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The Girl in a Swing: I can’t figure out why this film got lukewarm reception.. it’s exceptionally well directed, with strong attention to small details that build tension (even something as typical as close ups and reaction shots on touching a hand to signify goosebumps is expertly edited into the suspenseful courting process). The film builds its impending dread so methodically that we as an audience blend it with the similarly arousing anxiety of getting to know a romantic partner we’re infatuated with, the parallels discovered and exploited by the filmmaker. Once the relationship appears to plateau, the normal jarring undoing of the expectations set forth by the honeymoon period is meshed again with something eerie and frightening that is outside that standard scope. This works because it’s an allegory for stages of a relationship that leave one party in awe and fear of the impenetrable nature of the partner they think they ‘know.’ This approach also provides sympathy for both the surrogate and the ‘other’ by not transforming that person into the facade-that’s-really-a-monster trope and instead validating her pain and trauma as the constant living experience it is rather than a past event that begets change that is the misconception, even if that is sourced in responsibility.

The creepy warning signs and ultimate unraveling is expertly constructed and Tilly gives one of the better perfs I’ve seen in a horror film, moving as far away as the fellow caricatures as is possible for her character to do in depth and emotional resonance. It’s a high wire act to pull off this kind of trick, a strong wind blowing at a delicate stack of cards without them falling, but the strength of the love between the couple as well as the kindness toward all characters helps this stand the test of the storm.

Fun: The exposition here reminded me of Larry Clark’s underrated Bully except rationalization is replaced with a more honest void of translatable or expressible reason. This alters the film’s intentions and genre completely, transforming a thriller into anthropological horror that comes from a blockage in sociological competence not to mention a disconnect from empathy. And yet for the lack of rationalization dissected by the filmmaker (though we do get hints that sexual and physical abuse and neglect in childhood didn’t exactly help), the characters do this apart from the murder- a diffusal of responsibility early on in a passive one-off comment declares that people commit actions through no fault of their own but because of an impulse inside, one girl referring to her father’s crime. The really scary part of this movie is how little idiosyncratic details are relatable and, dare we even say it, normal. Alicia Witt’s sassy interaction with the clinician (“I don’t see any tea”; “Do I have to sit down?”) is the kind of questioning, authority defying teenage behavior that is common, universal, and even endearing in the wit with which she executes it. These ‘normal’ behaviors that bind us to understand these characters only make the sociopathic one all the more harder to stomach, both for our understanding of human nature and our complicity as viewer in the role of vicarious joiner with the social enemy of empathizers.

The dance the actors take in fleshing out their personalities is impeccable. Witt especially is an actress I’ve always loved but never saw her get any role worthy of her talents, but here we fucking go. This is one of the best youth perfs I’ve ever seen. Bonnie may exhibit those normal behaviors but she quickly turns manic and her clear defense mechanisms are matched equally by inaccessible psychological symptoms, before reverting back to that need to connect with her boyfriend self-consciously. Similarly, Hillary plays the mean girl act but is desperate to connect with Bonnie in her lonely space as isolated prisoner, showing a shade of fear otherwise hidden from the world. These are not your typical antisocial-personality characters, but this movie isn’t typical either and the caricatures we use to define the ‘other’ are not actually as simple as we want them to be, so we here have it. Even if they’re angry at the world, they just want to be happy.

Rayon Vert wrote: Sun Jan 19, 2020 4:53 am The Devil Rides Out (Fisher 1968). Despite the fact that it reworks Dracula tropes into the satanist cult theme (the power of the crucifix, hypnotism, the female disciple who does the master’s bidding), it nevertheless has imagination and a modern feel, and as Mr. Sausage wrote works largely because it plays it for real. A fairly strong script, but it really struck me that Fisher here gives the material a lot of extra weight with the quality of his direction, in things like framing, types of shots and editing – really some of his best work. Some really stand-out sequences here, like the car chase and Mocata’s visit to the Eatons’ house to try and recapture his initiates.

Mr Sausage wrote: Tue Jan 03, 2012 12:19 am The Devil Rides Out (Terence Fisher, 1968): Unexpectedly, this one works because it treats its premise with real seriousness. Lee in particular brings such an intense conviction to his role that even the sillier elements are imbued with a real gravity. The dodgy special effects take away from the impact of the final scenes, but this is a superior horror movie nonetheless and one of Hammer's very best. List worthy.

