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Jul

wargames 25th anniversary event

By ripperlady 0 Comments

Categories: Analysis, Commentary, LOST and Reviews

It was the coolest movie trailer in the summer of 1983. A robotic synthetic voice asked “SHALL WE PLAY A GAME?” as the words themselves spooled out across a computer screen. And a nearly unknown Matthew Broderick (character name: David Lightman) answered back: “How about ‘GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR’?”… unleashing a phantom Soviet missile attack and chaos inside of NORAD.

OMG!!! IT WAS AWESOME!!

Okay, so ordinary people didn’t scream Internet (or even mundane) slang in all-caps back then. Actually, nobody I knew had ever even been online… except maybe those guys who kept round-the-clock vigil inside the university computer lab and spoke amongst themselves in Elvish. But for the rest of us, David Lightman’s hack in to the ARPANET was our first entry into the world of hacking, personal computers, dial-up connections and extremely large floppy disks.

Young America packed the theaters, Roger Ebert gave the film a rousing thumbs-up, and computer science majors must have tripled that Fall after the summer movie Geekathon! Even a decade later, I got a special WarGames rush when I opened the back of a new PC, installed a 14.4 Kbps dial-up modem, and then dialed my first number, heard the handshake and logged in.

The movie rocked my world. So what did I think when I heard there would be a special 25th Anniversary big screen presentation? I was: 1)Thrilled. 2)Worried.

Worried? Yes. What if it didn’t hold up after all these years? I really hadn’t seen the film since Matthew Broderick (like us) was still a fresh-faced kid. And the technology involved could—you know—be called a little… old. I mean, the first Mac didn’t even come out until a year later. And now? In a single day, I can confront two unique virus threats to my work PC, conduct business by email with prospective magazine contributors located anywhere inside the English-speaking world, send an article typed from a prone position on my laptop to an online magazine that could be housed literally anywhere in close enough proximity to Earth, and practice lightsaber technique, Backgammon and advanced Sudoku on my iPhone. If you’re reading this, you are already online and can add your own litany of everyday computer marvels.

So how did this seminal and award-winning film hold up after all these years? Astoundingly well—and definitely worth a shout-out on its Silver Anniversary.

Pre-event photo taken on iPhone

To celebrate the landmark, MGM Studios teamed up with Fathom Events to create a satellite broadcast airing Thursday, July 24 at 7:30 pm local time in select theaters nationwide. The theater selection, though, was fairly broad—at least in major markets. Virtually all of the multiplexes on the Virginia side of the Washington DC Metro Area offered tickets, including my local theater, where I had just seen this summer’s blockbuster, Dark Knight, a few days before.

The short feature preceding the main event contained standard made-for-DVD feature fare (film footage, on-the-set stills, interviews with major cast and crew) plus a look inside the real NORAD (the military command center featured in the film).

Did you ever see that Star Trek documentary in which LeVar Burton got folks at NASA and the scientific community to talk about the aspirational impact Star Trek had on their professional lives? That’s what the interviews with NORAD personnel were like. The interviewees adored WarGames, but were quick to point out the fantasy elements of the film in light of NORAD realities. For example, they didn’t even have full-color displays back in 1983. WarGames gave the folks at NORAD technology they could aspire to—though not (and never!) technology that could go around crucial human decision making.

After the short documentary (which I will just bet is on the 25th Anniversary DVD!), they rolled out the trailer for War Games: The Dead Code, set for straight-to-DVD release on Tuesday, July 29. The new movie does not continue the adventures of David Lightman (though the character list does include a “Dr. Stephen Falken,” the scientist who programmed the WOPR computer that wanted Lightman to play a game). Rather, the film is a cyberterror update, featuring a new fresh face wanting to play games with a seemingly benign piece of particularly pernicious code.

The warm-up over, WarGames itself finally hit the big screen for one special show. It was kind of like catching up with an old friend from 20 years ago. I couldn’t always see what was coming, but I remembered it when I saw it. Among the pleasant semi-surprises:

Getting a quick look inside the Minuteman Missile silos. I didn’t know it until about a decade after my dad retired from his top secret job negotiating contracts for the Air Force, but those silos put food on my table when I was a kid. By the time I got to college, I’d concluded that dad had bought Minuteman nukes for a living, but he corrected me when asked, saying: “No. I bought the silos.” WarGames gave me at least a fictionalized look into what my dad had wrought.
The film score and sound design. I never knew just how far I could wax nostalgic over sounds from the video arcade! Using a combination of military-style march music and 1980s computer bloops and bleeps, the film score struck a perfect balance between the worlds of NORAD and David Lightman. Not surprisingly, “Sound” was one of three categories for which the film received an Oscar nomination. Alas, “Soundtrack” was not another.
The intelligent and nuanced nature of the script—another category for which the film got nominated. The screenplay for WarGames could have gone for any number of clichés. For example (skip ahead of you don’t want spoilers!):
1. The commanding general could have been a bloodthirsty redneck warmonger.
2. The resolution could have used a classic deus ex machina straight out of Star Trek to disable the computer.
3. The script could have given us dialog making a direct comparison between young Lightman’s skills and Falken’s long-dead hopes for his now-deceased son.
Instead:
1. Colorful as he is, the general is the voice of reason, arguing with government civilians that humans, not computers, should control the warheads.
2. The tic-tac-toe game does not halt the launch of WWIII by blowing the computer’s circuits in grand Star Trek: TOS style, but rather helps the artificially intelligent computer to reach its own conclusion that mutually assured destruction is a pointless gaming strategy.
3. We can read the excitement and pride in Falken’s face as Lightman finds the solution, but the script never bashes us over the head by making explicit comparisons with Joshua.

