Gothic Originals / Lovecraft on Film: The Haunted Palace (Roger Corman, 1963)

“Opening his eyes before staggering out of that room of horror, Dr. Willett saw that what he had kept in memory had not been kept amiss. There had, as he had predicted, been no need for acid. For like his accursed picture a year before, Joseph Curwen now lay scattered on the floor as a thin coating of fine bluish-grey dust.”
- HPL

I.

Ever since I started this weblog, one of my objectives has been to undertake a survey of films based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft – more or less a rite of passage for any writer focusing on quote-unquote ‘weird horror’ - but somehow I just never quite got around to it. Until now.

As is widely acknowledged by just about anyone who shares a joint interest in Lovecraft and off-the-beaten-track horror films, ‘Lovecraft Cinema’ is a bit of a two-edged sword. Speak to any dedicated fan of Lovecraft’s writing, and they will no doubt tell you, correctly, that not a single motion picture adaptation has ever adequately captured the themes, ideas, images or atmosphere of the man’s work. Indeed, it is ironic that the few films that do to some extent trespass into Lovecraftian territory (Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ for instance, or Zulawski’s ‘Possession’) are those that exist entirely outside of his authorship or direct influence.

From a high-minded literary/artistic point of view in fact, the history of ‘official’ Lovecraft Cinema is a chronicle of travesty, failure, compromise and misunderstanding that it is best to draw a veil over, focusing instead on the vain hope that some long-promised ‘serious’ adaptation (Del Toro’s ‘At The Mountains of Madness’? Richard Stanley’s ‘The Color Out of Space’?) may one day emerge to right the wrongs of the past and send punters screaming from multiplexes with a reassuringly soul-crushing vision of existential cosmic terror.

At the same time though, from our POV as b-movie / cult film fans, is it not within the darkness of travesty, failure, compromise and misunderstanding that some of our most cherished stretches of misbegotten celluloid can bloom? If none of the Lovecraft adaptations that have made it to the screen thus far can really be said to be ‘successful’ adaptations of their subject matter, they have nonetheless tended to be strange, fevered and twisted movies, borne of a collision between unwieldy literary subject matter and brutish commercial necessity, and I have found at least something to enjoy in just about all of them.

In fact I have a great fondness for many of them, even as they busy themselves with mashing the vision of one of my favourite authors into a confused and often unrecognizable mush. Time and time again in fact, the trace elements of Lovecraft in a film’s DNA seem to act as a trip-wire, sending potentially bland horror vehicles staggering off into the realm of something wholly other - and it is those moments, more than anything else, that I would like to think this blog exists to celebrate.

II.

This of course brings us to the film that American International Pictures insist we refer to as ‘Edgar Allan Poe’s The Haunted Palace’, better known to most of us of course as Roger Corman’s attempt to infuse new blood into his “Poe cycle” by ditching Poe altogether and mounting a loose adaptation of Lovecraft’s ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’.

As in so many things, Corman was ahead of the curve in choosing to adapt Lovecraft. Whilst HPL’s name may be ubiquitous in horror fiction today, he did not actually attract a widespread readership until mass market paperback editions of his work began to proliferate in the mid/late 1960s. At the time Corman was planning this film, Lovecraft’s following was still a closely-guarded cult within the wider cult of Weird Tales/fantastic fiction devotees, his reputation kept alive largely via the expensive, small-press editions produced by August Derleth’s Arkham House. (In fact, insofar as I can tell, one of the earliest Lovecraft paperbacks put out by a mainstream publisher was a 1963 UK Panther edition of ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’, presumably intended to coincide with ‘The Haunted Palace’!)

If juggling the names of Poe and Lovecraft seems a cinch in the 21st century, it was a considerably more daring proposition in the early ‘60s, when the former was a celebrated pioneer of American letters whilst the latter remained an obscure purveyor of pulp magazine schlock. It is hardly surprising therefore that AIP wanted to hedge their bets by making sure Poe’s name remained front and center in the film’s marketing, even if one suspects that the initials of the film’s release title are less than accidental. (The name ‘The Haunted Palace’, by the way, is taken from the poem recited by Roderick Usher in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, which Vincent Price’s post-dubbed voiceover dutifully gives us a few stanzas of here.)

In spite of its faux-Poe makeover though, ‘The Haunted Palace’ has still always seemed like a bit of an outsider within the early AIP gothic cycle. True, there had been other entries that diverged from the central axis of Price / Corman / Poe, but for one reason or another, these are generally considered disappointments, and kept at arm’s length by fans and critics from the rest of the series. (‘The Premature Burial’ lacked Price, and emerged as forgettable and dreary; ‘The Comedy of Terrors’ dropped both Corman and Poe, but the combination of Jacques Tourneur’s heavy-handed direction and Peter Lorre’s ill-health render it one of the most grimly dispiriting ‘comedies’ ever put before an audience; as for ‘The Terror’… well, what can you say about ‘The Terror’ that hasn’t been said before?)

As the remaining key/successful entries in the series easily pair up into critic-friendly couples (The Fall of the House of Usher and ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’ are the genre-defining classics, ‘Tales of Terror’ and ‘The Raven’ are the ensemble comedies, ‘Masque of the Red Death’ and ‘The Tomb of Ligeia’ are the weird, quasi-psychedelic British ones), ‘The Haunted Palace’ eventually stands alone as the one overlooked outlier in the series that is actually *really good* (assuming of course that you like this kind of movie in the first place).

III.

I’m unversed on the whys and wherefores of how Roger Corman was introduced to Lovecraft’s writing, but I think there’s a fair chance that the connection might have been established via scriptwriter Charles Beaumont, who took the reins of the “Poe” series here from his fellow Twilight Zone alumnus Richard Matheson, having previously subbed for Matheson on ‘The Premature Burial’. Whilst not really a ‘horror guy’ as such, Beaumont’s background as a short story / pulp magazine writer may well have given him an awareness of Lovecraft, if not, apparently, a great deal of sympathy for what the Old Man of Providence was trying to achieve, if his work here is anything to go by.

Mindful above all of commercial expectations, Beaumont’s script for ‘The Haunted Palace’ carefully sifts Lovecraft’s long and complex story for elements that correspond most easily with the tried & tested gothic horror formula, then builds around what remains with a dedication to genre convention that, despite the comparatively weird subject matter, results in a film that often feels more like an exultant celebration of the established gothic tradition than the beginning of an exciting new ‘Lovecraftian’ style of filmmaking.

Predictably, Lovecraft’s beloved Arkham is here recast from the bustling Edwardian market town envisaged by its creator to an especially huddled and backward village community that doesn’t seem to have made any concessions to modernity since the days of the pilgrim fathers, dominated by the shadow of the titular ‘palace’ that looms vast and decrepit from the cliffs above the village. (The beautiful matte paintings and sprawling interior sets look more like a ‘castle’ to me, but who am I to quibble?)

