The Exorcist III (William Peter Blatty, 1990)

George C. Scott in The Exorcist III

Cast: George C. Scott, Ed Flanders, Brad Dourif, Jason Miller, Nicol Williamson, Scott Wilson, Nancy Fish, Tracy Thorne, Barbara Baxley, Harry Carey Jr., Mary Jackson, Zohra Lampert, Viveca Lindfors. Screenplay: William Peter Blatty, based on his novel. Cinematography: Gerry Fisher. Production design: Leslie Dilley. Film editing: Peter Lee-Thompson, Todd C. Ramsay. Music: Barry De Vorzon. 

I am no great fan of The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), so I couldn't be expected to like The Exorcist III very much. It's an inchoate movie, made by a writer-director who has a lot of interesting ideas, which he sometimes accomplishes, but he doesn't quite know how to put them together. The premise is that a priest, Father Dyer (Ed Flanders), and a police lieutenant, William Kinderman (George C. Scott), who were close to Father Karras (Jason Miller), the exorcist of the first film, meet on the 15th anniversary of his death. Within a few days Father Dyer is hospitalized and then murdered in a peculiarly unusual way, neatly drained of his blood while in his hospital bed. Investigating the death of his friend, Kinderman interviews hospital staff, including the chain-smoking head of the psychiatric ward, Dr. Temple (Scott Wilson), who gives him access to the most securely guarded inmates. One of them has been institutionalized there for 15 years after being found wandering the streets of the city. After claiming amnesia and lapsing into catatonia, he suddenly turned violent and began to claim that he was James Venamun, who had been executed 15 years earlier as the serial killer known as Gemini. There have been recent murders that strikingly resemble those of Gemini, so Kinderman is allowed to interview the patient, whom he recognizes as the long-dead Father Karras. During the course of the interview, however, the patient changes form to resemble Venamun (Brad Dourif). Further deaths follow, and Kinderman's own family is threatened before he begins to figure out what in the literal hell is going on. The problem is that there are two or three movies going on here at once. One involves the mystery of Father Karras, and another the story of Gemini, and of course the whole thing is tied back to the demonic possession premise of the original The Exorcist. Blatty hadn't planned to include an exorcism in the film, which is based on his novel Legion, but the producers insisted, so a priest called Father Morning (Nicol Williamson) is awkwardly inserted into the story to do a big effects-laden exorcism scene. It fits oddly with the slow, moody pace of much of Blatty's film, and finally turns out to be the wrong way to deal with the problem anyway. There's a good deal of overacting in the movie -- Scott was nominated for a Razzie as worst actor, though Williamson, Dourif, and Miller do their share of hamming it up too. Blatty does accomplish one good jump scare scene in the film, effectively using sound and camera placement, and there's a well-done sequence in which Kinderman races to save the lives of his family, so it's not a total misfire.    

So Evil My Love (Lewis Allen, 1948)

Ray Milland and Ann Todd in So Evil My Love

Cast: Ray Milland, Ann Todd, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Leo G. Carroll, Raymond Huntley, Raymond Lovell, Martita Hunt, Moira Lister, Roderick Lovell, Muriel Aked. Screenplay: Ronald Millar, Leonard Spiegelgass, based on a novel by Joseph Shearing. Cinematography: Mutz Greenbaum. Production design: Thomas N. Morahan. Film editing: Vera Campbell. Music: William Alwyn. 

So Evil My Love needs a better actress than the starchy Ann Todd to make its central premise work, that a respectable Victorian widow of an Anglican missionary would fall so hard for a handsome cad that she'd do anything from larceny to murder for him. It could also have used a more charismatic cad than Ray Milland in the role. We meet Olivia Harwood (Todd) on a ship returning to England from Jamaica, where she has buried her husband. When the ship's doctor asks her to help nurse some malaria patients on board, she agrees -- a little reluctantly, which is perhaps a sign that she's not as sweetly complaisant as she might be. One of the patients is traveling under the name Mark Bellis (Milland), which may not be his real name: He's an artist who makes his living by stealing valuable paintings and forging Rembrandts. A spark is lit between them, although we don't really see it because the actors have so little chemistry, and when they get back to London, Bellis makes his way to her doorstep. She owns a small house and lets out rooms, one of which he takes, though under the disapproving eye of her other tenant, the ostentatiously proper Miss Shoebridge (Muriel Aked). When Olivia allows Bellis to paint her, in an off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, she relaxes her defenses and passion blossoms -- or what passes for it in the screenplay if not on the screen. Meanwhile, Olivia makes contact with an old school friend, Susan Courtney (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who is unhappily married to the wealthy and domineering Henry Courtney (Raymond Huntley). Susan has confessed her unhappiness, and her love for another man, Sir John Curle (Roderick Lovell), in letters to Olivia. When the affair between Bellis and Olivia develops, he finds the letter and sees the possibility of blackmailing Courtney, who is in line for a peerage that would be derailed by scandal. Under Bellis's spell, Olivia gets deeper and deeper into a plot that turns lethal. There's potential for real heat in the story, but miscast leads and a talky script undo it. 

Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932)

Cast: Wallace Ford, Leila Hyams, Olga Baclanova, Roscoe Ates, Henry Victor, Harry Earles, Daisy Earles, Rose Dione, Daisy Hilton, Violet Hilton. Screenplay: Willis Goldbeck, Leon Gordon, based on a story by Clarence Aaron "Tod" Robbins. Cinematography: Merritt B. Gerstad. Art direction: Cedric Gibbons, Merrill Pye. Film editing: Basil Wrangell. 

Possibly the most unorthodox film ever made by a major Hollywood studio, let alone one made by MGM, a studio known for glossy entertainments. It was a kind of disaster when it was first released, subjected to censorship and deep cuts before being re-released, and even then widely panned, derided, and snubbed by critics and audiences. It could almost certainly not have been made after the introduction of the Production Code. It's a unique and unclassifiable movie that's usually treated as a horror film, but not easily filed away in that category. Its acceptance today as a classic, deserving its place in the National Film Registry as one of the most important American films, is largely the result of changing attitudes toward human diversity and difference, including the rejection of "eugenics," the pseudoscience that promoted the idea that only those deemed physically and mentally superior should be allowed to breed. As a movie, it's sometimes not particularly well acted and the central plot -- the trapeze artist Cleopatra (Olga Baclanova) marries the dwarf Hans (Harry Earles) and then poisons him to try to get her hands on his inheritance -- is trite, though Cleopatra's comeuppance is effectively gruesome to say the least. But the movie is atmospherically staged and filmed, and the central theme of our common humanity prevails.   

Battle Royale II: Requiem (Kenta Fukasaku, Kinji Fukasaku, 2003)

Cast: Tatsuya Fujiwara, Ai Maeda, Shugo Oshinari, Ayana Sakai, Haruka Suenaga, Yuma Ishigaki, Miyuki Kanbe, Nana Yanagisawa, Masaya Kikawada, Yōko Maki, Yuki Ito, Natsuki Kato, Aki Maeda. Riki Takeuchi, Sonny Chiba. Screenplay: Kenta Fukasaku, Norio Kida. Cinematography: Toshihiro Isomi. Production design: Emiko Tsuyuki. Film editing: Hirohide Abe. Music: Masamichi Amano. 

I suspect that anyone watching Battle Royale II: Requiem after the Hamas attack on Israel will have a different reaction to it than those who watched it before. It's a movie in which the heroes are terrorists: We even get a repeated shot in which they blow up two identical tall buildings. The first Battle Royale (Kinji Fukasaku, 2000) was an easy movie to get caught up in because it was fast and often funny, and the premise of a government of an overpopulated Japan selecting teenagers to kill off one another in a televised game show format was ridiculous enough that you could easily distance yourself from the movie. But the sequel, begun by Kinji Fukasaku but completed after his death by his son, Kenta, isn't so inventive, and the heroic terrorist premise is hard to swallow. It reunites some of the survivors of the earlier film's massacre who are part of a worldwide crusade against adults in general. This time, they're holed up on the island where they fought in the earlier film, and a class of ninth graders from a Japanese middle school for troubled kids is forced to storm the island and defeat the terrorists. But once they land on the island, after a sequence obviously designed to remind the viewer of the D-Day landing in Saving Private Ryan (Steven Spielberg, 1998), the would-be attackers join forces with the terrorists and turn against the government. The rest is a series of war movie scenes as the government returns fire. The borrowing from other movies is pervasive: The film's climax, for example, is a direct lift from the end of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969). The teacher of the students chosen for the assault is wildly overplayed by Riki Takeuchi, who delivers a blistering anti-American speech before sending the kids off to fight. In general, it's a muddled film, not only politically but also in its failure to present clearly delineated characters in whom we can invest some emotional commitment and in the overall lack of suspense about their fates. 

