Cult-Induced Time Warp: Triple Review!

Okay, so I might be a little behind.  But here I am -- I alone survived to tell you -- in three abrupt, terrible, and probably not-all-that-worth-it reviews.  But I can't let something silly like inability stop me.  Onward Christian soldiers...err...welll, you know.

Title: The Wicker Man

Director: Robin Hardy

Country: UK

Year of Release: 1973

Runtime: 88 mins.

The Wicker Man.  Oft proclaimed "Citizen Kane of horror films."  I can't quite figure if this appellation is accurate or not.  For one, I'm not quite sure what that means anyway.  And for two, well The Wicker Man is a movie unto itself in many ways.  I've never seen anything quite like it.  It is part detective story, part thriller, part supernatural horror, part cult movie, part musical.  And it has Christopher Lee as Lord Summerisle.  According to the man himself, this is the best role he ever played.  That's saying something, given his many, many, many performances over the years.

But wait.  What was that?  Oh, yes.  Part musical.  If you've never seen it, this is one of its more bizarre aspects.  Because in musical fashion, the musical interludes last song-length.  So, there are entire scenes that consist primarily of song.  But the film takes advantage of the inherent strangeness of the musical interlude (especially when encountered outside the genre proper).  Music sections are frequently used for the film's more surreal sequences, when our hero staid hero, Sgt. Howie (Edward Woodward) encounters the more lurid aspects of cultic life on Summerisle.  The film's most infamous scene, I believe, comes when the Inn-Keeper's daughter (Britt Ekland), sings and attempts to nakedly seduce our hero through the walls of his room.  The weirdness of the genre shift accurately mirrors the weirdness of the action in the scene, or at least the weirdness surely experienced by devout ol' Howie.  This comes, notably, after an equally traumatic scene, in which various townspeople are seen copulating in a graveyard.  And in one instance, with an actual burial mound, unless my eyes deceived me.

The film follows Howie as he attempts to find a missing child.  But he comes to realize something sinister is going on beneath the island's placid surface.  Of course, we find that the town is actually a pagan fertility cult.  And their failing crops require of them a sacrifice.  It isn't until the end we learn that the child, for whom Howie and the viewer have been fearing all this time, is only a decoy.  Howie is the real sacrifice.  And thus the film ends, with Howie burned alive in the titular Wicker Man.

The thriller plot works quite well, I think.  But more valuable and more exciting, by far, is the utter strangeness of the place.  The setting and characters play deliberately with our sense of normal (and very English) society.  It is fitting and cathartic that the film's climax comes after a masked pageant and parade.

There is something to how this movie combines different senses of England (standing in, I suppose, for modern culture).  Howie represents conservative values, of course.  But he is also the film's most genuine and good-hearted character.  But he is clearly an emblem of society at large.  The island of Summerisle itself represents a kind of untamed, free and wild landscape that seems likewise emblematic of one idea of British culture.  We think of it as a particular kind of green, with a particular kind of grey-blue sky.  Moreover, we imagine it in-tune with an ancient past.  We feel there is some richness to its version of nature...something almost supernatural.  And we have the organization of this feeling into the contemporary pagan cult, which collides both senses.  Howie points out, near the films' end, that his death will change nothing.  And surely, as a modern audience, we agree with him.  We know this sort of thing is outdated and misguided.  And yet he is doomed anyway, by the cult's zeal.

This final scene was the most memorable moment for me.  Howie's eternal devotion, as he chants prayers inside the Wicker Man...strikes deeply.  Because he is just as devout as the pagans.  I'm not sure exactly what the take away should be from this film.  But it starts, I think, to speak to modern discontent.  Our mutual fear of and attraction to not just the occult, but the libidinous and forbidden dark side of human nature, which we repress.  Thus, The Wicker Man is the site of a battle.  And, we might infer, neither side will win.

