Romance of Mystery

Runtime: 83 minutes
Country: USA
Cast and Crew
Directed by John McNaughton
Written by Richard Fire and John McNaughton
Starring Michael Rooker, Tom Towles, Tracy Arnold, and Ray Atherton
In my last review, I wrote of how the film Battle Royale was disturbing and unsettling for several reasons, child brutality being the foremost example. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer is also very disturbing and unsettling. But the two films work on completely different levels. Battle Royale is tinged with fast-paced action sequences and contains an operatic score that likens the film to a kabuki tragedy. Henry is more akin to that creepy uncle that your family doesn't invite to the reunion. It is a dark and gritty piece of cinema that slithers down your throat and leaves you with a cold and queasy feeling in your bowels. To put it succinctly, it's beautiful.
Henry leaves a roadside diner on his day off of work, cruising about the Chicago streets in his beat up car. Henry is a killer, a serial killer to be exact. He has left a horrid path of corpses in his wake, the dead bodies of once beautiful women mercilessly slaughtered and left to rot. He rooms with lunkheaded Otis is his scummy apartment when he isn't working for an extermination company or scoping out victims. Henry is surprised to find Otis has brought his abused sister Becky to the place in order for her to begin life anew. This new arrival sets off the gears of an unstoppable machine where Otis is drawn into Henry's homicidal proclivities. The result is an insane crescendo of violence where no one is safe from Henry's wrath...
The depravity, if you'll allow me, seems to radiate from the screen as we watch Henry go about his day to day activities. That in of itself is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the film. Henry coolly stalks women through the winding streets and prompts Otis to kill unsuspecting victims as if he were simply taking out his laundry or reading from the phone book. Henry is an empty shell, fueled only by the addictive lust to destroy human lives. Everything about him (his job, his interactions with people) are only accommodations he must make in order to move in for the kill and blend into society.
American Psycho and the television series Dexter also deal with murderous men performing only the absolute necessities of humanity in order for their true nature to go undetected. The strength of these two examples primarily depend on the strong and complex performances of the lead actors, Christian Bale and Michael C. Hall respectively. Henry is no exception. Michael Rooker delivers his lines in a manner that evokes both shivers and fascination. The Southern lilt to his voice is infectious; you may find yourself nodding along with Henry's words, as disturbed as they may be. The scene between him and Becky where he discusses how he murdered his mother is perfection. The proverbial pin makes a deafening crash during the oppressive silence that occurs in between Becky's wide-eyed curiousness and Henry's quiet rage. For having no acting experience whatsoever, Rooker hits the nail on the head with his dynamite role.
The film does not lose one ounce of the demented power it exercised over shocked audiences twenty years ago. The brutality is coarse and in your face; you become a captive victim yourself as you are forced to watch the horror unfold before you. And I don't know about you, but if that videotape murder sequence doesn't chill you at least a little bit, your pulse must have ceased ages ago. Not even the realistic factors that were present in The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity can match the jaw-dropping nature of that scene. It seems to be a pioneer of that oft-repeated "handheld camera" look that films try to desperately achieve. Henry gets it down to a science. If you didn't know any better, you would be positively sure that the actors had broken into a home and started terrorizing an actual family. It gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. Not to mention Otis's nonchalant request: "I wanna see it again."
According to John McNaughton, there was an occasion where a stupefied audience member actually confronted him and said "You can't do that." He was appalled that the director would make a film where the villain, after performing unspeakable acts, was left unscathed and unharmed by the law at the film's end. McNaughton's simple reply was "We just did." That quote is a good summation of the film as a whole. McNaughton and company sought to make a horror movie that dealt with the human monsters among us, set in the harsh landscape of the starkest of realities. And they succeeded. Just cause they wanted to. Deal with it. The movie is a good challenge for a viewer to put themselves through to test their endurance. Can they withstand the bloody crimes of a mad murderer? Can they distinguish where the lines of character and actor are defined? Can they take the horror of it all?
Trailer

