Did "Psycho" not have enough museums and Yiddish folklore for you? Then I think you may be the audience Herbert J. Leder was aiming for when he made "It!". An audience I suspect consists of one member, namely: "Herbert J Leder".
Arhur Pimm (Roddy McDowell) is a curator's assistant at a museum which has just had a warehouse fire. He and the curator, Harold Grove (Ernest Clark), search the smoky, brick strew ruins. The only thing left standing among the rubble is the ashen, ghastly figure of The Golem. Grove rests his umbrella in the figures hands, soon there's a yell and suddenly Pimm has a dead boss.
Pimm hopes to get the curator position but doesn't, and he gets suitably p.o.'d about it. The Golem is moved to the museum, and the electrician there to light it takes a moment to blow smoke in it's face. If there's anything Golem's hate worse than umbrella's it's cigarettes, so the figure falls, crushing him to death.
Word gets out that the museum has a killer statue, which leads to boffo box office. Arthur fancies the late Harold Grove's daughter ,Ellen (Jill Haworth), and he invites her out for a drive with his mother. At first, she declines, telling him she likes him well enough, she just doesn't "like like" him. Eventually, though he guilts her into it. The car drive doesn't happen until the end of the picture, and it won't be exactly what she bargained for. An American expert, Jim Perkins (Paul Maxwell), is flown in and informs Pimm that the inscription on his statue is the same as that on the Golem of legend. Jim has got two things on his mind: making time with the lovely Ellen and getting The Golem back to New York. Markings from the statue are taken to a Jewish scholar, who informs Pimm they are a warning mankind will not make it into the 21st Century. Using a scroll hidden in the Golem's foot, Pimm re-animates the creature. Professor Weal (Aubrey Richards), the new curator, sees him doing this, and the Golem (Alan Sellers) is ordered to eliminate the witness. When the murder is complete Pimm has the Golem help him steal jewelry he can bring home to his dead mother.
Oh, have I buried the lead? Yeah, Pimm lives at home in a Norman Bates-ian existence with his mother's corpse, right down to the rocking chair (a "rot-king" chair, if this were a "Tales From the Crypt comic). Writer/producer/director Leder is an odd guy; he does an unfrozen Nazi movie actually about a decapitated head of a young woman, and he does a Golem movie that's a psychological study of a necroOedipal jewel thief. There's a great dream sequence, in which an unclothed Ellen appears to Pimm, bathed in lurid red light. When he finally reaches her, though, it turns out to actually be the decaying body of his corpse mom. It's Hitchock by way of a 1950's horror comic, all shadows and colored lighting. Frustrated by both his subconscious incestuous desires and Ellen's spending time with Jim, Pimm has the Golem destroy a bridge, the aftermath of which is shown in a really bad matte painting.
The movie never becomes as interesting and fun as it could potentially be, favoring endless scenes of dry dialogue over exploring the truly twisted psyche of the main character. More than once Pimm mentions he and his dead mother's connection to the supernatural, but again, aside from a mental bond to The Golem, nothing much is done with it. As with "The Frozen Dead", Leder introduces all these cool (pun not intended) elements and just leaves them on the table. Leder isn't enough of a maniac to take the movie he has started and push it to the limit, he's constantly pumping the brakes.
Not until the last ten minutes, when there's a Golem prison break, followed by Pimm taking Ellen hostage and hiding out with dead old mum and his pal Golem at a castle, does the movie finally give into it's wild side. We've got Roddy McDowell lighting a woman on fire and the British army firing a bazooka The Golem who is guarding the castle. If only Leder didn't eat up the other ninety-percent of his movie with people talking in a museum. The bazooka proves ineffective, so what do you do when that happens? If you're the army in this movie, you employ a "small" nuclear warhead, of course. The ending is what you'd get if Robert Bloch had a mental condition and was 12 years old when he wrote "Psycho". This picture manages to be both insane and underwhelming at the same time. Yes, the ending is crazy, but getting there is a slow crawl. Leder's reach exceeds his grasp and one can't help but think he would have been served well by creative collaborators. The climax of this film is essentially Norman Bates vs. The World, and it's given such little screen time that it comes across as muddled and rushed. We should have gotten here at the beginning of the last third of the film and not the last ten minutes.
"It!" is a weird mash-up of disparate influences: "Psycho", Jewish legend, psychic abilities and nuclear apocalypse. Fun on paper, but unremarkable in execution, "It!" continually threatens to be a psychotic good time, but unfortunately waits until too late in the proceedings to stop taking it's medication.
No comments:
Post a Comment