Short Takes: ‘Aaron Loves Angela’ (1975) ★★ 1/2

With the recent passing of Irene Cara, I thought I’d check out one of her earliest film roles, director Gordon Parks, Jr.’s 1975 movie Aaron Loves Angela, made when she was just 15 years old.

Aaron (Kevin Hooks, age 17 at the time) is a Harlem teenager being pressured by his father Ike (Moses Gunn) to become a basketball phenom (Ike measures his son daily to see if he’s grown any taller), while his pimp neighbor Beau (Kevin’s real-life dad, Robert Hooks) taunts Aaron for even dreaming of earning any money legally. Aaron’s more concerned about his present, however; specifically, making Angela (Cara), the cute Puerto Rican girl at his school, part of it. He expresses his infatuation through graffiti, tagging walls with “Aaron likes Angela.” Angela knows her mother wouldn’t approve of her dating a Black boy, but she can’t resist Aaron’s charms, or his graffiti. It’s not long before Aaron’s spray painting “Aaron loves Angela” (title drop) on tenement walls.

What drives a wedge between the two teen lovers isn’t racism, however, but Aaron absconding with a briefcase full of cash that he gets through a series of thoroughly contrived events.

This one’s a mixed bag. Parks makes good use of his setting, showcasing the griminess of 1970s NYC without making it seem totally bleak, and there are some effective slice-of-life moments between Aaron and his father and between Aaron and his best friend Willie (Leon Pinkney). Helping the movie immeasurably is its soundtrack, supplied by José Feliciano. But the movie fails as a blaxploitation retelling of Romeo and Juliet, with neither the Super Fly director nor screenwriter Gerald Sanford having much interest in the central teen romance. There’s a bit more attention paid to the animosity between the African American and Hispanic communities—standing in for the Montagues and the Capulets—but even that is fleeting. Parks and Sanford seem more invested in shoehorning a subplot involving a scheming pimp, his good-hearted ’ho and ruthless mobsters. You know, the usual blaxploitation shit.

The acting is decent, at least. I’d like to say Cara makes an impressive film debut (we won’t count her bit part as a dancer in the comedy Apple Pie), but she and Kevin Hooks are merely adequate, with the adult performers—especially Gunn—making bigger impressions. The only truly awful bit of “acting” is from Walt Frazier as himself. In his brief cameo the “NY Knicks basketball legend” (per his Cameo page; I know nothing about sports and care even less) delivers his lines like he’s taping a PSA encouraging kids to stay in school. Though in Frazier’s defense, his dialog is written as such.

Overall, Aaron Loves Angela is enjoyable despite its unfocused storytelling and uneven tone, but it’s no must-see like Gordon Parks, Jr.’s classic Super Fly—or the camp classic (and beginning of Cara’s rapid descent) Certain Fury.

He Should’ve Let It Ring

The 1984 paperback edition of Eyes
teases a different novel than the
one Felice Picano wrote.

Though it’s difficult to believe now, there was a time—before smartphones, before voicemail, and when answering machines were still priced as a luxury item—when people felt obligated to answer a ringing telephone. To just let it ring was simply never considered. It’s true: the past was fucking awful. So is the present, but at least we can block unwanted callers. 

It’s during that barbaric time when we blindly answered our landlines, with no caller I.D. to warn us of who was on the other end, that Felice Picano’s 1975 novel EYES is set.

That impulse to answer a ringing phone is what kicks off the story proper, when Stu Waehner, a twenty-something, New York City social worker, returns from his workday, after a shittier-than-usual subway commute, and hears his phone ringing on the other side of his locked apartment door. Thinking it might be his semi-estranged girlfriend Jennifer, Stu is positively desperate to get inside to take the call, yet he has as much difficulty unlocking his apartment door as a teen-aged girl has trying to start a car in a slasher movie:

“Coming,” he said, and fumbled in his pocket for his key chain.

The phone kept on ringing.

