Curtains (Richard Ciupka, 1983)

One of the most original in the wave of early '80s slashers, Curtains survived its troubled production and unsuccessful theatrical release to slowly earn cult status (a gif of its most memorable scene is frequently used on social media). It's an imperfect movie with a few bad scenes and some underdeveloped characters, but the premise is fantastic, it's weird as hell, and when it works, it really works. If the filmmakers had taken the time to give the characters more depth (and get along with each other), this thing would have been great.

Canadian producer Peter R. Simpson was riding high off the success of his 1980 hit, Prom Night, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, and was keen to make another slasher movie, with a slight change in formula. Simpson had correctly observed that most slasher movies were about teenagers or college kids and thought a slasher about adults would tap into an ignored market. The kids and horror freaks would still go see it because it was a slasher, but adults who had dismissed slashers as teenybopper stuff may go see one about grownups, Simpson figured. He asked Prom Night screenwriter Robert Guza Jr to write an adult slasher, and Curtains was born.

Completing the creative team was first-time director, Belgian cinematographer Richard Ciupka, who was fresh off the TV movie An American Christmas Carol, starring a heavily prosthetic'd Henry Winkler as the Scrooge-like Benedict Slade, and who would go on to Louis Malle's Atlantic City and regular work with Claude Chabrol. Ciupka and Simpson quickly clashed and would continue to clash throughout production. Simpson wanted a commercial slasher movie, Ciupka wanted an art film disguised as a slasher. They ended up with a confused but fascinating combination of the two.

Ciupka angrily quit mid-shoot in 1980, production was halted for a year, Guza (who would go on to a long and successful career writing soap operas) rewrote parts of the script (most of those scenes were shot but cut), new crew members were hired, and Simpson stepped in as replacement director, finishing the film, including the final two dramatic scenes, in 1982. The directing credit was given to Jonathan Stryker, the name of John Vernon's director character in the movie. Have any other movies been officially credited to a fictional character from the movie? Curtains was finally released in '83 to poor reviews and empty theaters. All this hoopla helps explain the somewhat disjointed feel of the movie, but it's pretty remarkable that we have a finished product at all and that it's so much fun. And the killer has one of the great creepy masks of '80s slasherdom.

Curtains is about the casting of a lead actress in the title role of Audra, one of those Oscar-bait career-making dramas based on a bestseller about a mentally ill woman. The film's director, the aforementioned Jonathan Stryker (the aforementioned John Vernon), is one of those Svengali cult-of-personality types who loves playing mind games and preys on the women in his orbit. (Vernon is so good at playing this blowhard, self-absorbed, predatory, hilariously pretentious guy.) His on-again, off-again romantic partner, aging (by Hollywood's standards) movie star Samantha Sherwood (The Brood's Samantha Eggar) has been promised the role (she even bought the movie rights to the novel as a gift to Stryker), and she goes as far as faking insanity to get herself committed, all in the name of research. Stryker, who was wildly on board with the fake insanity plan, visits her in the institution and decides the method to the madness has become a little too heavy on the madness. She's too crazy for the part now. He throws her under the bus and announces a plan to cast the lead from a pool of six younger contenders, who will audition for him at a weeklong retreat in his country home (filmed outside Toronto).

The aspiring leads are drawn from a wide variety of show business backgrounds, not just acting, and include an established actress, an up-and-coming actress, a musician, a dancer, a figure skater, and a standup comedian. We don't get to know these women very well, with the exception of the aspiring actress, Amanda (Deborah Burgess, who doesn't even make it to the audition but has an extended scene before her demise that is packed with detail), and the comedian, Patti (Lynne Griffin, who was also in Black Christmas), but we do know they are the targets of a killer in a creepy old woman mask even if they don't know it yet.

We also get a funny cameo from veteran character actor Maury Chaykin as the agent of one of the women, and Michael Wincott has a small part as the caretaker of the country house. Wincott's role was butchered in the edit, so he amazingly never says anything. You see him grinning it up at the dinner table, having sex in a hot tub, acting suspicious in the woods, and drunkenly driving a snowmobile while guzzling vodka, but you don't hear him talk. The guy has one of the most memorable speaking voices in film, and they cut all his lines. I was reminded of a vaguely similar situation in another early '80s slasher, 1981's The Prowler. Lawrence Tierney, possessor of one of the all-time great gravelly voices, has a role in that movie, but he plays a mute. Hilariously, I think the legendarily difficult Tierney demanded his character not speak, but the Curtains team were the ones making the poor decision to cut Wincott's lines here.

