Girdler Binge: The Manitou (1978)

William Girdler’s final film, The Manitou (1978), is just about the craziest knock-off of The Exorcist (1973) yet fashioned, and as a result, the director’s most entertaining cinematic effort.  

Every frame seems infused with the director’s gonzo desire to push the limits and dazzle the audience, and accordingly The Manitou zig-zags merrily between inventive special effects sequences and over-the-top moments of bloody horror. What the movie sacrifices in coherence, it thus gains in terms of jaw-dropping spectacle.

Underneath it all, the film's story and its consequences are utterly ridiculous, but that fact doesn’t stop Girdler from going for broke with his dedicated, throw-everything-out-and-see-what-sticks approach to the material. Because of the director’s non-conventional, open and inventive approach to the material, Girdler stages some moments -- such as a creepy séance and a levitating old lady -- with real ingenuity. 

The Manitou is in no way a great movie, which seems to be my refrain this week on the blog (see: The Legend of Boggy Creek), and yet it ably demonstrates how Girdler was growing with each opportunity behind the camera, and gaining a sense of confidence in his work.  

Writing of The Manitou, film scholar John Brosnan observed in Starburst #8 (1979) that it is “basically very silly.” 

He added “it’s too slow in places; it lacks an internal logic, the dialogue is often embarrassing…but in the long run none of this matters because the movie succeeds in being entertaining.”  

He also notes that the last thirty minutes of the film are a high point, a “mind-blowing barrage of special effects, each one more outrageous than the last.” On all these points, he is absolutely correct.

I thus maintain that Girdler’s early death (in a helicopter accident…) was not only a terrible personal tragedy, but a loss for the genre. I just can’t help but believe that had the Kentucky filmmaker lived, he would have made some very memorable genre movies in the 1980s; films that we'd all be talking about and reviewing on blogs to this day.

As it stands, The Manitou -- so visually-daring and yet also bizarre story-wise -- is Girdler’s last hurrah. The film is weird and wild -- incredibly variable in quality -- and a lot of fun. And that description perhaps, is the best epitaph for Girdler’s career in movie horror. 

“It kind of…moves, sometimes.”

A woman named Karen Tandy (Susan Strasberg) is admitted to a San Francisco hospital because of a strange, expanding growth on her back.  

At first, the growth is believed to be a tumor, but Dr. Hughes (Jon Cedar) and Dr. McEvoy (Paul Mantee) determine that it is not actually a growth, but a fetus.

Harry Erskine (Tony Curtis) a fortune teller and friend of Karen’s is disturbed that the constantly-growing fetus-thing can’t be removed by any conventional means. Dr. Hughes attempts surgery, but cuts his own hand during the operation. Later, a hospital laser grows crazy and starts blasting the operating theater during a second removal attempt.

After consulting with a medium and a historian Dr. Snow (Burgess Meredith), Erskine recruits Native American medicine man John Singing Rock (Michael Ansara) to fight the thing growing inside of Karen.  

As it turns out, this weird “baby” is the reincarnated form of an ancient, evil medicine man called Misquamacus. Misquamacus is angry because x-rays have mutated him, and he emerges from Karen’s back deformed, hideous, and seeking power.

Planning to take over the world, Misquamacus summons several manitou -- evil spirits, including the Lizard God, The North Wind, and Satan himself.

But, as Harry realizes, every object in the world possesses a manitou, and he hopes to harvest the hospital’s equipment to strike back against Misquamacus before he grows invincible.

“Love is one of the strongest medicines there is.”

The Manitou features several notable trademarks of the 1970s cinema, including the possession/exorcism scene (familiar not just from The Exorcist, but also Girdler’s Abby), the “birth” or hospital delivery scene gone wrong (It’s Alive), and finally, the zippy laser beams of George Lucas’s Star Wars.  

On that last front, the movie's final battle witnesses a (topless) Strasberg perched atop her hospital bed, shooting colored lasers from her finger-tips at a hovering Misquamacus. The battle takes place not against the backdrop of the San Francisco hospital, but the entire cosmos itself.  All the universe is the (weird) background for this story...

That’s just the final touch, however, in Girdler’s crazy kaleidoscope. 

My favorite scene in the film is the one in which a little, blue-haired old lady arrives to have her fortune read at Harry’s apartment, and is suddenly possessed by Misquamacus. 