“Don’t hang up yet, Jenny. I’m coming…”

He had to switch everything to under the other arm—these locks had to be opened left-handed.

The phone was still ringing.

“Don’t hang up yet.” One lock. Now for the top one. It squealed, then seemed to be stuck. There it was. Now the long key for the police lock. There! The door swung inward, then abruptly stopped short after opening a few inches.

With the impact, everything under Stu’s arm fell to the hallway floor.

The police lock was stuck.

The phone kept ringing.

And the phone keeps ringing, until Stu finally makes it inside his apartment to answer it. It’s not Jennifer, but a woman asking for Bill. A fucking wrong number. Yet the woman calling doesn’t just apologize and end the call. Instead, she belligerently asks if Stu is sure no Bill lives in his apartment. Stu insists she has the wrong number, and then the woman takes issue with his justifiable annoyance. Remarkably, Stu does not just hang up, but continues arguing with the woman, who calls him a paranoiac and recommends a stay in Bellevue. The conversation just as quickly de-escalates, with Stu apologizing for yelling and the woman apologizing for having the wrong number, and readers just wondering why the hell didn’t either of them hang up the moment it was realized the woman misdialed.

But the woman hadn’t misdialed. Her whole plan was to get Stu on the phone and keep him on it. That woman is Johanna, a freelance editor, also in her twenties, who lives in the tenement across from Stu’s building, and who has a perfect view into Stu’s apartment from hers, and, with opera glasses in hand, has been watching him intently. She’s also struck up a casual friendship with Gladys, the retiree who lives in the unit below Stu’s, to get some insight and gossip about Gladys’ upstairs neighbor, and even encourages the old woman to badger Stu into adopting a stray cat/plot contrivance. She keeps a journal as well, detailing facts she’s learned about Stu—including his previous address and current employer—and her observations gleaned from spying on him (“He seems to have no close friends of ether gender.”)

For all Johanna’s learned about Stu, she is unprepared for him to have a girlfriend, and is dismayed when Jennifer, who had been touring with her dance company since before Stu moved into the apartment across the street, returns. Stu is a little disappointed, too, but for different reasons. Jennifer’s affections for Stu have cooled significantly in the time she’s been away, while her love for her career has intensified. Women’s Lib may have been in full swing when this book was written, but Stu still has a chauvinistic mindset, viewing Jennifer’s dancing more as a hobby than a career, not to mention he’s suspicious of her constantly praising her choreographer Caspar (he dismisses Caspar as a romantic rival, however, later referring to him as looking like “the Fairy Godmother”).

In Stu’s defense, Jennifer is a bit of a pretentious twat, always bitching about how small the apartment is and often taking shots at Stu for his lack of ambition. No wonder he’s receptive when Johanna, now using a voice changer and adopting a British accent, calls back. Stu pushes for a name (“You know my name, why not tell me yours?”) Johanna tells him to call her by any name he wants, horrified when he settles on Joan (Joan was so close to her own name, so uncannily close. As if… he’d intuited it or somehow knew and was teasing her.) Still, she endures the moniker as long as Stu keeps taking her calls.

Inevitably, Stu and Jennifer break up, leaving Stu’s evenings free to take Joan’s calls. “Does she get real dirty? You know, breathy and hot, all that kind of stuff?” asks Bill, Stu’s coincidentally named co-worker, after Stu tells him of his mysterious caller. Alas, she does not, and Stu never pushes their conversations in that direction, either. Though Johanna is romantically fixated on Stu, she’s not overtly horny for him. In fact, the one other time she’s done this phone-stalking thing—with the previous occupant of Stu’s apartment, a Texas dude named Colin—she presented herself in person shortly after establishing a rapport over the phone, appalled to discover that the guy immediately wanted pussy. Because of that unpleasant experience, Johanna wants to keep Stu at a safe distance, determined to establish not just an emotional connection, but a co-dependence as well.

