The Ghosts of Simian Jack

 Hi.  I'm just testing to see if anything can be seen here by anyone but me.  It's been five years since circumstances forced me to abandon this blog, and I'm still not in a place to add to it.  Still, now I know it's still here I'd like to salvage the thing rather than start over.  My circumstances will be changing again within the next few months and I hope to have the time to begin talking about movies again.  I'm partway through the process of restoring this place.

This is what I do. It's amateur work.  There are spoilers in many of these.  I'd love to be making money by doing something I love, but honestly this is just for fun.  

The name Sinister Simian (I'm known as Simian Jack and Jacques the Monkey here and there online) is a nod to the late Sinister Cinema from KATU in Portland, Oregon, which similarly inspired the name of the home-video company.  There's also a character named Sinister Simian from a cartoon or video game, but I'm not familiar with it.

Keiko Desu Kedo (I am Keiko) (Sion Sono, 1997)

I had to watch 'I Am Keiko' at least three times before I even began to know what I was seeing.  At first it seems like a tedious piece for art's sake.  Its only character never comes right out and tells you what's really going on with her. There's a reason why they tell you to watch for signs of depression, most who suffer from it aren't going to announce it.  I didn't. I didn't even know that's what it was.

The first five minutes f the film is a static shot of Keiko (played by Keiko Suzuki) staring directly at us, unspeaking, with a tear welling in one eye.  In the background, walled away in another room, are ambient family noises.  Keiko seems completely open, vulnerable, but the silence becomes uncomfortable.  It is broken when she announces the film's title (and first credits).

I have posted this review under the film's given Anglicized name but I suspect from the credits translation that its  more correct title is "It's Me, Keiko", and definitions of the individual Japanese words 'desu' and 'kedo' suggests even that isn't quite right either.

Keiko will be 22 in three weeks and wishes to document that passage of time.  "I want to record my own time as precisely as possible."  Time is more than a concern of hers, it's an obsession.  Can one be awake, aware, and active every minute of one's life?  What constitutes an acceptable use and what is a waste?  The film will end in precisely one hour and one minute, she tells us, and keeps her word.

Meanwhile she spends entire blocks of minutes counting off each second while we stare at a clock.  This is a hard movie to watch.  My first time seeing it I wanted to hit FF.  Much of I Am Keiko is made up of static shots of her surroundings, or of Keiko staring out windows.  The movie is without score though the ambient noise hints at Sono's preference for classical music.  Color schemes are stark and primary.  Until breaking out in the final act most of the film is confined to Keiko's bedroom. She shows us some snapshots of her history.  "Here we are" she says of one snapshot, speaking of her family, but the picture is of an unoccupied table.

She is hyper-aware of the passing of time, yet does nothing with it as if paralyzed with her own thoughts.  She doesn't seem to get much sleep, as we see she is filming even in the middle of the night.

This is the behavior of a depressive.  Keiko's father died recently, and while she doesn't speak much of it we see several times a small box she has kept with a few of his bones she stole from the crematorium.

Echoing Rupert Pupkin (or just about every child ever) Keiko shares with us some "news broadcasts" she anchors, reaching out to an audience that isn't there. For each pretend broadcast she wears a different wig.

I don't know if this is a clue to the movie if if the movie is a clue to writer-director Sion Sono, but I Am Keiko directly quotes an earlier movie Sono had made as a teenager with his own camera, "I Am Sion Sono".  In that film Sono was the polar opposite of Keiko - manically extroverted.

I haven't figured out Sion Sono yet.  His best-known works are those of a director of flamboyant material, sometimes excessive or grotesque and usually tongue-in-cheek.  I Am Keiko wouldn't seem to fit that pattern.  He can also be overstated in one sequence yet oblique in an overall scheme, and he can be nakedly sentimental.  Here he has stripped down Keiko's predicament to it's most fundamental even beyond exposition. Keiko is using her camera as a lifeline, trying to connect with whoever will watch.

Star Cops - Conversations With the Dead (S1E2)

The introductory ep of Star Cops had a cast of characters who treated death in a rather chilly fashion.  In this second  ep, loss of life is more keenly felt, especially by Nathan Spring.  Lee Jones, Nathan's girlfriend, is murdered.  Meanwhile, his officer David Theroux is looking into an accident that has set a spacebound couple on a trajectory which will see them run out of oxygen with no recovery possible.  The crew at the moonbase react in their individual ways, but all are devastated by the inevitable deaths of their colleagues.  The episode is all about grief, a welcome and stark contrast to the insouciance of 'An Instinct for Murder'.  As a newcomer to the show, it's a relief to see that 'Star Cops' does have a heart after all.

I think my initial guess was right, though, that the coldness of the first episode was a deliberate part of this fictional landscape.  Nathan, being a cop, damn well wants to find Lee's murderer himself but is bluntly told to butt out by the cop (Devis) who's actually assigned to the case.  Devis is one of those TV police who is pigheaded, incurious, unimaginative, uncaring, rude, and wouldn't bat an eye if the case  was closed without a solution - less work for him to bother with.  That's all Lee's death is to him, work.  He's not much like Nathan except in that one crucial regard: a life lost is not felt personally, it's just an academic puzzle to solve.  Karmically speaking, Nathan has has met himself and it's a slap in the face.  Butt out?  Someone he loves has just been brutally murdered and he's supposed to just whistle  his  way back to the moon?  It isn't just indifference, either, Devis tips his hand with a snide remark about leaving the job to "real policemen", revealing his contempt for the 'star cops'. Later Devis will show a more sympathetic side but admit that he finds Spring "a bit sentimental for my taste".

Lee's murder is a small masterpiece of budget-conscious staging.  She returns home to find that a message from Nathan awaits her, laden with security  encoding that takes forever to get through.  That it's from Nathan makes us more urgent than it does her, we know it must be important.  We get more anxious the further the scene progresses, the more we want to hear that message.  When it comes, it's a dire warning that Lee's life is in danger...and it just sits there  with Lee in another room not seeing it.  The lights go out. A stranger has broken in.   Hitchcock would be proud of the manipulation of both Lee and us.  The message was a ruse to keep Lee in place so that her killer could be sure of her location.

I felt this death too.  Time was devoted to establishing the bond between Nathan and Lee in the first episode, which served as character development for Nathan.  I thought it might lead somewhere, but not here.  Had Lee been introduced in this episode, we wouldn't have shared that loss with Nathan.  Another innovative scene transpires with a grieving Spring at the restaurant at which we saw them before, reliving their last conversation together.  At first it looks like a flashback until we see that Nathan's lips aren't mouthing the words we hear from him.   It's disorienting.   Anyone  who has lost someone dearly loved will have had similar moments of dislocation.  On a personal note, I've just been through that recently, so I know.  It's a poignant scene expertly intuited by director Christopher Baker.

On the moon, personnel are dealing with the unavoidable but still pending deaths of a couple (Mike and Laura) who were shepherding a supply shuttle to Mars.  The shuttle's engine has fired early, forcing them into a trajectory that has sent them on a death course.  They are as good as dead but still alive to know it.  The base personnel are  crushed and try to deal with their grief in their own ways, including arguing about how to take the news and what to do next.  What will Mike and Laura do?  Blow out the airlocks and die quickly?   Play out their time?  Theroux wants to discover whether the engine failure was intentional but finds that his questions are an intrusion on  the attempt to cope with devastating loss.

We never see Mike and Laura, we only hear their transmissions.  At first this bothered me a little.  But I think it helps us to identify with the moonbase personnel. We know the couple are going to die but are too removed from them to do anything about it.  Think of it as  Voight-Kampff empathy test.  We knew Lee already, but we feel even more for Spring...Mike and Lura we don't know at all but we can feel for them, and for the  ones they left behind. Loss is loss.  I wanted to know who the executed Russian girl was in Instinct for Murder but no one gave a damn.

Productionwise, Star Cops is still finding it's feet, just like Nathan in zero-G.  One effective weightless scene involving a  sleeping harness is followed by another unconvincing one of Nathan trying to seat himself at a  console.  In his acrobatics to appear weightless you can see that he is  actually struggling against gravity.  He gets all the moves just right but the illusion is broken by the effort itself.  Ironically, it made me better appreciate the work that went into it from the actor (David Calder) to whoever choreographed the scene.  Incidental music was more on target this time, two pieces of scoring suited  Lee's murder and a sequence luring Spring to a park  for info on the killer.  That theme song has become a lot more on-message now. I like the look of the moonbase and the moonbuggy that gets people  there.  Looks very proto-UFO.

There's another nice touch in Spring's meeting in the park at night.  He is approached by a shady but possibly innocent character who happens to be on roller skates.  You don't often see physical assaults that involve skates.  It's just unusual enough to provide a bit of off-kilter flavor.

Like the previous ep, there are two cases that are unrelated.  One is transparent, the culprit obvious the moment we are introduced.  The other story is far more clever.  I didn't catch it, because like Nathan I kept tuning out the newscasts as so much unwanted distraction.  Both cases bring us back to that same coldbloodedness, a blind eye to the value of other's lives in the face of our own goals.  The people responsible for Lee's death do indeed understand grief and the human psychology that drives it - they understand but don't care except that it is a tool to their own ends.  In neither case will justice be  served.  It's a cold world after all that warm-blooded nobodies like Laura, Mike, and Spring live and die.  The eps finale took me by surprise for Nathan's solution and his unresolved desire for revenge clashing with his self-loathing at having been personally responsible for three deaths now.

