Autumn wave of ghosts, ghouls and poltergeists

AFTER THE rather happy go lucky atmosphere of Cork Film Festival, I came home straight into a week of horror movies. This late autumn wave of ghosts. and ghouls, alarms and poltergeists, blood and bones, seems a slight exaggeration of the usual silly season of programme fill ups.
The curious clutch including a near traditional ghost story, two films of quality — one a thriller within sight of the inevitable Hitchcock standard — and only one squeak and giggle shocker. gave me an opportunity to examine my own lack oh enthusiasm for the horror genre. The present batch presents an unusual range of terror for inspection.
Of the new movies aspiring to some sense, The Fog ("AA" Classic, Oxford Street) is directed by John Carpenter, whose Hallowe'en formidably impressed those who saw it. 1 didn't but was equally impressed by Carpenter's ingenious science fiction comedy.
Now The Fog gets off to a magical start. That splendid old producer actor, John Houseman, in a style reminiscent of Hitchcock's own introductions to his television series, tells a group of children in a cave the local legend of a shipwreck in Antonio Bay near San Francisco.
According to the legend, when the fog recurs the sailors will rise from the dead intent on vengeance and atonement. The central movie is about a modern recurrence qf the fog, its movements commentated by a disc jockey, Stevie Wayne (Adrienne 13arbeau, in private life Mrs John Carpenter) from a lighthouse. Fite fog is credited with supernatural powers; glass shatters, a truck explodes, a church wall falls in and a trawler faits to return. Meanwhile the bank of fog spreads.
Carpenter succeeds in building up and maintaining a genuine sense of mystery in the villainy of the fog. My only serious objection is to the-film's typically non-Catholic superstitious attitude connecting an evidently way-out priest, Father Malone (Hal Holbrook), with the occult happenings.
It is nice to see Janet Leigh as the wife of the missing trawler's skipper, and her daughter Jamie I..eigh Curtis as a hitchhiker in the fog.
The thriller distinguished enough to warrant the inevitable reference to Hitchcock is When a Stranger Calls ("X", Classic Haymarket). The sound formal construction begins with the familiar situation of a baby-sitter (Carol Kane) left alone to mind the children and answer the anonymous male telephone calls; and ends seven years later with the same girl. now a housewife and mother, left to protect her own children.
The first ordeal is familiar enough. The film's substantial centrepiece involves in the search a superb performance by Colleen Dewhurst as "mature woman" working with a mature private detective (Charles Durning) to solve the mystery.
It would be difficult to convey more of the story without giving away the most genuinely and legitimately shock denouement I earl recall for years. But besides creating tense suspense, Fred Walton has made a gripping study of characters and a powerful argument against the too ready release of prisoners who have committed violent crimes.
The Changeling ("X", Rialto) begins well enough (after a precredit sequence killing a mother and daughter in a car crash. The widower, John Russell (George C. Scott) is a composer, just arrived in Seattle to take up a post as professor of music. Unfortunately there is only the briefest promising introduction to this splendid actor in a new role, before he is renting from the local Historical Association an obviously haunted. old (by American standards, about a hundred years) mansion.
The film then turns into an immensely slow moving melodrama of a haunted house where mirrors splinter and crack, a wheelchair goes berserk, and things generally go bump in the day as well as the night.
At its plodding pace the film just holds attention but offers scant scope or challenge to Scott's great talent. Melvyn Douglas's appearnaces as an aged tycoon are all too few.
Another horrid little horror film is He Knows You're Alone ("X" Ritz) directed by Armand Mastroianni, where a particularly savage murderer operates (with a knife at close range among brides fitting their cheap wedding dresses.
The film turns out to be as poor as it is nasty, though neither as poor not as nasty as Train of Terror ("X", London Pavilion). This follows a really outrageous journey by a trainload of students in fancy dress travelling to play a cruel practical joke in a noisy rush through corridors with blood-baths.
The only realism I saw in this disgusting little movie was that it reminded me of a journey in my youth in America when our Pullman was invaded for a whole day by a convention of so-called Elks.
An exception to the horror half-dozen is Babylon. I reviewed it from Cork where I was not as enthusiastic for it as some of my colleagues. As a merry British black musical I found it too long, and much less brilliant than the earlier "Black Joys".
As a more serious impression, the hostility on both sides of the colour bar may be more realistic but is not either so entertaining or so welcoming. When I left Ireland where people were hoping for a boost in British tourists front Aer Lingus's new policy Supersave air fares, (even undercutting Apex) I also flew not only into the horror series, but from festival to festival, arriving here just before the opening last week of the twenty fourth I.ondon Film Festival.
I much regret I did not come in time to see Kevin Brownlow's impression of the early work of Abel Gance's 50-year old great classic Napoleon, probably the festival's principal attraction. The silent film (with new music) is reconstructed by Kevin B rownlow.
But it is being shown at the Empire Leicester Square on Sunday November 30th (with all seats at £7 each), not at the National Film Theatre like the rest of the Festival Brownlow, whose lecture in Cork which I so much admired and enjoyed had prepared the shorter impression of Gance and his work to give the NET audience a chance of seeing this one glimpse of the great Gance's work.
Another main attraction of the Festival is the Japanese Kurosawa's Kagernusha. It will be showing in London next week at the three Gate cinemas and 1 shall hope to catch up with the other Festival Films like Wajda's The Conductor (starring Sir John Gielgud and showing on Saturday November 15) and Zanussi's -The Constant Factor'' (tomorrow).
Freda Bruce Lockhart