How do you cope? London, the present day. Lonely screenwriter Adam (Andrew Scott) is flirted with by his drunk tower block neighbour Harry (Paul Mescal), whom he rebuffs. He visits his unoccupied former childhood suburban home in Croydon and finds his parents (Jamie Bell and Claire Foy) there. They died in a car accident when he was twelve (Carter John Grout). Returning to his London flat, he reciprocates Harry’s interest and they have sex. Adam comes out as gay to his mother, who accepts him but reacts with concern. He has sex with Harry again, and then Harry describes his own feelings of distance from his family. Adam talks to his father during his next visit, who accepts him for who he is and tearfully reconciles with him over the bullying he faced as a child. Adam and Harry go clubbing and do ketamine together, causing Adam to imagine a long-term relationship with him, then black out and wake up in his parents’ house on Christmas. Unable to sleep, he gets in bed with them and tells his mother about how he was sent to stay with her mother after her death but they are interrupted by Harry appearing in bed with them. Adam wakes on a train and pursues Harry onto another, seeing a vision of his younger self screaming in the reflection of the window before waking in his bed, Harry having taken him home after he panicked while high. He tells Harry about how his father died instantly but his mother lingered for several days, though his grandmother kept him from seeing her, and how their deaths grew into a great terror of being alone. He decides to show Harry his parents but finds the house empty, though Harry catches a glimpse of them as Adam breaks a window to get in … I’m not a proper writer. I write scripts. Writer/director Andrew Haigh’s quasi-autobiographical exploration of his past is actually derived from a 1987 Japanese novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada previously adapted for the screen as TheDiscarnates (1988). The time-slip structure gives this fantasy a generic mode that fuses the present-day concerns of a man coming to terms with his past not just in terms of grief but of having grown up gay in the Eighties. Haigh integrates his own life into the story, even using his childhood home as a location so that this is imprinted with concerns that echo throughout his aesthetic process. Much of Adam’s frame of reference is provided by the band Frankie Goes to Hollywood: their sound and imagery pervade the story. A man preoccupied with the life of the mind and imagination, Adam’s ability to conjure his parents acts as a salve to all the questions that remain unanswered in his life and in the lives of his parents who get the opportunity to catch up with the son they would never see grow into his adult self. He explains to them that his loneliness is not due to his sexuality: things have changed in ways they could never have imagined. His father heard him crying at night but never hugged him. Now he can do so. Harry erupts into Adam’s life and with what gusto. That look of lust on Mescal as he first approaches Adam is something else – he surprises himself. And he rests his face on the door jamb with what – shock? Pleasure? It’s hard to tell. It’s exciting. The juxtaposition of life in the tower block with its Ballardian foreboding and alienation made solid alternates with the warmer cosy low-slung Eighties semi-dee where Adam reconciles himself to who he is with the backing of parents who are younger than he is now. Our boy’s back home. Elevators, windows, door and hallways, colour palettes and soft furnishings, these are the stuff of architecture but they have a telling effect on experience and perception. Scott offers a tour de force performance in a film that is audacious in its normality – as though this were possible, occupying two times simultaneously. This is real, Adam tells himself. In this realm we enter the idea cinematically that the mind plays tricks on a character in order to save himself from himself. But also, Everything is different now. The pressure of finally becoming disinhibited means Adam loses himself in Harry’s presence – which has unintended consequences for this man he barely knows (in every sense of that expression). This is sublime filmmaking, moving, intense, an exhilarating ride through emotions expressed through sheer craft. A modern masterpiece of love and loss that lingers long in the mind. I suppose we don’t get to decide when it’s over
