Saturday, August 28, 2021

The Black Room (Roy William Neill, 1935)

Movies that showcase one actor playing identical twins, with one twin evil and the other kind, tend to be silly and gimmicky at best and offensive at worst, but this Gothic horror period piece, with Boris Karloff as twin brothers Gregor and Anton, is pretty elegant and effective, with Karloff finding different mannerisms, personality traits, affectations, and slight changes in speech to flesh out and differentiate both parts. Director Roy William Neill presents it all mostly seriously, with just the right flavoring of camp, and the production benefits from having the full financial weight of Paramount Pictures behind it, sparing little expense on lavish sets and crowds of extras.
The Black Room begins in a castle in a small Tyrolean village in the late 18th century. The Baron's wife has just given birth, but the color drains from the Baron's face (or so I assume; it's a B&W movie) when he learns she has delivered twin boys. The Baron doesn't have anything personal against twins, but the prophecy that has so far foretold an accurate history of his bloodline is pretty clear that the family line will end with twin brothers, with the younger (by one minute) killing the older in the castle's Black Room. This is exactly how the dynasty began, with brother Ram killing his slightly older twin brother and first baron Wolfram.
The Baron is extremely bummed about the prophecy, even though most of his peers no longer believe in it, but he bounces back when one of them suggests walling up the Black Room. Problem solved, right? In a quick montage, we learn of the eventual deaths of the Baroness and Baron, and we flash forward 20 years after the twins' teen years to find Gregor the ruling baron at the castle and Anton living the quiet life in a nearby village with his beloved mastiff Tor (played by Von the Dog, who would go on to star in four more films and a documentary about movie dogs). Anton has been away for a decade, but Gregor invites him for a visit, with dark ulterior motives.
Anton arrives at the village pub, discovering how hated his brother is by the townspeople, and, riding in his brother's coach to the castle, he barely misses a bullet meant for Gregor. Back at the castle, Anton sees that Gregor has become a creepy, paranoid tyrant, but he doesn't realize things are even worse than that. Gregor is a predator and murderer of women, with several women in the village disappearing shortly after being in or near the castle.
The townspeople, long suspecting Gregor, have had enough, and an angry mob is forming to give Gregor what he deserves. Meanwhile, Gregor has a creepy fixation on a young woman named Thea (Marian Marsh), the niece of the village's colonel, Paul (Thurston Hall), and he is determined to make her his bride despite her complete aversion to him and her own engagement to a young lieutenant. The timing of all this turmoil and Anton's visit are not coincidental, and Gregor has a dark plot in the works.
You probably see where this is going, and several moments in the film's conclusion are telegraphed pretty far in advance, but the story is presented with such style, skill, flair, and graceful camera movement that it's never less than satisfying. There are a few awkward, gimmicky trick shots of Karloff talking to Karloff, but these are dispensed with relatively early in the running time. The beautiful and beautifully Gothic village, castle, and graveyard sets are given their full due on camera, and Neill and his cinematographer Allen G. Siegler frame and photograph some spectacular shots and images. The actors do a great job of matching the film's mostly serious/slightly camp tone. Karloff is particularly great, but the rest of the cast does fine work, too, even the initially dull young lovers.
Another important character, castle servant Mashka, is played by Katherine DeMille, who has a pretty wild Hollywood story of her own. She was born in Canada to a Scottish father and an Italian/Swiss mother, though she lost both parents at a young age. Her father was killed in WWI, and her terminally ill with tuberculosis mother took young Katherine to California to find the child's grandparents, who had emigrated there. Katherine's mother died before finding them, and the child was placed in a Los Angeles orphanage run by the wife of famous director/producer Cecil B. DeMille, Constance Adams. Adams and DeMille were unable to conceive again after their first child, so they adopted Katherine when she was 11. Katherine became a movie star and had a long but sometimes unhappy marriage to Anthony Quinn. She quit the movie business in grief after the couple's oldest son drowned in a pond at W.C. Fields' home at the age of two or three, but she returned for a handful of roles nearly a decade later. The perennially unfaithful Quinn left her in the 1960s for his mistress, and she spent her final years out of the limelight with family in Arizona.
Director Neill was born on a ship off the coast of Ireland, which his father was captaining. Jeez, these people's lives are something else. He directed a staggering number of movies at a prolific pace from the silent era through the mid-1940s, dying of a heart attack in '46. Though most of these were low-budget b-movies (The Black Room was one of his rare big-budget productions), some critics and historians credit his visual style as one of the inspirations for film noir. Neill is most famous for directing the bulk of the Basil Rathbone-starring Sherlock Holmes movies, but he also made several horror films (and several films in almost every genre, for that matter; he directed 111 movies in all; no wonder the guy had a heart attack). 