I have a theory, that there were conflicting interests behind the scenes on production level. What makes Devil Rides Out so special is how it can feel so utterly dignified with so much tackiness and how much of that tackiness was absolutely awesome. On one hand we have intense occult drama scenes with great direction and performances. On the other hand there’s stuff like the over-the-top hypnotic stare of the blackamoor Djin and destroying the very jovial baphomet by a drive-by cricifix assault. In ritual climax both of these elements co-exist. So the acting and directing are strong without a hint of campy approach while special effects scenes and some art department solutions are groovy in a way that’s not serious at all.

According a bluray extra documentary Lee was friends with Dennis Wheatley (the writer of novel Devil Rides Out) and he suggested filming Wheatley’s books for Hammer producer/executive, who’s name I don’t remember. It made perfect sense of course, so they started making two movies, Devil Rides Out and Lost Continent. The latter (without Lee) turned out pure psychedelic camp. Wheatley was a very uptight and conservative fellow and him and the Hammer exec did not get along at all and the exec had some very nasty comments about him later on. I think the production of Devil Rides Out was drawn in two different directions. Lee was trying to make a serious movie partly out of loyalty towards his friend and partly because of his own ambition to be taken more seriously where as the exec wouldn’t have minded making a fool of Wheatley and ridiculing his old fashioned world view and there was probably also doubt wether a serious low-key horror drama like Lewton’s The Seventh Victim would do well commercially. Lee probably had influense over the cast and Terence Fisher where as the exec had power over the (post-)production and art department and the result was a movie that’s uncharacteristicly unique and uneven for a Hammer production.

The Pit and the Pendulum (Alexandre Astruc, 1964) is a great Poe adaptation because it eerily describes the physiological and psychological disorientation in voiceover to maximize the effects of vicarious torture for the audience. I won’t say the viewer because sound is key to the jarring experience and the visuals do less loud tricks to shake us up (they’re actually pretty methodically slow and calculated in form) but the camera moves around away from the subject or action in frame to displace us further from the groundedness of sight as a tool of control as we listen to the powerless confused narrator and become the oppressed through sensory deprivation. It’s by omission as much as inclusion, and more specifically what is expected is omitted and what is not (a doubtful non-omnipotent narrator) is included, that drives this to success beyond the great source material already rooted in corporeal horror vs supernatural, a rarity for Poe and all the more fitting to implement and hinder the audience along those same lines issuing tangibility with the camera as god and us emasculated of power over our own experience.

Beyond the supernatural elements, the Girl in a Swing belongs to what I might call "the Horror of Anxiety," wherein one offhand comment ruins at least three lives forever!

And glad to welcome another member aboard the Fun train as well. As I said in the Madeline's Madeline thread, Witt gives a great performance of a troubled youth that feels realistic but also exhibits what I'd call acting, not embodying the role. It's a shame she's been relegated mostly to TV and some pretty lousy indies that I already paid the iron price on so no one else has to. I know Lynch is fond of her, maybe he'll write her a good role one day...

Astruc's career took a right turn into the dumpster in the sixties (La proie pour l'ombre is one of the worst films to come out of France in this period, though none of his features from the decade are any good), but Le puits and to a lesser extent Evariste Galois showed he still had his wits about him, he just apparently elected to not use them!

Strangely enough, I was first attracted to Witt in her Sopranos role even though her episode is widely considering to be one of the worst, I looked her up and have been moderately obsessed ever since. Of course looking through her filmography I had seen her before (though I still haven’t worked up the courage to rewatch Bongwater, as once in middle school was enough- and can hardly remember her presence in a handful of others). Then there’s her solid role in Justified (I’m not counting her piano recital in Twin Peaks) but I even watched that half of whatever Walking Dead season she was on... it wasn’t worth it.

She'll always be Cybill Shepherd's daughter to me!

Maniac (Carreras 1963). (rewatch) Another Jimmy Sangster Les Diaboliques-inspired riff, with that many more deceitful plot twists than Taste of Fear. It’s not in the same league as the earlier film, and in a way it feels we’ve been through this stuff before, but despite its many imperfections, including plenty of stylistic incongruities, I still found this very enjoyable. There are no Gothic components this time, and the Camargue region of southern France in which the film is set, with its rocky, arid desert scenery, and the horses and even cowboys, offer contrasting Western visuals to this noir-ish thriller-with-a-touch-of- gruesomeness. Those many location scenes differ sharply from the usual set-heavy atmosphere of the Gothic horror films. The movie definitely likes to play with the viewer’s sympathies, starting with establishing the supposed villain (“maniac”) as the father who kills the man who rapes his 15-year-old daughter. Things get weirder still when the daughter and the stepmother are jealous of the attentions of the American tourist who comes into town four years later, and even though he’s clearly established as the film’s good guy he still has no qualms about intending to get it on with either (both?) of them. You gotta love Hammer.


