13 Ghosts (1960)

               These days the name William Castle almost refers more to a concept than a person. In the popular consciousness he kind of encompasses all the wily, slightly shady film producers who wheeled and dealed with the various independent cinema owners of the 50’s and 60’s to get their non-studio films booked and in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Castle is kind of the sanitized version of the archetype, since generally his films were simple monster movies or thrillers with a distinct lack of nudity or gore. He was contemporaneous of but very distinct from similar producers like Herschell Gordon Lewis, of ‘Blood Feast’ and ‘2,000 Maniacs’ fame, or Roger Corman, who kind of built his own studio system. Before the consolidation of the theaters into large chains a smart producer could book any number of theaters with a killer title and a slick poster, then use that money to actually make the movie. The reason genre films seemed to whipsaw around for a couple of decades, from nudies to monsters to gore to thrillers to hippy stuff, is because it all directly tracked from the feedback theater owners were getting from their teenage clientele.

              Castle is such a fun character because of his endless parade of gimmicks. Unlike a lot of other such producers, who would use the notoriety of the content of their films as their own advertising (such as 1967’s ‘Teenage Mother,’ which boasted the tagline “The film that dares to explain what most parents can't.”), Castle came up with a seemingly endless parade of dumb publicity ideas. In 1959’s ‘The Tingler’ the titular monster killed people by latching on to their spinal cords, so he had little electric buzzers placed on random people’s seats to give them a jolt in sync with the monster’s attacks in the movie. In ‘Mr. Sardonicus’ the audience could vote on which of two different endings would be shown, death or mercy. That sort of thing.

              In ’13 Ghosts’ it was “Illusion-O,” a variation on the usual 3D colored glasses. Since there’s a quasi-magic set of ghost spectacles in the movie, whenever a character would put them on the film’s color would shift from pure black and white to shaded blue, except for the ghosts which were shaded red. Audiences were handed two pairs of glasses with colored cellophane lenses, one pair blue and one red. If you were “chicken” you could wear the blue lenses and thus not see the ghosts at all, if you wore the red lenses the ghosts would be even more intense. This really doesn’t translate outside of the theatrical experience; most home video releases have just included the ghost footage in black and white, although I’ve also seen a blu-ray version that keeps the tinting. I can’t speak to how well the experience worked in the theater but watching it now the ghost segments just grind everything to a halt while the terrible effects take over.

The effects aren't ... seamless.

              Castle wrote and directed the movie himself, and since this is my first Castle movie I really had no idea what to expect. Luckily my first reaction is one of pleasant surprise since the dialogue and scene construction aren’t terrible. There’s not a whole lot to this movie but the character motivations are well established, the relationships between people are clearly delineated, the only character I don’t like is the villain, and all of the people I do like get happy endings. Nobody falls off a cliff and most of the movie isn’t spent waiting for the various people who know the backstory to dribble it out to everyone else. The direction is simple and standard, just a couple of steps up from tv dramas of the time, but aside from the ghost segments everything is paced pretty well.

              The only actor of much note is the child actor who got top billing, Charles Herbert as Arther “Buck” Zorba. Interesting that the family at the center of the movie is Greek and it’s never really mentioned, I guess good job the 60’s? He was very popular at the time, in fact Castle only secured him by promising that top billing, but a couple of years after this he started to age up and his career completely evaporated. His isn’t a new story, child actors have been treated terribly by the industry for decades, but it’s interesting to run into someone up there in popularity with Tommy Kirk or Bill Mumy that I’ve never heard of. It’s pretty depressing to wonder just how many other discarded child actors are out there and how many I’ve seen in movies like this without ever knowing what happened to them.

              Oh, I tell a lie. There’s also Margarent Hamilton, of Oz fame, who plays Elaine Zacharides, the spooky house’s housekeeper with a mysterious past. That’s worth a note. I wish they didn’t make quite so many witch references with her, but by all accounts she was comfortable with her legacy in later life, and at least she was working.

              The movie opens solidly. We’re introduced to Donald Woods as Cyrus Zorba, leading a tour of the LA Museum and explaining the history of the tar pits. He gets called away to take a phone call from his wife, Hilda, played by Rosemary DeCamp, who tersely informs him that their furniture is being repossessed. Again. He’s a little surprised and vague on the details of their money, at which she is completely unsurprised. That night they have a little birthday party on the floor for their youngest, Buck. His older sister Medea, played by Jo Morrow, mercilessly teases him throughout, and it’s kind of nice to see a scene that’s doing more than one thing at a time. We’re meeting the family, getting their dynamics, establishing that Buck has a thing for ghost stories and spooky stuff in general, and we’re also getting the details of their financial situation, all through their dialogue. They’re clearly broke despite Cyrus’ museum job, but the family is also pretty close and happy despite that, clearly having gotten used to making the best of it. The scene pre-answers a lot of questions the audience is soon going to have about why they’re putting up with a house full of so many ghosts.

              Buck makes a wish to live in a house with furniture nobody could take away and a spooky breeze blows out his birthday candles. There’s a buzz at the door and a spooky man is there with a telegram from a local lawyer, Benjamin Rush, played by Martin Milner. The go to see him the next day and it turns out they’ve just inherited a mansion, furniture and all, from Cyrus’ rich uncle Plato Zorba. He was an eccentric genius and the lawyer grimly informs them that he collected ghosts from all over the world and kept them in his house. He also hands over a box with the magic ghost spectacles in them. A fake fly clearly on a string buzzes around them for a few seconds before landing on the glasses and instantly dying in a huge spark. Good stuff.

              The family of course moves right into the house. Various bits of the will come to light over the next few scenes, ticking off questions the audience might have. Turns out that Plato liquidated all his funds into cash but nobody knows where the money is, which is the central mystery the movie eventually turns to. If the family doesn’t live in the house it goes to the state, so they couldn’t sell it even if they wanted to. It doesn’t come with the aforementioned Margaret Hamilton, and it’s established that the family explained that they couldn’t pay her, but she’s agreed to work for room and board while she looks for a job elsewhere. It’s not perfect but it does explain why the family stays when the ghosts show up: they’re broke and they don’t have anywhere else to go.