Saturday, August 14, 2021

Cemetery High (Gorman Bechard, 1988)

A semi-feminist meta horror/comedy about movies, Cemetery High is an unusual ultra-low budget b-movie that turns many of its limitations into strengths, though not everything lands and some of the jokes are sub-sitcom-level. The sound is pretty bad, too, with the dialogue occasionally obscured by the much louder background noise. Still, it's got a lot of charm, and I enjoyed it more than I didn't.
Movies that are commentaries about themselves and the medium of film usually create a distance between audience and character, and that's also true of Cemetery High, though the comedic tone treats the viewer as co-conspirator. These movies also tend to come in hot and fizzle out quickly. Cemetery High avoids this second-half slog by maintaining a fast pace and moving on to another scene after making its point. There's not much padding here. It's like a film version of a Ramones song.
Cemetery High begins in the last week of the school year. A trio of twentysomething teenage women, Kate (Debi Thibeault); Kathy (Karen Nielsen); and Michelle (Lisa Schmidt), have been sexually assaulted by three members of the football team. These rapist jocks have been terrorizing the girls at the high school for years (they keep flunking and returning to school; apparently, there is no academic probation for athletes at this institution of secondary education), and our heroes decide to do something about it. On graduation day, they kill the creeps with knives and axes. The women decide to continue their vigilante spree full-time, trading their messier weapons for guns and adding a fourth (and later, a fifth) member to what is eventually dubbed the Scumbusters by local media (Dianne, played by Simone Reyes, and Lisa, played by Ruth Collins).
No man in the Waterbury, Connecticut metro area is safe, particularly rapists, harassers, pedophiles, and guys who relentlessly hit on women in bars. (Nearly every man in the film is a fake Guido stereotype, a fake redneck, or a fake biker.) The murder spree turns the women into folk heroes and the city into a relatively crime-free zone (except for the vigilante murders, of course), but also makes them the target of unhinged sexist Jesus freak Mayor Goodman (Tony Kruk). The group's only male allies are Bob (David Coughlin), the local sheriff, who is too dumb to be a threat, and the gay coroner, Dr. Schiavone (Frank Stewart).
The movie routinely breaks the fourth wall. Footage of a cheap gong being struck plays whenever a violent scene is about to happen and a pair of bicycle horns being honked precedes the nude scenes. An on-screen narrator is murdered by the women mid-interview, and the characters refer to themselves as being in a movie and talk about what needs to happen in later scenes to satisfy genre and storytelling requirements. One scene takes place in a video store, with the characters perusing a VHS copy of director Bechard's previous film. The movie even breaks away for a commercial about the Rock Jock, a bulletproof jock strap that will protect men's crotches from the vigilantes' bullets.
These meta moments are alternately clever, stupid, clever-stupid, obvious, and/or annoying, with about a 50/50 chance of landing on a decent joke, but they give the film a flavor lacking in run-of-the-mill revenge-based b-movies. Cemetery High's messaging about sexism and rape culture in both the movies and women's everyday lives is sometimes obvious, sometimes heavy-handed, but welcome in a 1980s b-movie, and it manages to do all this while staying light and fun and avoiding grimness. Not all of it works, but the moments that do are pretty enjoyable. Bechard is not a big fan of the movie, however. The production company took control of the project, and it was edited (and a few scenes were shot) without his input, much to his chagrin. 
Bechard's had an interesting career. His early work includes genre films Disconnected, Psychos in Love, and Galactic Gigolo. He then turned to indie drama and romantic comedy with You Are Alone, Friends (With Benefits), The Kiss, and Broken Side of Time, but he's probably best known for his music documentaries and concert films about The Replacements, Archers of Loaf, Grant Hart, Lydia Loveless, and Sarah Shook. His other documentary subjects have included the bond between an elderly man and the abused dog he rescued, senior dogs, the three oldest pizzerias in New Haven, and people from various walks of life answering the same 20 questions.