Nostalgiaville: Something Wicked This Way Comes

Well, horror fans, we’ve reached the last week of our Halloween-themed month on No More Popcorn. It’s been fun. I was particularly looking forward to this week, since it’s a Nostalgiaville week, and it means I’d get to revisit a scary movie from my childhood. Thinking over possible candidates, it quickly became clear to me that there was really only one movie to fit the bill: “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” the 1983 Disney movie that scared the living daylights out me as an impressionable 10-year-old. I’ve seen loads of horror movies between then and now, but none have really scared me the way this movie did.

The movie, adapted from Ray Bradbury’s novel of the same name, tells the story of a couple of young boys living in a tiny Illinois burg, whose citizens include a greedy tobacconist, an amputee bartender, an old maid schoolteacher and a pervy barber. One day a carnival, run by a pre-“Brazil” Jonathan Pryce, rolls into town on a spectral train and peddles the dreams of those who visit. The two boys, Will and Jim, suspect something’s up, and sneak back into the carnival after hours. They get a peek at some supernatural goings-on that they’re not supposed to see, and Pryce hunts them down with the help of a demonic carny and a nearly unrecognizable Pam Grier as an uber-creepy witch. The boys seek protection from Will’s dad (Jason Robards) who has a few things he wouldn’t mind changing in his own life.

“Something Wicked” plays out a bit like an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” in that Pryce’s Mr. Dark grants the wishes of the townspeople with some serious strings attached. The sex-starved barber gets frisky in the exotic dancer tent and gets turned into the carnival’s bearded lady. The schoolteacher gets her youthful good looks restored, but loses her sight. And all of the wish-fulfilled characters become the property of the carnival. There’s also a moral to the story, with the real heart not being the boys’ adventure, but Robards character’s coming to terms with his age and physical condition, and learning to appreciate his life for what it is, not what it isn’t.

Of course, in addition to Pryce’s soul-sucking carnival barker, there are scares aplenty. The movie features a demonic man-child, “Arachnophobia”-style spider infestations, bodily decay and an overabundance of creepy dwarves. Did I mention it’s a family film? The effects in the movie are surprisingly gruesome for a film directed at kids, and while they didn’t really disturb me this time around, I could absolutely understand why the movie frightened me as a child.

But, upon closer inspection, the payoff scenes are really the only thing “Something Wicked” has going for it. In concept, it’s a great idea. In practice, it drags. The balance between the freakier aspects of the movie and the family-friendly elements doesn’t always work. For example, the journey of Robards’ character from out-of-touch, regret-filled father to accepting, loving dad is sweet, but feels like it belongs in an altogether different movie.  It’s also not terribly compelling. Dramatically, whatever Will’s father wishes he’d done differently doesn’t come to the surface much, except for a couple of awkward conversations and faraway looks. The movie wants to be about the relationship between Will and his dad, but what it’s really about is a freaky boys’ own adventure with moral undertones.

If the movie had focused more on Will and Jim, I think the film might have better achieved what it set out to do. The absence of Jim’s father, for example, is a subject that’s subtly addressed, but should be more prominent. The lack of a father in Jim’s life is supposed to have made him vulnerable, and anxious for that kind of relationship. We barely see it, until the possibility of having that kind of relationship with Mr. Dark becomes a temptation. It’s a narrative twist that seems to come out of nowhere (and doesn’t make much sense). But, with a bit of nuance, it would have made for an interesting subplot, especially since father-son relationships are a kind of theme of the movie.

So is “Something Wicked This Way Comes” kiddie-horror, straight horror, or family-friendly fare? In fact, it ends up being a little of each, and none of the above all at the same time. There are too many legitimate scares and high-minded morals to make it appropriate for kids, yet not enough of either to make it satisfying for adults, and too much of an imbalance to make it enjoyable for a family. It turns out there’s a reason this movie has become a faded obscurity in the Halloween-viewing canon. It’s a movie that tried to be all things to all people, and ended up being not enough of anything for anyone.

Random observations:

• Despite the fact that this movie isn’t a classic by any means, the visuals and basic concept have crept into all sorts of modern entertainment, something that’s probably better attributed to Bradbury’s novel. The TV series “Carnivale,” for instance, owes a huge debt here, as does Jonathan L. Howard’s novel “Johannes Cabal, the Necromancer,” which cribs just about every aspect of its central plot device from Bradbury’s story.
• Maybe it’s the weirdo townspeople, or just copious use of dwarves, but I’d just love to see David Lynch do a remake of this movie. Wouldn’t you?

