Black Scorpion (2001) Part 2

 

Creators: Roger Corman and Craig J. Nevius

Screenplay: Steve Gentile, Nick Guthe, Elijah Aron, Heidi Ferrer, Raly Radouloff, Lev L. Spiro, Malcolm Stephens and Mike Vitale

Cast: Michelle Lintel as Black Scorpion, Scott Valentine as  Det. Steve Rafferty, BT as Argyle, Enya Flack as Tender Lovin', Steven Kravitz as  Slugger, Shane Powers as  Specs, Guy Boyd as Capt. Henry Strickland; Shae Marks as  Babette, Robert Pine as  Mayor Artie Worth, Raye Birk as Dr. Phineas Phoenix

Ephemeral Waves

[The following is a continuation from the first half which you can read HERE. And yes, they were written separately over time, the first devoted to the first half of the one season of television and the later covered here to the final. You can tell a lot of additional emotion in the words what the final review and progression was.]

Halfway through viewing the Black Scorpion television series, you have a villain with dwarfism, more of a trickster who rides about on a hover board in the air (part of the show's then low budget CGI). He is dressed as Cupid firing arrows at bystanders that cause them to fall in love with the first person they see. He never returns after that one episode, and certainly is the most baffling moment of the whole season. He is not even the main villain of the episode, but there to cause mayhem in a scenario where the leads are paired with villains they had romances with, adding to the weirdness.

Black Scorpion, to be blunt, could have done with more of this as by the second half the sense of decline and numbness started to kick in trying to watch the show. It was doomed by the inherent structure of having to pad out forty plus minute episodes for its original station the Sci-Fi Channel, which would have been an hour with the advertisement breaks.  This is a huge crippling flaw, as you can feel the show having not enough to come up with in terms of good material, more so for a twenty two episode show, eventually draining for myself to see. It eventually has to rely on the same specific villains being brought up over and over even in cameos, as the show has established early in the season it can have even dead ones cloned back to life.

It is a programme where not a lot is sustained or memorable, and whilst the episodic nature could have been worked around, there is a sense too of the budget being way too small to really push into anything more than its template. It has to rely on a lot of dialogue and including all those poorly put together fight scenes with actors who (with sympathy for them) are clearly not trained even to do choreography. One episode is about virtual reality, which is strange as surely by 2001 the first wave of VR as a craze had died out in the late 1990s and would have waited to the 2010s for the tech to improve. It is mostly just to add production value in a fantasy medieval set or two for the deadly VR game, which allows Roger Corman to recycle his Deathstalker films for footage. Even then, the episode squanders cult actor and bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno as a fantasy grunt than a villain which could have boosted the show for a moment considerably. Set in a scenario where someone wants to use VR to help the homeless, by putting them in a virtual utopia, only for the mayor to use it for the prisoners in jail, Black Scorpion's political satire is still a mangled but fascinating mess even if less pronounced. Even a late running plot, of police chief Henry Strickland wanting to run for mayor, is quickly written off in two of the last episodes when it could have been rewarding to see where that went for the series finale.

A large part of the show, always and still the most compelling running joke, is that Mayor Worth is to blame for most villains due to his corruption. He even hires a band of female rockers, whose music is not as bad as everyone says but is grungy alt-rock with horror punk lyrics, to subliminally cause riots through their music for a mock morality campaign. That is satire the show had right in the palm of its hands and could have toyed with. That the show's humour instead is mostly bad puns, based on the villains' gimmicks, sadly becomes more and more the case in the last half of the season when before there was more playfully fun comedy. Even the villains themselves eventually become interchangeable baring one or two exceptions, like a hockey player that Mayor Worth accidentally has paralysed by his own team mates to rig a game, getting a robot suit from a mad scientist so brazen he enters a hospital room randomly and even has a glossy catalogue of his deadly tech.