The Tingler (Castle 1959). (1st viewing) I was surprised at how fun and good this movie was, and I think this is so much better than the more well-known Haunted Hill. There are continuities in the sadism of the characters and the exceedingly poisonous marriage depicted, but the film breathes more with its different settings, feels less artificial, and it keeps surprising you by the different places it goes to (the LSD-taking scene just one of them). Great overambitious scientist character played by Price, too, who definitely has a morally ambiguous quality but at the same time is still likeable. And Patricia Cutts is also terrific as the venomous, unhappy scientist’s wife (very much like Mrs. Jekyll in Hammer’s The Two Faces of Dr. Jekyll, but just that much more vengeful) with a lot of gleeful intensity in her performance, and her tall and strongly built physique (à la Ingrid Bergman) adds to it. Overriding all these great aspects, though, is just the fact that there’s just something completely, and so enjoyably, outlandish and surreal about this story and the discovery of the tingler that lives in all of us. And at the end the way the movie conspires to establish a metafilmic rapport with the theater audience is really clever in itself; it’s an inspired bit of movie-making.


Taste the Blood of Dracula (Sasdy 1970). (rewatch) I didn’t remember this as being anywhere near as good as I found it to be this time. Risen from the Grave had some touches of humor or lightness in the non-Dracula scenes, but this is such a different, completely grave and very dark film. Dracula features in fairly late into the film, and by then we’re already engrossed in the, as Mr. Sausage wrote, patriarchy-busting presentation of the moral hypocrisy of the Victorian men, ready behind the facade to sell their souls to the devil for a bit more sin, and in the narrative of Alice’s attempts to escape from the dominating authority of her father. Good actors and really solid direction, with nothing to envy from the best of Hammer’s pre-70s output. The first four Hammer Dracula films (including Lee) have such distinct personalities, and all are good in their own way.


The Tenant (Polanski 1976). (rewatch) The film isn’t fully comprehensible, which both keeps it from being fully satisfying and makes it interesting and contributes to its producing a deranging effect. It resembles Repulsion most (although it also winks at Rosemary’s Baby obviously, as well as Hitchcock), but in the earlier film Carol’s disintegration was explainable, whereas here Trelkovsky’s just happens. It’s also more complicated than that because, although he eventually is clearly losing it and is hallucinating, the behavior of many of the people in the film goes beyond eccentricity. Immediately this is established in the film with the way the Shelley Winters character acts, and it just piles on from there, whether it’s the grieving Stella’s grabbing Trelkovsky’s goodies in the cinema theater after he’s just met her, to the neighbor trying to explain to him that it’s unreasonable to have a party on a Saturday night, etc. etc. Signs keep pointing to weirdness in this world, but the various “clues” don’t add up. For instance in some ways there appear to be conspiratorial forces, in other ways the protagonist clearly imagines them. In the end, then, this ends up feeling a bit like the director is just having fun with what he can create, narrative- and image-wise, and also adding a lot of absurdist black comedy. The mise-en-scène is a lot of fun to watch, and it’s a disorienting experience for the viewer to invest in a rational agent among a world of kooks and to be at a fairly sudden point left in the lurch by his going completely off, but ultimately it’s hard to get completely involved.

(The Shock blu-ray is basically just an adequate, just OK upgrade of the existing DVD image. It’s extremely shoddy as a basic disc, though – no subtitles, not even a menu or any chapters, which means if you stop it and want to go back to a scene you have to start at the beginning and fast-forward all the way through.)


The Curse of the Werewolf (Fisher 1961). (rewatch) A Hammer favorite for me. The studio does a pretty convincing job creating a Spanish setting, which gives a very unique and different flavor to the original take on this monster. Great scenes with the boy wolf before we get to Oliver Reed as the adult, and the different sections are terrifically realized on all levels (acting, sets, costumes, photography, etc.). The introduction to the film features another typical Hammer presentation of the completely immoral aristocracy, with more deviance and gore than usual.