Naturally, Arkham’s villagers are a cowed, suspicious bunch, ready to form a torch-wielding mob at the drop of a hat, as they promptly demonstrate during the ‘flashback’ opening sequence, which sees them stomping across the blasted heathland to the castle to put a stop to the godless depredations of warlock Joseph Curwen (Price, obvs) and his mistress Hester Tillinghast (actress Cathie Merchant, exuding a great blue-skinned gothic temptress vibe), who are midway through ‘offering’ a hypnotised local virgin to the unspeakable whatever-it-is that dwells in a well beneath their basement.

You can probably guess more or less what transpires when Curwen answers the door to the pitch-fork-happy mob, so let’s just say that, if the idea of a witches or warlocks cursing the descendants of their persecutors as flames lick around their ankles is more or less as old as the hills in horror films and literature, for our purposes here we might assume that it was repurposed from AIP’s successful Italian pick-up of a few years earlier, Mario Bava’s ‘Black Sunday’.(1)

Likewise, the notion of a hapless aristocrat becoming possessed by the spirit of his malevolent ancestor had already been thoroughly explored by Corman in ‘The Pit & The Pendulum’, and those familiar either with Lovecraft’s story or gothic horror movies in general won’t be surprised to learn that that is exactly what recurs here, when, “one hundred and ten years later”, one Charles Dexter Ward (guess who) rocks up in Arkham to reclaim his ancestral home. (By necessity, Lovecraft’s eager young scholar has been remolded into a middle-aged gentleman of genteel manners, and naturally enough he is accompanied on the journey from distant Boston by his devoted wife Ann (Debra Paget).)

Completing the roll-call of gothic cliché, the notion that everyone in the village looks identical to their ancestors from the preceding century is taken here to what many viewers may find a laughable extreme. Not only does everyone look the same after the film reverts from the ‘past’ to the ‘present’, they still all hang around in the same tavern (which doesn’t seem to have been redecorated), talk about the same stuff, seem to recall exactly what their forefathers got up to with perfect clarity, and might as well even be wearing the same costumes, give or take a few ruffled sleeves and tri-corn hats. It must have been an uneventful nineteenth century in Arkham, to say the least.

Though patently ridiculous, I personally find that this blurring of past and present adds greatly to the film’s overall atmosphere of disjointed, fairy tale-like unreality, implying a kind of entropic ‘timelessness’ that recalls that conjured rather more deliberately by such films as Bava’s masterful ‘Lisa & The Devil’ (1972).

One shot is particular, in which two actors (professional western heavy & b-movie scripter Leo Gordon and everyone’s favourite perpetual loser Elisha Cook Jr, no less) can briefly be seen together staring through the exact same window that their ‘ancestors’ stared through a century earlier, their faces carrying looks of forlorn hopelessness, conveys a crushing sense of a meaningless cycle of cruelties being repeated through time immemorial as the Dark Gods look on impassive that certainly beats what little the script itself has to offer on such topics.

IV.

Another thing that inadvertently lends a European flavor to ‘The Haunted Palace’ is the fact that, whereas Richard Matheson’s plotting tended to be tight as a drum (always your solid, all-American logic from that cat), Beaumont here seems happy to leave a few loose ends flapping in breeze, accidentally evoking the spirit of some of our favourite irrational/non-linear/lazy [delete as applicable] euro-horrors.

For a start, there’s a whole deformed village offspring/mutant-child-in-the-attic angle that is tacked onto the story but never really developed or concluded in any meaningful fashion, then there’s Curwen’s ‘crossing names off the list’ campaign of vengeance against the villagers, which kind of fizzles out half-way through, and we’ve also got random oddities like the third resurrected sorcerer (played by Milton Parsons) who turns up to assist Price and Lon Chaney Jr in their rites. After being briefly introduced, he basically spends the remainder of the movie standing around doing absolutely nothing, the rationale for his existence perhaps having been excised from an earlier draft, or somesuch. (2)

Actually, Beaumont’s writing is a tad, shall we say, unpolished, all round here, and the stretches of delectable dialogue that Matheson enjoyed crafting for Price in the earlier Poe movies are also notable by their absence. Given the slightly different tone adopted by ‘The Haunted Palace’, that’s perhaps not necessarily such a bad thing, and Beaumont does at least manage to throw in a few slightly more clipped (almost ‘hard-boiled’?) horror movie zingers amid the reheated cliché. (I’m particularly fond of one villager’s declaration that “It isn’t a house, it’s a madman’s palace, as old as sin!”, and the moment when the steadfast Dr. Willet (Frank Maxwell) advises Ward and his wife to flee Arkham, “..just as you would a madman with a knife..”, right as the scene cuts to a particularly baleful exterior of the lightning-illuminated palace.)

V.

Also missing from ‘The Haunted Palace’ is the psychoanalytical take on the material that Corman made a point of exploring in his previous gothic films – a surprising omission, given the director’s oft-stated dedication to this approach. Admittedly, ‘..Palace’ does at least follow the pattern set by Corman’s ruthlessly Freudian riff on ‘The Pit & The Pendulum’ - in both films, our ancestor-possessed protagonist exhibits a somewhat conflicted attitude toward family and gender, and meets his comeuppance whilst fiddling with large mechanisms in the basement. But here, these elements feel more like mere accidental hangovers from the earlier film than an attempt to grapple with anything more profound.

If pushed, you could perhaps make the case that ‘The Haunted Palace’ simply widens the scope of the ‘building-as-mind-map’ concept utilised in the earlier films, effectively extending the metaphor to embrace the entire village and its history-haunted occupants - but to my mind, this would just seem like over-stretching a reading that the film itself never really makes much effort to encourage.

In fact, in spite of the myriad gifts Lovecraft’s fiction offers to armchair psychologists, it is difficult to really read any valid sub-text into ‘The Haunted Palace’, beyond the bits and pieces that remain as residue from its literary and cinematic sources. If there is any “return of the repressed” stuff going on here, I would contend, it is transpiring purely on the ambient level common to all horror films, outside of the filmmakers’ conscious intent.

For viewers who like to take a more ‘thematic’ approach to their horror, this lack of ‘depth’ might make ‘The Haunted Palace’ feel a bit flat, but personally, it is actually one of the things I like best about the film, in a strange sort of way. I mean, you can delve deeper if you must, but as far as Beaumont and Corman (and more to the point, AIP) are concerned, this is a straight-up, two-fisted tale of occult evil, resurrected sorcerers and Dark Gods, executed with the utmost seriousness, and caring little for the nods, winks and grand gestures that helped the earlier Poe films win over the critics.

VI.

So dour and puritanical in fact is the film’s overriding atmosphere, it’s possible that its relative failure to make an impression on the public might be down to the fact that audiences simply didn’t know what to make of it, given that the three AIP/Price gothics immediately preceding it had all been framed more or less as arch, self-aware comedies.