Most of the time though the show is relying on buxom actresses in fetished costumes, neither helped by the fact the heroine's willingness to kill them is still there, even despite defending herself from accusations of this at one point. There are too many villains and too many killed off, preventing any from gaining traction through the series. Those that do sustain a bit of time are not really interesting either, baring their sidekicks of the opposite sex and common trademark of novelty themed bombs to throw out the back of the van like explosive ice cream scoops, as was the case in the first half of the series. Adam West, who was a stand-out in the early episodes as the Breathtaker, is reduced to a goon to eventually escape prison and is merely voiced acted, which is a miserable waste. The one figure who gets someone interesting is Stoney Jackson, as the Gangster Prankster, with an odd but memorable second episode where Jackson gets to stand out. That and the premise at least shake things up. That Argyle is forced against his will onto the side of the villains, actor BT one of the most charismatic of the leads, and where the plot eventually leads to. That, when Gangster Prankster is sick of a comedian mocking him on television, it leads to the creation of a device that causes people to expand like balloons and even explode when they laugh. It is bizarre, with a death-trap involving being tickled on the feet and Gangster Prankster wanting to cause mass explosions by dropping feathers on Angel City on a plane, but it is at least idiosyncratic for a series which is repetitive most of the time. If the show had kept to this warped, low budget pulp, it may have gotten more mileage for me.

Instead, I struggled eventually to even get through the series for writing a review, let alone to complete, all in spite of any episode by itself being innocuous. This is a show which, if shorter, would have been tolerable in spite of being very conventional, but as an episodic narrative where the characters will not progress it becomes harder to sit through for each episode's length and the amount of episodes. Michelle Lintel's lead has moments of conflict but really has no wiggle room to drastically evolve her character, whilst Scott Valentine, in-between directing one episode where we get an ice skating Black Scorpion for a memorable moment, plays a character who is pulverised all the time by villains. That also includes Black Scorpion herself, who usually kissing him afterwards, means that in-between their romantic chemistry, his character is also eventually going to be a masochistic if he was not before.

One of the few episodes to really take a challenge, and hence one of the only good ones, drastically upturns the show even in a scenario which eventually retcons this, bringing back normalcy by the end credits in a bizarre sci-fi twist. That Black Scorpion's identity is revealed and leading to everything getting darker - friends are forced to sleep in their cars due to their connections to Darcy, the police are after her, and Valentine's detective changes in his conflict of emotion. That this has to be amended by the lead getting a clone of herself, who is rapidly degenerating the moment she left the cloning tub due to an ever increasing brain, is weird yet gets into something compelling, including the continuous aspect of the lead having to fight against her alter ego, literalising it here.

It is one of the few compelling episode, and still in mind of having the bad puns and being around a villain from the first half of the series who is an evil photographer, the episode having to be forced out of all the series' bad creative decisions to be good. Even the two episode finale, which should be a major climax, feels brittle. Soupy Sales, famous among other aspect for his daily children's television show Lunch with Soupy Sales, plays a useless TV psychic who gets villains, abruptly just new clones than already in jail as they were, to cause crimes for him to predict. The resulting narrative has a lot of padding and does not feel like a jump in drama in the slightest. It becomes twisted in a way which is not dramatically compelling but just morally wrong too from one character, when Argyle has Darcy's dead father cloned to help her through a crisis of faith as a superhero. This would be the end of this version of the character, followed up by two compilation movies from episodes of the show, and frankly any semblance of this show working was clearly visible halfway through as not being there. Roger Corman whilst a man of huge talent is imperfect, and there is really a sense here, ironically, whilst he could make films cheaply and quickly in his golden era, that a television schedule is its own structure which could not be easily deal with. Black Scorpion had moments there were entertaining, but so much for a show I had to sit through for a long time I can gladly live without now.