              At around 17 minutes in the movie has a Ouija board scene, a good thirteen years before ‘The Exorcist.’ Slightly less of a box office phenomenon, this one, so I understand the lack of accompanying hysteria around it. The session goes wrong, with the board very directly stating that there sure are ghosts in the house (12 of them to be exact, they’re threatening to have 13) and that one of the family is going to die. The planchette them floats over to point at the sister Medea, although she’s never really threatened in the movie so I don’t know what’s going on there. A huge framed painting tips off the wall and smashes right down onto the board, not really coming close to anyone but it's relatively shocking. The picture is back on the wall, perfectly fine, for the rest of the movie, by the way.

              The next forty-five minutes are just rotating instances of the Illusion-O gimmick being used over and over. I should explain, during these scenes they overlay semi-transparent footage of the ‘ghosts.’ The worst is the kitchen, where a guy clearly dressed in a black bodysuit with white shorts and a chef hat on and with a clearly cardboard white mustache stuck to his face mimes taking a butcher knife to another couple of people also in black bodysuits. Without the colored glasses it’s clearly just people in costumes overlaid on the actual footage. They also hold on the scenes for way too long. At one point Cyrus wanders down into a hidden lab, puts on the glasses for no real reason, then recoils from random skellingtons and ghouls and a whirling something of fire for a solid two minutes. That’s a long time to see things on strings being jerked around. There’s also a section where Buck grabs the ghost glasses off of a coffee table, which is obviously where you store such things, wanders around with them in one hand without ever putting them on, which is certainly how kids work, then eventually finds himself in the basement poking around an old chest once owned by a lion tamer. So now a ghost lion and ghost headless lion tamer show up to kind of be in the same shots as the kid for a good three minutes. It does end with a decent joke as Buck spends the next few scenes telling everyone he just saw a lion and gets blown off.

I mean ....

              Eventually the ghost shenanigans cause Cyrus to discover a switch in Plato’s old bed that lowers the canopy down to the mattress. It’s been established that Plato died in bed of apparent suffocation, by the way. I’ll address how stupid all this is in due time. The family learns that, rather than just a housekeeper, Elaine was Plato’s assistant and fully versed in all the spooky goings on. The ghost stuff seems to escalate when a zombie apparently shows up in Madea’s room. This is eventually revealed to be the lawyer, spoilers he’s the bad guy, which doesn’t really make sense by the end, but we’re moving on. They decide to hold a full séance to contact Plato and ask him what the heck is going on. Around this time Buck discovers Plato’s hidden fortune when he’s messing around with the stairs. Benjamin the lawyer happens upon him at this very moment and instantly flips from friendly and charming to deeply skeevy. He gets Buck to promise not to tell the rest of the family until tomorrow when it’ll be a big surprise. For the past few scenes he’d been pitching the rest of the family on schemes to get them out of the house, clearly intent on finding the money, and this is his big chance.

              The séance happens and Plato possesses Cyrus briefly, uttering some vague words about a crime having been done to him. They begin to suspect that he’s hanging around to get revenge for some unspecified wrong, not really getting the idea that he was murdered by the lawyer for his money. After the séance everyone goes to bed, unaware that the lawyer hid upstairs after getting Buck to promise his silence. He’s wearing part of the zombie costume for no real reason and checks that the canopy-lowering switch on the bed still works. He then goes to Buck’s room, bodily picks up the sleeping child, carries him to the murder bed, and kind of plops him down. I was a super heavy sleeper as a kid and I would not have slept through that.

              The lawyer starts the incredibly slow process of lowering the canopy down onto the sleeping child to smother him, and let’s just have a brief aside examining the logistics of this method of murder. Somehow this lawyer, through frequent trips to the house to go over legal matters with a paranoid shut-in, installed a mechanism on the shut-in’s existing bed that would very slowly lower the cloth canopy down onto a sleeping human, all without being noticed. Once lowered the coverage is so tight that not only does it prevent the victim from escaping they are smothered to death. Was this an all-in-one conversion kit he picked up from his local murder store or was it something he managed to piece together himself? Did he consult an engineering buddy from school with the excuse that he was thinking about writing a murder mystery and wanted to get the details right? Was it a prop that Plato had sitting around from his worldwide ghost hunting forays that he decided to get some use out of? If he’s going to smother the boy anyways why not just do it with a pillow in his own bed, why risk waking him up by whipping him from one bed to another?

              Luckily for everyone but the lawyer ghost Plato shows up. His moans wake Buck, who quickly rolls himself off of the bed and starts screaming. While everyone rushes to the room ghost Plato shoves the lawyer under the descending canopy. Buck rushes out of the room, yelling about the ghost and the lawyer and everything, and the scene fades to black as everyone runs into the room. It’s never made clear what the lawyer’s fate is.

              There’s a fun little epilogue as the family sits around the dinner table very clearly relishing the act of slowly counting out their cash. There was a budding romance between the lawyer and Madea, but she doesn’t seem too broken up about it. Elaine states that the ghosts are gone, but when the rest of the family leaves Buck asks her if they’ve really left, and she gives an ominous non-answer, much to Buck’s delight. There’s a final terrible montage of ghost effects in the foyer of the house before the front door closes and spooky red letters spell out “House for Sale.” Then William Castle briefly appears to dare people to take their ghost glasses home if they’re so sure ghosts aren’t real.

              Gimmick aside, there’s absolutely nothing special about this movie, but I kind of liked it. It’s hard to overstate how much decent performances of even slightly interesting dialogue and characters can make or break a movie. I will admit that something like ‘The Uninvited’ was technically (and budgetarily) a better movie, but I didn’t really like the characters and thus didn’t really care as they went back and forth between dialogue scenes where they didn’t say much of interest to each other. The special effects in this movie are way more frequent but much worse than a movie made sixteen years prior, yet I had a better time here. The mystery is foolish and there’s no real closure beyond knowing that the lawyer was the bad guy, but the simple fact that the family is happy and together at the end, along with the frankly greedy way they’re counting their money, endears me to them. As I said this is the first William Castle movie I’ve seen (it was almost ‘House on Haunted Hill’), and this makes me want to watch some more. I think it was the salesman in him that gave him an idea of the kind of movies people want to watch. This is far from high art, but it did leave me feeling pretty good by the end credits, and that’s something a lot of movies fail to accomplish.

