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Let's
see, we've seen Shaw-O-Scope,
Hypno-Vision,
Specta-Mation,
Dynamation,
Illusion-O,
and glorious Sepiatone
-- and now we can add another film process
to that ever growing list:
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?
 |
| Booga!
Booga! Booga! |
Results,
as they say, vary per customer...
...We
open in Switzerland where our protagonist,
Sheila Wayne (Cathy
O'Donnell), recounts a horrible
dream to her therapist: The reoccurring
nightmare consists of a point of view tour
of an old, decrepit mansion, and the dream
always ends with Sheila at the foot of the
attic stares, which seem to be beckoning
her to come up. But whatever's up there,
terrifies her, and Sheila really doesn't
want to see it because she always wakes up
at that point, screaming her head
off.
And
I gotta say, Miss O'Donnell has 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 malady. We find out she
spent two years there, recovering from
something -- he said ominously --
but her memories as to exactly what that
was are a little fuzzy.
Sheila
has recently married Philip Justin (Gerald
Mohr), and plans to move back to
the States with him. And it was about the
same time they were married that the
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.) He tells his new wife between
smooches that he used to take girls to the
bus stop or train station and then
"kiss them goodbye. But not really."
(And 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.)
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 house looks a little
too familiar to Sheila...
Terror
in the Haunted House,
better known as My
World Dies Screaming,
was the brainchild of scriptwriter Robert
C. Dennis. To say 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
to The
Six Million Dollar Man
and 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.
Dennis
collaborated with director Harold Daniels
for this film. Daniels, who up to that
point had made a career as a bit player,
went on to deliver the snoozer House
of Black Death
(and
even the presence of Lon Chaney Jr. and
John Carradine couldn't save that one.)
Before that, he was probably most
notorious for a certain steamy little film
starring Peter Graves bedding down with 15-year
old Lita Milan called Bayou
-- but we know it better as Poor
White Trash,
which 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!!!
Why???
I have no clue!!!
I
can't say enough good things about Cathy
O'Donnell's honest and earnest performance
as Sheila. O'Donnell starred in a couple
of noir classics Bury
Me Dead
and Nicolas Ray's They
Live By Night.
Terror
in the Haunted House
was her second to last role. Her last
role? She played Charlton Heston's sister
in Ben-Hur
the very next year. (Now
there's an extreme of spectrum's for you.)
Gerald
Mohr's career 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 Reds 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 Sheila's
in some deep psychological doo-doo...
When
her initial reaction to the house wears
off, Philip's behavior even turns more
suspicious when he demands to know what
Sheila is so afraid of. Insisting that
it's all in her head, reluctantly, she
agrees to go inside. (And
we as the viewer want to know if this is
some kind of an attempt at shock therapy
by Philip -- or does he have something
more sinister in mind?)
Sheila's
suspicion 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.)
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 in case the owners
come back. When Sheila asks where the
family went, Jonah gets even more cryptic
when he says they just left and never came
back. When she asks their names, he tells
her the house belonged to "the Mad
Tierneys."
Which
just happens to be the same name she saw
on the mailbox in her dream!
Sheila
starts to have 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 PLOT
POINT! Be careful, they've dropped the
damned things all over the place in this
movie.)
Philip
returns, interrupting Jonah before he can
say anymore. Between the creepy caretaker
and remembering details of a house she
swears she's never been in -- including
rooms she didn't dream about -- Sheila is
really spooked, and begs Philip to take
her away. 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 try to make the best of
it. That night, in bed, Sheila hears
someone screaming, but awakes to find her
husband gone. She puts on her robe to
investigate, but spies a ghostly figure
outside the bedroom window, which not
surprisingly frightens the holy-hell out
of her. Sheila screams and runs
downstairs, right into Jonah's vicious
dog, who chases her right back into the
bedroom -- where Philip has mysteriously
reappeared. (The
hell?) Philip thinks Jonah is
trying to scare them off, and after he
leaves to look for the caretaker, Sheila
digs into their suitcase, looking for her
husband's pistol. She finds it -- and the
distributor cap. (Huh? Philip said
Jonah must have done that...Maybe it was
the dog?)
Sheila
takes the gun and the cap and heads back
into the hallway, where a mysterious
shadow frightens her, and then herds her
toward the attic stairs. She looks up the
familiar set of steps, screams, and
swoons. Philip catches her -- Was he
chasing her? -- and brings her around. He
wants to know what's scaring her, and to
remember what she saw up in the attic so
long ago. When she refuses, he starts
behaving like 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. A boy's
initial's -- P.T. -- are carved next to
hers, with a heart chiseled around them
both. 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. He finds Sheila
and claims to own the place, and has no
knowledge of anyone named Philip Justin
wanting to rent it. Snell demands that the
Justin's leave, but then recognizes Philip
as someone else: Philip is really the last
of the Mad Tierneys. Seems that the old
man 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. He
missed Philip because he was away at
school, and after his 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 Sheila
thinks Philip is a good man, and believes
the evil house has done something to him,
corrupting him, and is making him insane.
Then,
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 comes with another, violent
scream in the night. Sheila finds her bed
empty again, but opens the door in time to
see Jonah fall over the rail to his death.
Philip's
car miraculously heals itself, and he
heads back into town to notify the
sheriff. Snell tells Sheila not to trust
him, and sure enough, Philip sneaks back
into the house and spooks Sheila toward
the attic again. There's kind of a nifty
stand-off where Sheila has the opportunity
to shoot Philip, but she can't bring
herself to do it -- she still loves him.
He wants her to go up into the attic, but
she freaks again and passes out. This
time, though, Philip gathers her up and
carries her up the steps.
Then
in the last five minutes, all those
convoluted plot threads and plot points
we've been stubbing our toes 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. 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. 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 new
grandson. So Jonah decided to make his son
the one and only heir to the Tierney
fortune, and it was Jonah who killed
Philip's father and brother, and then
framed the grandfather for it.
His
plan almost worked because Philip, ashamed
of his heritage, changed his name and
abandoned the family fortune, leaving it
all for Snell -- until he miraculously
tracked down Sheila...IN SWITZERLAND!
Sheila
was the daughter of the maid (or
something), and spent a lot of time
playing in the attic. She hid under the
bed when the other men came in, and saw
the whole thing. Jonah found her, 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.
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 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
Shot
in 1958 but not released until 1961, Terror
in the Haunted House
claimed to have been banned by the U.S.
Government. 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.
Daniels and Dennis would use the same
shenanigans again in their follow up film Date
With Death.
Like
some of William Castle's films, this movie
could almost stand up on it's own without
the gimmick. It has 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 of
the film to explain everything away. And
by that time, the film had a hell of a lot
of explaining to do. I will give them a
few props, though; I thought this was
another drive the wife crazy into doing
something rash film, but then it took a
left turn on me. And then a right. And
then another right. And then a 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, they're a distraction.
I'm
not sure what the original subliminal
messages or images were for the film, but
Rhino restored the artwork -- So were they
removed at some point? -- provided by some
guy named Johnny Legend. 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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| That
bottom blurb says to BUY A RHINO
VIDEO EVERY DAY. |
| To
Quote Ralphie Parker... |
| "A
crummy commercial...?
Sonofabitch." |
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