Midnight Movie of the Week #192 - The Brain That Wouldn't Die

There are a lot of genre films out there that succeed because they take a ridiculous idea far too seriously. Movies about time travel, killer animals, invaders from space, vats of liquid Satan (Prince of Darkness, represent!), and plenty of other wacky things can be great cinema when the right filmmakers and cast members are willing to believe in an unrealistic premise. Nobody, save the extremely nerdy and critical, blinks twice when an '80s kid travels to 1955 in a Delorean or when a scientist turns a preserved mosquito into an island full of dinosaurs, because the filmmakers behind these movies distract us elsewhere and don't give us time to think too much about how crazy the whole darn movie is.

The Brain That Wouldn't Die is not one of those movies. If anything, it's the exact opposite. It spends too much time making us think about what's going on - thanks to some poor pacing and a tendency to just let the characters talk about the plot instead of having them do anything - which makes it an easy target for skeptics, such as the Mystery Science Theater 3000 crew that once mocked it thoroughly on television.  (In the film's defense, it's hard to have a character who is only a severed head "do anything." We'll talk more about that later though.)

If you don't know The Brain That Wouldn't Die, a drive-in stalwart that was released in 1962, it's the story of a power hungry doctor who specializes in Frankensteiny experimental medicine and the woman he loves - a woman who is beheaded in an automobile accident while he is driving erratically due to his lust to get to his science. Fortunately - or unfortunately, depending on who you listen to - that same science allows our narcissistic doctor to keep that head alive, living in a few clamps and a tray of serum (or, as the MST3K guys called it, "neck juice"), while he searches for a body that he can use for a transplant. Oh, and there's a "thing" living and groaning in the closet too. You gotta wonder if that's gonna come in to play later on.

Now, most will scoff at that premise - a severed head suspended in a pan while an evil doctor hunts for a victim - but I can see a good movie inside of it. And one of the things I love most about The Brain That Wouldn't Die is that it's clear that writer/director Joseph Green believed there was a good movie in there too.  The film's script has plenty of dialogue that misses the mark or is delivered awkwardly - like the disfigured character who keeps repeating how she carries memory of her past around with her or the lab assistant who shouts things like 'You're nothing but a freak of life! And, a freak of death!" - but there are also moments in the film where the script stumbles upon slightly profound comments on science and the doctor's meddling nature.

Virginia Leith - who stars as both the full bodied girlfriend, Jan, and as "Jan in the Pan" - is given most of the opportunities to monologue about right and wrong, and she's clearly not excited to be preserved as a captive cranium. As she rants about her captivity she eventually stumbles into one of the film's more interesting arguments, discussing her "power" with the lab assistant and the creature in the closet. The empowered version of Jan, like most of the characters in the movie, spends more time talking than she does achieving, but she still seems a lot more interesting than the rest of the characters in the film. Maybe it's Leith's smoky delivery of her lines, or maybe it's just the fact that she's a severed head in a pan with fantastic eyelashes, but when she rasps "like all quantities, horror has its ultimate...and I am that" I definitely can see that Green had some good ideas up his sleeve when he made this movie.

Then again, most of the flaws - like the awkward catfight and the doctor's doomed search for a body - are the things that make The Brain That Wouldn't Die a must see piece of flawed drive-in history, and by the time that closet opens up late in the film I think most fans of pure cheese will find themselves having at least a little bit of unironic fun with this film. Those hints of something smarter in the dialogue - even throwaway lines like "The corpse is yours, do what you want to do" seem like they would get a laugh in a less serious film - and Leith's presentation of tabletop anger that keep me thinking about how perfectly imperfect the tone of The Brain That Wouldn't Die is, and that tone is what makes this film so memorable to me.

Well, it's that tone that makes it memorable....and it's also the talking severed head that's floating in neck juice that's memorable. You never really forget seeing that.

Midnight Movie of the Week #189 - Seconds

Long before Davids Cronenberg and Lynch made the bizarre their normal, Hollywood heavyweight John Frankenheimer made one of the most fascinatingly surreal genre-bending movies of all-time. The film is Seconds, released in 1966 to little fanfare and much confusion, in which an old man (John Randolph) decides to escape from his old life and use a radical medical procedure to become a young man (Rock Hudson) with a fresh young life.