That distance is jeopardized when a Joan slips up during one of their phone conversations and remarks on the whereabouts of Stu’s cat, revealing that she is, in fact, watching him. Stu, predictably, wonders from which of the many windows across the street Joan is spying on him.

Stu later brings home a young hippie chick he met a nearby park and doesn’t bother to pull down the shades before they do the nasty. He senses Joan is watching and is briefly troubled by the possibility before deciding, hey, if she wants to watch, he’ll give her a show (regretfully, said show is not explicitly described). Joan/Johanna is not pleased. “I’m very disappointed in Stu,” Johanna writes in her stalker journal. She later laments that she can’t even complain: Did she expect him to be faithful to strange woman on the telephone whom he never even met? It was her fault. She was the one who set the limits.

That all changes when Johanna accompanies her horny best friend Alice to the Hungry Hat, a restaurant/singles bar, to meet-up with Alice’s coke dealer, Bill, who’s sitting at the bar with his friend from work...Stu! Alice, who’s made Johanna her project (she’s already goaded Johanna into getting new clothes, updating her hairstyle and accepting a full-time job with a book publisher), sends Stu over to chat with her reclusive friend while she and Bill take care of their transaction. A mortified Johanna says she must leave, but neither Alice nor Stu will let her escape that easily. Ultimately, Johanna thaws enough to give Stu her work phone number.

To Johanna’s amazement, Stu is genuinely attracted to her, and a real, in-the-flesh romance blossoms. It’s a fantasy come true, but it’s also a problem. What to do with Joan? Things get especially awkward when Stu wants to discuss with Joan the wonderful new woman in his life: Johanna. Johanna decides the best way to dissolve this phone friendship—as well as find out what Stu’s true feelings are— is for Joan to become a jealous bitch, shit talking Stu’s new flame at every opportunity (“She didn’t strike me as being the picture of glowing femininity, but, after all, she’s probably just fine for a little therapeutic sex.”)

Joan’s snarky comments about his new girlfriend aren’t enough to drive Stu away, nor are they enough to kill his curiosity about her identity. It’s that curiosity—with help from a horny tomcat and one of Johanna’s neighbors—that’s going to get one of them killed.

Not the Book It’s Marketed As

Though it drags here and there, I found Eyes to be a fairly engaging read (I’ll forgive Picano’s inclusion of a feline ex machina). However, I was also mildly disappointed and for that I blame the book’s marketing, which teases a much different novel. “There are many ways to satisfy desire,” reads Dell Publishing’s teaser copy on the front cover of the 1984 paperback. “Some people dream. Some people watch. Some people kill.” My expectations were further manipulated by the ellipses-heavy synopsis on the back cover:

Day and night, a mysterious woman called, a voice from the darkness telling him she was all alone… that she wanted to talk to him… needed him…desired him…

Day and night, the eyes followed him, no matter what he did, whom he held, whom he kissed. And what the eyes saw would lead to love…and fear—and then to terror.

Because of the cover text, I was expecting something much more salacious: Joan/Johanna would be a dangerous psychopath. Her calls to Stu would be unsettling, even threatening, not to mention obscene. Stu would be more of a player, and all the women he brought home would ultimately end up dead. And when Stu discovers his new girlfriend Johanna is not just his harassing caller but the one who’s killed all the other women in his life, it would lead to a more intense confrontation.

Also, while the model used for the book cover suggests that
Stu looks like Frank Stallone (left), going by Stu’s description
in the book, he more closely resembles the
1979 Playgirl model on the right.

Instead, Eyes is much more subdued, barely qualifying as a thriller. The body count is low—a mere two deaths, one from natural causes—and the calls Stu receives from Joan, while at times testy and irritating, are far from threatening. Johanna is not a psychopath, she’s just a sad, lonely woman with some serious self-esteem issues. She does not, as some other reviewers claim, have dissociative identity disorder; she’s well aware of the persona she’s creating when she calls Stu, hence the voice changer and fake accent. Joan is the confident woman Johanna wants to be. What she’s doing is the phone-based equivalent of catfishing, except the real person is as desirable as the fake one she’s presenting herself as, she just doesn’t realize it.