The Birds (Hitchcock 1963). (rewatch) I’ve already written this up in the Hitchcock project, but did another revisit just to rank it. That thread had an interesting discussion on trying to interpret the birds’ attacks in relation to the parallel relationship drama. Just pulling back again to a more surface level, though, the film’s power definitely resides strongly in the fact that those attacks not only come out of the blue, but are never explained, and may even be ultimately unexplainable. That creates an uncanny feeling, the sense of a more abstract, malevolent force that dwarfs both human action and understanding (reinforced in this film by the fact that the problem isn’t solved in the end either, just left behind). Perhaps that ties in with Lovecraftian cosmic horror in some ways. In any event to me horror films that deal with such a sense, where the threat comes from an aspect of the larger fabric of the universe (rather than being a distinct and explainable, even if super-powerful, antagonist, whether animal, supernatural or human), are the ones with the greatest potential, not only in terms of creating terror but also feelings of awe and dread.

I always feel like the odd man out in scratching my head at people who proclaim The Tenant to be the best of Polanski’s trilogy, so glad to see someone else who doesn’t get it. As for The Birds, well I’ll have to rewatch it myself but you basically sum up not only why it’s one of my favorites but why horror works for me too. That’s why demonlover may top my list for taking this cosmic concept and applying it to the powerlessness over the organic yet unstoppable effects of globalization, which basically feels like the equivalent of discovering that these birds are not only real but have invisibly been creating existential wear on me my whole life!

I think the descent in The Tenant is completely comprehensible on the level of theme. Polanski seems to have taken all of the contraptions placed upon him in his real life and like in The Trial, which this probably has the most common with, asks is this all deserved.

Interesting reading. I guess in that way potentially the non-sense makes sense.

Speaking of the non-sense, there's also the fact that the main character, once derailed, oscillates unpredictably between the identification with (or possession by?) the personality of the previous tenant, to the paranoid schizophrenic. The Egyptology interests of the former tenant also seems like one of the "clues" spread throughout the film (also see the mummified results of the victims), but it seems like another absurdist red herring in the end.

Apropos of nothing regarding The Birds, I noticed the five main characters are all very noticeably blue-eyed. Likely a coincidence, but a bit of a weird one.

Social issues have commonly been employed to explain why the birds attack, with racial integration being a common one, so I guess there's a log for that fire

And sign me up for Team the Tenant Does Nothing For Me

I think that connecting the film to absurdism or western surrealism is a bad idea and would likely cause a sour taste for anyone. The best precedents for what Polanski seems to be going for is magical realism, particularly of the kind practiced by east European Jews. Compare The Tenant to Schulz's The Hourglass Sanitarium. In many respects Polanski's film forms a connective tissue of exposing the causes and effects of the holocaust with Has' adaptation and the amazing Austeria from a few years later.

Spoiler

This is the importance of the identification with the previous victim and ultimately his death at the end of the film. Where Polanski differs from the other two film I mentioned is how he ties his story to the concept of diaspora which isn't a component of either other ones. From the start he's a stranger in a strange land who doesn't know how to join the melting pot and thus sticks out despite best efforts. We are so totally encompassed in his perspective that everything must become heightened to the point where we are equally confused. That's also why I don't think it is useful to try to figure out what is and isn't a hallucination. As a result of the paranoia and the genuine persecution existing simultaneously (e.g your family dies in the holocaust, your wife gets murdered, and you get kicked out of this inviting land for reasons that you may or may not understand as legitimate) so anything that seems like a hallucination may be just that or calling it such may be a coping device to ignore the actual danger as well as vice versa.

I mean, I don't like the Hourglass Sanatorium either, so sure, I can buy that it's in that spirit

I'm not trying to convince people to like it, I don't think I'm that good of a talker, but I think I'm providing the most fruitful reading of the film that will at least breed appreciation rather than necessarily liking. Though I find your understanding of the Has, if I'm reading your post correctly, to be mistaken as the narrative by symbols doesn't strike me as a set of randomness. That's probably for a different discussion though.

Thanks for that interpretation, knives. Again that makes a lot of sense with what's on the screen, especially with the film's emphasis on Trelkovsky's outsider origin, and all that stuff about both genuine and imagined persecution co-existing. I'm not sure what you're referring to in Polanski's bio about getting kicked out of an inviting land at this point in time, though.

I always get the years mixed up and forgot that the court case was the subsequent year.

No problem, the rest fits though. I was wondering watching it if he was writing the screenplay thinking about when he first arrived in France.

