Day Ten: Trilogy of Terror (1975)
What is it about Karen Black? She’s like one of those horror stories about the houses that contain geometrically impossible angles that drive people mad. Something about her doesn’t fit with other intangible things that I can’t describe. She’s sexy even though she shouldn’t be. She looks clueless and intelligent at the same time. Cross-eyed but focused. Vulnerable but vicious.
In short, she looks tee-totally deranged, whether she’s supposed to be or not. Karen Black has appeared in several legendary films (Five Easy Pieces, Nashville, Easy Rider) as well as films of less prominent status. Few have worked with both Roberts Altman and Zombie, and that’s a testament to the various seemingly disconnected sensibilities of Ms. Black.
I go on about Ms. Black because she’s the sole reason to see the cult TV horror anthology Trilogy of Terror. She’s most certainly the terror of the trilogy, it’s charge. The first two stories (based on work by the great Richard Matheson) are completely forgettable, save the sexuality that Black injects into the material. Her not quite what she appears to be school marm from the first story deserves a swifter vehicle with a better, less predictable punchline. The second story doesn’t even have a character going for it, its humorless, Grade Z Psycho.
The third story is quite famous, and is also taken from a Matheson story, the primal, effective “Prey”. In “Prey”, retitled “Amelia” here so the stories can all be named after their protagonists, Karen Black is terrorized by her gift to her prospective boyfriend, a Zuni Fetish doll, who, she tells her mother, she picked up at a curiosity shop. The doll madness that ensues isn’t bad as that sort of thing goes, but one has to sit through ten minutes of superfluous exposition to get to the good seven minutes that follow. That may sound a bit impatient, but keep in mind that we’ve sat through two underbaked shorts already by this point. The final image, though, is quite creepy, and sets up a story that may have been scarier than any we’ve just watched.
And let it be said that Karen Black sticks a knife in a floor like no one I’ve ever seen. And those teeth…
Day One: Shivers (1975)
David Cronenberg is one of the few horror filmmakers that has survived the prejudice that almost always greets one who chooses to work in the genre. It’s not hard to see why. Cronenberg respects the genre, respects the need for ambiguity, for slow burn, for inescape. Audiences do not go to horror films to be let off the hook by the filmmakers, they want to revel in the fear, and let themselves off the hook later, by assuring themselves of the film’s fiction. A happy ending, generally, is an anti-climax in a horror movie, you leave the theatre wondering “is that as bad as it can get?”
Cronenberg also deals, particularly in his early work, with the most sensitive of audience pressure points, the frailty of the human body and, much scarier, the changability of the human body. Early Cronenberg films are about caterpillars changinging into butterflies*, only they haven’t been blessed with the foresight of the process’s result. The films, and this has been said many times before, take the POV of the agent of change, and are generally actively rooting for said change, ending with an ironic sigh of relief.
All of this is true of Cronenberg’s first major release, Shivers, which plays a bit like Invasion of the Body Snatchers reborn as a satire of the just say yes liberation of the 1960s and 1970s. You don’t have to dig deep for subtext in the film’s plot, which concerns a bunch of little leech penis creatures who invade a remote high rise apartment building and turn its citizens into sex crazed zombies.
The remoteness of the setting is established in typically efficient, curt, masterful fashion by Cronenberg in the opening credits, where we see an advertisement for the Starliner Apartments complex bragging about the remoteness of the location. By minute three of the film we’re watching a couple’s introduction to the apartment, but, also typical to Cronenberg, this couple is not our POV, they are only our entryway into the picture (much like the Naomi Watts, Viggo Mortensen switcheroo in Eastern Promises).
Cronenberg is obviously an intelligent person. He knows he’s working in B subject matter on a B budget with a B (two weeks) amount of time to complete the picture. It’s fascinating in Shivers to watch how Cronenberg skates around the potential pitfalls of the subject matter. The acting in Shivers is, at best, adequate. Cronenberg works around this with limited exposition, limited back story, and a terrifying lack of feeling.
Like much early Cronenberg, Shivers feels less like a movie about penis leech creatures, and more of a retrospective documentary about a penis leech creature outbreak. Yes, this clinical style is born out of Cronenberg’s sensibility, but I think its also logical self-preservation. The less sentiment there is, the less potential there is for bad acting to laugh you out of the picture.
