Halloween 2021: October 16th

The Collector (1965)

William Wyler holds the distinction of having more Oscar nomination for Best Director than anyone else in history, at twelve. This is far from his only distinguishing notice. He directed three Best Picture winners, a feat which no one else has achieved, as well as more Best Picture nominees than anyone else. He directed thirty-six performers to acting nominations, of which fourteen won. He owes these golden records to legendary crowd-pleasers like “Ben-Hur,” “Roman Holiday,” “The Best Years of Our Lives,” and “Mrs. Miniver.” Yet in the last third of his career, after making “Ben-Hur” the biggest blockbuster of its day, Wyler would direct a decidedly darker motion picture. “The Collector,” adapted from a popular novel by John Fowles, would see the filmmaker exploring the mind of a madman.

After winning a large sum of money on sports betting, Freddie Clegg purchases a home on a private patch of land in the British countryside. An obsessive butterfly collector, Freddie has now turned his attention to something else: Miranda Grey, a beautiful and posh young woman. He abducts her and hides her in the cellar of his house. He says he loves her but is controlling and dangerous. She attempts to alert other people but Freddie remains in control of the situation. She talks him into letting her leave after a month but, when she rejects his marriage proposal, he changes his mind. And that is when Miranda starts to get really scared. 

A key moment in “The Collector” has Freddie showing Miranda his butterflies. His vast lepidopterology collection takes up an entire room, with multiple slides. She, at first, says its beautiful before deciding it's horribly sad too. That Freddie has captured beautiful, living things, killed them, and placed them under glass. This perfectly describes the young man's interest in Miranda too. Later, when she attempts to seduce him, he becomes incensed that she has a sexual side. As he learns more about her interests, her social standing, he grows increasingly frustrated. Freddie doesn't want Miranda to exist as an actual person, with thoughts and opinions and messy sexual desires. He wants her to be a pretty object, something unmoving that he can keep preserved in one state forever. Even though few men would resort to abduction, many probably have feelings like this. 

Yes, watching “The Collector” in 2021, Freddie Clegg does come off as some sort of proto-incel. He complains that women like Miranda would never want anything to do with a guy like him and fixates on a handsome male friend of her's. (Though its social standing, not physical appearance, that he believes separates them.) He alternates between adoring and despising the woman. In an absolutely chilling ending, he winds up blaming Miranda for his actions. Yet Freddie is more sympathetic than that too. He was bullied at school and work. He's intensely shy and nervous around people. He reads “The Catcher in the Rye,” Miranda's favorite book, and looks at an art book she has about Picasso. Freddie is unable to understand what Miranda sees in the book. He can't grasp Picasso, because the artwork doesn't reflect literal reality. He can't relate to other people, doesn't understand social cues, and is fixated on a highly specialized subject like butterflies. If the character existed today, Freddie would undeniably be diagnosed as somewhere on the autism spectrum. Terence Stamp's performance brilliantly tows the line between frightening and pathetic.

Even if “The Collector” clearly gives Freddie lots of depth, there's never any doubt about where its sympathies lie. From the moment Miranda arrives, she is terrified and desperate to escape. She feigns appendicitis but he figures out what's happening. Once it becomes clear that she can't outfight him, she attempts to outsmart him. Yet pretending to play his games, to agree with his opinions, to accept his wedding proposal or trying to seduce him, also enrages Freddie. There's nothing she can do to please him. (Because any variance from his pre-conceived notions angers him.) Samantha Eggar's performance is heartbreaking, as she grows increasingly hopeless. Her pleas to be let go, as she slams on the cellar door, are haunting. 

Obviously, “The Collector” chronicles a very tense situation. Wyler and his team create several extended moments of suspense. When Miranda requests a bath, Freddie has a visitor stop by unexpectedly. Her attempt to alert this man, and Freddie's frantic attempts to stop her, are effectively stretched out. Maurice Jarre's music fantastically builds suspense in several key moments. Such as Freddie slowly pursuing Miranda through the home or the rain-soaked climax of the story. Sometimes, the movie manages to create a chill with nothing but a slow zoom-in on Terence Stamp's eyes. Ultimately, a villain so unpredictable and chilling powers “The Collector's” nervous energy throughout.