I could definitely see that being the case. I can't remember, was he on good terms with the Polish government when he left? That could probably play an effect as well. I know that Skolimowski's relationship to Poland had a profound effect on a lot of his ex-pat films, most blatantly Moonlighting.

domino harvey wrote: Sun Jan 26, 2020 6:15 pm Social issues have commonly been employed to explain why the birds attack, with racial integration being a common one, so I guess there's a log for that fire

One of the few relatively concrete memories I have from my college film classes was a professor declaring the best examples of Lacan’s ‘Real’ to be when Dorothy emerges from the dark naked in Blue Velvet and the birds’ intrusion disrupting the imaginary social comfort in The Birds and awakening the characters to this reality that had always existed by way of fear. Specifically the god’s eye shot from above as the birds come in and we align their perspective as the omniscient, suggesting that this is not an instance of attack but in accordance with Lacan’s theory, an absolute. I could be butchering this reading though, it’s been probably like 12ish years

I still have not seen The Tenant (waiting in vain for an acceptable release of it!), but it also sounds as if that recent film The Double is also in a similar vein, with a bit of Gilliam added in. Domino does not like this one either
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I went back to therewillbeblu's comments on demonlover earlier in the thread and just wanted to add that one of the moments that has stuck with me from this film is that moment very early on after Diane has drugged her boss's bottled water on the plane and then we seen the boss reacting to it in the airport, at first just seeming a bit jet lagged by the baggage carousel and then pushing her luggage trolley whilst dozing off before just as she is about to collapse two men come up behind her and whisk her away. That shot of her feet slowly moving and then suddenly effortlessly transitioning into dragging along the ground as she is being swiftly propelled into a private area to be robbed, is beautiful and terrifying at the same time, only emphasised by the droning of the Sonic Youth score. It really managed to convey that sense of the delirious total abandonment of control (albeit unwilling) at the same time as being forcefully propelled onward by the unstoppable momentum that your business dealings have built up, as person previously holding all of the cards finds themselves removed from the deck! (I also love the moment when the ex-boss returns later on, I think around the mid-way point of the film, to provide Diane with the illicit website's log in details and a word of advice!)
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And on The Birds I like that we get almost bookending scenes at the opening and close of the film of the human character being surrounded by animals, caged in the opening pet shop scene, uncaged and owning the outside world at the end whilst the human beings are themselves now caged (within their house, or car), restoring the balance of nature. Though its arguably gone a little bit too far the other way by the end!

I mostly love the way that The Birds uses language and treats it as kind of an irrelevance (the romantic scenes are often as much about placement of character in landscape as the content of their words, which are often white lies or at least concealments of true feelings) or even just another animal noise that needs to be tempered, eventually muting everyone down into silence. Even the birds themselves seem curiously placid at the end, as if they have managed to quieten down the hubbub of human noise (including those children singing their circular nursery rhyme, for which they must pay the price! Or the whine of the motorboat necessitating drastic measures to mess up the skipper's hairstyle and perfect composure!) to acceptable levels! Which of course makes turning the car on in the final scene all the more scary!

I also really like those stuttering edits in to emphasise horror, the one of the aftermath of the attack on the farmer's house that Mitch's mother stumbles upon (And then is speechless to convey the horror of, another moment of words being stolen from the characters. Even the ability to scream), and of course in that amazing, and almost filmically unique, sequence of shots showing Melanie's reaction following the trail of the lit petrol back to the gas pumps, in which Tippie Hedren is posed in each of those three quick reaction shots as completely still and frozen in terror whilst all the background actors behind her are still moving around showing that this is not a freeze frame image, until she 're-syncs' back up with everyone at the point of the explosion.

(That sequence in the town is full of great moments: the long talky debate scene in the bar about the whole situation with lots of wonderful different points of view; the pull back to the distant shot of the town immediately after the explosion to show the people scurrying around like ants around the fire whilst the shot steadily fills up with birds; Melanie being trapped in the phone booth; the quiet hopelessness of the return to the bar. Its enough to just about mitigate that guy stupidly burning his finger on a match and setting everything on fire in the first place!)