Westworld (Michael Crichton, 1973)

James Brolin and Richard Benjamin in Westworld

Cast: Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, James Brolin, Norman Bartold, Alan Oppenheimer, Victoria Shaw, Dick Van Patten, Linda Gaye Scott, Steve Franken, Michael T. Mikler, Terry Wilson, Majel Barrett, Anne Randall. Screenplay: Michael Crichton. Cinematography: Gene Polito. Art direction: Herman A. Blumenthal. Film editing: David Bretherton. Music: Fred Karlin. 

Today, Michael Crichton's film Westworld is probably best known for inspiring the HBO series of the same name. Viewing both of them is a study in the anxieties of two eras almost 50 years apart. The 1973 film takes place in a futuristic amusement park in which the guests indulge their fantasies by encountering androids playing figures from the past and mostly either killing them or having sex with them. So does the series, which ran from 2016 to 2022. In both the movie and the series, things go seriously awry, with the androids killing or maiming their human guests. Especially in comparison with the series' handsomely realized vision of the future, its exploration of the creation of the androids, and its portrayal of the corporate intrigue behind the scenes of the park, Crichton's movie looks antique: the special effects are clunky, the characterization and acting are routine, and some of the action scenes are unconvincing. But the chief difference between the movie and the series lies in their understanding of the causes of the park's disaster. In the movie, the cause is said to be malfunctioning technology, an undetected glitch in the machinery. But in the series the cause lies deeper: The androids develop consciousness, a self-awareness that causes them to rebel against their human makers. To put it in other words, in the 1970s we were concerned about the problem of increasing dependence on fallible technology. In the 21st century, we're worried about technology becoming too good, about artificial intelligence outstripping human intelligence. The fallibility is not in the machines but in ourselves. But to be fair, Crichton showed a sign of our concern about AI, specifically the potential for cybernetic beings to self-replicate and evolve on their own. An engineer in the movie notes that the androids are "almost as complicated as living organisms. In some cases, they have been designed by other computers. We don't know exactly how they work." 

Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry (John Hough, 1974)

Cast: Peter Fonda, Susan George, Adam Roarke, Vic Morrow, Eugene Daniels, Kenneth Tobey, Roddy McDowall, Lynn Borden, Adrianne Herman, James W. Gavin. Screenplay: Lee Chapman, Antonio Santean, based on a novel by Richard Unekis. Cinematography Michael D. Margulies. Production design: Philip Leonard. Film editing: Christopher Holmes. Music: Jimmie Haskell. 

"Dirty Mary" is Mary Coombs (Susan George), a petty thief and groupie who gets involved with Larry Rayder (Peter Fonda), a would-be NASCAR star, when he pulls off a supermarket heist with the aid of Deke Sommers (Adam Roarke), an alcoholic auto mechanic, and goes on a run that develops into a widespread, high-speed car (and helicopter) chase, masterminded by state police captain Everett Franklin (Vic Morrow). And that's pretty much all you need to know about Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, except that the title does a disservice to Deke, the third in the trio and the only close-to-interesting character in the film. Mary and Larry might as well be animated cartoons for all the humanity their characters generate, and George and Fonda play them accordingly. (George's manic performance, often lapsing into her native British accent, got on my nerves.) But Roarke makes some effort to provide some nuance to Deke, a loser whose fondness for the bottle makes him unemployable even though he's shown to be a master at making bashed-up automobiles run. He's also somewhat in love with Larry, his one chance at redemption. Otherwise, the real stars of the film are the cars, a 1966 Chevrolet Impala, a 1969 Dodge Charger, a bunch of Dodge Polara police cars, and that helicopter. You pretty much know how it's all going to end, and when it does it stops, having accomplished the inevitable with no need to point a moral or adorn a tale. 

Flesh for Frankenstein (Paul Morrissey, 1973)

Joe Dallesandro and Dalila Di Lazzaro in Flesh for Frankenstein

Cast: Joe Dallesandro, Monique van Vooren, Udo Kier, Arno Jürging, Dalila Di Lazzaro, Srdjan Zelenovic, Nicoletta Elmi, Marco Liofredi, Liù Bosisio. Screenplay: Paul Morrissey. Cinematography: Luigi Kuveiller. Production design: Enrico Job. Film editing: Jed Johnson, Franco Silvi. Music: Claudio Gizzi. 