The plot sounds relatively simple, like something that would be used for a 30 minute TV show like The Twilight Zone or Tales from the Crypt (both of which did offer  episodes with similar ideas), bur Frankenheimer finds more than enough content to fill this full-length film with bizarre imagery and thought-provoking plot turns.  The film teeters on the edge a few times, and it's easy to see why some viewers lose interest in the fluid narrative of the film, but each time I see it I feel more in tune with Frankenheimer's loopy sci-fi odyssey.

The film opens with the life of Arthur Hamilton, played by Randolph, and quickly makes the viewer feel unease about this man's life without really telling us much. The camera follows him through mundane daily activities and uninteresting conversations with his aging wife, but also dangles a carrot of intrigue in front of him. Hamilton has been receiving late night phone calls from an old friend named Charlie, urging him to visit a secret medical organization which will help him start his life over. It sounds too good to be true, but Hamilton has reason to believe something is going on there, because he has known for sometime that Charlie is dead.

Hamilton makes up his mind rather quickly, which leads him to this company and leads the film into some haunting sequences which challenge the morality of his decision. Some of these are done visually, like a creepy sequence where a seemingly drugged Hamilton enters a room with a young woman in a bed, but others draw their power from the script. One of the best sequences in the film sits Hamilton in the middle of a room and lets a series of employees talk to him about the decision he's making, starting with an insurance man (who manages to say "The question of death selection may be the most important decision in your life." with a straight face) and leading to a devilish old man who seems to literally talk Hamilton into killing himself. Of course, this kind of suicide promises a second chance, but the words of this old man come off as a rather ominous sign of trouble ahead.

Hamilton goes forth with the procedure, assisted further by a bit of blackmail that makes it impossible for him to turn back, and is reborn as Tony Wilson, who is played by Hollywood star Rock Hudson. Hudson was far from being Frankenheimer's top choice for the film, and I too have often thought of him as an actor with less range than some of his contemporaries, but Hudson certainly brings his best to this role. From day one of his new life we can tell that there are some second thoughts, and even a relationship with a young woman doesn't seem to satisfy all of his expectations about being young again. Wilson also ends up finding himself in some strange social situations that become chaotic on screen, which I've often read as a statement about dropping the seemingly introverted Hamilton into an extroverted world as Wilson. Hudson does an excellent job of showing us the unease that occurs in this character as he comes to recognize regrets about his choice, which leads the film back to the company for an unforgettably chilling final act.

From the opening titles - a montage of extreme close-up images put together by the legendary Saul Bass that reminds me of his opening titles for Vertigo - it is obvious that Frankenheimer does not want to viewer to be comfortable watching this character (or is it these characters?) and one of my favorite things about the film is that the camera always seems to be doing something I call "fishbowling" to the characters. You know how when you look at a goldfish in a bowl it either looks really far away or really close to you and huge, depending on the angle you look through the glass? Well, that's how Frankenheimer and cinematographer James Wong Howe - who would receive an Oscar nomination for the film - make Seconds look. There are a lot of shots that are far too close to the character's face, but they're offset with moments where the camera just seems to be lingering at an angle in the opposite corner of a room or hallway. The altered perspective that comes from the camera's eye adds a lot to the mysterious intrigue of the film.

Seconds tries to succeed on a lot of levels - it's a sci-fi film, it's a horror film, it's a parable about life and death - and it is at least interesting in each of these domains. When the solid lead performances (which are buoyed by supporting turns by actors like Jaws' Murray Hamilton and Will Geer as the previously mentioned Old Man) mix with the haunting visual style, the result is a film that will certainly get viewers thinking. Considering its age, Seconds seems like one of the first great cult cinema mindbenders, and it's still worth revisiting as one of the finest nightmares on film I've ever seen.

Midnight Movie of the Week #178 - The Oblong Box

Every year, on May 27th, I celebrate three birthdays. One is my sister's, which is inconsequential here unless we are speaking of Clownhouse.  The others belong to Sir Christopher Lee - who turned 91 AND released a heavy metal album on Monday - and his late companion in horror villainy, Vincent Price.  So this week, I celebrated another year of love for two of horror's greatest stars with a viewing of their first on-screen collaboration, The Oblong Box. (I celebrated with the sister too, sadly without Clownhouse.)

