The Leather Funnel, Orson Welles Mysteries (1973-74), Two and a half stars.

Rev., Jul 11, 2026

Introduced by Orson Welles in his later in life persona as the gourmand decadent who traffics in the strange and mysterious, one thing you can say about this series, he certainly attracted top shelf actors. In this one, Simon Ward comes to visit his future uncle Christopher Lee to talk about his intended, Lee’s niece, the young Jane Seymour in her witchiest best. Ward always plays the briskly handsome man whom you would think would walk confident in the world but carries with him a weak spot. He stops by to meet his fiancé for dinner, but she is late, and Lee is there, this in Paris, to give him the whole worldly gentleman treatment including offering of a whiskey or cordial (they did a lot of drinking in old movies). Lee carefully directs the conversation, because Ward notices that he has many wonderful works or art and objects, to a strange leather funnel placed on a side table. Lee asks him if he knows a lot about dreams. He then mentions what sounds like a psychometric belief applied to dream theory. That is, that critical events of one’s life can be called back up, as a sort of dream, by an object that was deeply associated with that event. He is talking about triggers, of course, but in a more psychic way. In this theory the object can act as a sort of physical tape recorder to absorb fully the story and after that you can play it back simply by contemplating or partaking of the object. But the human mind must be in a most receptive state. As Ward drinks his drink, his eyes begin to roll and shift toward Lee, not quite believing anything he says. But, alas, the drink is drugged, and he nods off in a high chair. He now instructs Ward, half asleep, in this hour before Veronica returns, I want to see if you descend into the dream which is embedded in this leather funnel. In that dream you will find out something very important about your beloved Veronica. And so Ward spirals in an iris and a blur down into a dream state. At the bottom of the whoosh, the iris opens up into, unbelievably, it looks like a three-hundred-year-old French court. Caught between a striking militant mural and a friars cross Seymour in curls and with a razor-sharp grimace stands accused. This is Jane Seymour at, as i said, her early career witchiest best, that same evil simper that she wielded so awfully in The True Story of Frankenstein. She is accused of the murder of father and brothers, and of I think being a witch. She rejects the claim, and blasphemes, adding that to the list of her crimes. She is as a follower of the antichrist condemned to death, when asked to repent, the camera pulls back to see Seymour majestic in baby blue against purple curtains quietly put her hands below her hips verging toward her crotch, a posture of refusal and defiance, awesome dream image. But then the executioner comes through the corridor, she is taken to a room, and as her torture the leather funnel is fitted over her face, and Seymour darts her eyes in terror down the whoosh of its awful presence (because I think vermin were fed her face through it?)  And with the funnel closing over the camera Ward whooshes back up to waking, what has he learned? That, in fact, his fiancé, Lee knows, being family, is a 300 hundred year old witch. When Ward reveals what he learned Seymour hisses denial, and tries to look offended and insulted, denying it. But when she walks off, I think Ward cured of his infatuation, the reflection she sees in the mirror is that 300-year-old worshipper of the antichrist, thus the leather funnel, last shot, lives to warn people off her ever after. It is a taught little story, butlered beautifully by Lee in his worldly gent best, and Ward, but mostly Seymour gives the story the shifty eye, the snarl, and hiss that makes it work.

The Clifton House Mystery (1978). Two and a half/three stars.

