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Let's
see, we've seen ShawScope,
Hypno-Vision,
SpectaMation,
Dynamation,
Illusion-O,
and glorious Sepiatone
-- and now we can add another film process
to that ever growing list:
Now,
PSYCHO-RAMA! allegedly taps
into the fourth-dimension via subliminal
communication to enhance our viewing
experience. And as I scratch my head,
wondering what the hell vectors,
hyper-planes, and orthogonal compliments
-- that's the fourth dimension, right? --
have to do with a haunted house picture,
I'll let you know that all Psycho-Rama
consists of are quick, subliminal blurbs
and warnings that something spooky is
going to happen.
Was
PSYCHO-RAMA! an effective device to
enhance the terror? Results,
as they say, vary per customer...
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| Booga!
Booga! Booga! |
We
open in Switzerland, where our protagonist,
Sheila Wayne (Cathy
O'Donnell), recounts a horrible
dream to her psychotherapist; a
reoccurring nightmare that consists of a point
of view tour of an old, decrepit
mansion, and the dream always ends with
the girl at the foot of the attic stairs,
which seem to be beckoning her to climb up;
but whatever's up there terrifies her so
badly that Sheila always wakes up at that
point, screaming her head off.
And
I gotta say, Miss O'Donnell has got quite a
set of lungs on her that she'll be
putting to good use during the course of
the film. Of course, if my co-star was
Gerald Mohr...
Between
Sheila and her therapist, we're clued in
that the girl was sent to a sanitarium in
Switzerland when she was very young to
recover from some crippling malady. We
also find out that she spent over two
years recovering from whatever had happened,
but her memories as to exactly what happened
to send her there in first place are a
little fuzzy -- he typed ominously.
But
that was a long time ago. Now, reasonably
adjusted, Sheila has recently married
Philip Justin (Gerald
Mohr), and plans to move back to
the States with him. Strangely, it was
about the same time they were married that
the terrible nightmares started. (Why,
yes, we've just tripped over a big old
PLOT POINT!) When we finally meet
Philip, we immediately get the sense that
he's kind of a creep (-- or at
least I did.) Telling his new wife
between smooches about how he used to take
girls to the bus stop or train station and
then "kiss them goodbye, but not
really" ... I don't know about the rest
of you, but that sure as hell sounds like
a derivation of the old "put out or
swim" gag to me. (Like I said
-- he's a creep.) And
when they reach the States, Philip insists
that he can cure Sheila of her malaise
with a little peace and quiet in the
country. To accomplish this, he's rented a
house for them out in the swamps of
Florida; but when they arrive, the old
house looks a little too familiar to
Sheila...
Terror
in the Haunted House,
better known as My
World Dies Screaming,
was the brainchild of producers Robert
Corrigan and William S. Edwards. Shot in
1958 but not released until 1961, Terror...
claimed to have been banned by the U.S.
Government, explaining away the time on
the shelf. Now it is true that the hammer
dropped on subliminal advertising in 1961,
making it illegal to use the technique,
but I don't think this movie had anything
to do with that decision -- but it was
more than willing to cash in on it. And
Corrigan and Edwards would use the same
shifty shenanigans again in their follow
up film, Date
With Death.
Digging
into the nuts and bolts of the film, to
say Robert C. Dennis was a prolific
screenwriter for the boob-tube would be a
bit of understatement. The man wrote for
everything from My
Mother the Car
to The
Fugitive
to The
Outer Limits,
and from the The
Six Million Dollar Man
to
Project
UFO
to Charlie's
Angels
before he died in 1983. Drawing a lot of
inspiration from the
psychological/supernatural thrillers of
the day, Dennis's script is ambitious but
it's already bogging down under its own
weight by the end of the first act -- and
we've got a ways to go yet. Behind the
camera, director Harold Daniels is
probably best known for
helming a certain steamy little picture
starring Peter Graves bedding down with a fifteen year old Lita Milan called Bayou
-- but we know it better as Poor
White Trash,
which notoriously claimed:
Due
to the abnormal subject matter depicted
in POOR WHITE TRASH, no-one under
17 will be admitted, and armed policemen
will be on hand at all times!!!
Other
films of note on Daniels' résumé include
the giant killer crab feature, Port
Sinister,
and a real snoozer of a turd-burger called
House
of Black Death,
where
even the presence of Lon Chaney Jr.
and John Carradine couldn't salvage it.
As
for the cast, I can't say enough good
things about O'Donnell's honest and
earnest performance as Sheila. Back in the
late '40s, O'Donnell had starred in a
couple of noir classics, Bury
Me Dead
and Nicolas Ray's They
Live By Night,
and her future looked bright. However,
when she married producer Robert Wyler, a
man twenty years her senior (--
she was 23, he was 48), Samuel
Goldwyn nullified her contract with MGM,
thus casting her adrift, but she continued to
work steadily until retiring in 1961. Terror
in the Haunted House
was her second to last film role. What was
the last? Well, the very next year, O'Donnell
would play Charlton Heston's sister in
Ben-Hur.
