Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988)

David Cronenberg is a director driven by his own curiosities and instincts rather than the whims of the marketplace (one of the many reasons he's one of my favorite filmmakers), but it was still a considerably gutsy move to follow The Fly, a big hit that managed to work beautifully as both a popcorn monster-movie flick and a purely Cronenbergian art-horror movie about illness and loving someone who's ill, with Dead Ringers, the polar opposite of a popcorn flick. This is a movie that can't help but push the popular audience away, and though it was a critical success, Dead Ringers did not make The Fly's big bucks.

Good stuff lasts, though, and Dead Ringers has remained a cult favorite, even inspiring a gender-flipped TV miniseries remake a few years ago. It's a complex, chilly, uncomfortable movie, but there's vitality and humor underneath the chill, and Cronenberg is one of the great visual stylists who understands better than most how to marry content and form.

Loosely based on the novel Twins by Bari Wood and Jack Geasland (which was itself loosely based on the true story of Cyril and Stewart Marcus ⸺ look that up if you want your mind blown), Dead Ringers almost happened in 1981, the rushed nature of the financing forcing Cronenberg to delegate screenplay duties to a writer he'd worked with in Canadian television, Norman Snider. The financing evaporated as quickly as it arrived, and Cronenberg extensively rewrote Snider's screenplay when he was finally able to make the film in 1988. After William Hurt and Robert De Niro turned down the parts (De Niro was uncomfortable with the subject matter while Hurt told Cronenberg it was hard enough to play one role), Cronenberg struck gold with his third choice, Jeremy Irons. It's hard to imagine anyone else in these roles.

Irons plays identical twin brothers Beverly and Elliot Mantle, Toronto gynecologists who share a high-rise apartment, a private practice that specializes in improving fertility in women who are having trouble getting pregnant, and (without the other parties' knowledge) patients and romantic partners (who, wildly unethically, are sometimes patients). Elliot is outwardly more confident, outgoing, schmoozy, and manipulative, while Beverly is introverted, more research-focused, and insecure in social situations. In what could have been a stupid evil-twin/good-twin gimmick in a much stupider film, the twins in Cronenberg's movie are complex, disturbed, and fragilely human, and Irons pulls off the extremely difficult job of making each twin distinct in scenes where you need to know which man is which and making it hard to tell them apart in scenes where it's vital their identities be fuzzier.

Geneviéve Bujold plays Claire Niveau, a famous actress shooting a miniseries in Toronto and the newest patient at the Mantles' clinic. She hasn't been able to conceive, and the brothers discover she has a rare mutation that has created three cervixes. Claire is a highly intelligent woman and almost as unconventional as the Mantles (she's sympathetic but mysterious, and her character is further complicated when we see her icily and calmly verbally destroy the miniseries' costume designer). She begins dating Beverly despite him being her gynecologist (she's excited by how beautiful he finds her internal mutation; classic Cronenberg), but once she learns about the existence of Elliot, she catches on almost immediately to being the victim of the ol' switcheroo and drops the brothers fast.

Unlike their previous double acts with women, this one has shockingly and unexpectedly turned into love. After Claire dumps them, Elliot chuckles and moves on, but Beverly is devastated. Elliot is deeply disturbed by Beverly's devastation (even though he's the more controlling and seemingly independent of the brothers, Elliot is the one who is unable to imagine them having separate lives), and the brothers begin a slow descent into drug use, mental collapse, and even more heightened levels of enmeshment. Claire later decides she's not quite done with Beverly, either, and, for the first time, the brothers have something in their life that separates them from each other, which only accelerates their decline.

Cronenberg avoids some of the wild set-piece scenes from his previous work in favor of a quieter, subtler, and more claustrophobic dread. It's a very still, controlled film, almost all tension with almost no release, though the editing gets quicker and the scenes shorter as the brothers unravel. It's still unmistakably a Cronenberg film, but it also marks the transition in his work from his incredible body horror films (with the exception of 1979's Fast Company, a drive-in movie outlier about race car drivers that's more of a fun little un-Cronenbergian b-movie except for the very Cronenbergian approach to filming the races) to movies that are harder to place in specific genres and that emphasize psychology just as much as or more than biology (his next three movies were Naked Lunch, M. Butterfly, and Crash, the J.G. Ballard adaptation about people aroused by car accidents, not the horrible Paul Haggis pandering white liberal Oscarbait movie of the same title). Some people prefer '70s and '80s Cronenberg, some people like the later stuff, but I'm a huge fan of his whole career.