Back from the Dead (1957)

               Through no fault of this movie, I was already annoyed before I even started watching. I had two solid films locked and loaded, ready to go, and then it turned out that both of them had a complete lack of any actual ghosts. Despite their titles, 1958’s ‘The Haunted Strangler’ and 1959’s ‘House on Haunted Hill’ feature exactly zero hauntings between them. I was looking forward to them too, ‘The Haunted Strangler’ is a Boris Karloff vehicle good enough to be included in the Criterion box set “Monsters and Madmen,” and the other is a tight little thriller letting Vincent Price strut his stuff. I still have the 1999 remake of that one to come so I might shove in a little review of the original when I get to the newer one, which as I recall has some terrible CGI crammed in.

              Eventually I dug up 1957’s ‘Back from the Dead.’ I continue to be surprised at how few serious ghost movies were produced in the first few decades of the film industry. It started to pick up in the 1960’s for whatever reason and seemed to reach something of a frenzy by the late 90’s / early 2000’s (just in the years from 1999 to 2002 I currently have nine different movies picked out). Of course, the ‘found footage’ craze loves it some ghosts but I’m still trying to come up with some additional titles so I don’t have to fall back on ‘Insidious.’ I literally went on Wikipedia and just started looking at horror movies year by year until I found this one.

              The director was Charles Marquis Warren, who had a decent career as a producer and writer. He was primarily known for westerns, writing such titles as ‘Streets of Laredo’ and ‘Little Big Horn.’ He was also involved in the production of the tv shows ‘Rawhide’ and ‘Gunsmoke.’ 1957 was his busiest year, he directed five movies in twelve months. The screenplay was by Catherine Turney, adapting her own 1952 novel. She bounced back and forth between Hollywood and plays to some success. Much of her early work in the industry was uncredited, as seems to have been all too common, and this was her final screenplay.

              There are really only two actors in the film that I think are in any way interesting. The first is Peggie Castle, who here plays the lead role(s). The reason she’s notable to me is that she starred in two different MST3K movies, ‘Invasion, U.S.A.’ and ‘The Beginning of the End,’ the second one as the lead opposite Peter Graves, and those are still pretty foundational texts for me. She had a decent career and even landed a three-year stint as one of the main characters of the tv western “Lawman.” She’s pretty good in this movie in a dual role as a woman named Mandy who becomes possessed by a dead woman named Felicia, though the script doesn’t give her a lot to do besides vamp.

              Far more interesting is Marsha Hunt as Mandy’s sister, Kate. Although I didn’t really like this movie, I have to give it credit for actually doing what I keep asking these films to do, which is beef up a secondary woman’s role into the lead that the story structure naturally wants it to be. This movie has an ostensible male protagonist of sorts in Dick, Mandy’s husband, but he doesn’t have a whole lot do with the story and thus is offscreen a great deal of the time. Marsha Hunt had a fascinating life. Her career was plugging along just fine for the first few years, she didn’t have ingenue looks but what she did have was a good work ethic and natural acting talent. Then in 1950 she ran into the HUAC buzzsaw and got blacklisted. By 1957 the infamy had faded enough that she was able to star in six movies in three years before semi-retiring in 1960. After that she took the occasional tv and stage role but focused more on humanitarian efforts for the homeless and mentally ill of California. She only died two years ago. Seemed like a neat lady and she’s the best part of this movie by quite some distance.

              The plot is very straightforward, but to make up for that it’s constructed in the most obvious and boring way possible. Entire chunks of the backstory are kept shrouded in mystery for absolutely no reason except empty drama. About half of the eight or so characters in the movie are fully aware of what’s going on and aren’t sharing it with the audience or the leads for reasons ranging from “Now’s not the time,” to “Let me think more about it first.” About every twenty minutes we get an exposition dump about very specific parts of the backstory, just enough to lead us to the next set of scenes that eventually lead us to the next exposition dump, repeat until credits. The plot just kind of happens to the characters. I was 47 minutes into a 79-minute movie when I wrote in my notes in big letters, “Actual character action!” This is when Kate starts to do things besides exist in the backgrounds of scenes.

              The movie opens with dumb, faux-spooky narration over waves on a beach. A person eventually revealed to be Kate drones on about evil organizations and the harm they cause, and we see a couple of people in robes dump a body off of a cliff. I will give the movie some credit, this does come back up. Then we cut to Peggy Castle as Mandy standing on a big rock at the beach, staring at the waves, mildly concerned about the smug female voice laughing in her head and telling her stuff like there’s no escape, you’ll be mine, ha ha ha. Her husband and sister are also at the beach and they collect her soon enough. The husband’s name is Dick and except for feeling guilty for lying about his entire life before meeting Mandy he doesn’t have a whole lot to do in the movie. It’s also established that Mandy is newly pregnant.

              Mandy tells Kate about the voice in her head and how nobody believes her. Kate is properly sympathetic. Then they’re back at Dick and Mandy’s vacation house. Dick insists on playing a specific piece of music that Mandy hates (it’s later mentioned in passing that the spirit of Felicia made him do it). Mandy has a full seizure and passes out. Fade cut to the doctor telling Dick and Kate that she’s lost the baby. We are like ten minutes in and that’s a pretty big hammer to hit the audience with already. After the doctor leaves Mandy wakes up and claims to be someone named Felicia. She calls Dick ‘Dickens,’ Felicia’s pet name for him, and knows things she couldn’t possibly know. Dick stumbles out of the bedroom while the actor holds his face on a stiffly shocked expression, then he dumbly exposits to Kate that Felicia was his first wife who died six years ago. She supposedly fell from some nearby cliffs and, although her body was never found, her wedding ring later turned up inside a shark. It’s all as awkward as it sounds, like a dumb ‘Rebecca.’

              Everyone instantly agrees that, even though she’s acting completely differently and knows things she definitionally couldn’t, Mandy is just going through some kind of phase. The doctor advises them that the best thing for her is to do everything she asks and go along with this whole Felicia thing. I can already tell that physicians in these movies are going to be very mixed bags. I’m deliberately picking movies with real ghosts, so of course in the first half the doctors are all going to be useless, diagnosing patients as delusional, hysterical, etc. when there’s actual spookums afoot. I suspect that the ones who stick around into the second half are going to eventually turn into believers, because if they’re not going to be useful characters the scripts can just drop them from the proceedings, as this one swiftly does.

