The Sentinel (1977)

I find that New Yorkers have no sense for anything but sex and money. Troubled New York City model Alison Parker (Cristina Raines) decides to make some changes in her life. She breaks up with her boyfriend Michael Lerman (Chris Sarandon) and after being advised by realtor Miss Logan (Ava Gardner) of an apartment in Brooklyn Heights moves into a brownstone with a great view of the city where the only other tenant is a withdrawn blind priest Father Halliran (John Carradine). Then she meets another neighbour Charles Chazen (Burgess Meredith) who invites her to his delightfully devilish cat’s birthday party and encounters there a lot of other neighbours not supposed to be in residence. After experiencing several strange occurrences she informs the slippery Michael who works with NYC police detectives Gatz (Eli Wallach) and Rizzo (Christopher Walken) to uncover the origins of these people.  Alison begins to realise why the holy man is there – the building has an evil presence that must be kept in check at all costs and it’s somebody else’s turn to keep the devils out ... It’s all right. Listen, listen. I know everything now. The Latin you saw in that book was an ancient warning from the angel Gabriel to the angel Uriel. Personally I always thought my old apartment was the gateway to Hell but that’s another story. All I can say is I wasn’t expecting Gerde’s (Sylvia Miles) galpal Sandra (Beverly D’Angelo) to masturbate fully clothed in front of her houseguest while awaiting afternoon tea. Not exactly good etiquette. Some Lesbians do ‘ave ’em, eh?! There’s a birthday party for a cat (hip hip hooray!), crazed Catholics,  demons, induced suicides – just your usual sociocultural cross-section in a city apartment block, all helpfully revealed by creepy Perry (William Hickey) who says, I just open doors. This is filled with those lovely women that seemed to be everywhere at a certain point in the late Seventies/early Eighties – Raffin, Raines, Miles and the stunning Gardner and it effectively rips off all the Satanic horrors to date, from Rosemary’s Baby to The Exorcist under the guise of property porn. And there’s Arthur Kennedy as Monsignor Franchino, an unholy priest and Jerry Orbach as a horrible director. And look out for Jeff Goldblum while even Richard Dreyfuss shows up on the sidewalk. Sigh. Nutty, derivative, terrible and horrible, a travesty, an insult to the God-fearing, a twist ending you could see coming – I couldn’t take my eyes off it. And no matter what, I am never asking Ava Gardner to be my realtor. Peak Seventies cult. Fabulous. Adapted from his novel by Jeffrey Konvitz with director Michael Winner. All killers, all dead. She went to a party with eight dead murderers

Torture Garden (1967)

I am very well known for my excursions into the unexplored regions of the mind. If five visitors will pay extra, devilish sideshow carny torture act Mr Diablo (Burgess Meredith) promises people an insight into their real natures – violent, greedy and ghoulish – as they experience a taste of their future. Adapted by Robert Bloch from his own short stories, this contains four, plus a postscript, all directed by Freddie Francis in their fourth collaboration.  Look at the shears!  Enoch: Greedy playboy Colin Williams (Michael Bryant) takes advantage of his dying uncle Roger (Maurice Denham) and falls under the spell of Balthazar, a man-eating cat. Terror Over Hollywood:  Anyone who knows the titles of all the films I’ve made since 1950 deserves a break.  Starlet Carla Hayes (Beverly Adams) discovers her immortal celluloid co-star Bruce Benton (Robert Hutton) like all other movie stars is an android and the secret cannot be made public. Mr Steinway:  You really do love music, don’t you? A possessed grand piano called Euterpe becomes jealous if concert pianist owner Leo Winston’s (John Standing) new lover Dorothy Endicott (Barbara Ewing) and takes revenge. The Man Who Collected Poe:  He really was the greatest collector. He even collected Edgar Allan Poe himself.  Poe collector and obsessive Ronald Wyatt (Jack Palance) murders another collector Lancelot Canning (Peter Cushing) over a very desirable item he refuses to show him only to find it is Poe (Hedger Wallace) himself...  These stories progressively improve with great production design, sharp narrative turns and surprises aplenty, until the masterful final Poe pastiche and an ingenious twist ending. A wonderfully spinechilling Amicus anthology practically perfect for Halloween. Produced by Milton Subotsky and Max Rosenberg.

