I Dismember Mama (1972): Poor Albert and Little Annie

"I Dismember Mama", aka "Poor Albert & Little Annie" (1972) has one of those notorious titles that I have always seen lurking on the outskirts of my awareness, on video shelves, in magazine articles, in catalogs...and all with no idea what kind of movie to which it was attached.  I decided to end this silly game that "I Dismember Mama" and I were playing with each other, and just walk right up and introduce myself. That was when "I Dismember Mama" turned around and whacked me up side of the head. I still haven't recovered.

Directed by Paul Leder, whose career I'm mostly unfamiliar with, "I Dismember Mama" is a low budget curiosity that is full of interesting photography, excellent performances by actors, and a memorably bizarre story. Although its cheapness shows through in almost every scene, it shows just as much art and inspiration as it does technical ineptitude and fragmented editing. If it hadn't featured such convincing performances by the leads, it never would have worked.

"Don't say that you love me, just tell me that you want me."

The first thing we see in the film is a man's face surrounded by darkness, next to a running film projector. The face belongs to Albert Robertson (Zooey Hall), who is currently in a mental hospital. A nurse comes in and interacts with him, gently scolding him with something like "Now Albert, you know you're not supposed to be watching these films..." and we assume these are what proper people refer to as "art films".  When she takes the film out of the projector, Albert goes from mildly irritated to violent in a split second, hurling the startled nurse onto a bed, ripping her clothes off and trying to strangle her. Orderlies intervene in the nick of time, but we immediately understand that Albert is screwed up like a soup sandwich, and appears to be in an institution ill-equipped to deal with him. Albert's doctor tells him Albert's there to deal with his feelings that "all women are whores," and he seems to fixate on his mother (Anne Marie Jordan) most of all. Albert has tried to knife her to death, and because of Albert's lack of remorse for his aberrant behavior, the doctor intends to send him to a state institution. See, Albert's mother is rich, and she has him in some private, low-security hospital, and Albert easily escapes by murdering an orderly.

"NO dear, don't take that Brady Bunch acting job, I'm warning you, it will kill your career."

From what we see of Mrs. Robertson, Albert had the right idea after all, as she seems like a self-absorbed snob. We see her talking down to her housekeeper, Alice (Marlene Tracy), and she blames Albert's outburst on his victim, the nurse, and she pooh-poohs the idea of sending Albert to an institution. She changes her tune though when Albert calls her and tells her he can hardly wait to see her. The police spirit her away to another house, but apparently it never occurs to them to put an officer at the main house. You know, the one Albert knows his mother lives in? When Albert shows up there later, he catches Alice packing her suitcase to leave.  In one of the movie's most disturbing scenes, he begins to torment Alice, threatening her with a knife for information about his mother, then ordering Alice to strip for him and perform a sexy dance. It's an intense scene, and one that both actors carry off expertly, especially Marlene Tracy. She's forced at knifepoint to strip and sing for Albert, and we can see in her eyes when Alice begins to realize Albert will certainly murder her. It's one of the most hair-raising things I've seen in a movie.

But the rest of the film is just as engrossing and disturbing. Alice's preteen daughter, Annie (Geri Reischel), comes home from school after Albert has killed her mother, and the dangerously disturbed Albert tells her that her mother had to go to the doctor because she was ill. After they hang out together for a while, Albert takes a liking to her and apparently decides not to kill her, instead spiriting her away on an idyllic day where they ride paddleboats and a small train. When Albert takes Annie to a hotel, his strange attraction to her starts to manifest itself. Instead of making a sexual advance toward Annie, Albert goes to a bar and picks up a woman there by flashing a little money around. We already know he's going to kill her, and Annie wakes up when it happens, escaping the hotel suite down the fire escape. Albert chases after her and pursues her in the film's climax, which finds them Annie lost in a strange, deserted back alley of the city. They wind up in a mannequin factory, where Annie tries to hide among the figures. Albert spots her though, and accuses her of being "just like all the others", attacking her with a convenient meat cleaver that just happens to by lying nearby. Annie, however, pushes a mannequin into him and he falls out a fourth story window onto the concrete.