Labels: 1980S, Creepy, Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer, Psycho, Serial Killer, The Crypt

Runtime: 51 minutes
Countries: USA
Cast and Crew
Directed by Dwain Esper
Written by Hildegarde Stadie
Starring William Woods, Horace B. Carpenter, Ted Edwards, Thea Ramsey
Production Company: Roadshow Attractions
The early 1930�s were an interesting time for film making. Just as pictures were making the transition from silent films to talkies, some people ran over a few road bumps on the path to glory. Some films stumbled along, the physical acting retained from the silent films only hampered even further by the wooden and creaky camera movements. Other films seemed to be clearly aware of these foibles but, instead of blushing in their midst, decided to blow their big ugly horns for the entire world to hear through sleazy, meritless exploitation movies. Good taste be damned! Morals? Bah! Dirty, cheap entertainment? More of that please! These are the qualities that make Maniac a fine picture indeed.
Don Maxwell (William Woods) is not well at all. A former vaudeville performer (his acting sure shows it!), the mentally unstable lad finds himself assisting the even loonier scientist Dr. Meirschultz (Horace B. Carpenter). The crazy kraut is determined on perfecting his formula for reanimating dead tissue... but oh! how will they ever find a body? Cue Maxwell�s brilliant powers of impersonation and the devious duo soon have a first class ticket to the town morgue that apparently highlights as a torture chamber on weekends.
Motivated by the success of his serum, Meirschultz tries to coax Maxwell into suicide so that he may use him in his experiments. The conversation goes something like "Oh, here. Kill yourself. No really, dude, it�ll be awesome. I�ll like revive you and stuff." Maxwell has a better idea: he guns down the doctor and then uses his Handy-Dandy Makeup Kit to complete his transformation into Meirschultz. What follows is a smorgasbord of insane antics that include homages to Poe, wrestling women, and a dramatically moving scene of a man eating a cat�s eyeball.
Dwain Esper was a talent in the pioneering days of sound films who knew the quickest way to an audience�s heart: mindless and morally objectionable drivel pumped through their popcorn-greased veins. You know what kind of film you�re in for when you witness a scene of young women parading around a bedroom in nothing but their lingerie. Masterpiece Theater this is not. Maniac is filled with so many similar scenes of laugh out loud hilarity that it seems tough to write a review that encompasses all of them. So instead I�ll take the quick and easy way coached to me by Mr. Esper to highlight a few memorable moments:
� The movie has one of the best opening scenes this side of The Dark Knight: a stirring title card that urges the audience to fight off any thoughts of fear in order to keep insanity at bay! Approved by a licensed doctor of course.
� During the scene where Maxwell and Meirschultz go to the morgue, the doctor takes out his stethoscope to check the corpse�s heart rate. Yep. She�s dead alright.
� What is with all of the animal fights? We have cats fighting dogs, canine on canine brutality, and an actress in male drag who makes a living from skinning felines and rats that she/he raises on a backyard farm. Uh huh...
� Whenever Maxwell is having a fit of mad laughter, the screen is filled with superimposed, surreal images derived from the darkest nightmares of Man and the foulest regions of Hell. Actually they�re just clips from Haxan: Witchcraft through the Ages and Fritz Lang's Siegfried.
� As if the beginning didn�t drive the point home, we have lovely "mental illness intermissions" that tell us of the brain disease that is to be portrayed in the following act. Trouble is, these intermissions like to come up right in the middle of a scene.
� And, in perhaps the greatest scene of the entire film, Maxwell/Meirschultz plans to dispose of an ill patient by injecting him with some water as a placebo. In a truly Looney Tunes moment, Maxwell accidentally grabs a hypodermic needle filled with SUPER-ADRENALINE and gives the bum a shot of the good stuff. The guy goes into a fit of diabolical acting and recites a bit of jam poetry before turning into a frothing monster. A girl wandering onto the wrong set finds the error of her ways when the horny maniac steals her into his scrawny arms and runs away with her into the night only to rip the dress off of a completely different actress.
Check it out for yourselves:

