Fear No Evil (1969)

One night, while clearly in some kind of altered state, Paul Varney (Bradford Dillman) buys an antique mirror from a store, driven to the purchase by forces he can’t quite comprehend. Some days later, leaving a get-together by friend-of-a-friend psychiatrist and occult expert Dr David Sorrell (Louis Jordan), Paul and his fiancée Barbara Anholt (Lynda Day George) have a (vintage) car accident caused by his zoning out just like he did in that night he bought the mirror. Paul is killed, while Barbara gets away with minor injuries.

Obviously, Barbara is not taking this well, and is all too happy when Paul’s mother (Marsha Hunt) decides to break off the cold war that apparently was raging between them when Paul was still alive and invites Barbara to live with her in the family’s rich people mansion. Right in Barbara’s new room is that mysterious mirror Paul bought. On her first night sleeping there, Barbara feels drawn to the mirror – and wouldn’t you know it, a version of Paul that has developed a sartorial interest in French existentialist intellectual chic appears. Barbara is as clearly overwhelmed by intense sexual desire as a TV movie from 1969 can get away with (which is surprisingly much) and she and Paul do get it on late 60s TV movie style, Barbara somehow crossing over into the mirror world with her mind while her body, as is clearly implied, has its fun with the mirror.

After the first night of this, she goes to Sorrell for help. Sorrell does go for the most logical psychological explanation of her encounter being simple grief, but a case some years ago has taught him that sometimes, strange occurrences actually have supernatural sources, and so he begins to investigate what really happened to Paul before his death. This becomes particularly pressing since the now nightly encounters between a Barbara who simply can’t resist the mirror and Paul seem to have a dire influence on her physical and mental health.

This TV movie as directed by Paul Wendkos is a real gem of TV horror, working a very effective occult detective tale into the constraints of late 60s TV. The script by Richard Alan Simmons (based upon a short story buy Guy “The Werewolf of Paris” Endore) is surprisingly inventive in the ways it mixes the TV version of grief with Barbara’s supernatural misadventures, hinting at the connections between love, grief and physical desire, without feeling the need to explain them too much. There’s surprisingly little psycho babble TV of the time loved so much here,too, or really, just as much of it as the film needs for exposition.

Fear No Evil works very well as a tale in the classic occult detective mode, Sorrell’s double-expertise as a psychiatrist and a man of occult interests making him the ideal go-between between science (as much as psychiatry is one) and belief, and position him as one of the healer type occult investigators rather than the researcher of weird shit. I’ve never been the greatest fan of Jourdan – he always feels a bit too smug to me – but his performance here is just right, with just the right mix of that smugness and believable compassion; well, and a lot of cigarettes.

The plotting is pretty neat too, for the whole affair makes sense as a proper mystery, just one involving experimental demon conjuring and a magic mirror.

Wendkos does a wonderful job, too, pacing the investigation well, getting to the core of a scene clearly and efficiently, but also creating the proper mood of the outré as part of the human experience when it is called for. He is also doing wonders creating the supernatural menace on TV budget. The climax in particular is visually and conceptually inventive and makes total sense as a lived example of magical thinking, too.

Apparently, this was a pretty big ratings success for NBC, so the next year, there was another adventure of Dr Sorrell hitting the screen, but one without Simmons or Wendkos involved. About that one, I will complain in a coming “Three Films Make a Post” entry, because it’s as terrible as Fear No Evil is great.

Past Misdeeds: Day of the Animals (1977)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


It's the late 70s, and the ozone layer has become thin. So thin, in fact, that animals living in higher altitudes begin to act rather strangely. Our former furry friends become more aggressive, begin to hunt in packs even when they're not pack animals, and also develop the sort of fiendish intelligence that leads to things like dogs driving people into cars full of snakes, and what looks like a non-aggression pact between all non-human species. As further developments during the course of the movie will show, the phenomenon - except for the "becoming more intelligent" part - does not stop with animals; the lowest form of human life on the planet - ad executives - can be influenced by it too.