9 pairs of rollerskates in the dark. 

My favorite line came when Spring, trying to wrestle down his anger, barks "DEVIS!!  ...d'ya wanna  drink??"

Star Cops - An Instinct for Murder (S1E1)

Let me say right up front that I like Star Cops. I want that right up front because I'm having a serious problem reviewing it.  I've seen the first episode twice and have no idea what to say about it.  It kinda puts my brain on hold, and I haven't been able to pin down why.

The name had me expecting something quite different.  Didn't Gerry Anderson do something about a space precinct?  Rather Star Warsy (think cantina scene), I saw a few minutes of it.  Sounds like an action show.  Could be drama, could be humorous.

What I got instead:  Chief Superintendent Nathan Spring is comfortable in his job and would like to remain so.  Where he's at is conducive to the family he's planning to start.  His superiors, on the other hand, have zero interest in his plans or what he finds comfortable.  He's being forced to take over another department, a move that means personal upheaval.  Nathan is a man old enough and secure enough in his position that he likes to wear sweats to work while the younger officers under his command dress chic.  He's not yet retirement age, but he's not young anymore.  Nathan is soft-spoken, a man of consideration, and given to a dry ironic humor.  His manner is amiable but slightly put-upon.  He's not world weary...just weary.  No go-getter, in his estimation he's already gone and got.   Keeping in mind that this is a production for British television, this plays very much like any number of police mysteries (I'm especially fond of Inspector Morse).  It's all played with understatement, not histrionics.  So far so good.

So, "Star Cops"?  Yes.  The year is 2027 and the setting is the burgeoning world of space exploration in the hands of the international corporations funding it.  We can expect stories of politics, corporate espionage, and the like.  "Star Cops"' innovation is the invention of a  special police force detailed to cover this effort: badges in space.  Spring has been hand-picked to head this agency, the International Space Police Force.  Some wag in the media dubbed them 'Space Cops', and it stuck.  There's nothing flashy here or overtly futuristic, opting for verisimilitude.  Again, I'm on board.  It's a great idea from the show's creator, Chris Boucher of Doctor Who and Blake's 7 fame.  Boucher wrote and directed this introductory episode. 

Two murders have taken place.  We ave two floaters, one in a lake and one in orbit.  We all float up here.  Or would that be 'out here'?  We the audience know they were murders, we saw them happen.  Nathan Spring thinks they might have been and would like to know more.  Various police authorities have decided that no crimes have taken place not on the strength of  the evidence but because a computer analysis has concluded that it's unlikely.  Spring wants the lake death investigated.  On the space station Charles de Gaulle space cop David Theroux finds the number of supposed EVA suit malfunctions (resulting in deaths) suspicious.  Spring is ordered off the Earthbound case and into orbit.  No one really cares, I think, it's just a gambit to secure Spring as the new Space Police Commander. 

On Earth or in space, Spring disdains computer analysis at the expense of human intellect.  He asks of his people that they utilize their own instincts, their capacity for reasoning, curiosity, and observation.  In fact, when the solution to the death in space is revealed it turns out to be one Theroux might have caught were he more fully in the habit of using his own faculties.   He's halfway there, having pressed for the deaths to be questioned instead of taking  the computers assessment as everyone wanted him to.  He will be appointed Spring's second in command. 

Star Cops aired in 1987.  I remember there was a streak of distrust of analysis in police fiction, if not in real life.  Screen heroes with badges universally rolled their eyes at words like"profile" and treated experts with open hostility and ridicule.  Often the analysts were portrayed as incompetent and full of airs .  Today those analysts are glamorized by pop entertainment, from Clarice Starling to NCIS and many other shows.  Spring may be a badge in 2027, but he's pure '80s old school.  This is one of the major conflicts of the episode and I expect it to be a thread throughout the series.  Spring has a technological personal assistant, a boxy device called Box (foreseeing real-life devices like Alexa).  He constantly has to argue with it, cajole it, and rebuke it as if it were alive.  Spring has a measure of reliance on Box he finds annoying.

The kind of story the pilot promises is one of clever manipulation of the rules this fictional realm works on by highly placed instigators we never meet and who may never really be brought to justice.  Spring is a low-level servant, arresting the low-level servants who carry out the crimes.  Very non-Hollywood.

So I do like this show.  Why am In not more enthusiastic yet?  I'm not sure the hybrid works smoothly yet - it's hard to imagine Inspector Morse defending himself with a medical laser.  Space Cops gives us astronaut training instead of an exciting space flight - this is good, sure it saves on the budget but it also stresses a character moment over action.  OTOH we're expected to accept that more sci-fi flavored action does take place even though we're not allowed to see it.  Some of the predicted technology hasn't aged well and I'm doubtful they would have played well even in 1987, if for no other reason than that they clash with the usual contemporary detective fiction.  I've seen Outland, I thought that dd it better.  On the up side, the tech of the spacecraft, stations, etc. are based on current real-world designs, That's crucial to the show's credibility.

It might be the dialog, which is entertaining but hard to follow for the accents and rapid pace of banter.  I like clever dialog, I like it even more when it's not so clever as to obscure its import.  This is not Joss Whedon.  I eventually had to resort to headphones to catch more of the words, that helped.  Dialog often overlaps in Robert Altman style, which suits the verisimilitude but hinders clear presentation of information. 

It's definitely the production.  I'm used to seeing unconvincing sets on Doctor Who, but I don't see why a police station set only a few years in the future should look so little like what you would see in real life when realism is a goal.  They're worse given that the space station locales are more convincing by comparison. The FX of weightlessness are better than expected, lending weight and credibility to the space-borne scenes.  I like the costume design, aside from one Miami Vie escape who rolls up the sleeves of his business jacket.  It's recognizably of our world instead of campy spandex, glitter, and outrageous collars and hats. 

I do have a problem with the theme song and incidental music.  I think the score was meant to be hiply ironic but the choices jar as inappropriate. I can take that if the choices are good, these aren't.  Maybe I'll get used to the theme song (it's by Justin Hayward!) but I doubt it will ever feel like it belongs.

I think what blunted the episode most for me was an emotional disconnect - which I hasten to add may well be a deliberate choice reflecting the theme of humanity surrendered to technology.  People die in this story at an alarming rate yet no one ever seems to care except Spring and Theroux, and I'm not sure it was more than an academic exercise from Spring.  Theroux tries to recruit the help of someone who's more concerned with her recreation.  So what if people are dying, the computer says it's statistically acceptable!  Another innocent is put to death by her government when she was not at fault.  That life lost is no more than a cynical aide, we never meet her nor does anyone express remorse.   There are no grieving friends or relatives.  What drove Morse (sorry, I keep bringing him up but its true for all the others, the best of them) expressed moral outrage and an appreciation of loss. 

Torn between  a 6.5 and a 7.  It's a refreshing premise with a protagonist well-played by David Calder, has an interesting scheme but is hampered by some poor production choices.  Okay, let's give it room to go up...6.5 restaurant TV trolleys.

Blake's 7 - The Way Back (S1E1)

Earth's future, at an unspecified date, in an unnamed country, under an interplanetary federation.  Good citizen Roj Blake  has a dodgy history.  In fact he might have more than one, and dodgy in ways he doesn't even know.

Blake was once a dissident who, having recanted and renounced the rebel movement in his highly public trial, would like to move on.  That's not easy to do when one of his friends is one of those annoying conspiracy theorists.  She insists on thrusting her anti-government rap at him. Lately she's asked him to fast for a few days as she claims the food and water are secretly medicated to keep the populace sedate.  Nutty, and yet he goes along with her request.  Now she's got him going to meet some "friends", a meeting she didn't tell him would be highly illegal.  Her friends turn out to be a group of rabblerousers and legal outliers eager to begin a new revolt now the last is several years dead.  Their leader has a shock for Blake: he says Roj's life is a lie.  Blake, he contends, was brainwashed and his family murdered. They want him to reclaim his role as their spearhead.
Before Blake can process this, he witnesses government forces slaughter the group as they try to surrender peaceably.  Welcome to the future.

So we have our world-building.  Blake's Earth is a dystopian future under a faceless totalitarian regime - the police stormtroopers wear threatening gear that hides their faces and kill without reflection, the bureaucrats  are mild-spoken folk who as a matter of routine decide Blake must be discredited all over again, and the populace is laced with spies that Stalin or McCarthy would be proud of (one such, Dev Tarrant, set up the dissidents to be butchered).  Blake's 7 was a British television production of the late 70s, a natural development under the Doctor Who mold.  That means its production values had to be curtailed, leading to some very sparse set design on obvious stages, and location work at numerous bleak-looking industrial installations.  It may look cheap, but it is also well-suited to the tone set by the premise: bleak.

It's decided that the Federation's best interests would be served by making Blake out to be something so reprehensible that any decent citizen must balk at the idea he could be any kind of hero.  Thus they charge him with molesting children, and proceed to manufacture evidence and witnesses.  This means brainwashing children with false memories of having been sexually assaulted.  This is decided in the same manner with which a committee might decide on a tax measure or work  bill.  It makes no difference to the children that the assaults never took place - they will now be scarred with the memories of it all the same, never knowing its not true.  Projection - the government piously accuses an innocent of the very crimes they commit themselves.  The very banality of the villains and their deliberations is the most chilling thing about them.  It's not melodrama, just procedure.  The villains look like school teachers, librarians, and kindly grandmothers.