Rev., Jul 11, 2026

Though this lovely haunted house story had no business stretching itself out into six episodes in 1978, which I, of course, did not see, being in America, if you compress it in your thinking there is a lot of interest here. The Clare family, mom and dad and I think three kids, have bought an old house in Bristol, plan to fix it up, and make a home of it. Things start off with a nice garage sale of many of the old odds and ends left by the old lady who used to live there, and the sale attracts a lot of old timers. This is where a very odd portrait of a Napoleonic era British soldier enters this picture. It has an odd notrightness about itself, with the face in the helmet looking particularly inadequate. But whether it is the pose on horse, or the plumed helmet, when the dad sees his wife try to sell it, he thinks, you know what, not for sale, I would like to keep that one. After they move in, and the only thing that separates adult from kid horror is that the ghosts are kindly, and the children are in charge, see Mr. Blunden of a few years earlier, an elderly ghost nurse tucks the children to be at night. They begin to report to their skeptical parents that they are sensing and sometimes seeing ghosts, the house is haunted. Since mom and dad don’t buy it, they undertake a private research, and since this is a kids movie they go to the local librarian who must be having a slow day because she has all the time in the world to sit down and using a stack of books go through the whole history of Bristol to see what era a ghost might hail from. This is a very good, even top notch book research section. It was the boy who was doing the reading, and she confirms the funny feeling he had reading about a judge. That funny feeling is conveyed on screen by the screen splitting off into paired red and blue, and a blurring effect. (My experience was more dysmetropsic over old books in my 20s). But then she shows them a lovely old map of Queens Square, where I think their house is. She takes her pen and points out this or that in detail. She focuses at that point, pulling out two lavish fold out gatefolds, the 1831 riots when the Second Reform Bill, wiki tells me, failed to include voting rights for Bristol so a mob began to burn the city down, and pillage Mansion house. Even better than the double spread of the riots is the double spread of the part of the city burned down by them, it looks like 1944 Dusseldorf. To drive the point home, we get some grainy printed close ups of the fights and the fires. And then, and then, in like the fifth book she refers to, in this deluxe visit to the librarian of wisdom, we see a picture of the exact man in the portrait back in their haunted house! That is the very picture in the book that made the son get dizzy and swoon over a book too. As a result of all this evidence, the parents relent and agree to let a ghost hunter come in. He immediately freaks over the portrait in the house, he is not surprised that the piano plays itself, he is kind of eccentric and a true believer so the parents hesitate, but his big breakthrough is when he, well, actually breaks through to find a secret room in the house. Ah, the secret room, whenever it shows up in movies, it captures my imagination, and this is a very good one. The ghost hunter, dresses in white, the symbol of purity, to tumble through the hole in the wall. What he finds is not just a secret room but a whole lavish if dustborne ancient bedroom that even the old lady who lived there before them did not open. When he steps in, he is zapped by a bright light, which makes it all the scarier, and then, in a four poster draped in cobweb, he sees, praying, through a blockage of entoptic spots spinning in his eyes, he can hardly believe it, a skeleton in the bed. Oh chosen spirit who has remained go thy way, he cries out. Find thee everlasting resting place. And then with that prayer and the wobble wobble of the visual confetti, the skeleton suddenly turns into, and they found an actor who was the spitting image of the portrait, the Napoleonic captain in full red uniform rises up. The fact that he is dressed exactly as in the book the boy read, and the librarian confirmed, and that the actor arrests himself in silence and staring, makes for an impressive undead spirit. After telling all, they encounter him again, rising up out of the skeleton, and this time the captain gets up and walks beside the bed wielding his sword, and then I think he does return to where he belongs. The story is, during the riots he shot, accidentally or on purpose it is unclear, two rioters, he feared arrest, and sought refuge in the house, and maybe took his life there. And now that he has been found and released, the house is no longer haunted. In the epilogue the ghost hunter at breakfast remarks, by the way, has anyone looked at the portrait this morning? It seems that the portrait was also half responsible for holding the soldier there, because in its current form the face has emptied out of the helmet, and is a blank. They at last invite the city officials in to remove the skeleton, they also have news about who he is, and that he ought to be buried with the Brethertons in the local cemetery. The story ends with a shot of the strange portrait, one of the strangest I have encountered, not unlike the one in Schalken the Painter, with a rain of fire coming down on the soldier, the horse rearing up as if in fire, his face now entirely burned out of it, very strange thing indeed. You are going to have to wade into a lot of chit chat and back and forth spread out over too many episodes, but if you press it all together it really is a very good haunted house haunted portrait hidden secret scary bed movie, more so for being off centered in Bristol and tied to an obscure event of public riot in previctorian England.

The Bel Jar (1979). Two and a half stars.

