Sisters (Brian De Palma, 1973)

Jennifer Salt in Sisters

Cast: Margot Kidder, Jennifer Salt, Charles Durning, William Finley, Lisle Wilson, Barnard Hughes, Mary Davenport, Dolph Sweet. Screenplay: Brian De Palma, Louisa Rose. Cinematography: Gregory Sandor. Production design: Gary Weist. Film editing: Paul Hirsch. Music: Bernard Herrmann. 

You can get caught up playing Spot the Steal while watching Brian De Palma's Sisters as he steals from Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954), borrows from Psycho (1960), or pays homage to Rope (1948), as many critics have noted. He also called out of retirement the composer most associated with Hitchcock, Bernard Herrmann, to compose the score. But the central borrowing is of Hitchcock's most prevalent theme: voyeurism. In the opening scene, Danielle (Margot Kidder) and Phillip (Lisle Wilson) appear on a parody of a reality game show that has a voyeuristic premise: He's a man changing in a locker room when she enters on the other side of a partition that has some missing panels. When he realizes that she's blind and she starts to change clothes, what should he do? The contestants on the show have to predict his action: Will he watch? Will he tell her he can see her? Will he turn away? After the show, Phillip learns that Danielle is not really blind, and they go out to dinner and then back to her apartment where he spends the night with her. But he encounters some complications: He learns that she has a jealous ex-husband (William Finley) and that she has a twin sister named Dominique who is staying overnight in her bedroom because it's the twins' birthday. What happens next is partly witnessed by another voyeur: Grace (Jennifer Salt), a journalist (she writes a column for a Staten Island newspaper but dreams of better things) who witnesses some of what happens in Danielle's apartment from her own across a courtyard. But when she calls the police to tell them what she saw, at first they don't believe her (she has written articles criticizing the cops), and then when they go to Danielle's apartment there's no evidence that what she saw has happened there. We know the truth, so the suspense in the rest of the film comes from Grace's attempt, with the help of a private detective (Charles Durning), to uncover both the crime and the cleanup. It's a nicely plotted variation on the Hitchcockian theme. The film suffers because Grace is written and overplayed as a nervous wreck, plagued by an interfering mother (Mary Davenport), another Hitchcockian trope. And the revelation that Danielle and Dominique were conjoined twins who were separated introduces some not too convincing psychology. But the suspense and the ironic ending are nicely handled. Watch for Olympia Dukakis in a bit part as a woman behind the counter of a bakery.

Unfriended (Levan Gabriadze, 2014)

Shelley Hennig in Unfriended

Cast: Shelley Hennig, Moses Storm, Renee Olsted, Will Peltz, Jacob Wysocki, Courtney Halverson, Heather Sossaman. Screenplay: Nelson Greaves. Cinematography: Adam Sidman. Production design: Heidi Koleto. Film editing: Parker Laramie, Andrew Wesman. 

If physical space can be haunted, it stands to reason -- or at least the kind of reason one can bring to such things -- that cyberspace can be too. That's the premise cleverly articulated in Unfriended, a teen horror movie that takes place entirely on a computer screen. The computer belongs to Blaire (Shelley Hennig), a teenager who uses it to communicate via Skype sessions with her boyfriend, Mitch (Moses Storm). We see her first online with Mitch in a makeout session in which they vow to wait until prom night to go all the way. Then they're joined by other friends: Jess (Renee Olsted), Adam (Will Peltz), Ken (Jacob Wysocki), and Val (Courtney Halverson). They exchange the usual taunts and gossip and dirty jokes until they notice that the avatar of another person has appeared on their screens. Who is this lurker and what do they want? To cut to the chase, it turns out to be Laura Barns (Heather Sossaman), who committed suicide a year ago to the day. Anniversaries of deaths, as we know from other horror movies like I Know What You Did Last Summer (Jim Gillespie, 1997), are not to be ignored. Laura is back for revenge on those who posted the videos of her getting drunk and soiling herself that drove her to take her life. And so she wreaks her revenge, not only eliciting the guilty secrets of the others on the computer screen -- Blaire, for example, who has just promised to give her virginity to Mitch, has already lost it to Adam -- but also killing them one by one as the rest watch. The technique of telling the story is interesting, and the actors are up to the challenge of going crazy with terror. But the characters elicit no sympathy and the pacing lags enough that you can't help asking why they don't just shut down their computers and go for help instead of, for example, Googling for solutions. It's also a movie that works better on one's own computer screen than on either a TV or theater screen where the various windows and text boxes opening and closing are hard to read and follow. A sequel, Unfriended: Dark Web (Stephen Susco, 2018), was a flop. 

