The Spell (1977)

Rita Matchett (Susan Myers) is bullied by her peers as well as by her much more mainstream-compatible sister Kris (a very young Helen Hunt) for being mildly overweight as well as because of her general vague “weirdness”. Her family is of little help: father Glenn (James Olson) neither likes her nor seems to give a crap about his less easily relatable daughter’s wellbeing, and her mother Marilyn (Lee Grant) is theoretically trying to help but is in practice at best not actively harmful, and really, for most of the film way nearly as egotistical as her husband, which is saying something.

Things begin to change with the accidental yet strange death of a classmate who was a particularly nasty bully. Rita – to the horror of particularly her dad – seems to start to take pride in being different (oh, the horror!). Soon, other people who give her trouble begin having accidents as well.

Lee Philips’s The Spell is an – appropriately – unholy mixture of formalistically shot family drama with arthouse ambitions, overheated 70s occult horror tropes, and oh so many scenes of absolutely terrible parenting the film seems to believe are at least somewhat okay. Also appearing are a bunch of very funny made up “parapsychological” concepts and terms, and a shock ending that has sod all to do with anything else the movie cares about.

As is painfully obvious, this is one of those movies that attempt to use horror movie tropes to express the fear of clearly freaking rich “middleclass” people of having nonconforming children. The better movies of this type – be they about witches or young female telekinesis practitioners – tend to show the story from the perspective of the maltreated child that eventually explodes, putting an emphasis on the destructive power of the society around them awakening a different kind of destructive power in them as a form of psychic self-defence.

This film at hand is told from Marilyn’s perspective, however, and really doesn’t seem to know what exactly it is trying to do with this, wavering between conservative hand-wringing, compassion with Rita and bouts of apparently believing that being a shit parent is a-okay because of some 70s “finding oneself” bullshit. The film makes little effort actually getting inside of Rita’s mind; which is particularly problematic since there’s very little of interest going on in her parents’ heads, even though Marilyn who is at least trying to do right by her more difficult offspring, is the somewhat more sympathetic of the two.

The film’s largest problem, however, is that Philips really doesn’t seem to know what he wants to do with the metaphorical elements of the narrative, nor how to make this part of the script work in tandem with the film as a horror film. Consequently, the metaphorical level seems to have little resolution and meaning while the horror plot stops and starts and goes nowhere fitting.

From time to time, the heated family discussions suddenly ring true in a more realistic manner, and two of the horror sequences are surprisingly effective. But that’s really all there is to The Spell.

Visiting Hours (1982)

Politically engaged TV journalist Deborah Ballin (Lee Grant), barely escapes the murderous intentions of a mostly unspeaking serial killer (Michael Ironside) with a fondness for photographing the faces of his victims while they die during a home invasion; a friend of hers is not so lucky, and the killer escapes. Ballin’s injured enough to need to spend quite some time in the hospital. Unfortunately, the killer doesn’t seem to be done with her and starts regular visits to the hospital. He’s having trouble actually locating the journalist, but he’s clearly seeing that as an opportunity to just kill quite a few other people. The guy hates women more than men but isn’t one to overlook an opportunity for killing you, whatever your gender.

Given that the killer does this more than once without being stopped, it’ll come as no surprise to any viewer that the police here is less than useless for anyone not wanting to get brutally murdered. Luckily, Ballin’s pretty tough even in her traumatized and injured state. Plus, one of the nurses, Sheila Munroe (Linda Purl), a highly competent hard-working single mom, has taken quite a shine to the older woman and does her best to protect her and the other patients.

From time to time, William Shatner also pops in as Ballin’s boss, but I suspect he’s only in more than one scene because the production could get Shatner for a couple of days; as a character, he’s completely without consequence.

Which is perfectly alright, for at least half of Jean-Claude Lord’s Visiting Hours is difficult to read as anything but a paean to women. Specifically, women like Deborah Ballin and Sheila Munroe who do difficult jobs with competence, dignity, composure and compassion. On paper, this element of the film should not work too well with its more exploitation movie style sensibilities when it comes to the murders and the habits of its killer. In practice, the film is portraying its female characters so sympathetically, it is never a question if the film shares the killer’s hatred or not. Which doesn’t mean it is going to treat its protagonists nicely. It does, however, mean that there’s no space for a Shatner-style alpha male performance, nor any chance for these women to be rescued by anyone but themselves.