Black Scorpion (2001) Part 1

 

Creators: Roger Corman and Craig J. Nevius

Screenplay: Steve Gentile, Nick Guthe, Elijah Aron, Heidi Ferrer, Raly Radouloff, Lev L. Spiro, Malcolm Stephens and Mike Vitale

Cast: Michelle Lintel as Black Scorpion, Scott Valentine as  Det. Steve Rafferty, BT as Argyle, Enya Flack as Tender Lovin', Steven Kravitz as  Slugger, Shane Powers as  Specs, Guy Boyd as Capt. Henry Strickland; Shae Marks as  Babette, Robert Pine as  Mayor Artie Worth, Raye Birk as Dr. Phineas Phoenix

Ephemeral Waves

I've grown tentacles in funny places

[As television series, even one season wonders that were cancelled, can have a lot of episodes, it would be better to cover them in parts, starting here with a curious tangent in Roger Corman's history...]

If we were to look at Roger Corman, the legendary producer and filmmaker, he has worked for so long you can forget that, alongside a legacy of people who brought into cinema and key films, that his career has many properties and even arcs to them. His sixties Edgar Allen Poe films for example are very different to his eighties films he produced. The period after the eighties is an obscure era in itself not as talked about, in which after his last directorial production Frankenstein Unbound (1990), he spent the time just as a producer including readapting films of his from the past as television movies like Humanoid from the Deep (1996). This television show is a curious tangent for him, when he mostly stayed to films, a spin-off of two films made beforehand. Black Scorpion (1995), originally with Joan Severance as the lead, is sexy Batman without subtlety in the comparison, a film with a figure in tight black spandex like the Tim Burton and Joel Schumacher films, with the gadget leaden car, only with a very attractive woman as the hero with a nude sex scene at least in the first film. This was followed by Black Scorpion II: Aftershock (1996). Both were screened on the Horror Channel, a British channel devoted to horror movies which however screened other genres occasionally and where I saw these films. The TV series, when learning of it, felt like an obscure thing out of reach, but thankfully a lot has changed in that time.

Michelle Lintel replaces Severance, a female police officer named Darcy Walker who, inspired by her late father, dons the mask of the Black Scorpion as a rouge figure, even hunted by the cops, to stop super villains who terrorise Angel City. Helped by Argyle (BT), a former gang member as her genius tech man, she can take on the villains. One of the immediate issues is that Black Scorpion the series is very repetitious. Each episode a villain of the week, many having two henchmen (or usually henchwomen). Many of them, due to car chases being more easier for the show to produce, usually have a van to drop explosives out the back of at Walker's car when she pursues them, be it exploding clocks to exploding sports balls. Usually the villain is a buxom model or genre actress in an elaborate costume. The villainess Aerobicide for example, a feminist exercise guru with testosterone stealing beer and robot limbs, is Renee Allman, defying how lack of testosterone works in men in the episode but having a small filmography including Cyborg 2: Glass Shadow (1993) in her career. Her henchwomen are Ava Fabian, former Playboy's Playmate of the Month and actress, and Faith Salie, contributor to CBS Sunday Morning and journalist among other career roles, just to give you an example of the eclectic nature of these cases. There are exceptions, one a villainous male gardener with a giant green thumb, who even gets a tragic romance with the major's secretary and leading to a tangent, from Corman, where you get practical effect made monster plants which make weird noises for an episode.

On the police side, you have regular characters to prop up Walker's story. Scott Valentine plays Det. Steve Rafferty, the police officer who is trying to catch Black Scorpion. He has a complicated chemistry with Walker, including with Black Scorpion as a separate person, which comes to play when one villain uses hallucinatory gas and she is literally fighting herself. There is also a slovenly yet lovable police chief Capt. Henry Strickland (Guy Boyd), and two goofballs Slugger (Steven Kravitz) and Specs (Shane Powers), who I will admit will annoy some in the earliest episodes but do eventually stick with you. There is Enya Flack as "Tender Lovin", Argyle's girlfriend, who he has a loving if argumentative relationship with. When you have a work with a limited budget, you have to rely on the cast you have. This is something that I have especially seen in cancelled television shows I have watched where, especially with the episodic productions, it is always a virtue to have people with charisma to keep the show afloat. To the production's credit, Scott Valentine and Michelle Lintel do have a great chemistry with each other, though it is sad to know that Lintel's filmography is very tiny, with this show (and its own follow up film) one of the only prominent things within it.