Without warning, this senior citizen busts a move, commencing a Native American rain dance (which alone is a sight to behold...), and then levitates through Harry’s apartment, out into the upstairs hallway.  

Finally, the spirit hurls her down the stairs, taking much of the staircase banister with her body, absolutely pulping the construction. The scene escalates from off-kilter to bizarre to I-can’t-quite-believe-what-I’m-seeing insane in just a few minutes.  And the levitation effects still hold up.

Another moment that is splendidly orchestrated finds Harry attempting a séance with his friends, including a medium. 

During the séance, Misquamacus appears, but not in any conventional sense.  Rather than using wispy opticals or visual effects to represent the spirit, Girdler tries something truly original instead.  The black-top of the table at the center of the séance is replaced, invisibly, with a pool of black oil, and very slowly (and creepily…) Misquamacus’s head rises from the table (a real head, covered in the oil) to face his supplicants. The demon sort of “shapes” himself out of the table, and it isn’t an effect that I've seen used before in this particular setting.

But there’s still more. One whole ward of the San Francisco hospital is transformed into an Arctic wasteland, covered in ice and snow. 

And then there’s the incredible moment when the computer manitou -- battling Misquamacus -- explodes and Dr. Hughes suddenly explodes with it on screen. He just goes up in flames.

Even the birthing scene is a great gross out moment. Misquamacus casts of Karen like an old sweater and splatters onto the hospital floor before slithering away, off-screen.

In my review of The Manitou in Horror Films of the 1970s, I termed Girdler’s last effort a “fun house of film gimmicks,” and today that description seems appropriate. It looks to me like the filmmaker and his team had a ball thinking of the wackiest, most unconventional ways to attack the horror sequences. Not all the effects work, but the creativity is admirable.

I haven’t read the novel by Graham Masterson upon which the film was based, but I must presume that it made sense, and connected its narrative together well. The same cannot be said of the cinematic version. 

For example: why was Karen picked as the “mother” for this resurrection?  Why do some Manitou oppose Misquamacus, while other support his cause? More importantly, what is his cause, really?  If he is powerful enough to summon Satan as a minion, he must be fearsome and strong, and yet he is undone by…the power of love?

In the end, however, such questions matter not.  This “Manitou,” as one character notes, “has momentum…”

The sad thing is that with The Manitou proving such a hit, Girdler had momentum in his career too. I would have loved to see what the filmmaker did with that that currency, and I wonder still, sometimes, of the strange destinations he had planned for future audiences.

Girdler Binge: Three on a Meathook (1973)

The quaintly titled Three on a Meathook (1973) from director William B. Girdler is a full-on homage to -- or perhaps rip-off of -- Alfred Hitchcock’s landmark film, Psycho (1960).  

Like that film (and like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre [1974] as well), the film is loosely based on the exploits of real-life, mid-western serial killer Ed Gein. Girdler’s version of the macabre tale, however, is shot in Louisville, Kentucky, and on a budget of just twenty-thousand dollars. Still, Girdler actually apes the Master’s moves in some key sequences here, though to little avail.

The fledgling artistry evident in the best moments of the admittedly uneven Asylum of Satan (1972), is, alas, not present here to any significant degree. Perhaps this is so because Three on a Meathook arises from a more naturalistic school of horror filmmaking, and Girdler doesn’t seize opportunities to make his film particularly stylish. 

In fact, the film is relatively short on close-ups, which saddles Three on a Meathook with a distant or remote quality. This approach makes it difficult to invest in the characters, and without investment, fear cannot blossom.

Worse, the film grinds to a halt during the protagonist’s stop at a Louisville dive, where a local band performs not one but two songs in their entirety. In a film just eighty-minutes in length, that’s a lot of time to lose on a musical interlude.

Never reaching a real fever pitch of tension or suspense, Three on a Meathook proves interesting mostly in a few nicely orchestrated death scenes, particularly one shocking moment involving a decapitation.  

Other than that, however, the film showcases a sort of developmentally-arrested Girdler, a director still finding his way with actors and visualizations. Call it a sophomore slump.

“Let this boy keep his evil to himself.”

In Kentucky, four young women get together at a lake resort for the weekend. When their car breaks down, the friendly local, Billy (James Pickett) offers to help them, letting them stay on his farm for the night. Billy’s strict father, Pa Townsend (Charles Kissinger), doesn’t approve of the arrangement. He worries about Billy’s behavior when he is near women. The boy has never been the same since his mother died years earlier.

