19: An Act of Confession (1972, Anthony Spinelli [as "Sybil Kidd"])

Owned version: The 2014 DVD release from Vinegar Syndrome, which has it not only third-billed behind two other Spinelli films (Cry for Cindy and Touch Me) but relegated to a second disc along with the softcore version of Cry for Cindy. This is not by accident.

Acquired: May 23rd of 2015 from Vinegar Syndrome.

Seen before?: No.

What is there to say about a boring porn film? An Act of Confession doesn't have much to it - it's a series of sexual fantasies dreamed up by a novitiate nun, and despite the long fertile history of the naughty-nun genre, this one runs out of ideas roughly twenty minutes in. A case could be made that this is due to genre constraints, inasmuch as this is a straight fuck flick without any of the demonic-flavored aspects that crop up in wilder examples of the genre. But even accounting for that, this pales next to something like School of the Holy Beast - the perversity ended at the concept. Which makes for a dull watch once you realize that all you're getting is concept.

It's not like this is any fun, either. The pace if this is funereal, and any expressions of ecstasy are limited to the grimacing faces of the involved dudes. The nun whose fantasies these are may be a plank of wood for all the life she shows. Really, the attitude here can be summed up by the disclaimer that shows up prior to the title card, which is as follows:

All due respect, Mr. Spinelli, but you ain't no Boccaccio. Though, like a number of tales in The Decameron, this is structured like a dirty joke, building to one heretical (and, in retrospect, inevitable) punchline. The framing of said punchline is actually fairly inspired - the use of gauzy lighting is hilarious - but it's a long road to get there.

(I should also mention that this release, sourced from a 16mm print that is as of now the only known source, is trimmed of all penetration shots. I assume this is why it's been relegated to an extra on the release of two other films - while extra footage of thrusts and flying semen wouldn't really improve the product at hand from a filmic standpoint, the removal of its raison d'etre does mark this as a historical curio at best.)

18: Across 110th Street (1972, Barry Shear)

Owned version: The 2014 Blu-ray released by Kino Lorber under their KL Studio Classics imprint.

Acquired: July 30th, 2016 from Amazon.

Seen before?: No.

"You wanna drink?"
"Oh no, I don't drink."
"You will, Pope. You will."

Captain Matelli (Anthony Quinn), the offering party in this exchange with the named young lieutenant angling for his job, drinks. He drinks for a lot of reasons. In this instance, he needs a drink because it's late and he and Lt. Pope (Yaphet Kotto) have spent a long day('s journey into night) running through the rattled cage of early-'70s New York City. Matelli drinks because he's been running through this cage for decades, through many long days and nights like this, and the thread is getting to the end of the spool. He's been a fixture in the Harlem precinct for years - you can see it in how he deals with the public, how he wends his way through a crowd of aggrieved residents of the neighborhood and promises them he'll fix whatever has brought them to his station tonight, and how the residents react to him because they know his word is good. But he is now 55 and some of his more aggressive policing methods are rightfully going out of style and the top brass are not-so-subtly suggesting retirement. He drinks because he can feel the city shifting and changing around him, getting angrier and more violent, and maybe he doesn't know where he fits anymore. He drinks because he's getting old and soon there won't be anything else to do but that.

Across 110th Street knows Matelli, like a lot of people, is getting old and being left behind by a society that's working to move past him and what he represents. The tension between the old guard and those trying to burst free from under the thumb of the old guard is what drives much of this sweaty, snarling film. It's a 24-hour period in the life of a neighborhood - and a city, and a country - in the midst of a fierce upheaval. As appropriate for a film about people of a certain age feeling like the world is moving past them, 110th Street races through its day-in-the-life at a helter skelter pace - it's not so much juggling its three major character groups as it is pitching them to the ground and letting them bounce, scoot and ricochet off each other. The opening scene, the inciting incident, starts as a business-as-usual situation, a monetary exchange between the black gangsters who control Harlem and the Mafioso who lord over the entire city, and as such the concentration is on business being done the way it's been done ten thousand times before: dexterous fingers counting bound stacks of cash, hands writing carefully in well-used ledgers, calculators tap-tap-tapping as ambient noise, dialogue limited to grunts and mutters. Then two men in cop uniforms show up and suddenly it's blaxploitation via Sergio Leone - the film rapidly cuts from tense face to tense face, occasionally jumping to a close-up of the barrel of a submachine gun aimed and ready to chew up the room. One wrong move, a suitcase falls; when it hits the ground, the movie explodes like a starter pistol and doesn't stop its mad sprint until the final gunshot.