Yes, of course, the movie also has elements that appear incredibly silly today. Network security is almost non-existent. A world-class computer scientist has a backdoor password into NORAD’s WOPR war-strategy computer that anybody who’s read his bio could hack. It’s easy today to laugh at such nonsense, but as far as I can tell present-day network security (and password) standards resulted from hacker exploits. It didn’t precede them.

One other point of amusement: all those great shifting lights on the WOPR computer? Those were controlled by a guy sitting inside the box, hooked up to the interface with an Apple II (that’s pre-Mac, for you young folks!).

All in all, the WarGames 25th Anniversary Event was well-executed and a great deal of fun. Too bad it wasn’t better advertised.

And just remember the next time you see some cinematic hacker unleash a bit of cyber-havoc… David Lightman may not have been the first-ever hacker on screen, but WarGames‘ breakout success did make “the hacker” a standard movie character type.

Jul

regarding blondes, psychics and abberline’s
crutch (part 2)

By ripperlady 2 Comments

Categories: Reviews

Ally Ryder asked about the evolving themes in Ripper cinema. It’s a great question, and one that I don’t think I answered adequately. So here’s to a more in-depth explanation…

Early Ripper Films (1917-1954)
Early Ripper movies tended to use literary antecedents: Wedekind’s Lulu saga (3 plays condensed into a single film) and The Lodger. Between 1917 and 1954—a period of nearly 40 years—there are three movies based on Lulu and five based on The Lodger (if you count Room to Let, which I do). Waxworks is the odd man out.

The first Ripper film to feature Jack the Ripper as a central character doesn’t come until 1944—about 30 years into Ripper cinema. In the Lulu story, the Ripper (when he appears—which he doesn’t in the 1917 version) only appears in cameo. In The Lodger, the killer is supposed to be a central character, but in the two Novello versions, the lodger is actually an innocent “wrong man.” The actual killer is offscreen for all of the Hitchcock film and for all but a few moments of the 1932 film.

So in early cinema, the Ripper story is dominated by two strands—one telling the story of a fictional Ripper victim and the other telling the story of an innocent family unknowingly housing the Ripper under their roof. But the early Lodger movies are squeamish about putting the monster in the house. Once this threat had been fully realized in the 1944 Lodger, though, later adaptations followed suit.

The early English-speaking productions are equally squeamish about making the women prostitutes. I don’t know the cause of this squeamishness for the British films, but for the American movies it’s largely a result of Production Code restrictions and the censors.

Transitional Ripper Cinema and Television (1958-1968)
Television becomes a major force in this period, and new themes emerge. We routinely begin to see supernatural or other fantastical elements (at least in television)—first, a psychic; then an occult ritual used to maintain life across the ages; then waxworks possibly coming to life; and finally, a formless entity who kills so it might feed on the fear of its victims.

In the films, we see police procedural (including the first Sherlock Holmes confrontation) and yet more Lulu. (The Lulu story doesn’t die out until 1980).

One thing about all of these instances… none of them is terribly violent. True, the 1959 Jack the Ripper has that blood-red final scene in the elevator (the film had been in black and white). But on-screen violence was not yet commonplace in the Ripper cinema.

Someone asked why I thought that the Ripper case had been so sanitized. Largely censors, I think. The sanitization in this period, though, stopped applying to the issue of prostitution. In A Study in Terror, the victims are not only prostitutes, but they are given their real names on screen for the first time. This never does become an actual trend. Most Ripper television and cinema continues to create entirely fictitious victims. Notable exceptions include: Murder by Decree, Jack the Ripper (1988) and From Hell.

The Violent Era (1971-Present)
In the late 1960s, the US film industry abandoned the old Production Code and relaxed censorship standards. I’m not sure about the actual impact on world cinema (the Italians had been producing proto-slasher giallo films since 1965!). But from this time forward, Ripper cinema becomes increasingly violent, or at least the Ripper’s eviscerations are discussed if not shown.

I’m not going to provide a complete litany of violent movies. But the actual modus operandi of the Ripper killings finally gets on the table during this period. It’s discussed in the Michael Caine Jack the Ripper. It’s shown, to some extent, in From Hell. And it’s graphically (though boringly) displayed in the Tom Savini Ripper (1985). (No way did Tom create those utterly lame gore effects!).

The larger trend, though, has been just to exploit violence for shock value, regardless of the Ripper’s modus operandi—a trend started by Hammer Films in 1971 with the release of the mildly gory films Dr. Jekyll and Sister Hyde (in which the killer does take female internal organs, though not onscreen) and Hands of the Ripper.

Thematically, pretty much anything is now fair game—from strict police procedurals to the most outrageous supernatural, science fiction and sheer shock plotlines.