The film is an adaption-in-name-only of an Edgar Allan Poe story of the same name, which tells of an ill-fated sea voyage and the dark secret locked away in one piece of cargo.  The film, on the other hand, dabbles in voodoo, grave robbing, revenge, and madness with Price starring as a man whose brother is disfigured thanks to a curse by an African tribe and condemned to live locked up in one room on the family estate. Driven mad by circumstance, the brother - played by the primarily masked and character actor Alister Williamson - is made to appear dead by another witch doctor, and escapes from his brother's reign after being buried alive in a coffin that is - you guessed it - oblong in shape.  (By the way, this guy gets my respect for trusting a witch doctor AFTER he's already been cursed and deformed by a witch doctor. That's some surprising trust.)

What follows is a neat horror story that lives somewhere between Frankenstein and the modern slasher film that may have drawn some inspiration from the German "krimi" films of the 1960s. The devious and disfigured brother, Edward, is risen from the grave by his co-conspirators and then dons a red mask and goes on a spree of madness against those who wronged him (and the occasional shifty prostitute who tries to overcharge him for ripping her breast from her gown).  He's actually a pretty fantastic villain, spouting rage-filled dialogue from behind the hood and showing off his imposing size as he moves through the film. Lee co-stars as the doctor who unwillingly takes in Edward and provides him a home, and perhaps the most lasting image of the film is how it manages to make us think Edward is towering over and dominating the 6'3" man who made Dracula seem taller than Godzilla.

The Oblong Box is directed by Gordon Hessler, who would make two more films with Price the following year - Scream and Scream Again and Cry of the Banshee being the others, and the director brings a vision that seems more in tune with the pulse of its era than many other Gothic horror films of the time. The film is not exceedingly violent, even by the standards of 1969, but the masked killer is something quite different for the time period. And the fact that he is made to look stronger than both Lee - who spends much of the movie trying to sound tough but never really threatening Edward - and Price - who is in that "tortured soul who would be good if it weren't for his secret" role that he does so well - does wonders for the film. We don't expect to see Christopher Lee and Vincent Price both losing out to one villain in a horror film, and the fact that Hessler offers that for much of this film is a bold and kind of brilliant twist on the viewer's expectations.

Though the film was produced on a low budget for American International Pictures, there's definitely a grand feeling to the story at times. The script is attributed to two writers: Lawrence Huntington, who died at the age of 68 in the year before the film's release, and Christopher Wicking, a twenty-six year old writer who re-wrote the script that Huntington and original director Michael Reeves (who also died during production) had put together. Despite the number of contributors and the unfortunate circumstance around the film, it still offers some interesting twists. There's a bit of psychological play - led by the strange sexual relationship between the killer and pretty young servant and some late film showdowns between Price's character and his brother - and I definitely felt like the film was turning toward the new breed of horror that had been started by films like Night of the Living Dead and Rosemary's Baby in 1968. I am a big fan of Price/Poe films like those made by Roger Corman, of course, but it's easy to see that The Oblong Box was conceived from a different mindset than those films.

The end result is a macabre piece of horror that manages to create something new without wasting the talents of its two iconic stars. It's funny to me that the thing that drew me to this film was the pairing of Lee and Price, and yet it's probably the thing I'm least interested in talking about right now. If you're a fan of these icons you know what you're getting from them (Repeated Warning: it's not the dominating villain role for either, so check your expectations accordingly), which makes it important to know that most of the things around them - particularly Williamson and whoever provided his character's voice - are fantastic on their own. The Oblong Box is not what you might expect, but if you expect good horror cinema you could do a whole lot worse.

Midnight Movie of the Week #175 - Dracula: Prince of Darkness

Considering what I know now, it's a little bit hard for me to recommend Dracula: Prince of Darkness to people. The first sequel to Horror of Dracula that brought Christopher Lee back to the franchise is slightly infamous due to Lee's attitude toward the production. But I still kind of love the movie, and I don't really feel bad about that. I suppose I could use the term guilty pleasure, but I feel no guilt for disagreeing with one of my favorite actors on this one. Instead, I find that Dracula: Prince of Darkness works as something of a case study into how a film can succeed despite all of the troubling things that happen along its journey through production. 

(RANDOM TANGENT: By the way, I'd never use the term "guilty pleasure" anyway. It's one of those things I wish we could disinvent. There is no reason you should feel guilt over liking a movie. If you take things so seriously that you have guilt....you probably have some personal problems and you might wanna talk to somebody. Life's too short, be happy about movies.)

