Only now does it occur to me... THE BLACK CAT (1981)

Only now does it occur to me... that Lucio Fulci's THE BLACK CAT is one of the most compartmentalized films of all time, bizarre in its dissociation even for Fulci, an assemblage of isolated parts that come to approach abstract art. If you were to see individual clips out of context, your descriptions might resemble the fable of the blind men and the elephant.

A good 10% of THE BLACK CAT is roaming cat POV. This is to be expected, as it's an Italian horror movie from the 1980s called THE BLACK CAT. If Fulci had directed ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, at least 10% of it would have been bird POV.

But being as it's an Italian horror film with POV and black cats, obviously the cats are going to be doing some murdering. And so about 5% of the film is a disembodied cat paw being dragged across human flesh.

It's a feat of puppetry, the likes of which we would never see again at least until the appearance of Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog.

This ain't CAT'S EYE, but about 15% of the movie is cat eyeball closeups. We don't really get the classic Fulci trauma-shot, but practically every cat attack is preceded by EXTREME CLOSEUP: HUMAN EYEBALLS, EXTREME CLOSEUP: CAT EYEBALL, EXTREME CLOSEUP: HUMAN EYEBALLS, EXTREME CLOSEUP: CAT EYEBALL, CLOSEUP: CAT FLUNG AT HUMAN EYEBALLS. You feel like you're watching one of the duels in a Sergio Leone film, except with cats instead of Clint Eastwood.

10% of the movie is "charming-but-spooky English small town" atmosphere. It feels a bit like STRAW DOGS or AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON.

 

The fog machines are working overtime, in other words.

Now for a downer: 25% of the movie is Mimsy Farmer, looking at things. Looking concerned.

 

Right now, she is concerned by Patrick Magee, pictured on the right.

 

Look, I have nothing against Mimsy Farmer, whether she's nuzzling with Lee Van Cleef in the Italian WILD GEESE rip-off CODE NAME: WILD GEESE or wiggin' out in Argento's FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET. I can never decide if she's unexceptionally inoffensive or inoffensively unexceptional. It's not her fault, though. She's given practically nothing to do and has a compelling set of eyebrows as a scene partner half the time. Which leads me to:

35% of this movie is Patrick Magee eyebrow action. 

 

You may remember him overdoing it in A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. If that's the case, you ain't seen nothin' yet.

The eyebrows have been unleashed. Even the cat is powerless.

This is what puts it over the edge. I'm gonna be honest, without Patrick Magee, this would be a contender for Fulci's worst film. As is, it's in the bottom tier, but, can you say no to this face?

If we're going to split hairs, Fulci probably should have called this film THE WILD EYEBROW.

Also, outside of the last five minutes, THE BLACK CAT has nothing to do with Edgar Allan Poe's story. Even the last five minutes are a stretch. If Fulci's THE BLACK CAT is an adaptation of Poe's "The Black Cat," then we might as well say that PLACES IN THE HEART is an adaptation of "The Tell-Tale Heart." But if you want another whacked-out Italian take on the same story with equal amount of cat POV and 100% more Harvey Keitel, I highly recommend Argento's segment of TWO EVIL EYES, which I have to believe is some kind of taunt directed at Fulci. 

And because I can't plug this enough, if psychotic cat attacks are your jam, you're doing yourself a disservice if you've not seen Ngai Kai Lam's THE CAT.

Only now does it occur to me... THE PREMATURE BURIAL

Only now does it occur to me... that while the clear centerpiece of Roger Corman's THE PREMATURE BURIAL is the ridiculous scene where the gleefully nutty Ray Milland shows off his custom-made precautions against being buried alive in his extensively pimped-out tomb:

The 'ole "tools in the collapsible coffin."


The 'ole "hidden foodstuffs and secret passsageways."


The 'ole "surprise rope ladder and self-congratulatory raised eyebrow."

the hidden gem of the film is a small bit whereupon Milland imagines that a gravedigger, played by a young Dick Miller, has come to bury him alive!

Somehow, young Dick Miller looks exactly like old Dick Miller.

As someone who grew up watching Miller in stuff like THE TERMINATOR, EERIE INDIANA, GREMLINS, and every other Joe Dante movie under the sun, it's a joy to return to his Roger Corman roots and see the 'ole back catalogue.  

