Showing posts with label william castle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label william castle. Show all posts

Tuesday, 9 August 2022

Project X (1968)

William Castle had a brief run from the late 50s to the mid 60s as the king of the B-movies. His horror and thriller movies were modestly budgeted and not exactly masterpieces but they were highly entertaining schlock. Castle approached selling movies the way a carnival huckster sold carnival attractions. Salesmanship was everything. And Castle was famous for his gimmicks. Things started to go wrong for Castle with his 1964 movie The Night Walker. It’s a very good movie but it failed to set the box office alight. He bounced back the following year with the excellent I Saw What You Did but after that Castle’s career was clearly waning.

Project X, released in 1968, was a desperate attempt to revive his fortune with a change of subject matter and style. Castle’s earlier hits were in black-and-white but this one was shot in colour. And it’s a science fiction movie.

The basic idea is clever, if far-fetched. If you stop to think about it you’ll notice that the plot has more holes than a Swiss cheese. The secret to Castle’s success had always been to make sure the audience was kept so entertained that they didn’t spend time analysing the coherence of the plots.

It’s the 22nd century and the world is divided into two hostile blocs, the Sinoese and the West. The Western spy agencies have come up with an ingenious idea to protect the secrets locked inside the minds of their spies. Their spies are injected with a brain wiping serum. If they’re captured by the enemy the serum is triggered and their memories are entirely erased. Even under torture they can’t reveal secrets if they have no memories.


In the case of secret agent Hagan Arnold (Christopher George) the plan has backfired. He was captured and the serum was activated. Then the Americans got him back but their problem is that they need the information he has obtained on his last mission. But they can’t get it because Hagan Arnold has forgotten it. He’s forgotten everything.

There’s just one chance. Cryo-biologist Dr Crowther (Henry Jones) may have a plan. He’s been working on techniques for giving people whole new personalities. It’s just possible that Arnold’s vital memories are still there, buried deep within his subconscious. A sudden shock might bring those memories back to his conscious mind. Fear might do it. If Arnold can be convinced that he’s a criminal on the run then he might be sufficiently afraid to trigger that kind of shock.

A minor problem is that in the 22nd century crime no longer exists. This problem could be solved by making Hagan Arnold believe he’s a criminal, a bank robber, from the 1960s.

A remote one-horse town from that distant past is recreated and Hagan Arnold is led to believe that it’s the 1960s, he’s robbed a bank and he’s taken refuge in an isolated farmhouse.


Dr Crowther and his team have only ten days to get the secret out of Arnold, because in ten days time the fiendish bad guys (referred to as the Sinoese) will destroy the West. The Sinoese have discovered the secret of producing nothing but male babies. This will allow them to achieve world domination. Apparently it never occurred to them or to scriptwriter Edmund Morris that maybe a society with no females might run into problems. This was a time when science fiction writers were becoming obsessed with overpopulation. Maybe this aspect was explained more clearly in Leslie P. Davies’ novel.

The central idea is at least ingenious, and in 1968 mind control and erasing memories and giving people other people’s memories was also becoming a hot topic. It’s an idea that could have been the basis for an exceptionally interesting science fiction movie.

One of the major problems is that this movie looks very very cheap. It has a made-for-TV movie look. The idea of having a movie set in the distant future but taking place in a recreation of the 1960s must have appealed to the studio as a money-saving device but it reinforces the overwhelming impression of cheapness.


Dr Crowther has a gizmo that allows him to see inside Hagan Arnold’s mind. This is handled by some psychedelic sequences (done by animation studio Hanna-Barbara). Again they’re cheap. They’re not quite as terrible as you may have heard. They are too cartoonish at times and some modern viewers will be inclined to snicker. The really big problem was that the psychedelia stuff was possibly something that was not going to appeal to a mainstream audience. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 came out in the same year and initially had the same problem. It took a while for audiences to get used to such effects which up to that time had only been used in movies aimed at drive-in audiences (such as Roger Corman’s The Trip) and the drug connotations may have alienated audiences.

And Project X was simply not the kind of tongue-in-cheek fun that would have made it a success with a teen audience. It just comes across as a bit slow and a bit stodgy.

