It is the role they all want. It is the role they all covet. It is the role they all desire so badly they would do anything to secure it. The question is how far will any of them actually go to make it happen?
The role is Audra, a mentally unstable woman so completely pissed off at her constantly cheating lover she wants to kill him. In the opening scene of Curtains, British actress Samantha Sherwood (Samantha Egger) auditions by delivering Audra’s penultimate speech in front of the film’s watchful, Machiavellian director, Jonathan Stryker (John Vernon), while standing on stage in an empty theatre.
After she pulls the trigger of her prop gun, from the balcony he is coldly dismissive: “I don’t believe it.” (I didn’t, either. Some of her dialogue feels overwritten and she lacks true intensity.) “Audra would never pull the trigger.” Sherwood is amused but not hurt. She just thinks he doesn’t understand women or love or even herself. (They have a complicated history, you see.) Despite her being willing to improve her own performance with the added benefit of lighting and camera tricks he suddenly shuts off the spotlight from the balcony, gets very quiet and disappears. (Well, alright, then.)
A fitting moment since that’s when this movie goes completely off the rails. Desperate to land Audra, Sherwood cooks up a ridiculous scheme with Stryker to get herself institutionalized so she can study the cartoonish, one-note patients who live there. (Is this really necessary?) After signing the official papers to make this doomed idea a reality, she lamely tries to stab Stryker. While fighting her off, she is ultimately restrained by several hospital workers and put in a strait jacket. (Why is she even doing this when she’s already in?)
Stryker absurdly requests a private moment with his potential leading lady after everything settles down. Incredibly, he’s granted one. (Guys, she could still kick and bite him if she really wanted to, you know.) He gives the giddy Sherwood (who looks like David Bowie and sounds like Joan Collins) an undeserved rave review. She’s clearly wrong for Audra.
Sherwood’s experience in the mental hospital, unsurprisingly, turns out to be a nightmare. She can’t sleep thanks to the screaming weeper in the bed next to hers. She can’t do a jigsaw puzzle in peace. She can’t escape the clutches of a humming, tickling giggler while another hummer strokes her hair. And she can’t even watch herself in a old movie on TV without being laughed out of the room.
Despite kissing up to her during repeated personal visits (Sherwood sees right through his blatant flattery on one particular occasion), Stryker completely screws her over by ultimately abandoning her. (That’s the thanks she gets for buying him the rights to film Audra, originally a novel, in the first place.) Thanks to a mysterious friend whose face we never see she learns in Variety that he’s moving on without her.
With understandable vengeance on her mind, her mysterious friend helps her escape the mental hospital (are the real ones as lax as the fictional ones in horror movies?) and makes her way to his secluded mansion where he’ll be hosting a most unusual weekend casting session. An awful stand-up comic, an ok figure skater, an ok interpretive dancer, a musician and an insecure, looks-obsessed Brit all hope to replace Sherwood as Audra in a bizarre, highly manipulative two-day endurance test that is more fishy than sincere.
A sixth contender never even makes the trip. Before she’s stabbed to death in her own apartment there’s a horrifying scene where she’s being stalked by some creep wearing pantyhose over his head. He eventually breaks in and rapes her. Or so we think until we’re shocked to learn this is just a bored couple role playing. Oh, you wacky kids!
How the deadpan, deep-voiced John Vernon maintains a mostly straight face in all of this ridiculousness is a testament to how good he is as the unethical Stryker. Clearly and calmly in control at all times he seems far more interested in screwing with his actresses, both mentally and literally, than making an important casting choice for his movie. (When the annoying stand-up comic jokes about giving him a blowjob to get hired, he smoothly responds, “That shouldn’t be necessary, but I’ll keep it in mind.”) When he’s not putting them through completely pointless exercises (Wear this hideous hag mask and seduce me only with your eyes and mouth! Touch her breast like a man would!), he’s taking complete advantage of their collective vulnerability. The powerful creep ends up bedding two of the more desperate contenders, which doesn’t go unnoticed by Sherwood. Call me crazy but sometimes you wonder if making a movie is his real priority here.
