The Driver's Seat

Ah, Elizabeth Taylor, Empress of Batshittery.

"Who asked you for a stain-resistant dress!?"

And I say that with absolute love and respect. Elizabeth Taylor is the definitive movie star in many ways: She starred in film classics such as A Place in the Sun and National Velvet and big-budget blowouts like Cleopatra and Giant. Hell, she was denounced by the Vatican and in the United States House of Representatives and she was just like, "Whatever. Me and Richard Burton are going back to our yacht to eat diamonds." La Liz was one of the great film queens gifted with an abundance of beauty and a dearth of fucks to give: Louise Brooks, Kay Francis, Ava Gardner, none of whom cared that much for their careers, but saw glamour as a means to an end, to live, live live! (Usually in a way that involved lots of handsome men and top-shelf liquor and gorgeous clothes and five-star hotels.)

"In her walk, in her look! There was something about her that made you notice her right away. Something unseemly!"

But, anyway, long after Cat in a Hot Tin Roof and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf--hell, long after Butterfield 8--she made an array of weird-ass 70s movies like Boom! and Hammersmith Is Out and The Only Game in Town (which might have worked if it had been shot in Las Vegas with Frank Sinatra as originally planned, rather than faking Vegas in Paris with Warren Beatty). The Driver's Seat, also known as Identikit, is one such odd entry in the filmography.

The Driver's Seat is based on a short novel by Muriel Spark and has a plot best described as "stuff happens." It feels like an improvisational film or at least one made by someone who'd never made movies before--scenes of phone calls, letter writing, scarf buying, etc. go on and on in real time. Choosing a book involves a long, slow pan of paperback mystery novels. When characters go form one place to another, we watch a bunch of scenery go by and a few establishing shots.

"Not a presence, but a lack of absence. That's what it is."

I mean, I don't like spending time waiting for takeoff when I'm on a plane, much less watching someone else wait. Have you ever wanted to be trapped in a car with a guy who can't stop ranting about his macrobiotic diet? Me neither, but you get to in The Driver's Seat. The only time this time-consuming, time-wasting method of filmmaking is at all worthwhile is when we get to watch Taylor do her eye makeup in closeup, which is better than any YouTube tutorial.

"When I diet, I diet. And when I orgasm, I orgasm. I don't believe in mixing the two cultures."

There is a scene where she leaves her apartment in a crazy, mixed-pattern ensemble, looking for all the world like Jennifer Saunders as Edina Monsoon. then, as though the movie can read your mind, a little Italian lady jumps out of the shadows and crows "Are you going to join the CIRCUS in that outfit?!"

"Excuse me, which do you think would be more exciting? More sadomasochistic?"

So she has a shitty plane flight--middle seat, lecherous creep on one side, panic-attacking basket case on the other. Although we are reminded of a more innocent time, when you could buy knives at the airport gift shop and joke with security about having a bomb in your purse. And she lands and some dude gets shot and there's a lot of running and screaming and then Andy Warhol shows up with a white suit and a dubbed British accent to return the paperback she dropped--and, for all the noise made about his appearing in this film, it amount to three 60-second bits with someone else's voice. She carries the paperback everywhere, cover facing out, like a spy meeting a contact or a Tinder date that actually reads books (the former being more likely).

"It was as though something came out of her, some force that all women feel latent within themselves, stifled--a potential for catastrophe!"

At one point she and some weird old lady go to a deserted art deco department store with entire floors of grand pianos. They buy slippers and letter openers, there's a random act of terrorism that makes it hard to get a ride back to the Hilton..

This is not a picture of Divine.

It is a picture of Elizabeth Taylor in The Driver's Seat. For reals.

She spends a of of time smiling vacantly and then yelling at people. It's supposed to be a nervous breakdown, but it looks more like pills. Or perhaps just diva fits. And it seems Interpol is looking for her. Or will be looking for her: We get footage of various people being interrogated about Liz--or Lise, as she is called here--and even a few Rashomon-like revisions, which only add to the intertia and confusion. Also, everyone talks about going to the Hilton like the movie is a damn ad.

"I am an idealist."