Telling the narratives of each episode is pointless, as this is a wash and rinse show in the repetition of the same narrative, something which can work but is unfortunately worse here as the episodes are forty minutes long without advertising breaks, which feels too long in how they are usually structure. A reoccurring aspect, for most of the villains, is that most of them only exist because the mayor, Artie Worth (Robert Pine), is so corrupt it is comical and actually a funny piece of satire in itself. Cheating on his unseen wife with his buxom secretary Babette (Shae Marks), he can be involved with funding for toxic waste to be dumped into the sea, defunding the fire service and even paying a pyromaniac to burn things off the side, making it not a surprise many either try to kill him, kidnap him to the underground homeless person territory or break into his office almost every episode. Even his secretary has a plot for one episode, with the gardening villain who decides to create monstrous (practical effect created) muttering plants to exploit her attraction to power away from Artie. His character, to the credit of the show being deliberately broad, was a highlight in the first half of the series.

There are attempts at satire, where Angel City is built on many incompetent figures, but the show's various attempts at politics beyond their mayor do blunder along sadly the more it tries to be serious. It can be funny, such as the Black Scorpion mobile having some of its gadgets removed like the oil slick for being environmentally harmful, but many do radiate ill advised or confused tones. When tackling the homelessness issue, with cops taking them off street, they join the villainess in the episode even when Black Scorpion tries to convince them this is the wrong way to go. Any time this program deals with feminism, the show becomes awkward. That Walker has a tendency to kill her villains flippantly is common, especially with the knowledge that, with all the reused car chase footage of police cars crashing spectacularly, chasing Black Scorpion, there are likely a few officers who have at least retired from duty afterwards. The one running plotline throughout all the series is Dr. Phoenix (Raye Birk), a figure who can resurrect the dead villains to try to reform them, despite it clearly a misguided folly, even clone a character named Gangster Prankster from cremated ashes, a Joker stand-in he tries to turn into an upstanding citizen with a microchip implanted in his brain to induce electric shocks.

It is that episode, Episode 10, where the worse decisions involving the show trying to be serious are found. It starts off well, with a cop carnival to improve public relations with the police, so bad they have to dress up as clowns, but even the leads arrest Gangster Prankster based on presumption of him being a former criminal. This is not helped by the character is being played by an African American actor who, when he becomes a villain again, even says jokingly "Let my people go" whilst breaking out his henchmen. It is an episode difficult to love in the modern era in the worst vibes it portrays, which is worse as Stoney Jackson, an actor you may recognise from Walter Hill films or even being a prominent dancer in the Michael Jackson Beat It music video, is actually one of the best guest stars in the show, getting a Joker rip-off but making it his. He was already in the second Black Scorpion film before, and in terms of getting the most out of a character, including when he is a good guy and working for the police, in a comical cop outfit subduing armed suspects with pies, he is great.

For the first twelve episodes, this show has a cheese to it, knowing its own absurdity when one episode has an exercise bicycle that will electrocute the rider if they get under 25 miles per hour. Snippets of its co-producer, barring a Chopping Mall (1986) poster in alleyway fight, can be found if having to be toned down for television. The sensuality obviously had to be toned down, with a lot of cleavage if anything else the most titillating it can be. The fight scenes, regardless of what could be shown on television, are bad which makes the extended amount of them more of a chore as a result. When Black Scorpion relies on its comedy, you still have to put up with too many awful puns, but it helps bolster the show up considerably, even if this feels out-of-place at a time when superhero films where soon to be the juggernaut into the next two decade's worth of cinema. Lintel is okay, but it says a great deal that she stands out more when she gets to play Walker out-of-character when not showing a clear chemistry with Scott Valentine's character. Be it in hair curlers, dress and surly in a nightmare sequence as an annoyed trailer park wife for Valentine; as a ditzy gold digger undercover; or fighting herself as an evil Black Scorpion. Likewise characters like Argyle, with his argument heavy but loving relationship with Tender Lovin, or the police chief who is always close to retirement, are broad stereotypes but that is a pleasure to have. It argues that with a lot of television, the more I look at, they are the home for actors to really have to stretch themselves to keep their shows afloat if those programs were doomed from the start.