(Now
there's an extreme of spectrum's for you.)
Co-star Gerald Mohr's career,
meanwhile, solidified with his work in
radio, where he played both Philip Marlowe
and the Lone Ranger. (He would also
go on to voice Mr. Fantastic in the
original Fantastic
Four
cartoon.)
But genre fans will probably remember him
most from when he fought a giant,
mono-optical blob alien and lost in The
Angry Red Planet,
or when he was fighting a
different kind of Red in Invasion
U.S.A.
I
seem to recall Mohr lost that battle, too.
So I guess we'd better hope Philip
has better luck in this film -- or poor Sheila's
gonna be in some deep psychological
doo-doo. And it doesn't help that when
her initial reaction to the house wears
off, Philip's behavior turns even more
dubious when he demands to know what
Sheila is so afraid of. But the Magic
8-Ball in the girl's noggin' says the
answer is still unclear. Told that it's
all in her head, reluctantly, she agrees
to go inside. And
as they head in, one has to wonder if this
is some kind of an attempt at shock-therapy
by Philip -- or does he have something
more sinister in mind?
Sheila's
uneasiness grows when they meet Jonah (John
Qualen), the google-eyed caretaker
of the estate. (Sharp ears will
recognize Qualen's stammering twang as
Muley Graves from The
Grapes of Wrath.)
And while Philip goes to get the bags out
of the car, Jonah goes all creepy and
cryptic, telling Sheila that the house has
been empty for over seventeen years but he
keeps the place up for when the owners
come back. When Sheila asks where the
family went, Jonah gets even more cryptic,
saying they just left and never came back.
Asked for at least their names, Jonah
reveals that the house belonged to
"The Mad Tierneys" but Philip
returns, interrupting them, before he can
say anymore. But he's said enough --
Tierney is the same name Sheila sees on
the mailbox in her dreams.
With
these revelations, Sheila starts to get a
bad case of deja-vu, but the familiar
memories seemed to have happened along
time ago, as if they happened when she was
child. (And
yes, we done tripped over another big old
PLOT POINT! Be careful, they've dropped
the damned things all over the place in
this movie.) And
between the creepy caretaker and
remembering details of a house she swears
she's never been in before -- including
rooms she didn't dream about -- Sheila is
really spooked, so spooked she begs Philip
to take her away from this place as fast
as possible. He agrees, but when they try
to leave, the car won't start -- someone
has stolen the distributor cap. (Hey,
wasn't Philip the only one outside? Ah,
maybe Jonah's dog took it.)
So
they're stuck, but with some coaxing from
Philip, the couple decide to try and make
the best of it. Later that night, Sheila,
having heard someone screaming, awakens to
find her husband gone. And while putting
on her robe to go and find him, she spies
a ghostly figure outside the bedroom
window, which, not surprisingly, frightens
the holy-hell out of her!
Fleeing
from the apparition, screaming
the whole way, Sheila runs down the stairs
-- right into Jonah's vicious dog, who
chases her right back up and into the
bedroom, where Philip has mysteriously
reappeared. (The
hell?) Thinking Jonah is trying to
scare them off, Philip leaves to look for
the caretaker. After he's gone, looking
for her husband's pistol, Sheila digs into
their suitcase, where she does find the gun --
but also the missing distributor cap! (Huh?
Philip said Jonah must have done that.
Maybe it was the dog?) Taking
the gun and the doohickey, Sheila heads
back into the hallway, where a mysterious
shadow frightens her, and then whoever's
casting it herds her toward the attic
entrance. Faced with a familiar set of
steps, she screams and swoons, but Philip
catches her before she falls -- Was he the
one chasing her? After bringing her
around, Philip wants to know what's
scaring her so badly, and demands that
Sheila remember what she saw up in the attic so
long ago. When she refuses to answer,
whether she can't or won't, her husband
starts behaving like even more of an ass (--
if that's even possible.)
The
next morning, while chasing down another
fleeting memory, Sheila finds a tree with
her initials carved into it. Another set
of initial's -- P.T. -- are carved next to
hers, with a heart chiseled around them
both. And as the evidence mounts that
Sheila has been in the Tierney house
before, things
get even more convoluted when Mark Snell (William
Ching) shows up. Claiming to own
the place, Snell has no knowledge of
anyone wanting to rent it, or anybody
named Philip Justin for that matter.
Demanding that the squatters leave his
property immediately, Snell then gets a
closer look at Philip and recognizes his
as someone else. Turns out Philip Justin
is really Philip Tierney, making him the
last of the Mad Tierneys. And that's not
an exaggeration. Seems that the eldest
Tierney had a nervous breakdown one night
and killed Philip's father and older
brother with an axe. His rationale? He was
trying to end the family curse where all
the Tierney men tend to go a little cuckoo
and murder their offspring with axes. The
only reason he missed Philip was because
he was away at school, and after the dirty
deed was done, the old man dropped dead of
a heart attack.