This movie could have gone so wrong in so many ways, but Cronenberg maintains such delicate control of the tone, Irons and Bujold nail the tone (Irons as Elliot delivering the line "thank you, Shawn" to a waiter is one of my favorite line deliveries in cinema), and the set decorations, costume design (by Cronenberg's sister Denise), cinematography (the first of many Cronenberg collaborations with Peter Suschitzky), and smaller supporting performances (especially Heidi von Palleske and Canadian painter Stephen Lack, delivering the second of his two small but memorable Cronenberg roles (he was also in Scanners)) all come together beautifully. This is another great movie from my boy DC. It plays better every time I watch it. He has a new one coming soon called The Shrouds and you know I'll be there on opening weekend.

I'll leave you with a couple of wild connections between Dead Ringers and big-budget Hollywood comedies of the '80s. Despite looking like Cronenberg-designed creations, the bizarre stainless steel gynecological instruments Beverly creates after he starts losing control were actually borrowed props from Little Shop of Horrors, where they were the dental tools wielded by Steve Martin's sadistic dentist character. They were reused the next year as plastic surgery instruments in Tim Burton's Batman. Those are some versatile tools.

Here's another one. Ivan Reitman was preparing to shoot his Arnold Schwarzenegger/Danny DeVito long-lost-brother comedy Twins at the same time Cronenberg was prepping his Twins. Reitman asked Cronenberg to change his title, and Cronenberg agreed. I'm glad this happened because Dead Ringers is a much more evocative title than the basic Twins, which works great as the punchline on the poster for the Reitman movie, with Arnold and DeVito in matching suits. Before Reitman was a big-shot director of Hollywood comedies, he was an independent producer/director in Canada and produced two early Cronenberg movies, Shivers and Rabid. 

The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sidney Lanfield, 1939)

Though it's his biggest hit, The Hound of the Baskervilles is an outlier in director Sidney Lanfield's career. Lanfield, a jazz musician and vaudeville star turned gag writer turned filmmaker, mostly directed light comedies (many of them starring Bob Hope) and ended his career with TV sitcoms (McHale's Navy and The Addams Family were his most frequent employers). Baskervilles, though not without dry humor and sight gags, is a dark, atmospheric Gothic murder mystery with horror elements, and Lanfield proves himself surprisingly adept at handling the tone.

The first of fourteen (!) Sherlock Holmes adaptations to star the duo of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson, respectively, and the first Sherlock Holmes movie to retain Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Victorian setting (the previous Holmes movies updated the action to the present day), Baskervilles kicks things off with a bang with an eerie run through the foggy moors from an old Gothic mansion, the howl of a hound, a mysterious death, and a strange man hiding in the shadows who rifles through the dead man's pockets.

Though the Yorkshire moors here are just studio sets in Hollywood, they look spectacular, and set decorator Thomas Little and art directors Richard Day and Hans Peters deserve a lot of credit for the film's success. I'll spare you a lengthy list of Little's credits, but if you're a movie fanatic, you should check out his imdb page. The guy assisted in giving a lot of great films their visual presence and character, especially in a great run from the late '40s to the early '50s.

If you've read the Doyle novella or seen one of the many other film and television adaptations, you know the basics of the story. Several small changes and one major change have been made to the source material, but Lanfield retains the bulk of the story and captures its spirit. Rathbone and Bruce have great chemistry as Holmes and Watson, and Bruce is good at supplying the curmudgeonly exasperation, boyish excitement, and comedic facial expressions necessary to deflate any self-importance in the material with a delicate enough touch to avoid hamming it up. Rathbone is great at riding the line between smugness and likability. Holmes needs to be pleased with himself and a bit condescending to Watson, but he also needs to be a guy you want to spend the running time of a movie with, too. No wonder these guys clicked with audiences.