Meanwhile, someone in that hideous old lady mask is eliminating the competition one by one. Circumstantial evidence clearly points to Sherwood who has two very strong motives. But considering how at times the film challenges the audience’s expectations (the surprising rape fantasy sequence, for instance), Sherwood’s possible culpability seems a bit too obvious to be accurate.
Curtains is one of the strangest, most confusing slasher films I’ve ever seen. (Even a rare, second screening didn’t answer all my questions.) Shot and reshot over two years with two different crews and directors plus one notable casting change, there were so many alterations made that when it was finally completed the finished result bore very little resemblance to its original story.
Essentially, it’s two seemingly incompatible ideas (a deliberately slow paced, pretentious, twisty psychodrama and a standard slasher thriller) merged into one rather screwy whole. It isn’t particularly scary (the hag mask gimmick, complete with the killer’s heavy breathing, is a blatant, uninspired rip-off of Halloween’s Michael Myers) and there are many unexplained moments.
Consider Michael Wincott. During the dinner time sequence where Stryker introduces himself to the five contenders, in walks Wincott looking a lot like the love child of Sid Vicious and Keith Richards. After ogling one of the women, he ends up fooling around with her later that winter’s night in the outdoor Jacuzzi. (He has exactly one line of dialogue: “Hey!”) Then, while gathering firewood, we see him watch the figure skater walk to the frozen pond for a fateful training session (even though she left a note for Stryker saying she was leaving the mansion for good) and later, he drives away on a snowmobile for some reason.
We have no idea who he is and why the hell he’s at Stryker’s mansion. Is he a friend? His son? Hired help? Personal assistant? Secret gay lover? It’s never explained.
Meanwhile, there are other unresolved matters. Did Stryker have Sherwood institutionalized because he never really wanted her for the part in the first place and this was the best way to squeeze her out? Since the ruse, if it was one, didn’t exactly work why does he allow her to participate in the mansion casting sessions anyway?
How the hell did the killer a) retrieve that decapitated head from the toilet without leaving a mess (and where did it go?) b) squeeze through that tiny bathroom window without getting caught while the insecure Brit is doing her nails? c) find another way into the prop room vent to murder one of her cowering competitors? d) manage to drag the body of one of the victims to hang in the prop room undiscovered? And e) not immediately execute the most obvious threat to her professional future?
In the years following the film’s forgotten, short-lived theatrical release (despite being filmed in Toronto with a mostly Canadian cast it was curiously released here a year after its American debut) it has grown in popularity thanks to home video & Television re-airings, much to the surprise and amusement of some of its surviving cast & crew who appear in the entertaining DVD documentary. (Most were embarrassed and disappointed by it. I don’t blame them.)
Despite its resurgence as a cult film, Curtains never really had a chance to be a good movie or a logical one, for that matter, thanks to the constant tinkering of the story and the endless reshoots. I will say this for it, though. It’s a bit more ambitious than your typical 80s slasher movie, thanks to the considerable portion uncredited Belgian director Richard Ciupka was responsible for (the middle 40-50 minutes (it runs 89), he says on the DVD). Strangely, instead of using “Alan Smithee”, the film credits “Jonathan Stryker”, John Vernon’s character, as the official director.
In between the usual horror clichés, it tries to be surprising during other scenes, setting up our expectations for predictable resolutions only to throw in unexpected curveballs at the end of them. The problem is most of these swerves don’t work or leave you shaking your head like that bizarre rape fantasy sequence that really perturbed me during my initial screening or Sherwood’s needless, fake murder attempt on Stryker at the nuthouse.
Speaking of Stryker, it’s a testament to John Vernon’s much missed professionalism (he died in 2005) that his performance as the manipulative, shady director is the best one, even though he’s not always written smartly. Surely realizing the silliness of his character’s often questionable antics he nonetheless plays him absolutely straight. Even though I laughed when he convinces the eavesdropping, naive figure skater that the very real fight he just had with Sherwood in her old bedroom was merely a private audition, he never betrays his remarkably good deadpan. As the wise Costanza once observed, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.”