But it’s by no means a complete loss. There are some good ideas here even if the script doesn’t develop them fully. We do get the wonderful Henry Jones and for once he gets more than a supporting role. His Dr Crowther is in fact the central character in the movie. Jones plays him in a slyly ambiguous way, something he was rather good at.


The most interesting thing about this movie is that on the surface it’s a good guys vs bad guys movie with the Sinoese naturally being the bad guys. But if you stop thinking of this as a cheesy William Castle movie that can be dismissed with contempt and actually watch the movie you’ll find that it’s not that simple. The West (the good guys) is actually a very dystopian society. The West’s intelligence agencies trample all over people’s legal rights. It’s a sterile soulless authoritarian society, strictly regimented. It’s social engineering totally out of control. There’s material prosperity of a sort, but clearly there’s no freedom at all. The pretty blonde girl from the future whom Arnold meets by accident takes it for granted that she will have two children when she gets married, because that’s the number of children the government has authorised her to have. She works in a food production facility that is reminiscent of a labour camp. The employees sleep in a sterile dormitory.

The West’s government wipes people’s minds clean and then gives them new personalities. That’s pretty darned dystopian.

What’s clever is that our attention is never drawn to the dystopian elements. We’re left to notice them on our own and it’s amazing how many critics have missed this aspect of the movie.

In its own way it’s a more interesting movie than you might expect. Recommended.

Saturday, 4 June 2022

The Night Walker (1964)

The Night Walker is one of the lesser-known horror films directed by William Castle, but without the spectacular marketing gimmicks that had become his trademark. It was released in 1964.

The Night Walker opens in typical William Castle style, with spooky images and a voiceover warning us of the horrors that lurk in the world of dreams. It sets us up to expect either grand guignol horrors or science fiction monsters.

Howard Trent is middle-aged, incredibly rich (he is an inventor) and blind. We also soon come to consider the possibility that he might be mad. He is obsessed by the idea that his equally middle-aged wife Irene (Barbara Stanwyck) is having an affair. She dreams of a man every night. Howard knows this because he has a tape recorder hidden in her bedroom.

Howard suspects that his wife’s lover might be his lawyer Barry Morland (Robert Taylor). He confronts Barry. Barry protests that the idea is preposterous.

Irene later tells Barry that the man in her dreams is an imaginary lover. This is of course quite plausible although during the course of their conversation we get a sneaking suspicion that although there is obviously nothing going on between them she may feel some attraction towards Barry. He’s successful, good-looking in a slightly weather-beaten way, polished and he’s the sort of man that a woman like Irene might well find very attractive. We can see why Howard Trent was suspicious.


It’s an explosive situation and it does indeed lead to an explosion. A literal explosion. Part of the house blows up.

Everything has changed and Irene moves out and back into the flat above the hairdresser’s salon where she lived years earlier. The dreams continue. They’re just dreams, except that Irene isn’t convinced that they really are just dreams. They seem too real. Her dream lover seems too real.

She’s not just dreaming about her imaginary lover either. She dreams about the aftermath of the explosion. She’s becoming a bit disturbed.

Barry makes the mistake of asking an awkward question about that explosion and gets slapped, in classic Stanwyckian style. He gets into equally hot water when he suggests she see a psychiatrist. Irene can be a very feisty lady.


Irene’s most vivid dream so far involves certain events in an apartment followed by a wedding in a nearby chapel. It’s her wedding. But the identity of the bridegroom is not so clear.

Irene tries to convince Barry that her dream was real. He of course assumes that she’s mad, until she takes him to the apartment from the dream, and then finds the very chapel in which the dream wedding took place. Those places are real. Now he has to believe her. And he does start to think that maybe she’s not just dreaming.

The story builds to a climax as Barry follows up some leads that may provide the necessary answers but it’s obvious that Irene is in real danger. And can the dead come back to life to threaten her?


Blurring of the line between dream and reality is not a dazzlingly original idea but it can be effectively terrifying if handled well, and Robert Bloch’s screenplay handles it at least reasonably well. That’s if you don’t think too hard about the plot.