 

The Mephisto Waltz (1971)

There’s no reason to be scared. A frustrated pianist who spent four years at Juilliard, music journalist Myles Clarkson (Alan Alda) is thrilled to interview virtuoso Duncan Ely (Curt Jurgens). Duncan, however, is terminally ill and not much interested in Myles until he observes that Myles’ hands are ideally suited for piano. Suddenly, he can’t get enough of his new friend and thinks he should perform; while his daughter Roxanne (Barbara Parkins) thinks Myles should act, and Myles’ wife, Paula (Jacqueline Bisset), who believes he has a great novel in him, becomes suspicious of Duncan’s intentions. Her suspicions grow when Duncan dies and Myles mysteriously becomes a virtuoso overnight... Hands like yours are one in a hundred thousand.  Adapted from Fred Mustard Stewart’s novel it’s easy to dismiss this as an unambiguous Faustian followup to Rosemary’s Baby but it’s better than that. Once-blacklisted screenwriter Ben Maddow does a fine job (on his final screenplay) in conveying the book’s deep sense of dread and Jurgens is terrifying as the man whose influence stretches beyond mere existence. It’s set in California in a change from the original New York location. No matter how lusciously lovely it looks (courtesy of William W. Spencer), it’s shot through with death and strangeness, odd setups, underpinned by Jerry Goldsmith’s haunting score (and a guy called Liszt) and highly effective performances, particularly by Bisset who is fantastic as the horrifyingly cuckolded wife, and by the imposingly scary soul-switching Satanist Jurgens. I feel unfaithful – he’s like three different men, says Bisset after having sex with the newly-transfused Alda.  Even Parkins impresses as the seductive daughter whose own father clearly loves her outside the usual limits. Unfortunately Alda is the weakest link and seems more like a lucky social climber. It remains a terrifying film, with glorious visual insinuation and eerie dream sequences, wonderfully directed by Paul Wendkos. The only feature production by legendary TV producer Quinn Martin.  Success makes you miserable, doesn’t it

Spirits of the Dead (1968)

