CARNIVAL OF SOULS (1962)

I have had this film on a DVD of three public domain horror films sitting unwatched since 2003. I had long heard it was a unique and interesting horror film and having watched it I am glad I waited so very long to do so.  CARNIVAL OF SOULS manages to transcend its B-Movie origins and ends up becoming something altogether different. It is referred to as a cult classic but I think that does the film a disservice. It manages to take itself into a realm where it becomes simply a classic.

Mary Henry is the passenger in a car with friends. They take up the offer of a drag race but lose control and the car plummets off a bridge.  All appear drowned, until Mary miraculously emerges from the river. After recovering from the accident, Mary accepts a job as a church organist and moves to a new town. However, she is trailed by a strange spectral figure that seems connected with an abandoned pavilion by the sea.

I am not really sure where to begin with this film, there is so much to it. The script must not have looked anything special. The dialogue is reasonable if stilted and there is little in the way of characterisation.  The plot is essentially a reworking of Ambrose Bierce’s An Occurrence at Owl Creek Ridge. The main character narrowly escapes death and goes through a series of increasingly wild events only at the last to find that they died and all they experienced was in their minds. Recently BBCs Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes and JJ Abram’s Lost all reworked the concept. It is not in the script where the magic of this film lays.

Mary Henry is played by Candace Hillgloss, an actress with an unremarkable career. Her only other film of note appears to be The Curse of the Living Corpse another drive-in B-Movie.  She is not by any definition a good actress; she is stiff and her speech leaden. Somehow this adds to films sense of dislocation. Mary is an isolated figure throughout and her performance gives a very strange feeling to the whole piece.

The rest of the characters are better but only marginally so. A series of ciphers whose characters can be described by their job titles acted out like a local Am-dram play.  This unusually artificial sensation somehow makes it seem slightly more real. As if the camera is following actual people rather than actors. It is hard to define the sensation it creates except there is a bold sense of terror and tension running throughout the film.  It looks more like a French New Wave film than an American B-Movie. It has the same air of narrative ambiguity and subjective realism.  The film marketed itself with the tag line “A New Wave picture you CANNOT forget” If this was just marketing or a deliberate intention by the film maker I don’t know but it fits as New Wave cinema in France would not end until 1964.

It is the direction which really sets this apart. The cinematography has a strange, dreamlike air to it. It creates a sense of water and fluidity throughout. I do not know if this was intentional but as Mary drowns in the film I like to think not. The director Herk Harvey mostly worked in educational and public information films so even with its dreamlike atmosphere it feels very real. It is an incredible trick to pull off. I suspect this film was a major influence on David Lynch. His films Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Mulholland Drive have the same tone as CARNIVAL OF SOULS.  The audience are shown a dream as a documentary. I also detect an influence on George A. Romero from this film. The spectral figure which haunts Mary at one point arises from the water. Romero would shoot an almost identical scene in Land of the Dead with his zombies replacing CARNIVAL OF SOULS’ ghosts.

CARNIVAL OF SOULS is not just a cult classic it is a classic. This film deserves preservation as it is quite astonishing. It creates a sense of dread and unease in every part of the frame and note on the soundtrack. In any discussion of the influence of French New Wave cinema in America this should be the first and last example. Somehow what could easily have been a creaky B-Movie becomes art. It has stepped beyond the confines of its commercial format into something altogether different; it is like opening a Superman comic to find it has been drawn by Picasso. I say to everybody to see this film and you are in luck. As so often happened with B-Movies the copyright was not maintained properly and it has fallen into the public domain. So I present to you now CARNIVAL OF SOULS, “A Sensation About  A New Dimension”

THE BLACK HOLE (1979)

This is a film which has passed me by over the years. One of the post-Star Wars sci-fi boom films of the late 70s and early 80s it was one of Disney’s rare excursions into darker territory (Both literally and figuratively; the film’s about a Black Hole). THE BLACK HOLE has become something of a curio over the years. Unlike its Disney stable mate Tron it has inspired no spin-offs or calls for sequels.  The only real presence it has in pop culture is V.I.N.CENT, the floating robot which clearly came about as an attempt to emulate R2 D2s success. I had caught moments of it over the years on television but had always missed the first 20 minutes so never watched it through. My SKY TV package had been trailing the new Disney Film Channel for some months but all the trailers had focused exclusively on its animation output so it was a great delight when flicking through the on demand section one night on my iPad I found that it rather more than that. Such gems as One of My Dinosaurs is Missing are out of the remit of this blog so I finally settled on filling my sci-fi film knowledge’s black hole (Ahh see what I did there. I impress nobody)

The research vessel the USS Palomino discovers a long lost ship, the USS Cygnus, on the event horizon of a black hole. Empty except for the scientist Dr. Hans Reinhardt and a crew of mysterious robots the course is set beyond the final frontier and into the black hole.