Castle pulls off several rather impressive and creepy visual set-pieces. The wedding sequence with the store mannequins is superb.

This is a movie that is much closer in feel to Hammer’s psychological horror movies of the early 60s than to old-fashioned gothic horror but it throws us a few images that are pretty gothic.

The movies Castle had directed up to this point had been essentially drive-in fare. They were definitely pitched at a young audience, which was a sound marketing strategy. Which makes the choice of the two leads in The Night Walker rather puzzling. Taylor and Stanwyck would still have been strong draws for a middle-aged or older audience but they would have had little appeal to a teenage audience. There’s nothing wrong with their performances, and Stanwyck in particular is very good, but they were the wrong stars for the movie’s target audience.


There’s no compelling plot reason for Irene to be middle-aged. In fact the plot might have worked better if Howard Trent’s wife had been a young woman, much much younger than her husband. And there’s no plot reason at all for Barry Morland to be middle-aged - he could have been a young hotshot lawyer. The movie apparently was not one of Castle’s major box-office successes and that’s almost certainly because it lacked characters that would appeal to teenagers. Which is a pity because the movie itself is rather good and with younger stars should have been a substantial hit.

I suspect that Castle realised that he’d made a misjudgment. His next movie, I Saw What You Did, has two teenaged girls as the protagonists.

The Final Cut Region 2 DVD is barebones but the anamorphic transfer is fine. The movie was shot in black-and-white.

The Night Walker is a pretty decent psychological thriller/psychological horror movie. Highly recommended.

This is another movie I discovered through a review at Michael’s Moviepalace.

I’ve reviewed several other William Castle movies, including Strait-Jacket and 13 Ghosts.

Wednesday, 23 January 2013

13 Frightened Girls! (1963)

13 Frightened Girls2Even for a William Castle movie 13 Frightened Girls! is a lightweight offering. It’s a mildly amusing spy spoof movie featuring a 16-year-old girl amateur spy.

This 1963 movie is unusual for a William Castle movie in not involving any of the elaborate gimmicks that made his movies so much fun. The only thing approaching a gimmick in this one is the use of five different alternative opening sequences for use in different markets. One of the girls has won first prize in Latin and as a reward has been given the privilege of driving the school bus to the railway station from which the girls will depart on their holidays. In the Swedish version it’s the Swedish girl who wins the prize, in the French version it’s the French girl, and so on.

Miss Pittford’s academy for Young Ladies is an exclusive Swiss boarding school reserved solely for the daughters of diplomats, diplomats from all over the world. Her 13 current pupils include girls from Britain, the US, France, Germany, the Soviet Union and even Red China.

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The American girl Candace Hull (Kathy Dunn) is to spend the holiday with her father, the US Chargé d'affaires. Of more interest to her even than her father is Wally Sanders (Murray Hamilton), the local CIA bureau chief. Candace has had a crush on Wally for years and now that she is sixteen and considers herself to be a woman she is determined to get Wally.

Unfortunately things have not been going well for Wally and he’s on the point of being recalled to Washington. As an espionage agent he’s proving to be a bit of a washout. Candace decides to save his career. What Wally needs is a star agent, someone who can bring him some spectacular secrets. She figures that a girl attending a boarding school composed entirely of diplomat’s daughters should be in a pretty good position to discover some secrets, and who is going to suspect a 16-year-old girl? So Candace becomes Kitten, spy extraordinaire.

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As it happens Candace soon stumbles across some secrets in the Red Chinese embassy, thanks to her friendship with Mai-Ling, the daughter of Khang (Khigh Dhiegh), a top official there. Khang is a Red Chinese master spy, but he’s no match for Kitten. Soon Wally is on top of the world, with the mysterious Kitten feeding him high quality intelligence. Wally has no idea of Kitten’s real identity.

Of course things don’t keep running this smoothly forever and eventually Khang kidnaps Wally’s girlfriend and fellow spy Soldier (yes, she’s called Soldier) and threatens to kill her unless Kitten’s identity is disclosed to him.