If you found yourself grinning like an idiot during any of these descriptions, then you know this film is for you. The performances delivered by the actors are so tremendous that they would make any high school drama teacher cringe in torture. William Woods should be given the Shatner Overacting Award for his portrayal of Mad Maxwell and an honorable mention for Best Man Vs. Cat Scene in a Motion Picture. Ted Edwards� brief but ever so memorable appearance as Mr. Buckley will undoubtedly be burned into the audience�s memory for years to come.
The crown jewel of this production though is Mr. Horace B. Carpenter as Dr. Meirschultz. Never before has the screen been so impressed than with the image of a mad German Santa Claus giving the best maniacal laughter ever while gleefully holding a floating brain in a jar. His insane ravings and ramblings tickle the spine and make the flesh creep in a positively devilish manner. As Dr. Meirschultz most appropriately intones to Maxwell in the film�s beginning: "Vonce a ham... alvays a ham!"
Maniac is an absolute delight for people who have tastes in things socially unacceptable. While the film may have a few slight hints of actual artistry (check out the Freudian moment when Maxwell/Meirschultz is walling up the body of his doppelganger mentor), these are quickly replaced by montages of the mad professor menacingly pumping his hypodermic needle as bare-chested woman run around the sound stage. If this sounds like your cup of super adrenaline, drink deep of all the side-splitting lunacy. The rest of the crowd can go watch cinematic trash like Citizen Kane.