The film isn’t a gore fest. The killings do, however, have the nasty undertone of real violence, emphasising the shock and the helplessness of the victims before anything else. Ironside’s performance and Lord’s camera portray the killer’s misogyny and general hatred for humanity (going by the bits you can catch of his letters, he’s racist, to boot) through the physicality of the actor’s body as well as the staging, keeping the killer silent because there’s really no need for dialogue to express what he is about. There are a couple of flashbacks to the man’s inciting trauma that are, as well as the scenes in his apartment complete with framed letters answering his letters to TV and newspaper journalists and his murder wall, part of what looks like a conscious attempt at not turning him into a slasher movie like killing machine, and keeping him a broken human being.

Visiting Hours is clearly influenced by the slasher genre, though. The number of victims and the variety in murder methods makes this quite obvious. If you want, you can even read the final surviving character and the end sequence as a variation on the final girl trope that changes certain things about the basic nature of the final girl; virginity and such are not a thing of relevance when you don’t populate your movie with teenagers.

Indeed, the film does give the impression that the filmmakers (script by Brian Taggert, who has some pretty great and some pretty terrible work on his CV, much of it in TV) were very consciously trying to adapt certain slasher tropes to those of the kind of thriller you might have – in less violent versions than here – encountered in ABC’s TV Movie of the Week slot, films that also very often centred around competent female characters getting into exactly the kind of trouble the women here do, for no faults of their own. It works rather well, too, the fine performances by Grant, Purl and Ironside, the shape of the violence and Lord’s control over suspense set-ups fitting nicely with the slasher elements, suggesting yet another, less codified, way the slasher could have gone.

In short: The Internecine Project (1974)

Professor Robert Elliot (James Coburn) is an up and coming star of the military-industrial complex, soon to be promoted into a highly influential US government position. Unfortunately his overlords (represented by Keenan Wynn) need him to get rid of the four people in London who helped him with his own personal, and highly effective, mix of espionage, industrial espionage (in a clever nod to realism, the film doesn’t treat these two things as independent of each other) and good old blackmail.

Elliot, true believer in his own superiority that he is, decides the best way to get rid of his soon to be former associates is a complicated plan that will result in all of them killing one another in a single night with not a trace pointing to Elliot himself. As it goes with these plans, things go well until they don’t go well anymore.

Ken Hughes’s British/German co-production turns your typical 70s paranoia into a crime procedural very much like a nastier heist movie. For most of the time, the result is a deeply focused film, perhaps at times even too deeply focused, with only limited space to get an actual feel for James Coburn’s character.

The film’s only actual detour is Elliot’s relationship with his former girlfriend, journalist Jean Robertson (Lee Grant) but instead of revealing much about Elliot, or even just humanizing him, the scenes between the two don’t add much more than a distraction. I honestly don’t know what the writers were trying to achieve with the subplot. As it stands, it mostly seems there to deflate the tension every twenty minutes or so.

Which really is a bit of a shame, for the rest of the movie is very tense indeed, with Hughes using simple yet effective traditional thriller tricks to string the audience along while not keeping anything about Elliot’s plan secret. I don’t think contemporary thriller writers could even conceive of keeping tension without holding things back or adding twists to a plot, so if nothing else, The Internecine Project’s clearer approach does feel novel again in a movie, at least from the perspective of 2014.

The only real twist here is how Elliot gets his comeuppance in the end. Given when this was made, I was actually a bit surprised things didn’t end well for him, how ever much I was hoping for an ignominious result to his exploits.

The film’s politics are of course 70s standard fare of the type you could still use in a movie today without anyone complaining it to be too far fetched. Alas or fortunately – depending on your tastes – the politics here aren’t explored very deeply, and are only ever used to enable the plot. Which is perfectly alright in a film as effectively plotted as The Internecine Project is.

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