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Murray Hamilton is quite good as Wally. He’s not your average movie spy. He’s middle-aged and slightly weather-beaten and he’s no glamorous action hero James Bond type. Kathy Dunn is adequate as Candace. This movie represented the high point of her very brief acting career. Khigh Dhiegh has a lot of fun as the villainous Khang. Look out for the glamorous future star of the cult TV series The Champions, Alexandra Bastedo, in a small role as the British girl at Miss Pittford’s Academy.

I’m not sure that this movie was really such a good idea. Castle was very much at home in the horror genre but this is essentially a teen movie and probably needed an even more campy approach than Castle’s. In spite of that it’s still moderately entertaining in a very undemanding way.

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This movie is available as part of the William Castle Collection DVD boxed set. Extras on the disc are limited to the five different opening sequences mentioned earlier. The transfer is 16x9 enhanced and is excellent.

This is not a movie that would be worth a purchase but if you’re a William Castle completist it’s possibly worth a rental.

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Wednesday, 5 December 2012

The House on Haunted Hill (1958)

The House on Haunted Hill (1958)The House on Haunted Hill was one of William Castle’s first big hits and it set the tone for much of what was to follow. The plot is nothing special but with Vincent Price in top form and a strong supporting cast it’s all great fun. And it featured one of Castle’s best-known gimmicks - Emergo (a plastic skeleton which menaced the audience from above during the scary scenes).

Price plays an eccentric millionaire named Frederick Loren who rents a supposedly haunted house for the weekend. The owner of the house, Watson Pritchard (Elisha Cook Jr), has only spent one night in the house. He is convinced that it is haunted and that the ghosts were responsible for the deaths of his brother and sister-in-law.

Loren has chosen five people to invite to a party at the house. He has offered each of them $10,000 if they stay till morning. His guests have been picked because they all need the money badly and the party promises to be deliciously cruel fun from Loren’s viewpoint.

The five are test pilot Lance Schroeder (Richard Long), a secretary at Loren’s company named Nora Manning (Carolyn Craig), socialite Ruth Bridgers (Julie Mitchum), psychiatrist Dr David Trent and Watson Pritchard. All are desperate enough to accept the offer.

The House on Haunted Hill (1958)


The house is almost a prison. All the windows are barred and once the caretakers leave the house is locked from the outside and no-one can leave until they return in the morning. And there is no telephone.

So it’s another variation on the Old Dark House theme. Loren is hoping his wife Annabelle (Carol Ohmart) will enjoy the party as it will give her a break from her usual occupation of trying to think up ways to murder him. Loren’s insane jealousy and Annabelle’s greed has made this marriage more than a little tense.

The House on Haunted Hill (1958)


To add to the tensions of having a group of unstable personalities (if the guests were in any way stable they would not provide Loren with the kind of fun he is hoping for) all spending the night in a house with a formidable reputation for murders each guest is provided with a gun. With any luck they’ll soon all be so spooked they’ll be taking potshots at one another. It’s a dangerous party game and it may well prove to be hazardous for the host as well.

It doesn’t take long before the guests start cracking up. Watson Pritchard was ready to crack up as soon as he arrived and he’s holding himself together with copious quantities of alcohol.

The House on Haunted Hill (1958)


Price is in fine form. The role gives him the opportunity to ham it up quite outrageously and he obliges. Elisha Cook Jr shows that he can slice the ham just as thickly as Price can and these two over-the-top performances provide much of the fun. The other players provide capable support with Carolyn Craig taking every opportunity to demonstrate advanced states of hysteria.

The house itself is one of the stars of the movie. The Ennis House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and built in 1924, was used for exterior shots of the haunted house. The Ennis House was influenced by Mayan architecture and has been featured in countless movies and TV series. The interior sets used in the movie unfortunately don’t really fit the feel of the house itself.

The House on Haunted Hill (1958)


Castle throws every cinematic gimmick he can think of into this concoction, including a cellar provided with an acid bath - one false step and you’re reduced to a skeleton.

The Warner Home Video DVD release includes both a fullframe and a widescreen version of the film. The widescreen version is 16x9 enhanced and looks splendid. There have been countless DVD releases of this movie, many of them very inferior, so it pays to do some research before buying a copy.