For this series especially, the surprise guests really add a bit to the production depending on the casting¹. In lieu to the comparison to Batman, cast from the 1960s Batman do make an appearance in the first twelve episodes, with Frank Gorshin playing the Clockwise, wishing to steal people's time by aging them artificially. He is great here, which was not a surprise as, among the other pleasures in the 1966 Batman film spun off that show, his performance as the Riddler was one of the best things in said movie. Adam West, as the Breathtaker, a former doctor whose accident losing both lungs led to a mental breakdown and psychopathic tendencies, is in two episodes so far, and if there was ever one good thing to take from this usually average series, it is the hope that Adam West got to play more villains in his career or should have. His humour is still there, stuck behind an oxygen tent/jail cell as he informs a newly created villainess that she should always warm the public on the news of her plans to destroy the city as a standard custom, but there is quite a bit of this where he is legitimately creepy or menacing, something which is unexpectedly exceptional to witness.

There are some bizarre cameos too, and the two that particularly stand-out are worthy to end this part on, just to give an idea of what the time period was like for them to happen. Alongside the fact that Michael J. Anderson, a regular David Lynch collaborator, shares the screen with Frank Gorshin, throwing exploding alarm clocks at the pursuing Black Scorpion car behind, you also have Laura Harring play an assistant to Dr. Phoenix in the episode where Adam West first appears. This same year, the original footage an unused television pilot from 1999, Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001) would be released to acclaim with her in a main role, making Harring's tiny role in a sexy nurse's costume bizarre. More so as this means that there is a scene of her helping a newly resurrected Adam West regain his ability to develop words by exposing her cleavage to him. That she played Babette in Black Scorpion II: Aftershock adds to the curiosity of this. Even more strange? That Dave Mustaine of the thrash metal band Megadeth, and its founder, inexplicably appears in Episode 5 as a pyromaniac called Torchy Thompson. This is emphasised as an instrumental bridge of Hanger 18, one of their most recognisable songs, appears in a fight scene between him and Black Scorpion. Not even the main villain for that episode, as that belongs to a fireman who Walker falls for, it is one of the least likely things to happen. If anything, a series like this will intrigue for these unexpected pop culture tangents to be crossed.

 

[To Be Continued]

 

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1) Again, as earlier in the review, even an ultra obscure figure is fascinating especially if they were someone who stars in so much work their appearance was not a surprise. One personal highlight for one scene is Irwin Keyes, who I first learnt of as the monster in Frankenstein General Hospital (1988), an ultra obscure Frankenstein parody. He is easily recognisable even if he never has more than a cameo most of the time, and through his career he worked a lot so many have encountered him onscreen. Here he plays a man who is sick of the world and wishes to blow people up with a vest of cartoon dynamite, only for learning to juggle to bring meaning to his life even if he still has to be arrested.