              If there’s anything entertaining about the next half hour, the stretch of the movie where everyone is walking on eggshells around this spooky possessed woman (until that 47-minute mark when Kate starts making her moves), it’s that Felicia arrives fully aware that she’s possessing Dick’s new wife and acts relatively reasonable about it. She understands that nobody around her believes she’s really Felicia, so she never pushes it that far. She pretty much ignores everyone but Dick, and if anyone claims not to believe her she just dismisses them. At first she has no idea who Kate is, but once it’s explained she acts fairly cold but not overtly hostile. At one point she even grudgingly admits that she supposes they might as well try to be friends. This detente doesn’t last long, but it sidesteps a lot of stupid shenanigans that could have happened.

              It’s also fun that Felicia is clearly a manipulative bitch. Turns out there’s a reason that Dick never mentioned his first wife, and that’s because she’s kinda evil. This trip is the first time Dick’s been back to the old vacation house since Felicia’s death and so people who knew Dick and Felicia back in the day keep turning up. They either have terrible things to say about her or they’re in the same evil cult she was so are a lot more cagy. We’ll get back to the cult in a second, but first I need to mention John, Dick’s old friend, played by Don Haggerty. He’s the only old friend who shows up that sticks around, mostly to romantically pursue Kate. I think some of these old horror movies consider it immoral if the survivors aren’t all paired up by the end. Haggerty was a prolific character actor, mostly playing thugs and police officers due to his sports and military background, and it’s weird to see him play Kate’s love interest here. He’s not bad, just oddly cast. He shows up to explain to her and the audience that Felicia ran with a bad crew back in the day and isn’t to be trusted.

It might be difficult to spot but Felcia's brassiere is showing!

              Eventually Felicia decides she wants to go see her parents. They all troupe over there and first they meet her mother. At the start she doesn’t believe Felicia has really possessed Mandy, then after getting some correct answers to a pop quiz switches right over to being a true believer. This doesn’t entirely make sense based on what we later find out, but it’s not that important. Felicia’s dad hobbles downstairs on a cane and when he’s informed of Felicia’s return he’s horrified, accusing his wife of causing the possession. All of which convinces Dick that his first wife really has come back and causes Kate to genuinely start to panic.

              Some incidental stuff happens next. There’s a dinner party that Felicia ruins by swanning about in some revealing lingerie. John flirts with Kate by telling her to drug herself that night (it doesn’t make a whole lot more sense in context). That night Felicia takes the opportunity presented by a drugged-up Kate to try to kill her by opening up a gas hose in her bedroom, which is pretty inefficient. I kept waiting for that side of the house to blow up. She then goes outside, grabs a big ol’ sickle, and murders Mandy’s dog. Kate manages to save herself from the gas after being roused by Mandy’s voice calling to her from … somewhere. And still none of this is enough for Dick to do anything about Felicia. It does finally kick Kate’s ass into some welcome self-actualizing, though.

              A neighbor named Nancy, someone who used to run with Felicia, drops by and mentions a guy named Renault. Kate finally notices that this is the fourth time he’s been mentioned and starts to ask some useful questions. A day or so later Nancy takes her to meet Renault, who professes to be surprised at Felicia’s return and mutters to himself that Felicia’s mother must have done it behind his back. Which is why it was odd that she was surprised at her daughter’s return before, but never mind. He tells Kate that he’s the only one who can help her, then as soon as she leaves takes out a picture of Felicia and strokes it as he croons how they’ll soon be together again. Nancy sees this and seethes in visible anger.

              Quick scene of Kate getting home, answering a phone, then immediately leaving. She goes to see Felicia’s father, who explains that almost everyone from Felecia’s past is in that cult, including his wife. He left some time ago and is totally a good guy now, so never mind what Renault said, he’s the one who’s going to help her. He doesn’t, and it’s never stated how he thought he was going to, but moving on. As Kate’s leaving Felicia’s mother threatens her, and as she arrives back at the vacation house she starts physically collapsing, apparently from some kind of curse. As she’s writhing around on a couch John randomly shows up. Just his presence is enough to drive the curse away, it seems, and after Kate explains a little bit of what’s going on he drops a massive expository confession. Turns out that six years ago Felicia tried to seduce him at a party. He turned her down and left, only to find that Felicia had hidden inside his car. He stopped along the cliffs and told her to get out, so she threated to kill herself. In the best line of the movie he admits he told her, “Go ahead, this is a great spot for it.” While threatening to jump she accidentally fell into the ocean and died. Turns out he just went home afterwards and didn’t tell anyone about it. This is never mentioned again after this scene and he faces no repercussions for any of it.

              The last fifteen minutes are the usual logistical scramble. Dick gets a call from Felicia’s parents’ maid that they’re both dead. They hurry over and while the dad sure is dead the mom is still dying, apparently from a curse from Renault for daring to summon Felicia without him. They go back home and lock Felicia in her room while the men run around, but she bonks Kate over the head and escapes. Dick and John come back from wherever they were and find Kate recovering. They all rush over to Renault’s house where they interrupt both he and Felicia performing a human sacrifice involving another minor character. Maybe the sacrifice was intended to make the possession permanent? At one point Felicia said she was tired, that’s about all the info we get on any of that. They struggle, then suddenly Nancy is there with a gun, all pissed off about Renault’s love for Felicia, and she forces him outside. Then Felicia has the sacrificial knife and everyone struggles with her until she has another seizure and passes out. There’s a gunshot outside, so John wanders out and finds that Nancy has straight up murdered Renault and is happy to turn herself in to the police.

              The movie ends with Mandy back in bed, fuzzy about what’s happened, and her last lines of dialogue are remembering that she lost her pregnancy (!) and saying that the past little while is like a dream. John and Kate step away and she ponderously intones, “She must never know the truth about what happened to her.” To which John ponderously replies, “Will anyone ever know?” Which yes, now that you mention it, a bunch of people know exactly what happened to her, including Nancy by the way, who is still alive and will have a trial for Renault’s murder during which Mandy will probably be called as a witness, and also during which any number of people will happily testify that for a few weeks she went around claiming to be Dick’s dead first wife Felicia and knowing all sorts of gossip about a cult from back in the day. Also Dick’s old in-laws both died at the same time, likely going to be an inquest on that. Also Mandy still doesn’t know about Dick’s first wife, someone should probably fix that, it’s going to come up again.