The supporting cast also supplies a lot of flavor. John Carradine and Eily Malyon play the Barrymans (changed from "Barrymore" in the novella to avoid the appearance of poking fun at the Barrymore acting family), the caretakers of the Baskerville estate. Carradine and Malyon are excellent at playing suspicious characters, and Malyon has one of the best menacing stares in the game. The always reliable Lionel Atwill plays a village doctor who "dabbles in the occult" with his wife, a medium (Beryl Mercer, in one of her last roles). Morton Lowry is suitably oily and unctuous as the oily and unctuous John Stapleton. The impressively mutton-chopped Barlowe Borland is an elderly man who is constantly suing his neighbors for minor infractions of the law, and Nigel de Brulier gets to act weird and look even weirder as the mysterious man hiding in the moors. The only real snoozes in the cast are the standard-issue milquetoast young couple (a surprising staple of '30s cinema), in this case Richard Greene as Sir Henry Baskerville and Wendy Barrie as Beryl Stapleton, the half-sister of the oily and unctuous John, though Greene does get a couple of decent moments where a little personality comes through.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is the classic Hollywood equivalent of comfort food. Every location and its set decorations are a visual pleasure: the stones and landscapes of the moor, the sprawling Gothic mansion, the London apartment of Holmes, the city streets with hansom cabs, a comfortable train car. The narrative with its interconnected mysteries and Lansfield's visual realization of it are satisfying and expertly delivered, and the cast gives it personality and life. For what has turned out to be a week filled with difficult and disappointing news for my wife and me, this movie helped us relax and forget ourselves for a few hours, and that's a great thing.

In the 2020s, a time when studio executives have very little interest in, knowledge of, or affinity for the medium of film, when completed movies' releases are permanently canceled and the movies themselves deleted in order for their parent companies to receive tax write-offs, when shareholders are more important than the people who make the movies and the audiences who watch them, when craftsmanship and artistry are pushed aside in favor of dimly lit computer-generated slop, watching something from Hollywood's golden years is bittersweet but refreshing.

I'm not a nostalgic person, and I don't fantasize about some mythical past when things were supposedly better, but I have a lot of aesthetic problems with a lot of 21st century filmmaking, especially mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. When people who run studios (and even some of the people who make movies) think of movies as just another piece of branded content that only has value if it increases profits for shareholders, we get the shit we've got now. When studios are run by people who love and value movies, we get movies like The Hound of the Baskervilles that look like they were made by human beings. To be clear, the old studio heads were profit-obsessed business jerks, too, who frequently butted in on creative decisions and exploited their workers, but they also loved movies, wanted to make good movies, and sometimes even trusted and respected the people who made those movies, and you can see it on screen. Now we live in a world where the profit and exploitation remain, but the good stuff has been discarded. Worst of both worlds.

I'm dangerously close to driving this post into the ditch, so I'll conclude by saying that The Hound of the Baskervilles is recommended to anyone who loves classic Hollywood, Gothic mysteries, character actors, Sherlock Holmes stories, and foggy moors. I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

The Dark Side of the Moon (D.J. Webster, 1990)

Aside from a few narrative inconsistencies I'm still puzzling over, The Dark Side of the Moon is an effective, atmospheric, and well-paced sci-fi/horror film with strong performances and a wild narrative that ties together space travel, the Bermuda Triangle, and Satan (and a sexy robot). Sometimes the film's low budget is visible onscreen, but director D.J. Webster mostly does a lot with a little, and the screenplay by twin brothers Carey and Chad Hayes is pretty solid. (The Hayes brothers wrote several low-budget movies for years afterward until hitting the big time with the Conjuring franchise.)

Surprisingly, Dark Side is Webster's only film as director, though he also made several music videos. His most well-known work in this medium is probably 'Til Tuesday's "Voices Carry," but he also directed videos for The Alan Parsons Project, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Gloria Estefan and Miami Sound Machine, Jeff Beck and Rod Stewart, The Fabulous Thunderbirds, En Vogue, Amy Grant (in her brief secular phase), The Beach Boys, Smokey Robinson, Restless Heart, Nanci Griffith, Pam Tillis, Little Texas, and one-hit wonders Calloway. I can't find any credits past 1996 (his incomplete imdb page ends in 1993), and I have no idea what he's doing now. Internet searches haven't been any help, unless he became an actual dance music DJ or a biopharmaceutical communications professional, but I'm suspecting these are different D.J. Websters. The D.J. Webster mystery continues. (Podcast idea: Finding D.J. Webster. Get on it, people. I probably won't listen to it, but I'll read a synopsis.)

