Terrible Comedy

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Frankly, I expected better.  The Comedy of Terrors seemed to have a lot going for it.  With my current interests in American International (AIP), Vincent Price, Jacques Tourneur, and Richard Matheson, watching it for free was a no brainer.  And I mean, no brainer.  Maybe it lacked the Roger Corman touch.  The premise is cute enough, bring together horror icons and have them take the mickey out of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors.  Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff join Price and Matheson scripts generally don’t disappoint.  Tourneur had a string of great horror movies behind him.  But the magic just isn’t there.  Comedy horror, or horror comedy, is difficult to pull off well.  Particularly if it’s deliberate.  What Young Frankenstein got right just went wrong in Comedy.

All of this makes me more conscious of just how impressive a great movie is.  With so many moving parts, films leave plenty of gaps where things can go awry.  The vast majority of movies perish with little notice, of course.  Success—earning more than it cost you (still waiting for that with my writing)—comes to some, and that’s what has me vexed here.  Tourneur was a talented director.  The actors all had proven themselves repeatedly.  Matheson brought life to so many horror and sci-fi movies and television shows.  Even AIP had a number of hits after starting out as notorious for their low-budget approach.  The jokes in Comedy aren’t funny and the horror’s not scary.  Some have opined that the sarcasm is spot-on, but it didn’t seem so to me.  There’s even some disagreement as to whether the film earned its budget back or not.

Horror movies come in all stripes.  And spots.  Even solids.  Comedy horror isn’t my favorite, but some of the gems of the genre (Rocky Horror Picture Show, Gremlins, Shaun of the Dead, Ghostbusters) show that the combination can work but ought to serve as cautionary tales.  (Both Ghostbusters 2 and Gremlins 2 failed to capture the magic of their forebears.)  If everything falls together just fine, step back and bask in wonder.  Trying too hard (of which I’ve been accused) sometimes doesn’t work while you’re attempting to be funny.  It’s pretty clear that Nicholson and Arkoff thought bringing all of this talent together was a recipe for success.  Of course, there are plenty of moving parts and a director, or even a producer, is entitled to a blunder or two.  I like a good laugh as much as the next guy, and after seeing this flick I could use one.

Leopard Spots

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There’s always a dilemma involved.  Rent or buy?  Libraries face this when deciding on a subscription or perpetual access deal—is this something you’ll need for a long time?  More than once?  So also with movies.  Do you rent, watch, and forget or buy, supposing you’ll need to go back?  This plays out in my head when there’s a movie I want to see in these days of streaming.  The Leopard Man wasn’t a big hit when it came out in 1943.  There wasn’t really much of a taste for horror during the Second World War anyway.  In retrospect, however, it’s one of those films that has appreciated with age.  Apart from its effective use of the Lewton bus, the movie was well written.  It retains ambiguity and suspense throughout.  And if there is a leopard man who shapeshifts, we never see him doing it.  Spoilers follow!

Following on from his better known Cat People the previous year, Jacques Tourneur kept with the large cat theme in this film.  A publicist who (apparently) has no scruples, encourages his client/girlfriend to upstage a fellow performer by taking a leopard into her act.  The stunt backfires, however, when the frightened cat escapes.  Then mauled women are found and a hunt is on for the leopard.  If you’re adept at this kind of set-up you’ll figure out who the killer is—it’s not the leopard, except in the first case.  It’s implied that, rather like Cat People, the religion of the ancients, as Dr. Galbraith points out, might have some effect on modern people.  His dispassionate remarks about serial killers provides a clue, however, to who’s really behind it.

Religion runs like a thread throughout the movie.  The processions intended to alleviate the guilt for the treatment of the Indians, the ancient religion of those who made the museum pieces, and the Catholicism of the locals all play a part in this.  The question of whether Galbraith really becomes a leopard or not remains unanswered, but I sense it’s strongly implied that he does.  He had no intention of murdering the young woman in the cemetery and certainly had no time to premeditate the carrying of leopard hairs and claws to cover his tracks.  This is a man of science caught up in the spell of a forgotten religion.  Or so it seems to me.  In any case, it’s time to dust off this old gem and bring it back to the light.  It’s probably worth buying just to see it again.