The Raven (Lew Landers, 1935)

One of the many Edgar Allan Poe adaptations that aren't really Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, The Raven is a dark, tense, funny, occasionally silly, and consistently entertaining twist on the mad doctor story that reunites heavy hitters Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff (billed only as KARLOFF: all caps; I always get a kick out of the handful of credit sequences giving him this billing) and gets the job done in 62 minutes in classic 1930s fashion. I had a grand old time watching it.

Lugosi plays Richard Vollin, a brilliant surgeon who has retired from practice to do "research." This research consists of letting his Poe obsession run wild, as he has recreated several torture devices from Poe's short stories and poems in a secret room hidden behind a fake bookshelf. He also keeps a large stuffed raven near his desk and frequently recites excerpts from the poem named after the bird.

When interpretive dancer Jean Thatcher (Irene Ware) is gravely injured in a car accident, her surgeons hit a brick wall. Her father, Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds), and her fiancé, Dr. Jerry Halden (Lester Matthews), implore Vollin to come out of retirement and save Jean. After multiple refusals, Vollin finally relents when his ego gets enough of a massage, and he brings Jean back from the edge of death. When the recovered Jean becomes a regular visitor at Vollin's abode, the mad doctor falls in love with her, a love that only intensifies when Jean creates a sold-out interpretive dance performance based on "The Raven" in gratitude. Judge Thatcher recognizes Vollin's intentions and gives him the business about leaving his engaged daughter alone, which does not sit well with the mad doc, who loves torture even more than he loves Jean and the work of Poe.

You may think Jean a little naive for not realizing how insane Vollin is, but her doctor fiancé is one of those classic '30s condescending milquetoast duds who doesn't deserve such a vibrant wife. No wonder Jean gets a little infatuated with a weird but brilliant guy who won't shut the eff up about Poe.

Where's KARLOFF, you say? He shows up as escaped criminal Edmond Bateman, on the lam after killing some prison guards and a bank teller. He wants Vollin to surgically modify his appearance, but Vollin won't do it until Bateman agrees to help him with his own devious plans. Bateman is capable of some pretty intense violence, but he's also a morally conflicted man with a conscience, which leads to complications and actions from both men that I won't reveal.

Things get really wild when all the characters converge at a weekend soiree at Vollin's home. The tone jumps back and forth between goofy comic relief, truly anxiety-inducing suspense, and some pretty gnarly and twisted torture-related biz, but workhorse journeyman director Lew Landers (back when he was directing under his real name of Louis Friedlander) keeps control of it all with style and skill. (Albert S. D'Agostino's eye-popping art direction also deserves a mention.)

Landers died in his early sixties, but still managed to notch 176 directing credits between the early '30s and the early '60s in both film and television in nearly every genre and subgenre. He directed 12 feature films in 1942 alone. His final film was a horror movie, 1963's Terrified, released the year after his death.

Lugosi and Karloff don't have the complex material in The Raven that they had in Ulmer's The Black Cat, but their iconic status and wildly different acting styles complement each other nicely. Lugosi is delightfully hammy and darkly comedic, while Karloff is subtler and sadder, bringing out the pathos and conflicting emotions in his wounded character (though he does get to unleash a couple of Frankenstein's monster-esque grunts when he gets mad). Instead of clashing, the differing approaches gel nicely. This is a solid '30s horror film, well worth your time.

Clownhouse (Victor Salva, 1989)

Can you separate the art from the artist? It's an old question that has been given a fresh coat of paint in the social media era when we know so much more about the private lives of nearly everyone, and it's a question that I tend to think about a lot. I've never been able to arrive at a clear yes or no. My general opinion is that art and artist are already separated if you are someone who does not know that artist personally, but I have a lot of caveats and qualifications. I don't require the people whose work I engage with to behave in ways I find moral or ethical. My opinion of that person devalues if I find out they did terrible things, but it doesn't tend to devalue the work for me unless that person was using that work as cover or opportunity for those terrible behaviors. If an artist is a piece of shit who makes good stuff, I don't see that behavior as my problem or my responsibility, especially if that artist is now dead. I say all this as a lone individual engaging with the art by myself. 

On the other hand, if an artist whose work I enjoy does something horrendous and is still living and still working, or if I am experiencing the art with another person whose life may have been affected by actions similar to the ones perpetrated by the artist, my reaction to that art vs. artist question gets a lot murkier. I don't want to financially contribute (even in the small way I would be contributing with my ticket price, DVD purchase, etc.) to a lifestyle that enables that artist to continue to abuse people and get away with it, and I don't like the message it sends when my abused friends see abusers' careers continue to thrive. I want people to be held accountable for their actions, and I want the various art industries to be less heinous places. I'm also completely against existing work being removed or censored because of things the creators did. It's a complicated, messy question.