Consequently a merry little - unarmed, foodless - hiking trip of professional hiking trip leader Steve "let's send the hurt woman and her husband alone to the ranger station" Buckner (Christopher George) and a whole load of disaster movie fodder characters through the Sierra soon turns rather unpleasant. Steve really should have known better than to make a trip with a bunch of city slickers consisting of a couple going on an extreme hiking trip to fix their marriage, a freshly divorced woman from Beverly Hills (Ruth Roman) and her son (Bobby Porter), a former professional American Football player dying of bone cancer (Paul Mantee), a professor of exposition (Richard Jaeckel), a TV anchor-woman (Lynda Day George), a racist asshole of an ad executive (Leslie Nielsen shortly before he transformed himself into a deadpan comedian forever), and a random young couple (Andrew Stevens and whoever that actress is). Even with the tempering influence of Native American - of course wise to the ways of the woods and the heart - Daniel Santee (definitely not Native American Michael Ansara), it wouldn't need raving animals to lead these people into a disaster.

But as it stands, disaster in form of raving animals does strike soon enough, with animals attacking in the least typical manner, the group splitting up, bickering and then splitting up some more, and the people in the best position to help having their own animal troubles. It's the sort of thing that can only climax (in what is the film's actual climax even though the film's nominal one comes afterwards) in a shirtless Leslie Nielsen mud-wrestling a bear in a thunderstorm after ranting and raving about "Melville's god" and having tried to rape a woman.

Ladies and gentlemen, even though Day of the Animals may not conform to many people's concept of a good film, it very well may be director William Girdler's magnum opus. While all Girdler films recommend themselves to people of taste with moments of utter lunacy (see for example the Grizzly versus Helicopter fight in Grizzly, or the indescribable finale of The Manitou), the sympathetic viewer usually has to cope with quite a bit of boredom and scenes without much of a function beyond bringing a film to feature length to get to them. Here, however, Girdler has found his sweet spot of all nonsense all the time. The director provides his audience with every 70s eco horror shenanigan he could think of, only to stop from time to time for always amusing classic disaster movie non-characterisation  with a side-line of the most horribly wrong "romantic" dialogue this side of the 50s. Regarding the latter, let's just say that Buckner's way of romantic banter is based on inviting the TV anchor into his "woodsmen course".

Girdler could of course not afford the ménage of Hollywood has-beens and nearly-beens a disaster movie usually needs so had to go with actors with a bit or a lot of TV experience instead, but as it turns out, TV actors are just as good at eating up the scenery as Michael Caine when he needs to pay for his yacht.

As is probably quite clear by now, sensible pacing and plot logic are completely out of the question for Day of the Animals. I don't think there's any need for me to go into the film's plot holes, nor the idiocy of all characters involved, nor the bizarre logic of the way the animals act. However, a logical or well-structured movie could not contain (and I have to repeat that) a scene of middle-aged, shirtless Leslie Nielsen mudwrestling a bear in a thunderstorm after ranting about "Melville's god", nor various scenes where our heroes are outwitted by dogs, nor one where Walter Barnes's Ranger Tucker is attacked by what can only be described as flying rats, which provides further fuel for my theory that logic and structure are just terribly overrated.


However, this kind of 70s cheese is not the only thing that makes Day of the Animals worth watching. To my great surprise as someone who has never had anything good to say about Girdler as a director, the film also features a handful of scenes where it actually works as a horror film. Those among the animal attack scenes that aren't completely ridiculous (so about half of them) are actually quite tense to watch. Even better, whenever the film puts its mind to treating its animal attack story as an apocalyptic event, it develops some of the bleak and pessimistic air so typical of 70s horror, with some effective scenes of disturbed characters wandering through a deserted small town. It is quite possible, not to say probable, that Girdler arrives at the points where his apocalypse actually works despite of himself, just because that sort of thing was in the air at the time. For my tastes, every even just slightly effective moment of world-ending doom in a movie is to be treasured, for whatever reason it comes to pass, so Day of the Animals provides me with double the joy.

On WTF: Day of the Animals (1977)

If you ever wanted to see a shirtless Leslie Nielsen mud-wrestle a bear, you've come to the right film. Also making an appearance are flying rats, the snake/dog-gang, the 70s, and some rather bizarre characters.

My column on WTF-Film will inform you exactly how much I loved William Girdler's greatest achievement.

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