The murder scenes are surprisingly not too gory for an early '80s slasher, but each one is disturbing and surprising in its own way. The ice skating scene, in particular, is one of the great '80s horror scenes. You've seen the gif, now check it out for real. The basement scene, in a maze full of movie props, is pretty fantastic, too.

Even though Curtains was directed by two different people with two different creative goals in two separate years, and even though not all of it comes together (an early scene has a character remark while shuffling through some papers, "everything seems to be in order here," second only to "you just don't get it, do you?" and slightly above "turn in your badge and your gun" in rusty movie cliché speak), it's an oddball movie with memorable scenes, a sense of humor, a sense of style, and some truly wild moments. It stumbles as often as it runs, but it's one of a kind and very much worth seeing. 

 

The Golem (Julien Duvivier, 1936)

First things first, I had to watch this movie in a less than ideal print. At the present moment, Julien Duvivier's French sequel to the 1920 German horror classic is not streaming, not subtitled in English on YouTube, and only available domestically on a public domain-quality cheapie DVD that looks like a bad TV or VHS transfer, with white subtitles that can be hard to read when the black and white image is too white and some lines of dialogue that the subtitler ignored completely. This film really deserves a proper restoration and rerelease.

Despite these hindrances to the viewing experience, The Golem (or The Man of Stone, as it's sometimes called) is a pretty good movie and a worthy if more conventional followup to the 1920 horror classic The Golem. Duvivier was an established, successful director in France (he's probably best known today for his gangster film Pepé le Moko, starring Jean Gabin), and he gets a lot of resources to work with in The Golem, including hundreds of extras, lavish sets and the green light to destroy some of those lavish sets in the action-packed climactic scene, and several horses, lions, and tigers. It's an epic (that still manages to reach the finish line in 95 minutes).

Taking place in the same Jewish ghetto of Prague as the first film, this Golem picks up several years later with Rabbi Loew's young successor, Rabbi Jacob (Charles Dorat), entrusted with the safekeeping of the golem. Living under the oppressive regime of Emperor Rudolf II (Harry Baur), the Jewish citizens of the ghetto ask Jacob to unleash the golem, but Jacob encourages patience. Loew gave specific orders to not awaken the golem until things are at their bleakest point, and Jacob knows it's going to get a lot bleaker. He also suspects he may not survive the political turmoil, so he entrusts the secret to awakening the golem to his wife Rachel (Jany Holt, who has an incredible screen presence). As the ailing, insecure Rudolf grows more erratic and the ruthless Chancellor Lang (Roger Karl) gains more and more influence over Rudolf's decision-making, the Jewish population grows ever more imperiled.

Rudolf and Lang make it their mission to find and destroy the golem but are repeatedly thwarted. Bribery and torture don't even work on this Jacob fella. Things grow even more complicated when Rudolf decides to enter a marriage of political convenience with his cousin, Isabel of Spain, angering his mistress, Countess Strada (Germaine Aussey), who finds and steals the golem in retribution, causing big problems for everybody. When the golem is finally discovered, Rudolf decides to take genocidal action against the Jewish population, with Lang's encouragement and manipulation. The golem has other plans.

Rudolf and Harry Baur's portrayal of him are surprisingly complex for this kind of character. Instead of the one-note power-mad emperor, Rudolf is lonely, depressed, conscience-stricken, insecure, and isolated in addition to being pampered and vindictive and petulant and power-hungry. The film sees him as both a pathetic and empathetic character and shows that terrible actions are just as often the result of weakness and insecurity as they are malevolence and deviousness.

Though the film is exciting and narratively complicated (there are about six other major characters I didn't even mention), we don't even see the golem until the last thirty minutes, and the golem doesn't come to life until the big, final scene. This really pays off, but there are moments where I felt like Milhouse watching Poochy's debut ("when are they going to get to the fireworks factory?" (starts crying)). It's a neat story-mirroring trick, however, as it forces the audience into the same position as the characters, who have been ready for some golem-smashing since scene one. And Duvivier (and Ferdinand Hart as the golem) really delivers on the smashing. They wreck those sets, baby!

I wish I could say more about the style of the film, but the bad condition of the transfer gave me only a partial impression of Duvivier's visual construction. Jump in and release a decent print, someone.