Five hundred years of lies. Edinburgh, 2012. Separated mother of two boys, 45-year old Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins) is passed over for a promotion at work in favour of a less experienced better-looking younger woman. She unsuccessfully confronts her male boss that her chronic fatigue syndrome (ME) has never affected her work. Distraught at her distractedness and work absences, her estranged husband John (Steve Coogan), who lives in his own flat and helps out with their two teenage boys Max (Adam Robb) and Raife (Benjamin Scanlan), tells her to keep her job as they need the money. Philippa attends Shakespeare’s play Richard III which Max is studying at school and she identifies with Richard (Harry Lloyd) whom she feels was unfairly maligned as a hunchback, child killer and usurper. She begins to have visions of Richard who appears to her when she reads a biography that persuades her he has been unjustly treated by history. She joins the local Richard III Society who believe he was unfairly vilified by Tudor propagandists. Philippa stops going to work, manages her illness with medication and begins talking to her Richard III apparition (Harry Lloyd again). Her research shows some sources say he was buried in 1485 in the Leicester Greyfriars priory quire, while others say his body was thrown into the River Soar. After Greyfriars was demolished in the 1530s Reformation, Leicester mayor Robert Herrick around 1600 had a shrine built in his garden saying Here lies the body of Richard III, sometime king of England. Philippa attends a lecture in Leicester on Richard, lying to her ex-husband about it being a work trip and returning late forcing him to miss a date with his girlfriend. He knows she’s been skipping work and makes fun of her interest in Richard III. She meets Dr Richard Ashdown-Hill (James Fleet) who is publishing a genetic genealogy study on a Canadian direct descendant of Richard III’s sister, traced through maternal mitochondrial DNA. He tells her to look for Richard in open spaces in Leicester because people for centuries have avoided building over old abbeys. While walking around Leicester looking for the ancient site of Greyfriars, and seeing apparitions of Richard, she gets a strong feeling that an R painted on a car park is the site of Richard’s grave. Returning home, she confesses her activities to John. Philippa contacts University of Leicester archaeologist Richard Buckley (Mark Addy) who quietly dismisses her ideas but when the university cuts his funding, he gets back to her. Buckley finds a mediaeval map of Leicester marking Robert Herrick’s property, showing a possible public shrine in his garden. They overlay a modern map of Leicester and decide that the shrine may be in the middle of the car park that Philippa had felt strongly about. Philippa and Buckley team up. She pitches the project for funding to Leicester City Council. Richard Taylor (Lee Ingleby) of the University of Leicester advises that her amateur ‘feeling’ is too risky. The Council still approves her plan for the publicity it could generate but when ground-radar finds nothing, funding drops out. She turns to the Richard III Society to crowd-fund her Looking For Richard project and the money comes in from around the world to fund three trenches … I just don’t like it when people put others down for no reason. That’s Philippa’s take on Richard III’s bad rep but we know it’s a parallel with her own experience as an ME sufferer (the initials are unfortunate for an illness long rumoured to be imaginary). Plenty have tried to find him and failed. Not only does Philippa act on her feelings, she tells people about them – it takes Council funding committee chairman Sarah Locke (Amanda Abbington) to advise her not to mention them, they’re too female – but it’s her feeling when she stands above the letter R (for reserved) in the car park that she gets the greatest sensation of all. And she acts on it. Rewriting people into history isn’t just the story of Richard it’s the story of Philippa too – the amateur historian marginalised by the archaeological team at the University of Leicester whom she hired to do the dig and then finds them taking credit for her discovery in front of the world’s press. The same people who mock: It’s like someone with a home-made rocket saying they’re going to the moon. That Ealing feeling isn’t a coincidence in a tale of rehabilitation. The film reunites the Philomena team of star/co-writer Coogan with screenwriter Jeff Pope and Stephen Frears, making another mostly true seriocomic story about a seemingly eccentric contemporary woman trying to right the wrongs of history. Of course it has a preposterous provenance – imagine finding Richard III in a car park in Leicester (and this has four characters called Richard so it must be true). Yet they did and it actually took a decade but for dramatic reasons this is telescoped into a matter of months and Richard was indeed found on the