Well, I hope that answered Ally’s question a little better! And sorry this is taking so long (the podcast is now two weeks old!). I’m just having to do a lot of shuffling these days. And I hope I didn’t bore everybody with all the detail!

Jul

michael emerson’s 5 creepiest characters of all time:
hour of the wolf

By ripperlady 0 Comments

Categories: Analysis, Commentary, LOST and Reviews

In his “creepiest performances” video, Michael Emerson (Ben Linus on LOST) gives a nod to Max von Sydow and Ingmar Bergman:

Another great one is, if you watch Ingmar Bergman movies… Max von Sydow did a movie for Bergman called The Hour of the Wolf, where he plays a sort of standard tortured Swedish artist who just can’t stop killing young people. It’s kind of awful. —Michael Emerson

Most people don’t go looking to Ingmar Bergman for their “creepy fix.” But obviously they should—and Michael Emerson (almost apologetically) does. It would be hard to come up with a better pick. Hour of the Wolf, Bergman’s lone”horror” movie, practically defines “creepy.”

The film shows the disintegration of an artist’s mind as strange phenomena occur on the remote and isolated island he inhabits with his wife. We never know quite whether the phenomena are objective supernatural disturbances or subjective mental ones. (sound familiar?) But demonic figures (alternately referred to as “cannibals” and “ghosts”) do interact with the couple either objectively or subjectively, and seek to “claim” the man as their own—driving him toward murder and madness, and most likely to his own death.

Stephen King, obviously, ran with this concept in The Shining. But Stanley Kubrick’s film version of that novel relies on a visual style nearly opposite Bergman’s. Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel is full of light and color, a stunning contrast to the dark drama surrounding Jack Torrence.

Hour of the Wolf (shot by legendary cinematographer Sven Nykvist in black and white) uses chiaroscuro techniques to bring the faces of the characters out of the surrounding darkness (and to darken their faces when surrounded by light).

Not to belabor the point (such lighting has become so commonplace), but compare the shadows on Von Sydow’s face with the shadows often used to frame Emerson’s character, Ben Linus:

It’s easy, of course, to make superficial comparisons with LOST. After all, Bergman’s film is set on a remote island where we don’t always know what’s real and what’s not, while Von Sydow’s artist, Johan Borg, is almost always shot in partial shadow. But Hour of the Wolf is really more like what would happen if the unutterable humiliations found in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf were visited upon an insomniac already on the verge of a mental breakdown… and visited upon him by supernatural monsters. All I can say is that, psychologically, Bergman must have been having a pretty bad year.

As a filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman dealt with his personal anxieties and demons by turning them into movies. So Hour of the Wolf is not merely a brooding meditation on the theme of madness. It is actually a very personal film. Von Sydow is largely standing in for Bergman, who had himself suffered (and been hospitalized for) a significant mental breakdown only couple of years earlier. While Bergman grappled with the darkness, Von Sydow (a frequent Bergman actor) had been playing Jesus in The Greatest Story Ever Told, one of the last all-star biblical epics.

Okay, so now I’ll ‘fess up before I bore you with an endless stream of Bergman and Von Sydow trivia. I “found” Bergman during the requisite “post mortem” viewing of what I assumed would be a medicinal dose of just one or two of the director’s films. I’d been avoiding his work my entire adult life because of the whole “tortured Swedish artist” thing that Emerson mentions. But with his death, I decided it was time to see at least one Bergman film.

And so I saw The Seventh Seal. And then I watched Virgin Spring. And then I watched Wild Strawberries… and Persona… and Through a Glass Darkly... and Winter Light… and The Silence… and Shame… and Hour of the Wolf. I just couldn’t get enough. Bergman was nothing like what I expected. Yes, he was full-on arthouse and full-on tortured, but man was he compelling!

For me, finding Bergman was like a huge relief. Here was somebody making well-crafted movies that asked the big questions, and asked them honestly—not as a chance to pontificate but as an opportunity to explore. It was exciting to see films this courageous and probing—a cinema of ideas. And oddly, Bergman’s exploration of the darkness was not nihilistic, but often strangely hopeful.

But there’s not much hopefulness in Hour of the Wolf. The darkness of the title (the hour between night and dawn) permeates the fabric of the film. Von Sydow delivers a magnificently tormented performance as the doomed artist, and Liv Ullmann is spectacular in her part of the grief-stricken wife. You could say that this is a “creepy” favorite of mine. And I’m delighted to find that it’s also a favorite of Michael Emerson’s.

This article first appeard on Blogcritics.
It has also appeared on the LOST site Room 23.

BTW, if you want to get a sense of the film, you can find the American trailer here. It does contain partial upper nudity.

Jul

more creepy characters on the way!

By ripperlady 0 Comments

Categories: Information

Yesterday, I published the first installment of “Michael Emerson’s 5 Creepiest Characters of All Time.” I just want everyone to know that I plan to publish the other four installments within the next couple of weeks.

Right now, I’m waiting for that little red envelope to bring Emerson’s next favorite creepy performance to my doorstep.

Since I’m taking the movies in the order Emerson lists them, you can see for yourself just what’s in that little red envelope. It’s not a performance I would have thought of. But then, I don’t ever have to look for inspiration on how to play creepy…

I’ll have the envelope tomorrow. Should be fun!

