The Nick Schager Film Project

The Masque of the Red Death (1964): B+

Decadence, treachery, murder…and Satan! Such are the dearly beloved passions of Prince Prospero (Vincent Price), the 12th century villain of Roger Corman’s delectable Edgar Allen Poe adaptation The Masque of the Red Death. Very loosely based on its source material (as well as Poe’s short story Hop-Frog), this campy Corman classic is brimming with the type of lavish Gothic creepiness pioneered by Hammer Films, and its pedigree is enhanced by Daniel Haller’s gaudy set design, colorful cinematography by future director Nicolas Roeg, and one of the most delicious performances of Price’s storied career. Prospero’s boundless wickedness drives him to imprison a God-worshipping peasant girl (Jane Asher) and then force her to participate in his sadistic games of life and death with her father (Nigel Green) and her lover (David Weston), all while showing little mercy for the debauched nobility who have taken shelter from the Red Death plague inside his castle walls. Corman flirts with pretentious Ingmar Bergman worship throughout, but there’s an irresistible sumptuousness to his faux-medieval mise-en-scène (including the red robe-clad harbinger of death who plays cards outside Prospero’s depraved abode). And Price – whether smiling after the execution of a man who was willing to sell his wife in return for shelter from the Red Death, or delighting in his sister’s (Hazel Court) death after she burns an upside-down cross on her breast and undergoes a surreal marriage to the Devil himself – is at his most deliriously malevolent as the faithful servant of “the Lord of the Flies.”

The Flight of the Phoenix (1965): B+

Robert Aldrich’s The Flight of the Phoenix concerns a plane populated by oil company employees and military men that, due to a monstrous sand storm, crash lands in the Saharan desert. Forced to cope with the dawning realization that no rescue party is forthcoming and their water supply is depleting, the men – led by Capt. Frank Towns (Jimmy Stewart) and his right-hand man Lew Moran (Richard Attenborough) – are convinced by German airplane engineer Heinrich Dorfmann (Hardy Kruger) to build a new plane from the old plane’s damaged parts. As in The Dirty Dozen and The Longest Yard, Aldrich’s characters are, in one way or another, outcasts – Stewart’s pilot is an over-the-hill relic, Ernest Borgnine’s Cobb is leaving work because of “mental exhaustion,” Attenborough’s sidekick is a drunk, and Kruger’s mysterious Dorfmann is not the man he purports to be – and the director once again gets exciting mileage out of examining male codes of honor and behavior. The stranded men’s arrogance, selfishness and cowardice all come to the fore during the ordeal, and the central conflict of egos between Towns and Dorfmann resonates as a philosophical battle between not only old-world, hands-on ingenuity (Towns) and modern, analytical discipline (Dorfmann), but also between cocky, can-do American resourcefulness and cold, clinical German efficiency. Aldrich composes shots of these two adversaries for maximum tension – the characters always seemingly in conflict within the frame – and their eventual reconciliation winds up being a subtle, hopeful nod toward gradually thawing post-1945 relations between their respective homelands.

Dracula Has Risen From the Grave (1968): B

Atheism is no match for Catholicism in Dracula Has Risen From the Grave, the third installment of Hammer studio’s crimson-smeared vampire saga starring Christopher Lee as the lascivious hemoglobin-guzzling Count Dracula. Twelve months after the events of the last film, a priest finds a woman with bite marks hanging dead inside his church bell, a discovery that further convinces the parishioners that this place of worship – which is touched at dusk by the shadow of Dracula’s castle – is tainted by the unholy. A visiting Monsignor, disgusted by the townsfolk’s fear of an already vanquished monster, takes the priest up to the Count’s castle and places a giant golden cross across the door, though not before a storm causes the priest to fall down the mountain and bleed, conveniently, on the shattered ice that was imprisoning Dracula. Free to resume his demonic business, the Count goes after the Monsignor and his pretty blond niece Anna, who’s in love – much to the Monsignor’s disapproval – with a God-denying baker studying to be a doctor or professor (or something else “intellectual”).