Rev., Jul 10, 2026

Is there is anything worse than a tv film trying to be relevant? I don’t quite know what this is, but the literalism is often horrific. This 1979 movie version of Sylvia Plath’s suicidal novel is obviously not a horror movie, but it remains horror-adjacent for two odd reasons. One, it features Donna Mitchell, who plays Esther’s closeted lesbian pal, and Mitchell played the character I call the Black Lady in the party scene of The Exorcist (1971), hiding secrets imo. Two, the early black out monologue by Esther, and then scenes of screaming that almost become psychotic roaring seem like the prototype to two elements of Maggie Gyllenhall’s The Bride (2026), so that is curious. Then, too, this is a movie about suicide, but it is surprise whose. Anyways things start out with Esther, played with earnest 70s good girl Marilyn Hassett, giving us said monologue on her search for meaning. Then we drop into posh college life where she bumps into and befriends Mitchell, or Joan. When it happened to me I thought that negotiating for sex was unreal but it seems it was a trope for the decade because when Esther meets a posh preppy and he wants to do it she sits on the bed and refuses. And he is like what if I show you what I have, so he strips in the dark by the window and she seems interested. Then, he says, your turn, so she strips but only to her underwear. He then takes all this fun foreplay as foreplay and makes a move but she freaks out, and bolts. Next morning she reports to manhater Joan that it looked like a turkey gizzard, ew. So, Esther has some issues. Joan and Esther are such good friends Joan also brings her out to dinner with her parents, which is odd. Then life moves on and Esther gets a job at a magazine writing in New York and gets a room in the Amazon hotel for girls on east 63^rd street, so living the life. She is a hit with the boss, and doing well, but still plagued by doubts. At the hotel she becomes best friends with southern girl swinger Doreen, whom you might not notice is Mary Louise Weller who played the ample Mandy Pepperidge a year earlier in Animal House. Doreen likes to prance around in her bra and panties, and tries to reassure Esther about her doubts with men. But she also goes and gets what she wants. One night Doreen takes Esther along as her wing man to grab a man at a bar and that happens to be comedian Robert Klein playing the fast and loose sorta hippie who brings them back to his place for a threesome under the stuffed animal heads. Doreen has a terrific moment where, possibly as a substitute for sex in a tv movie, she grabs Bob’s shirt and smothers herself in its manly musk and rolls around in ecstasy. When then Esther sees that upside down on camera Doreen’s top is actually going to be coming off, she drops out of the threesome to lie in somber existential musings on the floor, I think she leaves too. Though Joan comes to town to be close to Esther, and Esther doesn’t have a clue, Doreen comes in one night and finds that Esther has not only trashed her room but is in a mental mess, she hugs her hard. But when Esther then takes her advice to get back out there she runs into a latin lover type who in the woods by a parry wont say no and when she has to fight him off it really freaks her out. It could be said that the bel jar that Esther has locked her in is her room at the Amazon, in which the window of that room is the outlet from which she screams her rage at the world. In a scene that is shocking in its nonstop expressive horror she vents her wrath at the window by stripping off the dress that was sullied by a sexual assault, roaring with a really scary guttural noise from her mouth, and to see her leaning naked by the window raging at the world, and that it goes on, and on, and on, it really worries you that she is going to jump. She doesn’t, but that is her nervous breakdown. She ends up at home under the care of her mother again. Mom takes her to get electric shock therapy, which in those days made you a zombie. She is committed to a sort of posh home for the mentally distressed and worries us again by writing in lipstick on the mirror HAVE GONE TO SEE DADDY. In another really over the top scene, she cuts her wrists with a razor over the bathroom sink, but when her blood drips in the sink she forms it with a finger into a face, and then paints her lips in her blood too, so, it’s very possible she is too crazy to do something so decisive as suicide. We then follow her time in the asylum under Jacksons care,  Anne Jackson just two years before she is the doctor in The Shining, but then one day Joan, Mitchell again, comes visiting, and still, three strikes, Esther does not catch on, as Joan reports that she too has been committed and pours her heart out to Esther. At last when they take a walk in the woods, they find a lonely meadow she Joan faces her and exposes her upper chest, declares her sexual love for her, hugs Esther hard but then drops down over her breasts, belly, and to her crotch, kissing along the way, and only when Joan hits the bingo point does the lightbulb in Esther’s mind go off, oh shit, she’s a lesbian! and she loves me in that way. Being a 50s girl, the decade when all this set, Esther stares into blank space disbelieving, pushes Joan off her in disgust, and marches horrified away. To rub it in she runs fast away from Joan, as if Joan has the plague. The camera then wanders a bit in the woods until it comes to a lovely overhanging branch, from which Joan hangs, a suicide for having been rejected by the love of her life. So, surprise, Esther survives, it is Joan who dies a sacrifice to her mental bel jar. I have no idea how accurate a reading of Plath’s novel this is, though it is scarily familiar in terms of its tropes of relationship troubles in the closeted era. I can’t say it is a good movie, or a horror movie, but three or four over the top intense psychological scenes makes it definitely scary.