Warning
Sheila that Philip is just as mad, Snell
urges her to get away from him. But
despite all the evidence, trusting-fool
Sheila thinks Philip is still a good man
at heart, insisting instead that this evil
house has done something to him,
corrupting him, and that's what's making
him insane.
With
that Family Skeleton tumbled out of the
closet, about a dozen more subplots are
introduced and tripped over as we stumble
toward the inevitable climax. Is Philip
crazy? Is Sheila crazy? Is Philip trying
to make Sheila crazy? Or is Snell up to
something? Our answer soon comes with
another, violent scream in the night.
Finding her bed empty again, Sheila opens
the bedroom door in time to see Jonah fall
over the rail to his death. Having miraculously
healed itself, Philip takes the car into
town to notify the Sheriff of the
accident. And when Snell tries to warn
Sheila not trust her husband again, sure
enough, we spy Philip sneaking back into
the house, where, also once again, he
spooks Sheila toward the attic stairs.
When he reveals himself as the culprit,
there's kind of a nifty stand-off where
Sheila has the
opportunity to shoot him, but she can't
bring herself to do it -- she still loves
him. He begs her to go up into the attic
to face her fear, but she freaks again and
passes out. Philip catches her again, but
this time, he gathers her up and carries
her up the steps.
And
with a mere five minutes left to go, all
those convoluted plot threads and plot
points we've been tripping over proceed to
piss all over each other when Philip
reveals that Sheila has been in
this house before -- and those were his
initials carved into the tree. You see, the
two were childhood sweethearts, but
something bad happened in the attic that
was so traumatizing, Sheila was sent to a
sanitarium in Switzerland to recover. Now
you've probably guessed that Sheila
witnessed old man Tierney axe his
offspring to death, and her nightmares
were nothing but repressed memories. Well,
you'd be wrong. Close, but wrong. Turns
out he didn't do it. You see, old Man
Tierney also had a daughter, who turned
out to be worse than his sons. After she
shacked up with the help and had a son --
the help being Jonah, and the son being
Snell -- the mother died during
childbirth, and the old man wanted nothing
to do with his illegitimate grandson.
Deciding to make his son the one and only
heir to the Tierney fortune, it was Jonah
who killed Philip's father and brother,
and then framed the grandfather for it.
Then Philip, ashamed of his heritage,
changed his name and abandoned the family
fortune and fled to Europe, leaving it all
for Snell. The only real hitch in Jonah's
plan: Sheila. The daughter of the maid (or
something), the young girl spent a
lot of time playing in the attic. Hiding
under the bed on the fateful day when the
other men came in, Sheila
saw the whole thing. Jonah found her after
the deed was done, but she had gone into
catatonic shock. Not wanting to kill her
-- Why? No, I'm asking you. -- he
used some of the Tierney's money to send
her far away.
His
plan almost worked, too -- until Philip
miraculously tracked Sheila down...IN
SWITZERLAND! Yeah,
I already called "No friggin'
way!"
Anyways,
Snell overhears all of this, too. He knew
all along what his father had done; in
fact, he killed Jonah, who was starting to
come unhinged, fearing he would spill the
beans, and then decides to take care of
the last of the Tierney's himself with
Jonah's trusty axe. But
bitter irony bites Snell in the butt --
well, actually, it kind of stabs him in
the back -- and Philip, who contrived the
whole thing so his wife would remember
what happened to her those many years ago
by traumatizing the hell out of her, and
Sheila, now miraculously cured, live
happily ever after. Leaving us in the
audience wanting to...
The
End
Like
some of William Castle's films, Terror
in the Haunted House
could almost stand on it's own without the
gimmick. It's got quite a few things going
for it: a solemn mood, good direction from
Daniels, and a great performance by
O'Donnell, but its convoluted story is
just that -- made worse by a record
thirty-six twelfth hour revelations in the
last five minutes to explain everything
away. And by that time, the film had a
helluva lot of explaining to do. I will
give Dennis a few props, though; I thought
this was just another drive the wife crazy
into doing something rash plot, but then
it took a left turn on me. And then a
right. And then another right. And then
back to the left when the chandelier fell.
And then another left after it made a
u-turn when Sheila found the Tierney
family bible -- you get the idea.
I
understand that when the film was released
theatrically, there was a prologue where
Mohr explained the PSYCHO-RAMA
process. The DVD I have from Rhino
doesn't have it, but an explanation isn't
really necessary. So is the gimmick worth
it? I can honestly say that nope, it
isn't. If anything, the intrusive images
are a distraction.
I'm
not sure what the original subliminal
messages or images were for the film, but
Rhino claims to have restored the artwork,
provided by cult-film aficionado Johnny
Legend. Does that mean they were removed
at some point? Who knows for sure. And if
you're like me, and spent way too much
time pausing and stepping through the DVD,
frame by frame, trying to see exactly what
those images were, you can't help be
disappointed by most of them.
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