As the Wicker Man's head melts, in the film's final shot, it bends downward and reveals the sun about to set, in the distance, over the ocean.  Nothing is more haunting, I think, than to see the utter primacy of nature, waiting always, always outlasting us and any feeble attempts we build up to front the inexplicable vagaries of life -- social or natural.

  

The Wicker Man is once again the horror movie as revelation -- as violent in its deconstruction if not actually on screen.  It threatens our stabilities, while mesmerizing us with its imagery.  Its particular weirdness, of which there are many wonderful set pieces throughout, is in the service of jarring us into contemplation.  Its horror, for us, is that it might just be too late.

Title: The Masque of the Red Death

Director: Roger Corman

Country: US/UK, filmed in UK

Year of Release: 1964

Runtime: 89 mins.

We shift cultic tones for this picture.  I hadn't spoken a lot about Christopher Lee's Summerisle above, despite his being quite wonderful.  But, for my donuts, there is no one I love more in these roles than Vincent Price.  And his role as a "dissolute Satanist," as Netflix accurately describes him, in Corman's The Masque of the Red Death is an excellent example.  It is my first Corman Poe film, otherwise I might be tempted to say, the best example...but, of course, I can't say, except that I imagine this role would be difficult to top.

The piercing, high, soft but steel tones of Price's voice have a lazy gentility to them that is utterly threatening and unsettling when applied to an evil character.  It's the perfect inversion.  Price's voice never seemed to me like it would fit a villain.  And yet this, paradoxically, makes him an incredibly effective one.  And he all but steals the show.  He is the essence of charismatic evil.

How can one forget such delightful exchanges as:

Franceca:  Your master...?

Prospero:  Satan.  (Softer) The Lord of Flies.  (Softer still) The Fallen Angel.  (Barely whispered) The Devil!

Okay, so maybe you have to see it.  But Price, as Prospero, is dressed in a purple turban and carrying a falcon in this scene.  And, really, that adequately summarizes this film for me.  I don't need anything else.  I'm fine.  I'm good.  Go home everyone.

Vincent Price in a sumptuous and indeterminately medieval castle, wearing increasingly bizarre costumes, invoking Satan, while falconing in the midst of a Red Death apocalypse.  This...is what movies were made for.  I don't think I can be convinced otherwise.  Go ahead.  Try.  Is there anything better than this?

Roger Corman is stealing my heart.  One of my favorite films from last month was Death Race 2000, and now seeing him in the director's chair is equally satisfying.  No doubt the movie benefited from Corman having access to the gorgeous high-budget sets from Becket (and they are lush).  These English sets lend the film that same peculiar ambiance -- like that of The Wicker Man.  Cool, cold, ancient, grey -- like there is always a chill wind whistling through the whole thing.  A quality of baroque, abstract horror -- that benefits from supposed "cultivation" by bending it into twisted forms -- be it Lee's Lord Summerisle or Price's Prospero -- who strike me as demented inversions of the gentleman hero.

 And I love any movie with an openly Satanic villain.  Ah!  And those rooms -- the coloured rooms: white, yellow, purple, black!  I would watch this movie just to the see the weird blue candles.  By the time the color-robed aspects of Death (which is what I take them to be) congregate at the end -- nothing is more fitting than the Red Death's last words to the audience:

"Sic transit gloria mundi."  Thus passes the glory of the world.

And once again, we are left in a kind of suspended animation, with a deferred sense of fulfillment.  The Wicker Man and Red Death take different paths, but they share -- in my estimation -- similar natures.  They show us how no human structure can hide us from death.  And that is why it is easy to look past what some might call the cheesy exteriors of these films.  Of course, I don't think of them this way. Once you realize the gravity at their hearts, it becomes difficult to look back on the foregoing images unmoved.

But this sort of "message" is always a reduction.  And I can't think of two films recently that work just as well, if not more so, on the level of their images -- the sheer potency of what is on screen.  And this is still using the language of conventional movies.  These aren't experimental films, really.  And they're not anything like, say, a Bergman.  But still, they somehow act as dreams unfolding, such that a real review, to me, would be, almost, a catalog of images.  It's hearing Price speak.  It's existing in the scene.  It's the incommunicable experience itself.

