Orlok

At the end of Peter Bogdanovich's 1968 film Targets, a mass murderer named Bobby Thompson, played by Tim O'Kelly, stations himself behind the screen of a drive-in theater where he fires randomly, but with precision, into the audience. Last night, or very early this morning, a man named James Holmes entered a Aurora, CO movie theater through one of the exit doors near the screen and did much the same thing. In Aurora, in reality, twelve people were killed and dozens more were wounded.

In Targets, Bobby Thompson's story is paralleled by that of aging horror film icon Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff) who is touring to promote his latest Gothic picture. He's morose, though, due to his advanced years and, more to the point, his belief that the kind of old fashioned, cobwebby movies he makes are irrelevant and cannot compete, in terms of generating fear, with the real horrors splashing themselves across the front page. This is a very late '60s idea, one of the ones that got its hooks in and has hung tight up to today. In any case, Orlok will eventually confront this belief very directly, as it is his film showing at the drive-in Bobby Thompson has chosen for his shooting gallery, and this drive-in is Orlok's last stop on his tour.

All day today people have talked and written about what happened in Aurora, taking their irrelevancies very seriously, and with some kind of belief that perhaps if we news-watchers could just take the time to hash this out we could stop it from ever happening again. It is nearly impossible to engage in this sort of thing without being insufferably trite, as I imagine I'm in the process of confirming as I write this. But everything will be hauled out before it's all done -- all done for us, I mean. For the twelve it's already done. Of course the thinking often is that for those gone there's nothing to be done, and when looking at the big picture and in practical terms, it's who's left that matters right now. This is debatable. Everything is debatable, I've learned, including the movie playing in the theater Holmes stormed into. The Dark Knight Rises, it was. Who can resist that kind of synergy?

In Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret, the impact of a fatal bus accident washes out over a number of characters, and while Lonergan's writing and the actors' performances makes each of them painfully specific, Lonergan's directing encompasses everything. His directing sprawls, so that sometimes the principal figures become lost, or just the next person in line after that one, who this film only happens to not be about. In a very real sense Margaret is about immensity and incomprehensibility, the bigness and wildness that we can't even see. "This is not an opera!" rages one of the film's more easily sympathetic characters, played by Jeannie Berlin, to another, rather less sympathetic one played by Anna Paquin, who is almost unconsciously trying to transform the central tragedy and her genuine feelings of guilt into something that is about her, rather than the woman who was killed. She says it again: "This is not an opera." It feels like it sometimes though, doesn't it? Conversations about What Is To Be Done Now sure can seem to. But it's not. It's just movies. It's all just movies.

Byron Orlok watches bodies falling around him at the end of Targets and does what we who are blessed enough to have never known, and God help us will never know, what it's like to find an exciting night out to the movies shatter into bloody chaos, might flatter ourselves into believing we would do: he approaches the source of the violence and means to stop it. It's all just movies, but with Targets, if Bogdanovich and uncredited screenwriter Sam Fuller understand one thing it's that yes, it really is all just movies. It would be disingenuous to claim that this excludes Bobby Thompson, but to the degree it's possible, Thompson is a separate entity within and apart from the film. Once the unavoidable is acknowledged -- Bobby Thompson is fiction -- it is allowable and possible to see him as a chillingly reasonable facsimile of Charles Whitman, his inspiration, or James Holmes. Byron Orlok is the opera.

The opera is the shape of things. Or the attempt to shape things. Margaret finally takes that same form, while Orlok was born to it. When confronted with the real horrors that had been grinding him down, Orlok is furious, using the cane with which he can barely keep himself up to beat down the killer, and then stunned.

"Is that what I was afraid of?" he says.

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Many thanks to Glenn Kenny for the screengrabs from Targets.

