Horror Express: A Name For Evil (Bernard Girard, 1973)

 Goddamn hippies. They turn up when you least expect it, don’t they?

I thought I had pretty much mapped out the entirety of the ‘hippie horror’ sub-genre a few years back (around the time I started making this thing), but these unexpected stragglers just keep dragging me back in.

On the surface of things, ‘A Name For Evil’ appears to be a sort-of-haunted house movie, theatrically released in ’73 with name stars Robert Culp and Samantha Eggar. Writer/director Bernard Girard was a TV veteran who occasionally made the jump into features, but even his one paragraph IMDB bio notes that “the majority of his film output has been routine”.

Cueing this up of a weekday evening, I was expecting, I suppose, some fuzzy, bucolic mid ‘70s TV movie vibes. Perhaps a bit of a pre-Stephen King, ‘Flowers in the Attic’/‘Burnt Offerings’ airport paperback kind of feel?

Well, I certainly got all of that. Indeed, we’ve got sun-dappled ‘70s cathode ray ambient gorgeousness as far as the eye can see. But, I also got so much more… and simultaneously, also kind of… much less, if you know what I mean (man).

Right from the outset, things are a bit… off. The distinctly Corman/Poe-esque opening titles consists of super-imposed/interweaving close-ups on a series of Bosch-via-Bacon expressionist paintings. Even more unnervingly however, the titles appear to have been set in some ‘70s equivalent of comic sans, and inform us that this is a “a Penthouse Production presentation”. Hmm.

The weirdness continues as footage of sunshine shimmering on water is cross-faded with images of construction cranes, cement mixers and skeletal tower blocks. “I don’t wanna build filing cabinets twenty stories high,” construction company exec John Blake (Culp) protests in voiceover. “I wanna build something beautiful! Every time I come into the office it makes me sick - I’m getting outta here!”

I don't know whether he’s turned on and tuned in yet, but John Blake is certainly ready to drop out. He wears a mustard yellow shirt, a funky neckerchief and brown leather jacket, and tells his middle-aged secretary that she’ll soon be “wrapped in cellophane, on sale for 49 cents a pound” if she doesn’t quit her job.

Via fragmentary, vérité type footage reminiscent of a ‘Medium Cool’/‘Putney Swope’-esque counter-culture satire, we see Blake triumphantly quit the rat-race for good, leaving his enraged brother/partner to pick up the pieces. (“You’re as loony as your great-grandfather The Major, and you’ll end up the same way - nuts!”)

Returning to his penthouse apartment (or, “this infernal plastic anthill”, as he likes to call it), Blake continues to talk anti-materialist turkey with his presumably long-suffering wife Joanna (Eggar). Obviously their relationship is on the rocks (because, y’know - the ‘70s), but John hopes that his plan to relocate to (and subsequently renovate) a beautiful yet dilapidated lakeside timber frame mansion he has recently inherited will bring them back together.

He also takes the opportunity to throw his television set off the balcony, allowing us to watch it descend to the ground and shatter in slo-mo, ‘Zabrinskie Point’-style (a particularly sweet moment for director Girard, one imagines), just in case he hadn’t quite made his point clearly enough yet.

Later that evening, John is rapping in the general direction of his sleeping wife, telling her how they’re going to “..find out the truth, together” (try looking for it when she’s awake next time dude, I think you’ll find that yields better results), when suddenly, without warning, sitars and tamburas are blaring on the soundtrack, and we cut to gel-lit, heavily super-imposed footage of naked, bead-covered dancing girls gyrating to the sound of a drowsy, finger-picked guitar which has joined the ersatz Indian drone. Sound the klaxon! Red alert! We’ve got some full strength hippie shit going on here.

Never fear though, it all vanishes as quickly as it arrived, and after a brief fantasy sequence in which Culp and Eggars try to embrace through a pane of glass (SYMBOLISM), we’re back in the ‘real’ world. It goes without saying of course that the aforementioned mansion has reached John’s ownership through the family line from the aforementioned ‘Major’, and, once the couple reach it, they learn - much to John’s joy and Joanna’s chagrin - that it is also both, a) completely uninhabitable, and b) located way out in the back of beyond, with nothing but suspicious, gimlet-eyed creepy locals as far as the eye can see.