first day, in Summer 2012. Look for an open space, advises Ashdown-Hill like some kind of academic Yoda to the expressive Philippa who follows her passion with determination and empathy. Eventually she even gets her ex to move back in with the family and he comes around to her feeling about Richard, making an anonymous donation to the cause which necessitates a small sacrifice on his part. So twisted spine equals twisted personality, does it? Philippa takes everything so personally. If I can find him I can give him a voice, she says but when she finally asks the dead king’s apparition why he never speaks to her, he tells her it’s because she’s never asked him a question – content to run off at the mouth with those monologues, probably an in-joke about Shakespeare in the narrative’s constantly self-reinforcing metaverse precipitated by a hunch(back). John initially sees Richard as almost a romantic rival yet he knows why Philippa is talking to herself – he’s seeing Seafood Sarah whom he calls normal but the difference is we never encounter this real-life woman whereas a long-dead king shows up all the time, often on his horse, quietly imploring Philippa to continue on her quest. This is perhaps taking the romantic notion of history a little far yet its role in the text is what a certain playwright got away with doing, on more than one occasion. When John takes the boys to the cinema it’s to see Skyfall – a monster movie production about as far from the world of this film as it is to imagine. And yet this sidebar is about an epic episode in history and what remains. Raife asks Philippa about getting a licence to kill – and this is a narrative all about (dramatic) licence, licence to read, remember, restore, exhume and, yes, to kill and to sideline. And as it’s a story about archaeology it has its procedural structure of excavation which in this interpretation involves the straightforward light-enhanced overlaying of maps (Buckley never thought of it, it’s too simple an idea, being a woman’s), radar views and a mechanical digger. When the skull with fatal wound and curved spine are uncovered it’s strangely moving. And our reactions are written in Hawkins’ extraordinarily mobile face. Naturally everyone must acknowledge the Tudor apologists: they’re going to have a field day. That phrase of course prompts a visit to Bosworth Field, where Philippa has her final encounter with Richard III, again on his fine white steed, accompanied by his men, about to meet his maker. The film concludes with real footage of the funeral of Richard III. And so it is that the rightful king of England, the last Plantagenet ruler 1483-1485, got his long-earned decent burial and Royal honours. Underdog Langley got an MBE but Buckley got the OBE, a higher honour, consistent with the doctorate he was awarded and again metaphorically expressing the idea here – that men write history and take the credit. This has led us back to crime writer Josephine Tey’s 1951 novel TheDaughter of Time, a book that served to re-ignite interest in Richard for a twentieth century readership and also questioned whether he could have killed the Princes in the Tower (who were apparently still there after the Battle of Bosworth Field by order of Henry VII). The cover features the portrait that Philippa explains here to John was doctored by the Tudors to retro-fit his image to their scurrilous version of events in which he was cast aside to make way for a new dynasty: his descendants include a cabinet-maker currently living in Clapham – no wonder QEII preferred to give a higher honour to an alleged establishment liar. This is about the real person who lies beneath the reputation and the effort it takes to read between the lines and understand the role of bias. It is about the very construction of history and how Shakespeare’s mythical play came to determine our perception of this misunderstood if controversial man whose dignity had been lost. Adapted from The King’s Grave: The Search for Richard III by Philippa Langley and Michael Jones, this is a small film about a mighty achievement. And, as the Titles inform us, it is Based on a true story. Her story