As a protagonist, Roj Blake appears on the surface as the standard hero.  He's earnest, forthright, and not unduly outraged at the injustices welling up around him.  He's an everyman, one of us, an ordinary citizen.  Who wouldn't identify with that?  He's the hero we'd all like to be.  Look a little deeper and he seems a bit flighty.  Invited to break the law in a particularly serious manner, he protests..then meekly goes right along with it.  Told that everything he knows is a lie, he's quick to doubt his own experience for the word of a stranger who acts like an old comrade.  Blake used to be a rebel leader, and they tend to be charismatics, firebrands, even True Believers.  The Roj Blake we meet in The Way Back is no natural leader, but he does have the makings of a True Believer who will embrace an ideology at the drop of a hat and run with it.

Is Blake's 7 going to be run--of-the-mill science fiction or something that will subvert our expectations?  I don't think creator Terry Nation chose to set the adversaries as "The Federation" as a coincidence but as a direct response to Trekdom's utopian vision.  This may be a  reactionary program about reactionary people.

We have two more protagonists in the advocate who takes on Blake's case, and the advocate's wife.  The more Tel and Maja Varon investigate, the more they doubt their client's assured guilt.  As the episode unfolds they begin to take the spotlight from the eponymous hero with a warm chemistry and empathy, and bewilderment at the corruption they're suddenly opening their eyes to that makes them more likable characters than Blake himself.  I can see following them for a few seasons.  
The exonerating evidence mounts.  Victory races the clock as Blake is hauled to a transport to a penal colony.  Blake's vindication is at hand as Act III is surely about to begin...and that's where the episode ends with Tel and Maja lying dead at Dev Tarrant's feet and Blake on his way to life in a penal colony.

The writing is sharp on some counts, less so on others.  For example, science fiction has always had a weak spot for shortcuts, and trial scenes are usually whoppers.  The one in The Way Back is one of the less convincing, letting the arguments to be weighed by data globes instantaneously so we the audience don't have to sit through them.  Fans of due process should be tearing their hair out. It doesn't harm the show too much, and does reinforce the degree to which this society has twisted against its citizens to secure the state.  A longer episode might have wrung more out of it for satire but not without slowing the pace of the space opera, and the tone set by The Way Back is oppressively humorless.

The production and fx of The Way Back are a marked improvement on Doctor Who.  There is a shot of the transport ship on an arrival/departure platform that had me expecting to see names in the credits associated with Space: 1999.  It was that good, budget discrepancies in mind.  So is a sequence leaving a protective city-dome behind in the night.

8 Magic 8-Balls of Judicious Wisdom. 

The abrupt ending is in line with a more serialized program but I couldn't help thinking it felt like one of those two-part pilot movies that's been chopped in half for syndication. 

Do the Varons seem  too incredulous about what they're learning?  That might be the machinations of the show trial, allowing Blake to have honest representation by lawyers chosen for their inexperience and naivety.

Scars of Dracula (Roy Ward Baker, 1970)

That's it.  Dracula has defeated me.  I've nothing to say.  It's not a great movie by Hammer (or any) standard, it's not terrible (as grade B horror goes).  It just...is.

 Christopher Lee makes his fifth appearance as Hammer's Count Dracula, 6th film in the series, a rush job debuting a mere half a year after Taste the Blood of Dracula in 1970.  Seems longer, many years longer, in human years, long enough for  Christopher Lee to have lost his vitality.  His Dracula is now a dough-faced stay-at-home who sends his manservant Klove for take-out.  He doesn't scowl, he doesn't lust or smirk.  Worse, he doesn't engage.  In order for the movie to serve up any victims people have to oblige the script by wandering into his ruined abbey through contrivance, and even for them he can't muster any enthusiasm.  He reads his lines at them, not to them.  Watching the movie makes me feel the same way. 

How did this happen?  The last film was bright in image, color, and idea with lively characters in an engaging premise.  Hammer must have spent it's vampire budget for that year, because the production values for Scars are immediately revealed to be low.  The first life onscreen is a rubber bat vomiting red paint in one of the Count's less memorable resurrections.  That's followed by a string of threadbare interior sets, some obvious painted backdrops, a model castle, and no establishing shots to lend a sense of locality.  Not that the photography is terrible, just severely curtailed.  We still get a few beautiful shots of English forest, and splashes of vivid reds and purples.  And warm cleavage, of course, Hammer has not forgotten itself.

Scars is not a loss, entirely...I suppose...if one were to look at it as an example of Saturday night horror schlock then it does hit the obligatory notes.  It's certainly better than many B-grade genre offerings.  By Hammer standards it is horror on auto-pilot.  When I first bought the DVD I was happily surprised that it wasn't as awful as I'd been led to believe.  On the contrary, it passes the time well in spite of it's limitations.  Ah...but this is now my third or fourth go-round for the movie, and like the Count it no longer engages.  The Satanic Rites of Dracula earns disparagement as well, I've not been kind to it myself, but at least it has a fascinating idea behind it (we'll get to that review eventually).   Scars tries to get on by ramping up the graphic bloodshed.  It makes for a shock but not for a story. 

For that you've got your standard protagonists-who've-wandered-afield plot.  It works well enough, it always does. 

One of our heroes is Paul, a charming young rogue and scoundrel who every woman he meets wants to bed.   See, that's supposed to be Dracula's provenance.  No wonder the Count looks so demoralized.  His own film series has robbed him of his identity. 

Paul has blundered into a film contrivance that takes him from a burgomaster's manse (more specifically, the bedroom of the burgomaster's daughter) to a birthday party to the border of the nation and beyond. It doesn't get any clearer than that, really, the slashed budget means being pointedly vague as to cities, towns, hamlets, and borders.  Paul's transport was a carriage yoked to a pair of spooked horses.  Must've been pretty spooked to have hauled Paul across two countries, or maybe the mansions were already out in the boonies.  Dunno.  The horses ditch Paul near a small village (which we also  don't see), and he is quickly run off by townsfolk who've had it with wandering strangers rousing the damn vampires.  Paul makes it to a small studio set that hints that the ruins of a castle must be nearby.  You won't see the castle either, although a scale model of a castle helps you imagine what it might look like if there were one.  Paul's brother Simon and the woman he loves, Sara, will come looking for him and meet the same welcome. 

They will meet the town's priest, a dispirited man who lost his courage when a previous attempt to rid the town of Dracula led to a mass slaughter of the raiding party's loved ones.  That could have been interesting to explore but the priest isn't a good hook for the target youth audience so we get Sara and Simon instead.  Then there's Klove (Patrick Troughton), Dracula's hapless slave, who takes a liking to Sara.  Dracula likes Sara.  Simon likes Sara.  Sara pines for Paul.  No, seriously, it's not a sex farce.  Really.  There's no subtext, no theme, nothing of depth transpires. The story moves at a pace, and Hammer asks nothing more of it.  If you're happy with horror that checks all the ingredients  then Scars will be enough for you.  It leads to a fittingly uninspired finale in which Evil is felled by his bad judgement in exposing himself to the weather. 

As game as most of the actors are, there is a brighter spark of life in the unlikely form of a landlord played by Hammer regular Michael Ripper.  He's a brusque, unfriendly man who reluctantly reveals to his barmaid that he is driven by fear and precaution.  He'd like to protect her and alienates her instead. 

From the Stoker novel, we finally have our shot of Dracula traversing the side of his castle bat-wise, and the mysterious window that can only be reached by bedsheets tied together.  Don't look for continuity, this production has no ties to the rest of the series.  Even Klove is a different character than appeared in Dracula, Prince of Darkness.

Scars was directed by Roy Ward Baker, who also helmed the superior Quatermass and the Pit and The Vampire Lovers., both for Hammer Studios.  Script was by Anthony Hunds (credited as John Elder).  Hinds had written many previous Hammer films including the prior Dracula sequels (uncredited on the best of them, Brides of Dracula).  I would have guessed that a less taelnted outsider to Hammer had penned Scars.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker - Horror in the Heights

The older one gets, the more one relies on others.  You need your crew - your friends and your community.  If your community lets you down, your friends are all you've got.  Ask the people of Roosevelt Heights.  Swastikas are showing up all over this Jewish neighborhood.  The city authorities have given up trying to get rid of the rats.  The police have grown apathetic to the devoured bodies that appear regularly each night, and when the media notices it's  to do  little more than lament "what a shame".  Yeah, your friends are all you've got getting you by.  Pray for Roosevelt Heights, because those friends are turning out to not be what they seem.

Ask Buck Feinman, night guard at a meat rendering facility.  Better yet, ask his friend Harry Starman, 'cuz Buck's dead now.  He left his poker party to get clean drinking glasses, and when they went to see what was keeping him found him among the rest of the gnawed meat.  The police pass it off as natural causes (old age) compounded by the environment (local rodent population).

Ask Harry Starman, he's got another idea.  There's this crazy Hindu, see, new to the 'hood, he's the one that's been spray-painting graffiti swastikas everywhere.  He's opened his own Indian cuisine restaurant.  In a Jewish community, no one wants any.  Crazy, I told ya.  Guy showed up with the first of the deaths.  Did you ask Harry Starman?  Too late now, he's dead too.  Pretty thoroughly chewed in under a minute.  Pretty fast work even for rats. 