The Collection Project: The Sanest Man in the World

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A telling feature of the Universal DVD set The Bela Lugosi Collection is that of the five films included, four of them also feature Boris Karloff in roles that are as important as, or more important than, Lugosi’s. This is not something you’re likely to find in sets devoted to Karloff – those may feature films in which Karloff takes a supporting role, as in The Strange Door for example, but you won’t find him repeatedly paired with a single actor who has, over the decades, become more respected and beloved than him. Karloff doesn’t get overshadowed, in other words. Lugosi, on the other hand, seems always on the cusp of becoming a camp figure, at least popularly, due to his waning years spent making movies with Ed Wood. For that matter, Lugosi was never as lucky or as good as Karloff – his signature film, Dracula, is nowhere near as good as Karloff’s equivalent Frankenstein – and as a result Lugosi is fading into the background of his own box sets.

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Still, it would be wrong to try to write off Lugosi, or to ignore the fact he and Karloff made a hell of a double act. One of their strongest pairings is in Universal’s The Raven, directed by Louis Friedlander in which Lugosi plays a total fucker named Dr. Richard Vollin, a retired surgeon who, at the film’s opening, is asked by his former colleagues to perform emergency surgery on Jean Thatcher (Irene Ware), who has just been in a bad car accident. Vollin refuses to help until Judge Thatcher (Samuel S. Hinds), Jean’s father, goes to Vollin’s home and begs him in person, and even that’s not enough until Tatcher tells Vollin that he, Vollin, is clearly better than any other surgeon, his colleagues included. So Vollin performs the surgery, saves Jean, and promptly falls in love with her because, for all his coldness he is, as he tells Jean, “a god with the taint of human emotions”, although if you ever met the guy you might be forgiven for failing to notice that last bit. Vollin is, in truth, a hateful, venomous, violent sociopath, who is also an avid collector and, it turns out, consistent misreader of Edgar Allan Poe.

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Obviously, that title – The Raven, I mean – should tip anyone off to some sort of Poe connection in the film, and it is part of a short cycle of Poe films that Lugosi made. But The Raven is fascinating in that instead of taking Poe’s simple poem of Gothic mourning and inflating it absurdly to somehow encompass mad science and shambling monsters, which is the kind of thing that Poe must be used to by now, it instead uses Poe’s fiction, and the abuse of it, as the basis for Villon’s madness. Admittedly, this abuse takes the form of a torture room in which Vollin has recreated a number of lethal devices described in Poe's fiction, an idea which has been hammered into the ground over the past several decades, but here Vollin goes out of his way to assume an affinity with Poe that betrays a complete misunderstanding of what Poe was about. Vollin gets off on Poe's violence in a way Poe himself never did.
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Vollin's love for Jean develops quickly, but really gets moving when she invites him to see her perform. She's a dancer, and her current routine is one she calls "The Spirit of Poe", and involves balletic flailing on her part while some guy reads "The Raven" out loud. It is, quite frankly, a pretty doofy bit, but it cements Jean's place in Vollin's black and shriveled heart. Curiously, this routine at times also calls to mind the climactic ballet in Darren Aranofsky's Black Swan, though with the psychosis coming from outside so that Jean becomes the raven in Vollin's mind, as opposed to Nina becoming the black swan in her own.

