Horror Challenge rundown: The first update
#1 - Frozen Scream (1975, Frank Roach): Imagine carving a statue. Think about all the bits left over once you’ve chiseled your work from solid, shapeless rock. Now imagine trying to build another statue from those cast-off shards using only a hot glue gun. That’s as succinctly as I can describe Frozen Scream, a film that feels crafted from random leftovers of a larger, less nonsensical piece. The basic situation is simple, woman-besieged-by-evil-forces stuff, and if it had stayed basic it might have been more coherent. It might have also been duller, more generic and less memorable than the singularly screwy final product - normal movies don’t have radio-controlled frozen zombies, white-coated German mad scientists (one of whom’s motivations & moral allegiance switch from scene to scene) surrounded by boxy electronics and blinking whatzits in the basement of a gymnasium, knife-wielding stab-happy figures in black cloaks or a heroic policeman whose voiceover narration intrudes at unexpected, ill-timed intervals, including during exposition-heavy dialogue scenes. The editing makes the film lurch from scene to scene, occasionally slipping back in time for a flashback or a dream sequence, neither of which end up meaning much of anything. Acting uniformly terrible, camera never quite where it should be, script dopey and inscrutably bizarre, Frozen Scream is a terrible, terrible movie. But it’s one of a kind.
#2 - The Corpse Grinders (1971, Ted V. Mikels): Part of me wants to like this simply for its off-the-wall supporting cast. Mikels clearly digs the freaky, the strange and eccentric - more so than his square doctor protagonists - and as such fills his film to burst with weirdo characters (a mute crippled secretary, a scruffy semi-homeless dude, a burly gravedigger with a nutbar wife who “feeds” a baby doll and generally acts like a reject from an Andy Milligan flick) who float in, do their thing and float right back out. The intent, I guess, is to goose the dull plot with these oddballs so that there might be something worth watching; if so, Mikels fails in execution if not intent. The Corpse Grinders is a bad film, but that’s not its greatest sin. It’s not just bad, it’s boring and lifeless. If you tried to remake Herschell Gordon Lewis’s The Gruesome Twosome without the gore or bizarre sense of humor, this is what you’d get. Also, cats? Still not intimidating.
#3 - Cat People (1942, Jacques Tourneur): The temptation to psychoanalyze this film’s baldy Freudian setup is strong - sexual hysteria rarely gets this blunt. Which makes the climax, featuring a psychiatrist and an angry panther, all the more amusing - the message seems to be, “Go ahead and rationalize it all you want. Ain’t gonna help.” Tourneur directs the holy hell out of this thing, with deep shadows and creative uses of limited lighting casting dread into every corner. (Replace the dread with despair and you’ve got noir.) A slow builder, setting up its conflict between the rational and the superstitious, the New World and the Old, with patience and care until the subconscious rips through and tears everything asunder. Potent shit.