Shelby Oaks (2024), two and a half stars.

Rev., Jul 10 2026

Shelby Oaks is one of those names that fits nicely into the language as bespeaking a place where something bad happened. It seems it is a town in Ohio that sometime in the long ago evil 90s began to empty out and turn into a ghost town. The set up of its hauntedness is nice, including an abandoned Ferris wheel in the forest, and a hospital returned to weed. It turns out that because people think it is haunted it is also these days a magnet of bloggers or podcasters looking for ghosts. In a house in the abandoned town four kids were killed, and a strange symbol of crossed xs found in blood on the wall. One girl in the murdered group who got away, but is still missing, Riley, is the subject of the movie. We hear from her sister Mia, who is alive, that at an early age Riley was adept at drawing horrible things based on a fear that there was some sort of figure standing at her bedroom window on the second floor staring in. The movie starts as if it is going to be found a footage film, and that the footage will continue with the final searcher after a lost sister. But, nope, it switches to cinematic real time, we join Mia, and she is straight up looking for her lost sister. She is worried because as kids their mother would carve their initials on trees to help the girls get back home if lots, but now those marks are overwritten by the cult mark. In the microfilm at the library she discovers that some believe the emptying out of the prison in Shelby Oaks was demonically done, and the ex warden, interviewed by her, agrees. She has a lead that the face Riley might’ve seen out her window was Wilson Miles sic and it turns when an inmate at the prison he also had a reputation for being offputting and quiet, more so when chaos was breaking out. When after a while Mia presents her evidence, in an elaborate stash of copy machine cost, to her husband, he is like, you need help and walks away, so she is on her own. Though the movie has already given us some research, this one doubles up on it by having her open a book on Demonaltary which features a dark Dore, and then a close up of a shadow on a tree in one; the mark of the incubus; then some obligatory closeups of Fuseli’s nightmare; the imp and horse lead to the idea of the hellhound associated with incubi, because she has been seeing dogs; and then she switches back to one of Riley’s more advanced drawings, of exactly an incubus at her bedroom window. It is well done book section, focused closeup on the key ideas sho it walks you through nicely. Her search then ventures into the realm of the improbable as at night alone she ventures back into the abandoned prison in Shelby Oaks and in Wilson’s old cell, she encounters not only his creepy drawings, but the dog, and evidence that the incubus still hangs out there. She runs. But, then, poking about the woods she runs into a witch living in one of the houses, she invites Mia in, and, incredibly,not picking up any suspect vibes, Mia says sure. Problem is, when the rather unseemly witch in a room whose walls are creeping with black mold goes off to make tea, Mia sees the ur photo album for her search, the book which contains all the answers, and we see the witch and husband as goddess hippies in those old 70s, and then later that they were using Riley in rituals, I presume, because her nightgown crotch is bloody, having something to do with menstrual and lunar cycles, and with this revelation, the witch opens a trap door below the carpet, which leads to a rockhewn dungeon, in a cell in which there is, voila, the missing Riley. Then, somehow, they get out, but feel the need to go chase the witch to get some answers, and somehow this hobbling old overweight woman was able to get to her attack where they find her in a magic circle circled by candles praying to a skin inscribed with the symbol of the incubus, and when the witch says all hail we find out the name of the incus is Tarion, incubus of the north, and that Tarion has been following Riley for her whole life, and she has a shrine to Riley who since childhood has been as it were their main sacrifice to Tarion, there is also a baby to be sacrificed, so Mia is like, no way, and conks her out, so they escape. Riley ends up in the hospital, looking almost as bad as Katie as a mummy in The Mummy, and I think things end up with the incubus still in control, the end. Though Mia’s search for the truth is bootstrapped nicely in the early going, more so that it takes place in the intriguing milieu of an abandoned town, catapulting their childhood into ancient history, once she gets going the secrets unveil for her too quickly and improbably making the climax in fact kind of an anticlimax. I mean, one night, she encounters both the incubus itself at the prison, and the witch, and discovers the cult, and sees the ceremony, and finds Riley, and it is all explained, that is a highly improbable winning streak in a ghost hunter experience.