Lee’s enormous cold eyes turn deep scarlet when his bloodlust is aroused, and, as in Dracula: Prince of Darkness, he “turns” a promiscuous woman but really has a craving for the pure, undefiled juices of the virginal Anna. A scene in which he mounts Anna (who’s splayed out on a bed) and rubs his face and mouth against hers before engaging in some pointy-toothed necking is indicative of the film’s more pronounced concentration on the sexual aspects of Dracula’s appetite. Freddie Francis’ direction employs a visual schema that’s both decadently classy and decrepitly moldy, but there’s just not enough of Lee’s Dracula – who, as in later films, becomes almost a side character – to sustain one’s interest throughout the sometimes tedious expository scenes featuring Paul and his co-workers at the local tavern. Although he shares with his nemesis an aversion to religious iconography, Paul eventually crosses himself in a sign of holy conversion after impaling Dracula on a gigantic cross, thereby providing a triumphant conclusion – for believers, at least – in which noble faith conquers that wretched condition known as godlessness.

Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966): B-

Perhaps the least effective Hammer horror film featuring Christopher Lee as the fly-by-night Count, Dracula: Prince of Darkness features an awkward silent performance from its star as the titular monster, whose ferocious snarl and lack of dialogue makes the character more feral monster than debonair, courtly spawn of Satan. Yet despite a less-than-stellar turn by Lee, Terence Fisher’s 1966 film – which is technically the third Hammer Dracula film after Horror of Dracula and Brides of Dracula, although the latter doesn’t feature Lee and, thus, doesn’t truly count – has a gothic mustiness that perfectly suits its tale of aristrocrats gone lost. A group of English fuddy-duddies ignore a priest’s warning and head off into the Carpathian mountains, where their driver abandons them for fear of getting too close to Count Dracula’s castle. There, the prim and proper travelers are picked up by a mysterious carriage that takes them to the ominous castle, which is being kept in order by the Count’s eerie servant Clove. Fisher tantalizingly hints at the coming horror when one of the two female travelers sits on her bed and remarks on its lumpiness (is the mattress made of bodies?), and Clove doesn’t waste much time bleeding one of the two men dry in order to resurrect Lee’s towering villain. Like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the film seems to be punishing these arrogant, idiotic nobles for recklessly avoiding the townspeople’s warnings about the dangerousness of their sightseeing trip and, thus, treating the nasty, brutal world as their playground. This being a Hammer production, the Count is naturally a sexually virulent beast, and, as in many of the series’ subsequent films, Dracula has a classic moment in which he tosses aside the needy, slutty vampiress (who he’s already defiled with a bite) in favor of attempting to slurp from the neck of a pure, noble – and thus symbolically “virginal” – blonde beauty. The climactic Dracula death is completely nonsensical – if running water is the bane of Dracula’s existence, why does he have a castle surrounded by it? – but the castle itself has a lascivious opulence that matches these films’ baroque blending of the regal and the bodice-ripping.

The Day of the Triffids (1962): C+

Doctors say not to look directly at a solar eclipse, but in Steve Selky’s overgrown plant thriller The Day of the Triffids, it’s a meteor shower that screws up humanity’s delicate corneas. A U.S. naval officer (Howard Keel’s Bill Masen) undergoing eye surgery in Britain misses out on the meteor lightshow of the century, but when he wakes up the next morning and removes his bandages, he discovers that everyone who saw the astrological event is blind. That would be bad enough, but to compound mankind’s problems, the meteors also sprinkled seeds that grow into giant man-eating plants known as Triffids. The Triffids move slower than molasses, and their slithering is accompanied by a sound effect akin to a bong clearing (or the noise made by blowing through a straw into a glass of milk), but people are nonetheless petrified, primarily because they’re blind and can’t see how ridiculous the tree branch-waving creatures actually look.