I killed your parents, and every one of your lovers. They kept us apart. AD 1972. Two hundred years after he’s been condemned to a living death as a vampire by Angelique Bouchard (Eva Green) a spurned servant who happens to be a witch, Barnabas Collins (Johnny Depp) is accidentally exhumed and vows to help his impoverished dysfunctional descendants while falling for his reincarnated lost love Victoria/Josette (Bella Heathcote). He returns to Collinwood where he hypnotises caretaker Willie (Jackie Earle Haley) into being his servant, introduces matriarch Elizabeth Collins Stoddard (Michelle Pfeiffer) to the family’s treasure trove, ordering her to keep it secret from her nee’er do well brother Roger (Jonny Lee Miller), his eccentric little boy David (Gully McGrath) and her own rebellious teenage daughter Carolyn (Chloe Grace Moretz). They have a permanent houseguest in Dr Julia Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter), David’s hard-drinking psychiatrist. They also have a rival in the local fishing business in Angel Bay Cannery run by Angie Bouchard (Green) who is still alive and well and determined to finally win Barnabas for herself but he is still in love with Josette… She has the most fertile birthing hips I have ever laid eyes upon. Just your everyday story of immigrants to the New World who turn into vampires because of an ancestral curse, this is one of those Tim Burton films that seems to fall between two stools: homage and nostalgia, in this earnest adaptation/pastiche of a TV daytime drama hitherto unknown to me but certainly filed nowadays under the heading of Cult. The screenplay by Seth Grahame-Smith is from a story credited to him and John August and adapted from Dan Curtis’ original show and was reportedly being regularly rewritten on set which is not unusual. It might account for the strangely disconnected feel of the production, which however looks incredible thanks to the designer Rick Heinrichs. At its heart it’s a morality tale about family: Family is the only real wealth. While the plot’s construction is of the laborious join the dots variety, there are some cute generation gap and proto feminist threads, good time shift moments, like Barnabas’ shocked reaction to television (What sorcery is this?), rock star Alice Cooper (who else?!) performing a concert and of course Depp, who gives a superbly physical Max Schreck-like performance and has very amusing sparring exchanges with all concerned. Not really sure if it wants to be a straight-up horror or a campy comedy and falls between both stools. Luckily Christopher Lee shows up as the king of the fishermen. Green would go on to replace Bonham Carter as Burton’s long term companion. Okay. If you wanna get with her, you’re gonna have to change your approach. Drop the whole weird Swinging London thing and hang out with a few normal people
Aka All At Sea. From the dawn of time we have always mixed in nautical circles. Royal Navy Captain William Horatio Ambrose (Alec Guinness) has an unfortunate problem – seasickness. It’s particularly embarrassing given his family’s 400-year history in the profession. He spent WW2 teaching in training schools and wasn’t exactly a success. He decides to invest in an amusement pier in the seaside town of Sandcastle but encounters opposition from the local Councillors when he attempts to establish the Victorian structure as a centre for entertainment for the young instead of the old codgers so decides upon a radical course – to have it registered as a foreign sailing vessel (the Arabella, in honour of his former foe now ally, beach hut proprietress Mrs Barringon, played by Irene Browne). He advertises cruises, to which the public flock in droves. When the councillors decide to charge him berthing fees he cuts off their land connection and his enemies plot a course of sabotage … For the price of my modest savings at last a command of my own. T.E.B. Clarke’s script might have a little too much quirk for modern tastes but it’s a lot of fun, with a couple of sequences featuring Bill’s ancestors that tip the nod to Guinness’ eight roles in Kind Hearts and Coronets – because Guinness plays them all. There are lots of other familiar faces including Percy Herbert as his first officer; Eric Pohlmann as the Ambassador from Liberama, happy to give his pier a boat number; Richard Wattis as a civil servant; and Victor Maddern as a treacherous dredge boater. There is a great sense of sly rather than vicious satire, backed up with lots of fun visual jokes – an escape artist rolling about stuck in a sack; a bunch of uniforms waging war in pedalos!; Bill and Mrs Barrington getting drunk and sliding up and down the floors of Crazy Cottage in wonderfully canted shots – and several good scenes mocking petty conspiracies and the backhanders people have to pay to councils, profiting off their situation. Ultimately cut off from the rest of his ‘ship,’ Bill arrives in France, to the delight of the locals. One might call it his Dunkirk. John Addison has a lot of fun pastiching seafaring tunes and shanties. Watch out for Jackie Collins as a beat girl. A massively underrated late Ealing feature, ripe for rediscovery. Directed by Charles Frend, also responsible for The Cruel Sea. What larks! What goes down must come up!