Shear tends to use his crosscutting effectively like that, concentrating on speed and tension and going for head-knocking effect whenever possible (like the cut from a man screaming as he's knocked down an elevator shaft to another man jolting awake and screaming in junk-sick pain). He shoots handheld and restless, appropriate for a film seemingly wired into the nerves of a screaming city; his framing goes heavy on the closeups and body-crowded medium shots, often pulling in just close enough so that we can count the beads of sweat on the foreheads of the subjects. Yet he's also experienced enough to allow a moment to breathe when needed, as in the scene where Matelli and Pope have to break the news of a man's death to his wife, played by Marlene Warfield; she gets a closeup held just a beat longer than average for this movie, and there's a subtle loosening on her face, a practiced hard exterior slipping away in confusion and shock, that works beautifully as a moment of grieving humanity inside a whirlpool.

For all its lurid bombast, Across 110th Street sticks like it does because of its knack for these small moments and its willingness to push its characters in unexpected directions. It's there in the defeated embarassment that takes over Quinn's face when it's revealed he's on the take and beholden to the Harlem kingpin Doc Johnson (Richard Ward), in a crucial moment during the climax where ex-con Jim Harris (Paul Benjamin) steals a glance at something behind him and loses what remains of his empathy, in the visible discomfort on the faces of Doc's chief henchmen as they witness unhinged Mafia enforcer Nick D'Salvio (Anthony Franciosa) drop a half-dozen racial slurs while stringing up a black man by his feet. The way the last bit cited there is cut, with three or four significant cutbacks to the two black gangsters looking halfway between offended and sheepish, led me to believe it would lead to an eruption of violence by them against the frothing D'Salvio; that it doesn't play out that way, that they stand by and let D'Salvio do what he will exchanging meaningful glances all the while, implies to me that they understand they don't need to act against this man - that he's already on his way out and his brutality is an extension of his moribundity.

It comes back to that, to the idea of being pushed out. Matelli is being forced out at 55, and D'Salvio is, at the age of 45, stuck doing the dirty work for an institution whose grip is already slipping. "We can't lose Harlem," says a Mafia Don at the outset, but it turns out it's already gone - Doc Johnson has more clout and more smarts than his ostensible Italian overlords and there's nothing a "punk errand boy" who's only where he is because the Don is also his father-in-law can do to stop this shift. He's being left behind just like Matelli, and he's none too happy about it. Power is a hard thing to have to give up, which leads Matelli and D'Salvio both to rage against their obsolescence in their own ways. It's a handy parallel... except it's not just that. Rather than a mirror, Across 110th Street has a triangle, as befitting the three main character groups. The third side is Jim Harris, the brains behind the opening smash-and-grab and a 42-year-old black man with multiple convictions and a crippling dope habit. Where the two aging white guys are acting out of the desperation of losing their perceived place in the food chain, Harris's desperation comes from having found a way out of the food chain in which he's perpetual prey. The opening rip-off was a foolhardy proposition from the get-go, but it's understandable as the act of a man with no recourse left to make something of himself, yet people died when they didn't have to, and that seals it for him. The tragedy of innocents caught in the crossfire, both literal and otherwise, pops up a number of times here (Warfield's scene, significantly, also has in the background a little girl); the tragedy of Harris, then, is his knowledge that, because it went bad and people died, the odds of him truly making it out are scant no matter how hard he fights or how far he runs. (A late-film exchange between him and his co-conspirator Joe Logart (Ed Bernard) sums up the fatalism: "Whatever happens we're gonna end up rich... or dead, man." "There ain't no better way.") Power is a hard thing to have to give up, but it's harder to never have had it in the first place, and either way you will be called to answer for the collateral damage you've left in your heedless wake.