Maybe I’m just over-thinking here, but my impression when I watch ‘The Haunted Palace’ side by side with Corman’s other gothics is that this one is a sneaky low-ball, bypassing critical favour and aimed straight at the kids in the cheap seats who actually just *like* all this horror shit. Though far from a satisfactory adaptation of Lovecraft, it nonetheless captures the ghoulish, pulpy atmosphere of pre-war ‘Weird Tales’ fiction better than any other ‘60s American horror film I can think of.

Cementing the film’s sombre tone, director of photography Floyd Crosby employs considerably more muted colour palette than the one he utilised for the earlier Poe films. Bright, heraldic reds and yellows are right out, and a sickly landscape of green, blue and grey instead predominates, interspersed with especially voluminous shadows and featureless New England puritan costmary.

Equally fitting is score by Ronald Stein, which is a corker. More ominous and old-fashioned than Les Baxter’s somewhat kitsch-inclined contributions to the earlier movies, there are certainly no theremins in evidence here; in fact the main theme is a stomping great thing, like a pacier, slightly more nuanced version of James Bernard’s hammer-blow Hammer scores. As is often the case with AIP movies, this single piece is repeated incessantly through the film’s run-time, but, with an indelible central melody that wouldn’t have sounded out of place in a big budget adventure movie or historical epic, the repetition rarely grates.

VII.

 Clearly conscious of the slightly different direction taken by ‘The Haunted Palace’, Vincent Price here tones down the more excessive aspects of his usual screen persona, and actually does so to great effect, delivering a dual performance as the tormented Ward and the stone-cold Curwen that for me rank amongst his all-time best.

If his comparatively low-key antics may not initially stick in the memory quite as strongly as his extraordinary characterisations in ‘..Usher’ or ‘Pit..’, on repeat viewing I think Price’s work here stands up extremely well, revealing a great deal of subtlety (well, whatever counts as ‘subtlety’ in Vincent Price world, anyway), and providing some great, understated line-readings that go a long way toward elevating the uneven material into something more powerful. In particular, he is chillingly convincing once Curwen is fully in control, projecting a feeling of icy, venomous evil that often seems like a dry run for his celebrated turn in ‘Witchfinder General’ a few years later.

Opposite Price, Debra Paget’s porcelain beauty and forthright composure make her a rather good gothic heroine, even if, as per genre tradition, her character is given very little to do (but hey, at least she doesn’t spend most of the picture consigned to bed on the pre-text of some vaguely defined womanly maladies, so that’s something).

Happily, the dynamic between Paget and Price actually works quite well too. They are believable in the film’s first act as a married couple who actually respect and care for each other, and, once Ward’s possession by Curwen begins to put a spanner in the works, the scene in which he visits Ann’s bed chamber in full-on evil mode to “exercise his husbandly prerogatives” is cringey and menacing in precisely the way it should be, with Price doing his ‘thing’ beautifully as Paget delivering a surprisingly affecting portrayal of a woman who has witnessed her life partner transformed into an unrecognisible villain of some dreadful, inhuman variety.

Whilst talking actors, we should also throw in a word for ‘The Haunted Palace’s second Jr-affixed hard-luck case, Lon Chaney Jr, who is third-billed here as Curwen’s oatmeal-faced servant Simon Orne. Though not exactly blazing with thespian fire, Lon does a dignified and professional job, staying in the background and not making a fuss, as he had learned to on innumerable Westerns and ‘40s b-horrors. If he never shows a hint of the depth of feeling he brought to Jack Hill’s Spider Baby at around the same time, well, neither is he the lumbering, drunken embarrassment he personified in 1964’s ‘Witchcraft’, so again, that’s something. A Likeable, comforting presence, the only thing that undermines Chaney’s performance here is that he just seems too *nice* to be an evil, undead warlock.

VIII.

Forgot about all that though. As I’m sure most fans of this film will readily acknowledge, the real star of ‘The Haunted Palace’ is Daniel Haller’s extraordinary production design.

If you’ve read anything about the AIP Poe pictures, you’ll probably be familiar with the way in which the crew maintained the ‘flats’ used for the sets of the films, slightly expanding and redressing them as the budget of each installment allowed, thus creating the impression that production values and interior sets were gradually becoming grander as the series progressed. As the last of the cycle made on U.S. soil, ‘The Haunted Palace’ presumably represents the apex of this approach, and, however hackneyed you may find the film’s constituent parts, you’d be hard-pressed to deny that the results are pretty damn magnificent. Expertly rebuilding and redressing the materials they’d assembled over the past few years, Haller and his collaborators here set a new benchmark for visual splendor in ‘60s gothic horror cinema; a benchmark that, to be honest, few ever stepped up to challenge as the appeal of these studio-bound fantasias declined sharply in the second half of the decade.

By the standards of low/mid budget 1960s filmmaking, the scale and detail of Curwen’s subterranean altar chamber is astonishing. From the vast wooden gantries leading down to the main hall, walls atmospherically lit by dozens of flaming torches (which, surprisingly, do not end up contributing to the obligatory closing inferno) to the towering, apparently ceiling-less cavern that houses the altar itself - its sheer size implying that it was designed to house the manifestation of some Cthulhu-like monstrosity - the gradual reveal of this centerpiece during the opening flashback is one of those wonderful “good grief, they actually BUILT this?” moments that horror films all too rarely manage to deliver; a jaw-dropper on par with the vertiginous grandeur of the iconic lab set in ‘Bride of Frankenstein’.

The eight foot high gouts of flame that Price ignites in the braziers surrounding the altar, the grotesquely elaborate wooden winding mechanism, reminiscent of medieval torture devices (and probably repurposed from the ones used in ‘Pit..’, more than likely) that opens to grated door to the glowing pit below, the angular, S&M-tinged frame to which sacrificial virgins are bound… what can you say? It’s certainly one of my favourite cinematic representations of this perennially blood-curdling pulp fiction spectacle.

IX.

Happily, this attention to detail is carried across to most other aspects of the film’s visual identity too. The matte paintings that introduce us to the geography of the village and the exterior of the palace – always one of my favourite aspects of these ‘60s gothics – are particularly lovely examples of the form, each looking as if it could have been pulled straight from the pages of some much-loved Victorian storybook, and the fog-shrouded village sets remain equally evocative, even as their theatrical painted backdrops and wobbly fence-posts are rather unflatteringly revealed via the miracle of blu-ray.(3)

Meanwhile, the extensive graveyard set that forms the conduit between village and castle is also wonderfully realised; the slow pan across the blasted heathland carelessly dotted with headstones, harking back of course to the opening of ‘..Usher’, must have had Tim Burton shuddering with envy every time he revisited ‘The Haunted Palace’ (which, I would humbly suggest, may have been frequently).