The Dark Side of the Moon takes place in the terrifying future of 2022. In these days of future past, NASA stopped operating in 1992. It's unclear whether American space travel has been privatized, partially privatized, or simply moved to a different agency. We need answers, Hayes bros. Anyway, our spaceship is operated by a maintenance crew sent out to do some upkeep on a nuclear-armed satellite. Most of this maintenance is automated (but still extremely dangerous), so the mostly sausage party crew consists of two pilots, a jarhead defense and security guy, a research scientist (she's a woman, so she also makes the coffee and tea and endures sexual harassment from at least two of the dudes; don't they know it's 2022?), a doctor, a ship expert and representative of the company who built it, and the ship's inexplicably sexy humanoid robot, who has eyeliner, bright-red lipstick, and a form-fitting S&M-lite outfit possibly made of latex or leather. There must be some technological reason for this. I have to give the spaceship creators the benefit of the doubt here. It's the high-tech future of two years ago. I'm a man of the present. I don't have their science to understand why the robot has to be sexy.

Playing this crew is a strong cast of mostly veteran character actors. "Hey, it's that guy from all those things," you'll say to yourself about two-thirds of these people. Robert Sampson plays veteran pilot Flynn Harding (a quality pilot name). Sampson was in at least one episode of every television show you've ever seen (including The Rockford Files) made between the mid-'50s and 2020 (the year of his death), and his movie credits include Lucio Fulci's City of the Living Dead and Stuart Gordon's Re-Animator and Robot Jox. Younger co-pilot Giles Stewart is played by Will Bledsoe, who had a much shorter acting career but has some spectacularly blow-dried hair that's a bit '80s Brian Bosworth if he didn't shave the sides. Good to know there are blow-driers in space. The jarhead security/defense guy, Philip Jennings, is played by Miami Vice regular John Diehl, whose other credits include Escape from New York, Stripes, National Lampoon's Vacation, the egg-yolk-sucking prostitute killer in Angel, D.C. Cab, Gettysburg, G. Gordon Liddy in Nixon, Jurassic Park III, and Wim Wenders' The End of Violence and Land of Plenty. Huge-glasses-wearer Joe Turkel plays ship expert Paxton Warner. Turkel's first film role was in 1949, and he appeared in several cult classics for Sam Fuller, Roger Corman, and, on three occasions, Stanley Kubrick (The Killing, Paths of Glory, and The Shining). He was also in Blade Runner and episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, Kojak, Fantasy Island, Tales from the Darkside, and Miami Vice. He died in 2022. Ship doctor Dreyfuss Steiner is played by Alan Blumenfeld. If Robert Sampson was in at least one episode of every television show you've ever seen, Blumenfeld was in at least two. To prevent this paragraph from devolving further into a list of credits, I will simply direct the curious to seek out Blumenfeld's imdb page. The guy's been in everything.

The two women in the cast, like the blow-dried Will Bledsoe, had shorter showbiz careers. Wendy MacDonald plays scientist Alex McInny. She was in several erotic thrillers, low-budget action movies, and TV movies in the late '80s and '90s before quitting the business. I reviewed her second movie, the slasher movie Blood Frenzy, on this site several years ago. That one was made by porn director Hal Freeman, who was then being targeted by the state of California in '87 in an initially successful but ultimately failed attempt by the state to destroy the adult film industry using Freeman as the scapegoat/precedent. He decided to make a horror movie while being prevented from directing porn. His conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court, and he went back to crankin' out the smut. But I digress. Sexy robot Lesli is played by Camilla More, who was in a Doublemint gum commercial and the fourth Friday the 13th movie with her twin sister Carey, the second twin named Carey to be connected to this film. Both sisters also played the same character on Days of Our Lives, Camilla from 1986-'87, Carey from '87-'88.

Back to the movie. The spaceship inexplicably loses power as it nears the nuclear satellite (located near the titular dark side of the moon), though the sexy robot says everything is functioning normally. The backup generator power comes on, but several of the ship's electronics mysteriously short out, and the temperature plunges. The crew members know they're going to run out of oxygen and power eventually and either suffocate to death or crash into the moon (or both), but they're pros, so they attempt to fix the problem. While they're troubleshooting the entire ship, one of the crew notices a floating NASA shuttle heading their way, which is odd since NASA closed up shop three decades ago. They dock their ship to the shuttle, pump the shuttle's air over to the ship to fix the running-out-of-oxygen problem, and send the pilots in to see if anyone is on board.

The pilots find a mostly empty shuttle except for the dead body of an astronaut that lands on top of them. They move the body to their ship so the doctor can perform an autopsy. He can't find a cause of death, other than the bizarre triangle-shaped incision on the astronaut's stomach. Guess what, everybody? That incision was put there by ... the devil.