By night, an unknown assailant brutally murders all four young women, some in their sleep. Pa blames Billy for the blood-bath and promises to clean up his mess. A guilty-feeling Billy goes to see The Graduate, and then visits a bar to drink away his blues. There Billy meets and falls in love with a free-spirited bartender, Sherry (Sherry Steiner).  He wants to invite her back to the farm, over Pa’s objections.

Sherry and a friend, Becky (Madelyn Buzzard) stay at the Townsend Farm, but Becky is butchered, and a frightened Sherry finds the corpses of the dead girls in the barn…on a row of meat-hooks.  

Soon, she is accosted by Billy’s father, who is behind the killings…but for a strange and sinister purpose.

“I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t listen.”

William B. Girdler has sometimes been termed the movie “rip-off” king because his movies almost universally ape a famous formula or particular film. His Abby (1976) is the “black” The Exorcist (1973). His Grizzly (1976) is essentially Jaws (1975) on land, and so forth. Similarly, one can make the case that Three on a Meathook follows this example.  It is -- no bones about it -- the director’s version of Psycho.

To start with, both films commence with a camera pan across a modern metropolis. In the case of Psycho, it’s Phoenix, AZ, and here it’s Louisville, KY.  

Then, immediately following this exterior pan we move into a hotel room, where a sexual liaison is already occurring.  Girdler is able to show more flesh here, however, than Hitchcock was permitted in 1960.  Girdler’s lovers are seen locked under the sheets together, topless. The man is mounting the woman. When the woman emerges from the coupling, she performs the rest of the scene without a bra.

Then, four women go on a trip (as Janet Leigh’s Marion Crane undertook a trip…), and end up at the abode of terror, in this case not a motel, but a farm.  

In both instances, the boy-ish host, either Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins) or Billy offer to feed the hungry guests, and in both cases a murder soon occurs in the bathroom.  

Here, the shower is not the location of the brutal murder however. A bath-tub does the trick instead. Intriguingly, four victims die during this sequence, and the best moment occurs not in the bathroom, aping Psycho, but in a hall-way where a lightning-fast and well-executed decapitation offs the last victim, and captures the attention.

After everyone in the initial victim pool is dead, a new female lead is introduced (Sherry, in this case, rather than Vera Miles’ Lila Crane). As she goes cross close to Billy, we are left to wonder as to the identity of the killer.  Is it his father?  Or is it his mother, whom we are told died when he was ten years old?

After the murders are resolved, we get, almost note-for-note, Psycho’s talky “restoring order” ending, in which a psychiatrist explains at length the details of the case.  Just as Simon Oakland discussed Norman Bates’ schizophrenia in Psycho, the psychiatrist character here goes on at great length about Pa Townsend’s psychosis.

And finally, in time for the last shot, we get the composition of an imprisoned madman, not Norman, but rather Pa Townsend. This is where they will spend the rest of their days…incarcerated.

From A to B to C, Three on a Meathook leads right back to Psycho. The movie’s “clever” twist, however, is an inversion of Norman’s story. Whereas Norman’s mother was really dead (and stuffed in the fruit cellar) but Norman was pretending she was alive by becoming her, Billy’s mother is believed to be dead, but actually alive.  

You see, she suffers from “cannibalistic tendencies” and Billy’s father, Pa, has been murdering passersby (and blaming Billy…) so as to procure meat for his beloved wife.  

The idea here is not bad: to ape Psycho relentlessly and for as long as possible and then, at the final surprise juncture, reverse a key plot point. But again, Girdler doesn’t do much with his narrative or his twist-in-the-tale that is commendable or even memorable.

The thrill of watching a film like Three on a Meathook, even today, comes from the fact that the film was made outside of Hollywood proper. Accordingly, you are never quite sure how far it will go, or what you will see. Hollywood decorum doesn’t matter in the Girdler-verse, and so you could see something that simply wouldn’t be allowed in an establishment film. 

For me, that moment of spiky, nasty invention comes with the aforementioned decapitation. I’ve included the still of that moment, which does it no favors since a photograph reveals how the trick was accomplished.

