Last of the Summer Wine – Blood and Porridge

October 28, 2024October 31, 2024

Mama Mia

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

One more post in advance of Halloween…

I’ve now watched all of the X trilogy of horror movies directed and written by Ti West and starring Mia Goth (who also co-wrote one of them). These are X (2022), Pearl (2022) and MaXXXine (2024), which focus on the characters of ruthlessly determined actress Maxine Minx and frustrated wannabe actress Pearl Douglas, both played by Goth. At its best, the trilogy is great. At its worst, it’s still good fun.

X is the story of some city-folk heading out into the countryside and falling prey to a foe their slick city ways can’t deal with. Yes, that’s the plot of half the horror movies ever made, from Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) to Sam Raimi’s The Evil Dead (1982), from John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) to Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez’s The Blair Witch Project (1999), from Eli Roth’s Cabin Fever (2002) to Ari Aster’s Midsommar (2019). In West’s spin on it, the city-folk are six young filmmakers, including Goth’s character Maxine. The year is 1979 and they intend to make a porno movie on the quick and on the cheap. As a market for their product, they’re eyeing the up-and-coming technology of VHS, which will allow people to pay money and watch steamy movies they’re never likely to see in their local cinemas. The filmmakers have rented a building on an out-of-the-way farm for the shoot, a farm belonging to an elderly couple called Howard and Pearl.

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

Incidentally, Howard and Pearl are also the names of an elderly couple featured in the BBC’s long-running, almost never-ending – and terrible – situation comedy Last of the Summer Wine (1973-2010). I guess an American like West wouldn’t have known that. Though maybe Mia Goth, who’s English, could have warned him that those character names were likely to give viewers from the United Kingdom PTSD-type flashbacks to Last of the Summer Wine.

X‘s Pearl is clearly unhinged and she’s about to get worse. Ruminating on her current wrinkly decrepitude, mourning the loss of her youth, and jealously resenting the nubile young bodies performing sex-acts for the cameras on the other side of the farmstead, the old woman flips. Bloody mayhem ensues, involving guns, knives, pitchforks and a large alligator who hungrily lurks in a pond elsewhere on the premises. The scene where Maxine takes a naked dip in the pond, not suspecting that its scaly occupant is slowly closing in on her, is one of the creepiest things in the movie. Rarely have aerial shots been so unnerving.

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

In all three movies, West revels in the setting. X takes place during a Texas summer and the heat and sweatiness are nicely conveyed by the 1970s-aesthetic of the visuals. The daytime shots, at least, have a faintly bleached and blurry look that evoke all sorts of bucolic American horror movies really made in that decade – the aforementioned Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the likes of John Hancock’s Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), Jack Starrett’s Race with the Devil (1975) and Jeff Lieberman’s Squirm (1976). Meanwhile, the way Pearl embodies the horrors of the aging process gives the film an extra depth. This theme is touched upon both melancholically, as when Pearl realises how much Maxine resembles her when she was young, and queasily, with Pearl shuffling down to the makeshift film studio, spying on the actors doing their sex scenes and imagining she’s taking part herself.

But X’s greatest gimmick is its casting, for Mia Goth plays not one, but two characters. She’s Maxine and Pearl. The latter role required her to spend ‘a good 10 hours in the make-up chair’ in order to get the old-lady prosthetics applied.

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

X ends with Maxine’s escape from the farm. She drives off into the night, still determined to make it big as an actress. But what comes next isn’t a sequel but a prequel. If it was plausible for Goth to play Pearl with heavy make-up as an old woman, she could obviously play the character without make-up as a young woman. Hence, we got Pearl, also released in 2022. This is set in 1918 with the title character stuck on her parents’ farm (the same one as in X, though disarmingly smart and new-looking compared with the crumbling, rundown version of it in the previous film) whilst waiting for husband Howard to return from World War I. She’s especially stuck because the Spanish flu pandemic, the early 20^th century’s equivalent of Covid-19, is raging and Pearl’s family are isolating themselves. It doesn’t help matters that her father (Matthew Sunderland) has been crippled by a stroke and her mother Ruth (Tandi Wright) is humourless, censorious and bitter. Pearl responds to the situation by fantasising about becoming an all-singing, all-dancing silent-movie star – which increasingly provokes Ruth’s wrath.

Meanwhile, Pearl is already subject to the psychopathy that’ll lead to X’s bloody events 60 years later. In an early scene, she takes a hay-fork to an unfortunate goose who didn’t display sufficient enthusiasm for a show she put on for the animals in the barn. She then goes to the pond and feeds the dead fowl to an alligator, whom she’s named Theda after the silent movie actress Theda Bara (and who’s presumably the granny of the alligator in X).