Halloween 31 For 31: The Terror (1963)

From https://alfredeaker.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/
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Director: Roger Corman (with Francis Ford Coppola, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill and Jack Nicholson)

Screenplay: Leo Gordon and Jack Hill

Cast: Boris Karloff (as the Baron von Leppe); Jack Nicholson (as Andre Duvalier); Dick Miller (as Stefan); Sandra Knight (as Helene); Dorothy Neumann (as Katrina); Jonathan Haze (as Gustaf)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #51

Not all Roger Corman films are created equal, and in the period of his legendary Edgar Allen Poe films The Terror was spawned from still having Boris Karloff after The Raven (1963) and deciding to take advantage of resources he already had from the Poe films he'd already made. Surprisingly, despite the ridiculous and illustrious list of people meant to have directed parts of the film unofficially with him, it's a surprisingly coherent and curiously woozy supernatural chiller, but the real issue is how undercooked in parts it is against the moments which do succeed completely. Jack Nicholson is a very unconventional choice for a French soldier, Andre Duvalier, who has lost his way from his regiment and into countryside where the alluring and mysterious woman Helene (Sandra Knight) is. Her existence, denied as merely his hallucinations, leads to the castle of Baron von Leppe (Karloff), an elderly lord who claims the woman is his long dead wife, causing Andre to try to get to the bottom of who is right.

Even if it suffers from being in the public domain, and lacklustre versions of the print, The Terror even if it looks like you're viewing it through a dirty sock at least has the same decadent, Technicolor style of the Poe films. Corman's films of this time aren't historically realistic in the slightest but, even on a small budget, are some of the only true examples of the baroque in American cinema, bright colours against dark shadows an irresistible combination in these films of his. As a result, everything from the dark woodland that Helene leads Andre to near danger to the sunny beach coast von Leppe's castle looks over, an opulent castle in itself which naturally has a dank underground family crypt which can be flooded, The Terror certainly has the look and style that made the Poe films so rewarding.

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So much so you forget even as tamer films from their era how nasty and macabre Corman's gothic horror stories actually are. In terms of violent content, The Terror has a far more violent scene than many of the films from this period of his in a character having their eyes gouged out by an eagle and then falling off a cliff. Aside from this the plot is as appropriately morbid for a gothic story as you could get as it deals with murder, adultery, a woman getting revenge through witchcraft and bodily possession. If anything, especially with Karloff as strong a charismatic individual as always to safely support his scenes on, The Terror would've worked without being a Poe adaptation with its unconventional original story.

The issue is that Karloff is only in a few scenes and the film drags without a clear magnetic prescience to support it during the plodding periods of dialogue. Even when he wasn't the lead, Vincent Price still was the glue that makes a great deal of the Poe films successful alongside their other virtues. The Terror suffers from a lack of Karloff and how Jack Nicholson is very young and green behind the ears here, perfect to play the bumbling son of Peter Lorre in The Raven but still stepping forwards awkwardly as a lead here, before he became a more charismatic actor, dealing with less than perfect dialogue without enough relish to it. Barring Karloff, the film is deflated in terms of charisma, needed to prick its spirit up but only standing out in its more colourful and macabre moments. Likely the reason The Terror is lesser known is that it's quite a flat, sluggish story in spite of its short feature length and moments of sparkle. As much as Corman is an incredibly talented director and shrewd producer, his tendency to recycle and take advantage of resources didn't necessary always work, and there's moments to The Terror that are fun but does suffer from this.

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The Raven (1963) [Mini Review]

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Director: Roger Corman

Screenplay: Richard Matheson

Cast: Vincent Price (as Dr. Erasmus Craven); Peter Lorre (as Dr. Adolphus Bedlo); Boris Karloff (as Dr. Scarabus); Hazel Court (as Lenore Craven); Olive Sturgess (as Estelle Craven); Jack Nicholson (as Rexford Bedlo)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #20

The Raven is one of the few Corman adaptations of Edgar Ellen Poe that's deliberately humorous. One of the best things about these adaptations is that, while fun, they took themselves seriously. The Raven is different in terms of having its tongue in its cheek but because it's still depicted with sincerity, the result is entirely riveting. The original poem of The Raven is merely an opening catalist to start a completely unique story, more drastic than the other Poe adaptations I've seen from this series in changing the original narrative, where isolated but humble magician Dr. Erasmus Craven (Price) lets a raven into his study only to find soon after that it can talk. The raven, once helped by magic, is revealed to be fellow magician and alcohol enthusiast Dr. Adolphus Bedlo (Lorre), turned into a bird after a duel with the sinister leader of the main magician's guild Dr. Scarabus (Karloff), whose maleficent reputation is matched by the possibility he has captured the soul of Craven's late wife Lenore (Court) and made her his possession, leading Craven and his daughter Estelle (Sturgess), alongside Bedlo and his son Rexford (Nicholson) to head to Scarabus' castle.