Secret Rites (1971, UK), Two stars.

Rev., Jul 8 2026

Given an X rating because it shows a good number of boobs and bushes, this movie is often called a sexploitation film because of it. Not really, because most often the alluring nudity quickly strips down to blank nakedness in the context of ceremonies conducted by surprisingly prudish modern witches. Alexander Sanders was Britain’s most famous witch back in the 1960s. When he married an 18-year-old, the marriage was a big deal in swinging London, and she became a leading witch too. They were always in the paper, using showing bare bums at sabbath or midsummer festivities, though the inevitable witch scare article was a recurrent theme too. Weirdly enough, the real Sanders has an online archive in which he has kept all the old clippings for you to enjoy. As a result of his media manipulations, he gained fame. So, Secret Rites is really a witch cult promo. Things start out with a stern Puritan like Peter Cushing five years later in Twins of Evil breaking in upon an orgy of writhing nude bodies copulating in every direction of their orifices, and then, the movie stops, that is how you envision it all, isn’t it? well, of course, that has been the PR for five hundred years. But now Sanders appears in his library, which he proudly calls one of the best libraries of witch books in the world, and takes us on a tour, paging through a few books, though I only spied de Plancy’s demons. It was 1971, and like everyone in the Brit folk horror boom, and the postwar witch boom, he floated on Dame Margaret Murray’s theory that the witches were just surviving throwbacks to the ancient cult of Diana, which lived on in their pagan ways underground for a millennia or two, and so here we are. Murray likely spun her idea out of the Frazer’s Golden Bough, and since I have long ago established the Cambridge crowd as the source of the ideas the popularization of which gave the impetus to folk horror movies, I accept that they accepted this idea (actual scholarship in the field since has found no evidence whatsoever that pagan cults survived underground in Christian Europe). The movie then pretends to follow the initation of two very bright and busty Swinging London birds, who want to become witches in the cult. First we see their initation and this includes a group of naked men and woman standing around at witch church while they strip and blind with blinders the two fulsome birds. Their nakedness, Sanders explains, symbolizes their truth and equality, ho hum. When he in black robe steps around in front of them their frontal nudity, symbolized by the bush in the 60s, momentarily stirs one, but he is like some pallid priest, and the ceremony is not would you would call Virgin Witch material. And then they are witches, and sit around, having reclothed, to chat with Sanders at how great it is to be a witch. The proceedings then go on to another ceremony, I think a marriage, because now, get this, in addition to being a believer in the horned god of Murray, Sanders also believes that he is a god descended from Anubis, in ancient Egypt, and Rome, and so he dresses up in a quite fearsome if ridiculous Anubis headdress to nod his scepter at the exotically adorned wedding couple, in a posture that is part Christopher Lee in The Mummy (1959) and part a photo shoot in the later Playbirds (1977), except that the ritual prose, “great mother blessed be thy right hip, which guarded thy sacred portals (that would be cunt and ass?)”, and then too the bride’s ample bare boobs are blessed too. Oh, I forgot, when Sanders goes on about the sacred portals he gets to kneel to as if by antique first night right kiss the navel and maybe below of the bride, to bless it. At one point the screen blurs in a mirror, and then I think the couple gets down to it because the scripture says so, as then “in one thing only do we feel as they felt and know as they knew”,” and my guess is, 1971, in the middle of the Brit folk horror goddess cult, that would be sexual intercourse, and coming, the end. The movie ends with an on screen thank you to Sanders for agreeing to be filmed as if filming this shoddy little witch church going exercise is some big state secret or actually witchily dangerous.

Schizo (1976), Three Stars.