17: The Abyss (1989, James Cameron)

Owned version: The 2000 Fox two-disc DVD release with all the fancy bells and whistles - the height of turn-of-the-century tech. (18 years later and jesus does this ever need a new release that takes advantage of the advances in technology vis-a-vis data storage, image restoration and seamless branching.)

Acquired: Likely in late 2000 or early 2001 from CostCo.

Seen before?: Never for the director's cut. Twice for the theatrical - once on August 10th or 11th of 1989 in a theater, and once from this disc on March 2nd of 2010. (The latter resulted in this awful review.)

Not sure why I was in such an evidently foul mood the last time I saw The Abyss, as judging from that writeup linked above. I assume I just wasn't framing it in the right way mentally - this is a dry run for what Cameron would later accomplish with Titanic, in all ways. It has the spectacle and the complicated setpieces full of gushing water, but it also has the old-school guileless melodrama, here kept grounded by a roughneck reticence. Maybe that's why I didn't go for it the last time - the directness of the blue-collar characters initially seems contrapuntal to the sort of emotional territory Cameron treads. But then, that's a feature and not a bug - the avoidance of swooning emotion in favor of the direct necessity of action is true to the milieu, and it makes the later parts of the film, where the dams burst free, connect with that much more force.

It also maybe helps that I watched Cameron's preferred cut this time around in addition to the theatrical release. The theatrical version, in the name of recouping costs and squeezing in an additional showing per day, runs about 2 hours and 20 minutes, where the director's cut runs an extra half-hour. While the released version has most of the necessary beats and is in general fairly lean for something of that length, it often feels a bit abrupt, as though its concessions to that dominant directness stripped it a touch too close to the bone - the relationship between Hippy and his rat feels more developed than that of the estranged Brigmans. The director's cut restores a lot of small character moments (like a bit where Bud and Lindsey discuss Lindsey's last boyfriend, a "suit" deliberately set apart from the proles underwater) that shore up and deepen the character work in ways that the actors alone are only able to allude towards, and it shows that Cameron once again almost never wastes a frame of space even at epic lengths. But while a lot of the trims are things that only improve the material (I especially mourn the loss of the marvelous shot pulling away from an overwhelmed, fraying Michael Biehn gazing out a portal window and down into the darkness of the trench - the abyss looking into him, indeed), a couple of them do make sense as a way to curtail perceived redundancies. Chief among these is the winnowing down of the scene where the rig crew watches the news regarding the sunken nuclear submarine they've been sent to investigate and the aftermath of its sinking. Where the theatrical sticks mainly to the "facts" of the sub sinking and the Cold-War tensions stoked by it, the DC continues on to detail another ship collision between an American destroyer and a Russian craft that is viewed as retaliatory by the Russians. This was, in the end, an unnecessary flourish/parallel to the Cuban Missile Crisis (especially as Hippy later comes right out and names the situation as a new version of the Kennedy-era historical event), and its removal harms the film not. Yet it did clarify and bring me to something regarding the film, its setting and its placement in late-Cold War history.

In that earlier, crappy review, I broke the film down to "cranky characters in cold, leaky places waiting for something to happen." This time through, it occurs to me that this may be part of the design. If we allow this as a late-breaking piece of Cold War art, drawing inspiration from '50s dramaturgy in more ways than one, the setting begins to seem not just instructive but imperative. Yes, it takes forever for anything to happen down there because the water and attendant pressure turn everything into a waiting game. When the topside crane collapses, all anyone on the rig can do is watch it fall and hope it doesn't cause too much damage to the rig. When characters get into the submersibles and chase other characters or attack them with the loading arms, the objects of the attack can only maneuver so much to minimize the impact. Any impact beyond a glancing blow can cause explosive hull breaches that lead to drownings, crushing, explosions. So. What we have is a number of people, ordinary people, thrust into a pressure-cooker situation by military and government forces who care not about their well-being, who desperately just want to get in and do their job and go home, who see bad things coming miles away and are helpless to avoid  or stop them, who know that any show of force whether deliberate or accidental will have catastrophic results... well, you tell me. Are we on the ocean floor or in the middle of Cold War gamesmanship?