Aka Tre passi nel delirio/Histoires extraordinaires. Three stories of hauntings adapted from Edgar Allan Poe. Part 1:“Metzengerstein” directed by Roger Vadim. Are you sure it was a dream? Sometimes you need me to tell you what you did was real. At 22, Countess Frederique (Jane Fonda) inherits the Metzengerstein estate and lives a life of promiscuity and debauchery. While in the forest, her leg is caught in a trap and she is freed by her cousin and neighbor Baron Wilhelm (Peter Fonda), whom she has never met because of a long-standing family feud. She becomes enamored with Wilhelm, but he rejects her for her wicked ways. His rejection infuriates Frederique and she sets his stables on fire. Wilhelm is killed attempting to save his prized horses. One black horse somehow escapes and makes its way to the Metzengerstein castle. The horse is very wild and Frederique takes it upon herself to tame it. She notices at one point that a damaged tapestry depicts a horse eerily similar to the one that she has just taken in. Becoming obsessed with it, she orders its repair. During a thunderstorm Frederique is carried off by the spooked horse into a fire caused by lightning that has struck.  Written by Vadim and Pascale Cousin and shot in Roscoff. Part II:  “William Wilson” directed by Louis Malle. It is said, gentlemen, that the heart is the seat of the emotions, the passions. Indeed. But experience shows that it is the seat of our cares.  In the early 19th century when Northern Italy is under Austrian rule, an army officer named William Wilson (Alain Delon) rushes to confess to a priest (in a church of the “Città alta” of Bergamo that he has committed murder. Wilson then relates the story of his cruel ways throughout his life. After playing cards all night against the courtesan Giuseppina (Brigitte Bardot), his double, also named William Wilson, convinces people that Wilson has cheated. In a rage, the protagonist Wilson stabs the other to death with a dagger. After making his confession, Wilson commits suicide by jumping from the tower of “Palazzo della Ragione”, but when seen his corpse is transfixed by the same dagger. Written by Malle, Clement Biddle Wood and Daniel Boulanger. Part III: “Toby Dammit” directed by Federico Fellini.  This film will be in color. Harsh colors, rough costumes to reconcile the holy landscape with the prairie. Sort of Piero della Francesca and Fred Zinneman. An interesting formula. You’ll adapt to it very well. Just let your heart speak. The modern day. Former Shakespearean actor Toby Dammit (Terence Stamp) is losing his acting career to alcoholism. He agrees to work on a film, to be shot in Rome, for which he will be given a brand new Ferrari as a bonus incentive. Dammit begins to have unexpected visions of macabre girl with a white ball. While at a film award ceremony, he gets drunk and appears to be slowly losing his mind. A stunning woman (Antonia Pietrosi) comforts him, saying she will always be at his side if he chooses. Dammit is forced to make a speech, then leaves and takes delivery of his promised Ferrari. He races around the city, where he sees what appear to be fake people in the streets. Lost outside of Rome, Dammit eventually crashes into a work zone and comes to a stop before the site of a collapsed bridge. Across the ravine, he sees a vision of the little girl with a ball (whom he has earlier identified, in a TV interview, as his idea of the Devil). He gets into his car and speeds toward the void.The Ferrari disappears, and we then see a view of roadway with a thick wire across it, dripping with blood, suggesting Dammit has been decapitated. The girl from his vision picks up his severed head and the sun rises. Written by Fellini and Bernardino Zapponi and adapted from ‘Never Bet the Devil Your Head’… Who but Vadim could cast Jane Fonda’s own brother as her object of desire? And she’s terrific as the jaded sexpot. Delon is marvellous as Poe’s ego and id, haunting himself; with Bardot turning up as a peculiarly familiar iteration of what we know and love. And then there’s the wonderful Terence Stamp as Toby, the scurrilous speed freak. This portmanteau of European auteurs having a go at Poe is the dog’s. Watch it over and over again to pick up on all the connections and beauty within. Uneven, fiendishly sexy, ravishingly brutal, moralistic and really rather fabulous. Makes you wish it was fifty years ago all over again. Oh, no. I’m English, not Catholic. For me the devil is friendly and joyful. He’s a little girl.

Night of the Demon (1957)

Aka Curse of the Demon. Where does imagination end and reality begin? What is this twilight, this half world of the mind that you profess to know so much about? How can we differentiate between the powers of darkness and the powers of the mind?  American professor Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews) arrives in London for a conference on parapsychology only to discover that the colleague he was supposed to meet, Professor Harrington (Maurice Denham) was killed in a freak accident the day before. It turns out that the deceased had been investigating a devil-worshipping cult lead by Dr. Julian Karswell (Niall MacGinnis). Though sceptical, Holden is suspicious of Karswell. Following a trail of mysterious manuscripts, Holden finds out that the sole link between Karswell and Harrington is a supposed murderer Rand Hobart (Brian Wilde) who is now catatonic. At Harrington’s funeral he meets the man’s niece Joanna (Peggy Cummins) who gives him Harrington’s diary. He enters a world that makes him question his faith in science …  It’s in the trees! It’s coming! Those words are sampled by Kate Bush on the intro to Hounds of Love. That’s how significant this film is in Gothic culture. The words are mouthed by medium Reginald Beckwith who is channelling Denham’s character. Adapted by producer Hal E. Chester, Charles Bennett (responsible for creating Hitchcock’s trademark tropes) and Cy Endfield, from the 1911 story Casting the Runes by the great M.R. James, this is one of the best horror films ever made. Notwithstanding the material’s power, the producer argued with director Jacques Tourneur (and Bennett) as to whether the demon should actually be shown – the producer won. Andrews (replacing Robert Taylor) is pretty good in a film that just drips with tension:  you wouldn’t want to attend a seance led by Athene Seyler in a hurry.  Locations include Brocket Hall, Herts., Stonehenge, Salisbury Plain, Bricket Wood Railway Station, Heathrow Airport, the Savoy and the British Museum Reading Room. It’s totally terrifying, incredibly atmospheric and an under-seen minor classic of the genre. I’ve heard it I’ve seen it I know it’s real