Rev., Apr 2, 2026

Schizo stars Lynne Frederick who would become a major figure in gossip columns of the time when she married Peter Sellers. This is likely her best movie, showing off her somewhat detached beauty most favorably. She plays a notable figure skater who after her marriage begins to be stalked by a mysterious older man. It is unclear what he wants, but she begins to feel like someone is following her, so the tension builds. Walker is expert in the “is anyone there?” sequences especially in one which involves a shower scene that takes place in the background of a shot crowded with objects, and when nude she has a sense that someone has got into the house, her towel-grab prowl to see is extremely tense, worse that she then, confusedly, finds a bloody knife. There is a sense that maybe a trigger memory is coming up and this is then played with in another tropaic situation, the super market, where, again, she begins to feel like she is being followed. When she panics, and rushes out, after an encounter with the butcher in the market, she goes to her psychiatrist and there they pull out of her deep memory, in a dark blur recreated, a scene where she remembers seeing her mother having sex with a strange man, and this sequence is shown with deep shadows, a child’s innocence, then even mother exposed, being the worst thing it seems could happen to her in life, her daughter to see her sexual side. A little problem that I noted, being a trope hunter, is that the psychiatrist works by a blue desk lamp, as in Dracula and his Brides, on Cushing’s desk, a symbol of something you are not seeing going on behind the scene. He is then murdered and in a Walker style montage we blink from seeing the bloody gash to almost seeing Samantha’s bush, symbol of death in horror, as she climbs nude into bed. Adding triangular tension to her husband’s increased concerns about his wife’s sanity is that his best friend is Stephanie Beacham, as Beth, whom maybe he should have married. When Samantha goes to stop by at her husband’s job she then feels the scopoaesthesia again and ends up in a chase through the factory with the colors of threads triggering a memory from spilling red paint on the school day when she saw mother having sex again. This time mother, sweaty breasted, and annoyed, scolds her for peeping. But then, in a memory slashed in half by black on screen, she sees a knife slash mother in the stomach and her knife swing down from her. This then unleashes the killer in Samantha today so this time she finds the older man, who is the lover in the bed, now an old man, and kills him. By the end of the movie neither husband or friend Beth, who waves them off on a vacation, knows that rather than being paranoid by thinking she is being stalked, Samantha is the stalker, who has brought a knife with her on her getaway.  It is all somewhat routine in plot but staged by Walker in his expertise at filming scenes that look like one thing then turn out to be the opposite.

Nandor Fodor and the Talking Mongoose (2023), two and a half stars.

Rev., Jul 9 2026

With Simon Pegg as Nandor Fodor and Christopher Llyod as Harry Price, noted paranormal searchers in the 1930s, this is a cleverly inconclusive telling of the tale of Dalby, a town on the Isle of White, that claimed to be haunted, or was it enchanted by Gef, the talking mongoose, in the 1930s. Things get off to a nice start as Pegg and Lloyd meet at a pub to talk over the latest in paranormal news, with a case by case skeptic-believer either way mindset. They are fun table companions. Even better, the movie has a good sense of its intermedial shiftiness, as news of the haunting came by book and newsreel. When they review the story, it is done for us by going through all the media coverage, including a deliriously weird photo from Fodor’s book of Gef perched on a local fence. We also get a lot of eight by tens of sites in the house where Gef has been heard, which is fun. Then, to further slice up the space of authenticity, Price reports on HIS visit to the town. He was told that Gef will intrude upon conversation in the family in any room and that is because he has free rein of the elaborate crawl space behind the walls. There are fun scenes of Llyod cocking his ears at holes in the wood paneling. But he makes an astute observation that helped me explain the thumping in The Exorcist, he notes that the crawl space running behind the walls in every room makes the whole house one enormous speaking tube, and the walls like sounding boards. So, acoustically, possible, but also possibly a gltich of an oddly built house. The daughter Voirrey had the deepest relationship with Gef, she had a little set up in her bedroom where he could rest. We see Lloyd appraise the record player, and his favorite ball, then peer into his hole. No go. Well, it takes all this preamble to finally get us round to movie real time and Pegg to go to Dalby himself. His time is contested, a skeptic, he nonetheless encounters symptoms of a mass delirium. He runs into a man hanging around the church who claims that Gef sings songs to him, he is mad. The host family of Gef, who seem entirely balmy over Gef, take Fodor on a rigorous hike up the mountain for him to call into the cave here Gef lives, no answer, oh my, he’s not in today. Adding to the wobble wobble is that Minnie Driver is along as Fodor’s secretary, and she takes a liking to Voirrey, who it turns out, suspiciously, has a secret talent, she is a ventriloquist extraordinaire. But when she throws her voice for it to sound like Gef in a hole in the wall, Driver doesn’t know what’s what. I think at that moment the authenticity of the voice made her believe. When Fodor is taken to a site in a barn where Gef often hangs out, and hears him speak, and a little tuft of fur rise up out of a hole, he is very skeptical. There is less interesting contest when he tries to get a Black servant to admit that it is all a farce. Finally, I forget why, Fodor is tossed into jail for rudeness, but once locked up, he loses his nerve, and feels a fear, that involves him in the mystique of the village. He ends up having loved the time in the village so much that he is now desperate to have Gef, who chooses at last to talk to him when he is behind bars, to just scratch him, once, so he can believe Gef is real, he needs to believe that Gef is real. He gets that scratch, and goes home, he eventually in real life wrote a noncommittal book about it, mentioning it in Haunted People, 1951, and later focusing on it, he comes away partly charmed. A subplot is that Driver has decided to quit his service, he convinces her to relent, there is a decidedly British suggestion that they both want more, but cant get there. All in all, a nice movie about small village oddities and manias in the 1930s.