The director's cut more or less insists on that reading, right down to an ending that reveals The Abyss as having been a stealth remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still the whole time, whereas the theatrical merely leaves that there for you to figure out. Without the Cold-War reading, though, this still works, especially in its late stages, as seeing a tragedy occur to a loved one in front of you and being unable to assist. So even in the abbreviated version, there's a lot going on here. Cameron, as always, is an extraordinary visualist and a technical wizard. The early exploration of the sunken nuclear sub is an analog wonder; foregrounded floating debris and diffuse backlighting add an unearthly quality appropriate to a tale of underwater aliens, while the creaks and clicks and hisses and bubbles and random white noise on the soundtrack, underlined by a minimal score, add a fine mixture of awe and apprehension into it. The Abyss often works like an underwater explorer, moving slowly but surely towards its next striking, summatory image - a door exploding off its hinges during a hull breach and creaming a poor rig worker; an imploding submersible releasing one large bubble, floating to the surface like a soul escaping; Lindsey gasping for breath and hugging the sides of Bud's helmet in a magnificent meshing of tenderness and tech. That last image feels like a keystone for Cameron in general, and it makes sense thusly that the film should really kick into gear when Bud has to go down into the abyss the melodrama is allowed to reach full throat. Mastrantonio gets a couple big actorly speechs - the "two candles in the dark" one in particular - and goes for it, wringing the maximum amount of pathos out of this sudden flood of distressed emotion; her need to keep talking is satisfying from a narrative standpoint (the whole film prior to this has been about men trying to downplay or silence her, to the point of Biehn's villain taping her mouth shut) and also as a counterpoint to Harris's inability to communicate in any way other than slow typing on a wrist-mounted keyboard. His clumsy brevity set against the verbal torrents she uses to keep him focused and alive is wrenching, Cameron-style maximalism at its most emotionally brutal. In his hands, underwater works to unleash the waterworks.

16: Absolution (1978, Anthony Page)

Owned release: This is included in the Drive-In Movie Classics 12-disc, 50-movie pack released by Mill Creek in 2008. This is on Disc 4, Side A.

Acquired: Purchased from Amazon on June 3rd, 2009.

Seen before?: No.

This, of course, would be the unnamed film in my Abominable Dr. Phibes review, another example of a long-desired watchlist title that once I had in my grasp I was suddenly in no hurry to get to. Like many a film, this one caught my interest in my teen years when paging through whatever edition of Leonard Maltin's yearly movie bible I had on me at the time. While Phibes may have worked better for me had I seen it back then, I suspect I was correct in sitting on Absolution until I knew a thing or two.

If nothing else, I also hadn't yet seen Sleuth or The Wicker Man or Frenzy as a teenager, which means had I procured and watched a copy of this back then, I wouldn't have understood how this fits into the larger question of the work of writer Anthony Shaffer. Coming to this after those two is the right way to do it, this being a minor but mature work that trades in much of the same stock as those two exemplary antecedents. The common thread in Shaffer's original work reads to me as the dangers of certainty - how an assumed knowledge of What I Know to Be True can blind a person to the true shape of the narrative in which they exist. Richard Burton's rigid Father Goddard, like Andrew Wyke or Sergeant Howie, is a man of imperious authority and strong will who finds himself caught up in intellectual gamesmanship with an opponent he ruinously underestimates, in no small part due to his need to filter the world through the lens of his religion and the vows to it that he has devoted his life towards. The structure of his life and work have been as they were for so long that he cannot conceive, for instance, his pet student Stanfield chafing under the restrictions of parochial school and pranking him via the sacrament of confession. The fallout from this prank proves darker than either man could have anticipated, as both proceed from an understanding of how Father Goddard can and will act.