We eventually discover lots of entertaining mumbo jumbo about the connections between space travel, the Bermuda Triangle, 666, and Satan's plan to steal heaven from God, but first, our blow-dried hero Giles has to convince Paxton to give him access to the sexy robot, who functions as a sort of distractingly attractive World Wide Web/Wikipedia/Ask Jeeves/spaceship owner's manual. The robot was supposed to be accessible to the entire crew, but Paxton added a security feature giving him sole access. It's heavily implied that Paxton designed the robot, and since we already know Paxton was creeping on Alex, we finally understand why the robot is so sexy. It's because Paxton is a dirty old man. I won't spoil any of the other reveals in case you check this one out, but I will tell you that we get lots of demonic possession in space, which is always fun.

Some of the spaceship's interiors look a bit low-rent, but the exterior shots (which I'm guessing are of handcrafted miniatures) have a suitably awe-inspiring visual presence. The characters and their relations to each other have a natural and lived-in feel, the story remains compelling throughout the running time, and the narrative inconsistencies didn't bother me much, though I'm not someone who really cares about that anyway. I think of each movie as its own dream, with its own dream logic (yes, even The Garbage Pail Kids Movie and Hollywood Hot Tubs 2: Educating Crystal).

The Dark Side of the Moon is a solid, enjoyable movie about Satan taking over a spaceship with help from the Bermuda Triangle, and we all need a little of this kind of thing in our lives, don't we? Think about how much better the world would be if we had five movies a year about Satan taking over a spaceship with help from the Bermuda Triangle instead of all that superhero shit. I had a good time with this one.

Deadly Friend (Wes Craven, 1986)

Deadly Friend is a movie with a weirdly dissonant tone, though that weirdness becomes less strange when you know what happened during production. It's basically an R-rated kids' movie, a family entertainment with a family-unfriendly killing spree storyline. It flopped in 1986, but its cult has grown steadily over the years.

By 1986, Wes Craven had directed several hard-edged horror films (and a porn film under the name Abe Snake) and was coming off a big hit (A Nightmare on Elm Street), so he decided it was time to switch gears and make a PG movie for the whole family. (Technically, he'd already done this with his comic book adaptation Swamp Thing in 1982, but only because the R-rated version with sex, nudity, and more intense violence was sanitized to a PG version for American theaters. The unsanitized version was released internationally, and both versions got a home video release here.) Craven decided to take on Diana Henstell's novel Friend, a sci-fi/romance/Frankenstein homage, but was too busy directing episodes of the '80s Twilight Zone to adapt the screenplay himself. He hired Bruce Joel Rubin for the screenwriting job because he admired Rubin's then-unfilmed Jacob's Ladder screenplay. That movie finally came out in 1990, alongside another Rubin-written film, Ghost. Rubin made Henstell's characters a few years older but didn't veer from Craven's family-friendly instructions.

After Craven's initial family-movie cut was completed, the studio decided to hold a test screening for Wes Craven fans, who were anxiously anticipating the next movie from the guy who made The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, Deadly Blessing, and A Nightmare on Elm Street. This was a stupid move. When the Craven fanatics saw Friend, they collectively expressed their extreme disappointment. The studio demanded that Craven turn the film into an R-rated horror movie and add some kills, some gore, and, because nightmares were a big part of Elm Street, some Krueger-esque nightmare sequences. The head of the studio even demanded the ridiculous ending. A pissed-off Craven and Rubin had little choice but to comply, and reshoots ensued. Friend became Deadly Friend. 

Hilariously, when Craven presented his new, studio-mandated gore-filled cut to the MPAA, they flipped out and demanded he remove some of the gore to avoid an X rating. Craven had to return to the well for a third time and trim some splatter to get his formerly PG family film back down to an R. Then the damn thing flopped in theaters. The gore scenes were restored to their bloody glory for home video and streaming. So far, searches for Craven's original cut have been unsuccessful.

The version of Deadly Friend we ended up with is exactly the kind of movie that pleased no one at the time of release but had all the makings of a future cult film. Schizophrenic tone? Check. Sassy robot? Check. Cult actors? Check. Doomed teenage romance? Check. Comedic spit take? Check. Pat Benatar poster? Check. Someone getting their head crushed by a basketball? Check. I won't make any kind of case for Deadly Friend being a cinematic masterpiece, but it provides a lot of silly '80s time-capsule fun and the actors do a surprisingly good job of humanizing all the nonsense.