Le Grand Breteche, Orson Welles Mysteries, (1973). Two/ two and a half stars.

Rev., Jul 11 2026

Because labelled as mysteries not all the episodes of this two-year tv series are worth reviewing in genre, but when you have Peter Cushing playing a grim old aristo and Susannah York begowned after adultery as his bored frantic wife, and then an Edgar Allen Poe solution, that is close enough for me. York plays Cushing’s bored young wife. He announces that he is off for a night at the club, so she invites a Spanish officer in for some hanky panky. But there has been a change of plan, and of course Cushing comes back. One gets the idea that this was part of the plan all along as he makes York swear before God that there is no one in the room with her. He won’t open the door until she does, she panics, shushes her en flagrante one into an adjoining closet or storeroom, and swears she is alone. But it has to be said she looks pretty darn frazzled from an hour of fucking, and in general discombobulated by the distinct possibility the Spaniard rang her bell. In short, she looks guilty as sin. Cushing then settles in for his torture. He decides this would be a good time for a little decorative adjustment. He never did like the door to that adjacent room so let’s brick it closed. He waits it out, while the work is done, York rather unbelievably holds her tongue, and hides her horror, Only when Cushing asks for a final thick coat of plaster does she falter. But, apparently, not enough to destroy their marriage, nor enough to confess and have the poor adulterating man released from being sealed up in a tomb, where one presumes the man dies (so how wouldthat sequel to the story go, Balzac I don’t think told us). It is a simple mechanism, but an enjoyable enough half an hour.

Asylum for Satan (1972), Two/ two and half stars.