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This flip matches to another flip, this time relating to Val Lewton and Robert Wise's The Body Snatcher. In that film, Henry Daniell's ice-blooded doctor sloughs away his guilt over the illegal procuring of bodies for his experiments, and the nefarious ways in which those corpses become corpses, onto Boris Karloff's Mr. Gray, who actually carries out the murders. Gray knows what's up, and knows how the Daniell character rationalizes his transgressions, and further has a lot of fun poking at the doctor's consience. Meanwhile, in The Raven, Karloff again plays a killer, an escaped con named Bateman who seeks out Vollin in hopes that Vollin can "change his face", not only to make him unrecognizable to the authorities, but because Bateman hopes Vollin can erase his ugliness, which he believes to be the source of his wickedness. In The Body Snatcher, Lugosi appears briefly as a drunk who sniffs out the deal between the doctor and Gray, and has to be done away with -- it's a very good scene, with Karloff plying Lugosi with booze (I especially like Lugosi's fuzzy attempt to bat away Karloff's hands as he gets closer). In The Raven, when Vollin's surgery makes Batemen uglier so that he can blackmail him into assisting him with a wild scheme to torture and murder both Jean and Judge Thatcher, Karloff becomes not only Bateman, but Daniell's doctor, in his attempt to hide from his own guilt, and Lugosi's drunk from The Body Snatcher in his inarticulate helplessness. Lugosi's Vollin, then, assumes the form of Gray the puppetmaster, keeping his face hidden and hands clean until the point of no return. He's perhaps somewhat less self-aware than Gray, however, considering that he claims all this torture and murder will ultimately result in his becoming "the sanest man in the world." Which, by the way, must have some claim to being one of the greatest lines of all time.
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The fact that The Raven predates every movie I've just compared it to is worth noting, as is the fact that it belongs to that glorious cluster of horror films from the 1930s that not only had the courage of their convictions when it came to dealing with their feverish Gothic trappings, but positively wallowed in them. Director Friedlander packs this thing with wall-filling shadows and mad cackling and drooping candelabra -- it's Gothic simply because its Gothic, not because it sees some snarky camp value in the form. If I may, I'd like to wear my old-fogey hat for a moment and wonder why pure Gothicism has been lost while most other forms of horror and suspense have found their unsullied way back to the big screen. This is the case in America, at least (Spain seems to found a rich vein of the stuff in recent years), with only Neil Jordan's somewhat underrated Interview With a Vampire embracing such imagery more-or-less sincerely.

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Anyway. The Raven is a treat. Occasionally absurd (Jean's car accident, which sets everything in motion, seems to have been caused by her desperate fear of detour signs) but easy on comic relief, something I can usually do without in such films, it's a jolt of pure, manic, old Hollywood-style horror, wearing its armchair psychology on its sleeve while somehow, at the same time, making it serve the characters and the emotion. And the moral of it might just be: Don't project yourself onto what you read. Sometimes I have no clue why I would ever want to watch any other kind of film.

