The Seventh Victim

Screw your torture porn: Give me the slowly building menace of a Val Lewton horror every time.

 The Seventh Victim is part of the series of darkly brilliant films Lewton produced for RKO. One would ask why a film now seen as a classic by a revered writer/producer would qualify as craptacular, but bear in mind that RKO was considered a bit of a second-class studio and this was horror back in an era where the genre was second-class by definition.

The Seventh Victim initially may seem like a conventional whodunnit--well, more accurately, a whereisshe--but it's got a deep streak of nihilism and a sense of doom hangs over it from the start, and not just because it opens with a trip to the principal's office. Our heroine, Mary, is summoned by the Head Dyke in Charge at her boarding school to be told that her tuition hasn't been paid and her older sister is missing. HDIC offers to let her stay on and work for her room and board but, as she leaves, HDIC's timid femme companion warns her: "Don't come back. No matter if you never find your sister. No matter what happens to you."

Mary makes her way to New York City and begins searching for her sister. She goes to the missing persons office of existential despair, where she runs across a rather weasely private eye type. 

She goes to the cosmetics company/spa that her sister owned to find that it's apparently been sold. The new Head  Dyke in Charge claims to have no idea where her sister is--but, as we saw back at school, behind every HDIC is a timid little femme who's willing to provide some information...

In a small Italian restaurant on Perry Street (the likes of which have been completely gentrified out of New York) she meets the couple who own the restaurant and who knew her sister , as well as writer's block-ed poet Jason. The latter joins in her search, the former spend a lot of time pouring wine and espresso and saying vague and wise things. (Definitely more useful in times of crisis.)

Mary also runs across Gregory, her sister's lawyer... and husband. She also makes the acquaintance of Jacqueline's psychiatrist, Dr. Louis Judd, who is played by Tom Conway. If Tom Conway seems like an ersatz George Sanders, it's because he's Sanders' younger brother. Dr. Judd has the same name and a similar demeanor as the psychiatrist in Lewton's Cat People--although Judd dies in Cat People, so we must assume that The Seventh Victim happens earlier in the Lewtonverse.

 

Another thing that happens often in the Lewtonverse is the "night walk," in which a character walks alone through darkened streets as suspense mounts and several false surprises are launched before the final, actual shock. We get several of them in The Seventh Victim, as Mary and Jacqueline each take their tense nocturnal stroll through the city.

 

Another constant from the Lewtonverse is the presence of Elizabeth Russell, who also appeared in Lewton's Cat People, Curse of the Cat People and Bedlam. Here she plays Mimi, a neighbor who is doing the slow fade from consumption.

Mary's search for her sister is mostly your classic hero's journey, recast as a noir film about a teenage girl's coming of age with a side dish of supernatural horror. Mary ventures into the big city, meets various allies and opponents, thinks of turning back but instead adapts to her new surroundings and plunges forward. She's played by Kim Hunter, who would earn an Academy Award as Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire and later play Zira in Planet of the Apes.

 

After some night walks and much fussing amongst the gentlemen, we discover that the "exciting and unforgettable" Jacqueline had fallen in with a group called the Palladists. Has she disappeared, or is she just hiding? And if she's hiding, where? And from who?

Jacqueline, with her black bangs, black fur coat and eternal pessimism--"I've always wanted to die"--is goth as all get out and clearly the coolest chick in the film. She's a bit like a cynical, death-bent Blanche DuBois wearing Bettie Page's hair and Louise Brooks' perfume. She is played by Jean Brooks aka Jeanne Kelly aka Ruby Kelly aka Robina Duarte--she changed stage names a lot after being discovered by Erich Von Stroheim while she was singing in the lounge at the Waldorf-Astoria. She made another Val Lewton film, The Leopard Man, but mostly worked in westerns and horror flicks, eventually dying of complications from alcoholism at 47.

But back to the film! It seems that "Palladist" is just a schmancy word for devil-worshipper. However, this group of Satanists isn't sacrificing babies or tormenting peasants or unleashing hordes of maggots--they're a pretty ordinary-seeming bunch, but their normalcy makes them even more chilling. Because it never is the fire-breathing horned monster that gets you: It's being ground down by the incessant nagging, the peer pressure, the adherence to nonsensical rules...

So much more enigmatic and chic than that silly pentagram-goat's head thing....

Like any fine art film, nightclub or romance, The Seventh Victim is all atmosphere and philosophy. It is said that when a RKO exec chided Val Lewton about films with messages, Lewton responded, "Our film does have a message and the message is: Death is good!"