The film begins with Doogie Howser-esque teenage science prodigy Paul (Matthew Labyorteaux, child actor in Little House on the Prairie and A Woman under the Influence and one-time national Pac-Man champion), his single mom Jeannie (Anne Twomey), and the aforementioned sassy robot BB (voiced by Charles Fleischer, who makes all kinds of crazy, wacky robot sounds) moving to a classic '80s suburban neighborhood near the college where Paul will be a 16-year-old grad student and his mother will be working. Paul is a genius at robotics, AI, and brain science, and he built BB from scratch. Paul quickly befriends the 15-year-old neighborhood paperboy Tom (Michael Sharrett), who falls off his bike when he encounters the robot. Paul and Jeannie's next-door neighbor is a pretty and sweet girl-next-door type (she literally lives next door!), Samantha (a pre-MAGA Kristy Swanson). Samantha befriends Paul, Jeannie, and the robot (she already knew Tom), and soon, they're all hanging out at Paul's regularly. The robot joins them for basketball, lawnmowing, and teenage pranks. Everyone's having a good time.

Life would be perfect except for three problems, two relatively minor, one major. First, a gang of biker punk bullies give Paul and Tom the business and start smacking around the robot. BB retaliates by grabbing the leader of the gang's nuts and giving them a robot-strength squeeze. I give an automatic three stars to any movie where a robot grabs somebody's nuts. It's a tough but fair system. Anyway, the gang leader calls off his bros to save his family jewels but vows revenge on the robot. The second problem is neighborhood menace Elvira (the legendary Anne Ramsey). Elvira hates everyone, constantly calls the police, brandishes her shotgun at anyone who gets near her property, and steals our heroes' basketball when it lands in her yard. You best believe she becomes enraged when she takes a gander at the robot. Elvira hates robots just as much as she hates other people.

The final and most serious problem is Samantha's single dad Harry (Richard Marcus). What seems like a live-action Disney movie up to this point gets a lot darker with the introduction of Harry. Harry is an abusive drunk who hits his daughter, won't let her have any friends or boyfriends, and is possibly sexually abusive, too, which is hinted at in the first nightmare sequence. This nightmare is particularly jarring. Up to this point, Deadly Friend has been a light and breezy Disneyfied romp. If the father character was toned way down and turned from an abuser into simply an overly strict dad, this whole cast would've been perfect for a terrible '80s sitcom that would have lasted at least two seasons. Teen prodigy, loving mom, blonde girl next door, goofy friend, sassy robot, crazy neighbor, biker bullies, strict dad. It cries out for a laugh track and a catchy but godawful theme song. The nightmare sequence, however, cranks the tone from family sitcom to menacing psychosexual gorefest without any transition in between.

The silliness and darkness continue to fight it out. After a Halloween prank goes awry, our lovable robot BB gets his ass blasted to smithereens by Elvira's shotgun. Shortly thereafter, Samantha suffers a terrible brain injury when her father shoves her down the stairs and she hits her head. The next day, she's declared brain dead, and her life support will be pulled that night. This sitcom is fucked, son!

Unable to handle Samantha's impending death, Paul concocts a scheme to steal her body and implant BB's microchip in her brain to reanimate her. This kinda works, but it also kinda doesn't. Let's just say a teenage girl with the brain of a sassy robot causes problems for everyone.

This is a ridiculous movie that I can't help but enjoy. I've never been a huge Wes Craven fan, and he's definitely my least favorite among the pantheon of '70s and '80s horror filmmaking greats he's often mentioned with (I'm more of a George Romero, John Carpenter, Joe Dante guy), but he has his moments. The finest moment here is the death-by-basketball scene, which is one of the greatest beheadings/head-squashings I've ever had the pleasure to witness. There's something about decapitations, head smashings, and head explosions that make my heart sing, and a really great one can make my whole week. Between the robot and the basketball death scene, I can forgive this movie's flaws. As I mentioned earlier, the cast does a great job, too. They make you believe these characters are people, which is pretty hard to do with this subject matter. Check this one out. It's a weird time at the movies.