Harry had been talking to reporter Carl Kolchak.  No, literally, talking to him the very moment he was killed.  Funny thing, though, poor Harry had thought he was talking to two Kolchaks at the same time.  One had jumped the back fence to the Indian stranger's residence, and the other came sauntering down the alley.  The Kolchak in the back yard heard Harry die but couldn't see it.  Stranger still, a pair of patrol officers died nearby, rumor has it they both had spotted people they trusted in an alley moments before they went in.  One saw a fellow cop.  One saw his mom.  Kolchak sees a story.

Horror in the Heights, penned by Hammer veteran Jimmy Sangster, is one of the best stories offered in The Night Stalker series.  The nature of the threat is made apparent but audiences are kept guessing about why it's happeneing and who or what is responsible.  Xenophobia plays a role in the story, both fear of other cultures and generational alienation, but Sangster introduces his themes observationally instead of being heavy-handed about them (he doesn't hammer them home, if you'll pardon the pun).  for the usually comically leavened series it's a pretty grim hour,  with dry and weary character-driven humor that isn't much relief and is certainly not camp.  Kolchak himself isn't developed much (he is driven throughout by simple decency both in his job then later his heroism) but the portrayal of his editor, Vincenzo, is laudable -  when Kolchak hands in a death notice for Feinman, Vincenzo tells him not to editorialize: if there's a story, do the job right and investigate. We also get to see Vincenzo stand up for his staff against bullying by the police.  In short, he's written as a professional who knows and deserves his job, which doesn't happen with him that often on K:TNS.  He's usually a timid gasbag and butt of jokes.  It's refreshing to see him written  with respect.

Miss Emily gets some character development, rounding out the episode's treatment of the elderly and demonstrating them to be both physically and mentally fit and active.  She's writing her advice column for inspiration as she aspires to write a novel, and she's not averse to making a new romantic connection should one appear.  Ron Updyke gets the second-best laugh of the night just by being himself, interjecting with an unasked-for lesson about culture clash and the invention of the longbow, confuzzling his colleagues.  He is upstaged only by the Hindu, who explains that he is hunting a Rakshasa.  He says to Kolchak, "One must be honest and brave - maybe you?" He pauses a moment and gives Carl a looking-over.  "Um, you'd best go home."

Rakshasa are  a Hindu legend, human-devouring shapeshifters that can appear human, presented on K:TNS as a monster that fools it's victims into seeing it as someone close or trusted. It's not a creature most in the Western Christian world are likely to be familiar with, and Sangster makes brilliant use of it re: his themes.  Its episodes like this that convince me that the series could have survived a few years longer given scripts of this caliber.  It's not the ideas that ran out, it's the budget and the patience of its star.  Sangster never lets us guess where he's going, nor does he let on that we're being schooled in diversity.  For example, the swastika is commonly recognized today as a symbol of human evil and hate while in fact it was already a far older sigil for good in Hindu faiths.  Thanks to the Third Reich, it can no longer be seen that way again.  I learned that as a child watching The Night Stalker and I'd bet a lot of others did as well.

This episode's guest cast includes Phil Silvers as Harry Starman, hired for his geniality but not his comedic talents, and young TV veteran Barry Gordon (another Barney Miller alum) as a friendly waiter at the restaurant kvetching on about his crazy boss and ragging on the entrees.

Creep factor is high with a highlight being the death of Starman only feet away from Kolchak.  There's something especially affecting about horror when it's tied to the exotic, as the servant of Brahma's home is: the ugliness of the swastikas (as we take them in the moment), the beauty of the beads at the entrance, the sitar for incidental score all make a scene that is alluring and upsetting in its tension.  We make wrong guesses just like most of the characters, out of ignorance.  We're often scared of the wrong things.  It's a lesson that's always current.

The mistrusted agent of Brahma is an old man who has no one left.  He must rely on the kindness, understanding, and goodness of a stranger, Kolchak, who is intelligent enough and concerned enough to have sussed out the truth of the situation.  The story is brought back to its theme...and then Kolchak, self-styled loner that he is, faces Miss Emily in a dark alley and has to decide an issue of trust.  He must be getting older.

10 flaming sword dances in tight spaces. 

Asides: how can it be rumored that the two cops thought they saw aquaintances when no one else was nearby when they died? 

I keep misremembering this ep as having the Hindu hero die in bed.  He is ill, certainly, but Kolchak confronts the Rakshasa on his way to getting medical help for him.  No more mention is made of what becomes of the old man.  I assume he lived. It's the nod to 'passing on the torch' that makes me stop at 'passing on'.

If the Brahman thought the Rakshasa was appearing to him in the form of Kolchak, whom he's never seen before, that doesn't suggest good things of his relationship to his employee.  Too bad, they both seem like nice people who'd get along.

Kudos to Jimmy Sangster for showing the younger writers how to do it right.

Taste the Blood of Dracula (Peter Sasdy, 1970)

*******SPOILERS Included*******

Do you remember Jaws: The Revenge?  That was the fourth in the series, in which the shark avenged itself on the Brody family in Jamaica, quietly intoning after each of its victims, "The fuhst", "The second", "The thuhd"...  Taste the Blood of Dracula is at essence a pretty good movie but it suffers a number of missteps, and one of them is making Dracula as mechanical as Bruce the shark.

Picking up where Dracula Has Risen From the Grave ends, a merchant happens upon the (un)dying Dracula as he disintegrates.  The merchant, Weller (Roy Kinnear) gathers the vestments and some of the blood, which has turned to powder.  He knows who Dracula is, and his instincts tell him it's a mistake...but the mercenary in him can't turn away from a sure sale.  Someone is going to want these. 

Cut to an unknown time later.  A trio of family men and respected elders spend one Sunday night a month in secret debauchery.  These are monied men, to be sure, the finest that polite society can offer.  One of them, Hargood (Geoffrey Keen)  treats his wife and daughter especially cruelly in his guilt.  Secker (John Carson) is a decent man, learned, traveled, experienced: in a word, jaded.  He's the closest thing to a Van Helsing character in this movie, full of useful knowledge and will voluntarily  do the right thing, but it;s not his vocation.  Paxton (Peter Sallis)  is the weakling, easily cowed into going  along with anything the alpha dogs want.  Problem is, they've grown bored withe the same old thrills. 

Enter young Lord Courtley, snotty, arrogant, and much farther along their path than they reckon.  Courtley lives for satiation and offense.  His latest quest is to meet Satan himself - or, if not Satan, then the closest thing to him.  To that end he needs the unholy treasure waiting to be purchased in Weller's shop: the blood of Dracula.  To get it, he'll need the money of the three thrillseekers.  Lucky for him they want his services in guiding them into darker pastures. 

Pretty good stuff so far, right?  The movie doesn't actually belong to them but to their children, innocent bright young things with bright untainted futures ahead of them.  They laugh and smile and talk of their pending marriages and elopements.  Paul Paxton and Alice Hargood are madly in love with each other.  Neither can comprehend why the elder Hargood hates Paul with such depth.  That Paul's offense is simply being the son of Hargood's partner in vice is lost to them.  The film has a Christian theme that is a little muddy - the sins of the fathers and all that.  Children and parents alike are going to pay.  Like the previous Hammer Dracula, this one is targeted at the older adolescent audience but this time trusting them with stronger meet and an earned adult rating (stronger material, an early glimpse of nudity for Hammer, and more bright red blood).  The darker nature of the film is leavened by the forthright sweetness of the kids, backed by a tender ballad from composer James Bernard (replacing his usual theme for Dracula) and by beautiful locales.  Taste the Blood is the series peak for cinematography,  with natural colors, almost no use of gels, and baroque art design. Every frame is full of details and textures to keep your eyes busy. 

Courtley performs a ceremony at a lonely, abandoned cemetery  (Highgate Cemetery provides the exteriors, a highly photogenic location).  This involves flattering himself by donning the Count's cape, clasp, and ring.  Assembling his three conspirators, he fills their goblets with Dracula's powdered blood revivified into a foul brew with a few drops of his own.  If the drink looks muddy, the plot is even muddier on the mechanics of Dracula's resurrection.  Courtley doesn't know precisely what is supposed to happen, and is taken by surprise when the potable gives him intense pain.  Hargood, Paxton, and Secker had already balked at drinking, and when they see Courtley felled they proceed to kick and beat him to death in their horror and revulsion.  They go home vowing the night never happened. 

Into dead Courtley arrives Dracula, helped by a dubious fx shot.  Courtley's corpse transforms into Christopher Lee who vows revenge on the three who have destroyed his servant.  Let me stop there for a moment, because I've got a few questions.  First, drinking Dracula's blood has always been a part of every adaptation, but it already had a function - it seals the bond.  Hammer was never concerned with continuity, though, and here it seems to have a different use...and the script is unclear just what that is.  If Courtley wasn't supposed to die by the ceremony alone, then was Dracula not meant to return in person?  Else, what's the difference?  He's got a body, what's he bitching about?   A servant isn't much use if he's sharing his body with you.  And what of the other three who were supposed to imbibe?  Would this have resulted in four Christopher Lees running around London spouting wooden dialog and glaring a lot? 

In any case, Chris Lee is reduced to glowering a lot.  He's out for revenge, just like the last film only with even less flair.  There's is none of the usual lust for life, the passion, the ferocity.  When he drinks from a woman, the pleasure he takes from it is fleeting, almost perfunctory.  He's the addict whose fix no longer satisfies.  Like Hargood, Paxton, and Secker he's grown bored, his thrills are no longer strong enough.  But, no, actually, that's reading into it a more interesting film than it really is - he's just badly utilized by an otherwise engaging script, and played by an actor who really  is bored by what his script offers.  That's the biggest flaw in this Hammer entry, it's a Dracula film in which Dracula is a mere engine to get us from A to Z.  He's the least interesting thing in his own movie.  He gets by on Lee's presence alone. 