Stu, though mildly chauvinistic and a bit of a homophobe, is also more nuanced than expected. He’s good at his job but not entirely sure he wants to make it his life’s work. When he and Jennifer break up, he doesn’t immediately hit the bars looking for sex (his sole hookup prior to meeting Johanna happens when that hippie chick casually offers herself, no strings attached, because 1970s). What Stu wants more than sex is someone to talk to, someone to be in his corner, and Joan fulfills that need.

Felice Picano wrote a few more mainstream thrillers after Eyes, his second novel, before becoming a prominent name in gay literature, publishing the queer-centric novels Late in the Season and Like People in History, as well as the memoirs Men Who Loved Me: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel and Nights at Rizzoli. He even co-authored The New Joy of Gay Sex. Nearly twenty years ago I heard Picano speak at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival, and among other topics he talked about the trap of writing genre fiction solely for commercial viability. Interestingly, I don’t recall him bringing up any of his work in genre fiction. I learned about that through the Too Much Horror Fiction blog. I haven’t read any of Picano’s gay books (well, I did skim through The New Joy of Gay Sex a few times at various bookstores when I thought no one was looking, but I was too deep in the closet at the time to even consider doing something so brave as buying it), but I was immensely curious about his early horror and thriller novels. Does the fact that I bypassed Picano’s acclaimed LGBTQ books in favor of what I thought (hoped) were his stabs at tawdry mainstream horror make me a self-loathing homo? No, just taste impaired.

I don’t think Picano is ashamed of his earlier books, nor should he be, but he clearly didn’t want to risk becoming a hack horror writer, and for a CisHet audience no less. Not that anyone would mistake Eyes as the work of a hack. Rather than the trashy erotic thriller Dell was hyping, Eyes is a more thoughtful story about loneliness, restlessness and alienation. That’s to the novel’s credit, but it’s also its biggest letdown.

BTW: According to his Wikipedia page, Picano wrote a screenplay adaptation for Eyes in 1985. The movie was never produced (1978-81 would’ve been the ideal time to have made the pitch), and now, thanks to technology rendering its primary device irrelevant, it likely never will be.

Gorilla Handjobs, Pickled Heads and Edible Dildos

The poster photo of George Kuchar and
Marion Eaton makes it clear that this ain’t
Deep Throat.

2022 has no shortage of worthwhile Halloween viewing: X, Pearl, Nope, Barbarian, Fresh, Hellraiser, the news. Terrifier 2 is so extreme it reportedly has audiences vomiting.

But none of those movies leave audiences fearing where the cucumbers in their salads have been. So, this Halloween, let’s check out director Curt McDowell and screenwriter/star George Kuchar’s 1975 underground epic, THUNDERCRACK!

Six travelers are making their way across Nebraska on a proverbial dark and stormy night. There’s Bing (Kuchar), a high-strung circus employee driving a truckful of exotic animals, grumbling to himself about how much he hates the children in the audience—but not his beloved gorilla Medusa (“Gorillas are different than children. They have more hair.”)

Elsewhere, bisexual hitchhiker Toydy (Rick Johnson) gets a ride from Sash (Melinda McDowell, the director’s sister) and her sharp-tongued, perpetually horny girlfriend—and Brooklyn Community College Grad—Roo (Moira Benson). Roo asks—demands—to see what Toydy is working with. “Oh, honey, I’d give you the formula to the atomic bomb if I knew it,” she says when the hitchhiker takes out his cock. Toydy responds: “Didn’t they teach you that stuff at Brooklyn Community College?” But then an argument erupts between Sash and Roo, and their tussling sends the car careening off the road, resulting in a fiery explosion.