"I Dismember Mama" actually doesn't feature any dismemberment, and eventually the mother is completely forgotten, so the title is nearly meaningless. This is probably one of the biggest problems that the movie has, since enough screen time is given to Albert's heartless mother that we start to care about whether or not he gets her, and we want him to. Although Albert is a compulsive murderer and rapist, we get the feeling that his mother is completely disassociated from reality, and she can't deal with the truth about Albert. There is also all sorts of ineptitude from the police, who aren't even coherent enough to guess that Albert might return home after escaping from the hospital. Even Albert's "doctor" is a shithead, openly defying the police investigation and refusing to tell Mrs. Robertson that Albert has killed her housekeeper.

"Lookin' out for looooove...."

But these unresolved plot threads are really superfluous anyway, since the film's centerpiece is Zooey Hall. His performance as Albert is as terrifying as David Hess from "Last House on the Left", but Hall endows the character with a likable side too, which really makes it upsetting when he lapses into his deranged behavior. The scene where he threatens Alice and makes her strip is really scary because he is so calm and collected during the whole thing, but his explosive violence in the other murders is just as scary. The terror of Albert is that he's obviously dangerously disturbed, yet he doesn't come up against anybody who can put him in check. The doctor he's assigned is unable to reach him, the hospital staff is unprepared to deal with him, and the victims he selects are seemingly unable to fight back against him. His interest in Annie, however, brings out a childlike side of himself, and it's hard not to feel pity for him when we see his momentary happiness. A lot of the tension, of course, depends on Annie being totally naive about the fact that she's in danger, not to mention that she is in the company of a man who apparently has pedophilic designs on her. After killing her mother, Albert takes her on a day of fun, then spends the night with her in a hotel, and in a bizarre sequence we see them conducting a mock wedding. Albert tells Annie that she's the only pure female he's ever known, uncorrupted by whatever issues he perceives about most women. In the hallucinatory chase through the mannequin factory at the end, surrounded by artificial female bodies in various stages of assembly, there's a moment when Albert finally spots her and sees her with cosmetics on, something we're never quite sure is real or not. This horrifies him and he immediately decides to kill Annie, using a meat cleaver that's conveniently lying nearby--in a mannequin factory! Only Annie's cleverness saves her; using a mannequin as a shield, she manages to push Albert out the window, the mannequin protecting her in the way an adult might protect a child from danger.

"I Dismember Mama" is extremely dated filmmaking, which either adds to or detracts from it, depending on the viewer. The glimpse into the social mores, design, clothes, decor, and attitudes of the 1970s is crucial to the experience, and there's even a ballad that plays over top of the montage where Albert and Annie have their fun day together. I loved one moment when a character was standing outside a hot dog shop that sold hot dogs for 19 cents. Viewers expecting gore will be disappointed, and with good reason in a film that was marketed until a title that features the word "dismember". There is a gory aftermath of a throat-slashing near the beginning, and a briefly glimpsed surface wound during a knife attack, but that's the extent. The original title is also misleading, though, and more than a little vague. I can't say that "I Dismember Mama" is a pleasant experience, but considering horror movies are meant to get under our skin, this one succeeded in spades with me. It is artfully disturbing and tastefully done, considering that it touches on themes of mental illness, sexual violence, and apparent pedophilia, and I won't forget it anytime soon.  Leder, who also was behind the awful 1976 giant monster spoof/ripoff movie "A*P*E", also made a sequel to "I Dismember Mama" in 1994 called "Killing Obsession", but as yet I haven't seen it, and I can't imagine how this doomy little movie could be improved upon. Forget the lack of gore; this is about as lurid, affecting, and engrossing that an exploitation film can get.

Keep My Grave Open (1976)

They're not kidding, fella. Believe me.