Jul

why the happening doesn’t

By ripperlady 0 Comments

Categories: Analysis, Commentary and Reviews

The RipperLady blog is not limited to Ripper movies. Here we takes a look at M. Night Shyamalan’s latest film, and how it stacks up against the movies it’s taking on.

Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan is known for creating twist endings. What he should be known for is twisting conventional genres. Sometimes it works—as it did in The Sixth Sense, Signs and Unbreakable. And sometimes it just falls flat.

In The Happening, Shyamalan plays off a couple of different genres, but most obviously he works with “nature gone wild”—a subgenre of science fiction and horror with a resumé dating back at least to 1954’s Them! In its science fiction manifestation, “nature gone wild” usually involves genetically altered species of animals or insects: giant irradiated ants (Them!), giant chemically mutated bunnies (Night of the Lepus), giant irradiated brain-eating talking crabs (Attack of the Crab Monsters). You get the picture.

In its horror manifestation, “nature gone wild” sometimes involves natural breeding gone dangerously out of control (The Swarm), but most often it involves some kind of malign natural sentience. That is, some element of nature, without any mad science assistance, has developed an apparently conscious will to kill humans. The two most famous examples involve: 1) a lone shark preying in shallow waters, and 2) the interspecies flocking of homicidal birds (c’mon, you know the titles!).

In The Happening, Shyamalan blends “nature gone wild” with what I jokingly refer to as the “siege on a farmhouse in Western Pennsylvania” subgenre of horror—i.e. the George Romero Dead movies and their descendents, including the British Dog Soldiers and Shyamalan’s own Signs. (Curiously, the original “siege on a farmhouse” movie took place in Bodega Bay, CA… and involved the interspecies flocking of homicidal birds).

In addition to alien invasion movies and Swedish existential ones, Shyamalan’s Signs took on Night of the Living Dead (arguably the most famous film by a Pennsylvania filmmaker) and did a credible job of it, turning flesh-eating zombies into aliens cultivating humans as food and directly assaulting the protagonists’ farmhouse over night. The Happening pays homage more to Dawn of the Dead, as the protagonists flee the city into rural Pennsylvania, hoping to find a safe haven from the assault, only to find a string of abandoned, hostile or semi-abandoned farmhouses… and no abandoned shopping mall!

The most obvious similarity between The Happening and Romero’s zombie movies lies in what happens to the infected. They don’t become flesh eating zombies, of course, but they do become something equally alien and horrifying to the non-infected: suicidal automatons, often wreaking (or seeking) havoc on their own bodies. The Dead films are not just about zombie noshing. They’re also about loss of will and becoming one’s own worst nightmare.

Shyamalan intentionally, even strategically, inserts The Happening into the lineage of some of Alfred Hitchcock’s and George Romero’s greatest work. So how does it match up?

In The Birds (Hitchcock’s first motion picture after Psycho), the master is at the top of his form. The Birds is sort of an apotheosis of the “nature gone wild” film. In it, birds mass and mount inexplicable (and unexplained) assaults on humans, attacking children as well as adults.

The Birds takes its time in revealing the threat. Starting out as a sort of screwball comedy about the wacky interactions between a wealthy socialite and a young lawyer, the first bird attack— a single swoop down on the socialite— comes at least 20 minutes into the film. The attacks build and build, though, until swarms of birds are racing down the farmhouse chimney, pecking their way through ceilings and doors, and massing for what seems like miles around the farmhouse. In the end, we don’t know the cause of the event. We don’t even know if it’s isolated to Bodega Bay and environs or if it’s the first wave of a worldwide apocalypse.

Night of the Living Dead similarly paces itself. An isolated attack in a graveyard leads to the discovery of an abandoned farmhouse, which leads to the grisly discovery of a mutilated corpse, which escalates towards a full-scale assault. We get the news in waves. The living, first in ones and then groups, descend on the farmhouse. Then come the dead. The film is well underway before we hear the first newscast explanations for this epidemic of homicide.

But the slow, deliberate tease is not necessarily crucial to the genre. Drawing on the mythology of its antecedent, Dawn of the Dead places us already in the middle of the crisis, opening with a SWAT team trying to take down zombies while talking heads try to explain the phenomenon.

The Happening tries it both ways—starting off fast, but teasing it out slow. Like Dawn of the Dead, The Happening opens with a large-scale crisis. Mass suicides occur in Central Park and nearby. But by the time Philadelphia hears, the only questions are how large the crisis is and what’s causing it. Our awareness of the size of the catastrophe, like the characters’, develops slowly, while our sense of the cause evolves over the course of the film.

Regardless of characters’ theories, the film never unequivocally adopts a single explanation. In fact, the “wrap up” at the end is actually The Happening’s most direct tribute to Dawn of the Dead. This is not a categorical summation or pronouncement but an intentionally comic explication of the event by an “expert”… and the exasperated reaction by the show’s host. If you want to get the joke, watch Dawn of the Dead and pay close attention to the talking heads. But herein lies a problem. Should we really need to familiarize ourselves with a secondary film in order to “get” the equivocal nature of Shyamalan’s ending? Not in a mass market movie! But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s back up a bit.

