This is filmed like a chirpy happy live-action Powerpuff Girls, in which a high school girl, accompanied by some friends, takes a summer vacation to visit her bonkers aunt in a big and isolated house. The girls are named Gorgeous, Kung-Fu, Mac, Melody, and Sweet, and everything is all cotton-candy happiness, until (and even after) they figure out that the house wants them dead.

The saccharine soundtrack — a few bars of kiddie music, repeated hundreds of times — is presumably meant to be an amusingly annoying earworm, but it’s more annoying than amusing, and becomes my only complaint here. Then again, I also get tired of the zither in The Third Man, so feel free to discount my opinions. Most people do.

My opinion of House is that it’s a frickin’ masterpiece. Everything is impossible, including homicidal furniture, a supernatural kitty, a hungry piano, flying decapitations, and endlessly garish and fake visuals, sometimes hilarious, so it’s surprising when the horrors kick in and they’re truly a horror.

It’s quite good and wildly unusual as a haunted house movie, but dig a little deeper and it’s more than that. It’s about loneliness, loss, and allegorically, the horrors of Hiroshima … but in an enjoyable way!

Verdict: BIG YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

Mom wakes up bloodied, unsure what’s happened to her husband and sons. A judge decides she killed them, and sentences her to thirty years in prison. When she’s freed after that sentence, she returns to the house where the mysterious violence happened so long ago, and it turns out the house isn’t through messing with her.

The dead come back, events replay, and what’s happened before doesn’t necessarily have to happen again. This is high-pitched horror, with a telenovela’s worth of family melodrama and tragedy, centered around that house, where time whirls around like it’s in a Cuisinart.

I’ve seen a zillion time travel movies and read all the novels (it’s my favorite sub-genre) and The House at the End of Time isn’t the best. It finds ways to feel fresh, though, and has half a dozen moments that gave me severe goose bumps — so many shivers I turned on the space heater.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

A married schmuck has the hots for his maid, forces himself on her (kisses only, since it’s the ’50s), and then, oops, he sorta-accidentally strangles her when she starts hollering too loudly.

What’s the killer willing to do to make sure nobody knows he done it? And will his brother help him with the cover-up?

I’ll never tell, but this tidy thriller from Fritz Lang grabs you by the neck.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

The House I Live In (1944)

Frank Sinatra sings a song, then steps outside to smoke a cigarette, and comes across a gang of kids in the process of beating up another kid for being the wrong religion. Sinatra jumps into the fray, explains American values to the urchins, and then sings a love song to democracy.

This is an 11-minute short, corny and (obviously) outdated, but sweet, dang it.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

This is a well-made documentary that says what I already know, and hope you know: the War on Drugs is a war on black people. All the arrests and imprisonments obviously trash the ideals America is supposed to be about, while just as obviously reinforcing what America is actually about.

“Since 19711 the War on Drugs has cost over $1-trillion and resulted in more than 45,000,000 arrests. During that time, illegal drug use has remained unchanged.”

In addition to lots of conversation with the victims of the War on Drugs, and footage of politicians saying cruel and stupid things, the filmmakers somehow found a prison guard and a few cops willing to say on camera that the War on Drugs is ineffective and awful. Only a few, though — most cops and jailers are well aware that without prohibition they’d likely be out of work. That’s the way of the police state.

This film is difficult to watch if you’re already aware, but essential if you’re not.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

A House in Bayswater (1960)

As a young man, future freaky filmmaker Ken Russell (Altered States, The Devils, The Lair of the White Worm, etc) lived in a boarding house, in a London neighborhood called Bayswater. Come 1960, it was announced that the house would be torn down to make way for an office building, and Russell returned, set up his cameras, and made this fine 29-minute short film for BBC. It shows what living there was like, and the film closes, sadly, with footage of the house being demolished.

Or at least, that’s the official story, but I became suspicious. The landlady prattles on perfectly in the film, and all the tenants are lovably eccentric and amusing, with not a boring word from any of them. By 2/3 of the way through, I wasn’t sure whether it was factual or fictional.

IMDB says it’s a documentary, but real people simply aren’t so consistently and comically kooky, off the top of their heads. Could it be scripted?

Every word spoken on-screen appears to be impromptu, the tenants talking to the camera, but the closing credits say that the film was “written and directed by Ken Russell.”

Any lingering doubt can be removed by putting the filming address, listed in IMDB as 30 Linden Gardens in London, into Google Street View.

That’s the same house where you’ve just spent half an hour. It hasn’t been demolished, this isn’t a documentary, and anyone thinking it is has been brilliantly, brilliantly punked.

But the film is a loving, enchanting look at the house and what it was like living there, as written and remembered by Russell.

Verdict: YES.

♦ ♦ ♦

… and out of alphabetical order …

This takes place over one night in Las Vegas, but not a moment was filmed there. Instead a series of enormous and surreal neon sets were constructed in Hollywood by writer-director Francis Coppola (nee Ford). He offers lots of trick shots showing two scenes at the same time, ephemeral fades and lyrical interludes, making it more a mood than a specific night in a specific place. And I like the mood.

For their fifth anniversary, Hank (Frederic Forrest) and Frannie (Teri Garr) exchange gifts. He gives her the deed to the house they share; she buys them a vacation to Bora Bora. They’re working class people, a shopkeeper and a travel agent, so such gifts are as much a fantasy as everything else, and One from the Heart is (intentionally) 100% fantasy.

It’s accompanied by a short concert’s worth of singing by Tom Waits and Crystal Gayle. Waits is a unique singer, a voice like steel wool that’s rusted, and I like his music, but need to be in the right mood for it. It’s a difficult transition, trying to follow Waits’ lyrics and also follow the movie’s story, and I lost my way every time Waits started mumblesinging.

Anyway, Hank and Frannie quarrel, run off in different directions, and have quick hook-ups with, respectively, circus acrobat Leila (Nastassja Kinski) and Latin-lover Ray (Raul Julia).

Garr was never lovelier nor ditzier, and the neon suits her. Forrest is a touch too tough and brutish, and you’ll wonder what either Frannie or Leila would see in him. And then Waits starts singing, and the story disappears like spit on a griddle.

One From the Heart visually sparkles, but the storyline never quite sparks.

Verdict: MAYBE.

11/21/2024

The House in Nightmare Park (1973)
House of Cards (1968)
House of Cards (1990)
House of Cards (2013-18)
… plus schlock, shorts, and surprises …

Now accepting movie recommendations, especially beginning with the letter ‘I’.

Illustration by Jeff Meyer. No talking once the lights dim, and only real butter on the popcorn, not that fake yellow stuff. 

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