Taylor may be having some kind of meltdown but you feel no sympathy for her. Mostly because she's a raging cunt to the help--dress shop salesgirls, hotel doormen, maids, she hollers at them all about stain-treated dresses, unwashed glasses, etc. She snaps her fingers at waiters, when she wants to know what time it is, she just shouts the question until someone answers....

She also keeps hanging out with the macrobiotic MRA creep she met on the plane who keeps talking about his need for a daily orgasm and how he can charge her hotel room "to the company." But, like every other man, she flounces off, shouting about how he's "not my type!" I'd say a good 25% of Taylor's dialogue consists of "Are you my type?" or "You're not my type" or "He wasn't my type." See, what Lise/Liz wants is to find a man who will kill her and the problem of the film is that she's looking for a murderer but she keeps meeting rapists. (Maybe she should asks one of those salesgirls she bitches at to gut her like a flounder. Pretty sure they'd be happy to.)

"I want to go back home, to feel all my loneliness again."

The Driver's Seat makes me think of that incredibly stupid movie with Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp wandering around fancy hotels in Venice and running yachts into people. (Which may or may not be worse than the movie with Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt wandering around fancy hotels in Malta and sighing a lot.) If you want to see a suicidal, clothing-obsessed diva have a nervous breakdown amidst European scenery, The Scarlet Lady is far more enjoyable. If you want a confusing story about a crazy woman loose in a strange city, Daughter of Horror has more giggles and more panache.

"After you stab, make sure you twist the knife upwards to penetrate deeply enough."

Overall, The Driver's Seat is just a bad movie. But gawd knows it'd be worse without Elizabeth Taylor.

The Devil Rides Out

The Devil Rides Out deals in some of the usual Hammer Films tropes, but adds a spin with its roaring 20s setting and by making an actor who is usually the villain into the hero. Also known as The Devil's Bride, the film was based on a novel by Dennis Wheatley.

Christopher Lee usually played a bad guy--hell, the baddest of guys--but he was equally as effective as a hero. He gives the comforting feeling that, whatever evil is coming your way, Christopher Lee knows it well and will shut it down. Oddly, this is kind of accurate: During World War II, Lee was a member of the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare--also known as the Special Operations Executive, an actual unit, dedicated to taking out Nazis by means that were... well, sometimes rather ungentlemanly. He was also six-foot-five and a direct descendant of Charlemagne.

But things kick right off with a set of opening credits that could easily be a heavy metal video if you just swapped out the soundtrack (perhaps one of Lee's own, as he had a late-in-life career as a heavy metal vocalist and was apparently a big Black Sabbath fan). Another twist to The Devil  Rides Out is that it's set in roaring 20s Britain and Satanism is just another lark for upper-class Bright Young Things.

The Duc de Richleau, aka Christopher Lee shows up to visit a friend who is hosting a "meeting" or his "astronomical society." Yeah, you ain't fooling the Duc, who has been around all the blocks, many times. Of course the meeting is actually a congregation of devil worshippers, led by none other than Charles Gray, whom you know from Diamonds Are Forever and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Here he is Mocata, the utterly unctuous leader of the local Satanic coven.

"Chickens in a basket, diagrams on a floor. Do these mean something to you?"

Rather like those in The Black Cat, it's one classy, well-dressed group of Satanists--the manor house is gorgeous, the patter is literary and the wine exquisite, and the crowd is strictly black tie and pearls, with the occasional dashiki or sari. But Christopher Lee feels nothing but disdain, as those who are "meddling with black magic" rank about as high in his esteem as Nickelback fans.

Christopher Lee waves off the devil worshippers and carries off his wanabe Satanist pal, but he's going to have to rout this bunch of vermin from the neighborhood. Any gentleman would. Really, it is interesting that The Devil Rides Out chooses as its main combatant against evil, not some radiant creature of pure goodness, but a guy who seems to know exactly what he's up against because he's been there and rolls his eyes at your puerile edgelord nonsense. You think you're a powerful mage summoning Baphomet to do your most vile and stygian bidding, to Christopher Lee you're just a spotty teen playing Marilyn Manson loud until mom makes you a Hot Pocket.