Plan 9 Cinema: Scream, Blacula, Scream

A few years ago, I was working at a college radio station and was searching around for some good instrumental music to play while I announced weather and events in between sponsor breaks and programming. Deep in the bowels of the station’s music collection, I found the soundtrack to “Blacula,” a 1972 Blaxploitation vampire movie featuring the sweet soul sounds of Gene Page and Hues Corporation. It quickly became my go-to album for voiceover music. It was kitschy. It was full of attitude. It was surprisingly good. I was hooked like a bloodsucker jonesing for an O-positive fix. Somehow, I had to find out more about this strange character marketed as “Dracula’s soul brother” and experience a Blacula movie for myself.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get my hands on a copy of the original “Blacula” for this week’s entry. But I was able to see its sequel, 1973’s “Scream, Blacula, Scream,” and while the music may not be quite as good (Bill Marx, you’re no Gene Page) it fulfilled my expectations in pretty much every other way. It’s about what you’d expect from a 70’s horror-Blaxploitation movie: low budget, ridiculously dated language, and fantastically horrid costumes and production values.

Here’s the story: After the priestess of a voodoo cult kicks the bucket, her followers decide to let leadership pass to Lisa (Pam Grier) a talented and kindhearted member of the group, rather than the priestess’ no-good hustling son, Willis. Angry at the decision, Willis gets aid from an enemy voodoo priest to raise help from beyond the grave in the form of Blacula, nee African Prince Mamuwalde (William Marshall). It doesn’t take long before Blacula converts Willis into a vampire–seriously, how exactly did Willis think he was going to control a super-strong undead bloodsucker?– and starts raising his own army of vampiric soul brothers, pimps and hip young ladies.

The best reason to watch “Scream, Blacula, Scream” apart from William Marshall’s acting (which is really very impressive) is to check out the amazingly dated fashions and talk. For an example, check out the scene below, where Blacula takes out a couple of tough-talking pimps:

Also note: according to this scene, Blacula can kill a man with a single bitch-slap. Skills!

The second best reason: effects. “Scream, Blacula, Scream” has every kind of low-budget special effect you could hope for in a movie of its type. When Blacula and his victims turn into vampires, for instance, they spontaneously sprout extra facial hair. Blacula in particular gets some intriguing extra sideburns that I’m pretty sure you don’t find in nature. Willis’ eyebrows not only get super bushy, but appear to change direction completely. Then there’s the bat transformation, which appears to be an animated black speck that’s drawn onto the film—I have to hand it to the filmmakers, however, it’s a lot better than a black speck dangling from a string. We also get treated to stiff-looking dummies thrown from stairwells, and vampires gliding on tracks.

Script-wise, you’ve got your basic gaffs: exposition conversations that seem to come out of nowhere, characters whose appearances are completely unexplained, and some who just disappear entirely after a single scene. But man, William Marshall really sells it as Blacula. His regal presence and James Earl Jones-style bass voice elevate the movie to a whole new level of class. He’s a ton of fun to watch. Overall, “Scream, Blacula, Scream” is your basic bad movie wad of cheese. It’s an entertaining watch, and also an interesting historical artifact from the world of cinema. Check it out, you jive-ass turkeys.

Random observations:

Before “Scream, Blacula, Scream,” the only other Blaxploitation movie I’d seen was one that parodied the genre, the great “Black Dynamite.” I had never realized until now how accurate Scott Sanders’ film was in aping these movies—he really got everything right!

In all seriousness, the soundtrack to “Blacula” is some awesome music. To this day it remains one of my favorite albums. If you can get a hold of it, listen to it.

Fun fact: IMDB tells me Craig T. Nelson is in this movie somewhere, in his fourth screen appearance. I couldn’t find him. See if you can!

The Non-Fiction Section: Cropsey

Every town has a boogeyman or a haunted house, some kind of cautionary urban legend that keeps curious kids from hanging around places they shouldn’t. Every once in a while, it turns out that some of these urban legends are based, at least partially, in truth. While the ghost of a psychotic killer may not actually haunt the abandoned house down the street, someone was actually murdered there, stuff like that. Because there’s enough of a crossover between the legend that’s grown and the thing that actually happened, it’s an intriguing idea that somewhere, underneath all that exaggerated fiction, there’s a strange-but-true fact, and it can be a creepy, fascinating exercise to find out where one begins to morph into the other.