Silly, kinky, campy, bloody, sometimes scary, often very funny, and altogether ridiculous, Flesh for Frankenstein is also known as Andy Warhol's Frankenstein. Warhol's contribution to the film was his name and very little else, except for his association with director Paul Morrissey and star Joe Dallesandro. The idea for the film has been traced back to Roman Polanski, who suggested to Morrissey that he make a Frankenstein movie in 3-D. The backing for the proposal came from producer Carlo Ponti, with the result that the facilities at Cinecittà in Rome and Italian film technicians like cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller, production designer Enrico Job, composer Claudio Gizzi, and special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi became available. The result looks better than it has any right to. It features Udo Kier in one of his first journeys over the top, playing the mad scientist baron, who is trying to breed a new master race. He has his female creature (Dalila Di Lazzaro) and the torso of the male in storage as the film begins, and is searching for a Serbian peasant with the right nose, or as he calls it, nasum -- the baron likes to drop in a little Latin to impress his assistant, Otto (Arno Jürging). He finds it on Sacha (Srdjan Zelenovic, an otherwise unknown actor), who has the misfortune to go with his friend Nicholas (Dallesandro) to a brothel. On their way home afterward, they're waylaid by the baron and Otto; Nicholas is knocked out and Sacha is beheaded. Unfortunately, Sacha wants to be a monk, possibly because, as we see, he's more attracted to Nicholas than to the women in the brothel. So despite having his head sewn to the male creature's torso, he's a failure when the baron tries to breed him with the female. Meanwhile, Nicholas has been hired as a servant by the baroness (Monique van Vooren), who wants him to serve at table but mostly to have sex with her. The baron, who is also her brother, has lost interest in sex some time after the birth of their two children. Nicholas recognizes Sacha when the baron presents his creatures at dinner, so with the help of the children, who have been spying on everything in the castle, he finds his way to the laboratory where everybody in the household eventually winds up in a scene that has more corpses than the last act of Hamlet. Let it be said about Flesh for Frankenstein that it's almost never boring. 

Henry Fool (Hal Hartley, 1997)

James Urbaniak and Thomas Jay Ryan in Henry Fool

Cast: Thomas Jay Ryan, James Urbaniak, Parker Posey, Maria Porter, James Saito, Kevin Corrigan, Liam Aiken, Miho Nikaido, Gene Ruffini, Nicholas Hope, Chuck Montgomery. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Michael Spiller. Production design: Steve Rosenzweig. Film editing: Steve Hamilton. Music: Hal Hartley. 

In commenting on Hal Hartley's Henry Fool, I feel a little like those people who used to say about Woody Allen that they preferred his earlier, funnier movies. It's not entirely true, of course. Henry Fool is a great step in the right direction for Hartley, winning him the award for best screenplay at Cannes, earning him more mainstream attention than his previous films, and setting up an intriguing trilogy (which Hartley has said wasn't in his mind when he made what became its first installment). It's just that to move from the comparatively sedate world of mostly harmless and underachieving misfits to one in which the characters confess to crimes like statutory rape, get seriously beaten up, commit manslaughter, and win the Nobel Prize in Literature is a long stretch. As usual, much depends on how well the performers can bring the characters to something like life while still working within the distinctive parameters of Hartley's style. They succeed brilliantly in Henry Fool, with Thomas Jay Ryan playing the Mephistophelean title role to perfection, moving from slovenly to seductive with apparent ease. James Urbaniak's Simon Grim is the perfect patsy for Henry's manipulations as he rises from semi-literate garbage man to literary celebrity, taking the fall for Henry even as he triumphs. And as Fay Grim, Simon's slutty sister, Parker Posey manages to break free from Hartley's deadpan mode to be the best Parker Posey she can be, always a treat to watch. There's also the usual gallery of supporting characters who irrupt into the world out of Hartley's imaginings. Henry Fool has more satiric moments than Hartley's earlier films, taking shots at right wing politics and the publishing industry (which I suspect Hartley intends as a stand-in for the film industry). 
 

Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmüller, 1975)

Giancarlo Giannini in Seven Beauties

Cast: Giancarlo Giannini, Fernando Rey, Shirley Stoler, Elena Fiore, Piero Di Iorio, Enzo Vitale, Roberto Herlitzka, Lucio Amelio, Ermelinda De Felice, Biaca D'Origlia, Francesca Marciano. Screenplay: Lina Wertmüller. Cinematography: Tonino Delli Colli. Production design: Enrico Job. Film editing: Franco Fraticelli. Music: Enzo Jannacci. 