Though her mother is determined to clip her wings, other things seemingly pull Pearl in the direction of her dreams – namely, the flattery of a handsome but lecherous projector at the local town’s movie theatre, and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join a travelling dance troupe, the auditions for which are being held in the local church. Predictably, during the ensuing conflicts, betrayals and disappointments, Pearl snaps. The bodies pile up and Theda the Alligator gets some unexpected meals.

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

Even more so than X, Pearl shows West and Goth at the top of their games. The director excels in orchestrating the showbiz-y fantasies that Pearl weaves around herself, including one set in a cornfield and involving a scarecrow that’s inspired by The Wizard of Oz (1939). We can’t help but pity her even though we know she’s turning into a monster. And Goth is amazing. She’s particularly awesome at the end, when Howard finally arrives back from the war and finds the farmhouse kitchen in a less than decorous state. Pearl presents herself – “I’m so happy you’re home!” – with a rictus-like smile, simultaneously heartfelt and terrifying, that seems to stay on her features forever. No wonder Peter Bradshaw, film critic in The Guardian newspaper, hailed Goth as ‘the Judy Garland of horror’.

Pearl isn’t around for MaXXXine, released in 2024 and set in 1985, six years after the events of X. But we glimpse her in flashbacks and her presence is felt in one of the film’s most harrowing scenes. This is when Maxine – now in Hollywood and trying to graduate from starring in porn movies to starring in something slightly more upmarket, i.e., horror movies – sits in a make-up chair and has a cast made of her head. With her face buried in the cast, and blinded by it, she suffers a panic attack and imagines Pearl is in the room, caressing her, as she did during one creepy moment in X.

Whereas the action in X and in much of Pearl was confined to a farm, MaXXXine is far more expansive. Its story unfolds all over Los Angeles, from the Hollywood Hills to the back-lots of Universal Studios (where, significantly, we see the Bates house and motel from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho), from the city’s luxurious mansions to its ultra-dodgy strip-clubs, peepshows and back alleyways. But it’s the time rather than the place that gives the film its vibe. MaXXXine unashamedly immerses itself in the garish sleaze and excessiveness of the 1980s: big hair, Ray-Ban sunglasses, spandex, lip-gloss, neon colours, graffiti, cocaine, hustlers, flashy convertibles with personalised number-plates, X-rated video stores, lascivious hair-metal bands, gory slasher movies and general ‘me’-generation greed. West depicts this world as a cesspit, but a somehow joyous cesspit. Maxine, of course, has taken to it like a duck to water.

But it’s still water that contains alligators. Maxine gets caught up in a murder spree by an apparently Satan-worshipping serial killer who’s targeting people close to her. She also has to deal with a crooked private investigator, played with scenery-chewing magnificence by Kevin Bacon, who knows she was present at the bloodbath at Pearl and Howard’s farm in 1979. These things happen while she’s pursuing what she believes is her big break – a starring role in a schlocky horror sequel called The Puritan II, about to be filmed by a hard-as-nails lady director (Elizabeth Debicki).

© A24 / Motel Mojave / Access Entertainment

This leads to the first of a few unsatisfactory things in MaXXXine’s plotting. Maxine is so determined to hold onto the film-role that she refuses to cooperate with the cops investigating the serial killer, because getting involved in a murder case will prevent her working on The Puritan II. We know that Maxine is now in some ways as psychopathically ruthless as Pearl – early on, she’s shown dealing with a would-be mugger in a manner that’ll bring a grimace to the face of anyone possessing a pair of testicles – but come on. Your friends are being slaughtered around you. There’s a good chance you’ll be next. How could you not go to the cops, important impending film-role or not?

Also awkward is the film’s ending, which veers off into a completely different style of movie – admittedly still a 1980s style, that of a Jerry Bruckheimer-Don Simpson action thriller. At the same time, when the identity of the villain is finally revealed, it’s scarcely a surprise, since it was heavily signalled beforehand.

However, criticising a film paying homage to the 1980s for being illogical is self-defeating, considering that bona fide 1980s movies were hardly known for their logic. It’s telling that one 1980s movie MaXXXine has been compared to is Brian De Palma’s violent thriller Body Double (1984). (Both have scenes prominently featuring Frankie Goes to Hollywood songs, Relax in Body Double, Welcome to the Pleasure Dome in MaXXXine.) Body Double is regarded as a classic now, but on its release the critics dismissed it as De Palma at his most throwaway, as a series of stylish set-pieces in search of a plot. MaXXXine is a similar, De Palma-esque mixture of splendidness and shonkiness.

