down to  how fair you find it that the film gains its ambiguity by deliberately withholding information, and how worthwhile you find the questions that it raises in and of themselves.

The premise is exceedingly simple. LA  hipster couple Peter and Lorna infiltrates a cult with the intent of making a documentary about the subject, only to find themselves asking some uncomfortable questions about themselves and their new “family.” See, the cult is headed by the charismatic Maggie (co-writer and ANOTHER EARTH star Brit Marling) who claims she is from 2054 and has traveled backwards through time in an effort to guide her followers out of harms way when some unspecified disaster befalls mankind in the future. If she’s telling the truth, the film should probably be called a Sci-Fi. If not, it’s closer to a prequel to MARTHA MAGGIE MAY MARLENE.

So is she full of shit, or should we take heed of her dire warning? She seems honest, approachable, human. Peter’s initial assessment of her is, “to hear her is to believe her,” but of course, that’s exactly what you’d expect from a successful cult leader, right? We also see her bully, intimidate, and manipulate. Is that merely an expression of her human flaws, or another good indicator that she’s a highly skilled con artist?

This can only end in Kool-Aide.

The film’s story evolves slowly but steadily, introducing new wrinkles just as you’re sure you’ve got a handle on the situation. But although the story is plenty compelling, the whole thing is mostly just a framework to examine the concept of belief. What is it gonna take to get you to believe someone when there’s no evidence to support their unusual claims? Is it a judgement of the person making the claim? A risk-benefit assessment? Do you simply want to believe even though maybe you shouldn’t? The film seems to slyly be suggesting just how badly most people want something to believe in or --more troublingly-- want to surrender their free will to some authority figure.

This particular film is about a cult, but of course it applies to any “mainstream” religion just as easily. If you’re willing to accept and respect people believing in accounts written decades after the fact about a mortal god who was his own son committing suicide to appease himself, then what grounds do you have for skepticism about this cute blonde gal who says she wants to help you prepare for a post-apocalyptic world which seems perfectly likely these days? And for that matter, why is either appealing? Is it the threat of the apocalypse? The appeal of a charismatic messiah? The simple, primal need to be part of something? Out hipster LA couple goes into the project with the smug certainty that they’ll easily infiltrate the cult and surreptitiously gather evidence to use against them later. What they don’t count on is just how being assimilated into the group will affect them, and how much it will call into question things they took for granted about themselves. And the audience --doled out information at the same rate as the characters-- gets to play along too.

Now, as an exercise in belief, I think it’s very slightly unfair for the simple fact that it’s a movie. In real life, I’m not sure I’d be tempted to believe some hot blonde’s story about being a prophet from the future unless it seemed likely that sex would be forthcoming. But in a movie, you know the director is in control of reality and it might very plausibly turn out that Lorna is a robot assassin sent from another dimension or some such nonsense. So as director Batmanglij* slowly reveals pieces of the puzzle, you get the experience of trying to assemble them yourself into something which seems plausible to you. And as things change, you’re challenged to ask yourself why you might have been so ready to believe one scenario over another.

Man, this Michael Bay reimagining of NINJA TURTLES has really gotten out of hand.

To my mind, the pleasure of the ambiguity is ruined slightly by the end, which provides one bit of information which seemed to me a little too definitive. But wouldn’t you know it, my filmgoing companions walked out with the exact opposite impression of what the end meant, so maybe that just proves Batmanglij’s point. Either way, don’t expect any big denouement where everything is neatly explained. Life is often a frustrating tangle of ambiguity for us to try to parse some sense out of, and the movie embraces that idea. Instead, expect a quietly tense, compelling, and haunting little story which dares to ask not just what you believe, but why.

Marling, who co-wrote and starred in both ANOTHER EARTH and this one, seems to be the real deal. A thoughtful, imaginative creator of simple yet compelling scenarios, who is also a gifted enough actress to pull off the execution. Looks like other people are taking notice; she’s being directed by Robert Redford and co-starring with Richard Gere, Susan Sarandon and Tim Roth in a few upcoming films set for release this year. But despite those names, the one I’m really looking forward to is her next film as a writer, again working with Batmanglij on something wikipedia calls an “action mystery film” (what, like 48 HOURS?) If that one is as good as her first two, I’m ready to officially call her one of the most exciting artists working today. And that, my friends, will be a belief based on very solid evidence indeed.


*motto: just say “Batman” and add “glij”

Murders in the Rue Morgue

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971)

Dir. Gordon Hessler

Starring Jason Robards, Herbert Lom, Michael Dunn, Christine Kaufman

People have been adapting Poe stories since the very beginning of cinema, and it’s easy to understand why: Poe stories are filled with irresistible imagery, articulated by a true master storyteller with a uniquely nightmarish imagination (which also incidentally, tended to imagine impressive set pieces which can be created on a budget. It’s not like we’re talking H.P. Lovecraft giant monsters and universes of unimaginable horror). According to the Olde Farmer’s Wikipedia, the earliest known Poe film was made in 1909, and they’ve been cranking ‘em out ever since then, perhaps reaching a high water mark with the many Corman-produced adaptations in the 50s and 60s.