The real horror is always ending.  When the movie ends and we return to our lives.  What do we take away?  What do we grasp on to as the dream fades away?  Maybe some platitude.  Maybe some genuine thread of meaning.  So, we have "Sic Transit Gloria Mundi."  And we say, yes, yes.  And we think.  But there is always a lurking fear.  For a movie like this -- there's no simple way to contain it.  

Like Prospero, as the end nears, what are we forgetting?

Title: The Devil Rides Out

Director: Terence Fisher

Country: UK

Year of Release: 1968

Runtime: 95 mins.

Other Titles: The Devil's Bride

Here's the Electric Wizard pick.  And before I go any further.  Dang it six ways to Sunday.  I love that poster.  Again.  A goat-headed priest in a psychedelic eye-robe popping in front of a BAM bright yellow.  Glorious.

This is one of Hammer's latter day flicks, released just a month after Rosemary's Baby.  I tell you, there must've been something in the water.  The threat, it seems to me, of the growing counter-culture and the flower child movement, was always this supernatural darkness.  If we believe in the power of love, in a kind of spiritual unity and transcendence -- we necessarily imply its opposite.

That's why -- at the turning point -- in 1969 you start getting acts like Black Sabbath.  They're the cusp and transition point.  They're basically hippies.  But they're evil hippies.  They still want to believe in the power of love, but they know the world has failed them.  When they invoke Satan in the famous "War Pigs," its not some silly act of reverence, but a condemnation of the abuse of power -- of the establishment that betrayed their ideals -- betrayed love for the world.  Satan is the threat and is the world.

Now somewhere along the line, this gets transmuted and the symbolism is expanded and broken down and spread out.  And it's not always easy to figure out exactly what anyone means by it all.  But with a film like The Devil Rides Out, and our foregoing two others, we see even the mainstream (such as it it) flirting with these ideas.  Because this era didn't just see the breaking of hippy idealism, it saw the breakdown of all ideologies.  We're entering the postmodern world in 1968, man.  And it's no surprise to me we start seeing Satan everywhere.  And in The Devil Rides Out, he's lurking behind our neighbors and closest friends.

This movie features both Christopher Lee (this time as our hero, in what he claimed was his favorite Hammer role), and the insidiously excellent Charles Gray as Mugatu, the evil sorcerer.  That's a pair made in hell.  And the movie -- with a rather straightforward thriller plot -- offers us a lot to chew on.  There are various demon summonings (both genuinely disturbing), cultic rituals bringing forth the Goat of Mendes, giant spiders, the Angel of Death, mind control, and urbane, clothed British orgies.

When you get a catalog like that, you know you're in a good place.  I guess what fascinates me about a movie like this is that tt makes you start to wonder.  Is this Satan a specter of our fears?  Or do we really just go for him?  For the spectacle? It's a different era that could find even a familiar fear in the occult, I think.  The idea of a Satanic cult as genteel as Mugatu's seems quaint today.

So here's the question.  Why do the psychotronicaly-minded among us go to see films about cults and goat worship?  What is it that fascinates us?  It may just be the sheer power of the weird.  We hunger for it in all its facets.  Stephen King, I think, has a quote (which I am having no luck in finding right now), which says something to the effect of: fans of horror, in particular, are willing to sit through two hours of boredom, schlock, bad acting, etc., just for that one moment.  That's the idea at least.  The Devil Rides Out has a lot more to offer.  But I've been struck by that idea, because it seems to ring true.  Horror movies, unlike so many other genres, don't necessarily suffer for anything that would hamstring another movie.

Sure, we can argue gradations.  We can talk about performances.  We can talk about sets, scenes, makeup.  I'd be glad to, and I'm sure I could talk your ear off.  But when it comes down to it, no matter how bad or good, it's all worth one shot of the Goat of Mendes and his weird, piercing raccoon eyes.  That Lee and Gray helm the ship is just all to the better.