Chandler feels up Bond.*

The fire is witnessed by two other travelers: another hitchhiker, Bond (Ken Scudder), and, at the wheel, Chandler (Mookie Blodgett, a.k.a. Phillip Heffernan), widower of the late Sarah Lou Phillips, the heiress to the House of Phillips Unlimited girdle empire. However, the two men have other things on their minds than the source of the fire. Chandler asks his passenger if his admiring glances at Bond’s “rather extravagant torso” have made him ill at ease. “Well, no,” Bond responds. “It’s just that all you’re doing is just looking.”

The guys are interrupted when they’re flagged down by another traveler, Willene Cassidy (Maggie Pyle), virgin wife of country rock star Simon Cassidy. She also saw the explosion in the distance, and she urges Chandler and Bond to go investigate its source. Chandler wants to keep going to Waco, where he plans to burn down the House of Phillips factory. “You scare me, Mister,” Willene says. “You’re talking like some kind of beatnik.”

“Supposing I am,” Chandler replies. “What have you got against beatniks?”

“Well, for one thing, their bongo drums.”

Bond ultimately convinces Chandler to go investigate the scene of the fire, suggesting he’ll let the bi-curious Chandler have full use of his body if he does. Willene then goes to a nearby farmhouse to call for help. 

Prairie Blossom: An artist's representation.

The lady of the house, Gert (Marion Eaton), may not be much help. When Willene pounds on the door and calls out, the inebriated Gert gasps: “My God, that was a human voice. A woman’s voice!” The shitfaced widow rushes to fix herself up before opening the door. Since she’s wearing only a slip and high heels, one would think she’d simply put a dress on, or maybe a robe, but instead Gert puts on a wig and draws on dark, asymmetrical eyebrows (a Kuchar trademark). Realizing she’s too drunk to receive visitors, Gert sticks her fingers down her throat, but, uh-oh, her wig falls in the toilet just as she’s blowing chunks. No worries. Gert just shakes the vomit off her wig, puts it back on her head and finally lets Willene into the house. 

 

Gert gets ready to receive visitors.

Willene helps Gert cum clean.

Willene politely listens to Gert stumble through the history of Prairie Blossom, the house she and her late husband Charlie Hammond built, before guiding the poor thing into the bathroom to bathe her. “Would you mind washin’ me a little lower, please?” Gert simperingly asks. The seemingly naïve wife of country rock star Simon Cassidy obliges, getting a grateful thank you from Gert when she gets the widow off with a vigorous scrubbing.

Bond and Chandler arrive with Roo, Toydy and Sash, who conveniently escaped their wrecked car before it exploded. Everyone is irritable, but Gert, revivified from her recent bath and orgasm (as well as being more than a little nuts) welcomes everyone with a bright smile and opens her closet to her cranky guests, urging them to help themselves to some dry clothes. They must change clothes in the bedroom at the far end of the hall and, she urges them, be patient as each person takes their turn.

Things Get Weirder. And Filthier.

Chandler prepares to fire up the penis pump...

From this point forward the movie gets delightfully dirty. The bedroom at the far end of the hall—once her son’s—is a veritable shrine to sex, with a large assortment of sex toys, tubes of KY and rubbers to choose from. Its walls are decorated with pages from skin mags; stills from hardcore porn movies, both gay and straight; and erotic art (including a cartoon by the director). One poster that stands out is a generic portrait of George Washington, yet because it’s so innocuous, no one bothers to inspect it too closely. If they did, they would discover Washington’s eyes are cut out, allowing Gert a clear view through two peepholes drilled into the kitchen wall.

... as Gert watches.

