Tag: Donald Pleasence

Dracula (1979, John Badham)

This Dracula adaptation takes place in 1913, which is only important so leading lady Kate Nelligan (battling and sometimes winning her English accent) can be a suffragette, and her beau, Trevor Eve, can drive a motorcar. So there can be a car chase. Or three.

The film begins already in England. A ship is having trouble at sea; the crew is trying to get a wooden crate overboard, but they’re too late, and a wolf attacks them. On land, Nelligan lives with her father, Donald Pleasence, who runs a mental institution. Her sickly friend Jan Francis is staying with them. Nelligan helps out in the institution, where the patients aren’t so much violent as profoundly tragic.

After the boat crashes, Francis goes down to the shore and discovers a lone survivor and apparently the ship’s only passenger, a Transylvanian count. We don’t get to see him for a while; Dracula, down to the John Williams score, is a late seventies studio blockbuster. The height of pre-ILM special effects, many smartly executed composite shots, exquisite matte paintings, and Superman: The Movie moments. Down to Laurence Olivier’s stunt cast as Van Helsing, who isn’t a vampire hunter, just a grieving father. Francis is his daughter, and she’s not long for the world. Or movie.

The film’s first hour is moving the pieces around so Langella and Nelligan can have a romance. They need to overcome hurdles, like her presumed engagement to Eve (apparently, they both were just fooling around) and Langella’s desire to create a vampire army to destroy the humans. Starting with Francis.

But since Nelligan disappears in the second half of the film—she’s the vampire’s victim, the fair maiden the men must protect—the film loses its romance angle. Langella hangs out to menace the good guys, but he also vanishes for a stretch. The third act misses them, particularly Nelligan, who never gets to sit with her burgeoning vampiric attributes.

Instead, it’s all about Olivier, Pleasence, and Eve teaming up, though in stages. Olivier and Pleasence get one set piece, then Olivier gets another, then Eve finally gets to team up for the car chases. Despite the good guy plot being Olivier’s movie, he makes room for his costars. He and Pleasence have a delightful rapport; before Olivier arrives to check on Francis, Pleasence is an absent-minded dad-type. He relies on Nelligan for a lot of the institution work, and he’s settled into fine country living when he’s off the clock. He doesn’t even remember how to help someone choking; it’s been so long since he’s practiced real medicine.

When Olivier arrives, Pleasence becomes his Watson. At least until the third act, when there’s not enough room for Pleasence anymore.

Director Badham is often ostentatious; despite the English shooting locations, Dracula’s very American—just listen to Langella’s accent (or lack thereof). Or, really, Nelligan’s English one. Olivier does a heavy accent, which is fine; his performance just doesn’t have any nuance. He doesn’t need it, I suppose. Francis’s accent’s terrible, though. It always sounds like she’s mumbling.

The film wraps up with a conflicted statement about Nelligan’s agency under the patriarchy—Langella’s offering her real power; she just has to eat people—but it’s a reasonably successful adaptation. Langella’s mesmerizing as a dashing Dracula, and he and Nelligan’s chemistry is good. Pleasence and Olivier are fun. Eve’s fine. Tony Haygarth’s a relatively harmless but still terrifying Renfield.

Lovely photography from Gilbert Taylor and good editing from John Bloom. The Williams score is just okay; he doesn’t have a good “Dracula theme,” which he needs.

Great costumes from Julie Harris and production design from Peter Murton. Dracula’s often sumptuous. It’s a little slow, but it’s all right.

This post is part of the Devilishly Delightful Donald Pleasence Blogathon hosted by Gill of Realweegiemidget Reviews and Barry of Cinematic Catharsis.

Halloween 5 (1989, Dominique Othenin-Girard)

What is it with Halloween sequels and hospitals? This time it’s Danielle Harris spending most of the movie in the hospital. Sure, it’s officially a children’s clinic and appears to be shot in a converted house, but it’s still a Halloween movie where the lead damsel in distress is in a hospital bed. The plot decision may be a nod to the original Halloween II; Harris is playing Jamie Lee Curtis’s kid (Curtis wouldn’t be back to the franchise for another nine years, of course), so there could be some kind of analog between the two films and experiences.