Few films are as hallowed in my humble world as 1973's "Don't Look In The Basement", directed by low budget auteur S.F. Brownrigg. With a modest five films in his repertoire, four of them are horror films, the last of which was 1976's "Keep My Grave Open". Having never seen it before, I was pleased to discover that it was indeed like his other films, ultra low on budget and deliriously high in rural gothic atmosphere. Like a Texan John Waters, Brownrigg made most of his no-budget films with recurring actors and actresses, and many of them appear in this one. The most notable is lead actress Camilla Carr, whose role in "Don't Look In The Basement" was that of Harriet, the unbalanced, murderous woman who thought her baby doll was a real baby.  Here, Carr plays Lesley Fontaine, a disturbed young woman who lives in an isolated rural mansion, and whoo baby does she ever go off the deep end.

Brownrigg opens the film with a lengthy sequence involving a transient man hitchhiking along a rural road.  He comes to a large house off the beaten path, and wanders up to it. Finding nobody at home after calling out numerous times, the man goes inside and raids the refrigerator of some food, including a large steak. When he takes the food away and builds a fire to cook the steak, he is swiftly approached by a shadowy figure that kills him with a large sword.

As the hitch hiker is killed, Brownrigg uses one of my favorite horror movie tropes: someone strikes a death blow with a knife, and there's an abrupt jump cut to a butcher chopping meat in a deli. This is where we meet Lesley, doing her grocery shopping in a small general store (replacing those stolen groceries, of course), but when she returns to the mansion, we learn that she seems to share it with "Kevin", an off-screen person that refuses to answer her from behind his locked bedroom door. It isn't long before we realize we will never see Kevin, and that Lesley has a dual personality thing going on. A few people come into contact with the reclusive Lesley, including her psychiatrist, Dr. Emerson (Gene Ross) and a young man named Robert (Stephen Tobolowsky) who tends to Lesley's horse. Dr. Emerson seems to know all about "Kevin", although we're not sure exactly who Kevin is, or was, or if he ever was.

Lesley dresses up like Kevin though, and goes all stab-happy. First Robert's girlfriend Suzie (Ann Stafford) gets skewered, and her death scene is the film's best: "Kevin" locks her in her room, but Suzie doesn't know she's in trouble, completely oblivious to a moment where the sword comes stabbing inward at her from between the door and the jamb. She slowly starts to panic until she's frantic and she gets impaled while leaning against the door again. We learn that Kevin is/was Lesley's brother, and also that Lesley's problems stem from her incestuous attachment to him. In an overly indulgent sequence, Brownrigg shows Lesley making herself as sensual as possible for Kevin, putting on makeup and a dress and then drifting weirdly to Kevin's bedroom, where the camera gets on top of her in bed for what seems to be a first-person sex scene. Camilla Carr makes Lesley a very compelling anti-heroine, the heartbreaking way she meticulously makes up her face and dresses in order to seduce Kevin into loving her. Just as she's "rejected" by Kevin, Robert arrives and she refocuses her seductive tactics on him, ultimately blackmailing him into having sex with her and then dressing up like Kevin to dispatch Robert with the sword.

The film is meandering and slow paced, and Brownrigg is definitely an acquired taste. The murder sequences are not the point of the film, although they're definitely intended to titillate the audience with the potential for blood and guts. Alas, "Keep My Grave Open" is much more reserved than the bloody "Don't Look In The Basement", and here Brownrigg seems less concerned with the murderous aspects of Lesley's breakdown. Her rampage is a lot like Catherine Deneuve's extended freak-out in "Repulsion", mostly based on what's going on in Lesley's warped mind.  There's isn't much of a story here, as it's just a matter of people who are unfortunate enough to wander into Lesley's path, but there is indeed depth to Lesley's character. At the film's conclusion, she reveals to Dr. Emerson the fateful event that seems to have caused her fractured psyche: a moment when Lesley's cruel and abusive aunt caught her innocently changing her dress in the same room as her brother and tormented her for it. When Lesley tries to seduce Emerson, he instead leaves to bring help for Lesley, which she knows will lead to the discovery of her crimes. Rather than face up to her actions, Lesley commits suicide by overdosing on pills; when she drops the glass pill bottle in her sink, she scoops up the pills as well as the broken glass and swallows both.