I'm starting my review of Clownhouse (a movie I watched for free in a pirated upload on YouTube) with this art vs. artist spiel because it was written and directed by Victor Salva. I thought Salva's name was familiar while watching the film, and I shuddered when I looked him up after it ended. The same year Clownhouse was released, Salva was convicted of sexually abusing the 12-year-old star of the film, Nathan Forrest Winters, and also of possessing child pornography. He served 16 months in prison, was paroled in 1992, and then worked as a telemarketer for a few years before resuming his film career. His first film back in the business was a straight-to-video cheapie, but he soon got the full marketing and distribution weight of Disney behind him for his next film, the inspirational fantasy movie Powder. I'm not sure how many people involved in the film knew about Salva's past, but surely the bigwigs at Disney knew. Winters and his family picketed the premiere and several screenings of Powder, and caused the story of Salva's past to break nationally, but, in the pre-social media age, the news quickly faded.

Salva went on to direct a successful horror franchise, the Jeepers Creepers movies, but the pendulum may be swinging back in the other direction. His other films have been flops, the last Jeepers Creepers movie went straight to television, and he hasn't been able to get recent projects made.

There's another name who deserves a bit of mud-dragging in the Salva story: his patron Francis Ford Coppola. I love Coppola's work, but his role in the Victor Salva story is not great. Coppola saw Salva's 1986 short film Something in the Basement (also starring Winters) at a festival and thought Salva had a lot of potential. He mentored and befriended Salva and helped him get Clownhouse made (though he kept his name as one of the producers off the credits as the controversy broke). Parts of the film were even shot on Coppola's Napa Valley compound. Coppola supported Salva even as he faced prison time, and has continued to support Salva's later work, acting as producer and financial benefactor on several of his movies. Coppola has said that Salva is talented, has paid his debt to society, and deserves to work. That point can be argued, but one that can't is Coppola's unbelievable quote in a Los Angeles Times article about Salva: "You have to remember, while this was a tragedy, that the difference in age between Victor and the boy was very small. Victor was practically a child himself." The Times' reporter added in a parenthetical immediately following the quote that Winters was 12 and Salva was 29 when the abuse occurred. That small age difference: 17 years. Practically a child: almost 30 years old. Fuck off, Francis.

How do I even talk about the movie now? Briefly, Clownhouse is the story of three brothers, teenager Randy (Sam Rockwell in his first movie), almost-teenager Geoffrey (Brian McHugh), and almost-almost-teenager Casey (Winters), living in rural northern California. The brothers are close, though Randy is an obnoxious bully who only reveals his caring side in rare moments. Dad's away in Cleveland on business, and the boys' mother is visiting their aunt for the night. The boys go to the traveling circus, though Casey is deathly afraid of clowns, and then head home for some popcorn and horror movies. Meanwhile, three escaped mental patients kill the circus clowns after the circus closes for the night and dress up in all their clown gear and face paint. The killer clowns then break into the boys' home, where it's brothers vs. clowns for the remainder of the film.

It's an extremely low-budget movie, but it's a well-made one, and it's suspenseful and exciting. But so are a lot of other movies where a 12-year-old wasn't sexually abused. And knowing what I know now, the brief and innocuous-looking scenes of boys in the tub and in their underwear and jumping bare-ass out of bed are not so innocuous. No matter how you look at Clownhouse, you have to acknowledge that this is a movie about boys written and directed by a pedophile, and one of those boys was abused.

By all accounts, Salva confessed and owned up to what he did, did not try to fight his conviction, and spent years in therapy after getting out of prison. Like many abusers, he was also abused as a child, and he was beaten severely by other prisoners while serving his sentence. It deserves to be pointed out that although many abuse victims go on to abuse others, many more do not. Salva had a choice; Winters didn't. So far, Victor Salva has been able to direct eight more films and a TV episode. Nathan Forrest Winters has never worked in the business again. 

The Crazies (George A. Romero, 1973)

George A. Romero's fourth feature film (following Night of the Living Dead and the underrated There's Always Vanilla and Season of the Witch), The Crazies is in many ways a companion piece to his debut, replacing zombies with something more frighteningly plausible. If the grim, relentless Crazies is not quite as fun as Romero's other work (though there are a few darkly humorous moments), it's just as viscerally intense and visually impressive.

The Crazies opens with a wallop. A brother and sister are half-playing/half-fighting, with the brother teasing his younger sibling with a mask. Behind them, their father goes berserk, smashing up the home, dousing it with kerosene, and setting it alight while their mother lies dead in bed. Bam! The opening credits kick in. That's how you start a damn movie.