The House on Haunted Hill is pure entertainment and fans of Vincent Price and/or William Castle won’t want to miss this one. Highly recommended.

Tuesday, 16 October 2012

Homicidal (1961)

Homicidal (1961)William Castle’s movies were notable more for the ingenious ways in which he promoted them than for their own merits, but most were at least competent and some (such as Mr Sardonicus were excellent. Homicidal, released by William Castle Productions in 1961, belongs in the competent category.

In this case the gimmick was a “Fright Break” which allowed audience members who couldn’t stand the terror to retreat to “Coward’s Corner.”

There is another element to this film that could be regarded as a gimmick. It’s one that works better than you might expect it to but I can’t say any more for fear of revealing spoilers.

Homicidal was strongly influenced by another very successful movie, but again to reveal which movie would be to give away a spoiler.

Homicidal (1961)


In Homicidal we know from the beginning that Emily is a psycho killer, and it isn’t very long to before we see her in full-fledged homicidal action. The movie begins with a flashback to childhood for two of the main characters, and we then move to the present day. Emily is caring for Helga, who is confined to a wheelchair and also cannot speak. Helga had been the childhood nanny of Warren and his half-sister Miriam.

Emily shows up at a hotel and makes an extraordinary offer to the bellboy. She offers him $2,000 to marry her, with the marriage to be annulled immediately after the ceremony. It all sounds pretty strange but two thousand bucks is two thousand bucks so he agrees. The wedding itself will come as a big surprise to him.

Homicidal (1961)


Emily obviously has some reason to hate Helga, and Helga obviously has some reason to fear Emily. We will not find out the reason until the end of the movie.

As a murder investigation gets under way (I’m being deliberately vague to avoid spoilers) Miriam and her friend Carl start to suspect that Emily may be the murderess but when she announces that she is married (not to the bellhop but to someone else) they are hesitant about going to the police. That could turn out to be a big mistake.

The plot is ludicrous if you examine it too closely. It’s based on an idea that stretches credibility beyond breaking point, but plot holes are not necessarily a fatal flaw in a horror movie and it’s to director William Castle’s credit that the movie sweeps us along so we don’t have time to think too much about whether any of it makes sense.

Homicidal (1961)


The support cast is mostly adequate but the star is certainly Jean Arless who plays Emily. She was not a great actress but her performance is sufficiently bizarre and unusual to make it a reason to see this movie.

There’s the kind of emphasis on childhood trauma as an explanation for psycho killers that was so popular at the time. It isn’t very convincing, but then such theories never were.

William Castle was trying to establish himself as a low-budget version of Alfred Hitchcock, doing introductions to his movies that were very similar to the introductions Hitchcock did to his television series. His enthusiasm for movies and his flair for showmanship make it difficult not to like the guy. As a director he rarely reached any great heights but he understood what audiences wanted and he was a thoroughly competent artisan who occasionally pulled off some fairly effective shocks.

Homicidal (1961)


This movie is part of the William Castle Film Collection DVD boxed set and it’s been given a very good anamorphic transfer. There’s also a brief featurette that focuses more on his showmanship than on his movies. The boxed set as a whole is a very worthwhile buy.

Homicidal might not be a great movie but it’s entertaining and it has one unusual feature that makes it stand out. Recommended.

Friday, 13 April 2012

13 Ghosts (1960)

13 Ghosts is one of William Castle’s better-known schlocky horror movies, and your enjoyment of the movie will depend entirely on how willing you are to accept its schlockiness as part of its charm.

Castle’s movies were not in the same class as the Hammer gothic horror movies or Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe movies of the same vintage. Castle was not a great film-maker; he was essentially a carnival huckster. I don’t mean that disrespectfully - I have a soft spot for carnival hucksters. But if you’re expecting something of the quality of the movies Terence Fisher was making for Hammer at that time or Corman’s poe films then you’re going to be disappointed. On the other hand if you’re going to try to take a William Castle movie seriously then you’re missing the point. These were supposed to be silly fun lightweight movies.