As for the movie– it's decent.  Not nearly as good as the other (Vincent Price)/Edgar Allan Poe films that came out of American International, but a fine spooky time.  I do, however, highly recommend the Milland/Corman collaboration X: THE MAN WITH THE X-RAY EYES, which will hopefully be the subject of a forthcoming review!

2014 HALLOWEEN COUNTDOWN

1.  FROM DUSK TILL DAWN 2: TEXAS BLOOD MONEY (1999, Scott Spiegel)

2.  MARK OF THE VAMPIRE (1935, Tod Browning)

3.  FULL MOON HIGH (1981, Larry Cohen)

4.  EIGHT-LEGGED FREAKS (2002, Ellory Elkayem)

5.  MASTERS OF HORROR: WE ALL SCREAM FOR ICE CREAM (2007, Tom Holland)

6.  STEPHEN KING ON SONS OF ANARCHY (2010, Bill Gierhart)

7.  THE INITIATION (1984, Larry Stewart)
8.  MUTANTS (2008, Amir Valinia)
9.  JAWS 2 (1978, Jeannot Szwarc)
10. ...

Theater Review: NEVERMORE, AN EVENING WITH EDGAR ALLAN POE (2011, Stuart Gordon)

Stars: 5 of 5.
Running Time: 90 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Jeffrey Combs (RE-ANIMATOR, THE FRIGHTENERS, CASTLE FREAK, THE BLACK CAT). Written by Dennis Paoli (BLEACHER BUMS, GHOULIES II, THE DENTIST). Directed by Stuart Gordon (ROBOT JOX, DOLLS, FROM BEYOND).

I was lucky enough this year to spend a portion of my Halloween in the mad, increasingly inebriated company of the Nineteenth Century's greatest poet and weaver of macabre tales, Edgar Allan Poe. Upon a candlelight-flicker'd stage at Lincoln Center, Jeffrey Combs performed a special New York engagement of his one-man show, NEVERMORE.

I'm a longtime fan of Mr. Combs (one of the more committed, versatile actors of modern genre cinema) as well as the rest of the creative team: the director is the great Stuart Gordon (Mamet crony, Lovecraft-adapter extraordinaire, and the man who brought ROBOT JOX into the world) and the playwright is Dennis Paoli (rarely has an accomplished dramatist also penned the best GHOULIES movie, which was 2, by the way). It is difficult to describe the sheer power of this show– its resonance, its poetic value, its sense of history– but I shall try.

A candle journeys from its first lighting to its natural end as a whispery nub of extinguished wick. In between, Edgar Allan Poe exists. Even an intimate familiarity with Combs' body of work cannot prepare you for his transformation. Sure, a prosthetic nose, a wig, and a well-tailored costume are employed, but Combs becomes Poe. Even actively looking for it, you can only see glimpses of Combs beneath his performance, a glint in his eye here, an off-handed remark there. Combs is so profoundly in the moment that a patron's cough, the New York milieu, or Halloween night itself might bring forth an unexpected reaction, a measured improvisation.

Combs imbues Poe with a singsongy drawl and much humorous pomposity, then enshrouds him in madness and submerges him in the haze of drink. He reads aloud "The Tell-Tale Heart" ("The Tell-Tale Heart"....perhaps you've heard of it...?," he smartassedly inquires) with a manic energy which brings alive the story's humor and derangement as never before. He physically stomps upon the carpet in an approximation of the story's terrible, persistent heartbeat, injecting a sense of rhythm to the piece that one usually only associates with Poe's poetry. He reads a line like "ALL IN VAIN, because Death in approaching him had stalked with his black shadow before him and enveloped the victim" with a wet malevolence that drips morbidly from every syllable.