And Gert gets a lengthy show as her weary and horny travelers give in to erotic temptation. Chandler avails himself of a very loud penis pump (seriously, it sounds like a rotary rock tumbler), while Roo uses a vibrator with a dildo attachment. Toydy fucks an inflatable sex doll while jamming a dildo up his ass, with some difficulty (“Get up there, goddammit!”). Only Sash—who, remember, is played by the director’s sister—takes a partner while in Prairie Blossom’s X-rated bedroom, boning Bond, who wears a novelty rubber for the occasion. (In the documentary It Came from Kuchar, Melinda McDowell-Milk mentions that Curt always wanted to celebrate sex in his work yet frustratingly never mentions how she felt performing in Thundercrack!’s hardcore scenes while being filmed by her brother. She was instrumental in getting the film restored for a Blu-ray release, so she clearly wasn’t traumatized by the experience, but I still wanted to hear her account of filming.)

Willene enjoys a refreshing snack.

While she watches from the kitchen, Gert masturbates with a rather long peeled cucumber. She’s barely finished with the cuke when Willene enters the kitchen, looking for a snack. She plucks the well-lubricated cuke from the bowl of fruit where Gert tossed it (“This looks refreshing”) and takes a bite, because you just knew someone was going to eat it. According to this movie’s IMDb’s trivia page, actress Maggie Pyle was, unbeknownst to her, eating the actual cucumber that had been up Eaton’s cooch, as payback for being a pain in the ass (i.e., showing up for filming drunk or otherwise fucked up). Kind of makes you wonder how many suspicious salads these people have been served while on set.

There are quite few more sex scenes to get through (the movie is almost three hours long), including Toydy fucking Bond. There are also a lot more secrets, like who’s pickled head is that down in the basement? What’s behind that locked door in the living room? And what does Gert mean when she insists that her son is not dead, he simply “no longer exists”? 

Dinner is served!

But before any of those questions can be answered, the house is surrounded by circus animals. A frantic Bing is let inside, and he has some secrets of his own, mostly involving his complicated relationship with the gorilla, Medusa. “Don’t minimize the danger, Mac,” he tells Toydy. “Medusa didn’t get that name for nothin’. One look at those blazing, red eyes surrounded by that black, matted hair can freeze a man to a block of stone on the spot. She made me hard one night.”

Cue a flashback sequence featuring underground filmmaker George Kuchar getting a hand-job from a gorilla (or, rather, Curt MacDowell in a gorilla suit). At this point, though, we’d be surprised if someone didn’t have sex with a gorilla.

Hardcore, But Not Necessarily Porn

Thundercrack! was originally conceived as a porn cash-in by McDowell and composer Mark Ellinger (both credited with Thundercrack!’s story), but the script written by Kuchar, who had been making underground movies with his twin brother Mike since the late 1950s, took the project in a different and wonderful direction. “I knew it wouldn’t make any money, because anything I work on is a financial disaster,” says Kuchar in the It Came from Kuchar documentary.

And Thundercrack! wasn’t a cash cow, either, but that doesn’t make it any less of a masterpiece. Sure, it’s not the most polished movie, with iffy sound and scene compositions that are at times more stagey than cinematic. And, sure, it doesn’t need to be nearly 3 hours long, but it’s not a problem that it is. You won’t be bored, no matter how many times you watch it. I’ve watched it several times and I always discover something I missed from previous viewings. Kuchar’s script has so many great lines that to include them all in this post would mean transcribing the movie’s entire script.

Chandler enjoys the show.

Eaton’s tour de force performance as Gert is another reason to seek this one out. Eaton was already an accomplished stage actress when, in her 40s, she decided to enter the world of adult films. The first adult movie she made, Sip the Wine, was produced by Heffernan, who told her about the auditions for Thundercrack! McDowell reportedly interrupted her during her audition to tell her the part was hers. And it’s hard to imagine anyone else in the role (though Georgina Spelvin would’ve been a good second choice). Eaton’s performance is at once sincere and a drag parody. Gert is an outrageous character, but Eaton doesn’t let us forget her humanity.