Maybe the strangest thing about "Keep My Grave Open" is how it never really gives the viewer a definitive answer about Kevin's identity. All along we've assumed Kevin to be either dead or a figment of Lesley's imagination, but as she stumbles out onto the front porch and slowly dies from the pills, Kevin's shadowy figure emerges onto the balcony above her, watching. She looks up at him and we're not really sure if he's there, or if she's imagining him. But then he appears the next day at Lesley's grave, too, dressed exactly as Lesley used to dress when she committed murders while wearing his clothes. He then returns to the mansion and speaks to Lesley, who is no longer there, the same way she spoke to him when he wasn't there.

Brownrigg made his films for audiences who were usually viewing them late at night as B features in a drive-in theater, and even though he didn't have much money to make these movies, he understood how to make them watchable and interesting. Some directors just threw these kinds of movies together and didn't care about the final product, but S.F. Brownrigg was definitely an artist and had a unique downbeat vision. Several sequences in the film seem to be more lengthy that necessary, possibly to pad out the film to feature length (it already runs just barely under 80 minutes), but it's this kind of indulgence that makes me think of Brownrigg as an auteur. Lesley's 'makeup' scene goes on and on, giving us excruciating closeups of her lips, but combined with the disorienting soundtrack music it also has a hypnotic effect, especially considering it occurs at night in the mansion, while Lesley's madness is in full swing. Another lengthy sequence occurs when Lesley stalks a prostitute she has brought back to the house for "Kevin". When Lesley appears in her Kevin outfit, the prostitute takes off, and unlike the other victims in the film, she fights back effectively, wounding Lesley and almost getting away. Almost.

"Keep My Grave Open" benefits greatly from Camilla Carr's performance, but most of the other actors are good, too. As I mentioned before, there are several holdovers from "Don't Look In The Basement", including Gene Ross, Jessie Lee Fulton, and the wonderful Annabelle Weenick, whose performance as Dr. Masters in "Basement" was unforgettable. The soundtrack music was done by Robert Farrar, who scored all of Brownrigg's horror films, and it's extremely similar in tone, with repeating riffs that effectively communicate the films anxiety and unstable atmosphere. Unfortunately, S.F. Brownrigg only made a few films, but the ones he left us with are worth revisiting, just to get that grungy, creepy feeling that he was so good at creating.

Whoever created this alternate title card was definitely not trying. At all.

Kevin finally appears...or does he?

Blood and Lace (1971)

In a font that you can almost read....almost...

Just a few weeks ago I sat mesmerized in my car at the Riverside Drive-In as "Blood and Lace" unspooled across the giant screen, and as each scene happened it got progressively more insane. I went into "Blood and Lace" entirely unaware of what it was about, so I was a blank slate.  "Blood and Lace" wrote all over me in crazy, schizophrenic lettering that made no goddamn sense.  If you want to experience that for yourself, stop reading this right now and go watch the movie. Meanwhile, I've got to vent.

Released in 1971 by American International, "Blood and Lace" features a wacky cast of actors you've most likely seen in lots of other things, the most recognizable being Gloria Grahame (her most famous role being that of Violet Bick in "It's A Wonderful Life"). Vic Tayback is here too, several years from becoming Mel Sharples in 1974. The lead is Melody Patterson, who had been seen on television in the series "F Troop". Out of nowhere is also a young Dennis Christopher ("Breaking Away", "Fade to Black", and a zillion other things), and there are several other character actors who worked a lot on TV.

"Blood and Lace" takes us into a cheap, artificial world reminiscent of a Harry Novak picture, populated by characters you think you understand until you realize that all of them are out of their friggin minds, especially the ones you initially think are the most normal. It opens with a murder sequence that is not entirely unlike the opening of John Carpenter's "Halloween", an extended point-of-view shot of a prowler lurking around a dark house, entering a door, removing a hammer out of a drawer, and then wandering through the house to the bedroom of a sleeping couple. The killer hammers the woman in the face until she's dead, and hits the man a few times, too. Before the man is finished off, the killer sets the room on fire, and we see the bludgeoned man roll out of bed and try to escape.