Unfortunately, despite a full century of efforts, I don’t think there’s a single film out there which really quite qualifies as a direct adaptation. The reason Poe was such an indelible master of horror fiction was that his voice was so unique, and his command of language was so stunning. Visualizing Poe’s mind tends to lead to something less than the poetry of his words, and has resulted in some morose but uninspired films which pick pieces of his work but fail to capture the essential character of Poe’s prose. That, and a lot of his stories are not particularly eventful. Take the words out of THE RAVEN and you’re left with a guy sitting in a room where a bird flies through the window. The greatness is in Poe’s bruising psychological violence and his profound ability to evoke dread comes through his peerless command of his medium of the written word. There’s plenty of room for someone with an equal mastery of cinema to capture that same haunting poetry – but it would take someone with a mastery of cinema equal to Poe’s mastery of the written word.

Which is a roundabout way of saying Gordon Hessler ain’t that guy. No offense to him intended; I don’t know who would be. David Lynch, maybe? Francis Coppola, in his heyday? Suggestions are welcome. We’ll see James McTiegue take a crack at it next year, but, uh, I don’t know that I’m holding my breath for him to be Poe’s artistic equal.* That being said, I’m excited as shit for that movie. Why? Simple. Just because you’re not going to create an enduring and transformative piece of art which will forever become part of the world’s great expressions of humanity doesn’t mean you’re not going to make something fun.

So I’m down with taking a visual or narrative cue from Poe and running with it, just so long as you throw me a murderous gorilla or two somewhere down the line. Bait the line with Jason Robards and Herbert Lom, and I’ll bite.

Director Hessler, in his somewhat surprisingly candid interview, is refreshingly honest about his inability to measure up to Poe, or even the long history of adaptations that came before his. In an effort to find some new ground to explore, he brings a meta approach to Poe, setting a series of unrelated killings in the context of a theater troupe which is mounting a production of Murders in the Rue Morgue. Postmodernism, of course, is the last refuge of a scoundrel, but to his credit Hessler doesn’t milk it as a gimmick; it’s more just a colorful poetic backdrop against which he sets a mostly unrelated story.

Said unrelated story finds Jason Robards (looking and dressing exactly like Vincent Price, who was originally up for this role) as the leader of an acting troupe which is shocked when one of their own is murdered during the performance. Sadistically, the murderer dons the dead actor’s costume (he’s playing the gorilla) and performs the rest of the show without anyone being the wiser! Now, many of Robard’s oldest friends an colleagues are getting murdered, but surely this doesn’t have anything to do with a former actor played by the obviously sinister Herbert Lom who went crazy and is definitely, for sure dead now, seriously, why even bother checking, has to be someone else. And it even more definitely doesn’t have anything to do with the events that occurred when Robard’s young wife (Christine Kaufman) was a child and Robards nursed an unrequited love for her mother, who by a complete coincidence was married to Lom’s character.

So it’s a pretty silly story, but there are a couple of effective bits to it. For one, Kaufman keeps blacking out and having a recurring dream about a weird abandoned house, a falling actor, and a sinister guy in a mask wielding an axe. For much of the film, the cinematography tends to be pretty standard and occasionally even a tad amateurish, but the dream sequences are sumptuously photographed and intriguingly staged. They have a dark and evocative poetry to them which actually does recall Poe’s carefully suggestive style. They hit on that subconscious level that I’m always going on about. You know how I get when I’ve been drinking. I never said I wasn’t predicable.

So the dream sequences are great, and the rest of the film has some nice atmospheric moments and a great Poe-y set in a dilapidated mansion and its accompanying crypt. But the whole thing is mostly crippled by its lack of a compelling central character arc. Robards --an actor I love—seems completely directionless here, wandering throughout the whole film without finding a clear anchor for his character. The interview with Hessler sheds some light here, as he remembers that two weeks into filming Robards was regretting not taking Lom’s role, which he correctly identified as more interesting. Unfortunately, Lom is a dead fish in his role, too – he seems barely awake in a part which calls from extreme intensity. Kaufman’s character is the only one the narrative follows all the way through, but she’s a wimpy victim throughout the whole thing, passing out at every opportunity and relying on the men around her to further any plot point. The one person here who walks away with a solid win is pioneering dwarf actor Michael Dunn, a charisma monster who somehow makes his thankless sidekick role the focal point of the whole film.

In his interview, director Hessler is admirably straightforward about the whole thing (even speculating that this film is what precipitated Robards’ career downgrade from leading man to character actor) and pretty honest about what life was like for a journeyman genre director in the 70s. He says that you had to do what you were assigned and didn’t always have a lot of control over the material, and that all you could hope to do was try to elevate whatever studio project came your way. I’d say that he can probably walk away feeling that he accomplished that, but despite a generally classy production and a few inspired sequences, the thing is an unwieldy bore.

Oddly, even though I think it's probably safe to say that Robards is a better actor than Vincent Price, getting Price in the central role here might have been enough to make it something a touch more memorable. Even on his worst day, Price has an irresistible magnetism to him which would have made the slippery character at this film’s center a more compelling force and perhaps would have given the whole enterprise a bit more focus. Price is a performer; he’s compelling to watch no matter what he’s doing. Robards is an actor, stranded without motivation and direction. Part of taking iffy material and elevating it is applying to the elements of human psychology that go beyond a single individual’s personality and motivation. Price knows how to tap into that bottomless, profound subconscious state that hits on a level which is more profound than logic, even if it is perhaps less personal. Poe did too. Maybe that combination makes more sense than most folks give it credit for.

*Edit from 2012: That turned out to be a fairly astute assumption.