It's widely documented - I posted an interview in which Lee confirms it just last week - that the star was so disappointed by the film's script that he refused to speak any dialogue in this film. The result is that there are some moments where we briefly forget that this is a Dracula movie, because the film is forced to spend a lot of time on other characters who vary from the very bland to the interesting-only-as-a-caricature. 

One of my favorite theories about sequels that a friend and I once came up with - and this is gonna veer in a non-horror direction, so stay with me - is that you often find sequels scrambling to replace one or two major parts of the first film's success with a larger number of smaller parts. If you saw Moneyball you can think of it as the same thing Brad Pitt did in that movie, but apply it to movies. For example, The Fast and The Furious had Vin Diesel as a criminal/cohort of Paul Walker who was undercover. Vin left and Walker became the criminal, so they had to add Tyrese as a cohort, Cole Hauser as a criminal, and Eva Mendes undercover. Simple math dictates that they needed three people to make up for the loss of Vin Diesel and for the change in Paul Walker's character's profession.

The same thing happened with Dracula: Prince of Darkness, which meant that Hammer Films' stable of writers and director Terence Fisher - who, by the way, does not get enough credit for holding together some standard horror productions and making them better than the sum of the parts (He might have been the Billy Beane of horror movies!) - had to think of new ways to make the movie go. Without Peter Cushing or the Van Helsing character (because you don't just replace Cushing!) and without Dracula as more than a silent force, Fisher and company added some unique characters to the mix and took a step even further away from Bram Stoker's novel.  (That last step might be a negative to some people - Lee particularly - but for the rest of this article I'm going to accept it. Again, life's too short.)

My favorite development in this sequel is the focus on what most vampire mythology refers to as "familiars" - the humans who serve Count Dracula for reasons unknown to most men.  At the front of this development is Klove, played by Philip Latham, a pale and grey-haired servant who maintains Dracula's castle and is responsible for the ritual that allows the previously perished Count to return and terrorize the family that wanders into his home. Klove fascinates me thanks to Latham's quiet and assured performance, and the sequence in which he carries out the blood ritual that resurrects Lee is one of the highlights of the franchise. There's a methodical, religious aspect to the character - watch how the actor pauses and slightly bows before the altar which holds Dracula's ashes - that builds up Dracula's power over the week. If nothing else, Dracula: Prince of Darkness does a really good job of making us recognize the power that Dracula can have over the weak.  (Klove would randomly return two sequels later in Scars of Dracula, but in this version the character is more desperate and pitiful while being played by The Omen's Patrick Troughton.)

Aside from the few familiars involved, this sequel offers a couple of other notable additions to the cast. Barbara Shelley does double duty, spending the first half of the film as an uptight and skeptical member of the group that enters the castle before becoming Dracula's female companion after a mid film bite.  She does a good job of selling both aspects of the character, cementing the fact that this movies is going to spend its time showing Dracula's impact on others. This is also hammered home by co-star Andrew Keir, whose addition to the film as a monk that knows all about Dracula and vampirism is clearly covering for some of the things we'd expect to hear from Van Helsing. It's a one-note character, but Keir's strong presence helps give the film a little more weight.

I probably shouldn't find Dracula: Prince of Darkness to be as interesting as it is, especially when I look at some of the obvious flaws in the production, the biggest of which is being a Dracula movie that doesn't have much Dracula in it. And yet, the way the movie has been put together and the amount of effort that appears to have been expended is somewhat infectious. I gain a lot of respect for everyone involved - even Lee, despite his objections - when I watch this movie because it's such a large challenge to replicate what Horror of Dracula did eight years earlier. Yet you can still see the wheels churning and no one seems to be resting on the name value of the film, and the final result is a vampire tale that is far from perfect but still good looking and a bit charming.

Midnight Movie of the Week #172 - The 10th Victim

Long before The Hunger Games and even before most of what we call "reality" television, a 1965 Italian film predicted on-air murders thanks to a government sponsored killing game. The film is The 10th Victim, and the game is "The Big Hunt" - in which those who need an outlet for their aggression are legally entered into a battle as "Hunter" and "Victim."  The distinctions don't really make sense - both participants are well armed and basically it's an excuse for men and women to shoot at each other - but they do make for solid entertainment.