"A girl fight in our underwear? No problem!"

The murdered woman was Edna Masters, a small town prostitute, and the man was her latest customer. Edna's teenage daughter Ellie (Melody Patterson) is placed in the care of a social worker named Mr. Mullins, who has her temporarily placed in a hospital--a nurse runs in after Ellie wakes up screaming from a nightmare and seems more annoyed than concerned, turning angrily to Mullins and saying "You've got to get this girl OUT of here." This was really my first indicator that this movie is not playing with a full deck--a nurse is angry at a teenage girl whose mother was just viciously murdered with a hammer to the head?  Ellie tells Mullins she wants to be on her own and seek out the father she never knew, but all she really knows about her father is that he was the first man who ever made love to her mother. Mullins tells her that since her father is unknown, legally she's an orphan and must be treated as such.After she tries to run away, Mullins reports her to the sheriff, Calvin Carruthers (Vic Tayback), and Carruthers chases her down and returns her to the hospital. Carruthers knows who she is, and his interest in her is already apparent--Ellie is taken aback when Calvin tells her he recognizes her from when she was a child and attended the theater he worked in. He is now the sheriff, and intends to keep an eye on Ellie while handling the investigation of the death of Ellie's mother. Ellie claims she saw a man run out of her mother's bedroom the night of the murder, but she claims she didn't see the hammer in real life, only in her dreams. Calvin warns her that the man who killed her mother might be after her.

But Calvin's intentions for Ellie are not entirely innocent. He meets Mullins for a drink in a bar to discuss Ellie, and Mullins tells him he intends to take Ellie to a private home for children run by a woman named Mrs. Deere. Calvin admits to Mullins that he is interested in Ellie as a potential wife because he considers her good "breeding stock", despite the fact that he is much older than she is.

"Have you gone crazy? Walk in the grass in my bare feet? Why it's ten miles up to Mount Bedford!"

"These young men and women are supposed to be children?"

Once Ellie gets to the Deere Youth Home is when things really go off the deep end. Mrs. Deere is a villain of the lowest caliber, an icy witch queen who hates children more than Miss Hannigan did--and does all the things Miss Hannigan probably did in scenes that were cut from "Annie" for being too batshit crazy. Mrs. Deere's world is seemingly on the brink of falling apart--her husband has been dead for a year, leaving her to run the orphanage with only the help of her skeezy handyman Tom Krege (Len Lesser). Oh, and it doesn't help Mrs. Deere that she is certifiably crazy. She subjects the children to Draconian rules, and when the rules are broken she tortures and abuses them. If they try to run away, she and Krege hunt them down and kill them, but not wanting to lose the income they bring, their bodies are kept in a large walk-in freezer in the basement. Mrs. Deere is hoping she can keep convincing Mullins that the kids are still alive and just "sick" when he visits, and she distracts him with sexual favors. But Krege suddenly blackmails her for more money, and Ellie arrives and starts snooping around to uncover her secrets, and Calvin shows up at the orphanage threatening to conduct a police search of the entire premises. In one of the movie's strangest scenes, she confides to her dead husband about how how her crazy world is imploding--of course she keeps his dead body in the freezer along with the others. Mrs. Deere reveals to Ellie (who still doesn't see the big picture) that modern medicine can work wonders with transplants these days, and that one day people who have died will be restored, so this is her grand plan. There's a great scene where she puts one of the dead frozen kids into an infirmary bed and talks to her while she's doing it: "Lucky I got you to the freezer in time, you could have bled to death!"