And I have to admit that I love Annie Hayworth, one of those supporting characters in horror films that I think we are meant to find as much, if not far more, appealing than the leads only to feel the pain of their sudden removal all the more keenly (and similar to those unrequited potential lover characters ignored for more the more dangerously vibrant yet unstable blonde leading ladies, as played by Barbara Bel Geddes in Vertigo and Diane Baker in Marnie)

The Flesh Eaters (Jack Curtis, 1964)

"...even after the storm passes there will still be too much turbulence to fly"
"But we can get off first thing in the morning, can't we"
"I'm afraid that we will just have to wait and see"
"See? Why?"
"Whether we will all be alive by then Miss Letterman. The island is completely unprotected. I can assure you that we are in for a good pounding."

I have been wanting to see this rarity for a couple of decades now and casually flicking through some back issues of Shivers magazine I ran across an article about it and it inspired me to see if I could track it down. Well its up on YouTube for the moment at least and I have finally had my chance!

It was quite strange after hearing for a while about all of the special effects sequences and thinking of it as a kind of contemporary of Fiend Without A Face, to find that it is actually pretty comic most of the time! Although I'm not sure if the completely picked clean skeleton washed ashore still with a bra clenched between its bony fingers was meant to have come across as quite as hilarious as it does! (Although the later scene of the beatnik noting the skeleton-held bra suggests it may have been!). It is quite a tonally bizarre film as whilst it contains a lot of out and out comic elements (the drunk actress, the beatnik, the parrot, oh God its got a parrot in it), the playing is very much as in a horror film. And there are some surprisingly vividly gory moments in there too!

After we get a couple of youngsters falling foul of a flesh eating blobby mass in the waters around their yacht in the pre-credits sequence (quite like the opening of Piranha a decade and a half later!) the comedy begins as a drunk actress (she is introduced trying to perch seductively on a railing of a dock only to slide off and almost head first into the water) and her secretary (introduced asking entirely the wrong person if she can charter a plane) hire a seaplane from a very belligerent chap, who inevitably turns out to be our hero. This really sets up the way that the whole film is full of that fast paced, slightly too knowing, witty screwball banter that I think is meant to play as cynical but lovable but just as often feels as if the characters (particularly our Bruce Campbell-looking leading man) are on the verge of an explosive temper tantrum!

They all end up stranded by a storm on an island where an 'inexplicably' German accented middle aged researcher is 'doing research', and lets them share his tent until his supply vessel arrives in a day or two. After a few misadventures (and the German researcher getting handsy with the actress, but she's holding an unrequited crush for the pilot, no matter how roughly he treats her and the secretary he's more interested in!) they find that they are trapped on the island by a collection of flesh eating beasties, that the German-accented (this will have the inevitable pay off later on) researcher has a vested interest in protecting, no matter what!

Oh, and a wild beatnik drifts ashore on a raft at around the mid-way point and despite only wearing a pair of sandals ("It took me three weeks to make those") and despite completely ignoring people shouting at him to keep away because it is dangerous despite obviously being able to hear them even over the tunes coming from his gramophone radio (something which gets really neatly called back to in his last scene, with again another pre-recorded soundtrack playing) annoyingly somehow manages to survive the flesh eaters to reach the shore and remain in the film!

I particularly love that the actress gets introduced as a completely unstable comic drunk (though a really fun drunk, albeit prone to philosophising about herself in the third person to an audience of her bottle friends!), and she gets a lot of things to do in the film as she wavers back and forth from being a lush to sobering up a bit, to getting a bit annoyed about it ("Gentlemen I drink. I don't mean polite cocktails. I drink!"). Here are just some of the antics that Miss Winters has to go through:

- your standard drunken ranting about not landing in the right place to the pilot
- apologising for her behaviour and properly introducing herself in the tent (in a fantastic shot where she approaches the camera directly to apologise)
- enduring the attentions of the German researcher trying to convince her that "knowledge is strength" over brawn, ("What makes you so superior, you little tin God!") and rebuffing him when he tries to kiss her
- starting to lose it again and getting her booze out of the plane ("Laura's medicine...everyone tries to take her medicine away from her") to eventually fall into a drunken stupor on the shore, which nicely sets her up to take the blame for letting the seaplane loose again (in another beautiful fade out shot of the plane disappearing into the darkness)
- apologising again for letting the plane loose, but then getting sidetracked into trying to get her case of booze back from the water and needing to be saved again from the rocks surrounded by the deadly monsters by the pilot

And I love that she both gets to betray our main couple by trying to side with the baddie, but manages to redeem herself at the end too and even kill the (first) monster in her final moments! She's a great character after starting as the most one dimensional and disposable one out of them all. I think wondering just at what point the character would meet her inevitable end, only to be constantly surprised over and over, was the most exciting part of the entire film!