What's clever about this film is how Shaffer's screenplay and Anthony Page's direction work together to quietly lock the audience inside Father Goddard's perspective as well. This is true in terms of the story structure, relying as it does on certain elisions of action that are necessary for us to make the same assumptions that Father Goddard makes. But there's some formal quirks that accomplish this as well, ranging from the obvious to the subtle. In the former camp, you have a crucial tracking shot of Stanfield running through the woods after an argument with Blakey, a drifter he's befriended (played in his film debut by the great Billy Connolly); the shot, keeping up with Stanfield in full sprint and overlaid with shrieking Hermann-esque violins, represents an overflow of panic and guilt, an eruption of action in what has to that point been a staid affair, and there are two subsequent shots that mirror it at different turns of the plot in blunt visual representations of the transfer or shift of that panic and guilt. Also fairly obvious, especially in light of this being from the guy who wrote The Wicker Man, is the import of Blakey living in the woods - of course this rootless dude, with his old letterman jacket and long hair and long beard and easy grin, whose first introduction to the boys of this school is hollering, "All property is theft!" at them and whose espousal of the hedonistic lifestyle becomes increasingly appealing to the young Stanfield, would be a nature boy and thus diametrically aligned against the stern Catholicism of Father Goddard in favor of a do-what-thou-wilt paganism. Blakey even reveals that he once served as a carnival fortune teller, making whatever codswallop jumped into his head and selling it to the gullible. "As long as they left smilin', I didn't care what crap I told 'em," he chuckles into his whiskey, and of course. Father of lies, right?

That we're expecting this push-pull battle for Stanfield is certainly encouraged by the script - the first exchange of dialogue is between Blakey and Goddard, with the latter refusing the former's request for employment - so it's only in retrospect that it sinks in that Blakey never actually does anything sinister. Through the narrative, he's nothing more than a friendly, shaggy hippie whose worst crime is stealing some food from the school kitchen and being a rootless sort of fella who befriends a young man itching for an excuse to rebel. That's what I'm talking about when I mention subtler indications that we're spending the whole film more or less in Father Goddard's headspace. This is apparent when parts of the narrative that he would have no access to and know nothing about still bear the echo of his judgment. A notable example is the scene where Blakey is harassed by two cops - as he's being pummeled by two cops, there's a cut to a closeup of his head smacking into the ground, then as one of the cops grasps his head and begins to pull him up by his hair, Page cuts to Goddard's classroom where a student is reading the line, "An enemy has done this." This is true in the moment from Blakey's perspective, but if we assume Goddard's perspective it's a sneaky callback to an early scene where the students are performing Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience and we hear the line, "The enemy of one, the enemy of all is!" Blakey is, to Goddard, an enemy against all he is and represents, and is thus an enemy to all his charges, and his influence over his prize pupil Stanfield is an offense he cannot bear.

His attempts to solve the problem while still holding fast to the restrictions necessitated by his role within the Church (most importantly the impossibility of breaking the seal of confession) only cause more problems, and as things spiral out of control, the warm earthen browns and greens of the forest shift to dark and threatening shades of autumnal decay, with multiple bodies found buried in earth black as Goddard's cassock, and the shadows in the school grow deeper until they threaten to swallow every hall and every classroom. (The climactic confrontation is cast in so little light that it might as well be happening in space.) The back half of Absolution invites the sort of crazed ultraham that Burton became known for late in his career, but he instead keeps a firm hand, leaking out just enough hysteria in his choked, whispered prayers and widened eyes that the effect is as though he were bellowing anyway. The closer Goddard gets to what he sees as The Truth, the further he gets from seeing the end reveal coming and the closer he gets to derangement. The key shot, from where I stand, comes in a scene where Goddard is confronting Stanfield about having lied in confession. The two men are at opposite sides of the frame in the foreground and a large ornamental spear in the background hangs on the wall. The arrangement of the actors is such that the spear appears to emanate from Stanfield's eyes and bury its point in Goddard's skull. It's a loaded image, but it's also something of a dodge: Goddard lets Stanfield get inside his head, leading to ruin for all... but not in the way we are led to believe. At the end of The Wicker Man, Sergeant Howie pays for his headstrong obliviousness with his life. At the end of Absolution, Father Goddard is left to a worse fate.

15: The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971, Robert Fuest)

Owned release: The 2007 MGM release, as included in the DVD box set Vincent Price: MGM Scream Legends Collection.

Acquired: July of 2011, if I remember correctly - I believe I picked this up along with a couple other discs at a going-out-of-business sale at the Borders in Mount Kisco.

