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The Carpenter influence is evident (The Fog, principally), Lang's Fury is more obliquely noted. The coastal setting supplies green ocean and pale, rocky sands, a vacationing photographer works on compositions of nets and seagulls suddenly unbalanced by the reds of a local lass (Lisa Blount), moments later he's pummeled and set aflame by a mob. (The siren later on returns in starched whites at the hospital to finish the job with a five-inch hypodermic needle.) Potter's Bluff, a cozy burg with grisly happenings ("A New Way of Life," promises the welcome sign), not a tourist trap but outsiders are snared anyway. The sheriff (James Farentino) has no clues, his wife (Melody Anderson) keeps a ceremonial dagger in her drawer and elucidates the fine points of voodoo to her class. The veteran mortician (Jack Albertson) exudes desiccated elegance, favors big-band oldies, and declares funeral makeup an art form. "Cosmetologists give birth. I make souvenirs." (Stan Winston's special effects second that notion—a procession of dissolves restores the squashed visage of the latest victim, from grimacing muscle to synthetic skin scored to "Moonlight Serenade.") Gary Sherman's grinning American Gothic, with a Dan O'Bannon scenario out of Ray Bradbury and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Capra's small-town schism, Cocteau's "death at work" applied to photography, it's all pulled into a complicated image of conformist dread, the carved-out heart in the vacant casket. (Giving your ghoul-spouse a proper burial after shooting her turns out to be ultimate declaration of love here.) Tell-tale reels of celluloid figure in a suggestive climax about horror concealed by cosmetics, "a good way to teach them about narrative." With Dennis Redfield, Nancy Locke, Christopher Allport, Joseph Medalis, Robert Englund, and Barry Corbin.
--- Fernando F. Croce |