Kuchar gives the movie’s other standout performance, though after watching the documentary about him I’m not entirely sure he was acting. Scudder, who appeared in numerous porn films from the mid-1970s to the mid ’80s, one-and-done Johnson, and Heffernan, are all better than average, and Pyle is effective as Willene (not sure if her being drunk/stoned helped, but it didn’t hurt). The weakest performances are from Benson and (sorry!) Melinda McDowell, who, bless her heart, struggles the hardest to get out the mouthfuls of dialog required of her.

Thundercrack! is hard to categorize. It’s a send-up of old, dark house and hag horror tropes, but it’s not exactly a horror comedy (though it is very funny), and it’s certainly not a porn parody. In fact, though it has a lot of hardcore sex scenes, I don’t really consider it a porno at all. In the context of Kuchar’s script, the intention of the sex scenes is to shock rather than titillate. Thundercrack! is its own glorious thing. You may not be turned on, and you definitely won’t be scared, but you won’t fucking forget it.

*Don’t judge the movie’s cinematography by the quality of the stills in this post, which were photographed from my computer screen while the Blu-ray was paused. 

Double Takes: ‘The House of Usher’ (1989) ★★ / (2006) ★

OK, I was wrong.

A couple years ago, when I reviewed a selection of David DeCoteau movies, I advised readers to skip DeCoteau’s very gay and very bad Edgar Allen Poe’s The House of Usher and try their luck with two other schlocky versions, one from 1989, the other from 2006, speculating that both movies look “like they deliver the fun kind of bad DeCoteau didn’t.”

They do not, though director Alan Birkinshaw’s The House of Usher (1989), comes close. In this one, Molly (Romy Walthall, billed as Romy Windsor) and her fiancée Ryan (Rufus Swart) are vacationing in London when they get an invitation to visit Ryan’s heretofore unknown uncle, Roderick Usher. But on the way to visit Uncle Rod, Ryan swerves into a tree to avoid two children in the middle of the road (why, yes, they are ghosts; how did you ever guess?) Ryan’s injured, so Molly goes to get help, by chance stumbling up to the Usher mansion, where Clive the asshole butler (Norman Coombes) assures her that he’ll make sure Ryan gets the medical assistance he needs. Meanwhile, why doesn’t she have a cup of tea and a lie down upstairs before dinner with the master of the house?

When Molly finally meets Roderick (Oliver Reed), she’s assured that Ryan is in the hospital but unable to receive visitors just yet. Though Molly has her doubts, she agrees to stay put. However, it seems no amount of drugged tea—served regularly by Clive’s miserable wife (Anne Stradi)—will keep Molly in her room. As she explores the titular House of Usher, discovering, among other things, another member of the Usher clan (Donald Pleasence) kept locked away in the attic, Molly begins to suspect Uncle Rod might have sinister intentions.

This version of Usher has some things going for it. There are a few—very few—noteworthy set pieces, including a hand forced into a meat grinder fake-out and a character getting his dick gnawed-off by a rat; plus, Reed and, especially, Pleasence raise the bar considerably. Unfortunately, we spend most of our time with Walthall, whose performance seems better suited for a movie entitled Sorority Beach Party than a Gothic horror. In fact, the movie’s whole tone is off, like Birkinshaw and screenwriter Michael J. Murray had initially conceived this adaption of Poe’s story as a horror comedy but couldn’t think up any jokes—good or bad—before filming began. Yet, the movie is still filmed like a comedy, as brightly lit as a Disney Channel sit-com and with tacky sets that look as if they were hastily painted for a haunted house attraction at a high school Halloween fair. And the less said about the ending, which is as infuriating as it is nonsensical, the better.