That’s the idea that starts “Cropsey,” a documentary that wants to be about the truth behind a particular urban legend in Staten Island, but is in fact about a series of cold-case child disappearances and the criminal trial that accompanied them. It’s a doc with creepy imagery, but an unclear purpose. As a result, “Cropsey” suffers from a lack of direction that bogs the movie down and makes it feel longer than its 90 minute-ish running time.

Filmmakers Barbara Brancaccio and Joshua Zeman were both raised in Staten Island, and grew up hearing different variations of the Cropsey legend. In some versions, he had a hook for a hand. In others, he wielded an axe. In all of them, he was an escaped mental patient from the abandoned Willowbrook Hospital who lived in the hospital’s tunnel system and kidnapped and killed small children. Brancaccio and Zeman eventually shrugged the stories off as urban legends as they got older, until several incidents of missing children in Staten Island showed them the danger was real. The man convicted for the kidnapping (but not murder) of two of these missing children was Andre Rand, a former orderly at Willowbrook who had established a campsite on the property. After a brief dalliance into the folkloric origins of the titular psycho killer, “Cropsey” abandons its initial premise, and instead follows the trial of Rand, the reaction of the community, and the experiences of his victims’ families as the trial commences.

It becomes increasingly clear over the course of the film that Brancaccio and Zeman desperately want to find something in this story—a conspiracy, satanic cults, anything—that just isn’t there. They exchange letters with Rand in prison and spend an inordinate amount of time looking at the letters, reading them out loud, showing them to friends and family, adding narration about what they think the messages might mean. During a “Blair Witch Project”-inspired sequence, the filmmakers wander through Willowbrook looking for evidence of dirty doings (at night, no less—what did they think they’d find in the dark?) but all they discover are some hobo droppings and a gaggle of teenagers exploring the place for kicks. It seems pretty obvious from the start that Rand is the killer, and that he simply wasn’t mentally well. All the attempts to explain Rand’s motives, and tie him to things like occult worship and human sacrifice just make the movie feel like a yawningly long version of “48 Hours.”

What’s more, there’s no evidence that Rand ties into Cropsey. The urban legend that’s supposed to serve as the catalyst for the movie we’re watching is nothing but a loose thematic connection. It makes the movie feel disjointed, and actually made me feel like the victim of false advertising. The concept of exploring the roots of an urban legend, and the coming together of fact and fiction is all but scrapped except for one teeny off-the-cuff narrative mention three-quarters of the way through the movie. It’s a huge disappointment, since it’s a good idea, and a genuine examination of that connection, if it indeed exists, would have made for a much more interesting movie.

However, in the movie’s favor, “Cropsey” does have a whole bunch of effective, creepy footage. First there’s the Willowbrook institution itself, a hollowed-out shell of a place that looks like a cross between the house from “Amityville Horror” and Danvers State Hospital from “Session 9.” The shots of the rotting building covered in graffiti, homeless campsites and subterranean tunnels is enough to give you the shivers by itself. To show the place in its historical context, the filmmakers accompany their footage of modern-day Willowbrook with clips from an expose on the place from the early 70s by Geraldo Rivera. The news piece shows mentally ill children sprawled out in dark rooms, naked and barely clothed, getting goopy spoonfuls of gluey gruel shoved down their throats. It’s disgusting, sad, and an even better example of real-life horror than the one Brancaccio and Zeman choose to present.

In the end, “Cropsey” is a movie that wants to be about a specific piece of a community’s history, but in the attempt to make that story interesting, gets caught up in the trappings of a lot of other more interesting ideas. It’s too bad that the film’s directors didn’t just ditch the original story in favor of the stories it alludes to and briefly follows, because those rabbit holes are the stories that are actually worth paying attention to from a dramatic standpoint. The tale of Andre Rand’s crimes is scary in theory, but it’s nothing compared to urban legend of Cropsey, which is entertaining and freaky, and the story of the place that inspired it, which is both heartbreaking and utterly terrifying.

Minding the Gap: Peeping Tom

It’s October, which means it’s the month of that greatest of holidays: Halloween! For me, the events surrounding October 31^st have always been more about the buildup than the actual day itself (although it’s plenty awesome by itself), so for the whole month, I’m going to be focusing my posts on horror movies, thrillers, urban legends, and things that send shivers down our collective spines.

I’m actually glad I waited a week to do a “Minding the Gap” post, because it means the first post of October focuses on a scary movie I haven’t seen yet. Since classic horror has always held a particular kind of attraction for me, I watched “Peeping Tom,” the 1960 creepfest that more or less ruined director Michael Powell’s career. At the time, it sickened critics and drove audiences away from the theater. But by today’s standards it’s fairly tame, though its themes are troubling, and the movie has enough psychological subtext to keep Sigmund Freud busy for months.