Only, no, because even if director Othenin-Girard could come up with such a device, he couldn’t shoot it. And even if he could somehow shoot it, cinematographer Robert Draper wouldn’t be able to light it. And even if they managed to pull it off, Alan Howarth’s music would crap it out. Because there’s nothing good about Halloween 5, at least not in the filmmaking itself.

Harris is not bad. She’s effective. Because she’s a little kid, who’s being stalked by a giant, unkillable spree killer. Plus, her adoptive parents have abandoned her in the clinic since Harris tried killing the mom at the end of the last movie. End of the previous film, she succeeded; this one opens with a slight retcon. Mom survived but didn’t come back. So instead, adoptive sister—they call her a step-sister, which is weird—Ellie Cornell visits her a bunch, bringing along her super-cool late eighties friend, Wendy Foxworth. They’re possibly in high school. It’s never clear.

They’ve got a third friend, Tamara Glynn, and they’re all going to party at Cornell’s since her parents are out of town for Halloween and, therefore, the only intelligent people in the movie. Get out of town when it’s time for a new Halloween.

Foxworth and Glynn aren’t important except as potential targets for killer Michael Myers (played here by Don Shanks; it’s hard to tell if he’s doing a good job because the mask looks terrible and ill-fitting). Glynn’s got a dipshit boyfriend (Matthew Walker) who’s going as Michael Myers for Halloween, Foxworth’s got a dipshit boyfriend (Jonathan Chapin) who’s got a muscle car and is also named Michael. You know, in case a large part of the second act is going to be Shanks impersonating Chapin after stealing his muscle car. And then chasing Harris through a Christmas tree farm. With the image flipped, so he’s driving on the wrong side of the car. Because Halloween 5 is thirty years old and no one ever thought to fix one of the film’s goofs in the countless home video releases.

Harris doesn’t have the worst support system. For example, at the clinic, she’s got a nice friend in Jeffrey Landman, and nurse Betty Carvalho is good to her. But Donald Pleasence is apparently her attending psychiatrist, and he physically abuses her to force her psychic connection to killer uncle Shanks.

Halloween 5’s that odd combination of shitty and wrong. It’s a bad movie where they make poor creative choices.

Pleasence is risible. Halloween 5 definitely did not help his acting legacy. None of the teenagers are good. Cornell’s the best, then Foxworth, then everyone else is worse. Troy Evans is in it for a bit, and he’s actually good, which is weird. And Beau Starr is okay. He’s able to muscle through the trash script better than any of the other adults.

There’s a weird Die Hard connection with Carvalho and David Ursin appearing in the film; they both had bit parts in Die Hard. The movie also wants to treat Shanks’s Michael Myers like the Frankenstein Monster, opening with an “homage” to Bride of Frankenstein, then what appears to be a nod to the old blind man trope, but more from Young Frankenstein than anything else. Especially when there’s a “roll in the hay” moment.

It seems more likely it’s a coincidence since a Young Frankenstein deep cut seems beyond Halloween 5.

The only way this movie makes sense is if it were some intricate tax dodge or money laundering scheme. But, as a feature film, the badness is simply inexplicable.

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995, Joe Chappelle)

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers doesn’t even run ninety minutes and gets boring fast; the last twenty minutes are completely mind-numbing. Nothing makes sense, characters act without motive, cults cult without purpose, it just goes on and on. At least Donald Pleasence is lucky enough to get knocked out for a bunch of it.

Pleasence isn’t in Curse very much. The scenes he does get are usually silly, sort of half expository, half bridging scenes to keep things moving. He has no narrative of his own, which is fine. He’s so uninvolved with the film’s events he shouldn’t have one. Of course, no one gets their own narrative in Curse. At least, nothing approaching a completed one.

Lead Paul Rudd doesn’t. His character survived the first Halloween as a kid, which makes him early-to-mid-twenties. He lives in a boarding house and obsesses over Michael Myers while peeping on new neighbor Marianne Hagan across the street. She’s a single mom moved back in with her family–mom Kim Darby, dad Bradford English, brother Keith Bogart. Devin Gardner plays Hagan’s kid.