But on film it all happens so fast and is so nasty in conception, that the moment is momentarily shocking.  The film could have used more moments like this one, and less like the unnecessary musical interlude.  The decapitation gag, rough as it is, deserves a mention because Girdler always sought to give audiences their money’s worth, and took apparent glee in creating weird and experimental effects.  The apex of that trend comes in The Manitou (1978) which boasts some very inventive, very ingenious and very weird visuals, but you can trace a line backwards from there to Three on a Meathook. Everyone starts somewhere.

Outside the decapitation gag and a nicely-shot “discovery” moment of revelation with three corpses on the aforementioned meat-hooks, however, the film feels flat and remote, as if we’re watching the whole thing from a distance. 

This approach actually diminishes the sense of horror, rather than augmenting it.  If Girdler could have aped any characteristic of Hitchcock’s, it should have been the master’s devotion to formalism, and the desire to make the audience feel -- through film grammar -- real terror.  Similarly, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre plays like some surreal, bizarre version of Alice in Wonderland, in a world where order is unsettled, and never restored. By comparison to either masterpiece, Three on a Meathook is very, very flat.

Girdler Binge: Asylum of Satan (1972)

Shot in Louisville, Kentucky, reportedly on a budget of just $50,000 dollars, Asylum of Satan (1972) is director William Girdler’s first feature film. He made it when he was just twenty-four years old.

As is the case with all of the director’s films, Asylum of Satan possesses notable gaps in logic, and the director makes some astoundingly poor choices about the monsters he chooses to visualize on camera. The film’s depiction of the Prince of Darkness is horribly inexpressive and phony-looking, and yet it receives considerable screen-time.More than that, the cheap Devil mask/head succeeds in scuttling the film’s crimson-hued climax.

Beyond these readily-apparent missteps and limitations of budget, however, it feels sometimes during the film like Girdler is actually onto something interesting, at least from a visual perspective. His best conceit is that of an asylum that seems to span two different or competing realities, and notably this leitmotif requires no visual effects or make-up at all, only set re-decoration. Accordingly, the double-nature of the film’s setting, Pleasant Hill Hospital, may be Asylum of Satan’s most memorable achievement.

From one perspective, some viewers may also enjoy Asylum of Satan as a kind of 78-minute dirty joke, given the film’s final revelation or punch-line. Yet it is exceedingly difficult to know if this is a case of a plot point that is unintentionally or intentionally humorous. 

Regardless, the film’s final revelation remains unforgettable.

In Asylum of Satan, concert pianist Lucina Martin (Carla Borelli) is unexpectedly transferred to Pleasant Hill Hospital -- a sanitarium -- by her regular physician, Doctor Nolan. She vehemently protests, but is told by an employee at the asylum named Martine (Charles Kissinger) that she will be glad to be treated by Doctor Specter (also Charles Kissinger), a “great man” whose specialty is pain.

Lucina meets Dr. Specter and promptly demands her release from custody, but he insists that she has had a nervous breakdown, and that she must recover in the isolation of the asylum. Specter also performs a physical examination of the lovely Ms. Martin and notes that her skin remains “unblemished…by sin.”

While Lucina’s boyfriend, Chris  Duncan (Nick Jolley) goes in search of her, and attempts to get the police, led by Lt. Walsh (Louis Bandy) to raid the asylum, Lucina’s fellow residents are killed one at a time, by insects, by fire, and by poison snakes in the swimming pool.  

As she soon learns, Lucina is to be Dr. Specter’s final sacrifice to Satan, one that will grant him eternal life for the delivery of virgin…

A legitimately great shot pops up early in Asylum of Satan. An unconscious Lucinda is carried on a stretcher up the stairs to her room by several paramedics. At the same time, a dark shadow, his features indistinct, silently watches her go. The positioning of the characters in the frame, with the dark figure intruding but un-moving,creepily suggests menace, and furthermore that, on occasion, Girdler is able to catalyze his instincts to make a shot that really carries psychic weight, at least purely in terms of imagery.

At another juncture, some kind of hideously deformed creature emerges from Room 319 in the hospital, lunging out of the dark at the camera. The moment is odd and frightening, and it goes unexplained. The creature’s make-up doesn’t hold-up to the scrutiny the camera’s gaze provides, so terror dissipates. But for the first few seconds, the fear generated by this set-up is palpable.

Alas, so many other moments fail to come off as Girdler no doubt hope and intended, and largely because, at this early junction in his career the director still seems to be calibrating what things should be seen on camera and for how long.  