Like Romero in Night of the Living Dead, Shyamalan does do a reasonably good job with building up the sense of danger, from rumor to reality to panic to mass death and the potential for apocalypse. But he gets his film too tangled up in secondary mechanisms (not to mention other people’s movies) to give his threat the immediacy it deserves.

In The Birds and the Dead movies, the threat is immediate and visceral. Birds or zombies attack. The characters defend themselves or die. In The Happening, the threat is more conceptual. Neurotoxins are released into the air by an unknown agency (the trees? the government?), and those infected kill themselves. (Technically, they lose their self-preservation instinct, and for some reason, this translates into an immediate and fatal burst of self-destruction).

Shyamalan did a nice job with the unseen threat in Signs. But there was always a physical bulk behind the invisibility, and that physical bulk could be fought. Here, the struggle is against something insubstantial (the wind) and microscopic (the neurotoxins it carries) and the destruction is ultimately carried out by a secondary agency (the infected individual against him or herself). This pestilence cannot be fought. All anyone can do is try to outrun it (or find an antidote!). And this makes the struggle seem less immediate, even passive.

By riffing off Hitchcock and Romero, Shyamalan creates certain expectations about the kind of threat his protagonists face and how they will fight it. Of course, Shyamalan lives to subvert expectations, but in order to do so successfully, he needs to create a work that at least nearly equals the ones he’s challenging. The expectations established by these films have, after all, seeped in to our collective cinematic unconscious.

So does Shyamalan pull it off? The concept he’s dealing with has potential. In “nature gone wild,” the things we take most for granted are typically the things that turn against us. And what do we take more for granted than the air we breathe? (No matter the cause of the crisis, air is the common denominator here). The concept can work, but it will need strong characters to drive it and actors who will sell it.

Characters do drive The Birds and the Dead movies. The Birds starts with strong characters and develops them more fully through the crucible of an apocalyptic nightmare. In the Dead films, Romero cuts straight to character development through crisis. Unlike Hitchcock, he can’t pay for for A-list actors or a lengthy prelude, but he makes up for these deficiencies in the raw urgency and passion he gets from his cast. Audiences care when major characters go down in Romero films. Romero’s actors, regardless of acting skill, always sell their situation.

In The Happening, though, Shyamalan sacrifices character to situation. Mark Wahlberg’s is the only well-realized character among the major cast. A few small players – the soldier and horticulturalist in particular – manage to make their characters resonate. But most of the cast has trouble getting the audience to care deeply about their characters’ plight or even their deaths. Whether this is a function of the writing or the acting, it is ultimately the responsibility of the director.

Shyamalan loves to present himself with tricky problems that he tries to solve in unique ways. But instead of high concept that can be distilled into a single sentence (eg. “tell a ghost story from the perspective of a ghost who does not come across as a ghost”), The Happening gives us multiple concepts that get tangled up in each other: 1) “transform the ‘nature gone wild’ subgenre from animal/insect threats into vegetation/environmental threats while remaining equivocal that the threat even has its origin in nature,” 2) “transform the end result of the toxin so that the infected do not attack the uninfected but the infected attack themselves,” 3) “transform pestilence movies from scientists racing to find a cure to characters racing against the wind,” and so forth.

The Happening ambitiously attempts to refresh old subgenres. It would like to be The Birds. It would like to be Night of the Living/Dawn of the Dead. But without the boldness of high concept, and without actors who can really sell its overly tangled and abstract threat, The Happening doesn’t ever quite happen.

This article first appeared on Blogcritics.

Jun

the crown jewels of ripper cinema: the lodger (1944)

By ripperlady 0 Comments

Categories: Analysis, Best and Worst and Reviews

fox horror classics

This article originally spanned two installments. Now that it’s completed, I’ve consolidated it into a single article here.

Not many movies are in contention for being among the Ripper cinema’s “crown jewels.” Perhaps Pandora’s Box. Probably Murder by Decree. And definitely the John Brahm/Laird Cregar Lodger.

My film geek friends have always been split over whether the 1944 Lodger or Murder by Decree is the best Ripper film of all time. There is no doubt in their minds that it’s one film or the other. But they are universally convinced that Laird Cregar gives the greatest Ripper performance ever. For many years, though, fans of Ripper cinema had a serious impediment to seeing this film and this performance. The 1944 Lodger was not out on video.

I, at least, had a decent reproduction in a non-commercial VHS print. But I could never tell visitors to Hollywood Ripper how to obtain a copy of their own. It was not available commercially (had never even been released commercially!), and it was difficult to find an unauthorized version short of visiting the dealer’s tables at a horror film convention. And even then, the movie was a rare find.

For about a decade, actually, the rumor had kicked around among classic horror fans that Fox was finally planning to release The Lodger. The wait, though, went on for so long that some thought the rumor to be a kind of urban legend for classic film buffs.

As it turned out, it was true. Not only did Fox finally release The Lodger, the studio released it in a lavish boxed set alongside two other 1940s films by director John Brahm—Hangover Square and The Undying Monster. So how is this long-awaited DVD? Well, it really delivers.