There's a great sense with The Raven that everyone is having fun while contributing said energy to great performances. Playing a hero for once in these Poe films for Corman, Price is so affable and a gentleman it's not surprising this his real off-screen personality effectively comes through, Craven the warm milk drinking man hesitant to get involved with Scarabus but pressed on to do so through Price giving him nobility rather than plot contrivance. Some might find Lorre's bumbling, drunken Bedlo an embarrassment for the actor, near the end of his life, but for me personally (in drastic contrast to the opinion of Harun Farocki's documentary The Double Face of Peter Lorre (1984)) this doesn't come off as an insult to Lorre but a talented actor gladly throwing himself into a lovable buffoon with decent material. Other actors had worse ends to their careers, such as Karloff sadly, who here thankfully gets to play menacing but by a grace without need for going over-the-top, the elegance of his performance even for slapstick a reminder the most beloved actors in horror cinema then and now had theatre experience or had worked in areas which had them flex their acting talents, not to mention a natural nobility to many of them away from the camera. Add to this Court vamping it up, and chewing more scenery than Price, Karlof and Lorre combined, and a very young Jack Nicholson in a role that surprises knowing where he'd be a decade on, at one point showing the stereotypical mannerisms when possessed while driving a horse driven coach but effectively playing the slightly bumbling son figure to Lorre.

Also significant is how Corman emphasised a clear quality to these films technically. Having Richard Matheson, legendary author and the man who penned the Poe films that came before this one helps, as does the rich production design onscreen. Still low budget, Corman's decision to use the money used to make two smaller films to make one Technicolor work with distinct sets helped immensely, the gothic look of the film elegant even in a film like this that's exceptionally goofy at points, the colour especially restored for Blu-Ray as well immensely appealing for this type of story. While it has significantly less of the psychedelic colours and none of the dream sequences of other Poe films, the distinct style is pitched at a quality above a lot of substandard colour horror films at this point in the sixties which couldn't use any of this then-new aesthetic properly. Even the antiquated magic effects have a handmade charm especially in the final magician's duel which comes off as a series of Looney Tunes punch lines one-after-another. It's with the serious tone here that, even if it has the likes of Price and Lorre involved in comedic pratfalls, it never becomes obnoxious irony and retains a respectability that makes the humour and chills work.

From https://horrorpediadotcom.files.wordpress.com
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Halloween 31 For 31: The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

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Dir. Roger Corman

Time for some Edgar Allen Poe. Having only seen two of his Poe adaptations, I can yet say the decision by legendary producer/director Roger Corman to make these films - appealing to a potential cinema audience for their lurid, baroque quality, but with intent for high art and production - was the best for him, able to succeed in both areas. The original short story of The Masque of the Red Death was only a few pages long, a mood piece, so a lot of additional material and a larger plot had to be added for a cinematic adaptation, turning it into a completely different type of story in fact, able to keep the main tone but be its own creation. The original set up is that Prince Prospero, played by Vincent Price here, has locked himself in his castle with lords and ladies, for countless days of dining, decadence and dancing, away from the Red Death, a plague that is killing off the population outside the walls. Here though, Prospero is also a Satanist and a cruel lord who doesn't care if his subjects in the village all die out, blaspheming against Christ and revealing in brutality for entertainment. Devil worshippers may be outraged, but no one would complain when it means Price is cast in the role, deliciously evil and throwing a punt kick verbally at the Christian God occasionally that does sting. Holding village girl Francesca (Jane Asher) captive, with her father Ludovico (Nigel Green) and fiancée Gino (David Weston) in the dungeon, he plans to have his way with them, not knowing that the dreaded spectre of the Red Death is just outside his castle walls, personified by a mysterious figure in a blood red gown covering his face.