The potential hazard of going back and looking at the early work of a great filmmaker is that we give the earlier picture a special break because we know how these themes will be refined in the future. I tried not to do that with Shivers as I revisited it for this post. I found a film that holds up, its dated aspects (clothing, decor) only enhance the satire of the picture. The film’s climax is unnerving in a way that I can’t quite put my finger on. It involves a total invasion, that’s easy to pinpoint, but it occurs in a public swimming pool, and this is queasy in a way that I can’t identify. Maybe its something about all the fluid in a sexual invasion metaphor movie, but I’m not sure.
One final thing about Cronenberg’s satire, you can’t quite pinpoint which side of the satire he’s on in any given movie, especially Shivers. One could say that’s he’s totally in favor of what eventually happens, or one could say that he’s mourning a perceived loss of the discriminate fuck. Or he’s ambivalent (as he’s often accused.) Either way, its one of the principle reasons his films last, and linger, and will be revisited by anyone who gives a damn about the genre.
*I hadn’t considered this upon initial posting, but Cronenberg almost literally did the butterfly thing in his masterpiece, The Fly. The footage was rightfully discarded, but you should take a look on the most recently issued DVD (out a couple of years ago).
Review: Night Moves (1975)
“Night Moves” is, like Altman’s superb “The Long Goodbye”, an example of the existential detective picture that was briefly popular in the 1970s. This is the type of movie where the story, which normally in this genre is dominant and rigoruously thought out, plays sometimes startling second banana to the eccentricities of the main character, who is allowed to be more anxious and less sure of himself than his 1940s noir counter part. The hyper macho conventions of the genre are usually satirized or frowned upon.
All of that said, the 1970s movies have their conventions too, and, while I agree that its probably the richest decade in American cinema, it wasn’t nearly as free-wheeling and “truthful” as we tend to make it out to be. The 1970s just had a more entertaining, refreshing pack of myths to sell us. The detective in the 1970s noir may be more of a realistic man in the sense that he’s not as fearless and always loaded with a Raymond Chandler quip, but he’s still a pretty suave, sexy in an unconvential way pseudo-hipster. Elliot Gould may not be Humphrey Bogart, but he isn’t you either. If you ARE Elliot Gould, my apologies.
Gene Hackman’s Harry Moseby, the PI of “Night Moves” is much closer to you than Humphrey Bogart or Elliot Gould, and this is the film’s greatest asset. Moseby isn’t hip, and we never really see him act particularly tough. He’s a troubled middle aged guy with a middling profession and a wife (Susan Clark) who cheats on him because she resents his emotional vacancy. Tellingly, Moseby doesn’t even confront his wife when he finds out, he confronts the other guy, and the man, knowing this was coming, precedes to lecture Moseby on insecurities he’s had to hear about second hand from the wife: his absent father, his lapsed promise as an athelete, etc. The man even asks Moseby if he’s gonna hit him like Sam Spade.
I’m making “Night Moves” sound like a pretentious slog, but I’ve only discussed about the first fifteen minutes of the picture. Harry is offered a new case (obviously) and he soon becomes enmeshed in a mystery involving a promiscious teenager, Delilah (Melanie Griffith, in a funny, wry little performance) and several older men working on the periphery of the movie industry that Delilah knows through her mother, a faded actress that has put Harry on the case.
As interesting as Harry Moseby is, the case, and the various symbolic allusions to it (the title is a pun, and Harry is obsessed with a famous missed opportunity in a chess tournament) are not as interesting or as well developed. You will probably walk out of the picture confused, as the resolution comes out of nowhere and is stuffed into the last ten minutes. This is intentional though and characteristic of the anti-genre stance of the decade, and especially director Arthur Penn, who made one of the most anti-genre movies of all time with “Bonnie and Clyde”. “Night Moves” is told completely from Harry’s point of view, and the sudden convergence of several surprises at once is meant to put us in Harry’s bewildered shoes, it works, but it bewilders us right out of the movie, and while one respects the intention, it doesn’t totally pay off.
But “Night Moves’ is worth seeing for a lead character a little off the beaten path of noir films, and for Hackman’s wonderful performance as that character. The film also has a pair of beautiful, creepy death scenes near its conclusion, and some memorable, cranky, wannabe tough guy dialogue. Be sure to note the distinction between wannabe tough guy and tough guy, that’s the kind of movie you’re walking into with “Night Moves”.
- Bowen
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