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On the steps of Fellini and Malle and Vadim (Spirits of the Dead), Poe vu par les auteurs. George Romero's "The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar," a concentrated greed screed in the guise of a corroded soap opera, the "air of normality" that suffocates. Trophy wife (Adrienne Barbeau) and shady doctor (Ramy Zada) against ailing moneybags (Bingo O'Malley), with an electronic fad for the hypnotic intermediary. The mansion-mausoleum has the husband entombed in the basement freezer, the suspended spirit is a rasp emanating from the frost-encrusted cadaver. Money mollifies the suspicious lawyer (E.G. Marshall), the blunt moral vision is gruffly voiced by a cop (Tom Atkins) at the scene of the crime: "Rich people. The sick stuff always turns out to be rich people." The closing image adds a splash of red to Lichtenstein's dollar bill. Dario Argento's "The Black Cat," an extravagant portrait of the grotesque artiste. The staring pussy unsettles the saturnine shutterbug (Harvey Keitel) but captivates the ethereal violinist (Madeleine Potter), who might have been a sorceress in another life. "Metropolitan Horrors," a collection of gruesome glossies with the strangled pet on the cover, grounds for separation. (The murder is a memory of Lang's Scarlet Street, a frantic stabbing interrupted by the indelibly tranquil note of a raised palm pierced by the blade.) A thrifty pagan feast materializing in Pittsburgh, a bedeviled camera swinging between the halves of a split torso, VHS tapes filling the shelves obscuring the corpse. "Perversity is one of the prime impulses of the heart." The punchline is reflected on a feline retina, and posits the whole thing as an adjustment of Buñuel's Él. With John Amos, Sally Kirkland, Martin Balsam, Kim Hunter, Christine Forrest, Holter Graham, and Julie Benz.
--- Fernando F. Croce |