Bride at the Alamo

My last evening in lovely Austin, TX was spent at one of several Alamo Drafthouse locations (this one known as the Alamo Ritz), watching James Whale's 1935 Bride of Frankenstein on the big screen, eating some pretty good food, and every so often getting annoyed by the audience laughter around me.
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Before going any further, I have to say that this was, for me, a pretty great experience. I don't often get the chance to see revival screenings of any old movies, let alone Golden Age films, let even more alone Golden Age horror films. On top of that is the fact that this was a little bit more than just a screening, but rather the second edition of a new series at the Alamo Ritz called Cinema Club. Cinema Club is hosted -- or at least was hosted on Sunday -- by a couple of guys named Lars Nilsen and Daniel Metz, who introduce the film, and then are joined by a scholar and expert on that evening's selection. In this case, that expert was Dr. Thomas Schatz, of the University of Texas and author of The Genius of the System, among other books. After the film, the three of them got on stage to discuss the movie, and field questions and comments from the audience. All of this was great fun for me, and I would go back for Cinema Club every month if I could (next month they'll be showing Barbara Stanwyck in Night Nurse, with special guest Kim Morgan). So no complaints.
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Bride of Frankenstein is, as you all know, essentially a horror-comedy, which is a subgenre of horror that is far more problematic than the seemingly endless contributions to the category would lead one to believe. The tone the filmmakers have to strike, and the line that needs to be walked, is very delicate, and most people can't hack it, largely because they don't know tone is an issue, or can't see the line. James Whale, screenwriter William Hurlbut, and the other collaborators on Bride do manage to make their crazy mix of mortality, philosophy, satire, Vaudeville, and bleak examination of loneliness work (even though I, like Boris Karloff, do ultimately think the film is too comedic) because, as Thomas Schatz said after the Alamo screening, it's hard to know what to do with film. It's so loony, but so well put together, with three great performances -- from Karloff, Colin Clive, and the indispensible Ernest Thesiger -- that I'm sort of left shaking my head afterwards, thinking "Okay, then. It worked, but I'll be damned if I can say why." I'd rather watch Whale's original Frankenstein than Bride, but I wouldn't give up Bride for anything.
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During the audience participation section of the event, one guy said that what really mattered to him about Bride of Frankenstein was the deep sadness of it, and of the monster's rejection by his bride (Arbogast has written extremely well about this element of the film, specifically the Bride's reaction to her mate, and I commend this post to your attention). Dr. Schatz beamed at the guy who made the comment, and I would have too, were I the type of person who beams, because that's what matters to me, too. The last twenty minutes or so of the film is what really provides any significant impact for me, at least emotionally, and I feel it's often overwhelmed by the tongue-in-cheek lunacy of the rest. I mean, even Schatz didn't bring it up, and his love of the film was quite clear.
. But coming to Bride of Frankenstein seventy-five years late is going to jack with some people's perceptions of it, and that's not the fault of the film itself. At the Alamo screening, when O. P. Heggie's blind hermit first appears on screen, there was quite a bit of laughter. It was of the semi-quiet, polite variety, for the most part, but its connection with what was actually on screen was telling. Outside of the bit with the cigars, this, the most famous scene in the whole film, outside of the Bride's reveal, is not played for laughs -- it's really pretty heartbreaking in how quickly it provides both the hopeless, desperate, dumb monster, and the blind, lonely hermit, with a glimpse of happiness and companionship before whisking it away with sudden violence and rage. It, in fact, sets up the monster's self-destructive rage at the end, when his best hope, another creature like him, looks into his face and shrieks in horror. And yet people were laughing as soon as Heggie showed up. And I knew why, and I'm sure you do, too: Young Frankenstein.
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Broadly speaking, audiences -- including the kind of "hip" crowd in the Alamo audience -- have a hard time taking horror seriously, unless it's of a particularly visceral and overtly disturbing nature. When you add on the often broad comedy of Bride of Frankenstein, and its various and abrupt tonal shifts, it's hard to ground yourself while watching. There were one or two condescending comments from Schatz and Nilsen about what in the world could audiences in 1935 have possibly made of this movie -- because even though a sophisticated guy like Whale lived in 1935 and made the film in 1935, it's hard to believe that the rubes in the audience could have possibly appreciated it on as many levels as we do today -- but I have to ask what could those laughing at Heggie's appearance during the Alamo screening have possibly made of it? To put it simply, Bride of Frankenstein was getting bad laughs, and it didn't deserve them, and in the case of Heggie's scene, it was all because Mel Brooks expertly spoofed the movie twenty-six years ago, and some members of the audience on Sunday night couldn't look past that. When Karloff is angrily waving away Heggie's burning stick, they were seeing Peter Boyle's burning thumb.
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In the Q&A, another audience member actually put this pretty clearly, asking Schatz how he thought Young Frankenstein colored our perception of Bride of Frankenstein today. I could have kissed that guy, because I think he was a irritated by that laughter as I was, but Schatz, unfortunately, didn't quite hear his question, or lost the thread of his answer, because the only point he made that was germane to the question was that it's impossible nowadays to come to the film innocently. True enough, but also too vague, and too willing to accept bad laughs borne of lazy, above-it-all attitude to old genre movies as a given. Yes, the film's madcap tonal changes play a part, but being unable, or unwilling, to shed the spoofs and copies you grew up with trumps all.
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Bride of Frankenstein is actually a tough movie, deceptively so -- you can't just let it roll meaninglessly over you and hope to get inside it, even though those new to it would probably very quickly assume otherwise. For all my problems with it, this fact is obviously entirely to its credit, and it's why the film was picked for the Alamo Ritz's Cinema Club, and it's why Schatz, and his hosts, love it so much. But the further away we get from this film, and others of its era, the harder it becomes to present it as something other than a novelty, or a time capsule, something to be bemused by, because those people in 1935 sure had a crazy idea of what constitutes a great movie.
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I don't mean this as a blanket condemnation of the Alamo crowd with whom I saw the film. Far from it, though I realize it probably sounds as though I'm doing exactly that. It's just that those bad laughs really pissed me off. It indicates that some people went to the movie with a certain distance already set up between themselves and the screen, and they didn't want that distance shortened. They probably don't know it can be.

