(1971)
Dir - Pete Walker
Overall: WOOF
Pure, laboriously dull nonsense from beginning to end, Die Screaming, Marianne was Pete Walker's first minor foray into horror and it is as unremarkable as they come. Calling it a horror film is as misleading as the title, but if one uses their imagination, they can almost see it as a thriller of sorts. The plot is equally convulsed and uninteresting which is an insurmountable obstacle to overcome. Whether or not the characters here meet through convenience or contrived scheming is as inconsequential as how they come to their end. Worse yet, Leo Genn mumbles his lines so obnoxiously that almost none of his dialog is even decipherable. Never once along the way is anyone's relationship to anything that is happening fleshed out anyway. With such a murky, barely present story to work with, absolutely no tension arises throughout. By the ending, you are likely to be as confused and as bored as you were at any other point before that. Being a Walker film might make it of passing interest to those familiar with the director's more notable works, but this is assuredly, (and rightfully), an obscure one.
(1972)
Dir - Alfred Hitchcock
Overall: GOOD
Alfred Hitchcock's return to London after having spent decades in Hollywood resulted in his penultimate film Frenzy. A typically violent murder thriller for the director, (after his previous two works Tom Curtain and Topaz were espionage themed), it was based on the Arthur La Bern novel Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square. The hallmarks of an innocently accused man being on the run where the smallest details of course end up being particularly important are both present, though the director breaks new ground for himself by including nudity for the first and last time in his career. It is also a bit heavy on the humor both dark and light, such as how the script delves out important information via a police inspector eating insufferable gourmet cuisine from his chipper, naive wife. Being a Hitchcock movie, there are naturally a handful of long takes and a couple of nerve-wracking scenes that are as memorable as any from the master of suspense, (an extended and almost ridiculous one taking place in a potato truck being particularly memorable). It is often easy to take Hitchcock's work for granted, but even with so many legendary films under his belt, this one is easily still a high-note to nearly go off on.
(1978)
Dir - Michael Anderson
Overall: MEH
An adaptation of Harold Lawlor's 1948 short story The Beckoning Ghost, Dominique, (Dominique Is Dead), has an interesting enough if not that singular of a premise where a scumbag husband drives his rich wife insane to the point of suicide, only to have the tides turned on himself in a pretty elaborate way. It stops way short of being gruesome, but still has the proper, EC Comics comeuppance angle of spending almost the entire movie waiting for the bad guy to get his. The wait is occasionally annoying as said bad guy, Cliff Robinson is awkwardly stiff, giving a performance that unfortunately borders on poor. Both he and the wife also see a generous handful of seemingly unexplained, logic-defying things in a short time, yet neither barely utters a word to anybody about them and of course predictably look like fools when they do. Anderson adapts a leisurely, deathly still pace for his numerous, tense set pieces which in fact take up nearly the entire movie, though most are rather decent. The twist is as convoluted as one would assume and naturally rather unsatisfying, but it still gets by enough for what it is.
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