              The first and rather irreparable mistake the movie makes is never establishing Mandy as her own character. Peggie Castle plays Mandy for around a grand total of six minutes of screentime, and a lot of that is taken up with seizing, feeling woozy, waking up in bed, not really iconic shit. It’s never made clear what kind of person she is so when Felicia takes over we don’t have anything to compare that performance to. Dick and Kate are both weirded out, but Dick’s a douche we don’t like and Kate’s relationship to Mandy isn’t well-established either, she just hangs in the back of shots looking concerned for the first half of the movie and in the second half she’s running around solving problems and not interacting with Felicia all that much. The cult angle is really undercooked, we see six members total over the course of the movie and by the end they’re almost all dead (or re-dead, in the case of Felicia). We don’t get any specifics of motives or methods, they just wear robes and are evil.

              This is only technically a ghost movie, the word “spirit” is used a couple of times and a woman gets possessed by someone who’s dead. I figure that’s enough. The only special effect is a little bit of extra lighting when Peggie Castle first wakes up as Felicia, no double exposure or cheesecloth needed here. The movie kind of vanished after release, at the time being mostly booked as a double feature with ‘The Unknown Terror,’ also directed by Charles Marquis Warren. Wikipedia notes that contemporary reviews are “difficult to find.” It’s now available on Blu-Ray, which is nice, but it doesn’t seem to be streaming anywhere. Rips of various quality are online in all of the various places, but they all seem to be pan-and-scan VHS rips while the actual film is in 2.35 to 1, of all things. We’re now 2 for 2 on movies with easy access to cliffs to fall from and a plot spent figuring out dead people’s backstories, and while I’m sure the cliff thing is coincidental it’s only now occurring to me that if I’m going to complain about contemporary people investigating the mysterious deaths of people in the past I may well have picked the wrong subgenre to look into.

The Uninvited (1944)

               While putting together the set of movies for this month I’ve been a little surprised at how few scary or at least serious films about ghosts have been produced by the major American studios over the years. I’m even including the direct-to-video boom periods of the 80’s and into the 90’s. VOD and digital filmmaking have lowered the bar to what gets sold as a ‘movie’ considerably in more recent years so there’s all sorts of nonsense in the flooded market now, but for the first handful of decades of the artform it seems spectral spooks were kind of rare. Since I’m not considering comedic ones like the ‘Topper’ movies or ‘Blythe Spirit’ I’m currently facing the daunting prospect of having to include an ‘Insidious’ movie in here to make all 31 days of the month. I have a few decades to go before then so hopefully I can come up with another, more interesting film. Maybe there’s a long-forgotten 80’s movie-of-the-week I can dig up.

              Ray Milland is an actor I should be more familiar with. I vaguely recognized his name during the opening credits to ‘The Uninvited’ but afterwards, when I was doing the little bit of research I do before unleashing a deluge of opining, I learned that for a while in the 1940’s and 50’s he was as big a leading man as any we’ve had. It was only a year after this movie that he won the Academy Award for his role in Billy Wilder’s ‘The Lost Weekend.’ The man was in ‘Dial “M” for Murder,’ ‘Love Story,’ and two different episodes of ‘The Love Boat.’ For at least a couple of years at Paramount he was the highest paid actor in the business. He ended up kind of coasting in the later years of his career, taking minor roles in smaller movies and tv shows as he saw fit, before passing at the age of 79. He’s perfectly fine in this movie.

              Another actor that might perk up some ears is Gail Russell, who did not have as pleasant a life as Milland. This was her third movie role and her first major one. She’d been signed to a long-term contract by Paramount in 1942 when she was just 18. It was reported that during the filming of this movie she would have frequent emotional breakdowns, often crying on set, and it was apparently difficult to get the required length and amount of takes with her. Such stories are all hand-me-downs of hearsay decades after the fact, so I’ll just say that being a woman that young when first eaten by the studio system is more than enough to break anyone. Supposedly a crew member suggested to her that drinking would help calm her nerves between takes. She was dogged with drunk-driving arrests and blown acting jobs for the rest of her life before she drank herself to death at the age of 36. She’s very young and stiff in this movie.

              The rest of the actors are basically fine. The only other notable actor in the movie is Ruth Hussey, who was outstanding as the least-famous corner of the love-square in ‘The Philadelphia Story.’ She’s not given much to do here and frankly her role should have been beefed up into the main character, but we’ll get back to that. Cornelia Otis Skinner plays something of an antagonist in the movie; she was far more well known at the time as a writer and stage performer. Alan Napier has a minor role as a doctor, he’s probably best known today for playing Alfred in the 1966 “Batman” tv show. They are all completely adequate performers.

              The script seems like it passed through a lot of different hands before production, made up as it is of various scenes that tie together well enough but jerk back and forth awkwardly between po-faced serious and corny comedic tones. It’s also almost a full 100 minutes long with far too much plot shoved in. The first credited screenwriter is Dodie Smith, a British novelist best known for writing I Capture the Castle and One-Hundred and One Dalmatians. She took a first pass during a part of her career where she brushed up against Hollywood. The final version seems to have been extensively rewritten by Frank Partos, a staff writer at Paramount who turned out some well-regarded but mostly forgotten noirs. Direction was by Lewis Allen, who had a decent couple of decades in Hollywood turning out a steady stream of mid-budget movies without producing anything particularly memorable. During the 50’s he did a lot of well-regarded television work, including the Frank Sinatra-led ‘Suddenly’ in 1954. He would later direct episodes of ‘The Rifleman,’ ‘Route 66,’ ‘Perry Mason,’ ‘The Fugitive,’ and tons of others.

              It was released to critical and commercial success, being one of the highest-grossing movies of the year. It had a small amount of scandal when questions were raised about some possible lesbian-coding of one of the characters, which I’ll admit is there if you want to look for it but doesn’t seem to have been that important to the movie’s themes. What strikes me about the contemporaneous reviews is how surprised all the critics were that the ghosts in the movie were real and thus how scary the movie was. I have seen the movie and at no point did it occur to me that the movie was even trying to be scary. A little tense, maybe, certainly mysterious, but if I had to go through the movie scene-by-scene again I’m not entirely sure I’d be able to identify any moments that were meant to frighten the audience. I think we’re now so far removed and film content has moved on so much that nothing here codes as scary to a modern audience.

              The main problem I have with the movie is not that I didn’t find it frightening, I don’t think anything before about 1960 is ever going to give me goosebumps, the problem is that because of all the drafts and revisions and ideas put in and taken out and rewritten it’s both way too complicated and way too simple. The contradiction comes from there being this fairly convoluted history to the haunted house and some of the characters that gets unraveled over the course of the movie, meanwhile the characters that are actually on screen don’t do much more than wander from room to room having conversations. There’s even a plot point where one set of characters takes several minutes traveling to rescue another character, then it turns out that they’ve already left for the place everyone just came from, so now they have to go back to where they just were. Much of the movie is taken up by logistics.