Like all of Lewton's films, The Seventh Victim was under-appreciated in its time, but has since grown in influence and prestige: There are echoes this film in Psycho, Rosemary's Baby and numerous lesser flicks. It's not horror in the maniacs with machetes sense, but its eerie atmosphere and gloomy outlook will haunt you long after the credits have rolled.

Psycho Gothic Lolita

Well, because the title, that's why.

As the trailer for Psycho Gothic Lolita announces: "Beauty, modeling and action! The core of Japanese films all in one!" There's also a goodly bit of splatter. Also known as Gothic & Lolita Psycho, it's a fast-moving series of fight scenes, punctuated with gallons of fake blood, none of which gets on our heroine's fabulous outfit.

 Basically the story is that Psycho Gothic Lolita's mom was murdered and her dad (who is apparently a priest) was paralyzed by some gang in black trenchcoats and now, of course, she is out for vengeance. I don't think we ever find out why the killed her family and there is an absurd twist at the end that would make even M. Night Shyamalan say, "That shit was contrived and unnecessary," but what kind of fool watches something called Psycho Gothic Lolita for the plot?

 

Our heroine has five people she needs to off in order to even the score for mom--each one is represented by a tarot-style card, a device that, like so many things in Psycho Gothic Lolita, remains unexplained. Her father, who is now in a wheelchair, is her Q and builds her a number of interesting umbrella-based weapons but we have no idea why she has to dress up in Gothic Lolita drag to get revenge--in the (tedious, overused) flashbacks, she is conventionally attired

As our Psycho Gothic Lolita, Rina Akiyama looks great, but isn't much in the charisma department: Not so much implacable killing machine as a outfit and a gimmick with a catchphrase that doesn't make sense. Although it is a hell of an outfit--love the umbrella-styled sleeves and laced-up skirt even if the Marie Antoinette via Michaels hairdo doesn't really do it for me. Also, i know it's all about consistency, but I wish she'd had one or two more outfits. The movie is about fashion, so give me some costume changes, dammit!

It also feels like they missed some opportunities with her opponents. Her biggest adversary, Elle, is in Gyaru style with pink lipgloss and a TLC-style eyepatch, as well as a pair of knife/guns, one of which has a built-in cellphone. (Wait--Elle with an eyepatch and guns? Well, I guess it's nice to see someone stealing from Tarantino for a change.) But the rest of the folks she battles are a sort of random assortment--if we're here for fashion, every one of them should have been some kind of Tokyo street style stereotype. She should have had to take on a Kogal schoolgirl or some Fairy Kei bitch in a Care Bears T-shirt and pastel fake fur.

 

There is one brilliant scene where she runs into "KAMIKAZE," a ridiculous bunch of Westerners that are half-Karate Kid, half-West Side Story and completely hilarious. Psycho Gothic Lolita ain't no Sex and Fury and it ain't no Heroic Trio. Hell, it's not even Tokyo Gore Police. But it does have its moments.

Las Vegas Schlock

Here's a link to three brief writeups on Vegas-set B-movies I did for my day job at the Vegas Seven. There's the Mamie Van Doren 50s heist flick, Guns, Girls and Gangsters. Then a piece of absolute crap from the 80s, a tale of showgirls turned mercenary commandos, Hell Squad. Finally, a little 90's indie downerdom, Speedway Junky, in which a runaway hits Vegas, gets rolled and becomes a hustler.

Want to go for the gold standard of bad movies? Enjoy a timeline of how Showgirls went from hype to flop to cult classic. Of course, if you like movies that are actually good, here's an oral history of the shooting of Casino. And, finally, you can take the Vegas movie quiz.

Daughter of Horror

I have watched a lot of movies that make no sense. However, i cannot recall one more bewildering than Daughter of Horror.

 

 A bizzarro horror-noir-expressionist-surrealist mishmosh, Daughter of Horror--also known as Dementia--is a late 50s silent film about a schizophrenic beatnik chick. It's basically one long dream sequence with a lot of jazz clubs and sweaty, creepy guys and a weird fixation on knives and cigars. It is the sole film credit of many of the people involved. That is probably a good thing.

While Daughter of Horror is a silent film, it does not lack for sound. The music is by avant-garde composer George Antheil (who also helped Hedy Lamarr invent the cellphone) with wordless melisma by Marni Nixon (who also did the vocals for Natalie Wood in West Side Story and Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady), doing an excellent impression of a Theremin. There's also a brief digression into a basement jazz club featuring Shorty Rogers and his Giants. And, occasionally, we get some truly bombastic narration courtesy of none other than Ed McMahon.