"R2-D2. Is he famous?"

This is a really decent film and has been unfairly forgotten in the annuls of sci-fi cinema. It is a good story which an interesting cast and great production design but I think I can see why it has fallen from the radar. It has a confused tone as it lacks the rigour of hard sci-fi and the daring-do of space opera. In falling in-between it is not successful as either. I think there was a serious Silent Running esque story at the core of this film but the success of Star Wars led to the introduction of melodramatic elements which might have been left for another film. If you can imagine 2001 with cute robot sidekicks and laser battles you are not a million light years away from this film. Actually that would be a great film – Hal in the body of a golden butler with a psychotic glint and the Monolith at the end transforms into a massive robot with a gun.  But I digress.

The film takes a turn into very 2001 territory at the end with a strange bit of metaphorical madness involving heaven and hell imagery. I dismissed it as quite tame then realised it was fairly bold for more modern Disney. It has that air of darkness which the original Disney films had but became lost once Walt Disney’s vision was replaced by corporate pastiche.

A wonderfully eclectic cast including Ernest Borgnine, Roberts Foster and Norman Bates himself Anthony Perkins creates a great texture to this film playing characters far from the traditional Hollywood archetypes. I cannot think of another large budget film with an aging cast full of scientists and journalists.  Roddy McDowell voices V.I.N.CENT and rather raises the role above that cute robot sidekick. His sarcastic, droll performance gently undercuts the whole thing. He is almost a prototype for Joss Whedon’s knowing characters.

The real stand-out of this film is the production design. It is fantastic on a scale we rarely see these days. Huge physical sets which look like somebody has translated sci-fi book covers into vivid architecture. There’s a reality to it modern green-screening cannot approach. The USS Cygnus is a wondrous thing and I was wondering why it seemed familiar. I think it may have been an influence on the Destiny in Stargate Universe. There are certain similarities of scale and design which seem more than subconscious. Vast industrial spaces illuminated by sulfurous yellow arc lights like a Stoke-On-Trent in space.

This could have been a great film but it does not quite manage to get there. I think it may have been Disney corporate policy which held it back. It is with some trepidation I hear a remake is abroad from the director of Tron: Legacy. There is nothing really sacred in this film, no internet fan voices clamoring for nostalgia which can hamper the best of reboots. I rather hope they embrace the impossible in the remake and make it into the film it should have been.

THE CURSE OF THE WEREWOLF (1961)

"Lovely Poster"

Now dear reader, this was an interesting one. I had been looking forward to rewatching this film for a very long time. I had fond memories of staying up to watch it late at night on Channel 4 when I was a bedroom lurking youth.  Now as a bedroom lurking adult it seemed time to revisit a film which I enjoyed so much I remembered vividly. After watching Hammer’s only werewolf film I discovered something to my horror. Many people are disappointed when watching films through the spectrum of age as time and opinions change. I was not so much disappointed as surprised because this was not the film I remembered.  There was one scene which seemed familiar and the film’s Spanish setting rang bells but nothing else.  My normally infallible memory had failed me spectacularly. I was watching a rather tame film about a man struggling with the beast inside rather than the vivid horror film set in zoo I recalled so lucidly. All roads lead to Wikipedia and I discovered what the problem was. I was not misremembering this film. I was remembering an entirely different film with virtually the same plot, Tyburn Studio’s Legend of the Werewolf.

Once I had got over this confusing disappointment I could actually get back to the film.

One Christmas Day a child is born to a mute runaway. The child’s bastard origins on the Lord’s Day curse him to become a werewolf.  Taken in and raised by the kindly Don Alfredo when he grows up to be a man he leaves home to work in a winery. The temptations of lust overwhelm him and the wolf comes out one full moon.

A rather lacklustre entry into the Hammer canon which start somewhere interesting ends abruptly and goes nowhere in between. In that respect it is very like the A47 between Norwich and Thetford. There is a long winded opening scene of a beggar being locked away by a sadistic aristocrat which rather eludes me. It spends all its time building sympathy for the poor man only to have him commit a rather unpleasant rape at the first opportunity. The product of which is Leon, the boy destined to become a werewolf. I kept getting thrown by the choice of name. Leo as in Lion, for a man who turns into a wolf, which sent me into a right symbolic funk and then realised I was probably the only person in the world who had ever considered that so promptly told me to shut up.  “This is my pet pit bull Lion-O”, but I digress. The film plods along mostly and without much of anything happening. Some Spaniards get drunk and disaster occurs when Leon visits a brothel and the beast runs free. Then at the end the werewolf is shot. That is the film really. To put it briefly;   beggar, rape, baby, wine press  werewolf, dead werewolf. That actually makes it sound more interesting than it is. The best I can say for this film is it is brief.