So Hagan and Rudd don’t show up for about twenty minutes, maybe a little more–though Rudd does narrate the opening titles, which are set over J.C. Brandy giving birth and then running from Michael and a cult. From a basement. Director Chappelle likes his basements. He likes to poorly direct scenes in them; cinematographer Billy Dickson lights these basement scenes poorly, like everything he lights in the movie. It’s all poorly lighted. Dickson and Chappelle shoot their night exteriors with a lot of blue light. Bright blue light.

Back to Brandy. She’s from the last couple movies but it was a different actress. The movie introduces her in the Rudd voiceover during the titles and there’s no time spent establishing her character. Even though her escape subplot goes on forever, it’s filler. And badly directed. Chappelle badly directs everything in Curse. The movie doesn’t just not having anything to recommend it, it has nil positive elements.

Chappelle’s direction? Bad. Daniel Farrands’s script? Bad. Dickson’s photography? Bad. Randy Bricker’s editing? Bad. Alan Howarth’s music? So bad.

And none of the actors are any good. Once Rudd and Hagan take over the movie, it’s all about Rudd finding Brandy’s baby and then trying to find Pleasence. Meanwhile Hagan’s got a subplot about… nothing? She’s got a couple scenes showing she’s suffering–dad English is physically and mentally abusive, Gardner’s a weird kid–but no subplot. On one hand, it’s good Rudd and Hagan don’t have a romance subplot, but it’s also bad because it’d be so godawful it might be fun to watch.

Rudd’s really bad. Hagan’s better. Darby’s okay. English is bad. Bogart is bad. Mariah O’Brien–as Bogart’s girlfriend–she’s bad. She’s got this subplot about bringing Halloween back to the town. There’s a festival, which doesn’t appear to have actually been staged because Chappelle’s terrible at establishing shots. He, cinematographer Dickson, and editor Bricker are really terrible at tying scenes shot in different locations together. Sure, the plotting is herks and jerks along, but Bricker has no rhythm. There’ll be a bad establishing shot, then a second–longer–bad establishing shot, just on a first unit location. Curse is a visual mess.

Leo Geter is awful as a shock jock who figures in, but not enough.

Mitchell Ryan is in it a few times as Pleasence’s old boss, who wants to hire him back even before Michael Myers returns. Even though Pleasence is clearly not in shape for a nine-to-five.

The jump scares are all cheap, usually red herrings, usually with terrible Howarth music accompanying. But mostly there’s gore instead of scares. But the gore is often insert shots; obvious insert shots. Like Chappelle has something to prove. He can keep finding ways to make the move worse, even as every other “creative” impulse runs out.

Curse is bad. And it goes on too long to be amusing at all in its badness.

The Bastard (1978, Lee H. Katzin)

Somewhere in the second half of The Bastard, the mini-series starts to wear you down and you just give in. The first half is set in 1772 Europe, first in France, then in England. Andrew Stevens is a French boy with a secret. His mom might just be Patricia Neal, inn keeper, but Stevens is actually heir to a great British title. He’s just a bastard for now. Soon, he’ll be a duke.

In other words, the first half of The Bastard is a bunch of weak accents (for the most part) and Southern California standing in for the French countryside, British estates, French estates, the British countryside, and London itself. Oddly, The Bastard isn’t a grandly budget mini-series. It’s got nice sets and some creative location shooting, but it’s far from opulent. Director Katzin probably wouldn’t know what to do with the extra money anyway.

It feels, especially in the first half, very much like a TV show you don’t really want to watch. Until about an hour into the movie, Stevens is just around to whine, get seduced, seduce, patronize, and get henpecked by Neal. Neal doesn’t even try a French accent. Stevens goes for it and fails, but for a second he gets some credit for the enthusiasm. Then the accent starts to slip and the credit goes away.