The Lodger uses a restored grayscale print with what is either a remastered or a re-recorded soundtrack. Both video and audio quality are superb. The restoration has removed all noticeable flaws from the print and given it a gorgeous range of tone, while the soundtrack has all the clarity, frequency separation, and stereo depth of a recording made on modern equipment. (View images from The Lodger)

In addition to high video and audio quality, this DVD collection comes with a small booklet, duplicates of original lobby cards, a “making of” feature, as well as a 1946 Vincent Price radio show production of the 1944 film. In short, this is a classy production. (We particularly enjoyed seeing our acquaintance, film historian Greg Mank, comment in the feature about The Lodger’s place in the classic horror canon).

So what makes the 1944 Lodger the “crown jewels” of Ripper cinema? If you ask my husband, the first thing he’ll say is “the atmosphere.” The movie has excellent production values and a wonderful Gothic feel, complete with foggy London streets, unusual camera angles, and creative use of light and shadow. The film stock here, with its lush but subtle gradations of gray, is a long way from the stark high-contrast stock of lower budget films from the era.

But beyond the film’s look and feel, The Lodger (1944) has a great script and an A-list cast. Laird Cregar and Merle Oberon were up-and-coming stars at Fox, while acting greats Sir Cedric Hardwicke and Sara Allgood (one of Hitchcock’s early favorites) filled out the parts of the landlord and landlady. Future Oscar winner George Sanders takes a delicious turn as the ever-so-sophisticated police detective. Even bit player Helena Pickard brings so much humanity to the poor has-been Annie Rowley that it’s hard to maintain dry eyes so long as she is on the screen.

Even a drab script could turn to magic in the capable hands of a cast like this! But this is no drab script. For starters, it’s based on Marie Belloc-Lowndes’ novel—which means that its makers would have had to try really hard to screw it up all up! This film doesn’t come even close. It makes some changes, of course (they all do). But the essentials of the novel are there.

In the Belloc-Lowndes novel, the killer is self-titled “The Avenger,” and he preys explicitly on alcoholic women. (I suppose Belloc-Lowndes probably could not get “prostitutes” past the censors). In the 1944 Lodger, the killer is called Jack the Ripper—for the first time in English-language cinema - and he preys on actresses, or women who once appeared on the London stage. (In this case, the change was made explicitly to get the script past censors).

Though this film’s Ripper carries a grudge against exquisitely beautiful actresses—women of the type who seduced and destroyed his brother—the women he actually targets are middle-aged derelicts, much like the Ripper’s actual victims.

This is the first film I know of, in any language, to treat the killings in a way that resembles the Ripper murders. The Lulu films, such as Pandora’s Box, tell the story of a beautiful young seductress who turns into a beautiful young prostitute who ultimately becomes a beautiful young Ripper victim. Hitchcock’s Lodger has the killer target beautiful young blonde models, while the 1932 version has him target random young beautiful women who happen to be out alone at night. The operative terms in all of these instances are: beautiful and young. The 1944 Lodger departs from this characterization. Here, the killer preys on down-and-out middle-aged barflies.

In addition to its more realistic treatment of the victims, this film addresses the fact of serious mutilation beyond the throat slitting. As the landlord puts it: “He slits their throats… and then he uses his knife.” The full details are too shocking to reveal to the public.

These departures from the earlier, more sanitized, film adaptations are indicative of the filmmakers’ general willingness to take this film right to the edge of social acceptability. The beautiful and respectable ingénue (played by Merle Oberon) becomes a music hall sensation by bringing a rather naughty (and very leggy) Parisian dance to the English scene. The Lodger uses its period setting (the cusp of the wild 1890s) to push back hard on the production code and bring the skirts all the way up.

And then, there’s Laird Cregar, whose general soft-spokenness makes his lodger’s sudden shifts into impassioned monomania all the more threatening. One moment, he quietly negotiates terms with his landlady. The next, he frantically turns pictures of old actresses to the wall… because their eyes followed him around the room. By understating his lodger’s more ordinary interactions, Cregar carefully modulate his performance so that even his character’s most extreme moments never drive him into overacting.

Yet Cregar lives dangerously in this role. In the lodger’s monologue on his brother’s destruction at the hands of a seductive actress (a “woman subtle of heart”), Cregar takes the lodger’s monomania beyond the edge of production code acceptability… all the way into hints of incestuous homoerotic desire. The script’s raw lines offer standard backplot—the sort of stuff most actors would walk through. But Cregar uses these lines to make the audience squirm ever so slightly (did we really just see what we thought we saw?) and reveal more of his character’s motivation than perhaps we are even willing to acknowledge. His relatively manic reading reveals that the lodger possesses a too excessive admiration for his brother’s physical beauty, a too excessive admiration for his brother’s artistic genius, a love for his sibling that goes beyond familial affection and possibly into the forbidden realms explored by Byron and Faulkner.

The two previous film versions of The Lodger, both starring Welsh heartthrob Ivor Novello, had turned the matinee idol into a “wrong man”—peculiar, suspected, but ultimately innocent. The 1944 filmmakers use this background to their advantage. Cregar’s soft-spoken lodger hearkens back to Novello’s. He seems overly-sensitive and perhaps too excitable (as Novello’s lodger was), but he likewise seems generally harmless.