That's too bad because his revenge is an interesting idea to explore.  His choice is to use the children against their parents.  In short, he corrupts them before their parents can and aims them homeward again as killers.  The earlier theme of vampirism as sexual liberation is out the window for a more puritan take, as patricide becomes a DeSadean pleasure for the girls.

Taste the Blood comes to a close with more muddled writing, in which the grand conflict sees Dracula ineffectually throwing bits of church from as much distance as he can get inside the church.  Pretty disappointing from a led villain.  He's been using this crypt as a hangout as it's long since been desecrated by the likes of Courtely holding black masses.  We know he can't be on hallowed ground.  This makes his demise one of the more interesting, and had the potential to be satisfying were it handled better - the church is re-consecrated with him inside it, trapping and killing him.  That's the idea, anyway. but it's Paul doing the re-consecrating.  Not a priest, not anyone at all qualified...ah, that's okay, Jesus would instruct that all it takes is faith, and anyone is worthy, but the movie never builds Paul as a man of any particular faith.  In fact, all he does is light a couple of candles and that seems to redeem the whole building. 

I've identified three problems, all of them found in the writing.  A little tweaking would have helped. none of these flaws touch the core story, yet are enough to blunt the movie as a satisfying whole.  It took me time to warm to Taste the Blood.  Today I find the bulk of it to be worthy...more weighty and fully formed than Dracula: Prince of Darkness or Dracula Has Risen From the Grave.  It's just too bad that Dracula himself is upstaged by...just about everybody.

"The first!  The second!  The third, Aaaah-HA-HA-HA-HAAA!"

*     **     **     **     **     **     *
On a personal note, I'm more of a Secker than a Van Helsing (See review for Hammer's 'Horror of Dracula').

I am in the process of moving and have not had internet access for a while now, except a few minutes each week.  Also, a few of my titles are packed away.  So, I won't be putting these up in chronological order...pretty sure Jess Franco's Dracula should have been up before this.  Also, still no decent screencap capacity.  Apologies for the lack of shots.

Mystery and Imagination presents Dracula (Patrick Dromgoole, 1968)

At the cinemas Christopher Lee was the reigning Count Dracula, an increasingly mute and brooding predator of base impulses: revenge, hunger, and reproduction.   Television was getting in on the Stoker act as well.   British anthology playhouse Mystery and Imagination offered their take with Denholm Elliott as a more social monster.  It was an adaptation that, while truncated, was the first to include a few details from the novel that had been neglected before, and for a TV production was more frank with sexuality than even Hammer had been. 

A patient known only as Thirtyfour (for his room number at Doctor John Seward's sanitarium) escapes confinement and crashes the dinner party Seward is hosting.  Guests at the party include the Weston mother and daughter, a count from Transylvania, and arriving late will be Mina  Harker.  Thirty-four throws himself at the feet of Count Dracula, calling him "Master".  The Count declares they have never met, and Thirtyfour immediately walks it back and returns meekly to his cell.  The party goes on, Dracula dominating the room (and young Lucy Weston's gaze) with his presence. 


You may know Denholm Elliott from the Eighties as Marcus Brody, the schoolmaster who employs Indiana Jones, or as the butler to Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy in Trading Places, or from any number of other character parts both more and less prestigious.  That's when he hit my own radar.  It's not easy to picture him as Dracula until you see the younger and slimmer Elliott rocking a Van Dyke and shades (eat your heart out, Gary Oldman).  Elliot's Count is highly urbane and has a confidence that's almost snide, quiet until talk of his heritage fires his angry pride.  If you think you know Denholm only from his late career, check this out. 

Dracula is the man of the hour.  Thirtyfour is easily swayed by a few words from him when the sanitarium guards are no match for the patient; Lucy breathlessly attends his every gesture, oblivious to her fiance Seward;  Seward has to hide his annoyance that his guests the Westons extended their invitation to the unexpected and unwelcome Russian royalty who has swayed them.  Mina is eager to meet the Count as her husband Jonathon Harker has gone missing after a stay at Dracula's home in Transylvania.    It's not the only question surrounding the Count - Thirtyfour was a passenger on the ship Demeter on the same voyage that brought Dracula to England.  After Dracula came ashore early the ship met with tragedy, the unidentified patient the sole survivor. 

Thirtyfour isn't just an amnesiac but a maniac obsessed with devouring insects and small animals for their life force while he awaits the arrival of "the master".   Seward consults his mentor,  esteemed Professor Abraham Van Helsing.  Mina meets the man, and things begin to fall into place.  Dracula sets his eyes on Lucy and begins to visit her each night.

What's interesting about this Dracula is that he comes across as a fairly skilled social manipulator, except for the lies that are easily exposed.  Seward is the first to suspect the Count of driving the tragedies that are unfolding around his clique, but Dracula has set him up to look the jealous lover and so his suspicions are dismissed by all.  Lucy and Thirtyfour are pitted against each other through yet more jealousy, the patient's for his lost place as the Master's favored pet.  Lucy's frail mother becomes a plot device as the vampire exploits her fears for her daughter (this is taken from the novel, and had never appeared onscreen before in earlier adaptations).  Later, after Lucy has become a vampire, Dracula will play off of Mina's grief and her depression, having driven her and her fiance apart. 

Under hypnosis, Thirtyfour recounts a little of his meeting with "the Master".  We see this in a dreamlike flashback in which three ghostly women stalk and  attack him in a castle.  The sequence is nearly silent but for the hissing of the women and the patient's narration.  The sequence stands out from otherwise staid camerawork and direction - not dull but not innovative.  The brides also stand out for their overt sexuality: for a television production, their sheer robes are shocking.  Now, I'm watching this on a bootleg disc made from an unrestored copy, so the image is not pristine...and that's from a production that had a constrained TV budget.  Its in black and white.  Plus, that sequence is murkily lit.  All the same, I can see that the the gowns become opaque only strategically, allowing glimpses of the actors' breasts that are nearly complete.  I couldn't get a screenshot to prove it.   Hammer took audience's breath away with decolletage - British TV took it further.  No one remembers.  Only Hammer is still known.

Later on Dracula will assault Lucy as she sleeps.  This is another sequence that is surprisingly frank for television.  Lucy writhes in bed, asleep and having a clearly sexual dream as Dracula kneels and watches.  When finally he penetrates her throat she climaxes.  Strong stuff for 1968 television. 

As the plot heats up, Dracula uses the undead Lucy as a proxy to seduce Mina.  The lesbian (well, bi really) attraction between them is undisguised for television.  Happily, this is depicted without bias, there is no vilification of sexuality in the film.  It's simply erotic. 

Looking back to the novel,  this is also the first production to allow the Count's facial hair, and the first time Lucy and Mina meet the old man Swales at the cemetery, where he engages in spirited talk of the town's seemier history.  In this, a colorful but inconsequential bit of the novel (a bit of mood-setting and character development) is spun into a clever twist that helps streamline the movie. 

I like this Dracula.  It's talky but neither slow nor stagebound (despite obvious, low-budget sets), and took me by surprise for a number of reasons: its sporadic fealty to the novel, its unadulterated sexuality, the revelation of Denholm Elliott.  More substantially, Dracula's crafty manipulations are given as much weight as his supernatural abilities, an innovative advance for the character.  Performances are good across the board - Bernard Archard is an engaging Van Helsing.  Corin Redgrave is a little affected as Thirty-four, suggesting he's more a stage than a screen actor.  James Maxwell (Seward) and Susan George (Lucy) are natural and fluid, easily sympathetic. 

The Future of Sinister Simian - a Post-it Note

The slow disintegration of my family and personal situation that has been growing worse for the past two or three years is now fully upon me.  My parents are gone, my home soon will be.  I have a place to go, but it will be a struggle for everyone involved, a situation I am loath to inflict on the people trying to help me.

If it is possible to return to this blog in the future and resume contributing reviews I will do so.  It won't be for awhile, and doubtful with any regularity.

I'm currently trying to cull my DVD collection, sadly.  I have a few thousand discs.

No promises.  I've got a good dozen or more Draculas (Draculae?) to go, more Stephen King, Tsukamoto's Kotoko (I still haven't see Fires on the Plain), quite a few by Sion Sono - though I don't have the same grasp on his work...I'd like to write about the 1988 remake of D.O.A., part review and part personal reaction...it's a movie about a guy who has only hours left to live, and I saw it when I was deeply depressed.  I'd like to do some Lucio Fulci or Dario Argento.   For that matter, I'm tempted to try to review Spike Lee.  Lee is an interesting case...the public Lee is kind of an asshole, but the private Lee seems to be a decent, thoughtful person...and Lee the director informs his films with all the consideration that seems to escape Public Lee when he  sounds off.  I think he's a tremendously talented (if unreliable), passionate filmmaker, provocative in ways good and bad. 

I'd also like to write about Blue is the Warmest Color or Shortbus.  Or the abysmal but fascinating trainwreck that is Caligula.  Tinto Brass wuz robbed.

Then there's the other half of Kolchak's run...and Russian Roulette, an unremarkable but highly endearing Canadian spy thriller from the '70s starring George Segal.  I have to lose my Doctor Who collection, sadly.  Space:1999, now,  that could be fun.