Bedazzled (1967)

What terrible Sins I’ve got working for me. I suppose it must be the wages. Stanley Moon (Dudley Moore) is a hapless short-order cook, infatuated with Margaret (Eleanor Bron), the statuesque waitress he works with at Wimpy Burger in London. On the verge of suicide, he meets George Spiggott (Peter Cook), the devil, who, in return for his soul, grants him seven wishes to woo the immensely challenging Margaret. Despite the wishes and the advice of the Seven Deadly Sins, including Lilian Lust (Raquel Welch), Stanley can’t seem to win his love and shake the meddling Spiggott… The writing and performing team of Pete ‘n’ Dud (aka Derek and Clive) were top comics in the 60s and this collaboration with Stanley Donen would seem to be a marriage made in cinematic heaven but it’s hard to see how their antic charm works in a Faustian satire that seems more antique nowadays. The seven deadly sins are embodied in quite clever colour-coded scenarios and there are some good visual tricks but overall the surreal touches can’t hit the mark. The deadpan delivery by the debonair Cook and the winsome charms of both Moore and Bron (who inspired Eleanor Rigby) as an unwitting femme fatale compensate for the shortcomings of the script. Best bits:  the pastiche pop show and the cross-dressing as nuns who trampoline. A time capsule of sorts. Julie Andrews!

Werewolves on Wheels (1971)

What on this good earth could possibly be better than a biker film – unless it’s a biker horror film?! Adam (Stephen Oliver) and his crew The Devil’s Advocates (nominative determinism or tempting fate?!) are tooling around as bikers do until he falls under the influence of One (Servern Darden) and his cult… Donna Anders, appearing here as DJ Anderson (confusingly, her real name!), plays his girlfriend Helen, who doesn’t like the hand of Tarot cards she’s dealt at the story’s outset. When they come across One and his gang in the deconsecrated desert church their food is drugged, she turns into a werewolf and soon infects Adam. (Is this a feminist act?!) They flee but get picked off one by one and when Adam and Helen transform in front of the others, the gang kill them. A few of them return to the church to kill the satanists but they recognise themselves in the procession …Notable for its footage of real-life bikers doing what they usually do, this was co-written by director Michel Devesque with David M. Kaufman. Oliver was best known for playing Lee Webber in TV’s Peyton Place between 1966 and 1968 and appeared in a number of other biker outings:  Motorpsycho (1965), Angels from Hell (1968), and Cycle Psycho (1973). You’ll recognise other cast members from The Last Movie. Cinematographer Isidore Mankofsky earned his stripes shooting for Encyclopaedia Brittanica but after this he made Scream Blacula Scream and in the following years got credits on films as diverse as The Muppet Movie, Somewhere in Time (sigh!), The Jazz Singer, Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer:  a versatile talent.  Likewise Levesque, who followed this with Sweet Sugar, another exploitation outing, but who also had an impressive career as an art director on such fare as Supervixens, Beneath the Valley of the Super-Vixens, Carquake and Foxes. There’s a notable psychedelic soundtrack provided by Don Gere. This is pretty good as biker werewolf movies go, which is to say, what more could you want from such a fabulously preposterous genre mashup?! If you’re hairy you belong on a motorbike! You read it here. PS cat lovers beware.