Soon, the military, in gas masks and protective gear, has set up shop in the local doctor's office. A virus is spreading in the small Pennsylvania town of Evans City. This highly contagious virus affects most of its carriers in two distinct ways. Some people get it and quickly die. Others survive but go irreversibly insane. A lucky few seem to have a natural immunity. The military plans to block off all entrances to Evans City and quarantine the townspeople in the high school. The blowhard mayor, a macho cop, and several gun-toting yokels don't like this idea but are clearly outmatched, despite the somewhat botched and understaffed initial efforts by the military.

When Col. Peckem (Lloyd Hollar) and reinforcements finally arrive, the news is worse than anticipated. The "virus" is actually a biological weapon, and its effects are being felt in the small town because a military plane carrying the weapon crashed nearby, contaminating the water supply. The president has authorized the military to nuke the town as a last resort if the spread can't be contained.

In the initial hullabaloo, Dr. Brookmyre (Will Disney) surreptitiously arranges for the escape of his nurse, Judy (Lane Carroll). Judy is pregnant, and the doctor instructs her to find her fiancé, David (Will McMillan), and hide out in the country until this whole thing blows over. (The townspeople are not given the biological weapon information.) David is a firefighter busy putting out the kerosene blaze ignited in the opening scene.

When Judy finally meets up with David and his fellow firefighter Clank (Harold Wayne Jones), they are scooped up by gas-masked military and put in an army van inhabited by a crazed older man, a widower named Artie (Day of the Dead's Richard Liberty), and Artie's daughter Kathy (Lynn Lowry, star of multiple cult movies, including Cronenberg's Shivers and Schrader's Cat People). Artie and Kathy seem a little loopy, but their behavior is not yet too alarming.

David and Clank are Vietnam vets who haven't been back home too long. Their Vietnam experience has instilled in them a healthy distrust of the military and its motives, so they use their training to take control of the van, overpower their captors, and escape. The crazy old man stays put, content to rant and rave on the street, but the five others go on the run, trying to get the eff out of Evans City and avoid the military and the virus while doing it.

This is the setup for everything that follows, as we bounce back and forth between the military's efforts to contain the biological weapon's spread, a desperate search to find a cure from a scientist who was on the team that created the weapon (Dawn of the Dead's Richard France), and the escapees' attempts to get out of town.

Romero is not a subtle filmmaker (with the partial exception of Martin), preferring the sledgehammer approach to make his sociopolitical observations, but it never comes across as heavy-handed or preachy and it almost always works because his dialogue sticks to practicalities rather than speechifying (when his characters do make speeches, it's because they're the kind of people prone to blowhardism, not because exposition needs to occur), he avoids sentimentality like the plague (no pun intended), and he's such a powerful yet unflashy visual stylist. It's the visceral, punchy, artful unsubtlety of pop art, comic books, rock and roll, protest signs, and fireworks exploding, not the unsubtlety of the lecturer or the showoff.

As I said earlier, The Crazies is a little less fun than Romero's other films because he dials his sense of humor way down here (notable exceptions including the killer knitting grandmother and the crazed woman calmly sweeping the grass during a gunfight between rednecks and the military), but the intensity and style and the strength of the performances kept me interested. Romero, especially in his earlier films, tended to cast experienced theater actors with minimal film credits who knew how to deliver committed performances without carrying the overfamiliar baggage of the famous movie star. His actors look like people, not superstars.

Unfortunately, The Crazies struggled at the box office, with indifferent audiences and an inexperienced distributor who worked hard to get the film in theaters (sometimes under multiple titles, including Code Name: Trixie) but couldn't make it a hit. Romero, despite the high quality of his feature film work, couldn't catch a break until the major success of 1979's Dawn of the Dead. Night of the Living Dead was a big hit, but a major screwup by the distributor, who forgot to put the copyright information on the title card after changing the title from Night of the Flesh Eaters, ensured that the film immediately went into the public domain after the first public screening. A lot of people made money off the movie, but not Romero and his cast and crew. Romero's subsequent pre-Dawn '70s films failed to reach a large audience until the home video '80s and '90s turned them into cult classics (so much so that The Crazies even got a remake in 2010), and he paid the bills with director-for-hire jobs on commercials, PSAs, and the ABC sports documentary series The Winners (subjects included Reggie Jackson, O.J. Simpson, and Bruno Sammartino).

Money talk is for business jerks, though, and what I care about is what's on screen. George Romero made so many good and great movies, and he's sorely missed. The Crazies' dark vibes may not be the best choice for a pizza party, but it's a damn good movie. Give it a whirl if you've never seen it, especially if you're a Romero fan (and if you're not a Romero fan, get bent, sucker).