As far as I can see, the host of the show inside the movie never really expands upon why the participants in The Big Hunt are all male vs. female - but it's pretty obvious when you look at the casting of the movie.  Ursula Andress, riding a wave of popularity from her iconic role in Dr. No, and Italian superstar Marcello Mastroianni were two of the hottest names and faces in European cinema of the 1960s, and the chance to pit these really, really, ridiculously good-looking stars into a romantic game of death is a chance few producers would pass up at the time.

That said, it's a given that writer Tonino Guerra and director Elio Petri spend much of the film trying to make their stars the centerpiece of a fated romance that is set against some of the most beautiful Italian settings possible. The romance between the two characters - who are, naturally, the hunter and victim in one of the Hunt's contests - never really feels sincere on any level other than "we have to be close to each other anyway and we're both trying to seduce the other and we're also good looking", but the duo have an excellent chemistry throughout the proceedings as the yin and yang of this deadly game.

Andress' American character is the more driven of the two, because she has won nine previous matchups and is set to earn her retirement once she drops her tenth victim.  Mastroianni, on the other hand, gets to play the victim as a calmer, cooler character.  He's not giving up the game, but he seems to toy with his hunter as she gets close to him and instigates a relationship.  We never get the feeling that he knows the extent of the plan that her and the TV crews who are trying to rig the game have in store for him, but from the moment their relationship begins we can be certain that many plot twists are ahead.

The 10th Victim does not expect the viewer to take its plot too seriously, and the tone is tongue-in-cheek for much of the film. It's a relatively dry satire that doesn't go for many big laughs, but most of the scenes involving the lead characters and the workers behind the scenes of the hunt make it clear that the film is not too serious with us. One of the most enjoyable recurring tricks in the film involves the Ming Tea Company that is sponsoring Andress' character and hoping to turn her final kill into an ad campaign.  Advertising is a source of comedy in later films about deadly sports and/or reality TV domination, but few films have ever matched the flamboyant Ming Tea extravaganza that erupts in the final act of this film. (In case it sounds familiar, the Ming Tea name is just one of the things that was borrowed from this film and transported into the Austin Powers series.)

It's a shame that the satire and romance take up so much of the film, because part of me wants to see a film that claims "If we had The Big Hunt in 1940, Adolf Hitler would have surely been a member and there would have been no war!" and actually expands on how the game works as a release of aggressive desires. But the film is still visually incredible - the blu-ray presentation by Blue Underground is amazingly fresh and clear - and the two stars moving about this purely 1960s production is more than enough reason to admire Petri's playfully plotted film. It doesn't have the laughs of something like the spy spoof Fathom or the tension of other The Most Dangerous Game clones (even The Running Man probably has more drama than this one), but The 10th Victim is a success because it keeps us staring at the screen and never breaks from its trance-enducing style.

Midnight Movie of the Week #160 - The Brides of Dracula

Hammer Films' Dracula tales are most remembered as vehicles for Christopher Lee, so some people are surprised to find out that the first sequel to Horror of Dracula was a film in which Dracula is already dead, Lee did not appear, and a rather unintimidating little man named Baron Meinster serves as the main masculine vampire. Alas, it's all true. The film in question is Hammer's 1960 vampi-rama The Brides of Dracula, in which Peter Cushing picks up where the 1958 film left off and takes on a new vampire threat, none of whom are actually wed to the Count.

The film primarily follows the exploits of a French babe schoolteacher named Marianne (played by Yvonne Monlaur, who is actually the daughter of a Russian count), who takes a job in the Transylvanian countryside (because, well, WHO WOULDN'T?) and ends up spending the night in a big old castle where a mother has her son chained up by the ankle. To some that might seem like a relatively normal night in Transylvania - I've seen enough horror flicks to know someone is always chained up to something - but the pure and innocent Marianne is pretty freaked out and this, along with the craziness of the house's servant (Freda Jackson, getting to play what's basically a female version of Renfield!), convinces Marianne that she's safer booking it through the forest than staying the night.

And that's when the hero returns in the form of Doctor Van Helsing, as played by the great Peter Cushing. Cushing would play "Van Helsing" five times for Hammer, but it's worth noting that he actually portrayed three different characters in five different films in three different timelines during his time with Hammer. This is (at least in Hammer's universe) the only continuation of the "original" version of Cushing asVan Helsing, while his performances in the Dracula films of the 1970s are relatives of this character. So, next time someone tells you Cushing played Van Helsing five times, you can prove them wrong by saying he only played this Van Helsing twice. Isn't that a great feeling?