In fact, that's the first thing we get: An underexposed image of the sweaty visage of a young Ed, looming in a field of "stars" and intoning, "Let me take you into the mind of a woman who is mad! This is a place where there is no love, no hope... in the pulsing, throbbing world of the insane mind, where only nightmares are real, nightmares of the Daughter of Horror!" 

If you thought the opening of Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf was a low-rent ripoff of Night of the Hunter, it has nothing on Daughter of Horror. 

Our heroine--she looks kind of like a cross between Leslie Caron and  Rachel Maddow in beat girl drag--awakens in a seedy hotel room and finds her two totem objects in a drawer: A groovy medallion necklace and an ominously large switchblade. She wanders out, past a bruised, sobbing woman, a guy being hauled away by the cops and a handful of rubberneckers. Out on the streets of Venice Beach, Beatnik Chick runs into "MYSTERIOUS STABBING"--oh, for the pre-Buzzfeed days of the totally opaque headline. The newspaper is being waved by a little person because, well, as Peter Dinklage himself once said, "The only place I've seen dwarves in dreams is in stupid movies like this! "Oh make it weird, put a dwarf in it!"

Some drunks grab, her, some guy beats up the drunks, some other guy summons her over to a car where another guy--a sort of Orson Welles and Jack Black hybrid--flashes his wallet. Beatnik Chick gets into the back of the car with him... wait? She's a hooker? A hooker in a suit and a turtleneck with no lipstick?

Beatnik Chick swings between laughing hysterically and laughing psychotically, a pattern she will continue throughout the movie. It's not that Beatnik Chick is out of fucks to give: She never had any to start with.

They go to the first of a series of nightclubs that we will wander into during the course of Daughter of Horror. It's a pretty good way to kill time: Nightclub montage. It's more interesting than the extended scenes of Beatnik Chick staring into a mirror or looking intensely at various objects or running down the street pursued by the spotlight of paranoia--or maybe it's the cops, who can tell?

Over the sound of horns and leers of the Creepy John, the over-the-top tones of Ed McMahon are heard: "The pulse of the neon lights, like a hammer at your brain! Tormenting you, haunting you! Forcing you to think, forcing you to remember your guilt, your horror!" And now we head into a flashback--well, i mean, kind of a flashback, given that this is the dream of a crazy person, so it's hard to tell. But anyway, some guy with a bodega-robbery stocking over his face leads her to a graveyard and then we see some kind of re-enactment of her childhood amidst the tombstones...

Dad smacks daughter (of horror), mom cheats on dad, dad shoots mom, daughter stabs dad. Boom.

Post-flashback, Beatnik Chick and Creepy John go to his apartment, which is in some kind of huge office building with giant stairs. He has a grand piano and a full bar but what really compels his attention is an enormous plate of greasy chicken wings. He scarfs wings, scarfs wings, scarfs wings, ignoring the increasingly agitated murderess sitting about six feet away.

Yeah, he gets his, as does any cigar-smoking man of girth who gets handsy with the Daughter of Horror. In some ways--delusional, intermittently catatonic heroine who represses shit and stabs people--Daughter of Horror is also like a D-grade proto-Repulsion. I wonder if Polanski ever saw it.

Anyway, after killing him, Beatnik Chick realizes he's grabbed her medallion as she pushed him (and his money) out of the window of his skyscraper (Take that, Ayn Rand! Emma Goldman and Diane Di Prima all the way!) She has to get it back! Thus we have the dismemberment, more faceless men, more Venice at night, more jazz club montage, more Beatnik Chick hysteria, more Ed McMahon: "The face of your first victim! Pursuing you relentlessly through your haunted dreams! Hunting you mercilessly through the twisted corridors of your tortured mind!"

Daughter of Horror is an inexplicable flick. One cannot figure out why it was made or how or by who. It's also reminiscent of the movies my college roommates used to make for their film schools--not the final project, but the projects they had to turn in a few times a year, which were inevitably underplanned and then stuffed with random surrealism and excessive portentiousness as some kind of feeble compensation. And, like here, all of the shots went on too long--when one is planning a student film or cable access TV show, one tends to be surprised at how quickly everything goes on screen. You thought something would take 90 seconds, it takes 30. If you're a pro, you know that already and plan, or you find a way to make something happen for that 90 seconds. If not, you just let that damn shot drag on three times as long as it should.

Still, there is something to be said for Daughter of Horror's unique brand of insanity and bargain-basement surrealism. It would make a fine TV backdrop for any Halloween party--actually, it's the film the teenagers were watching in the original version of The Blob when the blob invaded the movie theater. It's a B-movie's B-movie: That should tell you something about Daughter of Horror.