28 Days Later’s Danny Boyle must have been a fan, since his zombie film replicates Triffids’ finest element – Masen wandering around a deserted, end-of-times London populated only by the occasional sightless fool. For the most part, however, this campy ‘60s sci-fi adventure is decidedly short on awe-inspiring moments. Masen leaves the U.K. and travels to France and Spain, picking up a surrogate daughter and wife along the way; simultaneously, a marine biologist couple holed up in their lighthouse lab on a deserted island off the British coast try to fend off the encroaching monsters. This side-story, one can assume, is included for ironic thematic purposes – they’re in a lighthouse, but no one can see! – and as a means of introducing scientist characters who’ll eventually save the day. What it provides instead are two bickering fish lovers (one’s a drunk, the other’s a nag) who, in all their unbearable glory, almost make Masen and his new clan’s dull, episodic cross-country trek seem like Lawrence of Arabia.

Masen’s use of an electric fence to repel the horde of Triffids, as well as a showstopping cinematic aside involving an airborne plane piloted by, and carrying nothing but, blind people, have an apocalyptic liveliness, but unlike its ‘50s and ‘60s counterparts, there’s no social commentary lurking beneath this fantastical façade. The Day of the Triffids was based on a novel by famed British author John Wyndham (whose "The Midwich Cuckoos" was turned into The Village of the Damned), but his original story's apparent analysis of man’s bestiality has been wholly jettisoned in favor of quaint set pieces like the one in which Masen’s car gets stuck in the mud while hungry Triffids approach. Even worse, Wyndham’s original, pessimistic ending has been replaced by an 11th-hour cure for the Triffid plague that makes next to no sense. I mean, didn’t anyone just have some weed killer handy?

Blowup (1966)

(Originally published in Rocky Mountain Bullhorn)

A shallow fashion photographer (David Hemmings) in swinging‘60s London unwittingly captures a murder on film – or does he? – in Michelangelo Antonioni’s acclaimed Blowup. Hemmings’ Thomas is beset by ennui, and is only awakened from his hollow lifestyle of casual sex, materialistic excess, and inactivity after discovering – in a brilliantly edited sequence of escalating close-ups – that his photographs of a beautiful young woman (Vanessa Redgrave) and her male companion may reveal a lethal crime. In typical Antonioni fashion, wealth, fame and power cannot temper Thomas’ urban malaise, and the director’s decision to leave his existential mystery unsolved speaks to the inescapability of modern man’s emotional and spiritual alienation.

The Party (1968): C

After the back-to-back successes of The Pink Panther and its sequel A Shot in the Dark, Blake Edwards and Peter Sellers – perhaps thinking that anything they immortalized on film would be uproarious – re-teamed to make the largely improvised The Party, a middling comedy that plays like leftovers from the Panther films. Sellers stars as Hrundi V. Bakshi, a moronic Indian actor who – after being blacklisted for sabotaging a big-budget Hollywood epic – is accidentally invited to the angry film producer’s hoity-toity party. There, in a tribute to Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle, Sellers’ Bakshi fumbles his way around the producer’s modern Art Deco home, failing to properly operate the automatic doors and furniture and vainly navigating the house’s numerous pools. Sellers, whose character is Indian only to prove that the actor can affect a decent Bangladeshi accent (or is it a subtle form of post-colonial imperialism?), is most delightful during a dinner feast run amok and a scene in which Bakshi attempts to feed a testy parrot. The free-form film falls apart, however, by resorting to overly extravagant bits like having an elephant (painted with ‘60s slogans about love and peace) receive a good scrubbing during a monumental bubble bath in the middle of the house’s swank living room. One can understand Edwards’ desire to end this screwball film with a euphoric bang, but it’s never a good sign when a comedy’s opening scene – in which Bakshi’s incompetent movie performance as a military bugler causes his army comrades to turn their rifles on him – is its funniest. Despite Edwards and Sellers’ credentials, there’s little reason to RSVP to this party.

