Movies: Bargain Basement Report

Kinky thrills on a budget, that’s where my head’s been lately. Herewith, a rundown.

Shock (1946). A woman witnesses a murder, lapses into the title condition – and comes to in a sanitarium under the killer’s care! Modestly entertaining hokum; Vincent Price, as always, is fun to watch as the tortured doc, and Lynn Bari bewitches as his nurse, lover and accomplice. Fox released it as part of its film noir series, but that’s only because they tabled plans for a Gothic Potboiler Collection. The disc is worth checking out for one of the most entertaining and energetic commentary tracks I’ve ever heard, by former Bay Area horror host John Stanley.

Screaming Mimi (1958). Based on a novel by the great Fredric Brown. Dancer Anita Ekberg – yowza – is almost killed by an escaped maniac. While recovering at a asylum, she falls under the spell of a warped psychiatrist. (Hey, another one!) There are slasher murders, a dog, and some weird statues. With Gypsy Rose Lee as the proprietor of that noted nightclub El Madhouse.


Mimi’s not a good movie, but it’s a strangely compelling one. With its dream logic, troubled blonde, and constant under-the-surface carnality, I’d wager that David Lynch has seen it. In fact, if he’d like to remake it with Scarlett Johansson, I’ll queue up right now.

Anita has a bondage-themed dance number that we get to see in its entirety not once but twice in eighty minutes.

Me: Where’d her wrist cuffs go?

Rosemarie: She threw them off. It was like a hockey move. You didn’t see that?

Me: I must have been looking at something else.

Rosemarie: I’ll bet you were.

Wicked, Wicked (1973). A thousand thanks to Turner Classic Movies for finally giving me the opportunity to see the only movie shot in Duo-Vision™! Or, feature-length split-screen. It’s like watching two movies at once. Making Wicked, Wicked the first film to have no deleted scenes. Every inch of footage was used; I’m pretty sure I saw some Super 8 stuff from a kid’s birthday party in there.

The action unfolds at San Diego’s Hotel del Coronado, setting of Some Like It Hot and inspiration for Stephen King’s 1408. The junior handyman, a friendly sort studying embalming by mail, briefly suspends his killing spree when he becomes obsessed with the world’s worst lounge singer. Edd Byrnes plays the surly lifeguard in a performance that inspired the novelty song “Kookie, Kookie, Put On Your Shirt.” The lead character has a name which I forgot once Rosemarie called him Consort For Men. It’s all scored by my Aunt Minna playing the music from the 1925 version of Phantom of the Opera on a pipe organ. Think I’m joking? Watch the trailer.

Writer/director Richard Bare made the Joe McDoakes comic shorts of the 1940s – see some of them here – and he has no idea what tone to go for. Wicked, Wicked veers from tongue-in-cheek to dead serious and back, then goes for a Grand Guignol ending. The killer is saddled with a grim backstory that prefigures that of Francis Dolarhyde in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon.

To his credit, Bare milks the split-screen gimmick for all it’s worth. Sometimes it offers two angles on the same scene, with characters walking out of one movie into another. Sometimes it shows parallel action. A character will allude to an event and we’ll see a flashback on the other side of the screen, or they’ll lie and we’ll witness the truth. It all adds up to a load of nonsense, but it earns Wicked, Wicked an honorific I rarely bestow: the movie so bad you can’t stop watching.