And thankfully, it’s not just the sets in ‘The Haunted Palace’ that are right on the money either. Intelligent casting ensures that even the film’s minor characters are vividly and memorably portrayed, from the gurning villagers (old pros Cook and Gordon are joined by several other agreeably gnarled faces) to the aforementioned Cathie Merchant as Curwen’s mistress; even the young blonde girl shanghaied by Curwen and co in the opening flashback makes a strong impression with her unnerving look of dead-eyed, sinister acceptance.(4)

The only major misstep with the film’s production design in fact is the extremely questionable realisation of the creature in the pit during the finale. I’m not sure at what stage of the film’s production the decision was taken to feature a visible ‘monster’, but apparently the old “the house is the monster” line that Corman used to sell ‘..House of Usher’ to his paymasters just wasn’t going to cut it this time around, and, from all appearances, I’m guessing the filmmakers weren’t given much time in which to ponder the problem of how to film the indescribable before the curtain fell and the finished effects shots were needed.

As such, there’s no way to sugar-coat the fact that what they came up with can best be described as a mutilated ‘Creature from the Black Lagoon’ Aurora model kit shot through a fish-tank, accompanied by ‘roars’ that sound like they just put some reverb on the MGM lion. As far as on-screen representations of cthulhoid monstrosities go, it’s not a good start.

That ‘The Haunted Palace’ manages to stumble through such a disaster without completely annihilating the audience’s good feeling is, in a sense, the best possible testament to the atmosphere and dramatic exuberance the film manages to accumulate prior to its final reel. Even whilst I sometimes wish there was a special edition of the film in which those ‘special effects’ shots were prefaced by footage of an apologetic Roger Corman saying “well, the word was, we had to have a monster, and we only had about fifty bucks to split between this and the catering, so… y’know..”, it’s still remarkable that, when I re-watch ‘The Haunted Palace’ in the right frame of mind, I’m just about able to suspend disbelief and go with it.

X.

Whilst ‘The Haunted Palace’ is undoubtedly a travesty of Lovecraft’s work in many ways, I can’t deny that I still get a huge kick out of the elements of his mythology that do remain within it. As diluted and ill-served as the source text may be, the film is still full weird and incongruous notions, creeping around the corners of the film’s rigidly formulaic structure in a manner that, for me at least, is hugely entertaining.

Having sat through what feels like a thousand exposition-heavy dinner table conversations in gothic horror movies, it’s difficult to express how much I love the equivalent scene here, in which, rather than directing us toward family curses, tainted bloodlines or some other over-familiar hokum, nominal voice-of-scientific-reason Dr Willet instead starts banging on about the “..the Elder Gods, the dark ones from beyond who had once ruled the world, and will one day rule again..”, name-checking Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth before directing Ward and his wife toward a certain forbidden tome that was once said to reside in the palace (I like the slight New York twang Frank Maxwell gives to the word ‘Necronomicon’) - all of course framed in conventional “..you know the kind of thing these primitive people believe..” terms, even though Arkham’s villagers display no knowledge of or interest in such obscure notions.

Whilst the old “doing the Lovecraft bit” speech may seem quaintly familiar to horror fans these days, such ravings must have left yr average 1960s audience slightly taken aback. Simply by throwing this stuff in as background for Curwen’s sorcery, Corman and Beaumont suddenly change the game completely, breaking free from the comparatively cozy Christian cosmology and human-shaped ambassadors from the beyond that had dominated horror movies up to this point, and no doubt planting the seed of all manner of vast and horrifying possibilities within the minds of more imaginative young viewers, just as HPL originally intended.

Though the mellifluous Latin incantations Vincent Price uses to summon his pet whatever-it-is during the film’s finale may be a far cry from the guttural, alien tongues favoured by Lovecraft’s cultists, Curwen nonetheless delivers a particularly chilling line during his obligatory ‘villain diatribe’, wherein, after chiding his opponents for their failure to ‘understand’ his work, he says of himself and his fellow warlocks, “..as a matter of fact, we don’t really understand ourselves… we just obey..”.

Beautifully delivered by Price with a cracked half-chuckle, this gets about as close as this or any other movie adaptation has to a genuinely Lovecraftian moment of cosmic horror – the vain-glorious sorcerer sheepishly admitting that it is not his own will he is realising; that he is in fact just as much of a ‘victim’ as the hypnotised women he strings up on his altar, blindly propagating the unknowable, inhuman agenda of the ancient entity he has blundered his way into serving, and just a likely to be gobbled up alongside them when the time comes.

XI.

It is also interesting that, mirroring the ‘pick & mix’ approach taken by the Poe films, Corman and Beaumont actually manage to incorporate a few elements into ‘The Haunted Palace’ that were taken from Lovecraft stories other than ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’ – further suggesting that this project arose from a wider appreciation of the author’s work, rather than a “hey, this is a cool story, let's do it” one-off.

For one thing, mythos nerds will have been yelling at me since this review’s opening paragraphs for failing to clarify that the events of ‘..Charles Dexter Ward’ actually take place in Lovecraft’s real life home of Providence, Rhode Island, rather his fictitious Arkham, as featured here. For another, the “village cursed by half-breed/mutant off-spring” sub-plot appended to ‘The Haunted Palace’ is one that plays a prominent role in several other Lovecraft stories (most famously of course in ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’), but is entirely absent from ‘..Charles Dexter Ward’, whilst the dread Necronomicon – allotted much importance in Beaumont’s screenplay – is only mentioned in passing in the story, slotted in amid references to numerous other forbidden tomes, both real and invented.(5)

Curious too is the way that ‘The Haunted Palace’ seems to some extent to have ‘set the blue-print’ for Lovecraftian cinema, as can be seen from the way that several ideas and images from the film frequently reoccur in subsequent adaptations, despite the fact that they have only the most tenuous connection to Lovecraft’s fiction.

In particular, the image of a screaming heroine trussed up for sacrifice on an altar above a pit from which some unspeakable creature clamour is one that I don’t think ever actually occurs in Lovecraft, but, given its self-explanatory appeal as a cool scene for a movie, such scenarios have popped up again in both AIP’s version of ‘The Dunwich Horror’ (1970) and Stuart Gordon’s ‘Dagon’ (2001), amongst others.

Similarly difficult to account for is the longevity of the old “deformed, cannibalistic relative locked in the attic” meme, which appears for what I think may be the first time in ‘The Haunted Palace’. This went on to recur in both David Greene’s ‘The Shuttered Room’ (1967) and Gordon’s ‘Castle Freak’ (1995), in addition to dozens of other, unconnected horror films, in which it is often identified as a ‘Lovecraftian’ element, despite the fact that, as far as I recall, this idea never features at all in any of Lovecraft’s core stories.(6)

XII.

One last item I’d like to discuss before we (FINALLY) get to the end of this review is something that occurred to me whilst rewatching ‘The Haunted Palace’ for the first time in a few years – namely, the possibility of it having exerted an influence on another much-loved key text in the “Lovecraftian-but-not-Lovecraft” canon mentioned earlier, Lucio Fulci’s ‘The Beyond’ (1981).