We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. In 1912 Inspector Poole (Alastair Sim) arrives at the wealthy Birling household as he investigates the apparent suicide that afternooon of Eva Smith (Jane Wenham), a young working-class woman. He arrives in the middle of a dinner party and slowly reveals how each family member, including stern patriarch Arthur Birling (Arthur Young) and his uptight wife, Sybil (Olga Lindo), daughter Sheila (Eileen Moore), future son-in-law Brian Worth (Gerald Croft) and finally his own son Eric (Bryan Forbes), could all have had a hand in Eva’s death… We all started like that, so confident and pleased with ourselves, and then he started asking us questions. J.B. Priestley’s 1945 blend of closed-room suspenser and drama of conscience is a fascinating theatrical exercise adapted by Desmond Davis retaining Priestley’s rather blustering retro-fitted comment about complacency ahead of a war that couldn’t possibly happen in those halcyon pre-WW1 days. With the casting of Sim (famously Inspector Cockrill) you know this isn’t going to play out conventionally but each family member plus Worth has their flashback to their supposed involvement and the implications grow of a politically loaded social threat: the father set in motion the girl’s downfall because he didn’t want to pay more than subsistence wages and feared her collectivist instincts so fired her. It’s a canny work, toying with all kinds of prejudices and fears, ultimately summoning the supernatural to extinguish the guilty parties who are all, in their way, corrupt. Directed by Guy Hamilton. You and I aren’t the same people who sat down to dinner here
All we ever do is go to the movies. Movie critic Allan Felix (Woody Allen) is freshly divorced from dreamgirl waitress Nancy (Susan Anspach) who mocked his sexual inadequacy and is inconsolable, feeling that he’ll just never measure up to Rick Blaine in Casablanca, played by his movie hero Humphrey Bogart. His friends businessman Dick (Tony Roberts) and his neurotic model wife Linda (Diane Keaton) try to introduce him to dates with disastrous results. The ghost of Bogart (Jerry Lacy) advises him on the sidelines but after a dreadful night out with Sharon (Jennifer Salt) from Dick’s office culminates in a fight with bikers even his ex-wife shows up to have a word and shoots Bogart. Meanwhile, Allan becomes convinced that he has so much in common with fellow neurotic Linda and she has feelings for him, they spend the night together … My sex life has turned into The Petrified Forest. Allen’s 1969 stage play was adapted by him for the screen but directed by Herbert Ross and it’s a smoothly funny combination of parody and pastiche that Hollywood had been making since Hellzapoppin’ years before anyone dreamed up the term postmodern. Perfectly integrating the themes and action of Casablanca which kicks off the story as Alan watches sadly at the cinema, this is totally of its time, rape jokes ‘n’ all (but to be fair Allen’s script acknowledges it’s not an ideal situation for women). Keaton is a delight in their first film together, a work that cunningly exploits the gap between movies and real life and if it’s rather more coherent at that point than the edgy films Allen had already directed it’s still very funny. There are some awesome lines and the yawning chasm between Bogart’s cool and Allan’s chaos is brilliantly devised with the ending from Casablanca inventively reworked to satisfying effect. The San Francisco and Sausalito locations look great courtesy of the marvellous work of Owen Roizman. It’s the first Allen film I ever saw and it introduced me to the music of Oscar Peterson who was also on TV a lot in those days and I like it as much now as I did when I was 9 years old and that’s saying something. You felt like being a woman and I felt like being a man and that’s what those kinds of people do