Claiming the birthright of his actor parents to 'perform,' Combs' Poe lays siege to the stage against the better judgment of unseen handlers, stagehands, and the poetess Sarah Helen Whitman in the audience, whom Poe was courting at the time (in the wake of his wife's death). He rants against Longfellow, pokes at the Transcendentalists, and razzes Washington Irving. He brags at length about his career at West Point and his achievement of swimming the James River. But a bottle of Rye (at first swigged surreptitiously, then guzzled out in the open) causes the evening's events to grow increasingly and exponentially unhinged. "WHOOOOOOOOPS," he blurts as he gulps down the sauce again and again and again, promenading about the stage like an irrepressible beast. His ever-roaming, drunken tongue practically becomes a character in and of itself. He stumbles and staggers and teeters and falls; he earns our applause through the Herculean act of "standing up." He straddles a music stand like a horse, amuses himself by playing with a length of his ruffly shirt caught in a gap through his unbuttoned vest, battles the forces of gravity with great slapstick physicality, and shrugs it all off with a mad, wheezy cackle. There's an insane, boozy recitation of "The Bells," whereupon Combs hurls his arms about and boogies across the stage, flinging himself and suspenders alike with reckless abandon, ultimately whimpering in the aisle, wounded and bitter, but not quite broken. And for all the humor, there is a tremendous emotive core, perhaps best exemplified by the air of melancholy that results when a dried flower falls out from between pressed pages, a sudden and unexpected reminder of his dead wife. And I can't even begin to chronicle the profundity of Combs' reading of "The Raven," a reading which transports you face-to-face with the sullen, saggy-eyed countenance from the famous daguerreotype by which most of us know Poe's face.

NEVERMORE is a masterful work. Stuart Gordon's sure, even-handed direction is capable of handling all of Poe's heights and depths and tonal shifts; Dennis Paoli's script (with much assistance from Poe's prose and poetry) is in turns hilarious and heart-wrenching; and Jeffrey Combs' performance is a staggering portrait of a majestic poet and a gutter philosopher, a man whose mind and body tested themselves against the maelstrom for only forty short years. I'm not sure when this show will be performed again, but if it's ever in your power to see it, you must.

-Sean Gill

Film Review: TWO EVIL EYES (1990, George A. Romero & Dario Argento)

Stars: 4.5 of 5.
Running Time: 120 minutes.
Notable Cast or Crew: Adrienne Barbeau (THE FOG, CREEPSHOW), Ramy Zada (DALLAS, DARK JUSTICE), E.G. Marshall (CREEPSHOW, 12 ANGRY MEN), Tom Atkins (HALLOWEEN III, NIGHT OF THE CREEPS, CREEPSHOW), Bingo O'Malley (CREEPSHOW, KNIGHTRIDERS), Harvey Keitel (BAD LIEUTENANT, MEAN STREETS), Martin Balsam (DEATH WISH 3, PSYCHO), Tom Savini (PLANET TERROR, MARTIN), John Amos (GOOD TIMES, DIE HARD 2), Julie Benz (DEXTER, RAMBO IV), Madeleine Potter (THE BOSTONIANS, THE GOLDEN BOWL), Christine Forrest (MARTIN, MONKEY SHINES). Special Makeup Effects by Tom Savini. Based on works by Edgar Allan Poe.
Tag-line: "When I Wake You...You'll Be Dead."
Best one-liner: "Christ! Rich people... Sick stuff always turns out to be rich people."

Originally conceived as a George Romero-produced, Poe-based cable television series (with Michele Soavi directing "The Masque of the Red Death," Richard Stanley directing "The Casque of Amontillado," and with John Carpenter & Wes Craven involved as well), it failed to receive the final green-light and instead we ended up with a full-length horror-omnibus twofer entitled TWO EVIL EYES. I've heard a fair amount of bellyaching about this film, ranging from Poe purists who're upset that the settings are contemporary to disdainful viewers who inexplicably cite the complete incompetence of Romero and Argento (!). I must say that these criticisms are unfounded– I see TWO EVIL EYES as one of the stronger horror omnibii, fusing outrageous Savini gore, virtuoso camera-work, audacious performances (including an entire host of CREEPSHOW alumni), and original expansions to the Poe stories together into a result that's occasionally hilarious and occasionally terrifying.

So without further ado– since Poe was a poet, after all– I'll express my love for TWO EVIL EYES in the form of verse:

THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF M. VALDEMAR (in the mode of "The Raven")

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered zombie theory,
I felt a hankering for some Romero,
seized the disc and gave it a go,

Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven though he sorta looked a crow.
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he,
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched by the one-sheet of CREEPSHOW--
Perched upon a bust of Carpy above the one-sheet of CREEPSHOW--
Perched, and sat... like in the Poe!

Then the ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of neon electric glow,
"Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou," I said, "art sure no Wes Craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from your nightly sorrow--
Tell me what thy lordly name is upon this night's horror-show!"
And quoth the raven... "Adrienne Barbeau."