William Wyler was a perfectionist and demanded countless takes from his performers, in addition to socially isolating Samantha Eggar. Which isn't nice but his precise visual eye, fantastic set design, brilliant cinematography, and a pair of wonderful performances does cement “The Collector's” status as a classic. The film would earn Wyler his twelfth, and final, Best Director nomination. (Eggar was also nominated.) He only made three more movies, including light hearted comedies with Audrey Hepburn and Barbara Streisand. As for “The Collector,” it would supposedly inspired a couple different serial killers to try something similar. I'm pretty sure those guys weren't paying very close attention to this obviously anti-stalking movie. [9/10] 

Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings (2011)

It's hard to imagine anybody looking at a stinky piece of dog shit like “Wrong Turn 3” and being satisfied with it. Yet, clearly, some exec at 20th Century Fox's home video department was pleased with the sequel. Or, at least, pleased with how many DVDs and Blu-Rays it sold. Declan O'Brien, after gifting the world with “Sharktopus,” would return to make another one less than a year later. He provided his own script this time too, for whatever that's worth. “Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings” would arrive on Wal-Mart shelves, streaming services, and RedBoxes in October of 2011. 

Since the last of the cannibalistic hillbilly brothers was possibly killed off in part 3, the decision was made to go back in time. Back in the seventies, Three Finger, One Eye, and Saw Tooth were placed in the Glenville Sanatorium, in the snowy backwoods of West Virginia. They managed to escape and kill the staff. About thirty years later, they are still hanging around the long-since abandoned hospital. At that time, a group of horny college kids arrive to drive their snowmobiles around the hills. A winter storm forces them to take shelter inside the sanatorium. They don't know about the building's inhabitants but, soon enough, they are crossing paths with the blood-thirsty, mutated rednecks from Hell.

“Wrong Turn 4” has two good ideas and it squanders both of them. Four movies in and we still know almost nothing about the series' central villains. A prequel that would've explored their origins – and, perhaps, had them as villains protagonist inside an abusive sanitarium – could've been a decent movie. Instead, the prequel elements of “Bloody Beginnings” only makes up the first few minutes. The opening sequences has the three brothers, given the last name of Hillicker, as teens before the script leaps ahead to 2003. (I guess they spend the winters in the hospital, since the idea that they hung around the building for thirty years makes no sense.) The second good idea is placing its story in the snow, always an underutilized setting for a slasher flick. Yet almost the entire movie happens inside the abandoned insane asylum. When the story does shift outside in the last act, we get a bunch of silly scenes of the mutant hillbillies riding around on snowmobiles. How do they know how to operate those? 

Instead of doing anything interesting, “Bloody Beginnings” is mostly just a generic slasher movie. The group of horny college kids the movie follows are as generic as can be. The majority of them blend into one another, distinguishable only by their hair color. The script doesn't even take the time to designate stereotypes for most of its cast. About the only memorable thing about the murder fodder in this one is that two of them are an interracial lesbian couple. Yet even this seems to have been done so the movie could include some gratuitous girl-on-girl sex scenes. The movie opens with extended sex scenes and includes more, even after the gang arrive at the spooky abandoned hospital. The characters in “Wrong Turn 4” are better than those in “Wrong Turn 3” but only because none of them are Neo-Nazis. Otherwise, they might as well be cardboard cut-outs full of blood.

With absolutely nothing else justifying its existence, “Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings” packs in the gore. There's less shitty CGI than there was in part three, save for a barb wire garroting that ends with an awkward decapitation. The violence is excessively sadistic. The camera lingers on a doctor being slowly torn limb from limb. A needlessly drawn-out scene has the brothers tying a guy down, slowly slicing cubes of his flesh off and frying it. (As if that didn't make the movie a blatant “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” rip-off, one of the Hillickers gets to swing around a giant drill.) O'Brien's direction is totally artless, flatly watching as a girl is splattered by a snowmobile, with nothing to justify its cruelty. When combined with a hopeless, foregone ending – possibly ripped-off from “2001 Maniacs,” of all things – the film's tone is one of adolescent nihilism.