He just isn’t funny any more. Filmmaker Alvy Bates (Woody Allen) wants to make the transition from making comedies to serious drama and is persuaded to take a break from his heavy schedule of psychoanalsis, podiatry and hair treatments to attend a weekend film festival at the Stardust Hotel where he is the subject of a retrospective. His ex-girlfriend Dorrie (Charlotte Rampling) is recovering from another breakdown; his mistress Isobel (Marie-Christine Barrault) has left her husband and arrives unexpectedly; and he finds himself falling for the violinist girlfriend Daisy (Jessica Harper) of a Columbia screenwriting lecturer Jack Abel (John Rothman) attending the festival … It’s crazy. The town is jammed. I don’t know, is the Pope in town, or some other show business figure? In which Allen blends Wild Strawberries with 8 1/2 throwing a nod to Citizen Kane and pleads the case of the funnyman who wants to go straight all the while deploring the efforts of his fans and critics to understand him. And in case we don’t get this case of infectious auteurism (with jokes) it’s shot in an oily monochrome that befits this pretender to Fellini that has some wantonly cruel closeups of faces. It’s not just about narcissism and memories and how they encircle a rich man who travels about in his Rolls Royce it’s about the culture of fandom and the circus that seems to accompany success, hence the parodic elephant on the beach, not just in the room. While the women represent different and opposing aspects of Alvy’s brain, his real-life ex-wife and sometime co-star Louise Lasser (upon whom Dorrie is based) appears uncredited as a secretary while his manager/producer Jack Rollins plays a film executive but none of the characters has the complexity of the great female roles from his previous work. Perhaps because the film he made before this was the Bergmanesque Interiors and that left the critics cold. This response to critics is a loose rebuke to Judith Crist’s seminars at Tarrytown NY. There is some discomfort when what appears to be an underage girl (but actually a married woman) appears unbidden in his bed. Despite the undoubted aesthetic beauty (it’s shot by Gordon Willis) and the very funny lines it’s a difficult film to love principally because the degree of self-referentiality seems to hint at pure self-absorbed autobiography flattening the satiric effect. Are we supposed to empathise with a man who feels entrapped by his own fame? But its triumph is in its love of cinema, even if it happens to be made from the perspective of a man we might not actually love despite the frequent reminders of the standup comic Allen once was with some extraordinarily good lines flowing from a freewheeling script that limns politics, psychology and philosophy, perhaps ultimately focusing on the death of the ego. It’s this film that prefigures the transition to serio-comic drama that Allen would ultimately make. In case you missed it, that’s Sharon Stone playing the dreamgirl on the train travelling in the opposite direction that we might wish Joseph Cotten had actually met way back when. You can’t control life. It doesn’t wind up perfectly. Only-only art you can control. Art and masturbation. Two areas in which I am an absolute expert.
Keep Christmas in your own way and let me keep it in mine. On Christmas Eve, Ebenezer Scrooge (Reginald Owen) is visited by the spirit of his former partner, Jacob Marley (Leo G. Carroll). The deceased partner was as mean and miserly as Scrooge is now and he warns him to change his ways or face the consequences in the afterlife… Humbug, I tell you. Humbug! Charles Dickens’ sentimental novella gets a fine adaptation by Hugo Butler and a delicate, sprightly production by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and director Edwin Marin. Everything is beautifully staged and nicely played by a very apposite cast. There is a deal of magic with the ghosts (Lionel Brabham, Ann Rutherford and D’Arcy Corrigan) and some excellent scene-setting and romance between Fred (Barry MacKay) and Bess (Lynne Carver). The atmosphere is well sustained and it’s a very enjoyable rendition that tugs at the heartstrings even if the 1951 British adaptation is a personal favourite. The countdown begins… It’s the only time when human beings open their hearts freely