Particularly notable in this regard is Jimmy (inexplicably played by Kansas City jazz legend Clarence ‘Big’ Miller), the mansion’s simple-minded live-in caretaker, whose role seems to consist of lumbering around refusing to do any work, creeping up on people when they least expect it, and occasionally muttering things like, “once the Major’s, always the Major’s”. (A pretty demeaning, racially stereotyped role for a renowned musician like Miller to take on, I would have thought, but… who knows.)

Anyway, things progress more or less as one would imagine, and, in terms of both plot and atmosphere, ‘A Name For Evil’ seems to fit squarely into the “city folk with back-to-nature aspirations hit the country and get more than they bargained for” mould of ‘Let’s Scare Jessica To Death’ (1971) or Dark August (1976).

But then, during the second half of the film, things get increasingly tripped out and unglued - so much so that it started to put me more in mind of, I dunno, Brianne Murphy’s ‘Blood Sabbath’ (1972 - real dark heart of brain-fried regional hippie horror, that one) or Tonino Cervi’s witchy political allegory ‘Queens of Evil’ (1970), with a touch of Altman's nightmarish ‘Images’ (’72) lurking about in the background somewhere too.

Before we get to all that though, I must confess that I kept nodding off whilst trying to watch ‘A Name For Evil’ - a factor which would normally prohibit me from attempting to review a film, but in this case, I’ll make an exception. Because, the fact is, ‘A Name For Evil’ is a great film to fall sleep to - so much so that it often feels like it could have been made explicitly for that purpose.

Once the basic set-up has been established, very little happens. The horror element is extremely mild and unthreatening (basically just the ghost of The Major turning up occasionally to whisper in people’s ears or interfere with some building work), whilst the whole thing is so dream-like and sedate already, what with all those fuzzy, bucolic forests and shimmering lakes... after a while, you just end up closing your eyes and going to nice places. It’s inevitable. Just go with it.

At some point about two thirds of the way through the film, I awoke from a little snooze to find Robert Culp was riding a spectral white stallion through the forest to some kind of local bar / barn dance place, where there are campfire sing-alongs and wrestling contests going on, huge platters of spaghetti are being thrown around, and folk-pop singer Billy Joe Royal is on stage, performing his song ‘Mountain Woman’. (1)

Blake begins dancing with a blonde woman (Culp’s real life fourth wife Sheila Sullivan). She tears his shirt off, and suddenly the camera goes fish-eye crazy and everyone is naked! There are human pyramids of head-banging naked people. Billy Joe Royal is surrounded by naked girls as he strums his guitar. It’s a kaleidoscope of nudity!

Then, we’re outside, and there are are weird, naked pagan hippie ceremonies going on out in the woods. Culp and Sullivan make wild, passionate love on the forest floor, as the distant strains of ‘Mountain Woman’ reverberate ceaselessly in the background.

I'm pretty sure I didn't dream any of that. I think it all happened... within the movie, I mean. Whether or not it happened to Culp’s character, who can say.

Crawling back to the shack the next morning like a soggy tom-cat, John slips indoors and immediately gets into a situation with Joanna, who gives him hell for ruining her sleep, insisting that he actually spent the night next to her, “masturbating like a fourteen year old child”(!) This line is subsequently repeated several times in voiceover (as if it wasn’t bad enough the first time around), as Culp wanders around amid his beloved nature, looking aggrieved, and presumably reflecting on his inability to separate fantasy from reality, or somesuch.

But then, he drives back to the bar / barn dance place (so I guess it must be real?), and meets up again with the blonde woman (so I guess she was real too?), and they start having heavy conversations about, y’know…. life, and stuff.

Man, what a weird movie. It only marginally counts as horror, but the half-hearted supernatural elements, creepy atmospherics and monied, middle-aged protagonists jibe so strangely with the discombobulated psychedelic / counter-culture stuff which takes up so much of the run-time… just where in the hell was this thing coming from? And more to the point, where was it going? (Cos either way, I have a feeling it didn’t quite get there.)