The fact that these crazy events occur at all is part of the strange fascination of the movie, and all movies like it. The orphanage is appropriately isolated, to remove the more obvious question of "Why don't the kids just run away?", but an even better question is "Why don't they fight back?" None of the "kids" in the orphanage seem to be under the age of 15, and most of them actually look like they're in their mid to late 20s. The movie itself suggests that the "kids" are wards of the state until they're 21, as if they're prisoners in the orphanage, but they're way too old to be as helpless as the movie portrays them. The psychotic personality of the movie is never more apparent than in one of my favorite sequences: Mrs. Deere cruelly torments a girl she's been keeping locked in the attic as punishment for an attempted escape. As the girl languishes from thirst and begs for water, Mrs. Deere drinks a glass right in front of her and tells her how good it is. Then the scene immediately cuts to Ellie having an idyllic, sunlit walk through a field with the resident stud of the orphanage, while romantic music swells on the soundtrack.

Gloria Grahame and Len Lesser are both great as Deere and Krege. They're two capable actors playing these bizarre roles, and they really play well off one another. Grahame has several scenes where she talks in a babytalk voice to the kids while she's actually tormenting them, and there's a great moment when she reveals to Ellie how jealous she is of anybody who is youthful and beautiful. Obviously her appearance in this kind of film was in the tradition of older movie queens who found work in horror films late in their careers, like Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Veronica Lake, Shelly Winters, and most of all Geraldine Page, whose performance in "What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice?" seems to be the one from which Grahame drew the most inspiration.  Her final scene is also one of the ones you'll take away from "Blood and Lace" even if you hate it: after seeming to have all her problems solved when Krege winds up mortally wounded and Ellie takes off running, Mrs. Deere drags Krege's body into the freezer where she tells the dying man "We just have to chill your blood to stop the bleeding." But before she can leave the freezer, the thirsty girl appears in the doorway with revenge in her eyes, and slams the door shut on her, locking her inside. Just as the door closes, Gloria Grahame does this crazy thing where she grimaces in horror, screams like a daffy old bird, and jumps up and down. This was surely more acting range than was required from her when she played Bedford Falls' town hussy, Violet Bick.

The cheap atmosphere in "Blood and Lace" has a lot to do with the music and audio mix, too. Although released in 1971, the soundtrack uses hokey old-fashioned library music similar to "Night of the Living Dead" to an alarming degree. Another thing that I can't go without mentioning is the fact that Ellie's first scene, where she wakes up screaming in the hospital, is entirely and awkwardly dubbed, and Ellie's voice is dubbed by none other than famed voice actress June Foray--yes, the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel. That voice comes out of Ellie her first scene in the movie. The cinematography in the movie is another matter. I found it to be extremely exciting and effective, despite the fact that there wasn't much talent in the special effects department--the opening hammer murder should have been extremely shocking, but is instead unrealistic and laughable. Nonetheless, that lengthy point-of-view opening, the one that reminds me so much of "Halloween", is well constructed, and it's easy to see how Carpenter may have been inspired by this and determined to do it better by editing his scene so that it appeared to one long unbroken take, something "Blood and Lace" has no ambition or inspiration to do. As if a Michael Myers reference wasn't enough, a shadowy figure joins the plot as a disfigured man brandishing a hammer stalks Ellie at the Deere Youth Home, and the character bears a strong resemblance to future horror icon Fred Krueger. The bleakness of the sets is what reminds me of Harry Novak, with not much appearing to have been created just for the film, and there's a certain lurid appeal in watching a cheaply produced movie like this. The lighting is interesting as well, especially the way all the scenes inside the freezer are bathed in a monochromatic blue.

I haven't revealed the final plot twists in "Blood and Lace", and it's not because I don't want to talk about them. I think I would even be forgiven for doing so, because knowing them doesn't diminish the enjoyment of "Blood and Lace" in the least. Most of them you will see coming, and maybe some of them you will not. But I don't feel right talking about them, simply because the final moments of this movie revealed something so strange I could hardly comprehend it as a plot point, something so far from left field that it truly stunned me, the final blow in a movie during which nothing really seemed to make sense at all and where every single character turned out to be totally nutso.  In fact, "Blood and Lace" reminds me a lot of "Don't Look In The Basement" in the way it's full of insane characters who don't seem to have a firm grasp on reality, and their attempts to keep for themselves a little haven where they can act out their obsessions without being disturbed by the outside world.