Lots of people start getting killed off in quite gory ways, including another square jawed boat captain seemingly coming to the rescue in his motorboat only to get splashed in the face with the beastie filled water and immediately get turned into a skeleton! Which in retrospect makes that beatnik's sandals seem amazingly durable! I can forgive the beatnik for surviving for so long (and being used for comic relief social commentary, such as eating his food from cans with a twig because he's close to nature or something like that) because he eventually suffers an even worse fate for being so dumb and trusting! Did he not know the golden rule to never accept a vial of mysteriously bubbling liquid from a shifty scientist?

Our leading man is rather unsympathetic feeling throughout but I do really like the way that he lopes around in the action scenes. It is like he is very unsuited to physical acrobatics but does them anyway! And he does get a great travelling shot following him as he runs through the undergrowth!

It is not a remotely realistic film and quite easy to nitpick to death (for example why in the final fight scene after all the stuff about keeping covered does our hero wear the wetsuit but leave his hands and face uncovered? Surely that would have killed him? And how exactly does our researcher baddie actually intend to profit from his discovery that will kill any living thing on contact?) but I found this very enjoyable. Some of the special effects are a bit obviously unrealistic but I love they way that they are trying to show some really weird things (the guy with the hole in the middle of his torso; the flickering holes in the film to represent the beasts; the final creatures). And I love that the bad guy suddenly breaks off in the middle of his expository final speech to tell our hero to stop trying to escape! He does get an ironic comeuppance that weirdly anticipates the fates of most of the Nazis in the Indiana Jones films too!

And of course the biggest villain of all (aside from the Nazi experimenters with their own very 1960s looking indoor pool, just with a flag hung up for period authenticity) are the dangers posed by unchecked usage of solar power! Also it is rather heartless, but quite amusing, to put a microphone even closer to someone screaming whilst they are dying!

We do eventually get the payoff of a 'lumpy, bumpy monster' (similar to those described by Tom Weaver in his commentaries on the First Men In The Moon film!) making an appearance at the end of the film so that we get a big climactic fight! It is an wonderful extra bonus that 'for some reason' the monsters also explode when they die!

colinr0380 wrote: Mon Jan 27, 2020 10:49 am... in that amazing, and almost filmically unique, sequence of shots showing Melanie's reaction following the trail of the lit petrol back to the gas pumps, in which Tippie Hedren is posed in each of those three quick reaction shots as completely still and frozen in terror whilst all the background actors behind her are still moving around showing that this is not a freeze frame image, until she 're-syncs' back up with everyone at the point of the explosion.

That's the worst part of the movie for me.
It just looks so staged and phoney.

colinr0380 wrote: Mon Jan 27, 2020 10:49 amI mostly love the way that The Birds uses language and treats it as kind of an irrelevance (the romantic scenes are often as much about placement of character in landscape as the content of their words, which are often white lies or at least concealments of true feelings) or even just another animal noise that needs to be tempered, eventually muting everyone down into silence. Even the birds themselves seem curiously placid at the end, as if they have managed to quieten down the hubbub of human noise (including those children singing their circular nursery rhyme, for which they must pay the price! Or the whine of the motorboat necessitating drastic measures to mess up the skipper's hairstyle and perfect composure!) to acceptable levels! Which of course makes turning the car on in the final scene all the more scary!

That's a very interesting angle. I don't know if I'm completely onboard with that analysis but it definitely expresses how, yes, the film's human drama to a certain extent is made irrelevant by the bird apocalypse. I think it's a major strength of the film, and shows up how most horror films, then and now, are a lot more simple-minded by comparison, in that the film takes so much interest, time and care in developing this drama narrative, and the bird attacks are completely non-germane to it and their out-of-the-blueness traumatizes that narrative itself, until it almost collapses. It makes it all the more horrifying and disturbing. These characters and their relationships are clearly not written and built up just to be pawns in a horror plot.

Strangely enough, I was first attracted to Witt in her Sopranos role even though her episode is widely considering to be one of the worst...

That episode is considered one of the worst? I've never heard that before. It's one of my favorites and Witt is a big reason why.

barryconvex I agree with you, but I think we’re in the minority. Not only is it on lists of ‘worst eps’ but I’ve encountered plenty of people in my personal life who agree with that assessment. However, I don’t love the show in general so my opinion is bound to be a bit off kilter- even if I agree with a popular opinion that Pine Barrens is by far the best!