The film’s main character is Mark Lewis (Carl Boehm), a photographer and aspiring filmmaker with a fetish for capturing fear on camera. He gets it by shooting his own snuff films—he kills women by stabbing them in the throat with a shiv mounted in his tripod (phallic symbol much?), and makes them watch their own deaths via a mirror mounted on his camera.

Mark is equal parts Jack the Ripper and Norman Bates with a movie camera.  But as much as he appears to get pleasure from his crimes, he recognizes that he’s got a problem. Mark is surprisingly sympathetic, and comes across as more of a troubled, misguided young man than a cold-blooded killer, someone who’s painfully shy, and seems to genuinely want to get help if it means he can have a normal, loving relationship. There’s even that possibility, in the form of Helen, Mark’s cute-as-a-button downstairs neighbor. But Mark has some serious demons to overcome, and they’re not going to go away quietly.

That’s just the plot. There’s a lot more going on here than a run-of-the-mill serial killer movie, even a hyper-stylized one directed by half of the Archers filmmaking team. Beyond its thriller exterior, “Peeping Tom” is a massive commentary on the voyeuristic and fetishistic aspects of filmmaking; even, to a point, a commentary by Powell, the director, on his own career up to that point.

Mark’s day job is adjusting lens focuses on a high-profile film production, the leading lady of which is a spoiled red-headed starlet whose whining and poor acting causes the film’s director no end of frustration. It mirrors Powell’s own frustrations with lead actress Moira Shearer on “The Red Shoes,” another redhead whose reportedly “spoiled” nature troubled the production. It’s no coincidence that Shearer herself is in “Peeping Tom,” playing an extra who is friends with Mark. She enters the film to the side of the soundstage, watching her counterpart’s antics, as if Powell is forcing her to see how difficult she was. She also comes to a pretty sticky end, becoming one of Mark’s victims.

One other really interesting detail that deserves exploration is the presence of Mark’s father in the film. Mark seems to hate, fear, and respect his dad in equal measures. Although he’s dead, his presence haunts “Peeping Tom” like Mama Bates. We’re told Daddy Lewis was a biologist who enjoyed using his young son as an experiment, and Mark borrows some of his methods for his murders. For all his off-screen influence, Mark’s father appears only once in “Peeping Tom,” for just a second in a home movie, and he’s played by Powell himself.  The man responsible for creating Mark the monster is played by a visionary director whose movies have influenced generations of other filmmakers. It sends a subtle but important message about art: that an artist’s work has unseen effects on those who experience it firsthand, for better or for worse, depending on how it’s interpreted. Audiences will recognize Mark’s father as a manipulative abuser, but Mark seems to see him as someone to be revered, even imitated.

That’s to say nothing of the film’s most obvious comment on the voyeurism of film: film itself. “Peeping Tom” starts out with a first-person perspective scene of Mark approaching a streetwalker, following her into a hotel room, and killing her, all shot through his camera (this, by the way, is Powell’s method for shooting all of Mark’s victims). In these scenes, we’re no longer given the sense of distance that would normally keep us from feeling guilty about watching violence onscreen. We’re not just watching a murder, we’re practically taking part. And by knowing right from the get-go who’s committing the crimes, and making him a sympathetic character, we’re even pre-disposed to be on the killer’s side. It’s an early version of the kind of tricks directors employ today in movies like “Funny Games,” films that elicit the kind of repulsed reaction that “Peeping Tom” got upon its release, despite the fact that Powell’s movie, while certainly violent, is practically bloodless in its depiction of violence.

“Peeping Tom” is a movie that’s often praised as being ahead of its time. It certainly wasn’t given its due when it came out in 1960. Critics apparently weren’t ready for what Michael Powell was giving them, and were so disgusted with the film that its failure more or less ended Powell’s career as a director. But it’s clear that the cinematic community today really appreciates what he was trying to do, since these days you see the evidence of “Peeping Tom” all over the place. It’s influenced Martin Scorcese, Michael Haneke, Edgar Wright, even Wes Craven. For anyone looking to learn something from their Halloween movies, “Peeping Tom” provides plenty of classic thrills while giving you an interesting lesson in the history of horror filmmaking.

Random observation:

Just one this week-Watching Moira Shearer’s dance number in the movie, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the SNL “Ann Margret” sketch. I can’t embed it, unfortunately, but I’ll link to it here. Enjoy!