The Devil Rides Out (1968)

London 1929. When the Duc de Richleau (Christopher Lee) arrives with his friend Rex Van Ryn (Leon Greene) at the home of his protege Simon Aron (Patrick Mower) for a party he realises at once the young man is involved in devil worship and tries to extricate him from the clutches of the cult led by Mocata (Charles Gray). The other initiate Tanith (Nike Arrighi) is the medium through whom Mocata works and is essential to the plan to bring out the Devil at a ceremony on Salisbury Plain.  In order to defend them, the Duc has to create a protective circle with his niece and her husband that involves Mocata conjuring the Angel of Death to draw out his influence and take the couple’s child as a channel for evil. Dennis Wheatley’s novel is brilliantly adapted by Richard Matheson, and the material as a whole is treated with the kind of seriousness which elevates it from melodrama into  dramatic allegory, a duel between good and evil. This may be the best ever Hammer and the best film by director Terence Fisher. Lee is fabulous as the one strongwilled man capable of testing the forces of destruction while all around him is weakness, scepticism and naivete.  So terrifying.

Dark Places (2015)

 

A writer has one hit novel and everyone goes after her back catalogue:  such, I guess was the thinking here, with Charlize Theron putting on her producer’s hat (along with dozens of other credited producers…) and obtaining the rights to Gillian (Gone Girl) Flynn’s earlier book, which reads like it was a collision of TV movies. She helps Nicholas Hoult, a member of a Kill Club (amateur sleuths trying to solve old crimes and get people off Death Row) try to solve her family’s massacre which took place in 1985 when she was 7. She was the chief witness in the trial and named her older brother Corey Stoll, still in prison and with the records about to be shredded:  he never launched an appeal. It starts with a scene that looks like it’s out of The Blair Witch Project and the film suffers enormously from Barry Ackroyd’s use of sludge-like lenses for his DPing rather like he did on Jason Bourne. Written and directed by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, it takes forever to get going. Nothing is that simple and there’s a deadbeat dad in debt to an Oriental Satanist, teen devil worship, a possible teen pregnancy, a farm in debt (we know this is true because Sally Field and Jessica Lange suffered in the 80s just like mom Christina Hendricks does here) and grown-up Charlize is as much a prisoner as her brother because she wears a baseball cap and tries not to look too beautiful. (She fails.) As bad as this is, the flashbacks create an insistent rhythm that eventually exerts a horrible grip (and I’m not just saying this because a family in my neighbourhood got hacked to death recently) and it really did start to make a kind of sense and I really did want to know whodunnit and stuck it out. Weird.

Midnight Offerings (1981) (TVM)

Witching hour again! And this time it’s a witch-off between Little House on the Prairie‘s Mary Ingalls (Melissa Sue Anderson) and The Waltons‘ Erin (Mary Beth McDonough), a battle that has an incendiary ending.  Anderson is Vivian Sotherland, the spiteful Mean Girl at Ocean High CA who intimidates male teachers sexually and if they don’t succumb she murders them – we enter as she casts a spell that causes one to crash his car, saving her quarterback boyfriend Dave (Patrick Cassidy) from flunking and thereby keeping him on the team. New (motherless) girl Robin Prentiss  (McDonough) has read about his drunken misdemeanour in the local freebie paper but likes him despite her dad’s objections. They’ve moved from Connecticut following a series of unfortunate events – she has powers too, but no idea how to control them. Vivian can’t read her and starts to attack her dad and Dave and nearly kills Robin in a house fire. Dave is on to her scheme and brings Robin to Emily Moore (Marion Ross, Mom from Happy Days!) to help her ward off evil. Mrs Sotherland (Cathryn Damon) didn’t abort Vivian to stop breeding the 7th daughter of the 7th daughter and blames herself for allowing her to go off the rails so she must intervene before another murder occurs … This is clever, intelligent stuff, as you would expect from long-time Rockford Files writer/producer Juanita Bartlett, responsible for the screenplay. Anderson is very well off-cast in the lead but it’s McDonough who has the more expansive role and she is very good. A newly blonde Kym (Sound of Music‘s Gretl) Karath is the hobbled cheerleader and this is a point of interest – she made her debut in Spencer’s Mountain as a three year old, a film that was the first adaptation of Earl Hamner’s book that of course became … The Waltons. And look fast for Vanna White too. Excellent stuff, thanks to the Horror Channel for resurrecting it. Directed by veteran TV helmer Rod Holcomb.