THE MASQUE OF RED DEATH (1964)

 

(Director: Roger Corman. Screenwriter: Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell.).

Storyline

While the Red Plague stalks the peasantry, a cruel prince and his fellow deviants shelter in his castle.

Review

Based on Edgar Allan Poe’s story, MASQUE is an excellent, possibly perfect film, from R. Wright Campbell and Charles Beaumont’s tightly penned script, its top-notch acting, its vivid, symbolic splays of colors and lighting, to producer Roger Corman’s waste-no-shots directing. (If Beaumont’s name sounds familiar, he was a staff writer on the original 1959-64 TWILIGHT ZONE series.)

MASQUE stars include: Vincent Price (THE TINGLER, 1959) as the cruel Prospero; Hazel Court, who played opposite Price in THE RAVEN (1963) and whose last film was an uncredited role (“Champagne Woman at Hunt”) in THE FINAL CONFLICT (1981); Patrick Magee, as an envious, toady-like Alfredo─two of his later films include A CLOCKWORK ORANGE (1971) and THE BLACK CAT (1981); and an uncredited JohnWestbrook as Man in Red (a.k.a. the Red Death); Westbrook also appeared in THE TOMB OF LIGEIA (1964). Be sure to look for the background/visual cue callbacks to earlier Corman/Price films, THE RAVEN and THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM (1961)!

SHIVERS (1975)

 

(a.k.a. IT CAME FROM WITHIN; a.k.a. THEY CAME FROM WITHIN; director/screenwriter: David Cronenberg).

From IMDb:

“The residents of a high-rise apartment building are being infected by a strain of parasites that turn them into mindless, sex-crazed fiends out to infect others by the slightest sexual contact.”

 

Review

Shot in fifteen days in 1974, Cronenberg’s first feature film is a nasty, blackly humorous piece of occasionally slapstick venereal-horror work, showing the trajectories of an experimental virus that reduces people to animalistic lust as it rapidly spreads throughout a high-rise and beyond its walls. SHIVERS is shocking and boundary-pushing for an R-rated film for its overtly sexual violence (although it’s nowhere near as graphic as Meir Zarchi’s rape-revenge torturerama I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, 1978). SHIVERS was so controversial in Canada that it got Cronenberg kicked out of his apartment in real life.

Despite its gritty, carnal themes and action, there is an underlying antiseptic nature to the film that is often present in Cronenberg’s early-to-mid-career flicks. That hospital-like undertone would come to the fore in his later movies. IMDb.com notes that every scene in SHIVERS contains the colors yellow or gold.

 All the acting is suitably over-the-top, though two actors stand out: the long, raven-haired Barbara Steele (Mario Bava’s BLACK SUNDAY, 1960; PIT AND THE PENDULUM, 1961), who adds a wild card intensity to the cavalcade of messy terror; and Joe Silver, a veteran character actor whose laidback performance in this was later revisited in altered form in Cronenberg’s 1977 non-sequel follow-up RABID.

 SHIVERS is not Cronenberg’s best work, but it is all-around excellent, a bold, raw cinematic announcement of an evolving, distinctive filmmaker unafraid to ruffle a few prudish feathers.