But at least 1989’s Usher has some entertainment value. Not so director Hayley Cloake’s 2006 adaptation, which clocks in at a mere 81 minutes yet feels twice as long. This time out, our doomed heroine is Roderick Usher’s ex-girlfriend from college, Jill (pouty blonde Izabella Miko), who travels to the Usher estate upon learning of the death of Roderick’s sister—and Jill’s best friend—Madeline. Though the stern, Mrs. Danvers-esque housekeeper Mrs. Thatcher (Beth Grant) is less than welcoming, Jill sticks around after Maddy’s funeral, rekindling her romance with the charmless Roderick (a monotone Austin Nichols). Jill puts up with Mrs. Thatcher’s cock-blocking and her beau’s nightly sessions in a sensory deprivation tank to treat his neurasthenia, but it’s only upon discovering that the Usher family tree is a straight line that she begins to reconsider her relationship to the brooding Roderick.

Cloake’s movie may be a bit more competently made than DeCoteau’s Usher, but it isn’t any better; it’s just straighter. The movie’s most inspired elements—mixing in bits of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca into the story; the incest twist—are wasted, as are most of the actors. Miko makes the best impression, though I’m not sure if that’s testament to her acting skill so much as she’s just given more of a character to play than her co-stars. An actor who should have stolen this movie was Grant, a prolific character actor who usually makes a big impression in small roles. Grant frequently appears in comedies, so I was looking forward to seeing what she did with a more serious role. Not much, it turns out. It’s not her fault, though; it’s screenwriter Collin Chang’s. And if you’re thinking of checking this one out to ogle Miko or Nichols, don’t bother. Though rated R, this Usher only offers a few shots of Miko in panties and skimpy top and a near-subliminal shot of Nichols’ pubes. At least DeCoteau had the courtesy to appeal his audience’s prurient interests, albeit clumsily. Despite the curb appeal of her movie’s cast, Cloake’s The House of Usher is strictly a teardown property.

Short Takes: ‘Someone Behind the Door’ (1971) ★★ 1/2

Somehow, I managed to live half my life without checking out the works of Charles Bronson. I remember seeing promos for TV matinee showings his 1970s classics—Mr. Majestyk, The Mechanic, Telefon—when I was in junior high, but those movies aired while I was in school, and I likely wouldn’t have watched them had I been home. I could’ve easily watched his movies in the 1980s, when Cannon Films could be counted on to dump a Bronson movie in multiplexes every year, but at that time I had no interest in watching an old man with a gun take out younger guys with guns. I was more excited about the release of Yentl. It was a lonely time.

But tastes and times change, and over the past few years I’ve been steadily working my way through Bronson’s filmography. I like his action shit, but I’m particularly fond of some of the European thrillers he made in the early 1970s, including Someone Behind the Door (or Quelqu’un derrière la porte if you’re fancy), directed by Nicolas Gessner.

Bronson plays an amnesiac, brought into a British hospital by a good Samaritan who found him wandering a nearby beach road. A neurosurgeon, Dr. Jeffries (Anthony Perkins), takes an interest in Bronson’s case and, after a brief examination, offers to take Bronson back to his home where he says he can observe Bronson more closely. “You know what hospitals are like,” Jeffries says. “They’ll just put you in a ward and forget about you.”

But the doctor has ulterior motives, but we already knew that as he’s played by Anthony Perkins. Jeffries has no interest in curing Bronson. He wants to manipulate him into murdering his cheating wife Frances (Bronson’s then real-life wife Jill Ireland) and her lover, played by Henri Garcin.

Someone Behind the Door isn’t the best of Bronson’s European films that I’ve seen (for my money, that would be Rider on the Rain, with Violent City a close second), but it’s an intriguing psychological thriller, nonetheless. Gessner, who directed 1976’s The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane, doesn’t inject much style into his film and his screenplay, co-written by Marc Behm, is at times a bit too dry, yet the two leads make it an interesting watch. Bronson didn’t have the most expansive range as an actor, but he’s up to the challenge in this role that casts him against type. Perkins is better, even though his casting immediately tips the character’s hand. Garcin is merely serviceable, in a part that’s little more than a cameo. As for Ireland, she’s OK, though her performance does little to dissuade me from thinking most of Bronson’s movies from the 1970s would’ve been at least ten percent better had he been married to someone else.