Vincent Price (back) nails his brother into a coffin in Edgar Allan Poe film The Oblong Box
THE OBLONG BOX (Gordon Hessler, 1969)
Quad Cinema
34 West 13th St. between Fifth & Sixth Aves.
Wednesday, October 24, 6:45, and Thursday, October 25, 5:00
212-255-2243
quadcinema.com
Vincent Price made more than 125 films in his long career, including a slew of horror classics and cult favorites, highlighted by seven Edgar Allan Poe collaborations with Roger Corman and key roles in such other great works as Laura, The Ten Commandments, and Edward Scissorhands. So it’s extremely curious that for “Victoria Price presents: Vincent Price x 3,” Price’s daughter has selected three of his lesser-known frightflicks, Michael Reeves’s Witchfinder General) (aka The Conqueror Worm), based on the Poe short story), Jim Clark’s 1974 Madhouse, and Gordon Hessler’s debut, The Oblong Box. Paying tribute to the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death — Price died on October 25, 1993, at the age of eighty-two — Victoria will be at the Quad for screenings of the first two but not the third, leaving it completely up to the audience to figure out just what the heck is going on in this crazy film. Price stars as Sir Julian Markham, a wealthy British man who sees his brother, Sir Edward (played by Alister Williamson and voiced by an unidentified actor), crucified and his face disfigured by a vengeful African tribe. The brothers return to England, where Edward is locked in an upstairs room because, his mind gone, he is a danger to himself and others. He ultimately gets out, setting off on a bloody trail of murder as he meticulously chooses his victims, his face hidden behind a crimson hood.
The American International Pictures production, which is set in 1865, also features Rupert Davies as Kemp, a friend of Julian’s; Uta Levka as Heidi, an unfortunate prostitute; Sally Geeson as Sally, a maid who takes a liking to Edward; Peter Arne as Trench, Julian’s duplicitous solicitor; Hilary Dwyer as Elizabeth, Julian’s fiancée; Harry Baird as N’Galo, a local witch doctor; and the great Christopher Lee as Dr. Newhartt, the first time Price and Lee ever worked together on camera. The Oblong Box bears little resemblance to the Poe story; the movie is a messy mélange of body snatching, throat cutting, voodoo (with a racist depiction of most of the black characters), and mistaken identity, lacking in elements central to Poe’s style. Hessler would go on to make Cry of the Banshee and Scream and Scream Again with Price, in addition to Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park and Murders in the Rue Morgue. With Halloween around the corner, “Victoria Price presents: Vincent Price x 3,” which runs October 24-25, should get you in the proper mood; Vincent Price has a way of doing that, even in his lesser films.
And you thought the rat problem in New York City was bad. “I wanna tell you all a tale that’s crazier than hell,” Louisiana native and Treme star Wendell Pierce says at the beginning of Rodents of Unusual Size, Chris Metzler, Jeff Springer, and Quinn Costello’s eye-opening documentary about the nutria, the twenty-pound web-footed, orange-toothed South American creature that was introduced to Louisiana in the 1930s to boost the fur trade and has wreaked havoc ever since. The rodents multiply like tribbles and destroy so much vegetation that the resulting erosion affects storm surge protection, leading the government to encourage the mass murder of the beast by offering a five-dollar bounty for each tail. The filmmakers visit Delacroix and the Ninth Ward in New Orleans, talking to such nutria hunters as Larry Aucoin, Darrell Aucoin, Liz LeCompte, and Trey Hover, who is killing the swamp rat to help pay for his college education. LeCompte is doing it to protect the environment. “If the land’s gone, then me and my family don’t have a future,” she says, explaining that “Cajun women, they not afraid to get their hands dirty.” Nutria control specialist Michael Beran, who patrols the canal banks and uncovers nutria-built subterranean labyrinths that can also endanger bridges, notes that the nutria is an “invasive species [that] has to be deleted.” Nutria tail assessor John Siemion gets right to the point: “It offers these guys money when there is none,” he says. “This is their income for the year.”
On October 4, a framed painting titled “Girl with Balloon” by British street artist and provocateur Banksy began shredding itself upon being sold for $1.4 million at a Sotheby’s auction, shocking and delighting the art world. Was Banksy, whose very name evokes cold, hard cash, making a sly comment on the art market, on auctions, on the intrinsic value of a work of art? In the immediate aftermath, there was general confusion about just what the buyer had purchased and whether she had to keep it at all. In many ways that stunt exemplifies what Nathaniel Kahn’s highly artistic documentary, The Price of Everything, is all about. Kahn, who was nominated for Oscars for his 2003 film, My Architect: A Son’s Journey, which explored the legacy of his father, Louis Kahn, and his 2006 short, Two Hands, about pianist Leon Fleisher, this time trains his camera on the volatile global art market. “Art and money have always gone hand in hand,” superstar auctioneer Simon de Pury says. “It’s very important for good art to be expensive. You only protect things that are valuable. If something has no financial value, people don’t care. They will not give it the necessary protection. The only way to make sure that cultural artifacts survive is for them to have a commercial value.”
Alexandria Bombach’s On Her Shoulders is an extraordinary film about an extraordinary human being. In August 2014, the Yazidis of Northern Iraq were attacked by ISIS, who raped and killed thousands of Yazidis in what amounted to a genocide, turning countless women into sex slaves. Twenty-one-year-old Nadia Murad survived and later escaped the horror and has been on a mission ever since, traveling around the world to share her story in order to save and protect this ethno-religious minority, who have been scattered throughout refugee camps. “What must be done so a woman will not be a victim of war?” she demands. For a year, Bombach followed Nadia and Murad Ismael, executive director of Yazda, a global organization dedicated to supporting the Yazidis and other vulnerable groups, as Nadia met with media and politicians while hoping to be able to address the UN General Assembly. They go to Canada, Germany, Greece, and America, occasionally joined by human rights lawyer Amal Clooney, Yazda deputy executive director Ahmed Khudida Burjus, and former International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis Moreno Ocampo, as she makes her case to anyone who will listen.
Roger Paradiso’s The Lost Village takes on a subject near and dear to many a New Yorker’s heart: the gentrification and corporatization of the city, which is replacing affordable housing and mom-and-pop shops with luxury buildings and fancy boutiques. However, the film provides no new insight into the dilemma; in fact, Paradiso even hurts his cause by speaking with a fairly random assortment of people, including some fringe, less-than-objective, not very articulate figures, and demonstrating little skill with a camera. “People came to the Village because it was different,” he explains, stating the obvious. “They’re trying to change the character of the Village, trying to make it a hipster’s suburban mall version of what was once a great Village of artists and working-class families. It’s enough to make a Villager puke.” The film begins as a screed against NYU’s massive expansion into real estate, pointing out that many women students have become sex workers in order to afford their tuition. Mark Crispin Miller, NYU professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, shows a radical 1960s spirit in arguing against the university’s policies, but the rest of the film is scattershot and hackneyed as Paradiso, who previously wrote and directed the movie version of Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding, marches in a handful of economists, brokers, journalists, and activists who give meandering lectures that sound like “Voice of the People” letters in the Daily News. And it doesn’t help that the film looks like a 1970s relic in dire need of restoration. There’s an important story buried somewhere here; perhaps the series of talks accompanying numerous screenings at Cinema Village will shed more light on this critical topic. [Full disclosure: I’m an NYU graduate with a degree in Cinema Studies.]