Now back to the film, which strikes me as one of Hammer's more beautiful vampire films.  The sets are pretty recognizable - we must remember that this was a relatively low budget studio and they did reuse plenty of their sets and props - but there's something vibrant and wonderful about their presentation by director Terence Fisher here.  Horror of Dracula was not a dull film from a visual standpoint, but it seems Fisher attempted to cover up some of this film's issues with a little more color and a lot of feminine beauty. That's not a bad choice for a film that loses Christopher Lee and gains a looker like Monlaur, and the director's vision of the film helps The Brides of Dracula keep our attention for 85 minutes.

The tone of the film loses much of the romanticism that carried Hammer's first Dracula endeavor, and The Brides of Dracula certainly feels like a cheesy spin-off at times. A few of the sequences with the vampire women - especially the ones in which they interact with Jackson's manic servant/familiar - play out in bizarre fashion, yet the film strides forward with confidence that the viewer will forgive some of the sillier bits.  There are moments when the film could have lost me - like an unconventional scene in which Van Helsing deals with a bite wound to his own neck - but there's something to be said for this film's slightly random, slightly nightmarish approach to Marianne and Van Helsing's battle against evil.

The Brides of Dracula isn't the most dramatic vampire film from Hammer studios, and it's not even close to being the most unique.  But it's an abstract vampire tale that hits me as a perfect diversion, a new chapter in a familiar story that enhances my appreciation of Fisher as a filmmaker, Cushing as an actor, and the whole of Hammer Studios as a titan of terror. The Brides of Dracula is widely forgotten, but it deserves more attention for its place in horror history and its unique relationship to the studio's other Dracula films.

Midnight Movie of the Week #157 - Night Tide

There's no better way to start the new year than with a love story. At least, that's what I might say if I was the sentimental sort. Nah, the best way to start the new year in The Mike's world would primarily involve good football and good nachos. But I didn't have those this year, which brings us back to the love story. Don't worry Mom, it's not my love story. It's a love story between a young Dennis Hopper and a mermaid.

Yes, you read that last sentence right.  A young sailor played Dennis Hopper falls in love with a sideshow mermaid in Night Tide, a brooding and mysterious melodrama from 1961.  Directed by Curtis Harrington, the film is a poetic black-and-white tale that feels a little like the original Carnival of Souls when it draws us into the quiet world of this lonely young soul. The film's setting also draws parallels to that horror classic - the love interest, Mora the Mermaid, lives in an apartment on top of a merry-go-round on the Santa Monica pier - but the tone of this film seems to be less aggressive than most horror films.  You know how the mediums in horror movies always can feel whether or not a spirit is malevolent or benevolent? This movie's the benevolent one.

Dennis Hopper wasn't quite the Dennis Hopper that movie buffs know and love yet - in fact, it would be a full TWENTY-FIVE YEARS before the role in Blue Velvet that he's probably most infamous for - and it's weird to see him as this young, normal, and (dare I say it) innocent man.  Hopper had been around, on both the big and little screen, for almost a decade (most notably appearing in two of James Dean's three films in supporting roles) when he took the lead role here, but there still isn't a lot here that would make someone guess that he would become the scenery chewing force of nature that built his Hollywood legacy. But when you look at the film as someone who knows Dennis Hopper's later works, it's easy to see why he adds to this film as the lovestruck lead. The whole film has a kind of taboo feeling to it, and it's easy to see Dennis Hopper as the guy who might be vulnerable to the bizarre.

Speaking of that bizarre plot, the film's story primarily deals with the young man's quest to determine if his love interest is our is not actually a mythical creature. As Hopper's character wanders around the film, we realize that the supporting characters seem to hold the keys to the film's mystery. They are led by the drunken captain who found Mora on a tropical island, a fortune teller who hangs out around the seaside carnival, and a mysterious woman in black who seems to haunt Mora and her new lover. The film is very meticulous as it shows us how each of these people may or may not have information on this mermaid woman, and each interaction between them and the sailor leaves us with questions about where the film will go next.