As an aside, it’s refreshing to see so little gore and hear no misogynistic dialogue here, two unwelcome, longterm elements of the genre I’d love to see retired for good. That said, the women hungering for the role of Audra aren’t exactly feminist or sympathetic or bright. Before they even meet Stryker, they ponder numerous ways in which they’d sell out for him. It sounds like they’re half-joking but as the movie progresses, it’s clear some of them are not.
In the end, Curtains is a curious mess, a meandering mishmash of conflicting approaches that only hint at more compelling possibilities. Instead of burning all those head shots until they pop, the filmmakers should’ve torched this movie instead and start all over again.
Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Saturday, June 20, 2015
3:49 a.m.
THE WRITINGS OF DENNIS EARL 
Original Holy Holy Single Finally Makes CD Debut In New David Bowie Box Set
On September 25th, David Bowie will release a massive new box set covering the first successful phase of his long, highly regarded career. According to his official website, Five Years 1969-1973 will feature six studio albums, two live records, and a two-disc collection of single mixes, B-sides and rarities. It will be available in a 12-CD package as well as a separate 13-LP collection.
Space Oddity (AKA David Bowie (1969) and Man Of Words, Man Of Music), The Man Who Sold The World, Hunky Dory, Aladdin Sane and the covers album Pin-Ups have all been remastered once again specifically for this set. The 2003 stereo remix of The Rise & Fall Of Ziggy Stardust & The Spiders From Mars, only previously available on DVD, will also be included.
On top of that, Five Years will also feature the double-disc Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture soundtrack and Live Santa Monica ’72, a Ziggy-era bootleg that was first released officially in 2008.
Finally, there’s Re:Call 1. Sadly not available as a separate stand alone release, this exclusive two-disc compilation will feature 24 additional songs, many of which appeared as bonus tracks on previous studio album reissues as well as being a part of earlier box sets & greatest hits compilations. Far from comprehensive (not all the extra songs from the Rykodisc & 30th Anniversary versions are restored here, unfortunately), it does showcase most of the non-album A-Sides & B-Sides from the era. (The UK single edit of Space Oddity is on the track list, but neither of the two US single edits made the cut.)
Amongst a lot of familiar hits & flipsides are several genuine rarities, the biggest of which is Holy Holy. Originally a three-minute single issued in 1970, only the two-and-a-half minute 1971 re-recording (a Ziggy Stardust outtake eventually issued as a B-Side to Diamond Dogs in 1974) has ever made it on a Bowie CD, including this box set. Now, for the first time ever, the original three-minute version can be heard digitally, as well. It was only previously available officially on 45.
Also making its debut on CD is a rare, unreleased single mix of All The Madmen from The Man Who Sold The World and the German single edit of Drive In Saturday from Aladdin Sane.
Fans of John, I’m Only Dancing will be happy to know that the original mix and the sax version are included on disc two of Re:Call 1, marking the first time that both have appeared on the same release. Other highlights of the collection include the Arnold Corns versions of Moonage Daydream and Hang On To Yourself (but not the rare vinyl-only B-Side The Man In The Middle), the Italian version of Space Oddity (Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Sola), the single edit of Time from Aladdin Sane and Velvet Goldmine.
Five Years will also include a new book filled with rare photos, new liner notes written by Bowie producers Ken Scott and Tony Visconti, plus a foreword from The Kinks’ Ray Davies.
According to the official press release on davidbowie.com, this is only the first “in a series” of box sets to cover the six-decade career of The Thin White Duke himself.
Furthermore, regarding Five Years, the website promises “updates, pre-order links and more shortly.” Hopefully, one of those updates will note whether this box set is coming to Canada.
Dennis Earl
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada
Monday, June 22, 2015
11:19 p.m.
- Commentary
- Music
- Music History
on June 22, 2015 at 11:19 pm Comments (2)