Of course it wouldn’t be a William Castle movie without a gimmick and for this one he came up with one of his best gimmicks - the ghost viewer. This was to be supplied to every member of the audience. If you believed in ghosts you looked through one slot; if you didn’t believe in ghosts you looked through the other slot. Apparently if you looked through the disbeliever’s slot the ghosts on the screen would disappear! It’s a cool idea, and really not much dottier than some of the things that “serious” ghost hunters came up with in the early part of the 20th century.

And ghost hunting is what this movie is all about. Cyrus Zorba (Donald Woods) is a mild-mannered palaeontologist with one big weakness - he’s hopeless with money. He’s a devoted family man but he can’t manage money and the furniture has just been repossessed. So it seems like a lucky break when his rich uncle Plato Zorba dies and leaves him a big old house. Unfortunately there’s no money, just the house, but the house does come with some extra features - thirteen ghosts!

Plato Zorba was a ghost hunter and he captured the ghosts. If you can see a ghost you gain power over it and Plato Zorba invented a ghost viewer (just like the ones the audience receives free of charge!) that allowed him to do just that. He installed his ghost collection in his house.

Naturally, being a haunted house movie, his will stipulated that Cyrus and his family must live in the house or else it will go to the state.

There’s a further complication. Uncle Plato’s will makes no mention of any money and his bank accounts contained no money at all when he died but he was a very rich man. It turns out that he converted all his monetary assets into cash shortly before his death. Since he never ever left the house in the last decade of his life it is reasonable to assume that it is hidden somewhere in the house. A search was made after his death, to no avail, but the money has to be somewhere.

Naturally there’s a mysterious elderly female housekeeper reputed to be a witch, who was actually Plato Zorba’s assistant and medium. And there just happens to be a Ouija board lying about, so naturally the children, Buck and Medea (yes her name really is Medea), want to try it out. And contact is made with the ghosts! Pretty soon the ghosts become a constant presence and the family is about to move out when they are persuaded to try a sĂ©ance.

No audience member over the age of ten will have much trouble figuring out how the plot is going to play out.

The acting is not that great (although some of the actors were quite competent in other roles), but the last thing you’d want in a William Castle movie would be good acting. That would spoil everything!

The basic idea is not a bad one but it’s never really developed. The basic idea behind the special effects is not entirely bad either - tinting the screen blue (the movie is in black-and-white) whenever the ghosts appear and superimposing red images of the ghosts. Unfortunately the ghosts themselves are very very silly. But then the movie is intended to be goofy and fun. I don’t know if this movie has been subjected to the MST3K treatment but if it was it was a mistake. You can’t ridicule a movie like this - it’s such an obvious parody and so clearly meant to be tongue-in-cheek to begin with.

One gets the impression with Castle’s movies that he didn’t come up with a gimmick to promote the movies, he came up with a gimmick first and then built a movie around it.

It’s not a great horror movie, or even a good one, but if you approach it in the right spirit it’s a good deal of fun.

Tuesday, 1 June 2010

Strait-Jacket (1964)

I haven’t been overly impressed by William Castle’s other films, but Strait-Jacket is a definite horror camp classic. Made in 1964, this was Castle’s bid for the big time. He got Joan Crawford as star, and this was not long after Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Crawford was once again a hot item. 

He had to go to great lengths to keep Crawford happy. She expected to be treated like a star, but it was worth the effort. She delivered the goods. It’s a movie about a female axe-murderer, and Castle boldly starts the movie with an axe murder. Two minutes into the film and the body count has started already. 

Crawford is Lucy Harbin, and she’s just found her hot toy boy husband (Lee Majors in his film debut) in bed with another woman. Luckily there’s an axe handy, so that solves the problem of the unfaithful husband. Lucy’s daughter Carol is in the house at the time and witnesses the murders. Twenty years later Carol, now living with her aunt and uncle on their farm, gets the news that her mother is now cured and has been released from the mental hospital. 

Which is good news of a sort, but it does make things slightly awkward for Carol. She’s found a rich prospective husband and they’re just about to announce their engagement. Now of course her young man’s parents will want to meet her mother. And they move in the higher levels of society, and they don’t generally mix with axe murderers. 