Now, I’m not saying I have anything concrete to go on here, but the casual similarities between the two films are such that I can’t help but speculate that ‘The Haunted Palace’ may have been lurking in the background when Fulci and his collaborators knocked out their initial outline for ‘The Beyond’. I’m not sure whether any of the numerous writers who have lavished attention on Fulci’s film over the years have picked up on this before, but think about it. Opening flashback in which a grimoire-toting necromancer is violently punished by torch-wielding villagers? His clueless descendants inheriting the deserted property and umming and ahhing over whether to sell or renovate it? Sinister encounters with blind/eyeless people? The implication of a ‘gate to other dimensions’ or somesuch lurking in the basement?

As I say, none of this would stand up in court, and none of these were exactly novel elements for a horror film in 1981, but the similarities are sufficiently numerous to make it worth mulling over I think, especially in view of ‘The Beyond’s oft-remarked Lovecraftian overtones.

Ok, now that we’ve got that over with – concluding paragraph!

It is an odd paradox that, despite its novel subject matter, ‘The Haunted Palace’ is actually the AIP gothic horror film that adheres most strictly and straight-facedly to the conventions of the genre. There are no innovations, sub-texts or big ideas to upset the apple cart here, and to my mind the film is all the better for it. Taken on its own terms, it is a nigh-on transcendent testament to the power of ‘60s gothic, a towering heap of fan service to those of us who love the peculiar architecture of this particular misbegotten corner of filmmaking. And of course, this formal context only serves to make it all the more enjoyable when weird incursions of pulpy, Lovecraftian strangeness begin to make themselves felt, like a glowing green icing on the cake.

To more, shall we say.. rational?.. viewers, ‘The Haunted Palace’ will seem a superfluous and unremarkable addition to the Corman/Poe cycle – a “more of the same” hotch-potch of undercooked ideas and clichés. But for those of us with the right temperament, we who revel in the texture, the atmosphere and the mad, misfiring notions of horror films that seem to have been left to warp for too long in some mildewed basement, it is a pure joy - one of the most immersive and richly satisfying experiences that early ‘60s horror has to offer.

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(1) Opening-witch-curse-flashback also popped up in 1960’s ‘City of the Dead’ (aka ‘Horror Hotel’), and reoccurred a year after ‘The Haunted Place’ in The Long Hair of Death, if anyone’s keeping score. As Mondo 70 recently reminded me, it also pops up in Chano Urueta’s great ‘El Baron del Terror’ (aka ‘The Brainiac’, 1962), which gives us examples from three continents. Anyone want to point me in the direction of an Asian witch-burning/curse movie circa 1959-63, for a full house..?

(2) Seriously, this guy walks in, apparently out of nowhere, says “hi, how you doing?” (I paraphrase), then quietly hangs out in the background until the conclusion, at which point he inexplicably disappears! Scripting issues aside, I’m frankly amazed that Corman didn’t see the opportunity to save an actor’s fee here.

(3) To clarify, I should point out that the screen-shots used in this review are definitely NOT taken from any of the recent blu-ray presentations of this film. They are actually from the Studio Canal DVD included in a UK Corman box set from a few years back, if you must know, and I’ve artificially brightened a few shots because it looked pretty goddamned dark.

(4)The oracle of IMDB reveals to me that the sacrificial victim was portrayed by one Darlene Lucht, whose other notable screen credits included ‘Muscle Beach Party’ (1965) and ‘Five Bloody Graves’ (1969). You go girl, etc.

(5) Purely based on the text of ‘The Case of Charles Dexter Ward’, one would probably have sidelined the Necronomicon (mentioned twice) in favour of the works of one ‘Borellus’ (most likely 17th century French scholar and alleged alchemist Pierre Borel), whose speculations about resurrecting the dead using “..essential Saltes of humane Dust” seem to have provided Lovecraft with the inspiration for the story, and whose name is mentioned over a dozen times in the text.

(6)Ok, so I’ll cop that “deformed, cannibalistic relative locked in the attic” is admittedly the basis of the August Derleth “collaboration” upon which ‘The Shuttered Room’ is based, and the idea is at least vaguely implied in both ‘The Shadow Over Innsmouth’ and ‘The Lurking Fear’… but I still find it interesting that this has come to be seen as a “Lovecraftian” reference point in horror cinema, despite the fact that Lovecraft never actually set pen to paper to fully describe it in the first place.

CASTLE CREEP: The Eighth Annual Stereo Sanctity / Breakfast In The Ruins Halloween Mix CD.

Cross-posted with Stereo Sanctity.

Here, as tradition demands, is this year’s All Hallows mix CD, presented for your listening pleasure, and hopefully allowing you enough time to incorporate its delights into your festivities, or dark and solitary rites, or whatever else you’re up to this weekend.

Rumours that I’m now running short of material for these mixes after eight years should be treated with the derision they deserve, and listeners may be assured that, if mainstays such as Roky Erikson, The Cramps and The Misfits are absent this year, newcomers like Bum and Vanilla Fudge should make for more than adequate replacements, and there’s even the world premiere of a new Skull Tennis track to get your pulse pounding too. Thrilling stuff and no mistake.

Featured movies this time around are ‘The Devil’s Nightmare’ (Jean Brismée, 1971 / soundtrack by Alessandro Alessandroni) and ‘The Psychic’ aka ‘Seven Notes in Black’ (Lucio Fulci, 1977 / soundtrack by Bixio, Frizzi & Tempera), with a little bit of ‘Gli Occhi Freddi Della Paura’ aka ‘The Cold Eyes of Fear’ (Enzo G. Castellari, 1971 / soundtrack by Ennio Morricone) thrown in for good measure.

Whatever you’ve got planned for Saturday night, I hope you can find some enjoyment herein.

1. …
2. Bixio / Frizzi / Tempera – Suicidio (Prologo)
3. The Raveonettes – Attack of the Ghost Riders
4. Thee Tsunamis – Haunted House
5. Clinic – Walking With Thee
6. Black Time – The Mummy
7. Alessandro Alessandroni – Devil’s Nightmare
8. …
9. Bixio / Frizzi / Tempera – Fuga
10. Lair of the Minotaur – The Wolf
11. Apache Dropout – Ghost Stories
12. Skull Tennis – Gorilla in the Castle
13. Ennio Morricone – Seguita
14. …
15. Bixio / Frizzi / Tempera – Tunnels
16. Affinity – Three Sisters
17. Bum – God of Darkness
18. Vanilla Fudge – Season of the Witch
19. Alessandro Alessandroni – Dark Dreamer
20. …
21. Bixio / Frizzi / Tempera – Strane Visioni
22. Loren Mazzacane Conors – Blue Ghost Blues
23. Haikai No Ku – Saltes of Humane Dust
24. …
25. Dawn of the Replicants – Fearless Vampire Hunters

Link.