This house – it knows we’re here. Elderly millionaire Rudolf Deutsch (Roland Culver) is obsessed with the afterlife and hires sceptical scientist Lionel Barrett (Clive Revill) and his wife Ann (Gayle Hunnicutt) to lead a team into the infamous Belasco House, supposedly haunted by the victims of its late owner, a notorious six-foot five serial killer. Though the rational Barrett does not believe in ghosts, the other members of his group ding, including devout spiritualist Florence Tanner (Pamela Franklin) and psychic medium Benjamin Fischer (Roddy McDowall), who has been in Belasco House before and is the only survivor of a previous visit and has therefore seen what horrors can befall those who enter it... The house tried to kill me – it almost succeeded. Fabled novelist and screenwriter Richard Matheson adapted his own Hell House and transposed it from New England to the old country for financial reasons where it was directed by John Hough (who would also direct the cult Disney horror Watcher in the Woods there a half-dozen years later). This pits science and the rational against the paranormal, with fascinating excursions into the psychosexual – it ain’t too often you see a ghost having its way with a young lady. And Franklin’s presence, a dozen years after that spectacular classic of a haunting, The Innocents, is a guarantee of this film’s integrity and she rewards us with a dazzling performance. Hunnicutt is no less effective although her eroticism is literally in another kind of dimension. Frankly any film that commences with the following statement has me at hello: Although the story of this film is fictitious, the events depicted involving psychic phenomena are not only very much within the bounds of possibility, but could well be true (Tom Corbett, Clairvoyant and Psychic Consultant to European Royalty). The building’s negative energy has amazing repercussions for these investigators and McDowall has one of his best roles as an unlikely hero, with an unbilled cameo by one of Brit horror/exploitation’s key actors rounding things out as things end rather explosively but paradoxically, giving this a very human affect in a story of things unseen and the detritus of perversion. One of the very best horror films of the Seventies, probably inspired by Aleister Crowley. Shot at Bolney, West Sussex, Blenheim Palace and Elstree Studios. If you’re that clever why are you still a prisoner in this house?
No one will ever have you! Jazz pianist Tom Stewart (Richard Carlson) lives on the beach in Cape Cod and is preparing to marry Meg Hubbard (Lugene Sanders) when old flame Vi Mason (Juli Reding) turns up to stop him and falls to her death from the local lighthouse when he refuses to lend her a hand as the railing breaks. Wet footprints turn up on his mat, a hand reaches out to him, Vi’s voice haunts him and he starts behaving strangely particularly in front of Meg’s little sister Sandy (Susan Gordon). Blind landlady Mrs Ellis (Lillian Adams) explains to him that similarly supernatural stuff happened when someone else died in the area. Then the beatnik ferry captain Nick (Joe Turkel) who took Vi to the island to see Tom appears and starts getting suspicious that she never returned particularly when wedding bells are in the air … I’m going to live my life again and stop running. With a pedigree crew – director Bert I. Gordon co-wrote with regular collaborator George Worthing Yates – who did the screenplays for some great pirate movies and sci fis including Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers, which starred Hugh Marlowe, frequently mistaken for Richard Carlson – you’d be expecting a class act. And it’s a good story hampered by a minuscule budget which gives off a different kind of aroma. The effects are hilarious – particularly good is some woman’s hand entering frame when Tom is in young Sandy’s company and he hits it and runs off. Sandy sees nothing, of course. My favourite moment is when Vi’s disembodied head appears and Tom reaches out and enjoys a tussle with a blonde wig which he then wraps in paper and throws down a step only to have it picked up by his blackmailer and opens it only to find dead flowers. Despite Carlson’s character mutating into a murderous beast and his ex spinning a Monroe-esque vibe, and the hilarious hey-daddy-o exchanges with the beatnik boatman (whom you’ll recognise as Lloyd the bartender in The Shining), by far the most complex performance comes from young Gordon (the director’s wonderfully talented daughter). The ending is satisfying indeed if you like really proper ghost stories. However if you think you’re going to hear some decent jazz, well, it’s hardly a priority in a camp outing such as this. This was Sanders’ last film in a strangely brief career. She’s a perfume, she’s a footprint, she’s a hand, she’s a space in a picture
mondomovies 