The Slumber Party Massacre (Amy Holden Jones, 1982)

 

The Slumber Party Massacre (Amy Holden Jones, 1982)

Cast: Michelle Michaels, Robin Stine, Michael Villella, Debra De Liso, Andree Honore, Gina Smika Hunter, Jennifer Meyers, Joseph Alan Johnson, David Milbern, Jim Boyce, Pamela Roylance, Brinke Stevens, Rigg Kennedy. Screenplay: Rita Mae Brown. Cinematography: Stephen L. Posey. Art direction: Francesca Bartoccini. Film editing: Sean Foley. Music: Ralph Jones. 

A shabby little shocker with honorable origins, The Slumber Party Massacre was scripted by Rita Mae Brown as a queer feminist parody of the slasher genre. But even the Roger Corman quickie factory wasn’t prepared to go that far, so director Amy Holden Jones played the parody with a straight face. Still, the wit of Brown’s original shows through often enough for the horror elements to be tinged with mockery. The ditzy high school students (played by twentysomething actresses) are terrorized by a power-drill-bearing escaped mental patient (Michael Villella). Most of the victims are the mean girls who decided not to invite newcomer Valerie (Robin Stille) to the sleepover being thrown by Trish (Michelle Michaels) while her parents are away for the weekend, but they also include a hapless pizza delivery boy and the older neighbor who agreed to look after the girls if they need help. There’s a lot of shrieking and running around in the dark, but the blood, considering the gruesomeness of the murder instrument, is kept in check. Yes, it’s a cult classic that defied the initial bad reviews and went on to inspire sequels, none of which are quite up to the original.

Rosaline (Karen Maine, 2022)

Rosaline (Karen Maine, 2022)

Cast: Kaitlyn Dever, Isabela Merced, Sean Teale, Kyle Allen, Spencer Stevenson, Bradley Whitford, Christopher McDonald, Minnie Driver, Nico Hiraga. Screenplay: Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber, based on a novel by Rebecca Serle. Cinematography: Laurie Rose. Production design: Andrew McAlpine. Film editing: Jennifer Lee. Music: Drum & Lace, Ian Hultquist. 

Rosaline is an amusing trifle, an exercise in parashakespeare like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Tom Stoppard, 1990) or Shakespeare in Love (John Madden, 1998), though I’m sure neither screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber nor Rebecca Serle, the author of the book on which Rosaline is based, would be eager to invite comparison with Stoppard’s erudition and wit. In Romeo and Juliet, Rosaline is only a plot device: Juliet’s cousin, with whom Romeo is infatuated, she’s never seen in the play, but serves only, via the teasing of his friends, to emphasize Romeo’s bent toward romantic ardor. The film casually turns the play on its head, converting tragedy into rom-com, as Kaitlyn Dever’s Rosaline gets her revenge on Romeo’s fickleness by trying to make him fall out of love with Juliet. Dever is a fine comic actress, and she gets good support from the rest of the cast. Kyle Allen, looking a bit like Heath Ledger in another parashakespearean movie, 10 Things I Hate About You (Gil Junger, 1999), plays Romeo as a lovestruck goof. His Juliet (Isabela Merced) is a faux naïf from the country, who manages to get the upper hand on the manipulative Rosaline. (There’s a mid-credits scene at the end that suggests things will not go smoothly for Romeo and Juliet after they escape Verona by means of a fake death.) Bradley Whitford plays Rosaline’s father, determined to marry off his independent-minded daughter. After a series of superannuated suitors whom Rosaline manages to scare off, he comes up with the handsome young Dario (Sean Teale), whom she initially rejects, but everyone who has ever seen a rom-com knows she will eventually fall for. There are nice comic bits from Spencer Stevenson as Paris, Rosaline’s gay best friend who gets roped into an engagement with Juliet, and Nico Hiraga as Steve the Courier, a stoner who delivers – or fails to deliver – the crucial messages that in the original play would precipitate tragedy. And while Juliet’s nurse plays a key role in Shakespeare, she’s only a bit part in the movie. Instead, there’s Minnie Driver as Rosaline’s nurse, indignantly insisting that she’s a trained registered nurse, not a babysitter. The screenplay wisely jettisons any attempt to evoke Shakespearean language and adopts contemporary speech that jars amusingly with the period setting and costumes. Director Karen Maine keeps all this fluff nicely airborne. 

 

The Invisible Man (James Whale, 1933)

 

The Invisible Man (James Whale, 1933)

Cast: Claude Rains, Gloria Stuart, William Harrigan, Henry Travers, Una O’Connor, Forrester Harvey, Holmes Herbert, E.E. Clive, Dudley Digges, Harry Stubbs, Donald Stuart, Merle Tottenham. Screenplay: R.C. Sheriff, based on a novel by H.G. Wells. Cinematography: Arthur Edeson. Art direction: Charles D. Hall. Film editing: Ted J. Kent. Music: Heinz Roemheld. 