Brainstorm (Douglas Trumbull, 1983)

Christopher Walken in Brainstorm

Cast: Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher, Cliff Robertson, Jordan Christopher, Donald Hotton, Alan Fudge, Joe Dorsey, Bill Morey, Jason Lively, Georgianne Walken. Screenplay: Bruce Joel Rubin, Robert Stitzel, Philip Frank Messina. Cinematography: Richard Yuricich. Production design: John Vallone. Film editing: Freeman A. Davies, Edward Warschilka. Music: James Horner. 

Brainstorm is a sci-tech thriller based on a premise familiar to the genre: Brilliant scientists come up with a breakthrough and face the threat that it will be misused by nefarious forces. In older films, the nefarious forces tended to be foreign ones, Nazis or Commies. Today, however, they usually come from our own corporate-military-industrial complex. Working together, Dr. Michael Brace (Christopher Walken) and Dr. Lillian Reynolds (Louise Fletcher) have created a way to transmit the brainwaves of one person to another, stimulating not only the visual and audible sensations but also the bodily ones -- respiratory, muscular, etc. The transmissions can also be recorded and stored. It's virtual reality gone whole hog, especially after Brace's wife, Karen (Natalie Wood), an industrial designer, comes up with a snazzy little headset. Brace and Reynolds are hopeful for all sorts of peaceful uses of the technology, but to get funding for it, they have to agree with the head of the corporation for which they work, Alex Terson (Cliff Robertson), that it can be shown to investors. And you know who has the money to fund such a project. The inventors are dismayed at the prospect of misuse, but they put up with it until the real dangers of the invention show up. A researcher records himself having an orgasm and gives it to another man who plays it on a loop, sending himself into a coma from the experience. And then Reynolds herself, a chain smoker, has a heart attack and dies, but not before hauling herself to the device and recording the experience. Brace discovers the tape and almost dies playing it before he's able to disconnect. Finding that the company has kept the tape and has actually killed someone with it and is experimenting with other malign uses for the technology, Brace and Karen team up to find ways to stop it. It's a worthy premise, but Trumbull, a noted special effects director making his first (and only) feature in the director's chair, encountered a perfect storm of difficulties, the chief of which was Natalie Wood's death in 1981. Wood's major scenes in Brainstorm had already been filmed, but MGM, which was in financial difficulties, pulled the plug on the project. Fortunately, the production was insured by Lloyd's of London, which stepped in and allowed Trumbull to complete the movie. Wood's sister, Lana, doubled for her in the remaining scenes. Still, Brainstorm was not a critical or commercial success. There's a funny sequence in which Brace causes the robots on the assembly line to go haywire, and Fletcher's performance is great. Wood is fine, but Walken, a specialist in offbeat characters, seems miscast. The subplot, which involves the Braces using the technology to communicate their feelings to each other and repair their fraying marriage, is tedious and sentimental. And the concluding sequence, in which we find out what Reynolds saw when she was dying, is almost inevitably a letdown.   

Gone in 60 Seconds (H.B. Halicki, 1974)

Eleanor taunts her pursuers. 

Cast: H.B. Halicki, Marion Busia, Jerry Daugirda, James McIntyre, George Cole, Ronald Halicki, Markos Kotsikos. Screenplay: H.B. Halicki. Cinematography: Scott Lloyd-Davies, Jack Vacek. Art direction: Dennis Stouffer. Film editing: Warner E. Leighton. Music: Ronald Halicki, Philip Kachaturian. 