Labels: 1930S, Exploitation, Maniac 34, Psycho, The Crypt

"I have the heart of a young boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk."
That quote, countlessly recited and paraphrased for God knows how long, is the perfect glimpse into the ghoulishly whimsical and macabre mind of horror scribe Robert Bloch. When considering who the first "inductee" should be into the cavernous spaces of the Hall of Heads, it only took me a few moments to come up with Bloch�s name. Why? In a way the man has been an introduction to me for a lot of things; most notably, it was his (in?)famous novel Psycho that served as my first and true entrance into the realm of online horror journalism. So what would be more fitting than having this wonderful man, an individual whose talents I have admired for so long, become the first honorary gourd to win a spot amongst the dusty shelves of acclaimed horror artisans?
It was on April 5, 1917 in Chicago that Robert was born, a son of his bank cashier father and social worker mother. The young Bloch always had an interest in the fantastic, from watching the eerie images of the skull-faced Lon Chaney stalk across the screen in 1925�s The Phantom of the Opera to reading the pulpy pages of Weird Tales magazine. After relocating to Milwaukee, Robert began to correspond with H. P. Lovecraft, the top writer at the magazine whose Cthulhu Mythos tales enthralled the mind of the young Bloch. After receiving some support from Lovecraft, Robert sold his first horror stories "The Secret In The Tomb" and "The Feast In The Abbey" to the very magazine he cherished so dearly� at the fresh age of seventeen!
During the rest of the decade Bloch began writing stories full-time, taking inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe and, of course, Lovecraft. After Lovecraft passed away in 1937, Robert began to experiment with his own style of prose, even selling his first science fiction story to Amazing Stories. It was around this time that the author began adopting and perfecting that dark and smarmy sense of humor that would forever distinguish him from his peers, as seen in such tales as "The Cloak" (about a horror film actor whose disdain for his work turns into terror when a stage cape transforms him into a bona fide bloodsucker) and the Lefty Feep tales, all whimsical stories concerning a hopeless nerd who has fantastic adventures (one which includes him transforming into a chicken mutant!).
With the onset of the 40�s, Bloch�s fiction began to show signs of interest in the psychological workings of demented minds. It was in 1943 that Bloch released one of his most memorable tales "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper" upon an unsuspecting public. Touching on the writer�s fascination with criminology and the legendary serial killer, the story went on to be adapted for both television and radio and is generally lauded as being one of Robert�s best works. Not to mention it packs one of the coolest twist endings ever. Throughout the following years Bloch began publishing his first novels, including The Scarf (1947), and The Kidnapper, Spiderweb, and The Will to Kill (all released in 1954!). These books were showing further signs of Bloch�s precise portrayal of damaged protagonists and the dark deeds they committed.
But it wouldn�t be until the end of the 50�s that he would follow up his mainstream novel Shooting Star (1958) with the work that would forever seal his fate as a legendary horror writer: Psycho. Published only a year prior to when Alfred Hitchcock�s film version had audiences everywhere going weeks without showers, Bloch�s novel gained him almost immediate stardom and rewarded (or cursed) him with nearly all of his future works carrying the title "The Man Who Wrote Psycho" underneath his byline. Today the book is usually outshined by the celluloid thriller, but the novel is as wholly effective, fast-paced, and engaging as it was for its first readers. In fact, I dare anyone not to feel the irresistible urge to pound through the gritty terror in one sitting!
A wonderfully candid shot of Bloch at a party.
Throughout the 60�s and 70�s, Bloch became a huge force in screen and television writing. Contributing tales of terror and vengeance to such boob tube staples as Boris Karloff�s Thriller and Alfred Hitchcock Presents (and even several episodes of the original Star Trek), Robert was able to flex his full writing powers. His filmed work didn�t bring an end to his output of novels, as seen in his releases of Firebug (1960) and The Couch (1962), both meditations on lead characters with homicidal tendencies. Robert even contributed two screenplays for lovable schlockmeister William Castle in 1964 for his films Strait-Jacket (starring Joan Crawford as a loopy axe murderess) and The Night Walker (with Barbara Stanwyck as a wife haunted by nightmares of her burned-to-death, blind husband).
Britain saw a huge Bloch boom during this time, starting with the Amicus film The Skull (1965) which was adapted from the writer�s shuddery yarn "The Skull of the Marquis de Sade." What followed was a collaboration between Robert and the film company that lead to the production of some of their most well-known macabre movies, including the stand-alone frightfests The Psychopath (1967) and The Deadly Bees (1968) as well as the anthologies The House That Dripped Blood (1970), Asylum (1972), and Torture Garden (1968), all containing tales based on Bloch�s works.
He also penned the memorable TV films The Cat Creature (1973) and The Dead Don�t Die (1975) for director Curtis Harrington along with the homicide happy novels Night World (1972) and American Gothic (1974, inspired by the murders of America�s first noted serial killer H. H. Holmes). With everything from feline demons that feasted on human heads to bizarre tailors involved in human resurrection, this was a highly prolific (and horrific!) time for Mr. Bloch.
The sensational scribe was still going strong in the 1980�s, following up his creepy classic with two sequels: Psycho II (1982) and Psycho House (1990), both books following the bloody aftermath of Norman Bates� original spree of madness. He returned to his allure for that famous London slasher again when he wrote Night of the Ripper in 1984, offering up his own solution to the crimes amidst a fictional setting of death and debauchery. Lori (1989), by comparison, was a somewhat softer spook tale, with the book�s female protagonist losing a sense of her identity upon the destruction of her entire family and home.
Shortly after the publication of Once Around the Bloch in 1993 (cheekily subtitled as An Unauthorized Autobiography), Robert passed away on September 24th, 1994 as a result of cancer. A master of the weird tale and the grim pun, Bloch was an artist whose influence can still be felt, his wit and charm forever sealed in the yellowing pages of his great paperbacks. He might have given the world a psycho, but the man himself was nothing short of a genius and a gentleman.

Welcome, Robert Bloch, to the Hall of Heads!

Labels: Biography, Hall Of Heads, Psycho, Robert Bloch, Writer