Of all the superpowers, including strength, speed, and flight, I think invisibility may be the most desired – and the most dangerous. The only obvious inconvenience is that for it to work, you’d have to be naked. (And as Claude Rains’s Dr. Jack Griffin suggests, you’d have to have a completely empty intestinal tract.) But the H.G. Wells novel and the 1933 film based on it seem to be designed as a warning to be careful what you wish for. The potion that gives Dr. Griffin his superpower also drives him mad, freeing him from any inhibitions against mayhem and murder. This may be my favorite among the classic Universal horror movies, more polished than Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931), less campy than Frankenstein (James Whale, 1931). Its chief flaw is that the part given to Gloria Stuart as Griffin’s girlfriend calls for her to do little more than fret and shriek. She does both well, but the role adds nothing to the narrative or the suspense. Much better are the gaggle of character actors assembled to play the villagers freaked out by the Invisible Man, especially the invaluable Una O’Connor as his landlady, whose own fretting and shrieking almost seem like a parody of Stuart’s. This was Rains’s American film debut, the more remarkable in that his face is seen only at the end of the film. He’s forced to do all of his acting with his voice, which would not have been familiar to the original audiences though it’s certainly recognizable to us today. It was enough to launch one of the great film careers. 

Vice (Adam McKay, 2018)

 

Vice (Adam McKay, 2018)

Cast: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Alison Pill, Eddie Marsan, Justin Kirk, LisaGay Hamilton, Jesse Plemons, Bill Camp, Don McManus, Lily Rabe, Shea Whigham, Stephen Adly Guirgis, Tyler Perry. Screenplay: Adam McKay. Cinematography: Greig Fraser. Production design: Patrice Vermette. Film editing: Hank Corwin. Music: Nicholas Britell.

Vice got me to thinking that maybe Hannah Arendt got it wrong: It’s not the banality of evil but the mediocrity of evil. Dick Cheney, at least as Adam McKay’s screenplay and Christian Bale’s performance present him, was initially a vehicle for the varying ambitions of others: his wife, Lynne (Amy Adams), his mentor, Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell), and George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell). Cheney was like a liquid that flowed into the channels they provided him, helping create the Republican Party that would be shaped into its current form by Fox News and Donald Trump. Bale portrays Cheney as the silent menace we know from newsreels, ready to snap at any plausible idea, from redefining presidential power to making war on Saddam Hussein to sanctioning torture. But he begins as something of a naïf, not even sure which party he belongs to, and even asking Rumsfeld what the Republicans are for, which provokes gales of laughter from Rumsfeld. The problem with McKay’s film, however, is that despite Bale’s remarkable performance, Vice is overlong and confused, wavering from straight behind-the-headlines dramatization to satiric bits like a waiter (a cameo by Alfred Molina) serving up Republican agenda items to a tableful of fat cats. The narrative is chopped up with flashbacks and time jumps, and even includes an occasional narrator named Kurt (Jesse Plemons), whose identity is withheld for most of the film to provide a small but essentially pointless surprise. There’s even a bit in the middle of the final credits, in which a contemporary focus group comes to blows over the film's “political bias.” I share McKay’s obvious bias, but I wish he didn’t wear it so proudly.

Lady in a Cage (Walter Grauman, 1964)

 

Lady in a Cage (Walter Grauman, 1964)

Cast: Olivia de Havilland, James Caan, Jennifer Billingsley, Rafael Campos, William Swan, Jeff Corey, Ann Sothern, Scatman Crothers, Charles Seel. Screenplay: Luther Davis. Cinematography: Lee Garmes. Production design: Rudolph Sternad. Film editing: Leon Barsha. Music: Paul Glass. 

After the success of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich, 1962), a cruel and ugly word, “hagsploitation,” was coined to denote a new subgenre in which aging movie stars were cast in films that subjected them to all manner of abuse. The stars were all women, of course. Male movie stars like Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and Humphrey Bogart were allowed to keep playing tough guys and cowboys and even romantic leads until the end of their careers. But actresses like Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, and Olivia de Havilland were stripped of their glamour in movies like Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte (Aldrich, 1964) and Lady in a Cage, which bridged the gap between psychological drama and horror movie. Lady in a Cage is a deeply unpleasant movie, with a pervasively nihilistic view of human beings. Its opening scenes, before we even meet our protagonist, Cornelia Hilyard (de Havilland), feature a young girl tormenting an apparently unconscious woman lying on the sidewalk and a shot of traffic swerving around a dead dog in the street. Soon, Cornelia, who is recovering from a broken hip, has sent her coddled son, Malcolm (William Swan), off on a long holiday weekend, only to be trapped by a power failure in the elevator she has installed in the stairwell of her house. She has an alarm bell, but no one hears it except a ragged wino, George Brady (Jeff Corey), who breaks into the house and begins to plunder it with the help of his friend Sade (Ann Sothern). When they visit the fence (Charles Seel), the loot catches the eye of Randall (James Caan) and his cohort, Essie (Rafael Campos) and Elaine (Jennifer Billingsley), a trio of psychopaths. They proceed to make life hell for Cornelia; in addition to looting and destruction they discover a letter that Malcolm has left for Cornelia in which he threatens to kill himself unless she stops coddling and smothering him. Randall takes the opportunity to suggest that Malcolm is gay and that mother and son are incestuous lovers. Mayhem ensues, and the film ends bleakly. And yet it’s a strikingly effective movie, one that feels out of time, anticipating by many years some of the darker films by directors like Lars von Trier and Michael Haneke.