Hangmen

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This post is part of the Boris Karloff blogathon being hosted by Pierre Fournier at Frankensteinia. Spoilers for The Man They Could Not Hang and Before I Hang follow.

Boris Karloff spent a lot of time trying to defeat death. Often in his films, leaps in medical technology offered the possibility of erasing death as a biological necessity, or at least a reversal of the aging process to such a degree that a person's lifespan could be doubled. Karloff's involvement in these breakthroughs could range from the driving intelligence to the assistant to the driving intelligence to the guinea pig. Whatever his place, Karloff always, finally, realized that death cannot be beaten, and to even try is an immoral act.
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Karloff's career in anti-morbidity began, of course, in James Whale's 1931 Frankenstein, where he played the stitched-together prototype of immortality to Colin Clive's basically decent, yet deluded, title scientific pioneer. One of Karloff's own first forays into the kind of role Clive portrayed in the earlier film was in Nick Grindé's 1939 The Man They Could Not Hang, in which Karloff plays Dr. Henryk Savaard. Cutting through the script's pseudo-science, Savaard's idea is basically that the heart of a deceased individual, with the kind of medical assistance that includes lots of electricity and beakers, and provided the initial cause of death did not damage the heart, can be restarted, and the deceased can actually be brought back to life. He's attempting to prove this as the film begins, with one of his medical students cheerfully acting as a guinea pig, but he is thwarted by a police raid which has been instigated by the guinea pig's fianceé (and Savaard's nurse), who chose the exact wrong time to turn her private misgivings into action. When the police stop Savaard, he has just killed his assistant, with the intent of bringing him back to life. But the police do not allow him to do this, so the dead stays dead, and Savaard is tried and convicted of murder, sentenced to hang, and hanged. Only, of course, to be brought back to life by one of his partners in science.
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Before he's hanged, and before he goes all Dr. Phibes on everybody, Dr. Savaard is given the opportunity to speak in court. Here, Karloff is allowed to rage with moral indignation and frustration at everyone who has allowed the boy to die and condemned him, Savaard, for trying to save humanity from mortality. He tells the judge, the prosecutor, the foolish woman who called the police and ensured the death of her fiancé, that when their time comes, in the moments before they each breathe their last, they will remember him, and what he could have done for them. It is with Savaard's conviction, and with his outraged and bitter words directed at all those who he believes, correctly, to be far stupider than he, that all the love for the human race that might have originally spurred him to pursue his theories, drains away from him forever. When he returns from the dead, he is physically as fit as he was the moment before his appointment with the gallows; however, mentally, even philosophically, he is a changed man. His entire existence at this point is given over to exacting vengeance on everyone he blames for his death.
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The thing is, though, now he has proof! His every breath is a slap to the face of the doctors, judges and policemen who laughed at what he claimed were his motives for killing the young man. When presented with this unavoidable proof, each of these men and women is properly thunderstruck, but Savaard does not use this to push his new technology forward. He uses it to mock his enemies, and throw them off-balance long enough to kill them. When his revenge plans inevitably fall short of his ambitions, and Savaard has to use his invention to resuscitate his own daughter before expiring from a gunshot wound himself, his last act with his second life is to destroy all his work so that it can never be reproduced. The last line in the film is delivered to Savaard a split second before he dies, by one of his intended victims: "Why did you destroy it?" No answer is forthcoming, but the only possibility is that Savaard has decided that, outside of his daughter, mankind doesn't deserve what he's offered them.
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Had Savaard not been sentenced to hang, but rather given life imprisonment, an imprisonment from which he escaped, would he spend any time seeking revenge, or would he instead retreat to his lab to continue his life's work? Some of Savaard's bloodthirstiness can of course be explained by the gross injustice he suffered, but isn't it also possible that he lost something in the days he spent dead to the world? If a return from the dead is possible, might not something still be lost? In Before I Hang (1940), also directed by Nick Grindé, this question, or some loose variation of it, is also posed. This time playing the far more gentle-of-spirit Dr. John Garth, Karloff is attempting to reverse the aging process. His work, like that of Savaard, is brought to a halt by a death, this time that of an elderly patient. Dr. Garth could not help this man, who was suffering great pain due to his advanced years, so Dr. Garth performed euthanasia. Again, like Savaard, Garth is convicted and sentenced to hang. While in prison, he is allowed to work with the prison doctor, who is convinced that Dr. Garth's new anti-aging, serum-based methods can succeed, and that Garth must be allowed to complete his work. The serum requires blood, and Garth chooses to test the serum on himself, shortly before he's set to hang, using the blood of a recently executed multiple murderer. As it happens, though, Garth's sentences is soon commuted to life imprisonment, which is followed up by a full pardon. As the years Garth has piled up begin to fall away -- he no longer needs eyeglasses, his hair darkens -- he is, like Savaard, walking proof that his crazy ideas aren't so crazy after all. Except that any time he tries to perform his procedure on a patient, he finds himself strangling them to death instead.

