Frozen Scream (Roach 1975) & The Slayer (Cardone, 1982)
“It is one of those works that has proceeded directly to the status of Great Movie without going through the intermediate stage of being a good movie.” Roger Ebert said this about Sergei Eisenstein’s
Ivan the Terrible, and these words came to mind when I was watching Frank Roach’s
Frozen Scream. It’s got a plot that’s total nonsense, seems to be slapped together with no grasp of normal filmmaking language and and is never less than completely fascinating. If I can describe the story, it involves the hero investigating a pair of mad scientists who are searching for the secret of immortality, which to them means enslaving people and turning them into braindead zombies. (The exact method involves freezing people to near death and then reviving them, hence the “frozen” scream in the title.) The hero narrates his quest in a robotic monotone that brings to mind Microsoft Sam, and calls out one of the villains’ “bad acting”, which is a bold claim to be making in this movie.
What follows is a mishmash of dreams drifted into and out of, visual non sequiturs that puncture the somnambulist ambience, a lot of the flat acting one associates with the marginal productions of regional horror but seems thematically appropriate here, and dissonant synthesizer music that serves as the score. I scrambled to jot down notes as I watched this in a desperate attempt to make sense of what I was seeing. A grim reaper in a dream with a scream, a fetching blonde, said blonde appearing topless in what might be another dream, a reflection of a character’s boyfriend turning out to be the blonde, the blonde choking her Paul Simon-ish date (okay, clearly I was a fan of the blonde), a character squawking as they were strangled, a really strange Southern accent, a reference to witches and goblins that seemed like an overreaction, and a cheerful line of dialogue (”I’m not going to guilt, I’m going to hell”). Yet it was no use, as these elements seemed to blend together into one surreal fever dream, assembled with a filmmaking sensibility that seems completely alien to our own.
The characters behave as if they are parodying human behaviour (I mentioned the flat acting earlier, which extends to some really robotic pillow talk), with the “star” (and producer) of the picture, Renee Harmon, shaking up the proceedings with her bizarre, left-field presence. I understand that Harmon has written several books about different aspects of filmmaking, yet if there is any conventional wisdom to be found in those books, none of that is seen on screen. On Harmon’s face is always the threat of a really out-of-place smile, one which never feels all that reassuring. Harmon produced this and other movies and seemed to place herself often in starring roles, yet for her lack of what most would call “talent”, I don’t find her presence egotistical but rather endearing in its strangeness. The violence is crude yet startling, and the ending manages to pierce through the strange fog cast by the film and tap into the genuine existential terror the material deserves.
I was similarly enthralled by
The Slayer, which is much closer to what most people would define as a good movie, yet also operates on its own distinct wavelength. There isn’t a whole lot to the story. Four friends vacation on an island off the Atlantic coast while the heroine is taking some much needed rest from her emotionally draining work as an artist. One by one they start to get killed off. Who or what is doing the killing seems to be an afterthought, although a couple of explanations are offered by the ending (it seems to split the difference). The word “dreamlike” can be used to describe vastly different horror movies, from the gory non sequiturs of Lucio Fulci to the shifting menace of the original
Nightmare on Elm Street to the low key ambience of Jean Rollin or Jess Franco, and I think this movie definitely feels like a dream in which the characters are adrift and the plot has dissolved. An almost abstract sense of menace hangs over the proceedings, one which sporadically becomes literal when the movie decides to deliver the slasher goods.
The movie has a delicate, elusive atmosphere not unlike what you would find in the work of Rollin or Franco, yet makes it its own by imbuing it with the presence of its island setting. (Herzog’s “voodoo of location” comes to mind, and the inclement weather does wonders to cast a sense of doom over the action.) The proceedings are channeled through the frayed nerves of the heroine and grounded by the mature, lived-in performances of the cast, sliding occasionally into the surreal but never losing grasp of its distinct mood. The sense of isolation is palpable (as in a series of deft cuts after the heroine discovers another victim) and the bursts of violence (which are not all that explicit by the standards of the genre yet are nonetheless grisly) are genuinely jarring. The ending, which offers only ambiguity to conclude the mystery, might be called a cop-out by the less generous, but with its forgoing of easy answers and embrace of the irrational, I think it achieves a deeper unease than a clean denouement would have allowed. The strange spell cast by both these movies can’t be explained away.
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