Also, “Bloody Beginnings” seemingly disregards the idea of chemicals from a paper mill mutating the populace that “Wrong Turn 2” presented. It credits inbreeding solely with the brothers' deformities. The opening scene even makes references to some isolated community in West Virginia where inbreeding is commonplace. Ya know, as a native West Virginian, I've got a pretty thick skin about this stuff but I find the idea that there's whole towns of us fucking our sisters a little insulting. “Wrong Turn 4” is the slightest of improvements over the third. There's less obnoxious bickering and the script at least has more focus. It's still a piss poor excuse for a horror movie, doing little with its good ideas, largely defined by indistinct choices, and boringly mean-spirited in tone. [4/10]

The Outer Limits: Quality of Mercy

I wasn't very impressed with the episode of the nineties “Outer Limits” revival I watched last Halloween but the show definitely has a following, so I'm giving it another shot. “Quality of Mercy” concerns two veterans of an intergalactic war, between humanity and a race of reptilian aliens. Major John Skokes is thrown into an inhospitable jail cell on a strange world. His cellmate is inexperienced cadet Bree Tristan. Their extraterrestrial captors are performing some sort of experiments on Bree, which are slowly transforming her into one of them. Bree feels increasingly hopeless, about both the war and their situation, while Skokes holds out hope for both escaping and the cause. The two draw closer as she continues to change. 

Is every episode of the nineties “Outer Limits” this maudlin and self-serious? “Quality of Mercy” is largely devoted to its two characters having very intense conversations about whether or not the war is worth it. Skokes continues to believe that the aliens are aggressors and that humanity needs to defend itself. He encourages Bree not to give up hope, no matter how grim their situation is. When not discussing this, the two talk exclusively about her transformation and to what degree she is still human. The ability of the human spirit to endure, how one even defines humanity anyway, as well as topics of jingoism in war time, are worth discussing... Yet “Quality of Mercy” goes about it in an obnoxiously hammy way. It's literally all these two talk about, via awkward and corny sci-fi dialogue.

The cast is almost able to make this work. Robert Patrick stars as Skokes and is the main reason I watched this. While Patrick is not able to make the ridiculous dialogue sound believable, nor is he able to make a series of underwhelming attack scenes thrilling, he does his best. He has semi-decent chemistry with Nicole De Boer, as Bree. The two develop an odd romance of sorts, drawing closer as she becomes more inhuman. The scenes of him holding her are the only time this premise feels warm and emotional. Which makes the episode leading up to a cheap twist ending all the more annoying. At least the creature effects are pretty good, as the reptilian humanoids are fittingly intimidating and scaly. De Boer's slow change is nicely squishy and unnerving. I also like the little crustacean creatures that are the prisoners' sole source of food. Overall though, this is a pretty lame forty minutes of television. [5/10]

The Image (1969)

I don't get a chance to mention David Bowie – perhaps the pop culture figure that has influenced my life more than any other – here at Film Thoughts very often. Though he lent his once-in-a-lifetime star power to a number of cult classics over the years, a lot of the projects he chose to act in still seem weird. Long before beloved films like “The Man Who Fell to Earth” and “Labyrinth,” or whatever the hell “The Linguini Incident” and “Mr. Rice's Secret” were, a young and hungry Bowie appeared in a 13-minute long short called “The Image.” It concerns an artist who paints a figure on a dark and stormy night. He's startled when the young man from the painting seemingly appears in his room. The artist is pursued by the mysterious person and repeatedly kills him, only for the living painting to reappear every time. 

“The Image” is the definition of an artsy-fartsy short film. It was filmed in atmospheric black-and-white and contains no dialogue. The story's events happen for no clear reason and it ends just as mysteriously. It's full of self-consciously arty editing. Every time the artist violently strikes down the living illustration – via a roman bust to the head or multiple stab wounds – images from the last bloody assault flash on-screen. (The film was sufficiently violent enough to earn an X rating, the first time in British history that ever happened with a short.) What exactly it all means is hard to decipher. Wikipedia describes it as “a study of the illusionary reality world within the schizophrenic mind of the artist at his point of creativity.” Which is certainly a series of words.

Made before he became Ziggy Stardust, and even before “Space Oddity” became his first real hit, this was Bowie's on-screen debut. This was back when he was really into mime and still sporting his “Laughing Gnome” mod haircut. Yet Bowie's otherworldly presence was already established this early on. It's well utilized here, as he plays a blankly starring and ominous figure that always approaches the protagonist, sometimes seemingly without moving his feet. “The Image” is never that creepy or nightmarish, though I'm not sure you could describe as anything other than a horror movie. Director Mark Armstrong would go on to make “Mark of the Devil,” so chills were likely the intended effect. Its quality falls far short of its art house ambitions. Still, Bowie's unique power as a performer does make “The Image” – which was rare and hard-to-find for years until it was released online in 2016 – worth seeking out. [6/10]