Why? Because, in a tip of the cap to the creature's abnormal brain, of the killer's blood now running through his veins. Garth does no choose to murder -- he's overcome by an unstoppable impulse. When he realizes what he's been doing, he begs to be apprehended, even killed himself, so that he won't harm anyone else. His wish is granted, but his work is carried on by his daughter and young apprentice, and the film ends on a note of optimism completely absent from the climax of The Man They Could Not Hang.

Even so, in both films, the best of intentions -- to help mankind live well beyond their natural allotment of years -- results in horror and death. And before Dr. Garth's serum kicks in, both returning Garth to his youth and instilling him with a bloodlust he'd never known before, he spends several weeks in a coma, a condition often referred to as a "living death". Savaard and Garth both return from their graves with a desire to kill that in one case replaces, and in another case betrays, both men's original desire to give life and health to their patients. They don't return from the dead the same men they were when they began that last great journey we will all face, and which we all dread. In perverting nature, the capital N kind, Savaard and Garth also pervert their own private natures, and that piece of themselves that they left behind in their different deaths was their core humanity.

And now look at Karloff in Val Lewton and Robert Wise's The Body Snatcher, from 1945. Five years after Karloff died as the kindly Dr. Garth, he was revived as the cynically and gleefully amoral John Gray, who will do anything to provide his employer, Dr. MacFarlane, with fresh corpses. MacFarlane is a cold man of science who cares only to solve the puzzles that medical science lays before him. He has nothing of the care for mankind shared by Dr. Savaard and Dr. Garth, and Karloff's Gray is amused as he commits the murders that provide the bodies that allow MacFarlane to continue his research. He's further amused by MacFarlane's belief in his own goodness, as well as Gray's essential evilness. Gray knows that MacFarlane is just as nasty and unpleasant a figure, and every bit as culpable in the murders, as Gray himself. Gray also knows where MacFarlane's own brand of medical drive and ambition will lead him. Gray knows how this will end. He's been here before.

There'll Be Nothing to Laugh at This Time

On February 11, 1969, one of horror cinema's most interesting filmmakers died at the age of 25. His name was Michael Reeves, and during his short life he made three features: The She Beast (1966 - known as Revenge of the Blood Beast in the UK); The Sorcerers (1967); and Witchfinder General (1968). The She Beast is available to rent from Netflix, and Witchfinder General was released on DVD by MGM earlier this, but The Sorcerers, despite starring Boris Karloff, is still unavailable in America, and has, in fact, never been available here. It seems to never turn up on cable, and although it has had a DVD release in England, that has since gone out of print.

I can't pretend to have any interest in the intricacies of the legal mudpit into which the video rights for this film are sunk -- whatever the story is, it would no doubt anger and bore me in equal measure. All I care about, especially after checking out Witchfinder General for the second time in about a decade and finding it to be absolutely terrific, is the damn film itself. I just want to see The Sorcerers. It seems like such a small thing to ask of the universe.

Well, the universe finally gave me the thumbs up on this one. My wife and I own a region-free DVD player, though we've put its primary selling point to almost no use up to now. But while dicking around on-line the other day, I found a copy of the out-of-print UK DVD of The Sorcerers for sale at an extremely reasonable price. Click, click, done. The movie arrived today, and I finished watching it about an hour and a half ago.

