Tuesday Film Score: Jo Gabriel’s Tinderbox Waltz: Tod Browning’s Freaks 1932

Tinderbox Waltz appears on my album The Unreachable Sky reissue 2010

Celebrate Life all you Wonderful Freaks!

MonsterGirl ( Jo Gabriel )

Saturday Film Score: “Sweet Charlotte” by Jo Gabriel * Hush…Hush Sweet Charlotte

“Sweet Charlotte” by Jo Gabriel from my Gothic Neo-Classical albumÂ The Last Drive In

Tribute to the great Bette Davis! and her performance in the Grande Gothic Cinema piece by directorÂ Robert Aldrich

Thursday morning film score: Wuthering Heights 1939 & Jo Gabriel’s Of Love and Ether

Here’s to those immortal lovers Cathy and Heathcliff.

Of Love and Ether appears on my album Fools and Orphans

Wuthering Heights 1939

Starring Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier

MonsterGirl (Jo Gabriel)

Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Robert Aldrich’s Hag Cinema Part 5 conclusion: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 “Ruined finery…that’s all I have left”

THE VISUAL NARRATIVE “Ruined Finery.”

Continue reading “Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Robert Aldrich’s Hag Cinema Part 5 conclusion: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 “Ruined finery…that’s all I have left”” →

Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Robert Aldrich’s Hag Cinema Part 4: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 “You’re my favorite living mystery” “Have you ever solved me?”

“From Belle to Outcast: Blood, Blame, and the Burden of Womanhood
Aging, Scandal, and the Specter of the ‘Hystericized Woman’ in Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte”

Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Aldrich’s Hag Cinema: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 Part 3 “Murder starts in the heart and it’s first weapon is a vicious tongue”

Miriam is back on screen, she’s looking around as if searching for something. The tinkling flutters of incorporeal music still tipping back and forth. We are suspended in some kind of time frame ourselves. Captive. Again, as in Baby Jane? We, as spectators, are being held within the constructs of the visual narrative as much as the characters themselves. Aldrich uses his shadows to constrict our visual movement. So much of the plot is drenched in the mysterious cloaking of shadow that it obliterates our senses. The shadows formulate the environment to feel obstructive.

Once again, the blackest bar of shadow cuts across Miriam’s figure, casting an ominous 2nd Miriam luring behind herself. Throughout Charlotte, the camera/shadows have aggressively dissected the woman’s bodies in various parts. In advertising, there has been criticism aimed at Ads depicting women’s body parts being cut off as if to dehumanize them. I don’t think Aldrich’s intention was to dehumanize these female characters, but rather to show the fracturing of their ambivalent personalities.

The Manifest meaning behind the shadows could be as simple as framing these female characters in mystery, the ultimate question is one of the Latent meanings, in which we might as spectators come to understand the characters’ principal personalities and the underlying motivating forces that drive them.

And I’d like to think that the camera lens didn’t develop a bit of Acrotomophilia, the amputee fetish that sadly some people suffer from. Still, I found that it is something worth noting to observe how these shadows frame the female body in both films.

Even the plant seems to cut across Miriam’s torso.

Miriam knocks on Charlotte’s door. There is a quick jump cut; Charlotte is on the other side of the door. Miriam knocks once more and then walks away. She shuts the lights out and throws us into yet even more darkness than before. She walks over to the silky lace-covered windows. The dog is still barking outside near the graveyard.

A flute flutters the scales in an almost Middle Eastern mixed Phrygian mode, an exotic, mysterious motif, as Miriam peers through the curtains yet looks back behind her. She turns away and walks back into the room.

We hear a creaking door. It’s the large Armour as the door swings open to show that Miriam’s sequined dress has been slashed. With the use of an inner monologue we hear Miriam say, “My dress, somebody’s slashed my dress.” She stares at it. Again we see her in profile. the little pipe flutterings play again as she walks toward the shredded dress. Slowly ever so slowly build the tension.

The fluttering is now almost childlike. Is this to represent that a regressive childish acting out is responsible for this destructive behavior? Miriam’s head is in complete shadow, surrounded by the shiny sequins, dangling like torn fish gills and silk. She begins to handle the ruined fabric, the music still with us. The strings come in strident. Finally, we see Miriam in full face. She looks contained but shocked at the same time. Continue reading “Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Robert Aldrich’s Hag Cinema Part 4: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 “You’re my favorite living mystery” “Have you ever solved me?”” →

Life Lessons from Barney Fife: from Convicts At Large “Let me guide you into the land of rhythm and pleasure”

From Convicts At Large: Barney and Big Maude

Barney – Lets you and me dance…

Big Maude (Reta Shaw )-You kidden’?
Barney – No, I’m not.

Big Maude – What made you change your mind?
Barney – You’re beginning to get to me
Big Maude – You’re a doll.

Barney – Now now… you just gotta relax, just flow with me, let me guide you into the land of rhythm and pleasure.

Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Aldrich’s Hag Cinema: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 Part 3 “Murder starts in the heart and it’s first weapon is a vicious tongue”

READ PART 2 HERE:

Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Robert Aldrich’s Hag Cinema Part 2 Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 “He’ll Love You Til He Dies”

HUSH…HUSH, SWEET CHARLOTTE (1964) – Continued

Charlotte is sipping her coffee and hears a car pull up. She’s holding her shotgun. She sets the china cup down and starts to get up, moving toward the door. We hear a small bird chirping, then the police vehicle comes up the drive, encircled by glorious oak trees. Charlotte closes the door and runs to the great hall, calling “Velma!” Velma comes to the top of the banister, looking through the wooden slats down at Charlotte. She hangs over the edge, “What?” in a long, drawn-out suspension of the word.

Velma is unpretentious and could be perceived as a crude woman. She’s like an unmade bed or someone who looks like she just rolled out of one, and she doesn’t throw away her words. She is strong, sensible, and reliable. Velma, disheveled, unkempt by the years of working as a caretaker to her Miss Charlotte, is misleadingly simple, yet she is sturdy and obviously faithful to her mistress. Continue reading “Grande Dame/Guignol Cinema: Aldrich’s Hag Cinema: Hush…Hush, Sweet Charlotte 1964 Part 3 “Murder starts in the heart and it’s first weapon is a vicious tongue”” →

MonsterGirl’s Sunday Nite Surreal: Black Sunday/La Mashera del Demonio 1960

BLACK SUNDAY/LA MASCHERA DEL DEMONIO

Directed by Mario Bava & starring the immortal otherworldly – Barbara Steele!

This timeless Gothic masterpiece is also known as The Demon’s Mask, Revenge of the Vampire, and House of Fright. It is the Maestro Bava’s first film as a solo director, since first working as a cameraman with another auteur of the dark Riccardo Freda, Bava co-directed I Vampiri (1956)

With the presence of the enchanting & luscious beauty of Steele– the film becomes a romantic exercise in the Gothic style of European horror. Her eyes alone could mesmerize an audience with an effervescence that few possess with their gaze.

Bava also controlled the prowling camera style and Nedo Azzini’s sets are emblematic of the netherworld the story is steeped in.

Like a malefic allegory shown with gruesome keenness, Black Sunday is loosely based on Nikolai Gogol’s The Vij.

Barbara Steele manifests two characters the mirror image of each other–Princess Asa Vajda is tortured and burned as a witch. This is how the film opens with a ferocity that propels the film to a whole other level of classical horror. It is the stuff that dark fairy tales are made of… and nightmares.

The iconic spiked Devil Mask that is pounded into Asa’s face for the crime of adultery, or what was considered to be an act of ‘witchery’ Women’s wiles have always been considered powerful, tempting, and dangerous to men.

The local Inquisitor calling Asa a witch, and condemning her to such a brutal death bears ironing for he is Asa’s own brother. Once Asa returns to claim her revenge she vampirizes Katia in order to rejuvenate her life force.

It is now 200 years later, and Katia Vajda the descendent of the persecuted Princess Asa, is the spitting image of the beautiful ‘witch.’ Asa and her lover Javuto (Arturo Dominici) rise up from the tomb, cobwebs, scorpions, and spiders to wreak revenge on the legacy of the Vajda family curse.

One of the most memorable scenes in horror film history is the resurrection of Javuto from the crumbling ground, the smoky dark clouds surround his devil-masked rotting visage underneath–as he claws his way out of his grave and lurches off into the ghostly night.

The special effects, masks, faces, matte painting, etc. were done by Bava himself with his brother Eugenio Bava. The face of Asa which bears the marks of the spike holes from the devil mask adds a chilling effect to the film. It also creates the image of the monstrous feminine that strives to conquer and drain the life of those she’s fixated on. The two characters that Steele plays are contradictory figures, one virginal and innocent, the other bloodthirsty and evil. Asa was unholy because of her sexual desires.

Black Sunday’s expressive influence and its grand sense of classical horror are rooted in the idea that a woman’s sexuality cannot be destroyed, and will always inevitably return by its own primacy enduring the scars of the violence inflicted upon her. That which the world order, particularly religious zealotry and patriarchal law attempt to oppress come back twofold just to shake up the order of things.

The ultimate threat appears as the merger of the two Vajda’s women Asa & Katia… the virgin and the whore. Bava continued to make films where men desperately tried to destroy the lure of women’s desire and their desirability…

STARE INTO THESE EYES… discover deep within them the unspeakable terrifying secret of BLACK SUNDAY… it will paralyze you with fright!

BRIDES OF HORROR – Scream Queens of the 1960s! – Part 4: The Dark Goddess-This Dark Mirror

MonsterGirl’s Sunday Nite Surreal: Spider Baby 1968-“This has gone well beyond the boundaries of prudence and good taste.”

Spider Baby or The Maddest Story Ever Told -1968

Virginia – “I caught a big fat bug right in my spider web and now the spider gets to give the bug a big sting. Sting, Sting, Sting, Sting, Sting!”

