(1962)
Dir - Freddie Francis
Overall: MEH
Freddie Francis' first in a career's worth of directorial efforts in the horror genre, The Brain, (Ein Toter sucht seinen Mörder), is a British/West German co-production that is the third and final cinematic adaptation in almost twenty years of Curt Siodmak's novel Donovan's Brain. It also suffers the same problems as the previous versions, problems which are inherent in the source material's convoluted story line involving a shady gentleman's brain being kept alive through pseudo-science nonsense and then going on to possess the doctor who saved it. Blackmail, criminal dealings, murder, money, pharmaceutical drugs, and some other stuff that is presented in a thoroughly uninteresting and complicated manner is not helped by a dated, plodding presentation that meanders around without any compelling stakes. Francis still being a top-notch cinematographer at the time, he does manage to get a few fetching shots in here or there, but some shadow-heavy lighting and clever camera angles are nowhere near sufficient enough to make up for a lousy, exclusively talky plot.
SÉANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON (1964)
Dir - Bryan Forbes
Overall: GOOD
The subtly unnerving
Séance on a Wet Afternoon is writer/director Bryan Forbes's top-notch adaptation of Mark McShane's 1961 novel of the same name. Lead by stellar performances from Kim Stanley and Richard Attenborough as a dysfunctional couple whose only son suffered a stillbirth, the deeply troubled narrative is handled in a calm yet gripping fashion by Forbes. Both Stanley and Attenborough's characters have processed their grief in polar opposite ways; the former as a professional psychic medium who is delusionally convinced that her child's spirit speaks through her, while the latter is a beaten-down, unemployed asthmatic whose humoring of his wife has taken a profoundly melancholic toll on him. Though their kidnapping deeds are certainly on the mortally dubious side, at no point do their diluted intentions evoke anything besides sympathy from the audience. Forbes patiently builds a sense of tension throughout the entire film, all with minimal use of incidental music and mostly restrained performances, turning the whole thing into an eerie yet touching essay on grief stricken mental illness and desperation. Though it was singular enough to not be a remake, Kiyoshi Kurosawa likewise adapted McShane's book nearly four decades later as
Séance; an even more excellent interpretation that featured significant supernatural components wholly lacking here.
THE VULTURE(1967)
Dir - Lawrence Huntington
Overall: WOOF
Pure nonsense in the most talky, repetitive, staggeringly boring manner,
The Vulture is
the final film from writer/producer/director Lawrence Huntington. A
D-rent British production with a handful of B-movie Americans in the
leads due to co-funding from Paramount oddly enough, the film opens with
an effectively grabbing scene where a woman arrives in a cemetery for
some reason during a particularly stormy night, only to see a screeching
creature emerge from a grave; a creature which remains unseen, (save
for its talons), from the audience throughout the entire movie. From
then on though, things settle into the age old, "We don't have a lot of
money to make this movie so here is just a bunch of people talking in
rooms for over an hour" trope. The dialog is hilarious monotonous, with more than one character saying "Big black bird...like a
vulture...with a human face!" verbatim several times early on, just to
make sure that the audience really gets that there is indeed a big black
bird like a vulture with a human face hanging around. There are also
perpetual warnings to keep the windows closed which of course are
ignored, followed by people talking about how important it really was to
keep those windows closed. That is about as exciting as it gets folks.
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