              To the premise, such as it is. A brother and sister in their mid-30’s, Rick and Pamela Fitzgerald as played by Milland and Hussey, are wandering around the coastal areas of Cornwall on vacation when they come across a deserted house. Their dog chases a squirrel inside and while retrieving it they fall in love with the place and decide to make an offer. They go to the owner’s house and meet his granddaughter, Stella Meredith, played by Gail Russell. She tries to tell them the house isn’t for sale but then her grandfather, Commander Beech, arrives and instantly accepts their low-ball offer. He does warn them that others have complained about odd noises and sights at the house, but they don’t care.

              The Fitgerald’s are soon moved in and loving the place, except for a studio up on the top floor that seems to always be cold and depressing. We see a bouquet of flowers instantly wilting in the room at like fifteen minutes in so at least the movie lets us know early that earnest spookums is afoot. While they’re in the room they see Stella looking up at them from the edge of the cliffs outside.

It's not an unattractive movie at times.

              The next day Stella apologizes to Rick for staring, explaining that her mother died in the house when she was three and that’s why she didn’t want to sell it. Her father died soon after her mother, so all she has left for family is her grandfather. It also turns out that she’s never been allowed to set foot in the house since her mother’s passing. Oh, and Rick is interested in her so they’re dating now. It technically takes a couple of scenes for the actual courting to begin but that’s what’s happening. The movie very carefully establishes that Stella is 20, as was Russell, and although it doesn’t ever specify Rick’s age Milland himself was 37 at the time of filming, which seems about right. 37 and 20 is not necessarily a creepy age gap, but Russell plays Stella as very young, and from what’s on screen it’s very easy to assume that Rick is the first adult man besides her grandfather to ever pay attention to her. Not super-solid relationship foundations, is what I’m saying. Incidental romances in movies of this era are almost never any good. They have a tendency to want to end films with everyone paired off, even the side characters, and usually don’t feel the need to justify how anyone ended up together.

              Rick leaves for a three-week trip to London to get the rest of their stuff and comes back to find that Pamela has not only learned that the house is haunted, but she’s also gotten pretty blasé about it. The first night he’s back Rick is woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of a woman sobbing. He’s about to go investigate when Pamela tells him not to bother, she’s already looked any number of times and has never found anything. Rick is appropriately skeptical, as he will be for most of the rest of the movie.

              During the next forty-five minutes or so the ghostly backstories are slowly dribbled out between scenes of people getting chills, feeling unexpectedly depressed, animals and maids refusing to go upstairs or ‘spend another night inside this house,’ some mild courting, all ways to shuffle people around the five or six sets they’ve built. Turns out that Stella’s dad was a painter of some ability, as evidenced by the huge pictures all over the place of Stella’s mother Mary. Thus the upstairs studio. We’re grimly informed that he also had a ‘foreign’ model by the name of Carmel, who everyone instantly admits he had an affair with. Mary’s mother supposedly died by accidentally falling from the cliffs behind the house. The clues as they’re uncovered start to point to her actually being murdered by Carmel in a jealous rage, but then! it turns out that actually Stella is Carmel’s biological daughter, a result of the affair. Mary was running to the cliff to throw toddler Stella off of it in a fit of jealous rage when Carmel stopped her, accidentally causing Mary to fall to her death. Carmel caught pneumonia during all of this and slowly died from the deliberate neglect of Mary’s maid, who grew up to run a weird psych ward and is crazy herself, and it turns out that the house actually has two ghosts in it, and Stella gets shipped off to the weird psych ward and they have to rescue her but she’s actually at the house and tries to throw herself off of a cliff and there’s a séance and then Rick laughs at a ghost and his sister Pamela marries the local doctor who she had a grand total of three scenes with, the end.

              It’s not bad by any means but it’s such a standard 1940’s movie, with no actual interiority of characters and such blatant ‘it’s time for a comedy scene’ schtick, that I bounced off of it with no real emotional connection. It’s not scary, it’s not tense, it’s not that pretty to look at, and the dialogue is merely functional. It also has the incorrect main character as Rick is, by far, the least interesting of the three main leads. I have to note as well that the amount this movie doesn’t care about Stella, who the entire plot revolves around, is startling. She has two different ghosts fighting over her, her birth mother Carmel is trying to protect her while her adopted mother Mary has been trying to kill her, and yet most of her dialogue is just meaningless replies to Rick’s endless banter. She finds out that her birth mother is actually this model that she’s kind of heard rumors about a couple of times in the last two decades and has never seen a picture of and by the way this means that her life is a lie, her grandfather has been deliberately deceiving her for her entire actual life, her adopted mother tried to kill her and her birth mother was murdered by a friend of the family she’s known for years, all this heavy, heavy shit, and her reaction to all of this is contained within exactly one short scene and is simply to be happy that she understands why the one ghost feels nice and the other doesn’t. Emotional scars instantly healed, she’s all ready to get married now to someone she’s known for a couple of months.

              I would have preferred following Pamela. She’s the reason they bought the house, feeling an instant connection to the place. This never gets addressed. She spent three entire weeks alone in an actually for-reals haunted mansion and seemed to cope just fine. She probably got up to all sorts of shenanigans, bravely wandering around in an empty house looking for the sobbing woman, chasing after the dog chasing after phantoms, maybe she visits a little antique shop in town and hears some gossip, all sorts of possibilities, but nothing is ever shown or even referenced. It’s mentioned in casual dialogue that Rick is a music critic for a newspaper and that their parents were well off so technically we know where her money’s coming from, but how does she spend her time? We never get told or shown, she just waits in suspended animation between scenes until Rick needs her. I think a better spin on this material would have been Pamela trying to figure out the secrets of the house on her own while Rick wanders around getting into weird drama with that girl who’s way too young for him and her weird family. There is a séance scene in the movie that Pamela’s technically present for but I can’t remember if she even has any lines. She’s the one who believed in the ghosts first, she should have been on top of that shit.