Seen before?: No, and that's where I'll begin.

I don't recall how long the desire to see The Abominable Dr. Phibes has been with me, but if I had to guess, I'd say it's between twenty and twenty-five years. When I first started getting into horror, there were several reference books I would consult as to what titles were worth tracking down, and all of them necessarily featured this film as either the first or one of the first listed titles. The baroque high concept - a revenge-minded mad scientist slaying his enemies via murders inspired by the Biblical 10 plagues of Egypt - sounded too good to pass up. Yet I don't recall ever seeing a copy in any of my local video stores, so it gradually got pushed to the back of my mental queue, filed as A Thing I'll See Some Day alongside titles like I, Madman and The Beast Must Die! and the next film I'll be watching/reviewing. By the time I purchased it in 2011, I had a different problem - my collector's mentality had led me to a sort of option paralysis, where I would consistently buy things, get excited about owning them, and then shelve them and never watch them. All this is a lot of throat-clearing to avoid the fact that I've finally watched a film I've wanted to see for over half my life and found myself with little to say about it.

I don't know exactly at what point I realized I wasn't into this film. I know I was still very much enjoying it when Terry-Thomas showed up. But I guess I gradually disengaged from there. Maybe it began when I realized Phibes was, aside from the devices he's constructed to allow the recreation of his voice, a mute, which runs counter to why you'd cast Vincent Price in any given role. Maybe it was when it sunk in that, despite the title and the top billing, the script is constructed so that Phibes is essentially a supporting character in the story, with the detectives on his trail serving as the leads in what is a half-baked discovery narrative. Maybe it was when it hit me that, for all its florid ridiculousness regarding the manners of its murders, the tone and pacing belong to something much more bemused and down-to-earth; while the veddy British matter-of-factness works in the favor of a line of dialogue like the exasperated, "A brass unicorn has been catapulted across a London street and impaled an eminent surgeon," it mostly dampens the more deranged elements, making them feel like just another thing that happens. And if you have a scene where a psychotic genius is feeding forest-green liquid plant goop through a tube onto a sleeping nurse's face followed by locusts to feed on the goop and the face, and my only reaction is to marvel at what a heavy sleeper the nurse must be for this gambit to come off... yeah, I've probably lost interest a bit.

I'm left to take bits and pieces and use them to imagine a film more my speed - the delicious opening, which starts as a standard Gothic introduction with a black-clad figure playing an organ in a culvert bathed in blood-red light before immediately taking the piss from that with the introduction of the clockwork brass band; a sweaty Terry-Thomas leering at a scantily-clad snake dancer on a filmstrip run by a hand-cranked projector, shot from a rear angle so the motion of his arm easily calls to mind the lewd action under suggestion; Phibes dryly holding a sheet of plastic with the stenciled form of a naked woman on it up to the cloaked form of his own body; the polite tetchiness of the jeweler when being interviewed by Detective Trout about the medals he unknowingly crafted for Phibes, crowned by calling the detective "Pike" instead of his real name. On that last point: There's a running thread about poorly-pronounced or misremembered names, encompassing also a couple different attempts at pronouncing Phibes's name and a doctor whose everyone agrees his name begins with a K, and I'm not sure what to do with that other than file it away as an odd joke of continuity that doesn't quite come off.

And then there's the last fifteen minutes, where Phibes finally shakes off its veneer of gentility and goes for broke. Price hisses through his talk-box and forces Joseph Cotton into a situation where he has to cut a key out of his own son to free him from an acid-shower trap, cackling, "Work faster, Doctor! The acid is descending!" while Cotton struggles to hold his concentration; meanwhile, Phibes's beautiful mute assistant Vulnavia tears apart the set with a huge gold-plated axe and the cops bumble about trying to cut through the madness and get a grip on the situation. To watch this ripping setpiece is to know what James Wan spent a good portion of his formative years obsessively rewatching - while the gleaming marble and bright lighting is worlds away from the rust and shadow and sickly neons of Saw, it's pretty easy to see the climax here as the prototype for the world of Jigsaw. Is this a positive or a negative? Depends on where you stand.