Boris Karloff plays Professor Marcus Monserrat. At the beginning of the film, he is trying to drum up business for his hypnotism business, which has fallen on hard times, we learn from Monserrat's wife Estelle (Catherine Lacey), since a reporter started poking around, and printed some unflattering things about Monserrat. As a result, the Monserrats are in dire financial straits, and are just barely scraping by. Even so, subsisting seems to be a secondary concern for the old couple -- Prof. Monserrat has another project brewing that he's finally ready to test out. He's built a machine that, when attached to a person and turned on, will subsequently give both of the Monserrats the power to control the thoughts and movements of the test subject whenever they want to. The sort-of-hard-to-buy point, and ultimate function (according to Marcus), of this machine is to allow elderly invalids to experience full, exciting lives vicariously through those young people who agree to connect themselves to such customers, via the professor's machine.

They need a volunteer for their test, and both Marcus and Estelle agree that a prime candidate would be a young person who has become bored with the free-living ways of the late 1960s. They find such a candidate in Mike Roscoe (Reeves favorite Ian Ogilvy), who Marcus runs into one night, and who, it must be said, is talked into taking part in this mysterious project incredibly easily. Once the experiment has been successfully conducted, Mike is sent away by the Monserrats, who marvel at the physical sensations they experience -- running water on their skin, cuts on their hands -- as their young surrogate goes about his daily business. But Estelle wants a bit more. She's tired of living off next-to-nothing, and wants to get back a little of what she and her husband lost, before turning the machine to its more altruistic uses for which Marcus built it. Marcus doesn't like the idea, but concedes to his wife, because he can see how unhappy she is. So they use Mike for some cheap, essentially harmless thrills. And still, Estelle wants more, she wants things that her husband finds horrifying, but her will, and her control over Mike, is stronger.

It's funny: when I first heard of The Sorcerers, I wanted to see it because of Boris Karloff. Later, more recently, I wanted to see it for Karloff, and because Reeves made it. But while Reeves does a fine job with unusual material, and Karloff -- solid as ever -- is the marquee name, and Ogilvy is ostensibly the hero of the story, the film belongs to Catherine Lacey. I don't believe I've ever seen her before, but her performance is about as creepy as anyone could possibly want it to be -- Reeves gets more mileage out of quick shots of her grinning face than most horror filmmakers can manage out of an hour and a half of beheadings. Estelle's turn from seemingly ordinary, but grinded-down, old woman to blood-crazy thrill-killer happens pretty damn quickly, but by keeping everything as simple as he can, Reeves makes it possible to believe that Estelle can go that route. All that needs to happen is that Catherine Lacey has to be able to play it, and good God, does she play it. She plays it big when she has to, while throwing in odd, skin-crawling little touches here and there to make the character seem like she really draws breath, my favorite being the moment when, after forcing Mike to do something particularly awful, Estelle slumps over in exhausted laughter, her forehead resting on her clenched fist, as if she were suddenly overcome with relief after hours of intense worry. But again, Reeves helps things along: his decision to follow up a sequence involving a night full of violent frenzy with Estelle spending the morning after in bed, hammered on a bottle of gin, was a brilliant one.

As I believe I hinted earlier, this movie is not without its flaws. The machine Monserrat built makes very little sense (and I don't mean scientifically, because who cares about that?), and there seems to be a gap between what the Monserrat's told Mike about the experiment and its results and how he deals with the aftermath. But the story taps into the same primal idea as Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde, which, like The Sorcerers deals with, among other things, the question of what keeps most people from doing horrible things to others: morality, or the fear of repurcussions? And while the film's climax may be easy to predict, it's no less effective for that. Above all, though, this film has going for it the Monserrats -- old, feeble, decent and deluded Marcus, and his loving wife of many decades, Estelle, who, one day, is given utter freedom from her fears, and a freedom to indulge her every taste. Marcus is terrified and disgusted by what these tastes turn out to be. Estelle, no doubt, is surprised herself. But she's not disgusted. Far from it.

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