 Lucy isn’t coping all that well with life outside the hospital. She’s understandably nervous. Carol decides she needs her morale improved so she buys Lucy a hot new dress and a wig. Lucy now feels young again, but this might not necessarily be a good thing. Lucy’s embarrassing attempt to seduce her daughter’s boyfriend is definitely a sign that all is not well. And then Lucy’s psychiatrist shows up, which puts her even more on edge. She gets even more nervous when he asks about her dreams. 

 So it’s not altogether surprising when the axe belonging to sleazy farmhand Leo (George Kennedy) disappears. Castle put together a pretty solid cast for this one. Diane Baker is particularly good as Carol. But of course the movie belongs to Joan Crawford. She’s in top form and not afraid to go outrageously over-the-top. She puts everything into this performance. It might have been not much more than a slightly bigger-budgeted B-movie but Crawford doesn’t care. She’s a true star, and no matter what the movie she’s going to give a star performance. That’s what being a movie star is all about. You don’t sit around whining that you’re not getting roles like Mildred Pierce any more - you take what’s available and make the most of it. 

 William Castle’s direction is better in this movie than in any of the other films of his that I’ve seen. He gets the atmosphere of tension built up very nicely, with everyone on edge waiting for the powder-keg that is Lucy to explode. He comes up with some pretty nifty little visual set-pieces. Crawford and Diane Baker are terrific in their scenes together. Baker must have been a little over-awed but it doesn’t show in her performance. They strike sparks off another rather effectively. 

 The major flaw is that the surprise ending is probably not going to come as a huge surprise to most people. The Region 1 DVD looks impressive. The black-and-white cinematography looks stunning. The most notable of the extras is a brief but entertaining featurette on the making of the film. It’s a movie that is going to be best appreciated as high camp, and in this area it’s difficult to beat. And of course it’s a must for Joan Crawford fans.

Saturday, 12 September 2009

The Tingler (1959)

William Castle is one of those film-makers whose life and personal style were more interesting than his films. In some ways he was a throwback to the classic age of exploitation movies in the 30s and 40s, when exploitation movies were taken on the road by distributors who were mostly ex-carny or sideshow people, and when the art of showmanship took precedence over the actual movies. And William Castle was certainly a showman, coming up with a string of gimmicks to sell his low-budget horror films. The Tingler, made in 1959, is a typical example of the breed, and of Castle’s showmanship.

In this case the gimmick was to wire up the seats in the movie theatres so that during the scary moments the seats would start to shake. The gimmick as known, for no obvious reason, as Percepto.

The plot is insanely but engagingly silly even by low-budget horror movie standards. Vincent Price is a mad scientist doctor type who performs autopsies on executed criminals. He comes up with the theory that fear produces a physical entity in the region of the spine which he christens The Tingler. It gets bigger the more scared you get. When you scream, it gets smaller again. If you don’t scream, it can kill you. This of course opened up another promotional gimmick - encouraging the audience to scream to protect themselves from The Tingler!

Quite by accident this slightly deranged medico makes the acquaintance of a deaf-mute woman who runs a silent movie theatre with her husband. Being deaf-mute, she cannot scream, which naturally attracts his scientific interest.

The movie is also notable for being one of the very first to deal with LSD. LSD was of course still legal in 1959, and Vincent Price uses it in his experiments on fear. His
acid trip experience is memorably over-the-top! The Tingler itself looks like something made out of rubber that you could buy in a novelty shop for about 25 cents, but that’s one of the joys of low-budget horror flicks!

Apart from his drug trip Price avoids excessive scenery chewing in his performance, perhaps wisely deciding that the story line is hammy enough without his contributing any additional hamminess!

The main problem with this movie is that it just doesn’t deliver any real scares, or any genuine creepiness, or any worthwhile atmosphere. Seeing it at the time with Castle’s gimmicks in place was probably quite a fun experience, but it hasn’t aged all that well. It’s at best modestly entertaining for the sheer absurdity and oddness of the plot. It is competently made and it certainly has some camp value.

There’s a new boxed set of William Castle’s movies about to be released, although unfortunately it’s a mix of movies already available on DVD and others previously unreleased in this format. It seems to be to be rather overpriced.