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The resulting film is a gleefully macabre yarn, a ridiculous film in tone, but never kitsch because it's made with a real artistry. It's a serious film in its plot yet is entertaining as expected with Corman in a very accessible way, comparable to many of Vincent Price's films that have a tongue in their cheek without laughing at the content within them, a playfulness alongside the gristly material. Price is compelling, as to be expected, twirling his moustache as an utterly evil yet charismatic character, as is the individuals on mass that are revealing in the blissful decadence, including Patrick Magee as Alfredo, a Lord who is to be humiliated by the dwarf Hop-Toad (Skip Martin) in Prospero's staff in revenge for the humiliation of someone close to him. If there is a problem with this film on the surface, the actual heroes of the film, played by Jane Asher, Nigel Green and David Weston, are not charismatic at all, the paradox being that we're supposed to see characters like Prospero or his wife Juliana (Hazel Court), who is going through a ritual to become a bride of Satan, as the villains but they're too compelling as onscreen beings and in the people playing them. Instead, the reason the film is entertaining is that it delights in extremely dark content that is surprisingly nasty still, including an unfortunate event of an accidental fire, without become misanthropic and losing the literary tone. In place of Poe's masterful construction of mood, you get an excited ghoulishness to the proceedings, the film as much rolling in its own gristle as it is still a film with an important tone.

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The production design and look in the other Corman-Poe adaptation I've seen, The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), was special but here the original story was a godsend for the aesthetic design. A key theme of the story is colour, Prospero having seven special rooms, four or so here in the film, all based around a single colour each - same coloured decor and lighting the same colour - except for the last, a black room which yet has a blood red light coming through the crucifix shaped window. The colour obsession is taken further in the other rooms in the castle and how everyone is dressed, before and during the masquerade. A film like this is what colour was made for in cinema, an already good film made even better by the striking use of colour. The sense of scale and tone for the entire narrative, the care taken in creating the setting and the details within it, is the masterstroke for the film's qualities, the care taken showing in the film and adding to its virtues. The entire film takes the Gothicism of the original story and adds to it the many rich aspects of horror cinema, anything from a reference to Poe's story The Raven twisted further along into a ghastly end for one character to a dank dungeon. There's even a psychedelic sixties trip sequence that just happens to surround Satan and a sadomasochistic ritual. The film takes on an occult vibe by its end that is drastically different from the tone of the original story, from the final masquerade as depicted almost as a dance of death to the reveal of what the red gowned figure, who is always with Tarot cards, is part of, adding atone for the final that is beyond the stereotypical good and evil plot set up originally but something much more darker and contrasts from the playful tone of before.

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Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None

Out of the films of this series that haven't gotten onto this list, this one does become more and more befitting the concept of "abstract" as it goes whilst still sticking to a strict narrative, becoming more and more about the metaphysical with extra emphasis on the supernatural forces in actual control, where the real force behind most of the narrative is also the being that brought the Red Death to life in the first place. Despite not adding an odd air to the film, the fact that the heroic male character is merely a background character as the story finishes, and the story goes away from the good Christians versus evil Satanists drastically by the final scenes, does come off as an unexpected shock and gave me something to smile about as the film went against my expectations.

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A Cinema of the Abstract film? 

The other interesting thing about this sort of film is that, between these films and those of the later Sixties, you'd see a transition to the more explicit and adult horror films by the Seventies, this nonetheless still a macabre movie despite its age, and moments in terms of the violence and the sexual content give an early sign of what was to come in the genre internationally. The emphasis on style as well here is something that would continue on in the likes of European cinema. The film itself was worthy covering and Corman's career is interesting by itself to be worth discussing.