I've mostly talked around Mora instead of about her thus far, which kind of sums up her role in the film. The character is played well by Linda Lawson, who manages to give Mora the exotic beauty that is advertised at her show while also getting us to buy in to the idea that she is a tortured soul. The first hour of the film doesn't offer a lot of actions that would make us worry about Mora or her suitor, but the actress' tone of voice and dream-like manner of moving through scenes - paired with a musical score that seems to bleed drama into the film - had me caught up in their tale from the start.

The final half hour of the film ramps up the tension considerably, and it can be a little difficult to keep track of where the film is going.  The plot's developments remind a little bit of Hitchcock - there are moments that could be seen as twists on Vertigo and Psycho here - but it's also clear that Harrington wanted to ground his film in a macabre place when he references Edgar Allan Poe with an on-screen passage. The film never reaches the heights that these two legends of storytelling did - few filmmakers ever have - but the mood still makes it a unique and captivating film. I find myself unable to look away from Night Tide, and I think any patient viewer with a taste for cinematic oddities will have the same excellent problem.

Midnight Movie of the Week #151 - Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell

If you're The Mike - and, in this case, I am - and you hear about a movie about a body snatcher from hell, you take notice.  And then, when you hear that that movie is a trippy Japanese production of the late '60s that was part of its studio's response to the box office success of Big G in Japan - you stand at attention.

Which brings us to Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell, which is a bizarre treat for lovers of original horror.  It's a film that blends plenty of horror staples into one unique package, and any comparisons to Godzilla (or other kaiju films) can be dismissed after the country of origin is discussed. Unlike many of the most popular sci-fi/horror films from Japan in this era, Goke focuses on a much smaller monster - but that doesn't make the scope of the film any smaller.

To simplify the film's plot is to do it an injustice, but I just have to say - yes, that is a blob.  This is a blob movie.  But not like The Blob.  It seems that Goke - short for Gokemidoro - is a parasitic entity who enjoys opening up folks' foreheads and oozing his way into their body, therein "snatching" control over them. As for the "Hell" thing, I think that's just said for effect. I don't believe Gokemidoro comes from the actual Hell, because I don't think you can get here from there in an orange spaceship. (If your religious beliefs disagree with my assessment, then I apologize for the offense. Please let me know what your Hell has to do with orange spaceships, I love learning!)

Anyway, Goke introduces us to a small group of people on an Air Japan flight - and if you think the flight looks eerily similar to something from Kill Bill you're not mistaken; Tarantino loves this flick - which flies into a red sky, sees some orange lights, and crash lands in an uninhabited valley.  The survivors survive (obviously), but that's just a convenient way to put this odd group of characters - including, but not limited to - a psychiatrist, a politician, and an American army wife - in Goke's path.

Strewn along Goke's path are scenes involving bickering and distrust, as well as some solid blobby mind-melding. The film finds several unique ways to tell us about Goke, and a lot of intrigue comes from the way this invader is portrayed.  There's a little bit of everything in this story, but none of Goke's trappings are just like something you've seen in another sci-fi film. We get a blob, we get body snatching, and we even get a bit of possession/assimilation. But they aren't the same things you know.  I kept trying and trying and trying to make the connection between the film and John Carpenter's The Thing stick in my head, but I couldn't do it. Goke is it's own animal.

I am, however, somewhat convinced that Mr. Carpenter had seen Goke, because my favorite moment in the film mimics one of my favorite moments in Carpenter's filmography.  The sequence in which the omnipresent voice of the Gokemidoro shares an ominous warning to the survivors by possessing a female survivor made me think fondly of Prince of Darkness, as the woman's hair billows in the wind and a voice - a voice that is clearly not her own - relays a message that is meant to signal the end for the people.  It's a moment that sent chills down my spine, and it really hammered home the meaning of these strange events.

Perhaps the best thing about Goke, The Body Snatcher is that it's one of the rare horror films that seems to keep escalating as it goes on.  There are a couple of minor lulls, but every time I thought I had Goke figured out it shook my pursuit and sped to a new height.  It's not going to scare anyone's socks off, but it's haunting enough to keep you interested and man, does it end with a bang.  Goke is a new favorite of mine, but I imagine I'll be going back to its odd world often, and I think y'all should experience Goke's world for yourself too.

(BTW, if you're reading this before 11/25/12, you can watch Goke, The Body Snatcher from Hell for FREE on Hulu. It's streaming for free right about HERE. So watch it!)