Four Poes.

(Everyman Library, 1975 – cover photograph by Graham Tucker.)

(Panther, 1967 – “Cover illustration shows ‘Venus Asleep’ be Paul Delvaux. Reproduction by courtesy of the Tate Gallery, London.”)

(Signet, 1960 – cover illustration unaccredited.)

(Digit, year unknown – cover illustration unaccredited.)

Normal posting schedule to hopefully be resumed shortly, but in the meantime, to help get us in an appropriately Autumnal / All Hallows-ish frame of mind, please enjoy this gallery of paperback Poe editions I’ve recently acquired.

By the time my own autumn has done come, I predict I will probably own about 147 printed versions of ‘The Gold Bug’, but, such is the vividness and variety of illustration & design work assigned to Poe collections over the years, I find it hard to say no when I spy one of these on the shelves.

Also, re: the Everyman edition pictured above, let’s just say that if that is indeed a ‘photograph’ as the back cover states, I want this Graham Tucker on my hypothetical payroll, pronto.

Furious (Tim Everitt & Tom Sartori, 1984)

 It occurred to me recently that I seem to have fallen into a bit of a… well, ‘rut’ isn’t quite the right word, but a bit of a comfortable routine, let’s say, in regard to the films I’ve been choosing to write about on this blog. Satisfying though it is to turn out functional reviews of straight-forward genre movies (yes, Jess Franco is a genre), long-time readers may be forgiven for wondering what happened to my vain attempts to grapple with the very existence of such wild outpourings of otherness as Alabama’s Ghost, or A Woman After a Killer Butterfly.

Well, rest assured, I certainly haven’t given up on seeking out and watching such films when the opportunity arises, even if trying to express my feelings about them in words often proves a pretty daunting task, amid the responsibilities of quote-unquote ‘adult life’.

Nonetheless though, I feel it’s time to step back up and do my duty toward the kind of synapse-malfunctioning cinematic weirdness that continues to perplex and delight me on a regular basis. As such, what we’ve got here is a little US-made ‘What The Fu’ number that, whilst it can’t quite compete with the “glancing blow from the Flying Guillotine” level of derangement achieved by many of its Asian counterparts in the martial arts/wuxia game, nonetheless beckons the patient viewer into a whole other realm of non-standard consciousness. So it’s probably about time I nixed the italics and started to tell you about it.

The twin gifts of VHS crate-digging and easy digital distribution of otherwise unavailable movies has in recent years drawn wider attention to all sorts of jaw-dropping oddities, from the depredations of the Intrepidos Punks to the travails of the Ginseng King, but one of the most fascinating artifacts that has filtered down to me lately through the VHS-to-Avi grapevine is entitled ‘Furious’, and dates from 1984.

I can’t remember quite how I ended up watching this fan-made Youtube trailer for ‘Furious’ (1984), but watch it I did. I learned, as you will too if you click through the above link, that ‘Furious’ (1984) appears to be an extremely low budget American kung-fu film in which, amongst other things, a boiler-suited Devo-esque rock band plays atonal synth music, a giant polystyrene dragon’s head belches dry ice, and an evil sorcerer fires live chickens out of his hands, hadoken style.

I know – nuff said, right? If you feel like deserting this review straight away and finding a way to obtain ‘Furious’ (1984) by any means possible, be my guest. We’ll check in again after you’ve finished watching it.

For those who have decided to read on, I should caution that, once ‘Furious’ (1984) is acquired in some form, expectations generated by the description above should be simmered down a little, and attention spans tweaked accordingly before viewing. Perhaps try a few minutes of meditation, stare at the ceiling whilst playing a Terry Riley record, or put aside your default movie-beers for a pot of green tea. That’s more the vibe you need to go for here, I feel.

Basically, those anticipating a non-stop cavalcade of high velocity, laugh-out-loud zaniness will be left with only a fairly thin serving of WTF yuks spread across a modest 74 min run-time. Viewers willing to put such concerns aside though and simply take the film as it comes will find themselves experiencing a more genuinely inexplicable piece of work than they could possibly have anticipated.

I don’t know whether there’s much tangible background information out there to explain the existence of ‘Furious’, but at the time of writing, I know next to nothing about the circumstances of its production – which is perhaps for the best.

The only real ‘name’ individuals involved here are brothers Phillip and Simon Rhee, renowned karate champions who went on to achieve certain amount of success via the ‘Best of the Best’ trilogy of STV action flicks in the early ‘90s.(1)

If ‘Furious’ was conceived as an early vehicle for the Rhee brothers though, it’s safe to say it was one that stalled before getting past the front gate. Possibly this was a result of their decision to work with what we might assume to be a gang of idiosyncratic So-Cal film students jointly inspired by marijuana, New Age mysticism and the films of Jean Cocteau… but all of that is pure speculation.

All we can say for sure about the story behind ‘Furious’ is based on what we can glean from watching the movie itself - and the fact the information thus gleaned adds up to almost nothing whatsoever is in a sense what makes the film so fascinating. Like all great outsider movies, ‘Furious’ succeeds by vestige of its continual refusal to adhere to *any* recognisable pattern. It toys with familiar genres and tropes here and there (kung-fu, art film, sci-fi, comedy), half-heartedly rubbing them together before ultimately discarding them and – in keeping with the wisdom commonly dished out to martial arts protagonists – finding its own path and following it to the bitter end.

The aims, methods and motivations of the creative team behind ‘Furious’ remain entirely opaque throughout the film’s duration. There is almost no point in the course of the film’s run time at which you could stop and think “yeah, I see where these guys were going with this”. We simply have no idea. Chances are, we never will either, unless someone tracks down credited writers/directors/producers Tim Everitt and Tom Sartori and demands an explanation. Even then, one imagines their faded memories and protestations of innocence wouldn’t do a great deal to illuminate matters. Basically, ‘Furious’ remains a glorious mystery – which is exactly the way we like it around here, needless to say. (2)

Sometimes the only way to get anywhere with a review like this is via a synopsis, so, let’s get down to it.

Post-credits sequence, and the wind whistles gently through some low, grassy hills. A beautiful young woman in traditional Chinese costume is fleeing from some men dressed in a manner suggestive of barbaric Mongol warriors. The woman appears to be following the guidance of a flattened ivory tusk, which, when spun on her open palm, points her in a certain direction. The Mongols communicate with each other using loud bird calls. This goes on for quite some time. The swirling, birds-eye-view crane shots utilised here are quite impressive, speaking well of the film’s technical know-how and ambition, but, as the pacing is quite relaxed and we have no idea who these people are, none of it is terribly exciting.

After the woman reaches a plateau on the summit of a vertical cliff face and fights off some of the Mongols with a wooden pole, the tusk leads her to a small cave containing a human skull and a cigar box. Regrettably, the lead Mongol – who is a blonde caucasian, incidentally - catches up with her and kills her (off-screen), claiming the magic tusk for himself.