It wasn't Father's Day, but Bingo O'Malley still wandered around, dead (ish)

You see, he died while hypnotized, so he can't sleep with the fish

This causes unease to his trophy wife
Who realllllly doesn't want his eternal life
Adrienne's performance is pretty sympathetic
Which after CREEPSHOW's "Billie" is no small trick
Gold-diggers got souls sometimes, too
(and you'll never hear me say that in another review)
The conspiring lovers wear yuppie pinstripes

and E.G. Marshall delivers some nice "old man gripes"

There's twists and turns and how the plot does grow!
Quoth the raven, "Adrienne Barbeau."

Hey lookit, it's Tom Atkins as a hard-boiled detective!
One of these days, I'll do a full-blown retrospective

And we hear about The Others, from the opposing side of the mortal gate
And while I won't reveal what they look like, I'll say that they're well worth the wait!

And Carpy's ex-gal shares a scene with (Christine Forrest) she of Romero,
Ya don't see that every day, I'll have you know
I'll bet they had some tales to tell in the midst of that tableau
It's not the kind of thing ya see in a film by Truffaut

So quoth the Raven, "Adrienne Barbeau."

And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Carpy above the one-sheet of CREEPSHOW;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow from his toe;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the row
Shall be lifted-- God bless George Romer-o!

~~~


THE BLACK CAT (in the mode of "The Bells")

See the suavitude of the Keitels
Bow-tied Keitels!

What a world of merriment
his beret fortells

He's a sort of Pittsburgh Weegee

What's this, who... me?

Oh that Keitels, tells, tells

Oh how we long to see
a shot of POV
on our old tube TV

So thank God for Signore Argento
The man puts on a goddamn show

There's things that he's got
and things that he ain't
of the latter, there's not
a great deal of restraint

Pendulum P-O-V
looks pretty good to me
(the gore's all Savini)

Cat P-O-V rears its feline head
and instills in Keitel a true sense of dread

He's a beret-wearin' artist livin' life in the city
He just wants to photograph the nice little kitty


He's shacked up with a sensitive l'il lady
her hair's as red as the beard of O'Grady

She's a music teacher to a young Julie Benz
And Argento captures all this with his wide-angle lens

Her violin music so beautifully wells
For the Keitels tells tells
The Keitels tells tells

Harvey hits up a ren-fair
But who knows if it's really there

It's probably only in his dream
But is there more to it than it would seem?

John Amos shows up, helpin' solve some crimes
But the plot's pretty fucken far from GOOD TIMES

Watch for Savini, blink and you'll miss 'im, gettin' arrested by the police
and if you're paying attention, his character's taken from Poe's Berenice

I don't mean to dwell
But this segment's all about Keitel
Oh the rapture it impels
of the Keitels tells tells

The cat begins driving dear Keitel mad
And so he resolves to do something bad

He begins choking the cat beyond hope of resurrection
(Yikes- I really hope Keitel didn't have an erection)

But what the hells who can really tells
After all, we're dealing with Keitels
(The Keitels tells tells)



At least it's set to smooth sax jazzytown
Nothin' set to that can ever make me frown

Amongst animal lovers, nausea it may induce
BUT DON'T WORRY MY FRIENDS THERE WAS NO ABUSE!!!


And check out this bar
I really hope it's not far

Sure, it ain't the Oak Room or the Ritz
But I'll bet you can pick up a cold sixer of Schlitz

Then Martin Balsam (from PSYCHO!) walks toward the stair
which'll give any true horror lover a nice fuzzy scare


Oh, how the danger sinks and swells
By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of Keitels

Of the Keitels
Of the Keitels tells tells tells
Tells tells tells
In the clamor and the clangor of the Keitels!

Tequila for breakfast– er make mine a Mezcal
It's merely a warm-up for Keitel's zany Grand Mal

For the Keitels tells tells
Oh how he tells tells tells


"IT'S... A... FUCKING CAT!!!! MEOW!!!! MEOWWWW!!"

MEOWWWW!!!

Keitel must have his say
We only do things his way

That Keitels tells tells
The Keitels tells tells

Oh the little lady's not too impressed, but how about now:


MEOW!!!!

MEOWWWW!!!

MEOWWWWW!!!!



-Sean Gill