Wish me luck.  I have a small handful of friends who are good people and want to see me through this.  I hope to be back again next year.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker - The Energy Eater

This week Kolchak takes on mucho Menudo.  That oughtta scare ya.  No, wait, my bad.  It's Matchemonedo. 

Dispatched by Vincenzo to a press tour of the new Lakefront Medical Research Center, Kolchak finds the place has opened prematurely.  There are alarming cracks throughout the subbasements, the air is stiflingly hot even with the AC working overtime to chill things, the elevator won't run smoothly, and even the grand opening event's bar is closed.  There's a story here to dig into of malfeasance and safety failures.  What's causing the damage - settling?  A geothermal vent, was the land not adequately researched? 

What he doesn't know and will soon learn is that people are already dying, and not in explicable ways.  The blood of the victims has congealed to a tarry substance.  The first two to die were a pair of steel workers for a construction service - they fell from a great height.  After that, the rest of the team walked off the job.  It was a Native American outfit.  Kolchak seeks the input of their super, who is also their shaman, one Jim Elkhorn.

This our third consecutive week that Kolchak has faced a legend of Native American origin, and the first time that any Indian has been allowed a voice as a character.  Jim Elkhorn is played by William Smith, making a happy break from his line of b-movie tough guys*.  He's a powerfully built man that you don't  doubt for a moment could single-handedly take apart a tavern and everyone in it, but Elkhorn never raises so much as his voice - not even when warning Kolchak that the reporter and his camera are about to meet his foot.  Oh, he's a modern macho man but his means of proving it is by making smooth moves on every attractive woman he sees.  Speaking French and being a household fix-it get him so much further.  I half-expected him to say he's a lover, not a fighter.  Elkhorn has fully assimilated into White Western Culture but accepts his people's lore as truth.  On the other hand, he feels  embarrassed about performing the rituals, as if he's afraid he will look comical to Western eyes.  He calls himself a shaman but admits he'd rather not pursue it...and he has a degree in business administration but has excuses not to pursue that either. 

Add to that Smith's casual presence, as immediately genial as it is is kickass. He and Mcgavin have an instant rapport even as Elkhorn and Kolchak begin at odds.  Few incidental characters on K:TNS are as fully rounded as Elkhorn, so I gotta give high marks to Smith and writers Arthur Rowe and Rudolph Borchert for that.

It's from Elkhorn that Kolchak learns of Matchemonedo.

According to 'The Pottawatomis: history and folklore of the Indians of Kankakeeland' (Al Stone, 1960),  "The Pottawatomi believed that two great spirits ruled and governed the world . . . Kitchemonedo (the Great Spirit, who was good) and Matchemonedo (the Evil Spirit, who was quite wicked.) We know that the Potta- watomi originally worshipped the sun, and we believe that they developed the concept of the two great spirits from the teachings of the Christian missionaries."
 http://archive.org/stream/pottawatomishist00ston/pottawatomishist00ston_djvu.txt

According to what I've been reading, the Potouatomi ascribe many things to Manitou, spirits of good or ill, and their culture places great emphasis on health and healing.  Apropos then that a hospital should be at the center of the episode.

Elkhorn claims that Matchemonedo goes much  further back, reported by other tribes, and is thought of as the Bear God.  I can't speak to whether the writers made that up or had much better research material than I found.  TNS presents Matchemonedo as a Lovecraftian being, invisible and eternal.  It feeds on raw energy, like electricity and plasma. A highlight of the episode is a chilling moment when Kolchak and Elkhorn recreate an image caught by a spill of x-ray plates to reveal a gigantic, angry eye. This history is clever writing that provides its own solution: the Bear God is so named because it hibernates in the cold months.  The area it inhabits had had a man-made lake until it was drained to make way for the hospital, thus the being has been awakened.  That means if it can be frozen, it will  go back to sleep.  That's a lot less arbitrary than a stake through the heart or silver bullets.   There too I'm liking the script.  On the other hand...

The writer gives us one of the less flattering portraits of Carl Kolchak.  We've seen him charming before, which he still is here, unfailingly.  We've seen him underhanded and manipulative, which he also is here, though usually for a bit of throwaway humor.  His lesser instincts are more pervasive this week, feeling more integral to the character to unflattering effect.  In the past he has been motivated by a desire to save lives or see the right thing done.  This week throws that for a  curve, and it's both a strength and a weakness for the episode.  A strength because it gives us something a bit different.  The character interaction is more complex.  As well as Elkhorn, Kolchak enlists the aid of Nurse Janis Eisen (Elaine Giftos), another fully dimensional role.  She chafes at the intrusion of a reporter trying to find bad press for her place of employment, but frustration at the deteriorating situation forces her to become a whistle-blower.  Kolchak, knowing that women  are  a weakness for Elkhorn, makes his way through the shaman's door by sending Eisen through it first.  They find him wooing his apartment neighbor who has tried to run a muffin through her toaster.  The scene is a low-key comic delight with four-way byplay and  a suggestion of other places the muffin could be stuffed.
 
Kolchak has managed to get rid of one distraction only to give Elkhorn another in Janis.  She reciprocates the attraction.  Instead of the usual sexual byplay with the lead most shows would offer, it's all between the side characters with Carl oblivious singlemindedly focused on Matchemonedo.  It's not the first time he's raised questions of asexuality, but an early exchange caught my attention: when he's greeted at the press tour by a young woman, he comments that she must be an aspiring actress.  She says that it's difficult to get exposed, and he replies - smirkingly, looking her up and down - "Oh, I don't know about that."  Excuse me?  Jesus, Carl, a casting couch joke?  Was that meant to be snide or...please don't tell me that was your idea of a come-on!  No wonder you never have a date. That was totally out of the blue and uncalled for.  Pervy Uncle Carl.  Nice.

Which leads back to Eisen.  She's an interesting  character, but once Elkhorn is on board neither Kolchak nor Rowe & Borchert have any use for her.  Kolchak has spent the episode using people (Miss Emily to write his first article on the hospital's opening, Eisen to reach Elkhorn), manipulating them (psyching Vincenzo into covering a story Kolchak doesn't want to be bothered with) and generally lying his way past obstacles, but in TEE he's downright cold-blooded in his dismissal of a room full of bodies, one of which looks to be Janis Eisen.  We never see her again.  I don't know what to make of it, because Elkhorn doesn't react with any concern for the dead either.  Is this bad writing, or have Borchert and Rowe given us the ugly truth about Carl as they see it?  Betrayal of character, or insightful summary? 

For that matter, Vincenso also has a moment that doesn't sit well.  When Miss Emily confesses that she wrote Carl's article, which she based on concern over the poor state of health care for the elderly, Vincenzo has the balls to ridicule both the older generations and the very concept of concern for them.  This, to Miss Emily's face.  It's beyond rude.  It also fail credibility - no editor would have such lousy sense of a newsworthy story.

It seems clear that Kolchak is no hero in the writers' eyes.  Consider the finale.  For once Kolchak has met with authorities who have the with to realize that his arguments are hard to refute, and they act on his advice.  They  do so grudgingly, of course, and secretly.  They even spite him for it, giving a story to the other news agencies but not INS.  It's a false story, of course, but it provokes Kolchak anyway, as it was meant to.  The hospital is evacuated and liquid nitrogen is pumped into the basement.  Kolchak, however, is determined to get a story and a  photo of Matchemonedo, and so armed with expensive cameras and infrared film storms once more unto the breach.  The final confrontation has no particular nobility about it - he's not vanquishing a foe, just getting a snapshot out of reckless pride.  I like the way it's staged, with cameras jiggled in a forerunner of 'shaky-cam', a shift to closeups to make the space suddenly more claustrophobic, and jarring changes in camera POV of the same shot. Hospitals are natural settings for horror.  We are till at ease in them, traditionally as places of disease and death, and more recently for fear of technology overwhelming us.  Add the cloying feeling of being deep underground, you have a winning setup. 

The Energy Eater present a dilemma for rating.  Overall I think it's a winner for it's richer character and diversions from formula, but  there are evident flaws.  How could Kolchak lay passed out on a floor  covered in liquid nitrogen and survive with only minor frostbite?  More troubling is his seeming sociopathy, which is either laudably honest writing or missing the mark badly. 

I'll  give it 8 blueberry-oat suppositories.

*I'll always think of William Smith foremost in another non-tough-guy role, as the race-car  pro in David Cronenberg's Fast Company.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker - The Spanish Moss Murders

 
"Père Malfait gon' getcha!"

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When the French came to Louisiana in the 18th Century they learned the Native American legend of the 'Father of a Thousand Leaves", a name which translated to French as Le Père de Mille Feuilles. It was a tall creature of vengeance in the bayous, covered in moss, branches, and mud, able to disguise itself as a tree. The Father was a protector of the swamps - do malice there and you would be sure to have a horrible encounter with Le Père. As language does, the pronunciation and translation migrated: the legend grew among the settlers as Père Malfait: roughly, Father of Bad Doings.

"Père Malfait" has a dreamy ring to it, non? Smooth like melted butter, saucy like a Cajun patois. But you can just call him Bad Daddy. He was a legend to tell your kids to scare them into line. That's how Paul Langlois came to know him, a childhood fear that lives on in the darkest parts of Paul's psyche. These days Paul's been spending all his time there, inside his own head, being a volunteer in a sleep study experiment. He has been asleep for six weeks.