Once again, we must turn to the oracle of the IMDB trivia page for answers:

“Filmed in 1970 as a psychological thriller that parodied then-modern society, production swelled over budget and MGM ultimately shelved the movie. Three years later, Penthouse magazine's movie division acquired the rights to re-cut the film and market it as a horror movie.”

Well, I suppose that helps clear a few things up (not least the film’s persistent reliance on off-screen voiceovers), but… I mean… I’m still not sure this version of events quite makes sense. 

I mean, one assumes Penthouse’s number one priority would have been adding more sex to the film, but, all the gratuitous nudity and weird orgy stuff occurs within the hippie/counter-culture sequences which I’m pretty sure must have formed part of the original 1970 footage. OR, did Penthouse actually acquire this film BECAUSE it had loads of naked people in it, and then realised that the rest of it was a load of (by ’73) heinously outmoded hippie blather, so tried to turn it into a horror film instead..? But, that scenario doesn’t work either, because visual elements of the ‘horror’ plotline (ie, the ghost of and the spooky occurrences he instigates) are embedded within footage featuring the principal cast and original locations from 1970, so…. agh, I don’t know.

Goddamned hippies. They never make it easy for us, do they? Whatever untold stories lurk behind the battered extant prints of ‘A Name For Evil’ though, they don’t really matter. It is what it is, and I make no apology for loving this kind of ambient, plotless weirdness and the unique and beautiful moment in culture which allowed it to exist, so… yeah. Dig it, and so forth.

At the time of writing, a tape-sourced print of ‘A Name For Evil’ can be acquired free of charge from Rare Filmm.

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(1) Quoth Wikipedia: “Billy Joe Royal (1942 - 2015) was an American country soul singer. His most successful record was ‘Down in the Boondocks’ in 1965.” Insofar as I can tell, ‘Mountain Woman’ does not appear in his discography of recorded work, but it was written by acclaimed session player and producer Emory Gordy Jr, with lyrics by Ed Cobb - the man who gave the world The Standells’ ‘Dirty Water’, Gloria Jones’ ‘Tainted Love’ and the career of The Chocolate Watch Band, amongst other things. Far out.

Horror Express: The Devil Commands (Edward Dmytryk, 1941)

 Darker, creepier and more intense than the other ‘mad doctor’ movies Boris Karloff made for Columbia between 1939 and 1941, this fourth and final instalment in the loosely connected series finds incoming director Edward Dmytryk really upping the ante, delivering a film which remains startling and somewhat unnerving to this day, in spite of its brutally foreshortened 64 minute run time and all too evident budgetary constraints.

A brief but highly effective prologue gets the antennae of us Lovecraft-fanciers tingling right from the off, as the daughter of Karloff’s Dr Julian Blair delivers an ominously deadpan voiceover narration, intoned over a series of very well done model-shots which take us on a slow pan toward the doors of a derelict, storm-lashed cliff-top mansion;

“In Barsham Harbour, on nights like this, when lightning rips the night apart, why do people close the shutters which face toward my father’s house, and lock their doors, and whisper? Why are they afraid? No one goes near my father’s house. I don’t know where my father is. I only know that for one brief, terrible moment, he tore open the door to whatever lives beyond the grave.”

I don't know about you, but I’m sold.

Thereafter, we rewind seven years, and the film’s first act settles down into a pattern very much in keeping with the Karloff’s other Columbia pictures, as the gentle and soft-spoken Dr Blair, a research fellow at a fictional New England college, astounds his fellow boffins by demonstrating that the human brain generates an electro-magnetic impulse which can be recorded, and potentially ‘read’, via electrodes attached to the subject’s temples, hooked up to a primitive, EEG-like encephalogram. (1)

Claiming that “the wave impulse of woman, the so-called weaker sex, is much stronger than man’s”, Dr Blair uses his beloved wife Helen (Shirley Warde) as his primary experimental subject. His beliefs become both more questionable and more obsessive though when, stricken with grief after Helen dies in a car accident, he observes that his machinery is still recording the unique ‘signature’ of her brainwaves, convincing him that his wife’s spirit remains present in the ether, attempting to communicate with him.