When they get to England, they meet Eleanor Parker and Mark Neely. Parker does a British accent, Neely doesn’t, which is good because Neely’s bad enough without a weak accent. Parker’s a nice cameo; Bastard has some good small parts. But if you’re around too long, The Bastard gets you. The script eventually gets Neal, who’s got a weak character in the first place, but Katzin’s direction, Guerdon Trueblood’s teleplay… Neal never gets a good moment.

Anyway. They go to London, they meet Donald Pleasence (who’s cute) and Tom Bosley. Bosley’s all in as Benjamin Franklin, down to the air baths–his enthusiasm, no one else’s, can defeat The Bastard. Shame he’s only got four scenes in three hours. Then they go to the colonies for the second half.

Oh, right, Stevens sleeps with Olivia Hussey too. She’s his half-brother’s fiancée who likes French boys. Stevens is supposed to be seventeen or eighteen at the start of The Bastard. He was twenty-three. He looks about twenty-eight with the tan. His young lothario thing is a weird script addition given it looks like a soap opera whenever Katzin does a seduction scene. Except maybe the first one.

Second half has William Shatner as Paul Revere. And it features a William Shatner enthusiastic horse backing riding sequence. It’s kind of awesome. Shatner’s not bad either. He’s extremely likable, which gets him over some of the bumps in the script. And he’s also not in it too much.

Ditto Buddy Ebsen as Stevens’s American mentor. Or Noah Beery Jr. Even Peter Bonerz leaves a good impression.

Strangely, William Daniels is a complete flop and he’s got a lot fewer scenes than anyone else.

The second half also brings Kim Cattrall as an actual love interest for Stevens. She doesn’t get seduced until they’ve had something like five scenes together, while the previous conquests fell at one and two, respectively. Cattrall’s kind of likable. She’s not good so much as she’s trying harder than anyone else. There are so many historical figures, the script is entirely caricature, Katzin’s not interested in the performances, seeing someone occasionally try. It helps.

But then The Bastard gets Cattrall too.

Stevens gets okay for a while, when it’s all the American Revolution flashcards. He doesn’t get good, but he gets okay. And then the script throws him a real curveball and the development–in Stevens’s performance, him, the script, probably not Katzin, come on–drags him under. It also drags The Bastard under, which is appropriate, since Stevens is the Bastard.

You know, Johnny Carson’s right. Sometimes, you do just like being able to say bastard.

Halloween II (1981, Rick Rosenthal)

Halloween II is not always a crappy sequel set in a closed setting without any sympathetic characters. It is a crappy sequel set in a closed setting without any sympathetic characters. But it wasn’t always.

Even though it gets off to a rocky start–the recap of the first movie is too abbreviated for unfamiliar viewers and superfluous for familiar ones, not to mention director Rosenthal clearly unable to reign in Donald Pleasence’s enthusiasm for histrionics–the first twenty-five minutes has potential.

There’s a lot to blame Rosenthal for with Halloween II. His inability to direct actors or even to compose shots of actors is a big one. He doesn’t have a sense for it; he additionally wastes Dean Cundey’s cinematography skills for the majority of the film, which is one of the film’s greater sins. But there are a handful of decent moments in Halloween II and even a couple good ones. And lots of bad ones with just too many problematic pieces, but not mishandled entirely.

But Rosenthal’s not entirely responsible. Writers and producers John Carpenter and Debra Hill, instead of embracing a bigger budget studio sequel to their indie horror sensation (hyperbolic enough?)–they try to undermine it at every step. That first half hour has potential because you can see Hill and Carpenter thinking about things, thinking about the implications of the first film. In the second two-thirds (at ninety minutes and change, the film almost perfectly splits into three sections), after creating a goofy subplot to give Jamie Lee Curtis something to do besides play unconscious, they stop. They’ve moved into their new story, that crappy one in the closed setting without sympathetic characters. Halloween II is shockingly inept at its characterization.

As such, it’s hard for the supporting cast to give good performances. Gloria Gifford is fantastic. Lance Guest isn’t. Hunter von Leer is simultaneously terrible, miscast and likable. Some of Leo Rossi’s performance is similar. And Pleasence is a complete ham. He’s got maybe one decent moment. Rosenthal just can’t direct him at all.

Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s score is too loud, too thoughtless. The same can be said for the editing.

It’s a bad film but has enough qualities to prove it shouldn’t have been.

THX 1138 (1971, George Lucas)

Director Lucas makes one attempt at audience accessibility in THX 1138. It’s actually the first thing he does–he shows a clip from an old Flash Gordon serial to let the audience know the story is about the future. The clip also lets the audience know the future isn’t going to be happy.

And once he’s made that concession, he stops being accessible at all. There are no explanations in the film, no foreshadowing, no acknowledgement of the characters’ realizations, Lucas doesn’t even introduce his leads in an easy fashion. Lucas instead just quickly visually familiarizes the audience with the leads–Robert Duvall, Maggie McOmie, Donald Pleasence–before focusing in on Duvall amid the first action confusion.

Lucas’s secret weapon in THX 1138 is co-writer and sound designer Walter Murch. While the film definitely has distinctive visuals right off, the sound is even more important to setting the film’s tone. Lucas and Murch confuse the viewer at the same time they confuse Duvall–it’s the only way to put the viewer on anything near a similar level. Later on, when Pleasence is exploring his future world for the first time (and the viewer’s), he stops and gives up, not wanting to know. Only then does his introspection reveal anything to the viewer about the future world.

Except there’s no explanation of the terminology, which leaves the viewer again removed.

The film’s biggest problem is its length–it’s just too short to submerge the viewer–but it’s still a masterfully produced film. Great photography and editing too.

3.5/4★★★½

CREDITS

Edited and directed by George Lucas; screenplay by Lucas and Walter Murch, based on a story by Lucas; directors of photography, Albert Kihn and David Myers; music by Lalo Schifrin; produced by Larry Sturhahn; released by Warner Bros.

Starring Robert Duvall (THX), Donald Pleasence (SEN), Don Pedro Colley (SRT), Maggie McOmie (LUH), Ian Wolfe (PTO), Marshall Efron (TWA), Sid Haig (NCH), John Pearce (DWY) and James Wheaton (OMM).

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The Great Escape (1963, John Sturges)

While The Great Escape runs nearly three hours, director Sturges and screenwriters James Clavell and W.R. Burnett never let it feel too long. Part of the quick pace comes from the first half hour being told in something like real time and another big part of it is the aftermath of the escape taking up the last hour. So for ninety minutes, the audience is getting to know and like the characters. It gives the escape aftermath a breakneck pace, even though Sturges doesn't do much different.

The Elmer Bernstein score also plays a large part. It's frequently upbeat and congratulatory to the characters (and sometimes the audience), but Bernstein also bakes in the possibility of tragedy. The music can go from light to dark in a second and the film trains the audience to prepare for such moves.

Also contributing to the film's relative brevity is how the script pairs characters up. Usually it's a strong personage with a weaker one, but the actors do such a good job–and Sturges often sticks with scenes of characters' frailties until they're uncomfortable–the pairings are never hollow. Even Steve McQueen, who gets a huge solo set piece at the end, starts off with a sidekick or two.

Most of the acting is spectacular. Richard Attenborough might give the best performance; him or James Donald. They both have the most responsibility and it clearly weighs on them. But James Garner, McQueen, Donald Pleasence, Gordon Jackson, Hannes Messemer–also all excellent.

It's an outstanding picture.

The Passover Plot (1976, Michael Campus)

For the first few scenes, Alex North definitely composes The Passover Plot like a big Biblical epic of the fifties. It’s not, of course, and not just because Plot’s from the seventies. It’s cheap and director Campus uses that reduced budget interestingly. Maybe not well, but definitely interestingly. Actors get close-ups when they don’t need them, there aren’t any establishing shots for scene transitions (not right away anyway) and there’s no expository dialogue. The only frames of reference for the viewer are the opening and closing text scrawls. Plot feels like a low budget, subversive seventies movie, which is actually an exact description.

It just happens to be about Jesus.