© A24 / Motel Mojave / Access Entertainment

Anyway, there’s much to enjoy in it. Goth’s first scene as Maxine is brilliant. It culminates in her emerging from the audition for The Puritan II and contemptuously informing the long queue of would-be starlets waiting outside that they’re wasting their time because she has the job in the bag. She then struts off to the sound of ZZ Top’s Gimme All Your Lovin’. The cast is great too. As well as Goth, Bacon and Debicki, it has Giancarlo Esposito playing Maxine’s shady agent. Esposito, of course, was the terrifying Gus Fring in Breaking Bad (2008-13) and Better Call Saul (2015-22) and here he does a shockingly Gus Fring-like thing near the movie’s end.

In my opinion, then, X is the best horror movie of the three, Pearl is the best movie full-stop, and MaXXXine, despite its flaws, is very entertaining. I wonder if West and Goth will get around to making a fourth film. Goth has played Pearl young and old, but played Maxine only young. How about a fourth movie set in the 2020s, with Maxine now as aged as Pearl was in X and living reclusively like the embittered Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950)?

Being a horror movie, though, it would be in the vein of what used to be called ‘psycho-biddy’ or ‘hagsploitation’ movies. These constituted a sub-genre of horror that featured aging female movie stars playing old ladies who’ve become psychopathically loopy: for example, Betty Davis and Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Tallulah Bankhead in Die! Die! My Darling! (1965) Zsa Zsa Gabor in Picture Mommy Dead (1966), Shelley Winters in Whoever Slew Auntie Roo? (1971) and Lana Turner in Persecution (1974). I have every confidence that the mighty Mia Goth, in old-lady make-up, would hold her own among the likes of Davis, Crawford, Bankhead, Gabor, Winters and Turner.

Come to think of it, she’s done it already, in X.

© A24 / Little Lamb / Mad Solar Productions

March 31, 2024April 6, 2024

Cinematic heroines 2: Sheila Keith

© Peter Walker (Heritage) Ltd

Every year, March is designated ‘Women in Horror Month’. This is when fans of horror fiction, cinema, television, comics, games, etc., are encouraged “to learn about and showcase the underrepresented work of women in the horror industries. Whether they are on the screen, behind the scenes, or contributing in their other various artistic ways, it is clear that women love, appreciate, and contribute to the horror genre.”

As an occasional writer of horror fiction, and just before the month ends, here’s my contribution. I pay tribute to a lady who, during a unique run of movies, did much to give me nightmares – or indeed, frightmares – during my impressionable youth.

Scottish actress Sheila Keith had a remarkable dual career. Though not a household name, she was certainly a familiar face – with a familiar, haughty, often-disapproving voice – to a couple of generations of British TV viewers. This was because of her appearances as prim ladies of a certain age, frequently nuns, or aristocrats with double-barrelled names, in cosy situation comedies like The Liver Birds (1969-78), Some Mothers do ‘Ave ‘Em (1973-78), Rings on their Fingers (1978-80), Bless Me Father (1978-81), Agony (1979-81), The Other ‘Arf (1980-84), Never The Twain (1981-91), A Fine Romance (1981-84) and The Brittas Empire (1991-97).

On top of that, she put in time in ITV’s long-running but much-derided soap opera Crossroads (1964-88), where she played cook Betty Cornet, toiling in the Crossroads Motel kitchen for 31 episodes in 1967. Poor Betty perished when workmen extending the motel’s premises accidently uncovered and set off a World War II bomb.

The second, less conventional strand of Keith’s resumé came from her involvement in a series of movies made by British director Pete Walker. Having started off making sex-comedies like 1969’s School for Sex and 1970’s Cool It Carol!, Walker hit his stride making horror movies during the 1970s, with Keith as a regular collaborator. A combination of exploitation cinema and social commentary, these were memorably grim – serving up (for the time) disturbingly graphic violence, attacking institutions like the judiciary and the Catholic church, and generally showing how depressingly grotty life was in 1970s Britain. And Keith’s performances, as ladies doing unspeakable things whilst maintaining the veneer of snootiness that’d served her well in her TV sitcom work, made the films even more memorable.

The first Keith-Walker collaboration was 1974’s House of Whipcord (1974), wherein a young woman called Ann-Marie (Penny Irving) suffers some spectacularly bad luck. Firstly, she discovers that a nude photograph of her has been put on public display. Then the nice young man who befriends her (Robert Tayman, who’d recently played the villain in the 1971 Hammer horror flick Vampire Circus), and takes her to his country estate to escape the scandal, turns out to be a ‘honey-trap‘. His parents are a demented anti-permissive-society campaigner called Margaret Wakehurst (Barbara Markham) and a reactionary, but now blind and senile judge called Justice Bailey (Patrick Barr). They’ve turned the country house into a secret, illegal prison where women they deem to have ‘fallen’ are brutally punished. And Ann-Marie, they’ve decided, has fallen.