For instance, the crippled female resident who is killed by bugs gets the worst treatment perhaps. Fake, jiggly insects -- creepy crawlies? -- land on her face, and there is no illusion of life, just the suggestion of jello or gelatin. Similarly, the final scenes of the film that depict a Satanic Mass that goes on for far too long.

And when the Devil himself shows up, it is in in a guise that inspires no fear, no dread. Yet Old Scratch remains in our sight, moment after agonizing moment.

As I noted in my introduction, there’s no reason, really, to show all this stuff, because Girdler does far better with the movie’s central location: an asylum that is sometimes an immaculate, state-of-the-art-facility, and sometimes a dilapidated, ruined place of EVIL. The environs shift back and forth unpredictably and without reason, and are thus, if not disturbing, at least discomfiting. The idea of the asylum being two places also fits in nicely with Lucina’s nervous breakdown. She could be imagining the horrors she encounters.

And though it is undeniably odd that Charles Kissinger should play both Lucina’s female hostess Martine and her male doctor, Specter, the double performance by the actor also contributes to this plot line about two universes operating on parallel tracks. This idea has been repeated in horror films and television since Asylum of Satan, but notably, and to great effect in (the brilliant) Silent Hill (2006).

What works effectively about many of the asylum scenes is Girdler’s choice to explain very little regarding the imagery. Instead, Lucina ends up in a dining hall with the other asylum residents, surrounded by hooded figures with hidden faces. These hooded figures all sit frozen in wheelchairs for some reasons, and are completely silent. On their plates: eggs still in the shells, untouched.  It’s such a weird and visually disturbing set of images that tension and intrigue are generated. 

Are the eggs there to represent souls? Why aren’t the people moving? Who are they?  Are they even, truly, present? Why is one of the hooded figures burned?

Meanwhile, the nurses in the institution all deliberately lack any emotional affect, and seem like drones or zombies. And creepy Dr. Specter has a peep hole in his medicine cabinet through which he watches Lucina disrobe. All these touches together work nicely to suggest a realm of darkness and diabolism.

It’s all creepy and slightly surreal, and even Kissinger’s stilted, declamatory manner of speech seems to play towards rather than against Asylum of Satan’s prevailing mood of strangeness. I often write about how many effective horror movies (like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre) take on the qualities of a dream, or a waking nightmare. Asylum of Satan is obviously nowhere near the same class of filmmaking,but occasionally it attains that kind of abject, disturbing weirdness that critics like me tend to covet in the genre.

From a certain perspective, Asylum of Satan is really and truly a dirty joke. The devil’s henchman, Specter, goes out of his way to procure a virgin for the Devil, only for the Devil to detect, almost immediately, that she has already been deflowered.  On one hand, this seems like wicked, droll commentary about the youth-revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and the difficulty of finding someone virginal.

On the other hand, as I noted in my book, Horror Films of the 1970s, there’s no clear “tell” that Girdler is pulling a gag or intends for the discovery to be played as tongue-in-cheek. Lucina’s *ahem* condition is played, for lack of a better word, straight.  

Also, it isn’t entirely clear to me, on this re-watch, why Specter missed that Lucina is, uh, sexually experienced since he performed a full medical exam on her.  We know she wasn’t deflowered at the asylum, but rather beforehand, because we get a flashback of Lucina and Chris making love after a walk in the snow on a wintry day.

I have a tremendous fondness for Girdler and his films, but it isn’t always easy to forge an affirmative case for his artistry. However certain shots and set-ups in Asylum of Satan work pretty well, and more than that, make the case that the director has a good eye….or was working to develop one. I limit that observation mostly to Lucina’s arrival in the sanitarium, and that weird scene in the cafeteria from Hell.  

Unless you’re really into horror films and horror film history, Asylum of Satan may not be your thing. The acting is weak, the dialogue is pretty atrocious, and the end is opaque in the sense that it isn’t clear how it is to be interpreted.  

But, again, every now and then the movie engineers a moment of creepy frisson, and thus keeps audiences tuned in.  In some ways, William B. Girdler’s first film, Asylum of Satan remains as schizophrenic as its two realities. 

On one hand, Girdler wants to show you everything, and “everything” -- like the bugs or Satan, himself -- doesn’t look so hot. 

On the other hand, he pulls back in terms of the explanation for the monster in room 319 and regarding the cafeteria of egg-eating cultists. In those moments, the film seems to achieve genuine idiosyncratic nuttiness.