True, Americans love cars. But it's equally true that they love seeing them crash. Gone in 60 Seconds is the fulfillment of stunt driver H.B. "Toby" Halicki's dream: to make a movie with the wildest, most destructive car chase in film history. At that he succeeds, with a 40-minute scene in which a yellow 1973 Ford Mustang called Eleanor takes on all comers, leaving 93 automobiles in ruins. Eleanor is the true star of the film, as Halicki realizes: She's the only performer mentioned in the opening credits. The remaining hour or so of the film is just setup, although an additional 32 cars get wrecked in some fashion before the big chase. Halicki plays Maindrian Pace, an insurance investigator with a sideline: He and his crew steal cars and resell them after disguising the stolen cars with identification numbers and license plates taken from similar models they buy from junkyards. (As an upright insurance man, he insists that all the stolen cars be insured.) When he gets a big order from a Venezuelan drug lord for 48 vehicles of all sorts, he and his gang set out to procure them. Each car is given a woman's name as a way of keeping track of them. There are a few hiccups: Nancy, a Cadillac Eldorado, is discovered to have a trunk full of heroin; Maindrian insists that she has to be destroyed, which angers his brother-in-law, Eugene (Jerry Daugirda), who wants to sell the drugs. Eleanor is also a problem: At the very last minute before he's supposed to deliver the cars, Maindrian discovers that she's uninsured, which goes against his rule. Fortunately, he knows where another Eleanor can be stolen, which further angers Eugene, who rats out Maindrian to the cops, giving them the location where Maindrian is going to steal her. When he's discovered, Maindrian takes off in the new Eleanor, leading a flotilla of cop cars from various Southern California towns and cities into the film's autopocalypse. The remarkable thing about the great chase is that Halicki was able to get cooperation from various authorities, ranging from the California Highway Patrol to the mayors and city councils of the towns through which it runs. The story of how the movie was made is in some ways more interesting than the movie itself. Halicki, driving Eleanor, was seriously injured in one scene and had to shut down filming for three weeks. (Fifteen years later, Halicki was killed in an accident while making a sequel to the movie.) Much of Gone in 60 Seconds is tedious setup exposition, and it's poorly acted -- the cast largely consists of Halicki's friends and family -- but those 40 minutes are golden, a tribute to Halicki's persistence and especially to his cameramen, stunt drivers, and film editors. 

Blood and Sand (Rouben Mamoulian, 1941)

Tyrone Power in Blood and Sand

Cast: Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, Rita Hayworth, Alla Nazimova, Anthony Quinn, J. Carrol Naish, Lynn Bari, John Carradine, Laird Cregar. Screenplay: Jo Swerling, based on a novel by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez. Cinematography: Ernest Palmer, Ray Rennehan. Art direction: Richard Day, Joseph C. Wright. Film editing: Robert Bischoff. Music: Arnold Newman. 

Vicente Blasco Ibáñez's novels aren't read much anymore, but they were a fertile source for screenwriters in the silent era, providing two vehicles for Rudolph Valentino, Blood and Sand (Fred Niblo, 1922) and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Rex Ingram, 1921), and two for Greta Garbo, Torrent (Monta Bell, 1926) and The Temptress (Niblo, 1926). It was probably the Valentino connection that led producer and studio head Darryl F. Zanuck to revive Blasco's old warhorse Blood and Sand as a vehicle for Twentieth Century Fox's biggest male star, Tyrone Power. He plays Juan Gallardo, the son of a bullfighter who was killed in the ring. The movie follows Juan's rise and fall, as he becomes the greatest matador in Spain, but finds love and glory too much to handle. It's genuine cornball stuff, with the usual characters: his sweet and devoted wife, Carmen (Linda Darnell); the temptress Doña Sol (Rita Hayworth), who steals him away from Carmen; and the devoted mother (Alla Nazimova) who prays that he'll be gored in the ring just bad enough to get him out of the game that killed his father. Darnell's is a thankless role, and it's not made any better by the decision to include a scene in which Carmen prays to the Virgin and we hear both her prayer and the Virgin's response to it in voiceover. Hayworth is sensational, however, never better than in a scene in which she dances with Manolo (Anthony Quinn), a friend of Juan's who has set out on his own to become a rival bullfighter. The Technicolor cinematography won an Oscar, and some of the credit goes to director Rouben Mamoulian, who wanted to evoke the palette of Spanish painters like Goya and Velázquez. Mamoulian has to be faulted, however, for the thudding obviousness of the death scene of Nacional (John Carradine), one of Juan's friends, who expires with his arms stretched out in a pose that recalls the crucifixes often seen in the film. The bullfight scenes, shot in Mexico, were supervised by Budd Boetticher, who had done some bullfighting there. They are, fortunately for those of us who find the sport repellent, kept to a minimum -- there's more sand than blood to be seen. 