"You been at the sherry again?"

There are some good points to Curse of the Werewolf. Oliver Reed is wonderful in a relatively early role. He summons the animistic passion of Leon excellently and Clifford Evans is fantastic as Don Alfredo, his adopted father. Warren Mitchell makes an appearance playing a man of indeterminate Hispanic/Middle-eastern ethnicity as he so often did back then.

Terence Fisher’s direction is as ever excellent and the film is really lifted by a fantastic musical score. This is one of the least impressive of Hammer’s golden age of horror films. It is not exactly bad it just never really gets started. The one scene I could remember, of Leon as a child half turned into a werewolf pulling against the bars which imprison him is the scariest scene in the film and was probably why it stuck in my mind.  The rest of it has receded replaced by the seemingly far more interesting Legend of the Werewolf.  Now that is a film I am looking forward to seeing.

THE QUATERMASS XPERIMENT (1955)

As it is the 50th Anniversary of Doctor Who this year I have decided it was time to revisit his immediate fictional predecessor Bernard Quatermass. Invented by Nigel Kneale in the 1950s Quatermass was a British Rocket Scientist who took on unknown alien menaces threatening humanity (well the British Countryside). 

Originally a BBC series the Quatermass Experiment Hammer licenced it for the screen in 1955 and began its success sparked the Hammer Horror genre. I shall be watching the whole Quatermass series and so begin where it all started.

A mission to space, launched by Prof. Bernard Quatermass' British Rocket Group, goes ever wrong and crashes back to earth. Only one of the three astronauts has survived and he begins to change into something else, something inhuman. When he escapes from custody Quatermass realises that what the astronaut is turning into is a threat to all humanity.

This is a frustrating film. I enjoyed it but I do not think I can say it is actually a good film. The script compresses the orginal 6 part BBC drama in 90 minutes which gives it a great pace. However, there is something lacking in this film. Some things happen and then at the end they stop and I never quite care about the journey. The more I have thought about the more I have wondered if it is because it was essentially the first Hammer Horror. It lacks the  vividness and lurid incident of the later films and goes beyond taking itself seriously. Hammer Horrors were never tongue in-cheek, that was a dreadful post-ironic media imposition, but they knew what they were there for. To get the teenagers in on a Friday night on the promise of swooning maidens and horrid monsters. The Quatermass Xperiment comes across as too earnest and it seems like it wants to say something relevant about the space race when it does not actually have an opinion.

"Evening All"

This feeling is not helped by the casting of Brian Donleavy as Quatermass.I do not think I have ever seen such a spectacular bit of miscasting in any film. The character is written as  a questing enthusiastic scientist seeking to push the boundaries of science but Donleavy delivers it like some humourless drill sergeant less interested in the pursuit of knowledge than throwing his weight around. His performance is stiff and lifeless and every time he walks on screen the film sinks. What is even more frustrating is the supporting cast are uniformly excellent with Lionel Jeoffries appearing briefly and being more Quatermass than Quatermass himself. One piece of casting which I did not know about and was a pleasant uprise was Jack Warner was Police Inspector Lomax. Dixon of Dock Green himself plays Lomax with a gusto which draws you in. I see why he became Britain's favourite copper for all those years. He is set up as the counterpoint to Quatermass, the supposed rationalist and intellectual, as a salt-of-the-earth man who believes in the bible. He comes to accept what is happening because of the evidence presented even if he does not think man should be meddling. Clearly there was supposed to be more of an opposition on the character arcs between Lomax and Quatermass. Lomax accepts that the events are going wrong because of the evidence presented. Quatermass who was supposed to embrace the unknown, has his faith in science and progress put to the test by events going wrong, or more importantly, not as he predicted. This is there in the script but Donleavy's stilted baleful performance robs the film of any of it.

"I don't know what's stiffer. This man or your acting"

There are some lovely moments in the film. A wonderfully strange bit when the changing astronaut absorbs a cactus into his body for no discernible reason (well there is a bit of techno-babble why but it never really explains the scene). Later on there is a riff on the scene from Universal's Frankenstein when the Monster encounters the child playing. Unlike in that film there is no real denouement to the scene apart from perhaps indication of the last vestige of the astronaut's humanity when he leaves the child to play. 

But those two scenes alone do not a great film make. This film has more worth as a curiosity than an actual film on its own merits. If you are a fan of Hammer Horror it is interesting to see where it all began and to see the first hero of British TV on the big screen. The film was named the Quatermass Xperiment to cash in on the new X Certificate fad but it never quite lives up to its own publicity. It set the stage for what was come but never really comes to life itself. So an inauspicious start to watching the Quatermass series but hopefully it can only get better from here. I am disappointed nobody has done the Quatermass XXXperiment yet.