As you might well imagine, ‘The Devil Commands’ becomes a gloomy and rather sad affair at this point, and Karloff conveys Dr Blair’s misery and exhaustion with almost painful conviction. Viewers who had previously turned out to see Karloff in Nick Grinde’s ‘The Man They Could Not Hang’ (1939), ‘The Man with Nine Lives’ or ‘Before I Hang’ (both 1940) will have been more than familiar with the path the good doctor subsequently takes, as his mental health gradually crumbles, and as he repeatedly ignores the advice proffered by the film’s procession of straight-laced supporting players, who urge him to give up his weird work and take a well-earned break.

The film’s tone shifts considerably however when, on the advice of his simple-minded assistant Karl (Cy Schindell) - only potentially mad scientists are assigned one of those, you see - Dr Blair attends a séance conducted by a renowned medium, the stentorian Mrs Blanche Walters (Anne Revere).

Though Mrs Walters is initially pretty pissed off when the doc busts up her phony séance, easily exposing the assorted gimmicks she has been using to hoodwink her clients, she nonetheless reveals herself to be as cold, avaricious and amoral an operator as any film noir spider-woman - so naturally, when Blair suggests that she could make herself a great deal of dough assisting him with his experiments, she’s all ears.

Before long, the doctor’s increasingly unhinged attempts to channel vast amounts of electricity through Mrs Walters’ brain in an attempt to make contact with Helen’s roving spirit lead to poor old Karl getting accidentally lobotomised. Blanche, who seems suspiciously well versed on how to handle such situations, suggests they duck out and make a quick getaway before anyone finds out about the accident, prompting the unlikely trio to flee the campus and hit the road, setting themselves up in the remote cliff-top manse we saw during the film’s prologue.

Once this memorably eerie set-up, reminiscent both of Lovecraft’s ‘From Beyond’ and the unhinged finale of Michael Curtiz’s Doctor X a decade earlier, has been established, palpable fear and loathing on claustrophobic interior sets is soon the order of the day. In a neat turn-around, we’re reintroduced to our characters a year or two down the line, through the eyes of the county sheriff, who comes a-knocking, investigating, oh, y’know, just some bodies which have gone missing from the local cemetery (uh-oh).

After the door is opened by a cowering, lantern-bearing maid (a great performance from character actress Dorothy Adams), the sheriff soon encounters the lumbering, Igor-like Karl, before Blanche descends the rickety, shadowed staircase, glaring daggers in full-on, imperious Lady Macbeth mode. And as to the good doctor, who shambles into view behind her, meanwhile… well, he’s certainly given up brushing the dust out of his hair, let's put it that way.

Under Blanche’s encouragement no doubt, Blair has of course gone full loony by this stage, and the crooked couple have indeed been re-appropriating the carcasses of the local citizenry for use in their experiments. In a breathtaking tableau of psychotronic weirdness, they have in fact wired up the mouldering corpses in what look for all the world like antiquated, metallic diving suits with flashing Tesla coils appended to their helmets. They are seated around a table with their arms out-stretched, in some perverse, quasi-scientific imitation of a séance, whilst the doctor’s banks of McFadden-esque electrical equipment whir and drone behind them. Good lord!

With shit like this going down, it’s naturally only a matter of time before a torch-wielding mob is called for - but, given that we know the house is still standing seven years hence, they’re required on this occasion to nix the flames and do their worst with clubs and wooden poles instead. Yikes.

Edward Dmytryk would soon of course go on to play a significant role in defining the aesthetic of film noir with the classic ‘Murder, My Sweet’ (1944), and he takes the opportunity here to prove himself a post-expressionist stylist per excellence here, ladling on angular shadows, spot-lighting, venetian blinds and dutch angles as if they were going out of fashion, and employing harsh, jagged editing patterns to produce a rather fevered, dissonant tempo.

