Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/30/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Friday, August 30, 2024

Next of Kin (Tony Williams, 1982)

Jacki Kerin in Next of Kin

Cast: Jacki Kerin, John Jarratt, Alex Scott, Gerda Nicolson, Charles McCallum, Bernadette Gibson, Robert Ratti, Vince Delitito, Tommy Dysart, Debra Lawrence. Screenplay: Tony Williams, Michael Heath. Cinematography: Gary Hansen. Art direction: Richard Francis, Nick Hepworth. Film editing: Max Lemon. Music: Klaus Schulze.

Next of Kin is an Australian creepy old house horror movie, with all the improbabilities, plot holes, and clichés of the genre, but if you stick with it you're rewarded with a literally smashing finale. When her mother dies, Linda (Jacki Kerin) inherits the big gloomy mansion her mother had converted into a nursing home in the rural small town where Linda grew up. She doesn't want the property, though it seems to be capably managed by a woman named Connie (Gerda Nicolson) with a physician, Dr. Barton (Alex Scott), seeing to the medical needs of the residents. After taking a look at the books maintained by her mother, which are something of a mess, Linda is inclined to sell the place and return to the city where she's been living. Even the presence of an old boyfriend, Barney (Alex Scott), doesn't really persuade her to stick around. And then a strange death of one of the residents occurs, and Linda's inspection of her mother's papers stirs her suspicions, particularly where the unexplained disappearance of her Aunt Rita is concerned. Of course, things get creepier, though the way writer-director Tony Williams sets them up is a little slow and clunky. The movie has its admirers, including Quentin Tarantino, who compared it favorably to Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980). Only the payoff at the end, I think, really measures up to that standard.