The remainder of the film is basically a race against time, with Ann-Marie’s friends (Ray Brooks and Ann Michelle) trying to track her down and rescue her, before her repeated attempts to escape the prison incur the ultimate penalty – execution. You might not want to bet your life savings on there being a happy ending.

Though not the lead villainess, Keith is memorable as Walker, one of Wakehurst and Bailey’s prison wardens. Walker may not be doing the job just for the money and from a misguided sense of justice — seeing the young inmates flogged seems to turn her on. Meanwhile, the other Walker, Pete, and his scriptwriter David McGillivray make it clear who their target is in a sarcastic opening-credits statement: “This film is dedicated to those who are disturbed by today’s lax moral codes and who eagerly await the return of corporal and capital punishment…” They may have had in mind the Nationwide Festival of Light, in vogue at the time, described by Wikipedia as a ‘grassroots movement formed by British Christians concerned about the rise of the permissive society and social changes in English society by the late 1960s’ and whose supporters included Lord Longford, Malcolm Muggeridge, Cliff Richard and the inevitable Mary Whitehouse.

A year later, Keith got a bigger role in House of Mortal Sin (1975), which this time took a swipe at organised religion and the Catholic church in particular. This had a slightly starrier cast too. Stephanie Beacham and Susan Penhaligon play Vanessa and Jenny, sisters who, through their friendship with a well-meaning young priest (Norman Eshley, later to find fame as snobby neighbour Jeffrey Fourmile in the 1976-79 TV sitcom George and Mildred), unwittingly enter the orbit of the deranged Father Xavier Meldrum (Anthony Sharp). Not only is Meldrum a stalker who’s soon targeting Jenny, but he’s a homicidal maniac who uses some appropriately ecclesiastical methods to murder people – bludgeoning them with incense-burners, feeding them poisonous communion wafers, throttling them with rosary beads.

Keith plays Meldrum’s housekeeper Miss Brabazon, who turns a blind eye – literally a blind eye, because she’s missing one – to the old monster’s crimes due to her love for him. She has responsibility for looking after Meldrum’s extremely elderly and ailing mother, and particularly gruelling are the scenes where she abuses her charge, blaming her for making her son enter the priesthood and a lifetime of celibacy. Again, don’t expect a happy ending.

However, it’s the film Keith made for Walker between the two Houses, Whipcord and Mortal Sin, that saw her at her terrifying best. In Frightmare (1974), she plays Dorothy Yates, a character who spends the film shifting gears between being a confused, pathetic, middle-aged housewife and a demented brain-eating cannibal. In the late 1950s Dorothy and her husband Edmund (Rupert Davies) were placed in an asylum after a string of murders – though innocent, such was Edmund’s love for Dorothy that he allowed himself to be incarcerated alongside her. Dorothy’s last 1950s victim, incidentally, is played by Andrew Sachs, soon to become a star as Manuel, John Cleese’s Spanish waiter / punchbag in Fawlty Towers (1975-79).

Released from the mental institution in the mid-1970s, the couple become a headache for Jackie (Deborah Fairfax), Edmund’s daughter from a previous marriage. She has to supply her father and stepmum, who’ve holed up in a remote farmhouse, with parcels of sheep’s brains in an attempt to satisfy Dorothy’s cravings. Also, she’s keen to keep her tearaway half-sister Debbie (Kim Butcher), Edmund and Dorothy’s daughter, away from her parents for obvious reasons. Things don’t work out well. Dorothy is soon demanding brains of the human variety, lures people into her parlour (full of chintzy ornaments and cups of tea) for Tarot card readings, kills them and eats them. Meanwhile, there are disturbing signs that her cannibalistic urges may be running in the family.

Frightmare climaxes with some nasty stuff involving a Black-and-Decker drill, but nothing quite compares to the image of Dorothy that assails Jackie during a dream – her mad stepmother stalks up to her, white-faced and grinning, chewing brains from a red-soaked parcel, blood oozing down her chin. In its less sensational, buttoned-up way, Frightmare is the English Home Counties’ answer to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was released the same year.