We cut to Simon Rhee, who is lighting some candles in front of a framed photograph of the deceased woman, and shedding a few manly tears. In contrast to the previous scene, clothes and accoutrements here are suggestive of the late twentieth century.

Simon, who lives in a wooden shack in the forest, is clearly very sad. The small army of children in karate pyjamas who stand patiently outside his home awaiting his teachings can sense this, and it makes them feel sad too. Simon dutifully marches them all off to a sort of makeshift training ground and demonstrates some kick-ass moves for them, but they can tell his heart is not in it. When the punch bag he is using falls to the ground, he solemnly leads them back home, and returns to his shack.

Then, the chief Mongol guy from the opening scene knocks on Simon’s door (further proving himself a jerk by casually kicking a dog in the process). He hands Simon a single playing card, and leaves again in silence. Written upon the card are two Chinese characters.

Cut to an establishing shot of a sinister, glass-fronted black tower-block. Perhaps it might be a university library or something in real life, but murky synth pulses on the soundtrack signify evil. In a dojo within the building, a karate demonstration is in progress. Phillip Rhee – white haired, wearing ‘aging’ make-up – watches approvingly.

“Alright”, he says, clapping his hands. Thirteen minutes in, and this is the film’s first word of dialogue, bird calls and grunts of exertion notwithstanding. Phillip’s right hand men are a black guy with a fine moustache and a really snazzy looking jacket, and a white guy with an equally good moustache and a very sinister demeanor. The chief Mongol appears from behind a black curtain and nods to them.

In a control room elsewhere in the sinister building, functionaries in white boiler suits and wrap-around shades monitor CCTV signals. Outside, two similarly clad guards oversee the main entrance. They appear to be robotically controlled minions or something? It’s not very clear.

Simon approaches the main entrance purposefully. Inserting the card the Mongol gave him in a reader in the door, he gains admission. Cautiously exploring the darkened office space behind the dojo’s black curtain, Simon sees a chicken cross a corridor. This will be the first of many chickens featured in ‘Furious’. Encountering the white, mustached henchman, Simon is summoned to an audience with Phillip, who is levitating in a black-walled room with rather groovy floor tiles.

Following a few master/pupil pleasantries, it seems they have a lot to talk about. “Your sister’s fate has becomes known to me, and your actions henceforth will alter the karmic debt she is paid”, Phillip says. “You are now between anvil and hammer – one truly orders one’s own destiny. The dove is a gentle creature, full of good – but if it encounters creatures greater than itself, it can be transformed.”

As he speaks, the mustached man pulls out a red handkerchief and performs some simple magic tricks, producing a bird from a handkerchief by way of demonstrating this dove metaphor.

“Seek who wears this sign,” says Phillip, passing Simon a pendant engraved with another mysterious character. “This will be the first stage on your journey.”

Presently, Simon and a small group of his ‘friends’ – two soft spoken, shaggy-haired white dudes in Hawaiian shirts and a lady in a knitted jumper carrying a Polaroid camera – visit a Chinese restaurant whose name has been identified as containing the character etched on the pandent.

Finding the restaurant closed, the gang are exploring what appears to be the courtyard of a small shopping mall when an unmarked black truck pulls up, and some men, led by the black guy in the snazzy jacket from the earlier scene, begin unloading – of course – CRATES OF CHICKENS.

Angered by the sight of Simon and his friends hanging around near the closed restaurant, the men become aggressive, initiating a free-for-all kung fu battle in which the mild-mannered friends hold their own quite well against the restaurant’s heavies – until that is, the stakes are raised by the intervention of a chef, who appears seemingly from nowhere and, with a vicious “Hi-YAH!”, dispatches one of Simon’s friends with a flying meat cleaver!

From then on, it’s absolute carnage. Crates full of chickens are thrown from roofs. The jumper lady gets in a great crotch kick and eye gouge combo. Simon slices the chef’s throat with his own cleaver. There are nunchucks, rooftop snipers and slow motion falls from first floor balconies. For a minor altercation regarding the opening hours of a Chinese restaurant, things are getting pretty intense.

Simon eventually succeeds in routing his opponents, who flee in the black chicken truck, but in the aftermath of the battle, all three of his friends lay dead. It’s safe to say his “journey” has not got off to a good start.

By this point, we are about one third of the way through the movie. Thereafter, it starts to get strange.

There are several visits to a shrine in the wilderness, where sinister voices whisper inaudibly on the soundtrack in a quite unnerving manner, whilst we are treated to some disorientating cross-cutting between Simon and a statue of the Buddha. “Travelling in a spiritual void can be dangerous”, an extremely sinister whispering voice repeats several times on the second of these visits. “Beware of Chan, he is evil”, the voice proceeds to repeat no less than ten times, as a montage of pieces of footage from other parts of the film is juxtaposed with shots of Simon contorting his face in pain. Who the hell is Chan, we may be forgiven for asking. Whilst I assume it must be Phillip Rhee’s character, I’m still not entirely sure.

And as to the scene in which Simon sensibly returns to the Chinese restaurant when it is open… what can you say? Ostensibly this is a public place of business, open to all, but, in keeping with the unwarranted aggression previously displayed by its staff, what we find within instead resembles a kind of interzone between two worlds - a cavernous, darkened room in which pensioners tuck into plates of greasy-looking duck, willing participants in some kind of terrifying, alien surrealism, reminiscent of the ‘other place’ sequences in David Lynch’s ‘Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me’.

The difference is though, whereas Lynch’s films evoke a very deliberate brand of gnawing, nightmarish otherness, ‘Furious’ seems to have stumbled into this dread realm entirely by accident, for reasons that I doubt even the filmmakers themselves would be able to sufficiently explain.

Rather than transcribing events in detail, it is probably best if I leave the specifics of this scene to your imagination until you get a a chance to see it for yourself – suffice to say, it had quite an effect on me.

In some ways, the methodology of ‘Furious’ reminds me of nothing so much as George Barry’s Death Bed – another unique piece of marginal American cinema. The same sort of slow, pulsing rhythm and careful positioning of strong visual elements is very much in evidence, as is the focus on close-up shots of inanimate objects and disembodied body parts; vivid images pulled from the natural resources surrounding the film’s production and examined, juxtaposed, mined for some obtuse poetic value or oddball humour, as if witnessing the workings of a mind entirely different from your own slowly unfolding before your eyes.

Whilst Barry succeeded in bringing a singular vision to the screen though, the disparate elements that play into ‘Furious’s final form are more suggestive of a malfunctioning brain-trust of different individuals, each pulling in a slightly different direction. Basically, the movie plays like an over-ambitious student film that went off the rails as different contributors began throwing in their own ideas (“hey, I know these guys who are really good at karate”, “hey, these friends of mine have this really weird band”, “hey, I found this fantastic location up in the mountains”, “hey, let’s make this film really COSMIC”, “no, it’s got to be FUNNY, put in more chickens!” etc), only later trying to piece the results together into something approaching a workable whole.