Movie-goers familiar with this history could easily be lulled into thinking that all will turn out as well in the end for Cregar’s lodger as it did for Novello’s. But despite The Lodger’s conventional façade, this film has little interest in letting its audience off that easily. Its “twist” is that it returns the story to Belloc-Lowndes… and thus challenges its audience to confront a harsher world than previously displayed in English Ripper cinema.

This article was also published on Blogcritics

Jun

the crown jewels of ripper cinema: ‘44 lodger images

By ripperlady 1 Comment

Categories: Reviews

the ripper looks furtively around as he tries to escape the police

We’re going all photo-bloggy today! This is a chronological sequence of images from the finale of The Lodger (1944), starring Laird Cregar in the title role. They are taken from the stunning new DVD boxed set.

The lodger (now known to be the Ripper) has just threatened the ingenue backstage after her performance in a Whitechapel music hall. She lets out several blood-curdling screams, and the police give chase.

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eluding police
Below, the lodger eludes police in the backstage labyrinth. Note director John Brahm’s expressionistic use of light and shadow:

laird cregar as the lodger
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$the ripper\'s shadow$
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$shadows play against the ripper\'s face$
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cornered
Below, the police corner the lodger. And Brahm takes the camera closer and closer into the the lodger’s wild eyes:
police close in on the ripper
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the ripper cornered
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$closeup of the ripper\'s wild eyes$

Jun

the 1926 lodger remade as copycat killer

By ripperlady 0 Comments

Categories: Commentary and Reviews

Director David Ondaatje has been remaking The Lodger. According to The Bioscope:

This time round, director David Ondaatje is setting the film in modern-day Los Angeles, and making The Avenger (originally played by Ivor Novello) a copycat killer (originally Jack the Ripper, maybe).

The Internet Movie Database confirms that this film is either in production or has been completed (depends on which page you access). Looking over the cast list, the names generally conform to the names in Hitchcock’s version of The Lodger (1926). I wonder if this means that the man taking up lodgings will again be a “wrong man” under suspicion.

One point worth noting: one of the athentic Ripper victims’ names actually makes it into the list of characters: Annie Chapman. I wonder how this will play out, though, given that we’re in contemporary Los Angeles (cf. Jack’s Back) and dealing with a copycat—not in London, dealing with a literary version of the Ripper (called “The Avenger”).

The theatrical distributor appears to have a thin resume, while the home entertainment distributor is Sony Pictures Home Entertainment. I wonder if this means that the focus will be on home video rather than theatrical distribution.

Whatever the case, I will be seeing this film… and reporting on it.

Aug

in the company of slashers

By ripperlady 0 Comments

Categories: Reviews

A couple of weekends ago, I was sitting on a panel at a film convention with a bunch of other writers, discussing “Monster Rallies” (movies with more than one major monster in them).

We had to talk about the Universal Monster Rallies of the 1940s (you know, the ones with Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, and the Wolfman). We had to talk about the Toho series of Japanese monsters, and all those battles between Godzilla and his enemies from space. But the really cool part was making the discovery that we all were looking forward–with anticipation–to the first big Monster Rally in American cinema in over 50 years. We all wanted to see Freddy vs. Jason.

Me, I was hoping that it would be like a Toho movie… with Freddy and Jason just knocking each other down, brutalizing each other, going at each other like mad until you think one or the other is finished, only to see them both get up and come back for another round.

So when I heard that Freddy brings Jason back from the dead and sets him to work killing teens on Elm Street (so that Freddy will be remembered again and be able to come back to terrorize the children there), I couldn’t help but think that it sounded almost too good to be true. I mean, with a few changes (made necessary by the differences between these monsters), that’s basically the underlying plot from x-number of Godzilla movies from the late 60s and early 70s. In these movies, space aliens invariably find some way to control Godzilla and make him attack Tokyo so that they can bring in the space monsters and assume control of the earth. Inevitably, Godzilla escapes their control, and gets into a big brutal knock-down, tear-each-other-up battle with the space monsters.

I am happy to report that my wishes all came true. Freddy vs. Jason really is like a Toho Monster Rally, dressed up in a lot of Freddy and Jason garb. Wait, that’s not quite right. This is definitely a slasher movie with two slashers. Freddy and Jason aren’t just window dressing for an underlying Toho plot. Maybe the best way to put it is that the writers have found clever ways to weave the Freddy universe together with the Jason universe and come out with a reasonably seamless piece of cloth. What they’ve learned from the Japanese movies is how to culminate the picture in an entertaining monster battle.

Needless to say, I enjoyed the film. My only real criticism is that the actors seem to sleepwalk through the parts where they have to provide some necessary exposition (like “Who’s Freddy?” or “Who’s Jason?”… and “What are the rules for fighting Freddy?” or “What are the rules for fighting Jason?”). This is standard material for monster movies (like Van Helsing needing to tell his listeners what vampires are and how to fight them), but here there’s no energy behind the exposition. The actors play it more like “Ho-hum, gotta do some explaining now.”

But aside from that, the movie consists of a lot of action and a number of entertaining set-pieces. I mean, just imagine Jason arriving at a Rave all in flames, or Freddy entering Jason’s dreams to take him back to his original drowning (while a group of Elm Street kids drive a heavily tranquilized Jason back to Crystal Lake).