Or Yeshua. I’m not sure if they went with Yeshua for accuracy or to be less controversial. Even though the film–with Plot right there in the title–is about how Yeshua (played by Zalman King) decides to fake his resurrection, he’s still really cares about people. It’s like if Jesus wasn’t magic and was just a good guy.

King’s effective, but not exactly good. There isn’t a lot of room to act in Plot, not with Campus’s strange choices regarding pacing and then there’s the script. It jumps all over the place and never gives the viewer a comfortable grounding.

Harry Andrews is a lot of fun, chewing away at the scenery, and Donald Pleasence is pretty good.

For what the filmmakers attempt, Plot’s a moderate success.

Except Adam Greenberg’s photography; he lights it too dark.

1.5/4★½

CREDITS

Directed by Michael Campus; screenplay by Millard Cohan and Patricia Louisianna Knop, inspired by the book by Hugh J. Schonfield; director of photography, Adam Greenberg; edited by Dov Hoenig; music by Alex North; produced by Wolf Schmidt; released by Atlas Film.

Starring Harry Andrews (Yohanan the Baptist), Hugh Griffith (Caiaphas), Zalman King (Yeshua), Donald Pleasence (Pontius Pilate), Scott Wilson (Judah), Daniel Ades (Andros), Michael Baseleon (Mattai), Lewis Van Bergen (Yoram), William Paul Burns (Shimon), Dan Hedaya (Yaocov), Helena Kallianiotes (Visionary Woman), Kevin O’Connor (Irijah), Robert Walker Jr. (Bar Talmi) and William Watson (Roman Captain).

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Halloween (1978, John Carpenter), the television version

The television version of Halloween has an interesting story–the original film ran so short, when the network wanted to run it on TV, there wasn’t enough film after they cut out the violence. Carpenter was producing Halloween II at the time so he came back and filmed some more scenes to pad it out.

Most of these scenes are with Donald Pleasence, which seriously throws the film off-balance. Besides the opening, Pleasence disappears for long stretches while Carpenter establishes Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Kyes and P.J. Soles. With so much more Pleasence at the beginning of the picture, one notices his absence more. He ought to be around, given his lengthy presence at the beginning.

The added scenes are also done with the sequel in mind, which means the film no longer makes sense if one has seen the second one and how the new scenes fit. However, during the final sequence everything happens at such an insistent pace it’s hard to dwell on the plot holes.

I’ve seen the television version a couple times and it always seemed like a lesser work, even though it does give Kyes (Halloween‘s unsung comedic star) another scene. This time’s no different.

This viewing must be my seventh or eighth of Halloween and I just now noticed the Psycho reference at the open and how Dean Cundey’s subjective camerawork does everything for the film’s mood.

In other words, awkwardly added scenes or not, Halloween‘s always got more to offer.

Halloween 5 (1989, Dominique Othenin-Girard)

Halloween 5 shouldn’t be mind-numbingly boring. There’s no chance something called Halloween 5 is going to be smart, so I was expecting mind-numbing stupidity… but not boredom.

The movie opens with a recap of the previous entry, with some changes to the ending to keep Michael Myers alive (he escapes in a manner straight out of an old Universal monster movie) and to make his nine year-old niece, Danielle Harris, retain sympathy.

Of course, she’s been rendered mute, which helps Harris’s acting quite a bit.

Halloween 5 has some really bad acting. It’s dumb and all, but there’s just some godawful acting. Ellie Cornell, returning from the last one too (where she was bad), shines in comparison. But director Othenin-Girard underuses any of the more capable (and capable is a stretch) actors and gives more attention to people like Wendy Foxworth, who’s atrocious.

Poor Beau Starr doesn’t have enough of a presence either, with the film promising him better screen time and then failing to deliver.

As for the always present Donald Pleasence? Halloween 5 is, apparently, the one where he’s willing to burn his acting legacy. It’s hard to say what’s more unbelievable… a hermit nursing Michael Myers to health or Pleasence getting away with roughing up Harris every chance he gets.

Composition-wise, Othenin-Girard could be worse. Alan Howarth’s score has its moments too.

But Halloween 5 can’t overcome its stupidity or its repetitiveness. Every “homage” is lame and everything original is horrendous.