A Macabre Legacy (José Bohr, 1939)

If you're a committed movie obsessive and have been on this earth long enough, you've probably seen way too many otherwise hard-to-find films in less-than-ideal presentations. Pan-and-scan VHS, washed-out and faded film prints, b&w foreign-language films with white subtitles that are impossible to read, foreign-language films with no subtitles at all, truncated versions missing scenes, cheap DVD transfers of poor-quality videotapes, ancient tapes dubbed from degraded prints shown on local TV, edited-for-television versions, MPAA-censored versions, phony "director's cuts," and the list goes on.

One of the most frustrating of these examples in our modern digital/cloud/AI era is the half-assed subtitle created using some kind of program lacking the human touch. These programs sometimes translate each word literally, losing the idiosyncrasies and nuances of how a particular language is actually spoken and/or wrecking the grammatical construction. They sometimes extract only the basics of the dialogue's meaning, taking out all the spice and flavor and converting it into a bland literalness. Sometimes, they do a speech-to-text thing that misunderstands half the words, which can be amusing when those misunderstandings create accidental absurdist art. Most egregiously, these programs sometimes miss entire chunks of dialogue, giving incomplete translations, particularly when several characters are talking at once.

All of these subtitle problems were an issue in my unofficial DVD copy of A Macabre Legacy, a movie otherwise impossible for me to track down. I purchased it from a trusted source of these movies who conveniently lives in a nearby city, but this one got past her otherwise excellent quality control. Sounds like these issues made watching this movie a real chore, right? Surprisingly, no. The movie, a Mexican melodrama that turns into a mad scientist/psycho husband horror film in its final third, has a mostly straightforward plot that was relatively easy to piece together from the subtitle scraps, but the accidental absurdism was off the charts. I got a good laugh at least once every three minutes from the insane shit the subtitles had the characters saying. The final four pictures in this post are screenshot examples of some of the wild times the subtitles brought to this party.

So, what is A Macabre Legacy actually about, to the best of my knowledge? Unless I missed some important context, A Macabre Legacy is about a brilliant doctor and medical school teacher, Dr. Ernesto Duarte (Miguel Arenas), who is not only an insanely gifted plastic surgeon but also a researcher close to discovering a cure for various tropical diseases (or maybe just one) and who has one of those silly-looking 1930s mad scientist labs. The movie opens on the doc's wedding day to the beautiful but immature Rosa (Consuelo Frank), who is mad that the doctor is spending time with sick and injured people instead of giving her all his attention. The doctor seems more sympathetic than his wife at this point in the movie, but several of his students have to remind him that it is in fact his wedding day, so these sympathies seem ripe for flipping.

The movie jumps ahead in chronology. Rosa becomes a less selfish, more mature woman living a lonely life because dang old Dr. Duarte can't stop obsessing over his job and his research. She's neglected, and he can't take a damn hint. When the doctor misses most of their one-year anniversary, he sends one of his students, Eduardo (Ramón Armengod), to spend time with her until he can make it home. Sparks start to fly, but Duarte eventually, and cluelessly, shows up with the rest of the fellas. Bonehead play, doc.

You can guess where this is going. Rosa and Eduardo fall in love. It's the worst-kept secret in town. All Duarte's students and household servants know about it, but the doc is so career- and research-focused that he's the last to know. When he accidentally discovers the truth at a dinner party, it flips his wig. The altruistic and religious doc becomes a deranged madman hellbent on revenge against Eduardo. He plans to win Rosa back, but when that plan fails, he decides to enact revenge on her, too.

This is all mildly enjoyable and predictably routine. Director José Bohr gives the film a competent but perfunctory look that's closer to the future medium of television than cinema, except for one elegantly gliding shot over the dinner table. There's nothing particularly special or uniquely terrible about this movie. A solid, mediocre effort.

Here's where the subtitle fun comes in. What was once a run-of-the-mill melodrama with horror elements is transformed into absurdist comedy gold by some of the most inadvertently deranged subtitling I've ever witnessed. If these subtitles are accurate, the movie also predicted the Internet, uploads, and the careers of Shakira and the Bee Gees decades before the fact. Remarkable. A man tells a woman he can't relieve her penis. A medical student walks into surgery prep and says, "Playing guitar." A phone call ends with this dialogue: "He didn't want to taste a snack today. Communism." This kind of shit happens every few minutes. Delightful!

I don't know what happened to make these subtitles display such wondrous text. Frankly, I don't want to know. I choose to live in the mystery. I embrace this mystery. The answers are never as fulfilling as the questions. The Bee Gees.