Oh, and as for the big monster battle… yeah, they do deliver. They fight on Freddy’s turf (in Jason’s dreams). They fight on Jason’s turf at Crystal Lake. They slash and bash and mangle each other, and they both go into the water at the end.

But I’ll leave it to you to find out who comes out the winner… if there is a winner indeed.

See the Blogcritics posting of this article.

Aug

is jack the ripper dead again and fatally attractive?

By ripperlady 0 Comments

Categories: Reviews

The first time I saw the Direct-to-Video horror saga Hell’s Gate (a.k.a. Bad Karma), I found it to be an interesting take on the Jack the Ripper story. I guess it’s just that, well, you know, when you’ve seen as many Ripper movies as I have, you’re ready for something that’s a little bit different. So the first time around, I really enjoyed the ride. Now that the novelty has worn off, though, I think I can measure the movie more accurately.

THE BASIC PLOT: A young girl is abducted and electrocuted into remembering her previous life as “Agnes”—Jack the Ripper’s lover/accomplice. Assuming the “Agnes” persona, she seeks to reunite herself with the man she believes is the current incarnation of her former love–i.e. her psychiatrist in the High Security wing of a mental institution where she’s been incarcerated since murdering four prostitutes. When the psychiatrist, Trey Campbell, goes on an island vacation with his family, she escapes, horrifically murders a bunch of people, and shows up at the island to terrorize/abduct Trey’s wife and daughter. In the ruins of the “Capilla Blanca” (”White Chapel”) monastery, she finally convinces Trey of his former identity as Jack, but he doesn’t respond in quite the way she had hoped. But with his former identity revealed to him, the audience is still left to wonder whether he, too, will assume that old identity in his new life.

THE GOOD: Interesting concept for a Jack the Ripper film, even though it rather transparently blends the reincarnation drama of Dead Again with Fatal Attraction. Here, we’ve got a a former mistress–from a former life(!)—terrorizing the family of the man she is obsessed with (with the man of her obsession, naturally, not sharing the obsession).

Despite the plot similarities to Fatal Attraction, though, the chills here are more intense because this woman… well… she’s a slasher. She may not boil any bunnies, but she does have a penchant for removing people’s internal organs. Consequently, she’s just a whole lot scarier than Fatal Attraction’s Alex. And you can put that on the plus side for this film.

Hell’s Gate also features some good lighting, sets, and camera work (thanks, largely, to the expertise of veteran horror director John Hough). And Patsy Kensit acquits herself quite nicely in her portrayal of this psychotic female slasher.

THE BAD: Okay… There’s just a lot of bad acting in this film. Not the worst I’ve ever seen, but pretty bad nonetheless. Amy Locane is just dreadful as Trey’s wife Carly, except when she plays anger (an emotion that Amy does pretty well). The rest of the time, though, her acting is about on par with an understudy in the High School play! The police investigator–who actually gets a good bit of screen time–is even more poorly portrayed (which makes you kind of wonder if that’s why his name doesn’t show up in the credits… and can’t be found even on the Internet Movie Database!).

Hand-in-hand with the lousy acting is a good bit of sloppy scripting–much of it centering around the detective. He’s a mainland cop, but for some reason he also has a desk (with nameplate) on the island, which is presumably out of his jurisdiction. And when he asks for a DNA test on a burn victim suspected of being the escaped psychotic, he gets the results back within hours!!! Of course, none of that is as blatantly ridiculous as having the New England island that the family is vacationing on just happen to be the site for a ruined Spanish monastery with a name that translates “Whitechapel.” I mean, seriously???

Still, on the less-than-bad end of things, the ruined monastery does look pretty cool…

THE UGLY: Nearly every minor male character in the film is portrayed as a sex-starved sleazeball just dying to get into Agnes’ pants. Given how many guys seem incapable of keeping their hands off “Agnes” (before she whacks them), Hell’s Gate looks like it just couldn’t decide whether it wanted to restrain itself to the t&a slasher/gore gig, or go all the way into porn. It didn’t, but the atmosphere of sleaze permeates practically every scene containing a minor male character in proximity to “Agnes.”

In addition to the bad acting, there’s some “ugly” acting. As Trey’s daughter, Aimee O’Sullivan isn’t half as bad as her screen mother, but of her three moods (hyper-perky, sad, and terrified), hyper-perky is the one turned on throughout most of the movie. Still, she’s a child actor. She has room to grow.

But, then, we’re supposed to take Patrick Muldoon seriously as a psychiatrist? I mean, this guy has one of those “Just waiting to drink some beer and watch the football game” voices. It’s hard to translate that into a character with years and years of post-graduate education… and have the audience buy into it. Still, when he’s in Victorian costume and sporting a Brit accent, Muldoon is actually not bad as Jack the Ripper.

Despite all these criticisms, I’m not trying to pan the film. It’s a Direct-to-Video low budget B-movie. And (in that context), well, it’s not exactly good, but it’s still far far far away from the lower end of the DTV spectrum.

For a DTV movie, it gets about 2.5 out of 5 stars. But if it were a theatrical release, it would lose at least one of those stars.

(Footnote: For a good low-budget DTV movie, see Fred Olen Ray’s Invisible Mom).

See the Blogcritics posting of this article.