A Shot in the Dark (1964): B+

“Give me ten men like Clouseau and I could destroy the world!” rages police commissioner Dreyfus (Herbert Lom) about his blundering French inspector in the second Pink Panther film A Shot in the Dark. What writer/director Blake Edwards should have given this wacky film, however, was a bit more of the pink feline. Where’s the Panther in the film’s animated opening credit sequence? Where is Henry Mancini’s legendary “da-Dum-da-Dum” theme song? And what about the diamond itself? Edwards completely overhauls Harry Kurnitz’s play (with the help of William Peter Blatty, future author of The Exorcist) for this breezy comedy, and despite the absence of the giant cat/jewel, he wisely situates Sellers’ idiotic investigator as the axis around which the film’s slapstick shtick revolves. Sellers is at his buffoonish best while getting his hand caught in a spinning globe (“I’ve got Africa all over my hand!”) and practicing foppish karate chops with his Japanese servant Kato (who constantly barges into Clouseau’s apartment at inopportune moments to attack his employer), and this is the first Panther film to exploit the actor’s gift for impersonations by having him don a number of disguises. Edwards mines repetition as a source for laughs – the repeated sight of Clouseau being mistakenly hauled off to jail, Kato’s surprise assaults, Clouseau’s speeches to his patient, oft-criticized partner Lajoy (Graham Stark) – and the director pulls of a nifty opening shot that details the multiple adulterous liaisons at a wealthy gentleman’s mansion. The negligible plot involves the clumsy detective’s budding love affair with a beautiful maid (Elke Sommer) suspected of murder. Yet despite this central romance, A Shot in the Dark’s real passion emanates from Lom’s commissioner Dreyfus, whose exasperation over Clouseau’s behavior manifests itself in the form of a hilarious eye twitch that gradually seizes control of his face. Dreyfus’ developing insanity – like Clouseau’s moronic antics – more or less function in a story-less vacuum, but the film’s freewheeling, go-for-broke joviality makes this Panther-less sequel perhaps the series’ most effervescent entry.

The Pink Panther (1963): B-

What made Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau so brilliantly funny was not simply all those perfectly calibrated pratfalls, but rather the looks that followed each of the sleuth’s gaffes – with wide eyes and pursed lips, Clouseau always looked slightly embarrassed and eager to ignore his own clumsiness by pretending that nothing ridiculous had just occurred. Sellers’ self-confident but nonplussed Clouseau was the actor’s finest creation, but Blake Edwards’ The Pink Panther is, because of Clouseau’s supporting character status, perhaps the series’ least interesting entry. While we get Henry Mancini's classic theme song and some brilliantly executed slapstick moments – a perfect introduction to Clouseau’s clumsiness courtesy of a spinning globe, a bedroom fiasco in which Clouseau’s wife hides two men from her husband, and the detective’s bumbling behavior while wearing a suit of armor at a costume party – there’s far too much time spent with David Niven’s master thief Sir Charles Lytton (a.k.a. “The Phantom”) and Claudia Cardinale’s ravishing but tedious Princess Dala. The Phantom wants to snatch the princess’ famed Pink Panther diamond, but what I wanted was less romantic dilly-dallying between Niven, Cardinale, Robert Wagner (as Lytton’s sneaky nephew) and Capucine (as Clouseau’s wife), and more loopy Sellers bits. Edwards is the kind of go-for-broke comedic director who throws a barrage of silly jokes at the audience and hopes some of them hit their mark, and while The Pink Panther is hardly what one might call “hilarious,” Sellers is at the top of his game, looking goofily sure of himself while Niven and Capucine conspire to steal the world-famous pink diamond behind his back. Future installments of the series aren’t quite as polished as the original, but they’re also less uptight and more anarchic than this seminal Clouseau mystery. Still, as an initial introduction to Sellers’ infectious, straight-faced zaniness, The Pink Panther is essential viewing.