As a student of literature, I was called on to memorize the seven deadly sins: pride, envy, wrath, avarice, sloth, gluttony, and lechery. But I don't think I was ever made to recall the corresponding virtues, which the medieval church categorized as humility, kindness, patience, charity, diligence, temperance, and chastity. Our age has added another to the list of virtues: survival. We speak of "survival of the fittest," which has caused us to couple fitness with health as the supreme necessities for survival. One of our most popular TV shows, now in its 45th season, is Survivor, the reality competition show that has a motto: "Outwit. Outplay. Outlast." Which brings us to Pasqualino Frafuso, aka "Settebellezze" or "Seven Beauties," the protagonist of Lina Wertmüller's scarifying satire Seven Beauties. Pasqualino commits almost every one of the seven deadly sins all for the sake of survival. He outwits, outplays, and outlasts the worst that can befall him in Europe under the heel of the Nazis, lying, killing, raping, seducing as the means to an end: staying alive. And of course we loathe him for it, while at the same time questioning what we would do in the same circumstances. Seven Beauties is an unsubtle film, and its lack of finesse in character and situation works against its ostensible aim as a moral fable. It makes a feint at seriousness of purpose by introducing a sympathetic character, Pasqualino's friend Francesco (Piero Di Iorio), and a moral exemplar, the anarchist Pedro (Fernando Rey), but the dominant note of the film is a sour nihilism. Giancarlo Giannini's performance as Pasqualino would be a standout in any film: He's introduced to us as a Chaplinesque caricature of a strutting dandy, and for a while it's fun to watch him go from bad to worse, as in his efforts to dispose of the body of a man he has killed. But soon a queasiness sets in, as we wonder how much lower this worm can crawl. There should be no redemption for a Pasqualino, but instead Wertmüller gives us a cynical ending, suggesting that Pasqualino will repopulate the Earth with his own kind, in his own words, "A rotten comedy, a lousy farce, called living." 

Corridor of Mirrors (Terence Young, 1948)

Edana Romney and Eric Portman in Corridor of Mirrors

Cast: Edana Romney, Eric Portman, Barbara Mullen, Hugh Sinclair, Bruce Belfrage, Alan Wheatley, Joan Maude, Leslie Weston, Hugh Latimer, John Penrose, Christopher Lee, Lois Maxwell, Mavis Villiers, Thora Hird. Screenplay: Rudolph Cartier, Edana Romney, based on a novel by Christopher Massie. Cinematography: André Thomas. Production design: Serge Piménoff. Costume design: Owen Hyde-Clark, Maggy Rouff. Film editing: Douglas Myers. Music: Georges Auric. 

As a study in erotic decadence, Corridor of Mirrors courts (and has received) comparison to any number of stories, films, and fables, including Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946), Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (filmed by Albert Lewin in 1945), and the French legend of Bluebeard and his wives. When we first meet her, Mifanwy Conway (Edana Romney) seems like a petulant young woman, catered to by her husband, Sir David Conway (Bruce Belfrage) and more than happy to escape from her three noisy young children to go to an assignation with her lover at, of all places, Madame Tussauds wax museum in London. She tours the museum until she comes to the effigy of Paul Mangin (Eric Portman) in the hall of criminals; he was hanged for the murder of Caroline Hart (Joan Maude), a night club singer. From here the story unfolds in flashback: Before she is married, Mifanwy meets Paul in the night club. He is attracted by her dark beauty and she by his mysterious aloofness. She goes to his opulent mansion, where her explorations take her to a hall lined with mirrored doors, behind each of which she finds a figure of a woman in an elaborate Renaissance costume. As their relationship develops, he eventually unveils for her a portrait of a 15th century Italian woman who looks exactly like Mifanwy, and claims that they were lovers in a past life. She also encounters a mysterious woman named Veronica (Barbara Mullen) who resides in his mansion and asserts that she, too, was once his lover, now relegated to the role of servant. This is all a little too spooky for Mifanwy, who finds that taking up with the comparatively normal David gives her a break from Paul's sinister ways. But she's drawn back again, with calamitous results. That Corridor of Mirrors stands up at all to the comparisons with the other tales is in large part because of the sumptuous settings and costumes, the atmospheric cinematography, and an only occasionally overbearing score by Georges Auric. What it lacks is the wit that Cocteau and Wilde brought to their fables, and any real chemistry between its leading players, Portman and Romney. Portman plays Paul with the stiffness of his effigy at Madame Tussauds, and Romney, who also wrote the screenplay with Rudolph Cartier and served as co-producer with him, doesn't have the range or depth as an actress to bring off such a complex role. It was her third film and her last. On the other hand, it was the first film for Terence Young as director; he went on to launch the James Bond series with Dr. No (1962), and made two more movies with Sean Connery as Bond, From Russia With Love (1963) and Thunderball (1965).