              Rick was the safe, obvious choice of a male lead, and despite Milland’s best efforts he’s just boring. He’s a frustrated composer making do as a critic, so he gets to namedrop some famous musicians while doodling around on a piano to impress the almost-child he’s pursuing. It’s interesting to note that the little ditty he says he wrote for her, “Stella by Starlight,” went on to become a well-known jazz standard. He performatively scoffs at the ghost stuff early on, waving it away as just noises, but then he gets wrapped up in uncovering Stella’s past. Not even as a ploy to get into her pants, just in a kind of dogged but unfocused way that never really gets justified, he’s simply concerned about her in a general way. The rest of his emotions and motivations are left just as vague. The only arc he gets is that he doesn’t believe in ghosts at the beginning then does at the end. A couple of people who covered up a murder are still at large and consequence-free at the end of everything but all the main characters are nicely paired off so we can fade out on a happy ending.

              More than anything else I am genuinely surprised that it was considered notable in 1944 that a ghost movie had ghosts in it. There must have been some grand cultural understanding where it always turned out that the ghost or the phantom or the spirit or whatever had some kind of rational explanation or was due to criminal shenanigans. I admit I made a wrong guess about 20 minutes in, figuring that Stella was faking the ghost noises to get them out of the house before it’d be revealed that there’s a REAL ghost in the house, but no, read that one completely wrong. It’s not like we don’t still have movies and shows where the ghosts aren’t real, the various ‘Scooby-Doo’ properties are still fairly culturally load-bearing, but it can’t really have taken a good three decades of film as a mass-audience art form before they featured real ghosts, can it? They had double-exposure and cheesecloth before then, they had the technology. Maybe they saved the real ghosts for the comedies out of some kind of vestiges of Victorian morality? Either way I hope the movies start getting even a little bit spooky from here on out.

Cocaine Bear (2023)

To hear people talk about it now, ‘Snakes on a Plane’ was the first time anyone thought to use a movie’s title itself to get people’s attention.  This is William Castle erasure.  It also ignores such great 1950’s pulp titles as ‘I was a Teenage Werewolf’ or ‘I Married a Monster from Outer Space.’  Not to mention that in the 60’s and into the 70’s we started getting full-on exploitation gems like ‘Teenage Mother’ and ‘I Spit on Your Grave.’  Sometimes these titles are overly long, like ‘The Englishman who Went up a Hill and Came Down a Mountain,’ sometimes they’re punchy and intriguing, like ‘Two Thousand Maniacs.’  Anyone who sneers at a silly name is ignoring this  long and proud tradition of slapping an attention-grabbing title on a movie that’s more interested in being entertaining than saying anything profound.  Fun movies can be art too, and hooking people into seeing your works is what artists are supposed to do.

In another example of the continuing success of mid-budget movies, ‘Cocaine Bear’ cost a reported $35 million and earned just under $90 million.  That’s Gerard Butler territory, which might be my new standard for success.  It’s enough that director Elizabeth Banks should get some more opportunities (just checked IMDB, she’s busy).  Screenwriter Jimmy Warden should also get some more scripts produced, although now that I look he’s apparently already set to both write and direct his next movie, ‘Borderline.’  I always question writers moving to directing so early in their careers, but on the other hand the script was on the 2020 Black List, so fingers crossed I guess.

The original incident that this movie takes inspiration from happened in 1985, but it wasn’t until 2019 that the producing duo of Lord and Miller announced they were developing Warden’s script as a horror-comedy.  For some reason I keep running into Lord and Miller, and despite generally liking everything I’ve seen with their names bolted on I’m starting to get a bit weary of the pair.  They originally approached Radio Silence Productions, the company behind ‘Ready or Not’ and the last two ‘Scream’ movies.  They turned down ‘Cocaine Bear’ to make ‘Scream (2022),’ which worked out pretty well for them.  Then, early in 2021, Universal Pictures announced they’d acquired the rights to the movie and that Elizabeth Banks would direct.  For such a relatively high-profile movie there’s a worrying number of production company slates during the opening credits, but I think the film managed to handle being pulled in so many different directions well enough.

This, to me, is a quintessential three-and-a-half out of five stars movie.  I’ve always been the kind of person who reads reviews of movies for their own sakes.  At the time of writing I own three different compilations of Roger Ebert’s reviews, as well as books by Anthony Lane, Pauline Kael, James Harvey, etc.  Obviously, I have not seen the vast majority of movies they write about, but I read their books anyways.  Good writing explains itself well enough.  What I’ve noticed is that a lot of my favorite movies are the ones that are well-made, fun, and have a firm grasp of the subject matter and what they’re trying to accomplish.  Grabbing randomly from Roger Ebert’s Movie Yearbook 2004, here is a selection of 3 out of 4 star movies (Ebert doesn’t go to five stars): ‘The Salton Sea,’ ‘Brotherhood of the Wolf,’ and ‘The Fast and the Furious.’  That is a solid set of movies.  What strikes me about this set of films is that they know what they are and what they’re doing.  They take the basics of their genres (in this case crime noir, historical adventure, and ‘Point Break’) and elevate them just enough that you’re pleasantly surprised and entertained.  Examples of similar movies that don’t work would include the 2011 ‘Conan the Barbarian’ and ‘Cabin Fever,’ both of which Ebert gave one and a half stars.  Then you get the really good four star genre shit, like ‘Se7en’ and ‘Inception.’  It’s a continuum, is what I’m saying, and there’s a very satisfied feeling you get from watching a movie and realizing that it accomplished exactly what it set out to do.

The reviews for ‘Cocaine Bear’ were decidedly mixed.  It got a 67% on Rotten Tomatoes, which seems about right, and a 54% on Metacritic, which seems low.  It opened above expectations, which speaks to the marketing campaign, and dropped a decent 54% in its second weekend, which shows that people liked it enough to recommend it to others.  Since it made a decent profit, there’s been some annoying sequel talk, like ‘Cocaine Alligator.’  Without the slim hook of ‘based on a true story’ and the surprise of the title, that’d just be pushing the joke past funny and into being an Asylum original for the SyFy channel.  Good luck getting Keri Russell for that.

Humor is a tricky thing to pin down, and a lot my my justification for liking this movie is that I generally found it funny.  For me it struck a decent, mildly absurdist tone throughout that winked a little at the audience but never went too far into becoming tiresome.  It’s a fairly shaggy screenplay, establishing a few rough groups of characters and their reasons for converging on the same section of the woods, then throws in a bear and boatloads of cocaine.  These groups range from drugs dealers specifically following up on the abandoned cocaine to a group of burnouts who hang around the forest robbing people to Russell’s mom searching for her plot-conveniently missing daughter.