The film’s production crew meanwhile douse practically every scene in thunder, lightning and squalling gales, undercutting the science-based plotting with the kind of quasi-gothic atmos you could cut up and sell by the pound, whilst mournful cellos saw away on the stock music score, emphasising the essentially tragic nature of the storyline.

Towering over the bumbling, submissive Karloff during the second half of the film, Anne Revere likewise acts up a storm, giving us the kind of vile, emotionless femme fatale / heartless bitch character who could eat Phyllis Dietrichson or Mrs Danvers for breakfast.

The uncertain nature of her relationship with Karloff’s character is in fact one of the movie’s most intriguingly perverse elements. Could they really have a romantic connection? Seems unlikely, given that Dr Blair is still utterly fixated on trying to establish contact with his late wife. We’ve already established that Mrs Blanche Walters is driven by a desire for money, but surely hanging around in a dilapidated mansion living off the diminishing resources of a crazy old geezer wasn’t exactly what she had in mind. Does she just get a kick out of lording it over the doctor and his mindless servant, or - is she hooked on the thrill she derives from having thousands of volts of electricity (and potentially the disembodied brainwaves of the dead) blasted through her nervous system on a regular basis..?

The latter possibility could have conceivably made her an early precursor to Barbara Crampton’s character in Stuart Gordon’s adaptation of From Beyond, but, forced to rattle through its potent story at breakneck speed to hit the era’s one hour b-movie finishing line, ‘The Devil Commands’ is allowed little time to explore such niceties as character motivation, leaving a wealth of rampaging ambiguity in the gaps between scenes which makes the film all the more fascinating.

Of course, the title and poster blurb assigned to this movie by Columbia upon its release are a complete misnomer. The film contains no reference to the devil, and he certainly issues no commands. Indeed, it is interesting to note that there is no allusion to religion or Christian belief to be found anywhere in the film; even the obligatory blather about defying God’s law or somesuch which was routinely shoehorned into this era’s post-Frankenstein mad doctor movies in notable by its absence.

Perhaps one explanation for this is that the script for ‘The Devil Commands’ (credited to Robert Hardy Andrews & Milton Gunzburg) was loosely derived from William Sloane’s science-based supernatural novel ‘The Edge of Running Water’ (first published in 1939) - an acclaimed work, often hailed as a landmark in the field of ‘cosmic horror’, which I’ve been meaning to obtain a copy of for many years at this point. (2)

Whilst I’d imagine that the film probably ditches or reworks many of the details of Sloane’s story, disquieting remnants of what I understand to be his core premise remain. Namely, we’re talking here about the idea that, whilst Dr Blair believes that his experiments allow him to make contact with departed human souls, he is actually tapping into something else entirely.

This truly frightening concept, beautifully implied by the novel’s title, is realised rather more bluntly during the frenzied climax of Dmytryk’s film, wherein we see Dr Blair’s table of wired up corpses become possessed by some unholy St Vitus’ dance as the riled up mob of townsfolk approaches, summoning up what, in their audio commentary for the film’s blu-ray release, the ever-reliable Kim Newman and Stephen Jones identify as perhaps cinema’s first example of a full-blown trans-dimensional vortex.

If on one level ‘The Devil Commands’ remains a morbid and joyless rumination on the self-destructive futility of seeking solace from beyond the grave, it is simultaneously animated by a crazed spark of total morbid madness which proves extremely compelling. Crashing heedlessly into the realm of what-man-was-not-meant-to-know with a fervour far more alarming than than anything generally encountered in the rather sedate world of early ‘40s scientific horror films, it stands as a raw, wild and genuinely unnerving classic of the weird/cosmic end of the genre.

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(1) I’m no scientist, but it’s interesting to note that, whilst Karloff’s learned colleagues in ‘The Devil Commands’ treat his theories as if they pretty far-out speculation, Dr Blair’s initial ideas about brainwave activity are essentially correct, and paper-and-ink EEGs very much like the once he demonstrates in the film had actually been in use since at least the early 1920s.

(1) This 1967 Bantam edition of Sloane’s novel, with its IMPOSSIBLY CREEPY cover illustration, is a particular paperback holy grail of mine.