Spider Baby is one of the most original psychological horror gems that is as queerly frightening as it is endearing. It opens with Bruno the Chauffeur played by Lon Chaney Jr. singing a little nursery song about werewolves and vampires and it’s quite effectively eerie as the opening hymn. Chaney’s character delivers one of my favorite lines–it’s a childish hymn that tributes oddballs in the world who struggle to find their place in the world.

Bruno, The Chauffeur: “Just because something isn’t good doesn’t mean it’s bad.”

The film is special partly due to the presence of Lon Chaney Jr. as Bruno who looks after the Merrye children with undying devotion. Living in the decrepit and crumbling old family mansion, they are the last generation of surviving Merryes occupying the odd space like a whimsical little fun-house.

Because of inbreeding the family has been cursed with a type of mental regression, and arrested development. Bruno sort of cleans up any of the messes or homicidal fatalities that happen due to the Merryes being like wild unchecked gremlins.

Including the postman (Mantan Moreland busy actor in the 40s who often took off on black caricatures for the all-white films he played all jittery or stereotyped buffoonery Hollywood made a brand out of his name and his ebullient persona. Anyway, he should have known better than to try and leave a package any further than the steps, instead of poking his head inside the window and being trapped in Virginia’s theoretical web and being sliced up with a large pair of knives, losing an ear that will be kept in a little box as a token. He was a big bug caught in her net after all.

Directed by Jack Hill (Blood Bath 1966, The Big Doll House 1971, Coffy 1973 and F0xy Brown 1974) who brilliantly populates this queer little world with the perfect characters, all on a budget of $65,000.

Lon Chaney was only paid a flat fee of $2,500 for his role and it was a little poignant to watch his performance with bits of his alcoholism seeping through the character, he had been drinking pretty heavily at that point but had remained sober during filming. The role had meant a lot to Chaney, who got the part after John Carradine turned it down.

Ronald Stein’s music is often lyrical & offbeat (Attack of the 50 Ft Woman (1958), Dementia 13 (1963), It Conquered the World & She Creature (1956) Not of this Earth, Attack of the Crab Monsters, The Undead, Dragstrip Girl (1957) The Girl in Lovers Lane (1960) The Haunted Palace (1963).

The film’s alternative titles are The Liver Eaters. Cannibal Orgy– I assure you there is no orgy, and there isn’t any cannibalism on screen. There is the family bible or a reference book that explains how exclusive Merrye Syndrome affects only that family, where the disease: causes its victims to regress mentally to a pre-infantile state of savagery and cannibalism. The three surviving children of Titus Merrye are Elizabeth who dresses like a little girl (creepy) and Virginia who thinks she’s a giant spider.

The Merrye sisters Virginia (Jill Banner) and Elizabeth (Beverley Washburn) are suited as the demented girls, and then there’s Ralph, adorable feral little Ralph manifested by the quirky Sid Haig who would later take on grittier roles as screen heavies in exploitation films.

Carol Ohmart (House on Haunted Hill 1959) comes into the picture as Cousin Emily Howe who is after the family fortune not expecting to uncover the house of Merrye madness.

31 Flavors of Noir on the Fringe to Lure you in! Part 4 The last Killing in a Lineup of unsung noir

The film has been compared to the work of iconoclast Luis BuÃ±uel. who was considered a moralist director who definitely populated his films with the sense that revolution was necessary to change the stagnant ways people conform to their lives.

I can see the dinner scene as a nod to his The Exterminating Angel, as the table is set where everyone but the guests are vegetarians. Ralph has caught a Rabbit. Unfortunately, it’s the neighborhood cat. When Ralph grabs the ‘rabbit’ and starts tearing into it, Cousin Peter (Quinn Redeker)Â is confused because he thought he was a vegetarian. Bruno tells him “But Ralph is allowed to eat anything he catches!”

Spider Baby creates its own little universe of characters who move in their own orbit with a sense of unorthodoxy. Virginia with that large bow in her hair is ridiculous as it is uncomfortably creepy for an obviously grown young woman to sport a child’s ribbon like a doll, where she evolves into a monstrous assassin with her two sharp knives in her anxious hands elevating her to a truly gruesome character and not just a childish simpleton.

It’s this teetering irony of the film that takes us from darkly whimsical to suddenly going for the jugular that creates the uneasy feeling surrounding the Merrye family.

It’s one of THE definitive Cult films for sure, as it’s witty, macabre, quirky, irreverent, and a bit of film noir in its use of shadows and devious figures doomed from the beginning. Spider Baby is an adult fairy tale with dark corners and speculative questions about madness and responsibility and who gets to make those decisions. And Carol Ohmart just looks damn sexy in her black lingerie as she runs around amidst the ‘old dark house’ trope as the woman in peril.

Jill-Banner — **Savage hunger of a BLACK WIDOW.**

IMDb Fun Fact:

The film was shot in August and September of 1964 with the title “Cannibal Orgy, or The Maddest Story Ever Told”, but its release was held up for years because the producers went bankrupt, which tied up the film in legal limbo. Independent producer David L. Hewitt acquired it for distribution in 1968 and changed the title to “Spider Baby” and “The Liver Eaters.”