A psychology grad student is dead, victim of a hit&run according to the police. The chef of an expensive French restaurant has been murdered in his kitchen. A street musician has been killed in a basement where he liked to toke up. All disparate deaths but for a couple shared details: they all had their chests crushed by inhuman force, each of the bodies had been strewn with some green vegetable matter. As Kolchak investigates, he learns that they also all knew Paul Langlois. Langlois, a musician and resentful hothead from Louisiana. Langlois, who has a perfect alibi.

One of my favorite character actors, Severn Darden, plays Dr. Aaron Pollack who is conducting a sleep analysis on his volunteer subject, Langlois. The purpose of this pure research is to study the brain patterns when it is deprived of dream activity over an extended period. Every now and then the monitors go nuts - something is happening in that skull, but no one knows what. Pollack finds it fascinating, and it's the only thing he has any interest in or patience for. Darden has a knack for underplayed comic gold, here playing Pollack as a soft-spoken but disdainful sufferer of fools. His encounters with Kolchak are a little different from the usual exasperated authorities the reporter clashes with. For all his complaints, Pollack is a loquacious sort.

Pollack: "I try to be a nice guy."
Kolchak: "How's that working out?"
Pollack: "I don't know."

Not Captain Siska, though. 'Mad Dog' Siska is a congenitally angry man who may have met his match in Kolchak, who manages to undo weeks of anger management therapy in a few hours time. It was a nice change while it lasted, his "I'm okay..."(heavy sigh)" you're okay" resistance to Kolchak's persistence, but this is the great Keenan Wynn and we'd be cheated if we didn't see him lose it sooner or later. "To tell you the truth, you're not okay! The people in group therapy didn't tell me I was ever gonna meet anybody as un-okay as you are!"

Kolchak follows a chain of leads to the street scene where he encounters Langlois' associates. One of them, Morris Shapiro (playing to rubes as 'Pepe') tells him a little about the sleeper and lets us in on Père Malfait, a childhood legend Langlois shared with some of his fellow Louisianans. Père Malfait was a monster from the Bayou, covered in moss. We learn from a botanic garden that the vegetation left on the victims is Spanish Moss, and it only grows in Louisiana.

As Kolchak and Shapiro talk, walking along an alley at night, Morris suddenly vanishes in the middle of the conversation - there one moment, gone the next, silently snatched away without a trace. Of all the scares in Kolchak to have stayed with me, it's one of the more unnerving for it's sudden sharp turn: TNS tends to telegraph it's scares. This one catches us unaware. Kolchak remains on the scene, trying to find the missing 'Pepe' in the dark, unaware that the thing that took him shares the space with him. It's not the only creepy scene in the episode. Another is a nasty fright when Kolchak discovers that the monster is now looking for him and has come to his very desk at INS. Earlier attacks were preceded by half-glimpses of a creature in glass, translucent, not quite there. Director Gordon Hessler maintains Chicago as a world usually seen at night. The first shot is a close up of an abstract painting, and the final sequence takes place in the city's network of sewers, which could double as a metaphor for the murky waters of Paul Langlois' id.

TSSM is one case in which it may be helpful to see the unrestored version, as the costume worn by Richard Kiel leaves something to be desired. It's a guy wearing moss. They didn't even green up his hands. Still...don't those sewer scenes look great?

That feeling of a nighttime world and the presence of dread is well balanced with the episode's character-driven humor ala Darden and Wynn. This week a full twenty-seven minutes passes before we even see the INS staff, they're used sparingly but with precision. Updyke has two scenes, one of them nothing more than a telling look - his singular spoken line is perfectly Updykian.

Kudos to writers Alvin R. Friedman and David Chase. It's Friedman's story, so it must have been he who brought in Père Malfait. That's a areal legend and even more obscure than the Diableros of last week. It's not easy to present a legend without diminishing it's power as a legend, but TSMM manages to do this by keeping it just that, it also ushers us into the unexplored realms of dreams and the power of the subconscious. These were hot topics of the era, the stuff of "In Search Of..." with Leonard Nimoy and countless documentaries. It makes TSMM double creepy.

The Spanish Moss Murders scared the hell out of me as a kid, and I'm delighted to say that, seen as an adult, it holds up to my memories in all aspect a kid wouldn't notice: writing, performances, directing, editing, photography. It's always been one of my favorites. I give it a dinner order of Cajun blackened chicken, couscous, and a 10 foot tall seaweed salad.

Asides:
Langlois is played by Donald Mantooth, brother of Emergency! star Randolph Mantooth. He played a cop in The Ripper and has a role in an upcoming episode.

If you enjoyed TSMM, check out the excellent Australian horror movie Patrick (Richard Franklin, 1978) in which a man lying in a coma for years acts out his desires via mental telepathy.

With that I bid you goodnight. Sleep well, pleasant dreams, and remember...Père Malfait, he go' getchoo.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker - Bad Medicine

According to Sonoran Indian legend, a diablero is a brujo (sorcerer) who by way of black magic can transform himself into a variety of wild creatures, such as birds of prey, dogs, wolves, coyotes and more.

Last week we had a threat who was human - imbued with Satanic powers, yes, but human. Robert Palmer in The Devil's Platform was human in his ambition, in his cunning, and in his deliberation. Sorcerers likewise are human beings, but for all the characterization the diablero gets in Bad Medicine it had me wondering whether Richard Kiel was playing a man who could appear as an animal or an animal who could appear as a man.

Wealthy women in Chicago are beginning to die off. At first it looked like suicide, until a chauffer also adds his body to the count via a broken neck. He was clutching a black feather. Kolchak also witnesses firsthand a robbery in which a police dog is killed apparently by another dog (or coyote) and two guards turn their own guns on themselves. A man is seen in Native American garb, is chased to the roof from which he leaps, and vanishes into thin air*.

it's got the INS staff abuzz. Tony isn't convinced there's a story to be had. Were the early deaths suicides? His staff can't see eye to eye with him on that, or that it's reasonable that the wealthy have wanted to keep a low profile. Ron Updyke is sent to cover the funeral but is too sensitive to do the job. Miss Cowles thinks Carl is on to something with the deaths being suspicious. Meanwhile, Carl is chasing tangents about coyotes and some nut dressing up like an Indian. Vincenzo's having a hard time drawing it into coherence.

If Vincenzo thinks the story is a mess, I too think the story is a mixed bag. Medicine bag maybe. There's a useful pun somewhere but I can't make it work.

A friend recently commented that the INS gang reminds him of Barney Miller: a motley ensemble of well-drawn, distinct, quirky personalities that bounce lines off each other with delicious timing. He's absolutely right. For the third week in a row the writing feels organic to the characters, and perhaps even more confident as it handles the entire newsroom at once in multiple scenes. If only Monique had still been around, it would have been a full house and a full episode. Even a sarcastic young photo lab tech gets a good scene. Never mind the spooky stuff - If K:TNS were a sitcom that never strayed from this single set, I'd watch it loyally.

Since my friend pointed this out, it becomes obvious that the guest cast fits the comparison as well. barney Miller thrived by its regular cast, but were fed material through an endless stream of colorful strangers who filed through the precinct case by case - vivid and hilarious people fully rounded and played by veteran character actors of the era. Every week you'd see actors you'd seen a dozen times before. Alice Ghostley, for example, who shows up on TNS this week as the curator of a museum on Native American folklore. She plays the part straight, yet her reaction bubbles with humor beneath when the details turn too preposterous. Another amusing scene is Kolchak dealing with a strict dog owner and trying to soothe his own nerves by speaking German to a well-disciplined canine. This parade of eclectic irregulars for comic relief is part of K:TNS' niche. When it delivers on this score, applying the comedy with the lightest touch and emphasizing character over humor, it's worth seeing.

I wish I could say the rest of this episode holds up its end. Give credit for an interesting choice of villain, at least, and for looking outside the West's dominant faith for inspiration. How it's handled on the other hand...

Purely on a surface level, the attacks by the sorcerer are eerie in their details but not conducive to a traditionally spooky atmosphere. Richard Kiel plays the diablero, and his stony face and malevolent glare are plenty menacing. The spookiness comes from the use of sound: first an animal of one form or another trespasses on a scene, and it's vocalizations are treated with an electronic distortion that remains in the air; then when the brujo appears the score goes breathy over a relentless percussion. The victims are under a spell. This works for me, though I've seen the episode so many times that altogether it fails to make me feel a pervading chill and I'm not sure anymore how much it ever did. It does lead to an appreciably tense finale when Kolchak tries to put an end to the sorcerer but loses the one weapon that could render the sorcerer powerless. Even that, though is hobbled by unintended absurdity. Kolchak creeps up on the brujo who is intoning (in an electronically altered voice) an incantation that is surely meant to sound otherworldly. "EE-eye-ee-eye-ohhh, ee-eye-ee-eye-ohhh, OOOOH ee-eye-ee-eye-oh." Pretty much takes the piss out of the scene.

So too is the investigation aspect weak this week, as first Carl leaps to a number of conclusions that are dubious. Saving a great deal of time, Victor Jory appears unbidden as a Native American holy man who not only knows everything Kolchak needs to learn about diableros but even miraculously happens to know the very one terrorizing Chicago. That ought to be a good story, right? But we don't get it, and Carl hasn't the wit to ask. Diableros are a Southern legend, this one is pretty far afield. These are the beliefs of the people of the pueblos, the communities that lived in apartment-like multi-lever housing of adobe, often along cliffsides. Kolchak lights on a story Ron is working, conveniently dropped earlier in the script, of an unfinished highrise.