Yet another of the main differences between The Devil Rides Out and your typical Satanist horror flick is that it almost entirely dodges the conventional Judeo-Christian angle for a more ego-centered version. When he goes off on the power of his will, it's not hard to hear the distaff Alestier Crowley` philosophy. It's a choice more suitable to the film's 1920s setting as well as the post-hippie/summer of Manson period in which it was released. (I bet Jimmy Page loves this movie.)

According to the Duc de Christopher Lee, "the power of darkness is more than superstition. it is a living force that can be tapped at any given moment of the night." Something like William S. Burroughs' "ugly spirit," that malevolent force that touches some more than others, and which one must struggle to control, regardless of whether one is suppressing or focusing its darkness.

So, anyhow, the deal is that Duc de Christopher Lee's buddy is in love with this girl who's already engaged to the devil--ergo the movie's stateside title, The Devil's Bride--and Charles Gray has to make sure that nothing interferes with getting her to the church--or coven--on time. One of the ways Charles Gray tries to keep his Satanic wedding planner mojo going is by causing a rather groovy car chase with old timey cars: His eyes appear in your review mirror and next thing you know you're driving a perfectly lovely Buick Roadster off the road and getting your cloche all askew.

So Christopher Lee has to disrupt the Satanic baptism--Baptism before wedding because, hey, we're Satanists!--which he seems to be intent upon disrupting not just because it involves sacrificing souls to evil incarnate, but because it's so damned tacky. I swear that as he drives his Hispano Suzia into the center of a group of frolicking devil worshippers, he's not only chanting prayers, but muttering something about "cheap Woodstock knockoff" and "ill-fitting hospital gowns" and various maledictions against those who would drink Captain Morgan's.

"As part of one's initiation, one has to choose the name of some past great practitioner of the occult."
Oooh! Can I be Jayne Mansfield?

"The goat of Mendes! The devil himself!"

Some friends come by to visit for not other apparent reason than to supply the plot with a child to be sacrificed to Satan later--meetings, baptisms, weddings, sacrifices... I can see why one has to be upper-class to belong to this coven. One would have to be independently wealthy to have enough free time--not to mention all of the appropriate outfits--for the many mandatory activities.

Charles Gray stops by to be all shady and mind-control-y. "In magic there is neither good nor evil, there is merely a science. The science of causing change to happen merely through one's will." When his cover his blown, he flounces out, proclaiming, "I shall not be back. But something will." Could be a campy British closet case or an Avon lady, could be a bomb cyclone or a giant spider, who knows...

The climax is when Duc Lee Richleau and his cronies do some kind of magic circle thing in the library to ward of an attack by Macaca that involves wind, lightning, bats and giant spiders. And you know what's worse than giant spiders? The Angel of Death! Okay, maybe nothing is worse than giant spiders, but it's still all kinds of bad stuff...

"Don't look at the eyes!" Lee does a lot of telling people not to look at shit, or not to leave someone alone or not to turn off the light or not to remove the crucifix and they always do. Why? I have no idea: If Christopher Lee tells you to do shit, you fucking do it. Fortunately Christopher Lee can pretty much always shut evil down, since he's a 12th level magic user, as well as a 7th level fighter--and his character in The Devil Rides Out clearly has a number of mystical powers as well...

I'd rather see you dead than meddling with black magic!

This is really the big scene of the film. Sure, everyone rushes over to disrupt the human sacrifice of some woman's daughter and flip off Charles Gray but that's basically a bunch of deus ex machina and an improbable happy ending. Because even more ridiculous than "it was all a dream" is "We time-traveled back to right before all of this happened."

The Devil Rides Out is a relatively short, fast-moving horror film and one wishes it had spent a little more time developing its unorthodox Crowley-esque vision of Satanism and the humanist magic Lee uses to defeat--or at least thwart--it.

And, well, they had Charles Gray and Christopher Lee to put this over. I would sit and watch those two recite the phone book or the dialogue from an Adam Sandler movie--much less act imperious and make dismissive gestures while reciting the names of Egyptian gods and random bits of Latin.

Overall, The Devil Rides Out is a solid horror flick--it may be light on the scares, but it makes up for it with atmosphere, characterization and a unique take on an old topic. Also, it's got Christopher Lee. And, even with 280 entries on the man's IMDB page, there's never enough of that.