One consistent element at least is the pacing, which remains leisurely throughout – more Jess Franco than Sammo Hung – suggesting the presence of someone behind the camera more concerned with crafting a piece of meditative art cinema than a rousing action / adventure effort.

Martial arts sequences that play more like sporting demonstrations than life or death battles are admittedly quite commonplace in the world of low budget kung fu, but rarely have I encountered showdowns quite as *languid* as the ones featured here. Though the aforementioned Chinese restaurant massacre is admittedly quite frantic, later fights have me itching to inaugurate the term “stoner-fu” – a phrase that could sum up the whole film quite nicely to be honest, should you need a one sentence soundbite to sell it to friends or local film club or whatever. (I’ll also give you “it’s like ‘Miami Connection’ meets ‘The Seventh Seal’!” free of charge.)

Not that there are any issues with the quality of the martial techniques on display in the film, I hasten to add. Simon Rhee is an excellent screen-fighter, insofar as I’m qualified to judge, whilst most of the other participants get a few good licks in too, and there are some decent stunts thrown in for good measure. Entirely divorced from the editing rhythms and directorial velocity that energises Hong Kong kung fu though, these scenes nonetheless tend to become as hypnotic and temporally disengaged as a Franco sex scene, or a Werner Herzog stare into the undergrowth. Ultimately, the result is just kind of pleasant. Undemanding. Like watching people performing yoga in the park during your lunch break. With the film’s ostensible ‘story’ remaining largely unguessable, you almost expect the fighters to shake hands when their considerate brawling is concluded.

The music in ‘Furious’, credited to one Mikhail Bodik, largely consists of stuff that sounds like it was pilfered from one of those dusty old Hollywood soundtrack LPs favored by Andy Milligan. This plays incessantly, sometimes overlaid with startling outbursts of atonal synth racket and passages of aching melancholia that could have escaped from Leyland Kirby’s Haunted Ballroom. Much of the time, the music is very low in the mix – sometimes finding itself almost drowned out by birdsong and other background noise – lending it a subliminal, slightly intangible feel that, along with the awkwardly post-synced dialogue, adds greatly to the ‘disconnected’ atmosphere of the film as a whole.

Amid the obtusely symbolic craziness that comprises much of ‘Furious’s second half, a highlight for many viewers will no doubt be Simon’s battle with the aforementioned mustached magician henchman. This fellow seems to be the lord of the ‘chicken magic’ that rules the roost (sorry) within Phillip/Master Chan’s evil empire. We have earlier seen him using magical fireballs to transform some of Phillip’s fighters into chickens (for reasons that never become clear), and here he cackles maniacally as he uses occult hand gestures to summon hens out of thin air and propel them at Simon with great force – an impressive feat, to say the least.

At the height of this confrontation, for reasons that also remain entirely obscure to me, the magician is transformed into a small pig. I mean, an actual small pig, whose head briefly protrudes from the man’s robes, before falling to the ground where it lies prone. Apparently close to death, the pig begins to speak, and, astonishingly, its words appear to be roughly in sync with its lip movements. How do you suppose they pulled that one off, without the aid of any digital effects..?

At first I at a loss trying to figure out how this effect was achieved, but upon revisiting the film for this review, I’m forced to conclude that the filmmakers simply shot footage of the reclining pig chewing or licking its lips, and had the voice actor dub his lines around the animal’s natural movements – a circumstance that certainly helps explain the strange, Yoda-like cadences with which it speaks.

Forming a deathbed confession of sorts, the discourse of the magician-as-pig  is quite difficult to follow, but if I’m interpreting it correctly, he seems to accuse Phillip/Chan with utilizing “capitalism and fast food franchises” in addition to “sorcery” as tools with which to further his evil goals, one of which seemingly involved keeping the magician-pig in psychic bondage.

The pig also speaks of “forbidden Mongolian caves”, to whence the magical tusk he entrusts to Simon will point the way, containing “the key to the universe”. If you’re still doggedly holding out for an explanation of what the hell is going on by this stage in proceedings, I’m afraid that’s about as close as you’re going to get.

Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention - that Devo-esque band I mentioned earlier are only in the film proper for about ten seconds, although we get to see a bit more of them during the closing credits. Comprising a few of the black towerblock’s boilersuit-clad minions, I can only assume that the implication is that some of these zombie-guards have been given leave to form a weird rock band on their down-time, which I suppose makes about as much sense as anything else in ‘Furious’. (Considerately, they drop their instruments and race out to help when an alarm goes off alerting them to intruders.)

I wish we could hear the sound that these guys were actually making, rather than the post-dubbed synth squiggles on the soundtrack, because it looks absolutely wild.

From all of the above, you might well get the impression that ‘Furious’ is mad as the proverbial bag of snakes – a diagnosis that, whilst tempting, ultimately does the film a disservice I think.

Though it is indeed incomprehensible to a degree that is almost unique in the annals of commercial cinema, I don’t believe that ‘Furious’ is really “insane” as such.

In fact, I would argue that the storyline is actually quite linear, in its own strange way. The problem is though, rather than using conventionally understandable events and signifiers to move the narrative forward, the film instead seems to be operating via a system of visual secret codes whose meaning has been completely lost somewhere on the rocky road between brain, script and screen.

The spinning magic tusk, the chickens, the exploding cigar box, the Mongols, the hand gestures, the playing cards and magic tricks - what does it all mean? All of these things seem like elements of some particular fantastical mythology created by the filmmakers, but no one has taken the time to introduce us to it, or to provide us with a key by which to interpret it, leaving us merely to guess or imagine the significance of each passing absurdity.

In keeping with film’s vague, esoteric themes, it often seems as if ‘Furious’ operates according to its own unique system of divinatory correspondences – the private tarot of some lost, incense-fogged soul wondering around the corridors of an abandoned film school somewhere in the wilds of California.

Further thought along these lines inevitably leads us back to speculation as to who made this film and why, and, short of any forthcoming revelations on the subject, we, like the interpreters of Nostradamus, could just go on speculating indefinitely. Far better I think to empty our minds of such thoughts, and enjoy ‘Furious’ for what it is – the shell of what was once a poverty-stricken independent genre movie, filled to the brim with exquisite mystery, awkwardly mixed by hands unknown.

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(1) In recent years, Simon Rhee has also found work as a stunt coordinator on numerous A-list Hollywood productions, according to IMDB.

(2) For the record, Tim Everitt went on to direct a couple of low budget thrillers in the ‘90s and has subsequently worked on visual effects on a number of bigger Hollywood productions. Tom Sartori has numerous credits as a ‘colorist’ for TV series and documentaries. If either of these gentlemen has ever publically spoken about ‘Furious’, I am unaware of it.