Two Fables by Hal Hartley

PJ Harvey and Martin Donovan in The Book of Life

 

Tatiana Abracos in The Girl From Monday

The Book of Life (Hal Hartley, 1998)

Cast: Martin Donovan, PJ Harvey, Dave Simonds, Thomas Jay Ryan, Miho Nikaido, D.J. Mendel, Katreen Hardt, James Urbaniak. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Jim Denault. Art direction: Andy Biscontini. Film editing: Steve Hamilton. 

The Girl From Monday (Hal Hartley, 2005)

Cast: Bill Sage, Sabrina Lloyd, Tatiana Abracos, Leo Fitzpatrick, D.J. Mendel, James Urbaniak, Juliana Francis, Gary Wllmes, Edie Falco. Screenplay: Hal Hartley. Cinematography: Sarah Cawley. Production design: Inbal Weinberg. Film editing: Steve Hamilton. Music: Hal Hartley. 

As the millennium approached -- remember the Y2K jitters? -- two producers from the French company Haut et Court teamed with a European TV network and asked filmmakers from around the world to make hourlong movies that would reflect their visions of the imminent future. Hal Hartley, fresh off the success of Henry Fool (1997), was the American director chosen, and The Book of Life was his response. It's a fable about the Second Coming: Jesus (Martin Donovan) arrives in New York City, tasked by God to fulfill the prophecies about the end of the world recounted in the book of Revelation. He is accompanied by Mary Magdalene (PJ Harvey). Jesus likes New York and its people so much that after retrieving the Book of Life (an Apple Powerbook) from a storage locker (No. 666) and breaking the fifth of the seven seals he calls the whole thing off. Apocalypse? Nah. His decision is hotly protested by attorneys from the firm of Armageddon, Armageddon, and Jehoshaphat. God, Jesus observes, is all about the Law, so lawyers are his favorites. Jesus is somewhat aided by Satan (Thomas Jay Ryan) who wants the world to continue so he has somewhere to meddle. The film's brevity is its chief virtue: Too much more and the wit would have cloyed -- as it sometimes does -- into whimsy. The humanistic outlook of the film seems to have stuck with Hartley into his next movie, The Girl From Monday, a venture into science fiction that doesn't quite work. In the future, the United States has become a conglomerate, and people are traded on the stock exchange. (The more sex they have, for example, the higher their value.) Bill Sage plays Jack, an advertising executive who is secretly a member of the resistance to this new order, but he's so disillusioned that he drives to the seashore where he plans to kill himself. Instead, he just passes out after taking pills, and awakes to see a woman (Tatiana Abracos) emerge from the sea. She's an alien from a planet where people are part of an incorporate whole, and when he asks her name she says "No Body." Jack takes her home with him and teaches her how to perform simple physical tasks like drinking and eating. He also learns that she's there to bring back with her a fellow being from her planet (known on Earth as Monday after its discoverer) who came to Earth years ago. The problem with The Girl From Monday is that the satire on consumerism doesn't mesh well with the sci-fi premise. The film is a muddle of ideas, many of which are half-baked. Hartley's inspiration is said to have been Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965), but Godard's movie has a coherence and dry wit The Girl From Monday lacks.   

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.