Hopping genres as breezily as he did continents, Jerzy Skolimowski followed the underappreciated comic duo
of The Adventures of Gerard and King, Queen, Knave with this teasing non-sequitur of a chiller, adapted from a
Robert Graves story. Black-shrouded brooder Alan Bates emerges from an 18-year stint with Outback aboriginals
to slither into the lives of Devon couple John Hurt and Susannah York -- packing satanic glower and the insinuation
of supernatural prowess, he proceeds to lord over the household and make York his sex toy, as Hurt scrambles to
find a chink in his dark armor. Whereas the Hammer workhorses would jack up the narrative's sense of outlandish dread,
Skolimowski submerges it beneath an almost ethereal absurdism -- despite Bates' titular party trick, a pulverizing
roar that sweeps the moors, annihilating everyone and everything within earshot, voices seldom get raised above a
murmur. Never more slyly pokerfaced than when a naked York scuttles on all fours or Hurt vanquishes the villain by
smashing a pebble, the film piles mystery upon mystery by bracketing the plot, Caligari-style, with nuthouse narration
set during a bizarre cricket game. The off-kilter images are complemented by an otherworldly soundtrack: Hurt, futzing with
experimental stereo, coaches unsavory moans out of rolling marbles and cigarette-inhaling, while glasses splinter,
flies soar, and skies rumble. Tribal animalism and British civility are the movie's dueling poles, and, when the climatic
eruption docks in, Skolimowski weaves all of the head-scratching together with a bolt of thunder. A film that creeps,
unsettles, and surprises, as lasting in the 1970s British horror genre as The Wicker Man or Raw Meat, though, much
like the rest of Skolimowski's work, bound less to a fixed nationality than to a singularly searching sensibility. Tony Banks and
Mike Rutherford, both Genesis alum, worked on the soundtrack. With Tim Curry, Robert Stephens, Julian Hough, Carol
Drinkwater, and Jim Broadbent.
--- Fernando F. Croce
|