Here is where the greatest disappointment Bad Medicine lies. I'm reminded of a scene in Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent in which another journalist, played by Joel McCrae learns that he is being sent to Europe to discover whether war is going to break out. He asks his astonished editor whether it might be a good idea to interview Hitler. "He must have something on his mind." Don't you think this diablero must have something on his mind? That's a conversation I would love to have heard. Instead, Kolchak - and the script - treat him as a creature to be hunted down and killed. It's a fine line walked by the script, as the holy man informs us that this diablero is under a curse to "wander the centuries" seeking treasure, and only after amassing a magnificent fortune may he pass into the next world. So...is he or is he not still human? No, never mind that, is he or is he not still interesting as a character? And, troublingly, is Kolchak guilty of forgetting that a human being is owed the right to trial? When he confronted Robert Palmer, it was to thwart him not kill him. The metaphysical state of the diablero (human or spirit) is left purposely vague so that we won't raise that objection. I think it's a dodgy kinda dodge.


More than one opportunity is lost here. I imagine the producers felt that The Night Stalker was not a property they wanted to get political with, though by the Seventies most television was dealing with prejudice and resentments, and injustice toward the Native American population well acknowledged - meaning, not an issue likely to rile viewers. Never mind, I wouldn't have expected much on that count anyway...but there's a more damning loss here, and that's the dramatic one. Let the diablero speak for himself. Let the conflict challenge us. There's a story here! Or, to quote Kolchak from one of the movies, "This is news, Vincenzo, nyyeewwws!"

5 "pyoo--webb-loes", give or take wiring and ductwork.

Asides:

Eidth Cowles, last week referred to as "Miss Emily" (whom we know is the INS advice columnist) officially announces herself as Emily Cowles when she answers the phone. Gaffe: she drops the 's' from her own name.

*Where does that phrase come from, 'into thin air'? I guess vanishing into thick air is pretty mundane, isn't it? Like losing someone in a fog.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker - The Devil's Platform

It's good to see a villain that's human for a change, even if said  villain does spend most of his of time running around on all fours.

It's election time, and Chicago is finding Senate hopeful Robert Palmer simply irresistible.   It doesn't hurt that his opponents are dropping like flies.  His allies too - Kolchak is in the right place at the right time to witness a tragic elevator failure that kills a carload of people that included one Stephen Wald,  a disillusioned campaign member that was about to disclose some damaging material on Palmer.  The only survivor is a big black dog Carl manages to photograph.  The dog runs away, with Carl accidentally snagging a pendant it was wearing.  We the audience know that Palmer got into the elevator - he wasn't in it when it hit the basement.

For once Vincenzo is supportive of a story Kolchak is following, provided it's solidly based in evidence.  It's a good, down-to-earth story of political corruption.  It does have an irritating drawback, as Kolchak insists on obsessing over that dog.  The damned thing keeps showing up.  It attacks Carl when he drops in on the Palmer estate hoping for an interview (bites a hole in Kolchak's pocket and takes back the pendant), and is seen by police ripping apart Wald's secretary who had a briefcase full of blackmail material on Palmer.  Off the record?  The police shot six rounds into that dog at close range, and it just stood there staring at them like it enjoyed it.  Meanwhile, the dog has disappeared from Kolchak's photo.  The dog has five toes per paw, which Updyke informs him is impossible.

I've been complaining that the writing of the episodes has been venturing into camp, which can be either amusing or painful, and threatens my suspension of disbelief.  Light comic relief is one thing, and it works if it rises organically from the characters and situations.  It's quite another if it becomes outright comedy that relies on caricatures or too-clever byplay.  Firefall was the show done right, IMO,   with well-rounded characters, a clever plot that doesn't take a predictable path, and humor that's organic.  TDP has another smart script well-directed, though not up to the level of Firefall - it's never particularly scary, nor does it surprise or misdirect.  We know what's going on well ahead of Kolchak, where it would have been more rewarding to discover the secrets of the case with him.  all the same, it's a nicely urbane piece with good character writing.  Vincenzo is less bellicose and more the model of an editor with a head for a good story ethically presented.  Updyke and Kolchak play their scenes less like high school rivals and more like realistic colleagues; they  trades shots at each other but not so maliciously that they can't share office space together.  Ruth McDevitt as Edith Cowles finally clicks into place, revealed as the advice columnist "Miss Emily" who was much alluded to but not seen in 'The Ripper'.  She's a pleasant sort, always wanting to do nice turns for her fellow office workers like buying them gifts when she's out of town.  She brings Carl a nice hat.  It's...not a Kolchak hat.  But it's a nice hat.

In the course of covering the story Carl meets a doctor who tries to brush him off, and doesn't reveal much, but the exchange is notable for a couple of reasons.  One, the dialog is terse and sharp without being bombastic.  In fact, this episode is entirely devoid of the usual antagonism between Kolchak and the  authority-of-the-week (there isn't a foil at all this week), which is a welcome change.  The doctor is mistrustful, secretive, abrasive, but also reasonable.  Also a female authority figure, with no fuss made about it, in a show that's been spotty on it's presentation of women.

Then there's our villain, Palmer, coolly played by now-veteran Tom Skerritt in an  early role.  He's an icy one, married to an equally icy woman unruffled in public but unhappy in private.  Her breezy rebuffs of Kolchak's efforts made me want to see more of her. (Kolchak: "What's it like, living with Bob?"  "He's perfect."  "I wish I were."  "So do I.  Goodnight.")  That doesn't happen, but with an economy of scenes we learn that privately she is left cold from her husband's pursuit of power and uncomfortable with his secrets.  We get the sense he's not the same man anymore.  He's certainly not a man who would hesitate to turn on her.  It's not a lot of development but it's more than the standard monster on TNS gets. 

Everything falls into place for Kolchak a mere ten minutes or less from the closing credits when an info packet on Palmer lands on his desk.  The candidate is seen in one photo wearing the same pendant that the dog sports: a pentacle in a circle.  Kolchak scours the libraries for books on Satanism.  He also reaches for Ms. Cowles' souvenir bottle of holy water. 

There's a nice sequence herein involving the INS darkroom.  A solid minute and forty seconds are spent developing a blowup of Palmer to see the medallion, and developing tension.  No  coincidence that the scene is dark, lit entirely in red.  Yes, that's standard for a darkroom but it also plays on the nerves and sets a mood.  Normally we should have  had Monique doing the work for him, with half a minute of banter serving as exposition.  We know what the scene is leading to, and utilizing Monique would have cut to the chase...but that would have lent the scene an entirely different flavor, useless to the episode.  Instead the director takes three times as long and establishes a mood of dread before the inevitable confrontation.

Kolchak sneaks into the Palmer household that evening and finds Robert in his basement preparing a ritual.  Palmer knows he's there and calmly calls him forth.  Skerritt underplays the scene beautifully, no histrionics or boasting an all the more threatening for his supreme confidence.  He makes Kolchak an offer: he could become the evening's blood sacrifice or he could see his life's ambitions to fruition by becoming a servant and acolyte.  Palmer's going to the top, President, and he'll need allies in the press - people to squelch honest  reporting and be a conduit for his lies.  That's how tyrants work, history shows.  Sad I need to reiterate that, but in 2017 the lesson is still timely...and the devil has nothing to do with it.  We saw it in Russia, in any number of Third World countries, in '30s Germany, and we're seeing it again today.  That's not a matter of right or left, it's a matter of democracy and freedom.  I know people on both sides of the aisle who are alarmed.  Devalue a free press, and slide into tyranny. 

"The offer expires almost immediately."  Skerritt gets a monologue that includes an  insightful passage about Kolchak himself.  "You're a good reporter.  Not a great one, you have character flaws that are going to keep total success from your grasp, but you are nonetheless a very good reporter.  You would like more than anything to have the Pulitzer Prize.  Though publicly you scorn the very concept of awards, you would like more than anything else to get to New York and work on a major daily paper.  You would even like a suede-backed chair at your desk.  Not leather, suede.  Such small ambitions, really.  Your editor is Anthony Vincenzo, he frustrates you terribly...you blame him for your problems but you know that you yourself are responsible for most of them. Mr. Kolchak, all those stumbling blocks can be very easily put aside.  You can have as little as you want and much more, starting tonight."

This is the crux of the threat.  Words, carefully chosen and backed up by demonstrated power.  The threat lies in a moral choice.  This again is an important change from the usual baited chase and trap, to the story's benefit.  We're never in doubt what Kolchak will choose, but we can feel how palpable the temptation for him. At the episode's start Kolchak laments that politicians seem "fearless, independent, and energetic" rather than "like the rest of us: timid, insecure, and lazy". Now Palmer is telling Kolchak that Palmer was just like him and did something about it. We've never seen a conundrum hit so close to home for Kolchak before.   Rightfully, he never voices his reason for the choice he makes - be it simplistic or complex, fueled by morals, personal integrity, or just stark terror at consigning his soul to darkness.  

I will give it 9 nice hats.  In spite of it's lack of scares, it's a good story.

Asides:
a bartender is played by Stanley Adams, Tribble-trader Cyrano Jones of Star Trek.

The juxtaposition of politics and Satan is not a new one, but The Devil's Platform looks forward to The Omen (which also has scenes involving scary dogs) just a couple of years down the road.  It's sequel, Damien: Omen II, even features a demise by crashing elevator.  Omen III: The Final Conflict has a nice turn by Sam Neill as the Antichrist that might have been inspired by Skerritt's unruffled quietude in TDP - they look not dissimilar to each other.