Rev., Aug 10 2026

Carla Borelli, a momentary famous tv actress, somehow gets herself committed to a sanitarium by a smoothe talking perv shrink with an ulterior motive. She is not the brightest bulb in the pack, as the gent in purple velvet who says welcome to Pleasant Hill is the very epitome of a walking red flag. After a bit of initiation, first comes the physical, for which of course she must strip, so it is very quick to be naked in the asylum. We know right away that this is a low key sexploitation movie by the fact that the camera pauses to follow every single step of Borelli removing her sweater, over her head, leaving her bra exposed, and getting that darn sweater over her glorious hair certainly tangles up the camera for a bit, and finally, of course, comes the magic elbows back breasts out removal of the bra, which they but we do not see. The doc is, of course, peeping through a hole in the wall near to the medication on a shelf. When then she has to take a bath to as it were purify herself of all the awful stink of the real world she is attended to by an odd staff person who today would be called trans but back then was transvestite and not even that really because it is obviously the same man she met like an hour ago dressed up as a woman so he can come in and in a soft voice praise her white pure skin as he offers and does wash her back and maybe her chest, naked of course but back to us. It is a comically obvious scene, I do wonder if it fooled any gender primitives back in the dark ages. Meanwhile, the clinic is a bit more strident in its disqualification of other inmates. Then have a room where a woman in a wheelchair wheels only for it to be filled with gas and as a gas chamber kill her spinning her wheels. It is so abrupt and so outrageously in bad taste less than a generation from the century’s gas chambers of horror, it kind of shocks but in an ick way. Not only is the wheeling victim wheelchairist extravagantly gassed, but then to be sure she is crawled upon by spiders and centipedes. Carla makes a big mistake by taking a nice gown prowl that night and when she runs into a freak faced troglodyte down the hall she runs back to her room. At this point, wondering if something is up, she sits forlorn at a rain wet window and as it reminds her of something she lets her mind drift and where does the mind drift but to sex she has had with her ex-boyfriend long ago, which means that Carla is not even remotely a virgin, unless of course virgins lay nude on men talking philosophy and did not consummate. It is comic that the grand master in no way reads her mind and that he has made such a fantastically improbable mistake as to think a Carla, who is a ten, would be a virgin at this point in her life, old joke, but the joke here is he really is clueless. It is the air vents in the place that are the trouble, and when a wan swimmer dips in the pool vents release snakes to sting her to death rather lot of work in the pool. Anyway, we finally get to the big night when the boss dressed as the female assistant presides over a ceremony by the white hooded staff so that Carla’s virginity can be transferred to him to increase his longevity in life and this is apparently done by the aegis of a demon that shows up who looks exactly like the demon in Night of the Demon (1956) but at human scale, but when the demon finds out, oh no, that Carla is not intact, the boss explodes, I mean, literally explodes, and attacked by the monster is reduced to a skeleton meaning that he was all along some sort of walking dead kept alive for generations by feeding on the blood of virgins. It is all so silly, but, still, for that, fun. I also did pick up from the blunt back and forth montage of the cops sirening their way to save her, and her being tied down in the ceremony, that the STANDARD oil sign seems to signify good true normal life against this perverted criminal enterprise, the cops rush in after they are no longer needed because with the boss a heap of rib ashes, no one is going to be bothering her supposed virginity.

Anneliese: The Exorcist Tapes (2011), two stars.

Rev Jul 9 2026

After Mary Jo Perrin in The Exorcist (1971, the novel), mentions that a family went mad in 1921 Bavaria from thinking a Ouija board connected them to the god of light, so they incinerated themselves, Fr Karras mentioned a case where a girl began to speak in syriac, proof that she was possessed, and I thought it might be this case. So, I came to this movie almost in the mood for it to be a real documentary, and for it to help me play along by posting a title card of the Bavarian state government helped me considerably. Property of the Bavarian state ministry of science, research and the arts. But it is all, of course, a fake documentary, still, I entered in a documentary state of mind. Problem is the bearded professor who wears green mountain climber hats is kind of clueless, he mostly notices that the family has an awful lot of crucifixes and holy pictures all around the house, suggesting a sense of menace. I mean he takes a full tour of all the statues, almost in the nature of a domestic autopsy. Out of this appears the crawling growling daughter Anne Liese, who I must say is a quite unprepossessing presence, There is also an American expert, and a priest, neither help much. Each day the government title card reminds us this is official, but all we see is Anne Liese curse and writhe on her bed. Things only get interesting on Day 3, I think, because, of course, it has to be mentioned by an outsider that it is certainly odd that three grown men surround the bed of a girl, and watch her writhe, lifting her night gown over her knees. If a movie comments on this in any way, you know it is fake, is my rule. Well, this one goes crazy on that point. At some point in this session the men are scrambling, because, of course, Anne Liese strips off her top and now will be doing her writhing and growling topless, which adds the required sexual element to a man jumping on her. At one point she kneels upright on bed, howling topless, which is actually kind of sexy, and, then, next trick, she lays back down to lift and spread her legs, the power of pussy compels thee. The official video camera up in the corner of the room has an odd way of solarizing now and then, to cover up the most ridiculous. Nor am I certain, because my German is not that good, if she gets profanely obscene on a level equal to Regan who was writhing in a bed in Georgetown only five years before her. Anyways it just goes on like that, the end. Little known fact, Bavaria is actually the fatherland of exorcisms, of legend of wandering poor souls possessing people, of Nazism, and of Frankenstein, so I take this as a nice document at least of all that, but it aint much of a document, because it isn’t.