In its best moments the movie establishes an agreeable rhythm as a low-stakes comedy of manners.  In what must have been a blessing to the budget a large portion of this movie is set in the woods.  This means that a lot of screentime is spent watching characters walk down forest paths, have confrontations at forest gazebos, or hide in forest caves.  The thing about forests is that, generally speaking, not a lot of money and effort has to be spent on set dressing or even lighting, if you get lucky with the weather.  That does drop the visual splendor of the movie quite a bit, but it forces the script to make the time we spend with these characters more interesting.  Most of the salary went into the CGI bear anyways, might as well distract us with decent writing.

The plot is utterly basic: a plane drops a bunch of packages of cocaine over a national park, a bear gets into it and goes crazy, chaos ensues.  I want to focus on two of the characters: Eddie, played by Alden Ehrenreich, and Henry, played by Christian Convery.  These two are strangers for almost the entire length of the movie and their storylines are completely separate from each other until the climax.  Eddie is the sad sack son of the drug dealer who owns the abandoned cocaine.  He’s roused from a depression over the death of his wife by his friend and fellow dealer Daveed, played well by O’Shea Jackson Jr., to go recover the cocaine.  They then wander towards the abandoned drugs, bickering and arguing about anything and everything as they go. 

Plot eventually happens to them, including an armed standoff with a cop, but what I like is how low-stakes and discursive most of their scenes are.  Eddie is mopey and surly but not unreasonably so, Daveed tries to cajole him into feeling better, and the two have a nice rapport that makes us like them both.  Throughout the movie characters bounce off of each other in weird ways.  Sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s annoying, but it’s almost always somewhat interesting.  The two run into some local criminals, and after a deliberately awkward fight scene they recruit one of them as a guide.  As they walk along the criminal and Eddie start to bond a little, annoying Daveed.  They get distracted by tangents, argue about minutiae, and it’s all done well enough that we’re along for the ride.  None of them are even aware that the bear exists until a full hour into the movie.

Henry’s a little trickier.  He’s played well by Convery and somehow manages to jump back and forth between being an amusingly precocious child and an annoyingly precocious child.  His journey through the movie is the inverse of Eddie’s, in that encounters the bear early on and spends the rest of the movie trying to avoid it.  Henry is saddled with a lot of lines that are supposedly funny because a kid is saying them, which almost never works.  In what’s possibly a nod to being set in 1985 he’s also a sweary little shit in the same way as the kids from ‘Goonies’ or ‘Stand By Me.’  He and Keri Russell have a decent dynamic where the dual issues of her missing daughter and the fact that he’s not her kid causes her to half-ass a lot of her parenting around him.  They’re never portrayed as equals, but they do get into subjects like drug use and death and they have a decent rhythm.  Unfortunately, he’s involved in a lot of the more jokey-joke humor in the movie, which doesn’t really work.  He is shown on screen trying to eat an entire mouthful of cocaine, though, and that’s not nothing.

The reason the characters of Eddie and Henry stick out to me is that it shows the kind of choices the writer was making.  The reason this movie needs as many quotation marks around the phrase “based on a true story” as possible is because that while a bear did eat some cocaine thrown out of a plane back in 1985 in reality it immediately died and most of the cocaine was never found.  That means that, in the screenplay, once the bear meets the cocaine you are free to make up whatever bullshit you can possibly think of, within the budget.  Coming up with characters is easy: half of the cast can be after the drugs, the other half can be people who just happen to be in the woods, and you start riffing after that, which is when it can get fun.  Keri Russell’s character is a slight variation on “tough 80’s mom,” but there’s enough complexity there that you can tell why she took the part.  Margo Martindale eats up an odd role as the local park ranger who goes from flirtatious to rageful to enthusiastically homicidal.  Ray Liotta has the least to do as a fairly generic gangster, but even he has a small subplot about being a lousy babysitter.

There are any number of versions of this movie that could be made.  It could be a gripping drama, a survival adventure, a depraved pitch-black comedy.  It could go absurd, go found-footage horror, it could be a Wes Anderson style stop motion meditation on mortality.  Just about none of those would have gotten made, though, certainly not with this cast and with this budget.  Much of the criticism of this movie involves its modest ambitions, criticizing it more for the movie it could or should have been instead of what they did make, which is based on a script that they were able to secure financing for.  What the characters of Eddie and Henry tell me is that this is a script that knows the basics.  The writer knows we need to have stock characters like a grieving father to provide an emotional core to the story and a plucky comic relief kid that gets scared so the audience does too. He can play around the edges with them, like using the excuse of the movie already being rated R to show kids doing coke and swearing, or portraying the park ranger as being way too quick to start shooting.  I don’t mean to overstate things, these are not well-rounded and complete people up onscreen, they are plot and joke vehicles, but they’re done better than they often are.

One genuine criticism I have for the movie is that it has trouble maintaining a tone.  During the attack scenes the move shifts into much darker territory.  It still has the same comedy rhythm as before but now instead of one-liners we get gore.  The centerpiece of the entire movie is a scene halfway through when EMTs arrive in the immediate aftermath of a bear attack.  It starts inside the ranger station and ends with the bear chasing down the ambulance and killing everyone inside.  We see people die on screen in fairly horrible ways and the deadpan framing and reaction cuts tell us very clearly that we’re supposed to be laughing at the carnage.  It’s then very noticeable when the movie hard shifts back to the more breezy tone of the rest of the film.  At one point the bear collapses unconscious on top of Eddie and the next few minutes are spent sweatily trying to wring comedy out of a sub-sitcom premise.  With a title like ‘Cocaine Bear’ I can hardly claim surprise at comedic violence, but I was surprised at how gently absurd the rest of the comedy was.  The contrast was striking and distracting.

The more I nail it all down with words the more I’m talking myself out of my fairly positive initial reaction.  It’s entirely possible that I went in with such low expectations that clever writing and decent acting were enough to flip me to enjoying it.  Others may regret the movie that wasn’t made, I can only watch the movie before me, and what I watched was fine.  It makes me mildly curious about what Elizabeth Banks is going to do next, although I think I’m fine without watching ‘Pitch Perfect 2’ and ‘Charlie’s Angels,’ her previous movies.  It also made me a fan of Alden Ehrenreich, though I also think I’m fine skipping ‘Han Solo.’