Walker cast her in two later horror movies, 1978’s The Comeback and 1982’s House of the Long Shadows, but neither was to the standard of their earlier work. The Comeback has an interesting idea – an elderly couple (one of whom is Keith) take gruesome revenge on a faded rock star whom they believe induced their daughter to commit suicide. Confronting the rocker at the end, Keith admonishes him in a hate-filled voice for his decadence, his depravity and even his ‘foul contortions’ onstage. This would have worked if the rock star had been played by someone properly decadent like Mick Jagger or Iggy Pop but, laughably, he’s played by Jack Jones, housewives’ favourite and singer of the Love Boat theme (1977). Jones’s performance was likened by one critic to that of a ‘hibernating bear’.

Some of the other casting is distracting too. Jones’s manager is played by David Doyle, who at the time was a regular in the popular American TV show Charlie’s Angels (1976-81) – wow, I thought the moment he appeared, it’s Bosley! Meanwhile, in the role of Keith’s husband is Bill Owen, famous in Britain for playing the wellie-wearing, ferret-loving Compo in the BBC’s Last of the Summer Wine, which ran from 1973 to 2010 and became the longest-running TV sitcom in the world. Just to round out the weirdness of The Comeback’s cast, Jack Jones, Bosley and Compo are joined by Pamela Stephenson, soon to hit it big as a comedienne in the BBC’s satirical sketch-show Not the Nine O’Clock News (1979-82).

You couldn’t nitpick about the cast of House of the Long Shadows, the last of Keith and Walker’s movies and, indeed, the last film Walker made. For horror fans, it’s awesome – horror legends Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and (from an earlier period of macabre cinema) John Carradine. Long Shadows tells the story of a hotshot young author (Desi Arnaz Jr) who makes a bet with his publisher (Richard Todd) that he can write a novel in 24 hours in a suitably-inspiring environment – a creepy, deserted mansion house in Wales. However, Arnaz Jr soon discovers that the mansion isn’t deserted at all. It’s still home to a decrepit lord (Carradine) and his sons (Price and Cushing) and daughter (Keith). Complicating matters is Lee as a pompous businessman, turning up to declare his intention to buy the property, and then the revelation that there’s a madman on the loose, killing the house’s occupants one by one.

House of the Long Shadows is a disappointment, which is hardly a surprise considering the disparate elements involved in its making. Price, Lee and Cushing had become stars in the 1950s and 1960s working for studios like Hammer Films and American International Pictures, making films that were colourful, gothic-horror costume-dramas – for example, instalments in the studios’ Dracula, Frankenstein and Edgar Allan Poe series. Made later, in the 1970s, Walker’s brutal, contemporary-set horror films were obviously a reaction against these. Similarly, his scriptwriter here, Michael Armstrong, had directed gory films like The Haunted House of Horror (1969) and Mark of the Devil (1970), which definitely weren’t of the gothic fairy-tale school either. Armstrong’s script, though, was based on a very old novel and play, Seven Keys to Baldpate, both from 1913. And the producers were none other than Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus of that very 1980s-esque outfit, Cannon Films. Thus, the stars, the director and scriptwriter, the source material and the producers belonged to wildly-different eras. Long Shadows unsurprisingly doesn’t gel.

It doesn’t help that Armstrong’s script ends with a couple of twists that don’t so much amaze the audience with their cleverness as make them groan at their corniness. But still, it’s a pleasure to see Price, Lee, Cushing and Carradine together, and Keith has fun playing an eccentric who fancies herself as a singer, even though she’s painfully tone-deaf. Small wonder she’s eventually done in with a length of piano wire.

Thereafter, Keith’s film appearances were few, although she turned up in the 1986 John Cleese movie Clockwise. She also kept busy into the 1990s with TV appearances. Fittingly, her last role – three years before her death in 2004 – was in an episode of the 2001 spoof anthology show Dr Terrible’s House of Horrible, written by Graham Duff and Steve Coogan and designed as an affectionate piss-take of old British horror movies from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Though handsomely staged, it wasn’t particularly good. However, it was nice to see Keith appear in an episode called And Now the Fearing…, playing a gypsy woman who crosses swords with an architect (Alexander Armstrong) who wants to clear her encampment to make way for a new development. Keith, predictably, draws on some old gypsy magic and has fun turning the tables on the smug, smarmy Armstrong.

The actresses who found fame in British horror movies tended to be of the young, sexy, ‘starlet’ variety – Ingrid Pitt, Caroline Munro, Linda Hayden and so on. Sheila Keith was already in her fifties when she arrived on the scene and didn’t have youth or sexiness on her side. Rather, splendidly playing a succession of harridans who were psychotic, sadistic, embittered and / or pitiful, she represented grey power. With power tools.